[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

[[Page 1807]]

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

[[Page 1808]]

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.