[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
[April 24, 1998]
[Pages 610-613]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks Announcing the Resignation of Counselor to the President and
Special Envoy for the Americas Thomas F. McLarty and an Exchange
With Reporters
April 24, 1998
The President. Last week, at the Summit of the Americas in Santiago,
I saw again the profound change in the very character of the
relationships between the United States and our neighbors to the south
and the start of a true partnership based on mutual respect, mutual
trust, and mutual reward.
Two quiet revolutions were the catalysts for this change. The first,
of course, was the quiet revolution of democracy and open markets in the
Americas. The second quiet revolution was Mack McLarty, our Special
Envoy to Latin America, who helped all of us to realize that the
Americas must become a cornerstone of our prosperity and security for
the 21st century.
Mack has made over 40 trips to the Americas since he became my
Special Envoy. He has earned the trust and respect, the friendship and
affection of leaders from the Caribbean to Central America, from Canada
to South America, who value his extraordinary combination of integrity
and intellect, ability and civility. He helped to change the way we see
Latin America, and just as important, he's helped to change the way
Latin America sees us.
Earlier this week, Mack told me of his desire to leave this
administration at the end of June
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to return to his private life, to spend more time with Donna
Kay, and with their sons, Mark and Franklin. It has been a
day I hoped would never come, so I accept his decision with regret but
eternal gratitude.
As most of you know, Mack and I have been good friends virtually all
of our lives. We've taken a lot of ribbing about Miss Mary's
kindergarten, but she must have done something right. [Laughter] Hillary
and I have been especially grateful to have Mack and Donna as friends
for a long, long time, and especially in our lives these past 5\1/2\
years. Mack represents to me everything that is good and decent in
public service; honesty and civility, fidelity and kindness aren't just
words to him, they're a way of life.
Just after I was elected President, I asked Mack to leave a long and
varied and highly successful business career to be the White House Chief
of Staff. It was a daunting task for people who were new to Washington.
We had new ideas and new energy. We had all kinds of ideas about the new
direction we wanted to take our country in, but we were also new to the
strange and often arcane ways of this city.
As Erskine Bowles has often said to me, from his own experience,
it's a whole lot harder to start up an enterprise than it is to take it
over and tune it up. Mack was there at the beginning. And as Bob Rubin
has said so often, and I know he would want me to say on his behalf
today, it was Mack that established a culture, in our White House and
administration, of teamwork and decency which has continued throughout
the years, and has been responsible for much of the success that we have
enjoyed.
During Mack's tenure, we launched policies that helped to turn our
country around, to bring our people together, to make our Government
work again. Our party had been out of office for 12 years. Beginning
with Mack's steady hand as we chose our first Cabinet, he helped to put
in place a dramatic change in direction for our Nation. He organized our
forces at the White House and was a driving force on Capitol Hill toward
the passage of our economic plan that has helped to bring such
unparalleled prosperity.
It sparked a boom in investment; cut the deficit over 90 percent
before the Balanced Budget Act was passed; invested in education and
health care, in the environment, in science, and space; cut taxes on
small businesses and 15 million people; and led to the creation of 15
million jobs. He helped to secure the passage of the Family and Medical
Leave Act, which over 12 million Americans have used when a baby is born
or someone in their family is sick. He set the stage for the crime bill,
continued our work that we began in Arkansas on education reform, helped
us to fight and win major victories to open markets in this hemisphere
and around the world through NAFTA and GATT.
After he became my counselor, I asked him to tackle complex and
important missions--from his work with the Vice President
to make the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta a success, to
his efforts in the Gulf, to secure support for the Dayton Peace accord
in Bosnia, to reaching out to the business community and other key
constituencies, and to his truly historic service as Special Envoy to
the Americas.
He has pursued these many missions with grace and decency and good
humor, earning the admiration and trust of a pretty disparate group of
people, from Dick Gephardt to Trent Lott, from Tom Donohue at
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to John Sweeney at the AFL-CIO, from
Jesse Jackson to Ross Perot. Now, this does not surprise me, because
as long as I've known him, he's always been well liked and well respected
by everybody. And, frankly, I still resent it. [Laughter]
Let me say to Mack and to Donna and to their fine sons, thank you
for serving America. To his family, I thank them for lending Mack to me
for a little while. For a long time now, we have been friends; now we
know we are colleagues; now we know what it's like to fight and lose and
win again on behalf of the American people. It has been a wonderful
experience. And again, I say that Mack McLarty is a genuinely patriotic
public servant in the greatest American tradition. And as is my
commitment, I promised him that for once, he can have the last word.
Mr. McLarty.
[At this point, Mr. McLarty made brief remarks.]
Q. What are you going to miss the most about the White House?
Mr. McLarty. Muy poquito, muy poquito [Very little, very little].
[Laughter] Probably, Helen [Helen Thomas, United Press International],
not having that energy, knowing that
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that first question is coming at a setting like this. [Laughter]
Prime Minister Sergey Kiriyenko of Russia
Q. Mr. President, I take it you can work with the new Russian Prime
Minister as you did with his predecessor.
