[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[December 9, 2000]
[Pages 2666-2668]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks on the Unveiling of the Design for the William J. Clinton
Presidential Library
December 9, 2000
Thank you very much. I want to begin by saying how glad I am to see
all of you here. I want to thank my two Arkansas Cabinet members, Rodney
Slater and James Lee Witt, for being here. And thank you, Skip
Rutherford, for all the work you've
done. And I want to thank the other Arkansans here who have tried to
help us get this off the ground, including Mack McLarty and Joe Ford and all the local
officials. And I want to say a special word of appreciation, obviously,
to Jim Polshek and all the people in the
architectural firm who worked on this; and to Ralph
Applebaum, who is not here today, but I will
say a few more words about why that's important.
I want to thank Hillary and
Chelsea, who have spent a lot of time on
this, working with me, trying to imagine what we wanted to do and how we
wanted to do it. And I want to thank Terry McAuliffe, who is sitting here trying
[[Page 2667]]
to make sure we can pay for it, as Jim
reels off all these things we're going to do. [Laughter]
Since President Roosevelt started a Presidential library--and he had
the only Presidential library, actually, where the President worked in
the library while he was President, because he built it in 1939 and he
actually used it whenever he went home to Hyde Park, until his death in
1945--there have been 10 Presidential libraries. I have actually visited
seven of them, myself, and I've looked at the plans and the scheme of
the other three. And I've tried to lift some of their best ideas in this
building.
But basically what I wanted to do was to, first of all, have a
building that was beautiful and architecturally significant, that people
would want to walk in 100 years from now, but one that would also work--
would work for average citizens. Ninety percent of the people who come
to Presidential libraries are people who come as visitors. They want to
see the museum; they want to know what happened in this point in our
history related to everything else and how it relates to the present and
the future.
And the challenge for any architect is that you've got to protect
all these documents, and they have to be in buildings that don't get
overly exposed to the light. So if you put all that stuff in one
building, you have to have a lot of solid walls. And so the thing that
we were able to work out that I'm really pleased about is, we're
protecting all the documents in the back there, and we don't have to
worry about that interfering with the enjoyment of the people who
actually come to see the museum and the building and participate in all
of that.
So I think that's really the thing that will make it fundamentally
more interesting and more enjoyable for all the people, plus the fact
that we--thanks to the good people of Little Rock, we've got enough land
here to have a park, which will always be accessible to the local
citizens as well as to all the visitors. And I'm very, very pleased
about that.
I also want to say that it was very important to me to try to
faithfully present the history of this time. And I want to say a special
word of appreciation to Ralph Applebaum.
Some of you know he did the Holocaust Museum here in Washington, which I
think is the finest museum of its kind anywhere in the world. And I was
elated when he agreed to do this.
I also want to say, since we'll be living in New York, I think that
the planetarium that's been done in Manhattan by the Polshek firm, which
some of you have seen pictures of, is basically this great square
building in steel and glass with a globe inside--it's just breathtaking.
And I knew that when I saw that, that they could do what I wanted to do
down here. And so I'm very, very pleased.
Skip has already talked about
this, but I wanted this library to also benefit the city and the State.
And I think recovering this portion of the river, recovering this part
of the neighborhood--you can't tell here, but those of you who aren't
from Arkansas don't know, but once you get down here, over here, you're
immediately into perhaps the most historic part of our State, the Old
State Capitol, which is mentioned, where I announced for President and
where I had my very first reception as a public official in January of
1977 in an ice storm--was built during the period in which we became a
State, from 1833 to 1836. And it's a wonderful, wonderful old building.
So it was very close to this present State Capitol and a lot of
other very historically significant buildings, including the magnificent
new library we have there. So I'm very pleased about it.
I'm very pleased that the library will be accessible and
interactive. You know, because of technology, you don't really have to
go anyplace anymore to get whatever is there. And we were laughing about
all these tens of millions of documents. The people who work here at the
White House who are part of the permanent staff, who work from
administration to administration and preserve these documents, one of
the things--I went over to visit them not very long ago, and they showed
me what they are doing, and it's amazing.
This may be somewhat embarrassing for me, but people will actually
be able to pull up on the Internet copies of actual memos that I wrote
on. And the woman said, ``The reason we've got to have so many documents
here is that you wrote more letters, more notes to your staff on more
pieces of paper than any President in history.'' [Laughter] And
unfortunately, most of them are unreadable, but--[laughter]--at least
the people will be able to get a picture of that. You will be able to
see drafts of the Inaugural Addresses and what I wrote and what they
wrote, and that's good, because it will let a lot of my speechwriters
off in history. People will think, ``Gosh, what he marked out was better
than what he said.'' But anyway, all that
[[Page 2668]]
will be available, and I think that's very important.
The third thing I would like to say is that I really wanted the
relationship that this library would have to the University of Arkansas
to be focused on public service. I want more and more people to want to
go into public service. And we are going to offer a master's degree in
public service, but in addition to that, I'm going to attempt to set up
partnerships with employers all across America to get them to come and
send their young executives to our place for a couple of months as a
kind of an orientation in preparation for doing a year of public service
in the National, State, or local governments all across the country.
I got this idea just basically from the Presidential Fellowship
program we have here. But I can tell you that all the people who come
here as White House Fellows make an incredibly unique contribution, as
do all the volunteers, all the interns, everybody who works here, and it
changes them forever, but they also help us do what we're doing here.
And it occurred to me that if we had a critical mass of people all
across the United States who are out there working in businesses of all
kinds and nonprofits and whatever, but they had spent at least one year
of their lives working in the public sector at the Federal, State, or
local level, that, number one, the Government would always work better,
would always have a sense of how whatever is being done affects people
who are not in Government, but secondly, we would not ever return to a
period where the American people felt as alienated from their Government
as we did for, in my judgment, too many years in the latter part of the
20th century.
And I really think it could--if we can get enough people to do this,
it could pretty much permanently change the relationship of the American
people to the way the Government works and the way that would have the
Government making better decisions, and also, having more people in the
private sector who had actually had the experience of being there. So
I'm very, very hopeful about it.
In 1941 President Roosevelt's library was dedicated. And he said,
and I quote, ``Building a library is really an act of faith, a belief in
the capacity of a Nation's people, so it will learn from the past that
they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.''
Well, this is a similar act of faith. And I hope that it will not
only allow people to see these remarkable 8 years but will help to
empower people and give them the confidence to believe that they can
build America's greatest days in the new century.
So again, I want to thank you all. And especially, I want to thank
those who have helped me to develop these plans. And I want to thank
Terry and all the others here who have agreed to help me figure out how
to build it, which is now the next big challenge. But I'm looking
forward to it.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 12:40 p.m. in the Roosevelt Room at the
White House. In his remarks, he referred to J.L. (Skip) Rutherford,
president, and Terence McAuliffe, fundraiser, William Jefferson Clinton
Foundation; former White House Chief of Staff Thomas F. (Mack) McLarty;
Joe Ford, chairman and chief executive officer, ALLTEL Corp.; and James
S. Polshek, lead architect, and Ralph Applebaum, interpretive designer,
William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library.