    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [July 1, 1999]
    [Pages 1105-1108]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on the Charters of Freedom Project
    July 1, 1999

        Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. As you might imagine,
    this is a very special day for Hillary and for me, in a signal honor for us to have the
    chance to serve at this moment. I want to thank John Carlin for his faithful stewardship of these great documents;
    thank my friend Mike Armstrong for his
    generosity and for calling on others in the business community to help
    in this endeavor; thank Secretary Riley and
    NASA and the Department of Commerce for working with the National
    Archives in designing and developing the new encasement that will house
    our charters. I thank the Center for Civic Education for their efforts
    to teach our children the importance of history.
        I'd like to thank these young people who are here who read--
    first they helped us recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and then they read
    from our founding documents. And I thought that young man did a
    remarkable job introducing

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    Hillary. I thought they were all
    great. Let's give them a hand. [Applause]
        And I would like to say a special word of appreciation to
    Congressman Ralph Regula for his leadership and
    for proving that this is one issue which is not a partisan issue. This
    is an American issue, and I'm very grateful to him for his leadership in
    the United States Congress on this.
        On July 4, 1776, King George of England wrote in his diary,
    ``Nothing of importance happened today.'' Now, even making allowances
    for the absence of world news and the Internet, His Majesty's diary
    entry stands as one of the more inaccurate statements ever written.
    [Laughter] We all know that those who put their names to the Declaration
    of Independence changed the world forever.
        Before then, liberty had been a rare and fleeting thing in the
    course of human history. Citizens of ancient democracies enjoyed it but
    let it slip from their grasp. So the Founders labored mightily to craft
    a Declaration of Independence, then a Constitution and a Bill of Rights
    that they hoped would help America to beat the odds and keep liberty
    alive.
        Two hundred and twenty-three years later we can safely say they
    succeeded not only in keeping the liberty they created, in fact, alive,
    but in moving ever closer, generation after generation, to the pure
    ideals embodied in the words they wrote.
        Today, our liberty extends not just to white men with property but
    to all Americans. Our concept of freedom no longer includes the so-
    called freedom to keep slaves or extract profit from the labor of
    children. And our Constitution is the inspiration behind scores of
    democratic governments around the world, from Japan to Poland to
    Guatemala to South Africa.
        Each generation of Americans is called upon not only to preserve
    that liberty but to enhance it; not only to protect the institutions
    that secure our liberty but to renew and reform them to meet the
    challenges of the present with an eye for the future. The renewal of our
    generation--in our economy, our social fabric, our world leadership for
    peace and freedom--is well symbolized by the project we celebrate today,
    employing the finest minds and latest technologies to preserve these
    charters of freedom for generations yet unborn.
        When Hillary and I first realized
    that the turn of the millennium would occur while we were in the White
    House, we knew we had an obligation to mark it in ways that would be
    good for the country, in her words, ``by honoring the past and imagining
    the future.''
        What we do with these hallowed pieces of parchment, all Americans
    can do with the important historical treasures that exist all around
    them, in their attics, their parks, their townhalls. Saving America's
    treasures is not about living in the past. It is about conveying to
    future generations the American story in all its texture and richness
    and detail, about fulfilling our duty to be good ancestors, about
    catching the spirit Thomas Jefferson had in his later years, when he
    became devoted to preserving desks and chairs and other ordinary things
    from his extraordinary times. ``These small things,'' he wrote, ``may
    perhaps, like the relics of Saints, help to nourish our devotion to this
    holy bond of Union and keep it longer alive and warm in our
    affections.''
        I want to thank, first and foremost, Hillary for leading this effort, which has already
    accomplished so much from restoring the Star-Spangled Banner to honoring
    our great artists, thinkers, and scientists. I look forward to walking
    on some of those 2,000 millennium trails we'll build together and to
    naming more and more millennium communities.
        We can all take pride in our efforts to renew our national
    treasures, for in a larger sense, the story of our Nation is the story
    of constant renewal, the realization that we preserve the ideals
    embodied in these documents not simply by revering them but by
    reaffirming our commitment to them. Each generation must widen the
    circle of opportunity, deepen the meaning of freedom, and strengthen the
    bonds of our community.
        ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
    equal.'' We fought a war of revolution to make those words real in 1776.
    We rededicated ourselves to that proposition in 1863, recognizing that
    the bright words of the Declaration could not abide the stain of slavery
    or endure the breaking of our Union. We rededicated ourselves at the
    coming of the industrial age, when we recognized that new measures were
    required to protect and advance equal opportunity and freedom. We
    rededicated ourselves again in 1920, when we ratified the 19th
    amendment, granting women the right to vote. We saved those ideals in
    World War II and for millions upon millions of people in the cold war.
    We rededicated ourselves again in 1963,

