[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[January 28, 1999]
[Pages 116-117]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Memorial Service for Lawton Chiles
January 28, 1999

    Lawton would get a huge kick out of knowing that I have just been 
upstaged by his 10-year-old granddaughter. 
[Laughter] When both the grandkids were singing, I was thinking, you 
know this is what Lawton would liked to have done if he had not been a 
politician, sort of the wandering minstrel for America. [Laughter] And 
in some ways, he was.
    I looked through the Scripture to find something that referenced how 
he started his political campaign, and there's a verse in Genesis which 
says, ``Arise, walk through the land and the length of it and in the 
breadth of it, for I will give it to thee.'' I think in so many ways God 
gave Florida to Lawton so that he could give himself to the people of 
his beloved State. And in so many ways, his homespun humor and his 
common sense became the glue that held Florida together as it exploded 
and diversified and changed in ways that make it almost unrecognizable 
to people who were there three decades ago.
    Every one of us who knew Lawton Chiles feels blessed. If we knew him 
very well, we loved him. He gave something to all of us. He gave me a 
lot when we were serving together as Governors. I mean, I couldn't 
imagine--I was serving as Governor with someone who had been chairman of 
the Senate Budget Committee. And he made sure that I was always aware of 
what I should know before I voted however he wanted me to vote in the 
Governors conference on whatever it was. [Laughter]
    I loved campaigning with him in Florida. I loved--it's almost a sad 
thing to say, but it was very moving for me--Florida had a lot of 
natural disasters during the period in which we served together. It was 
very moving to me to be in these places with Lawton Chiles, to see the 
pulse of the people beating in him and the feeling he had for them. I 
loved all the opportunities he gave me to help Florida, with late-night 
phone calls about every conceivable subject, the recommendations he gave 
that Carol Browner and Janet Reno ought to be in the Cabinet.
    And like everybody else, I loved the humor. I knew Lawton Chiles 
long before ``he-coon'' became a part of our political lexicon. And one 
of the most humbling nights of my life was a night at the Governors 
conference that I spent with Ann Richards and 
Lawton Chiles. [Laughter] I thought I was a good storyteller. I thought 
I knew every phrase that had ever been coined. I listened to them talk 
about how a stuck pig squealed, how a cut dog barks, how if you can't 
run with the big dogs, you ought to just stay on the porch. [Laughter] 
Listen, I lost that night. [Laughter] But I never forgot it.
    You know, Lawton may have worn a coonskin cap and coat to his own 
inaugural ball in 1995, and he did a lot of that ``aw, shucks'' stuff 
with all of us, but we all know that he was really a visionary. He saw 
the possibilities and the challenges of the future, and he saw his own 
life as a sort of continuing obligation to push people toward them.
    Long before most of the rest of us, as Senator Domenici and others 
have already said, he knew that we had to put our budgetary house in 
order if we wanted our children to have a future. And I'm very glad he 
got to live to see it come to pass--even though Pete's right, he'd want to see all the numbers and all the books 
and be a little suspicious.
    Carol Browner talked about how he saw that in Florida and in the 
United States we had to reconcile the imperatives of economic growth and 
preserving our environment. And because of his vision, the forests and 
the swamps that

[[Page 117]]

he loved so much as a boy, and especially the beautiful Florida 
Everglades, are going to be preserved.
    He saw long before the rest of us the promise in every child and the 
need to give every child decent health care and a world-class education. 
The fragile cry of his young grandson who 
sang for us today, born several months premature, inspired him as 
Senator and Governor to want to give every child a healthy start in 
life, the chance to make the most of their God-given talent. How proud 
he would be to see his grandson making the most of those talents today.
    I'm told that as he lay in state in Tallahassee a few weeks ago, a 
woman from Gadsden County, where Rhea and Lawton 
first began working to improve prenatal care in Florida, brought her 
young son to pay his respects. She said that Lawton Chiles had saved her 
son's life. That boy, and the millions of Florida children growing up 
healthy and ready, may well be his greatest legacy.
    I'd also like to thank him publicly for something else. As Florida 
explodes and diversifies, he worked so hard to make all his native 
Floridians--those who were like him--see all the new immigrants as their 
own, to see those children as a rich resource that would make life more 
interesting and the future more prosperous.
    I thank him for being an early supporter of political and campaign 
finance reform but in doing it in a way that made sense and didn't raise 
people's defenses. I don't think he had a sanctimonious bone in his 
body. He just didn't want everybody to have to spend all their time 
raising money. He thought it would be better if people talked to one 
another, face-to-face. He thought it would be better if, on television, 
people had honest debates and discussions. He didn't go around telling 
you how much better he was than everybody else because he only took a 
hundred bucks. And he knew that only one person could have ever made 
that walk, and then you couldn't just repeat that over and over again. 
He tried to convince us to relax and think. And he did it in the right 
way.
    Some of you know that, right before he died, I think I had about won 
a long, intense campaign that I waged to persuade Lawton to become 
America's Special Envoy to Latin America. He said, ``Well, I don't want 
to spend a lot of time in Washington.'' I said, ``Lawton, it's Latin 
America, not Washington.'' [Laughter] I said, ``You know, you'll have to 
breeze through every now and then and give me a report. There's a 
telephone. There are fax machines. You can do this.'' And he was really 
getting interested in it.
    And I say that not to make anyone sad, but to say that the reason 
his life was so rich is that he lived to the last hour of the last day 
thinking about tomorrow, thinking about other people's interest, 
thinking about other possibilities still to be developed.
    So I thank you, Lawton, for teaching us that public service is not a 
position, it's a mission; that our job is not to posture, but to 
produce. I thank you for feeling the pulse of the people and making 
their hopes and dreams your own. I thank you for never losing the light 
in your eyes, the steel in your spine, the love in your heart.
    Young Lawton's song was reminiscent of 
the wonderful lines from Wordsworth, ``We can make our lives sublime, 
and departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.'' What 
wonderful wide, deep footprints our friend left for us to walk in.

Note: The President spoke at noon in the Russell Senate Caucus Room, 
Room 325, at the Russell Senate Office Building. In his remarks, he 
referred to Ann W. Richards, former Governor of Texas; Rhea Chiles, 
widow of Governor Chiles; and his granddaughter, Christin Chiles, and 
grandson, Lawton Chiles IV.