    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [March 13, 1999]
    [Pages 370-372]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Dinner Honoring Former Senator Dale Bumpers in
    Little Rock, Arkansas
    March 13, 1999

        Thank you very much. Senator Lincoln,
    thank you very much. We're all very proud of you. Dale and I were
    looking up at you, listening to you speak, feeling a little bit better
    about his retirement and my imminent retirement in the next couple of
    years.
        I'd like to thank Congressman Snyder and
    Congressman Berry for representing you fiercely
    and well and for being my friends and for doing our State proud. The
    three of them remind me of why I have always loved public life in
    Arkansas. And I'm always delighted to see people who have served others
    and worked for others and helped others and done others service be
    rewarded with higher positions. And all three of them deserve it richly,
    and I'm very pleased to see that.
        I'd like to thank Rabbi Levy for being here
    tonight, and Bishop Walker, who is my longtime
    friend and whose vociferous and highly public defense of me may have won
    an election for me back in 1982, without which I wouldn't be here. Thank
    you, Bishop. I'm glad to see you.
        I thank Rodney Slater for his remarks
    and for his extraordinary service. He has really done Arkansas proud.
    And there are a lot of other Arkansans who have been critical to the
    success our country has enjoyed in the last 6 years who are here
    tonight. I'll probably miss some of them, but I can't help mentioning
    Mack McLarty, Bob Nash, Janis Kearney, Bruce
    Lindsey, Nancy Hernreich, Carroll Willis, Kris
    Engskov; anybody else who is here from home in
    the administration, I apologize that I missed

    [[Page 371]]

    you. But you should be very proud of your fellow Arkansans who are
    making a contribution in Washington.
        I would like to thank Vaughn McQuary for
    his leadership of the party. He has done a great job, and I'm proud of
    him. And I'm glad he's coming--and to all the other dignitaries that are
    here tonight. I almost cried listening to David Pryor talk, until I remembered that he's gone over to the other side:
    David Pryor tonight gave me his Harvard card--[laughter]--says he's a
    fellow at Harvard. You know, I think I deserve some credit; I had enough
    guts to go to the Ivy League before I was elected to office in Arkansas.
    [Laughter] David was always one of them. He was just waiting to get out
    of office. [Laughter]
        You know, one of the truly great joys of my life is that I got to
    serve as Governor when they were Senators together, Dale and
    David. I admired them. I liked them. I was so
    proud of what we were able to do together. I rarely ever called them
    about any issue they had to vote on, and when I did, they tolerated what
    I had to say and then did what they thought was right. [Laughter]
        But when I saw David up here talking about Dale and I, and then Dale
    whispered to me a story about two friends of ours who were Senators from
    another State who, to put it charitably, do not like each other--and it
    interferes, I think, with what they're doing--I thought of how many
    examples I have seen, State after State after State, where good people
    let their egos get in the way in the Senate and don't work together. And
    there was no State that had a better team of Senators, but they were
    made 10 times better because they respected and liked and even loved
    each other, and they never let themselves get in the way of doing their
    jobs. And I appreciate it.
        You know, the thing I'm going to miss most about having Dale Bumpers
    not in the Senate and not handy is that when I get really low, I can't
    call him and hear his latest joke. [Laughter] There has never been a
    person who liked jokes better than Dale Bumpers, I'm sure, in all of
    human history. [Laughter]
        You know, the three of us, we'd go on these road shows when we were
    all down here, we'd go to these roasts, and we'd tell each other's
    jokes. And if one of us would forget to tell one of our best jokes,
    somebody else would tell it and never give credit. [Laughter] But it got
    so bad one time, Dale Bumpers called me and said, ``You remember that
    joke you told me about a month ago?'' He said, ``I can't remember the
    punch line to save my life.'' He said, ``Tell it to me again.'' So I was
    really happy, because his jokes were funnier than mine, by and large.
    And I got in the middle of the joke, and he remembered it, and he
    started laughing. And I never to this day--that was 10 years ago--I
    still haven't finished that joke. [Laughter]
        I have crashed a plane with Dale Bumpers. [Laughter] I have been
    through all kinds of adversity and shared a lot of joy. But I would like
    to say something, if I might, to try to add my poor pittance to what
    Senator Pryor and others have already said.
        Yesterday I got to go home to Hope to dedicate the birthplace
    foundation, the home I lived in for the first 4 years of my life, and it
    was a very emotional thing. I had a lot of my family there. And I was
    coming back from Central America, night before last, thinking about what
    I could say and how I could say it in a very few words. And I said to
    them that in the heady days after World War II, when I was a child and
    first coming of age, my hometown wasn't perfect. It was still segregated
    and had its share of flaws, Mack McLarty reminded me, including a pretty
    bad town gossip or two. We glorify those types today. [Laughter] At
    least people used to be embarrassed about it.
        But I knew then that every child was raised with at least two things
    in my time, when I was a child coming of age. One was an immense sense
    of personal optimism that life was good and that you could live your
    dreams if you worked for them. And the other was a sense of belonging, a
    sense of community, a sense of responsibility to others as well as to
    your own life, and a clear understanding that a lot of the richness and
    texture and meaning of life came from being a part of a web of
    relationships with other people.
        And in that time, we also thought of, from my earliest childhood,
    public service as a truly noble endeavor, not that the people who were
    in it were perfect but that they were well motivated and that they
    wanted to serve and they wanted to advance our common dreams.
        Dale Bumpers represents all that to me in a time when it has been
    under assault from many quarters. And I tried to think about what it was
    about him that made him stand up all

