[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[October 16, 1999]
[Pages 1806-1808]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks at a National Italian American Foundation Dinner
October 16, 1999
Thank you ladies and gentlemen. First of all, let me thank you for
your warm welcome to Hillary and me. Thank you, Frank Guarini, for being my friend for all these years. Thank you,
President Joe Cerrell. To all the
distinguished guests here and the honorees, the Members of Congress,
Gerry Ferraro, Ambassador
Foglietta, Ambassador
Rosapepe. To our distinguished Italian
guests, Maria Bartiromo, Ambassador Salleo, and especially Foreign Minister Dini.
I would like to say a special word of appreciation at this point to
the Prime Minister and the Government of
Italy for standing with us and working with us for the cause of our
common humanity in Kosovo and, before that, in Bosnia, We could not have
done it without Italy, and I am grateful.
Justice Scalia and Cardinal
Hickey and all the others here--you stole my
line about 50 percent of my four Chiefs of Staff being Italian. The
other two wish they were. [Laughter] I thank you for all the gifts from
Campania, including the beautiful flowers for Hillary. We visited there when the 1994 conference of the G-7
nations was held in Naples. And we have been very blessed by our times
there. I understand my friend Dick Grasso and
the Barnes & Noble CEO, Leonard Riggio, are
both from that region of Italy. I'm about to go back to Florence, and
I'm only supposed to stay a day, so if I play hooky and stay an extra
day I want 3,000 of you to write an excuse for me, just like I used to
get when I missed a day of school.
I guess I ought to say, since this is baseball season, that I'm sure
of one person who would like to be here tonight who can't be is Joe
Torre. Now, I'm not taking sides in the baseball
series, but the Yankees do have two Italian-Americans on their team, Joe
and the catcher, Joe Girardi. And no city in
America has been better to me than Boston, but the Red Sox haven't had
an Italian since their pitcher Frank Viola retired. So I think we ought
to get the Red Sox an Italian baseball player to balance out our equal
opportunity agenda through the country.
You know, from the beginning of our country, Italian-Americans have
made invaluable contributions. And I want to say a special word of
thanks, not for all those which I could litanize, and you know them, but
for the National Italian American Foundation's leadership for our
efforts to build one America.
I'm very grateful that this is a country in better shape than it was
7 years ago when I first came here. I am very grateful for the chance
that I have had to serve. I'm grateful for the Italian-Americans who
have helped to ensure the success of our administration. I'm glad that
we have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years and the lowest welfare
rolls in 30 years and the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest
crime rates in 26 years and the first back-to-back surpluses in 42
years.
But I have to tell you that the most important thing we have to do
to get ready for the 21st
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century, even more important than our efforts to continue to grow our
economy, is to build one country out of our diversity. If we do, if the
American people really can come to have that wonderful balance which
enables us to celebrate our diversity and our unique ethnic and
religious traditions, which makes America a very interesting place to
live, and still say our common humanity is even more important, we'll
figure out how to deal with all the other things.
Last year, one of only 2 years I've missed since I first came here 7
years ago, I was up for 9 days and nights at the Wye Plantation trying
to keep the Middle East peace process on track. If you look around the
world at how I have spent my time as your President--working for peace
in the Balkans, among Muslims and Croats and Serbs, among Albanian
Muslim and Serbian Orthodox Christians; for peace in the Middle East,
among Arabs and Jews, among Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, Jordanians,
and Lebanese; for peace in Northern Ireland among Catholics and
Protestants; to set up protections against the kind of tribal slaughter
we've seen in Africa among people who shared the same land, in one case
in Rwanda, for 500 years--it is truly interesting that at the dawn of
this new millennium, when we're exhilarated by all these technological
and scientific advances that are being made--one man told me that when I
have grandchildren they may be born with a life expectancy of 100 years;
we know that our kids are using the Internet and talking to people all
over the world and knowing things we couldn't know--isn't it interesting
that, in this quintessentially modern era, our biggest problem is the
most primitive and ancient of human failings: the fear of the other,
people who are different from us?
