[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[May 31, 1999]
[Pages 858-861]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Memorial Day Ceremony in Arlington, Virginia
May 31, 1999

    Thank you very much, Secretary Cohen, 
for your remarks, your devotion to your country, and your outstanding 
leadership. Secretary West, thank you for 
your work on behalf of our Nation's veterans. And to both of you, thank 
you for your support of the recent actions in Congress to raise the pay 
of our military personnel and to improve their quality of life, to 
improve the retirement systems of the veterans and their readiness.
    General Ivany, thank you for your 
remarks, your example, and your leadership. Colonel Brogan, thank you for your prayers. Superintendent 
Metzler, thank you for doing such a 
magnificent job of maintaining Arlington National Cemetery, in honor of 
those who are buried here and as a tribute to all America stands for. I 
thank the members of the Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs, Congress, the 
diplomatic corps, the armed services who are here. I welcome the 
veterans and the families of veterans and members of the armed services, 
my fellow citizens.
    I'd like to begin by asking that we all join in expressing our 
thanks to the Air Force Band and the Singing Sergeants for doing such a 
fine job here today. [Applause] They deserve it. Thank you.
    Even though the day is bright and warm, I ask you to indulge me, to 
spend a few extra moments to think about what it means that we here 
today mark the final Memorial Day of this century. To be sure, it has 
been a century that saw too many white stones added to these gentle 
hills, marking America's sacrifices for freedom for over 100 years, in 
two World Wars and many other conflicts. Again and again, America has 
been tested in the 20th century, coming through it all, down to the 
present day, with even greater blessings of liberty and prosperity, with 
our enduring optimism and steady faith in our common humanity.
    Thanks to our brave men and women in uniform, our Nation has never 
been more secure. Thanks to them, the cold war is now another chapter in 
the history books. Thanks to them, nations that fought two World Wars in 
Europe and in Asia, some of which had battled each other for centuries, 
now cooperate with each other as never before.
    On the eve of a new millennium, we can see clearly how closely the 
sacrifices of our men and women in uniform in the 20th century are 
linked to the yearning for freedom that gave birth to our Nation over 
200 years ago, a yearning based on the then radical premise that we are 
all inherently equal, fully able to govern ourselves, and endowed with a 
God-given right to liberty. That is our history, a history that beckons 
us especially on this Memorial Day and especially here at Arlington, the 
most powerful