    [[Page 372]]

    these years for our State, for the children, for the country, for the
    environment, for the Constitution, for all the things he fought for,
    made him believe he could cast unpopular votes, like the Panama Canal
    vote, and still come home and tell the people why he did it and have
    them stick with him.
        I think there are three things: He never forgot the lessons of the
    past, beginning with the Constitution of the United States; he never
    stopped dreaming of the future; and he never lost his essential
    humanity. Our public life is poorer when people forget the past and
    ignore the future. It is poorer when they choose power over purpose
    because they forget we're just here for a little speck of time, and in
    100 or 200 years nobody will remember any of us, and all that will
    endure is whatever contribution we made to make life better and richer
    and more decent.
        I've watched Dale Bumpers in a way that the whole world got to watch
    him when he spoke in the Senate. But when you strip it all away, it
    comes down to that, to humility, humanity, a sense of one's own
    mortality and one's own capacity for incredible dignity and glory. He
    has represented all that.
        So if a child asks you if he or she should ever go into public life
    in this country, you should say yes. But don't ever forget the lessons
    from the past and how smart the people were that started this country.
    Don't ever stop dreaming about a better future. And do not ever lose
    your essential humanity. And all the complexities of all the problems I
    face and all the battles I see come before me, 90 percent of them would
    go away tomorrow if people could just understand they do not have to
    define their lives in terms of putting someone else down, defeating
    someone else, thinking they're better than someone else, ignoring their
    common humanity.
        I was looking at Dale and David tonight,
    and I was thinking, it seems like yesterday I first saw David Pryor
    running for Congress in 1976. It seems like yesterday I was first
    excited about Dale Bumpers coming out of Charleston in 1970. It seems
    like yesterday when we were all young and beginning and everything was
    new. And it passes in the flash of an eye. And when it's over, what
    remains is the feeling that you have been human and alive to the needs
    and aspirations of other people. There is nobody in public life in this
    country today who embodies it better than Dale Bumpers, and I am honored
    and proud to have served with him.
        Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 9 p.m. at the Statehouse Convention Center.
    In his remarks, he referred to Rabbi Eugene Levy, Temple B'nai Israel,
    who offered the benediction; Bishop L.T. Walker, Church of God in
    Christ, who offered the invocation; Vaughn McQuary, Arkansas State
    Democratic Party chair; Carroll Willis, director, community services
    division, Democratic National Committee; Kris Engskov, the President's
    Aide; and former Senator David H. Pryor.