And what a short step it is from fearing people to hating them to
dehumanizing them, which legitimizes doing away with them. And isn't it
interesting that at a time when the crime rate in America is at a 26-
year low, we still have these vicious examples of a man shooting
children at a Jewish community school and then going out and murdering a
Filipino postman; another man saying he belonged to a church that didn't
believe in God but did believe in white supremacy, killing an Africa-
American basketball coach in Illinois and then murdering a young Korean
Christian as he walked out of his church; and all these other examples:
the young gay man, Matthew Shepard, a year ago this week being stretched
out, literally, upon a rack; James Byrd being pulled apart in Texas
because he was an African-American? Not because all Americans are like
that--almost all of us aren't--but because in each of us there is this
fragile scale, like the scale of justice Mr. Scalia must try to balance in his work, and in this scale we
wake up every morning with some curious balance of light and dark, of
hope and fear, and when the scale gets badly enough out of whack, the
easiest thing to do is to strike out against the other.
So I say again to you, Italian-Americans have been subject to
discrimination and bigotry in times past in America. You still are
subject to stereotypes that I think are unfair and unrepresentative, to
be kind about it. But it is because of the values you share with other
Americans that we have a prosperous economy and a healing society. And
we just have to remember that overall. Yes, I hope a lot of your
children make hundreds of millions of dollars by starting Internet
companies; yes, I hope that my plans to take care of the aging of
America and save Social Security and Medicare will prevail; I hope our
plans to elevate the quality of all of our schools will prevail; I hope
I can convince both parties in Congress to resist temptation and save
enough of this surplus to get us out of debt for the first time since
1835 over the next 15 years. I hope all of that. But remember this: The
most important thing is to build one America out of this crazy quilt of
all of us who live here.
Last week Hillary and I had the eighth of her millennial evenings at
the White House. And we had an expert in the
Internet, who helped to design the architecture of the Internet, and an
expert in genomics, who talked to us about the
human genome project and the miracles it will bring. He says one day the
intersection of computers and gene studies will enable us to put
digital, microscopic digital pieces in all parts of the human body to do
even the repair work on shattered nerves to the spine. And we talked
about all the miracles out there.
And the genomics expert said, ``But what I want you to understand is
that of all the possible permutations among people, with all many, many
parts of every gene, 99.9 percent of us is identical to that of every
other human being. And the genetic differences among groups--that is,
individuals among the Italian community, for example--are more
significant and greater than
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the aggregate average genetic differences between Italians and Irish and
Africans and Latins.'' It's important to remember. For people of faith,
it reflects the wisdom of our Creator.
So I say again, I'm indebted to you for many things: your work
ethic, your family ethic, your creativity, your energy, your passion. It
made America a much more interesting place, and it fueled this
remarkable run we have had. But your commitment to see that neither
Italians nor any other human beings are subject to degradation and
prejudice because of who they are, that we will learn to honestly and
openly express our differences and enjoy our differences, but reaffirm
our common humanity, make no mistake about it--just pick up the paper
any day; look at the perils of the present day. We are in a conflict
between modern possibility and primitive hatred. One America is the only
answer, and you're leading the way.
Thank you, and God bless you.
Note: The President spoke at 8:37 p.m. in the ballroom at the Washington
Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Frank J. Guarini, chairman,
Joseph R. Cerrell, president, and Geraldine Ferraro, board member,
National Italian American Foundation; U.S. Ambassador to Italy Thomas M.
Foglietta; U.S. Ambassador to Romania James C. Rosapepe; Italian
Ambassador to the United States Ferdinando Salleo; Minister of Foreign
Affairs Lamberto Dini and Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema of Italy; CNBC
journalist Maria Bartiromo, event emcee; Cardinal James Hickey, Roman
Catholic Archbishop of Washington, DC; Richard Grasso, chairman and
chief executive officer, New York Stock Exchange; Joe Torre, manager,
New York Yankees; Vinton G. Cerf, senior vice president for Internet
architecture and technology, MCI WorldCom; and Eric Lander, director,
Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research.