[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[April 7, 2000]
[Pages 659-661]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Screening of the PBS Documentary Series
``The American President''
April 7, 2000

    The President. Thank you very much, and welcome. I want to say a 
special word of welcome to all the voices of the Presidents who are 
here--and they were supposed to give me a list of them. I don't know 
what happened; I just saw it. [Laughter] But I know we have Senator 
Bumpers, Senator Glenn, 
Senator Simon, Representative 
Rostenkowski, Governors Weicker and Weld. Bill 
Ferris, we welcome you here. And a special 
word of thanks to Sy Sternberg and 
his family. We appreciate the fact that New York Life has underwritten 
this.
    I also want to thank the coproducers, Philip Kunhardt, 
Jr., and Philip Kunhardt III and Peter Kunhardt. 
And there are some other voices here from the series: Ben 
Bradlee, Walter Cronkite, James Roosevelt, 
Charlie Rose--I don't know if he's here or 
not--and Tim Russert.
    Tonight this is a fitting way for us to open the first in a series 
of events celebrating the 200th anniversary of the White House. It is 
clearly the right thing to do to begin by honoring the lives of 
individuals who have roamed the halls and carried the burden of the 
Presidency within the walls of the White House.
    This room has not only witnessed historical events, it has played a 
role in shaping them. It has hosted 42 administrations and 41 different 
personalities, every President except George Washington. The East Room 
began as a laundry room for Abigail Adams--an auspicious beginning--
[laughter]--reminding us that there are certain basic elements to this 
job.
    Thomas Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis laid maps and animal skins on 
this floor where you're sitting and charted the Lewis and Clark 
expedition. Later, in 1814, a banquet was being held here in this White 
House and in this room when James Madison sent Dolley word that the Army 
had miscalculated where the British were going to assault Washington, 
and he told her to cut Gilbert Stuart's painting of George Washington 
down and get out of the house as quickly as possible. She did, and they 
had to leave the banquet here. The British came in, ate the food, and 
then burned the White House. [Laughter]
    Later, this house and this room was the headquarters for battle-worn 
Union troops during the Civil War. President Roosevelt's children 
roller-skated here. Over the years, this room and this

[[Page 660]]

house have survived a major fire, two wars, a plane crash, and five 
weddings. And of course, it has been a gallery for some priceless art 
which embodies the history of this country.
    Each President in his own time has survived unique challenges, 
striving to fulfill the purpose of our Founders to form a more perfect 
Union. Tonight we will have the opportunity to see two of these 
selections from the ``American President'' series, the first documentary 
series ever to profile all of our Chief Executives.
    The first viewing is on the life of Thomas Jefferson. Every American 
President has been inspired by Jefferson, affected by his decisions, 
fascinated by his life story. He spent a lifetime shaping our new and 
ever-evolving democracy. It would become, as he said, more developed, 
more enlightened as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, 
manners and opinions change.
    One hundred and fifty years later, our 35th President, John 
Kennedy--whose sister, Eunice, is with us tonight, and we thank you for 
coming--brought that same spirit of innovation and progress to the White 
House. His fleeting time in this house remains a singular story in our 
history. Our President for only a thousand days, he changed the way we 
think about our country, our world, and our own obligations to the 
future. The New Frontier inspired millions of Americans to take a 
personal responsibility for making our country stronger and more united. 
As he said, ``The New Frontier is not a set of promises. It is a set of 
challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people 
but what I intend to ask of them.''
    Many great people have called this house home. All of them, so far, 
have been white males of European descent. I am absolutely convinced 
that in the not-too-distant future, there will be a woman President, and 
a person of color will occupy the White House and the Oval Office. But 
the Presidency was not built by one person. And in a fundamental way, it 
has been carried forward by the American people since the beginning.
    I have spent a lot of time reading the histories of various periods 
in the White House and the biographies of some of my lesser known 
predecessors. One of the things that I hope this series will do is to 
give people a feel of the mixture of the personality and character and 
skills of a President and his time, and also a sense of what personal 
joys and tragedies surrounded Presidents.
    Just for example, Franklin Pierce, one of the only other Presidents 
who came from a small State and was a Governor, is generally accounted 
not to have been a very good President. But when you consider the times 
in which he served, I wonder whether Lincoln could have succeeded in 
1853, instead of 1861. And almost never do I hear anyone talk about the 
fact that when Franklin Pierce was on his way to be inaugurated, with 
his wife and his only child, he took the train from New Hampshire to 
Washington, and there was a minor accident in which 10 or 11 people 
received minor bruises. But his son fell on his head, cracked his spine, 
and died. He never recovered. His wife never recovered.
    I've often wondered why it was that Abraham Lincoln, who would have 
a hard time getting elected today because he had terrible periodic 
persistent bouts of depression before he became President, was married 
to a wife who was bubbly and strong and happy and, as far as I know, has 
the distinction of being the only woman in American history to have been 
courted by three of the four candidates for President in 1860. 
[Laughter] For John Breckenridge and Stephen Douglas also pursued her, 
and clearly she made the right decision. [Laughter]
    But they had lost a child before they came to the White House. They 
lost another child here. She lost three half-brothers fighting for the 
Confederacy. And then all the carnage of the Civil War, the burden of 
the tragedies they faced broke Mary Todd Lincoln, and in history she is 
seen as a very different person from the person she really was for most 
of her life. And yet, in some magical way, all the personal and national 
trauma of that time was absorbed by Abraham Lincoln in a way that 
enabled him to become stronger, to overcome his own demons, to leave 
aside his own depression, and to become, in my view, the greatest 
President we ever had.
    So I hope when this whole series is done, there will be a greater 
appreciation for people like Rutherford B. Hayes, who Senator Glenn is 
the voice of in this series. Rutherford B. Hayes was one of four or five 
Union generals from Ohio who became President. After the Civil War, if 
you were a Union general from Ohio, you had about a 50 percent chance of

