[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 19 (Monday, May 16, 1994)]
[Pages 1053-1055]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the National Fire and Emergency Services Dinner

May 10, 1994

    The President. Thank you very much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, 
for that warm welcome; and distinguished head table guests. I don't know 
about being America's Fire Chief, but I do know whenever I ring the 
bell, Steny Hoyer shows up. [Laughter] So today he rang the bell, and I 
showed up. And I am honored to be in your presence tonight.
    I want to recognize, not only Steny but the other Members of 
Congress who are here. I'm sure they've been introduced already, but 
Congressman Curt Weldon and Congressman Sherry Boehlert, Senator William 
Roth, Congressman Howard Coble. I think you will find that support for 
fire and emergency services is a bipartisan affair in the United States 
Congress. And I think you will find that I have tried to be a good 
partner to them. I also want to recognize some people who are not here, 
including Congressman

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Dick Durbin and Congressman Bill Emerson, who are the cochairs of the 
House Task Force on Natural Disasters; and to acknowledge the 
legislators of the year you identified, Chairman Norm Mineta and Senator 
Dan Inouye. I also want to thank, for their work in the administration 
and their work to come, our Fire Administrator-designate, Carrye Brown. 
And I'd like to say with a special word of pride how very much I 
appreciate the extraordinary work of one of my fellow Arkansans, James 
Lee Witt, the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
    You know, when I became President there were many jobs, but there 
were two or three jobs that I thought had suffered under previous 
administrations without regard to party, because they had not been 
filled with people who had actual experience doing what they were hired 
to do. One was the Small Business Administration, and I put someone in 
the Small Business Administration, not who had been a long-time 
political associate of mine, although he is a friend of mine, but 
someone who had spent 20 years financing and starting and expanding 
small businesses. It occurred to me that a person that did that job, 
since that's where most of the job growth is in America, would be better 
off if he or she had known something about it before they showed up at 
the door.
    And when it came time to pick a FEMA Director, as a Governor in the 
State that had the highest death rate per capita from tornadoes in the 
country, I knew a little something about what it was like to deal with 
FEMA over a very long period of time, under administrations of both 
parties in Washington. And that's why I asked the person who had done 
the emergency services work in our State and had gone through fires and 
floods and tornadoes and seen whole towns blown away, to do that job.
    Most people think that our administration has done pretty well in 
responding to earthquakes in California, floods in the Middle West, 
hurricanes in the South, severe winter weather that hit so many of our 
States last year. But we know that all the Federal responses in the 
world only work when it is matched with and really supports the courage 
that you show on a daily basis in all of your States and communities.
    I used to tell people that when I was the Governor of my State I had 
a real life. And back when I had a real life, one of the things I did 
was to work on trying to extend fire service to our rural areas with a 
direct funding stream every year that went to volunteer fire departments 
and with a number of other training and other legislative initiatives 
that made it possible during my 12 years of service to create over 700 
volunteer fire departments in our State. I'm very, very proud of that. 
And I'm proud of the work that all of them did and what it did for 
people's fire insurance rates and how many homes and lives were saved as 
a result of that effort.
    On Monday, yesterday, I went to Engine 24 and Ladder 5 in New York 
City, in Greenwich Village, to honor three firemen who 40 days ago paid 
the ultimate tribute: John Drennan, of Staten Island, who hung on for 40 
days with massive injuries over most of his body--his funeral Mass will 
be said at St. Patrick's Cathedral tomorrow--a captain, 49 years old, 
with a wonderful wife, a schoolteacher, and four children; and two young 
firemen, James Young, of Queens and Christopher Siedenburg, of Staten 
Island, who was only 25 years old when he died. Sometimes I think that 
we forget how dangerous it can be to put yourself in the line of natural 
disasters and sometimes manmade disasters for your fellow human beings.
    I was deeply moved when I met the partners of those three firemen 
who died, and I will always remember them. Especially will I think of 
them when I have the privilege and the honor of signing the arson 
prevention act. I am going to be proud to sign this law, not just to 
make your lives easier, but to reduce the number of wasted lives and 
wasted dollars we lose to arson every day, needless and senseless 
tragedies that might otherwise be prevented.
    I want to thank all of you who worked so hard on that law, all of 
you at the grassroots, all of you in the Congress, and the chief 
sponsors, Senator Dick Bryan and Representative Rick Boucher. I can't 
wait to have the chance to sign that. And I'm sure that Congressman 
Hoyer and Congressman Weldon and some of the others here will have some 
idea about

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exactly how we ought to sign that. And once again, when they ring the 
bell, I will show up.
    I noticed that the title of your annual report was, ``Protecting a 
Nation at Risk.'' I thought you were describing my job. [Laughter] I'll 
say this, there will always be risks involved in the work of freedom and 
the work of holding a civilized society together. The great tension we 
face today all around the world, in some ways, can be seen in the work 
you're doing against arson.
    There is today no cold war, no imminent threat of nuclear 
annihilation, although nuclear dangers remain. Three of the four 
countries in the former Soviet Union that had nuclear weapons have 
committed to getting rid of them, and Russia, which still has nuclear 
weapons, and the United States no longer point their warheads at one 
another. That is a wonderful thing to consider.
    But it's also true that we are fighting a constant battle all around 
the world between order and chaos and between those who wish to live in 
harmony and freedom and those who would abuse that very freedom. You see 
it whether it's in the ethnic brutality and the civil war in Bosnia or 
the rise, the lamentable rise, of organized crime in Russia where 
organized criminal thugs murder bankers at will who are trying to see 
free enterprise take root there or in the work of the gangs and some of 
the horrible tragedies within our own cities and communities.
    Those of you who are willing to literally put your lives on the line 
for other people's interests, for people who are in trouble, are the 
ultimate rebuttal to the cynics who believe we cannot create a world of 
justice and freedom where people live together in peace and honor. But 
we will, all of us, for the rest of our lives be fighting and working to 
make sure that our Nation is not put at risk and that our world can 
become safer by making sure the forces of order win over the forces of 
chaos and that the people who wish to have freedom are also willing to 
exercise it with responsibility. Every day, your lives symbolize that, 
the first and most enduring lesson of our democracy, and I thank you for 
it.
    Thank you very much.

[At this point, the President was presented gifts, including a statue of 
an American eagle.]

    The President. I promise when I was invited to come, I had no idea I 
was going to receive any of these things. And you probably don't know 
this, Congressman Hoyer, but I have sometime been a collector of eagles. 
I love them very much. And in our State, Mr. Witt and I, we did a lot of 
work trying to preserve the American eagle. And by the time I left 
office, we had the second largest number of eagles of any State in the 
country. They do symbolize what is best about our country, and I will 
treasure this. Of all the ones I have collected, I think I have none 
that is as beautiful as this, and I'm very, very grateful.
    Thank you so much.

Note: The President spoke at 8:03 p.m. at the Washington Hilton Hotel. A 
tape was not available for verification of the content of these remarks.