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evidence we now have that our country has accepted consistently the old 
adage that much is expected from those to whom much is given. From 
Concord to Corregidor, from Korea to Khe Sanh, from Kuwait to Kosovo, 
our entire history is written in this ground.
    As Secretary Cohen said, only 11 days ago a young man from Ohio, 
Chief Warrant Officer David Gibbs, was laid 
to rest here after his helicopter crashed in a training exercise on May 
5th in Albania. Chief Warrant Officer Kevin Reichert died in the same crash. We honor these two brave Americans 
who gave their lives in service to our Nation's highest ideals, joining 
other, more famous names who did the same. Here lie heroes of war, like 
John Pershing, George Marshall, Omar Bradley, President Kennedy; the 
great explorer Robert Peary; brave astronauts who gave their lives to 
increase our knowledge of the heavens; Medgar Evers, who fought for 
freedom at Normandy on D-day and then fought for freedom all over again 
at the University of Mississippi; familiar names, like Joe Louis, 
Justice Earl Warren, Abner Doubleday, Medal of Honor winner Audie 
Murphy. All different, all American, all made our presence possible.
    We are the oldest constitutional democracy in the world, but we must 
never forget in the context of human history just how quickly we have 
come to where we are today. Secretary Cohen quoted another famous 
American veteran who is buried here, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He 
fought in the Civil War and went on to serve on the United States 
Supreme Court until he was 93 years old. A young man caught him at the 
age of 90 reading a copy of Plato's ``Republic'' and asked whatever in 
the world he was doing, reading that weighty tome. And he said, ``I am 
doing this to improve my mind.''
    A remarkable man, Justice Holmes; his life shows us how quickly we 
have come here. When he was a boy, he shook hands with a veteran of the 
American Revolution. As a young man he fought in the Civil War, where he 
was visited by President Lincoln. You may know the famous story that the 
President was wearing his trademark stovepipe hat, and he began, because 
he was so tall, to attract fire from the Confederate forces, until 
Holmes shouted, without thinking, these famous words, ``Get down, you 
fool.'' [Laughter] Lincoln replied, ``I'm glad you know how to talk to a 
civilian.'' [Laughter]
    Justice Holmes lived through World War I and the Depression. He 
watched the United States assume the mantle of leadership. And he always 
remembered what he had done as a young man--that war reminds us, and I 
quote, that ``our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of 
things.'' He understood that our freedom had been and always would be 
bought by men and women ready to protect it, sometimes at great cost and 
peril.
    So we did not become a great nation just because the land was 
generous to those who settled it, though it was; just because the people 
who came here worked hard and were clever and resourceful, though surely 
our forebears were. We became a great nation also because every time our 
beliefs and ideals have been threatened, Americans have stepped forward 
to defend them. From our biggest cities to our smallest towns, citizens 
have done what had to be done to advance the dream that began on the 
Fourth of July in 1776--always following Justice Holmes' famous 
admonition that we must be involved in the action and passion of our 
time, for fear of being judged not to have lived.
    So my fellow Americans, if today is a day for history, it is also a 
day to honor those who lie here and in countless other places all across 
the world in marked and unmarked graves, to honor them by looking to the 
future; to rededicate ourselves to another 100 years of our liberty, our 
prosperity, our optimism, and our common humanity.
    Today, there is a new challenge before us in Kosovo. It is a very 
small province in a small country, but it is a big test of what we 
believe in: our commitment to leave to our children a world where people 
are not uprooted and ravaged and slaughtered en masse because of their 
race, their ethnicity, or their religion; our fundamental interest in 
building a lasting peace in an undivided and free Europe, a place which 
saw two World Wars when that dream failed in the 20th century; and our 
interest in preserving our alliance for freedom and peace with our 18 
NATO Allies.
    All of us have seen the hundreds of thousands of innocent men and 
women and children driven from their homes, the thousands singled out 
for death along the way. We have heard their stories of rape and 
oppression, of robbery and looting and brutality. And we saw it all 
before, just a few years ago in Bosnia, for 4 long years,