[[Page 661]]

becoming President. [Laughter] It's the only category in our history 
that has ever been like that. And a lot of the rest of us wish that it 
had been so easy. [Laughter]
    I hope we'll understand those people that we don't know very much 
about. I hope we'll have a better understanding of the personal 
circumstances that Presidents face. I hope we'll have a better 
understanding of how they fit with their times and how they overcame 
their difficulties, as President Lincoln did.
    Theodore Roosevelt once complained that he would never be viewed as 
a great President because he had the misfortune to serve when there was 
no great war. He couldn't have been more wrong. And I'm convinced his 
temperament was absolutely perfectly suited to the times in which he 
served. Ironically, since he complained about having no war, he's the 
only President ever to win the Nobel Prize for peace. [Laughter] Which 
all goes to show you, you've just got to show up every day and do your 
best. [Laughter]
    Now, I'd like to ask Sy Sternberg, the chairman of New York Life, to come up. And again, I 
think we should all thank him for making this evening possible. 
[Applause]

[At this point, Seymour Sternberg, 
chairman and chief executive officer, New York Life Insurance Corp., 
made brief remarks and introduced coproducer Philip Kunhardt 
III, who made brief remarks and 
presented two clips from the series.]

    The President. Well, I would like to, first of all, congratulate 
Hugh Sidey and Richard Neustadt on the marvelous job they have done with this 
program, and all of you who are involved in it.
    When I was watching those two very important pieces of our history, 
I couldn't help feeling grateful for some of the things which have been 
passed down to the present day, to me. The day before I became 
President, I received a copy of the only book that Thomas Jefferson ever 
wrote, ``Notes From the State of Virginia,'' which is remarkable for its 
incredibly detailed analysis of everything about the State. But it's 
most important today because it contained the first known recording of 
Thomas Jefferson's condemnation of slavery. And it always struck me that 
every person in this job lives with a certain ambiguity, and I wondered 
how he dealt with it. But I'm grateful for what he left us.
    Shortly after I became President, Pamela Harriman gave me a copy of the ink blotter that President 
Kennedy used in his office in the White House, that Mrs. Kennedy had 
given to her husband, Averell, about 12 days after President Kennedy was 
killed--with the letter that Jackie Kennedy had written. And because it 
was my great good fortune to know Jackie and her children, it is one of 
my most precious possessions. About once a month I open the ink blotter 
and read the letter again, just to remember how fleeting life is and 
what a great gift every day is.
    I think one of the most treasured pictures I have from my time in 
the White House is the picture I have of young John Kennedy looking at 
his father's portrait on a visit he made here, when we had a wonderful 
preview here of the great series on space that HBO did.
    So the history of the country goes on, and the families come and go. 
But you have given us a great gift tonight, and this whole series will 
be a great gift. And one of the things that I had hoped would occur, you 
have done, even with people who lived long ago: You have reminded us 
that for all their achievements and all their failures, they were also 
people.
    The great premise of democracy is that ordinary people will make the 
right decision most of the time; that no one is irreplaceable, but that 
freedom is.
    I hope you'll all join us now in the Dining Room for a reception. 
And thank you again to the 
Kunhardts; thank you again, Sy; thank 
you again to PBS; and thank you all for coming.

 Note:  The President spoke at 8:25 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to former Senators Dale Bumpers, John 
Glenn, and Paul Simon; former Representative Dan Rostenkowski; former 
Governors Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., of Connecticut and William F. Weld of 
Massachusetts; Ben Bradlee, former executive editor, Washington Post; 
Walter Cronkite, former CBS News anchorman; James Roosevelt, grandson of 
Franklin D. Roosevelt; Charlie Rose, host of PBS' ``The Charlie Rose 
Show''; Tim Russert, host of NBC News' ``Meet the Press''; and Hugh 
Sidey, narrator, and Richard Neustadt, on-camera scholar, ``The American 
President.''