The President. Well, I'm looking forward to it. We have a high
opinion of him based on our experiences with him, and the commission
set up--we had with the Vice President and
the Russian Prime Minister. I look forward to continuing that. It's
helped us to resolve an enormous number of issues. I also very much hope
that this will free the Duma up now to consider the START II Treaty,
because if they will ratify it, then we can move on to START III and
continue our effort of dramatically reducing the nuclear threat.
So this is, I think, a good news day for Russia and for the United
States. I look forward to seeing President Yeltsin in Birmingham in
about a month, and we'll have a chance to discuss these and other matters.
Latin America-U.S. Relations
Q. Does Mr. McLarty's leaving signify an erosion of U.S. interest in
Latin America?
The President. Oh, no, not at all. It is true that I don't know
anybody else who could get me to go down there 3 times in 12 months--
[laughter]--but I must say, every time I went I was more eager to
return. And I think that through his efforts, as Secretary Albright
said, the Government and the principals and, maybe in a fundamental way,
even the American people have altered their notions of what our
relationships with Latin America are and what they should be and what
they can become. And so we will continue to even intensify our efforts.
If you look at the agenda that we embraced at Santiago--which was,
in no small measure, Mr. McLarty's work--it will require, just to honor
the commitments we have made, a deepening effort in Latin America. It
will require us to do more than we have done in the past.
Airlines Agreements
Q. Mr. President, are you concerned about the impact on consumers of
the agreements announced between the four major airlines, and will your
administration look into possible antitrust violations in those
agreements?
The President. Well, any decision like that, of course, is not one
for the White House to be making. But I don't think we've had enough
time to analyze it to know whether we have concerns or not, so I don't
believe it's appropriate for me to make a comment yet because I don't
know enough about it to make a good one.
Corporate Trends
Q. Well, what about the trend in terms of the banks and so forth? I
mean, the country is moving in that direction. Is that good?
The President. Well, if it's being done to compete globally, and
there's still adequate amount of competition so that consumers are
protected in terms of price and quality, but American business becomes
more globally competitive, then it's a good thing. If it is a function
of there being an awful lot of money around in the economy today and
it's just one of those periodic bursts of mergers which may or may not
have a good effect on consumers and may or may not lend stability to our
economy, then it's much more questionable.
So I think that it requires a level of analysis about what is really
going on here and why, that I simply haven't had either the opportunity
to do or to get advised on by my folks. So I think it's something that
should provoke a lot of comment and a lot of thought; experts around the
country should be writing op-ed pieces for newspapers; people should be
thinking through this, but--to help the American people understand it,
because we've always had a native suspicion of bigness of all kinds in
America. It goes all the way back to our beginning. It started with big
government, and it's basically extended to all the large institutions in
life. And Americans often feel that ordinary people don't have enough
control over their lives anyway.
So I think that there is going to be this questioning atmosphere,
but I would just say, we need to analyze each one of these on their own
merits and ask the questions that I just put out. I'm pretty convinced
that I just gave you the right questions to ask; I just haven't had a
chance to analyze it and have experts talk to me about it and work it
through.
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Response to Criticism
Q. Mr. President, many House Democrats want to censure Dan Burton
for the vulgar remark he made about you. What do you think about that
remark, and what do you think should happen to him?
The President. Well, the House is obviously the judge of its own
affairs, and they should continue to be. And therefore, it's not
appropriate for me to comment on it.
Q. But surely as a human being----
The President. Well, as a human being, I learned that it's
inappropriate for the President to let feelings--human feelings
interfere with the job.
Q. Sure it is. [Laughter]
The President. We're going to have a--no, no, I'm saving all of that
for Saturday night, Helen. [Laughter]
Yes, but let me just say this. Go back to my Inaugural, this last
Inaugural, and even before, when Dr. Schuller and others gave me that great passage from Isaiah. A
President cannot repair the breaches in a country, cannot unify a
country, and cannot lift its vision if he takes personally personal
assaults. You can't do it. You just have to blow it off and think about
something else.
And, I mean, my advice, as I said--you asked me yesterday, I think,
if I had anything to say to Mr. Burton, and I
said, yes, I do--I hope he will vote the campaign finance reform bill
now that it's finally going to be put on the floor of the Senate--of the
House. And maybe we can get it on the floor of the Senate if we can pass
it in the House.
So I think that's the way we all ought to be. I can't further the
public interest of America by engaging in that kind of debate. I just
want to lift it up. I think that we all ought to just--we'd do a lot
better in this town if we had less personal focus and more public focus
of all kinds.
Thank you.
White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
Q. Speaking of Saturday night, sir, are you looking forward to
having dinner with Paula Jones in the same room?
The President. You know, we practiced all kinds of answers to this
question--[laughter]--and most of them I think I'll have to give
Saturday night. [Laughter] Thank you.
Note. The President spoke at 11 a.m. in the Oval Office at the White
House. In his remarks, he referred to Prime Minister Sergey Kiriyenko,
former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, and President Boris Yeltsin
of Russia; and Rev. Robert Schuller. A reporter referred to Paula Jones,
whose civil suit against the President was dismissed on April 1. A tape
was not available for verification of the content of these remarks.