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    hearing and heeding Dr. King's dream that, one day, the sons of former
    slaves and the sons of former slaveowners would one day sit down
    together at the table of brotherhood.
        Today, at the coming of the information age, we rededicate ourselves
    yet again. Thank God our challenges are not those of depression or war
    but those brought on by this hopeful and remarkable explosion in
    technology, by the globalization of our economy, by all the changes in
    the way we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the
    world.
        To keep our ideals alive, we must embrace new ideas and follow a new
    course. Because we believe equal opportunity in 1999 is just as
    important as it was in 1776, we must rededicate ourselves to the truest
    guarantor of that opportunity, a world-class educational system that
    benefits every single child.
        Because we believe the Federal Government must promote the general
    welfare, as our Founders instructed, we are dedicated to using its
    resources to pay squarely our single, greatest challenge as a nation
    today, the aging of America, and to do so in a way that pays off our
    national debt for the first time since 1835.
        Because we believe every human being has the right to life, liberty,
    and the pursuit of happiness, and no one should be discriminated
    against, uprooted, abused, or killed because of his or her race or
    ethnic background or religion, we are proud to stand with our allies in
    defense of these ideals in Kosovo.
        It is natural for any American contemplating the documents behind me
    to look upon those who crafted them as almost superhuman in their wisdom
    and the times that they lived as a golden age. But the more you read
    about them, the more you respect their achievement because the Founders
    were not gods on Earth; they were farmers and lawyers, printers and
    merchants, surveyors and soldiers, chosen by their constituents to hash
    out divergent interests and make difficult decisions about the future,
    to engage, in other words, in politics.
        I said at my alma mater, Georgetown, last week, that at its best,
    politics is about values, ideas, and action. That's what they were
    about. They turned politics into public service and made it a noble
    endeavor and left us a framework to keep it going. The Declaration and
    the Constitution emerged only after fierce debate and difficult
    compromise. Today, these documents enjoy universal acclaim.
        And at the time they were written, believe it or not, many
    Americans--though, thank goodness not a majority--actually did not agree
    with them. Yet, the framers refused to let serious differences of
    opinion become excuses to put off action. They overcame their
    differences and completed their tasks and stayed true to an idea that
    Jefferson would later express in his first Inaugural, that every
    difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.
        We have to keep that idea in mind today. The greatest threat to our
    democracy today, and certainly to freedom and democracy around the
    world, is the poisonous idea that what divides us is far more important
    than what we have in common; that as long as we have differences of
    opinion, we must have personal animosities, and we cannot have positive
    action. This is a dubious political strategy, a dangerous governing
    strategy, wrong as a matter of historical fact, and an affront to the
    sacred documents we gather here to save.
        Despite their many differences, the framers drafted, debated, and
    signed the Declaration of Independence in less than a month. They
    drafted, debated, and approved the Constitution in less than 5 months.
    If they could produce those enduring charters of freedom in a matter of
    months, surely there is no reason why we here in our time cannot make
    major progress in the remaining months of this millennium, to prepare
    our Nation for the new millennium and a 21st century which I am
    convinced will be America's best days.
        We owe it to these children to honor their past, to imagine their
    future, and to build a bridge to that future every single one of them
    can cross. So as we preserve the documents that launched this, the
    greatest journey in freedom and opportunity in all of history, let us
    resolve to do all we can to keep alive the spirit that got us to this
    point. These children will do the rest.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 3:55 p.m. in the Rotunda at the National
    Archives. In his remarks, he referred to C. Michael Armstrong, chairman
    and chief executive officer, AT&T; and students Jasmine Smith, Kevin Su,
    and Nora Skelly, who read passages from the Declaration of Independence
    and the Constitution of the United States. The transcript released by
    the Office of the Press Secretary also included the remarks of the First

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    Lady. A tape was not available for verification of the content of these
    remarks.