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until NATO acted, combining with the resistance of Bosnians and 
Croatians, to bring the Dayton peace agreement and to turn the tide of 
ethnic cleansing there.
    How did this all happen? Well, 10 years ago the Berlin Wall fell, 
ending communism's cruel and arbitrary division of Europe, unleashing 
the energies of freedom-loving people there, after two World Wars and 
the cold war, to be united in peace and freedom and prosperity. But that 
same year in Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic 
became the last holdout against a Europe free, united, and at peace, 
when he stripped away the rights of the Kosovars to govern themselves. 
He then went to war against the Croatians and the Bosnians. And in the 
wake of that, after 4 years, a quarter of a million people were dead. 
Two and a half million people were refugees; many of them still have not 
gone home. There was a stunning record of destruction, told not only in 
lives but in religious, cultural, historical, and personal buildings and 
records destroyed in an attempt to erase the existence of a people on 
their land.
    In Kosovo we see some parallels to World War II, for the Government 
of Serbia, like that of Nazi Germany, rose to power in part by getting 
people to look down on people of a given race and ethnicity, and to 
believe they had no place in their country and even no right to live. 
But even more troubling, we see some parallels to the rumblings all 
around the world where people continue to fall out with one another and 
think they simply cannot share common ground and a common future with 
people who worship God in a different way or have a slightly different 
heritage.
    Think about the contrast of that to the military we celebrate today. 
Every morning on Memorial Day, I have a breakfast for leaders of the 
veterans community at the White House. And I stand there with eager 
anticipation as people who have fought or whose relatives have fought 
and often died in our wars come through the line. I noticed them today: 
There were Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans; there were Arab-
Americans and Jewish Americans; there were Catholic Americans and 
Protestant Americans; there were African-Americans; there were Hispanic-
Americans; there were Asian-Americans.
    Just look around here today at the kinds of people who are wearing 
the evidence of their service to our country. We are a stronger country 
because we respect our differences and we are united by our common 
humanity.
    Now, we cannot expect everybody to follow our lead, and we haven't 
gotten it entirely right, now. We don't expect everybody to get along 
all the time. But we can say no to ethnic cleansing. We can say no to 
mass slaughter of people because of the way they worship God and because 
of who their parents were. We can say no to that, and we should.
    It is important that you know that in Kosovo the world has said no. 
It's not just the United States or even just our 18 NATO Allies with us. 
People on every continent--Arabs and Israelis are sending assistance, 
Protestants and Catholics from Northern Ireland, Greeks and Turks, 
Africans, Asians, Latin Americans; even those whose own lives have been 
battered by hurricanes and other natural disasters and who have hardly 
anything to give are sending help, because their hearts have been broken 
and their consciences moved by the appalling abuses they have seen.
    Our objectives in Kosovo are clear and consistent with both the 
moral imperative of reversing ethnic cleansing and killing, and our 
overwhelming national interest in a peaceful, undivided Europe which 
will ensure we will not have to send large numbers of young Americans to 
die there in the next century in a war. The objectives are that the 
Kosovars will go home; the Serb forces will withdraw; an international 
force, with NATO at its core, will deploy to protect all the people, 
including the Serb minority, in Kosovo. And afterward, to avoid future 
Bosnias and future Kosovos, we will learn the lesson of the Marshall 
plan and what we did for Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell, by 
working with our European allies to build democracy and prosperity and 
cooperation in southeastern Europe so that there will be stronger forces 
pulling people together than those that are driving them apart.
    I know that many Americans believe that this is not our fight. But 
remember why many of the people are laying in these graves out here--
because of what happened in Europe and because of what was allowed to go 
on too long before people intervened. What we are doing today will save 
lives, including American lives, in the future. And it will give our 
children a better, safer world to live in.
    In this military campaign the United States has borne a large share 
of the burden, as we

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must, because we have a greater capacity to bear that burden. But all 
Americans should know that we have been strongly supported by our 
European allies, that when the peacekeeping force goes in there, the 
overwhelming majority of people will be European, and that when the 
reconstruction begins, the overwhelming amount of investment will be 
European. This is something we have done together.
    And I ask you, in the days and nights ahead, to remember our brave 
pilots and crews flying over Serbia, to keep their families in our 
thoughts. I visited with them recently. I know that they risk their 
lives every day, and they even avoid firing back sometimes at people who 
fire at them because they fire from heavily populated areas, and they 
want to avoid killing innocent civilians.
    I ask you to support all possible efforts to relieve the suffering 
of the people of Kosovo. Even those who escape will be struggling with 
what happened to them for a long, long time. And this afternoon, I ask 
all Americans to join with those who have urged us to engage in a moment 
of remembrance at 3 o'clock eastern daylight time, in honor of those who 
have given their lives for our country.
    I also ask all Americans to honor, along with those who have given 
their lives for our freedom, the living symbol of American valor, our 
veterans and their families, the present members of armed services and 
their families, wherever and however they serve.
    How fitting it is that we are standing against ethnic cleansing with 
our wonderful, myriad, rainbow, multiethnic military in our increasingly 
diverse society that involves both the strength of our differences and 
the even more powerful pull of our shared American values. Our military 
inspires the world with their respect for one another and their ability 
to work together. And you pass every test with the same flying colors, 
red, white, and blue.
    Those who lie in this sacred place and in all those other places the 
world over, many of whom will never even be known, they would be very 
proud of today's men and women in uniform. And in the bright new century 
ahead, those who live free with pride in and without fear of their 
heritage or their faith will be very grateful to today's men and women 
in uniform.
    I thank you all. God bless you, and God bless America.

Note: The President spoke at 11:17 a.m. in the Amphitheater at Arlington 
National Cemetery. In his remarks, he referred to Maj. Gen. Robert R. 
Ivany, USA, Commander, and Col. Edward T. Brogan, USA, Chaplain, 
Military District of Washington; John C. (Jack) Metzler, Superintendent, 
Arlington National Cemetery; and President Slobodan Milosevic of the 
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro).