[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 23 (Monday, June 12, 1995)]
[Pages 1004-1008]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Faces of Hope Reunion Luncheon

June 9, 1995

    Thank you very much. Congratulations, Leslie, that's a--[laughter]--
Mr. Vice President, that may be your most memorable example of 
reinventing Government there. [Laughter] I promised you a personal 
service administration, and there's a living example of it.
    Let me say, it is wonderful to be here with all of you today. I want 
to thank the people who have worked so hard to keep this group together 
and in contact with us. I appreciate Sue Hazzard and Ann Walker and all 
the rest of you who worked on this. Let me thank you, because these are 
really very disparate people, living very different lives all over the 
country, and getting even further and further apart. One of you has 
since moved to Alaska since we've started--came back. I thank you for 
being here.
    Before we start, I'd like to just say that four of the people who 
were our Faces of Hope in 1992 have since passed away. Josh Cox, who was 
mentioned earlier; Sheri Kohlenberg, who came to see me with her husband 
and her son, Sammy--they're here. And Sammy left me something I thought 
was a dinosaur. He said it just looks like one, but anyway it's still in 
the White House over there. Sarah Weber, whose mother and sister are 
here; and Michael Quercio, whose partner is here. And Michael and I 
jogged together right before I became President, and I got to see him 
when I dedicated the new Kennedy Library. I miss them all very much; I 
know all of you do. And I'd like to ask if we could just have a moment 
of silence for them.

[At this point, a moment of silence was observed.]

    Amen.

[[Page 1005]]

    You know, all of you, in various ways, inspired us in this--when we 
ran for President, but you have very different stories: Some of you 
struggle to overcome great personal adversity; some of you still 
struggle with it; some of you struggle with your children; some of you 
were people who led what looked on the outside to be ordinary lives, but 
performed extraordinary service for others; some of you achieved very 
great things in your own lives, but took time to do things for others. 
There are a lot of different kinds of stories here. But the one thing 
that struck me about all of you was that you fundamentally decided that 
you would take an affirmative view of your life and life in general, 
that you decided that you would try to look for what could be done 
tomorrow to make it better, instead of just wallowing in what didn't 
happen yesterday or things that were beyond your control. You decided 
that you would make a constructive contribution to your own life and to 
the lives of others. You lived with hope. And that is a very important 
thing. You had a lot of influence on this administration, as the Vice 
President said. I think of all of you every time when I go someplace out 
of the country and our national service AmeriCorps people are there 
because that's what they do.
    I was in Texas the other day with people who are in the AmeriCorps 
program, all doing national service, earning money to go to college. One 
of them was a woman who retired from the military, said she never had a 
chance to go to college. She had the GI bill, but she wanted to do this 
service in her community before she went back to college--with two young 
people who had babies out of wedlock, as teenagers were on welfare, got 
themselves off welfare, got high school diplomas and were then 
contributing to AmeriCorps before going to college so they could help 
other people avoid the kind of problems they've had. And with one young 
girl who was a college graduate who was raised the child of a mother on 
welfare who decided after getting out of college she still ought to do 
the national service program because she ought to help other people.
    Now, everything--and I kept asking myself today, you know, what has 
all this got--how does it tie together? And I think, for me, all of you 
represent people who try to make something good happen. You didn't just 
talk; you acted. You tried to get on the solution side of--what I call 
being on the solution side of whatever your problems or challenges were, 
whether it was in your own family or in your community.
    And one of the biggest problems we have in Washington and one of the 
reasons politics is such a turn-off to people today is that it comes 
across to the American people over the air waves as being nothing but 
rhetoric and conflict and not being on the solution side. No one would 
run a family, a business, a charitable enterprise the way it appears 
that things here are run often. It would just run right off the tracks. 
You know that. You remind me here every day of what we should be doing.
    And you had another influence that hasn't been mentioned yet that 
you ought to know. When I became President, I put a lot of time and 
effort into making sure we had good people who were well organized in 
our casework division, when we get letters from people just like you all 
over America just asking for help with a problem or advice. About once a 
week, I get letters that I personally sign from ordinary American 
citizens who wrote the White House and asked for some problem. 
Everything--they have a sick child, they don't qualify for Government 
help, to, my father was supposed to get a medal in World War II, and he 
never got it, and all kinds of things in between. And I organized this 
because I made up my kind that I did not want to forget about people 
like you and the work that we do here.
    Because of a lot of folks like you, we have managed so far, even in 
these difficult budgetary times when we have reduced the size of the 
Government by 100,000, and we have shrunk the deficit, and we're going 
to have more cuts, we have increased our investment in education, 
medical research, and particularly, we have emphasized research and 
treatment for AIDS. And I'm not sure we would have been able to fight 
off all of those budget cuts if I hadn't actually met a lot of you and 
gotten to know you. Because of some of you here, when we passed the 
crime bill, we were able to say, ``Okay, you put more police on the 
street and have more punishment, but

[[Page 1006]]

put some money into giving these kinds something to say yes to.''
    There were two former gang members here from L.A. who spend their 
lives trying to keep peace on the streets of Los Angeles. Better we 
should support them; also cheaper for you.
    These are the kinds of things that we have tried to do. Because of 
you, we fought for the family leave law, and we've tried to fight for 
programs that would not only protect the environment but would also help 
to provide for economic transition where people are dislocated. When we 
had to cut back on defense, we provided for economic transition so we 
wouldn't forget about the people who lost their jobs because we won the 
cold war and we had to cut back on defense--because of you and people 
like you. And that's very, very important.
    We're having two big debates here in Washington today, and you put 
the lie to both of them. And so I want to talk about it. You'll hear it 
when we talk about what we're going to do to the budget. Debate, you 
know, number one is, whether all of our problems are primarily personal 
and cultural, that is, if we'd all just behave and do the right thing, 
there wouldn't be any problems, which is, at one level, plainly true, 
right; or, whether our problems are political and economic, that is, we 
have an obligation to help each other make the most of our own lives and 
overcome our problems.
    You put the lie to that debate. That is a bogus debate. Nothing I 
can do here in Washington will really solve your problems if you're not 
doing your part. On the other hand, if we don't do our part here, a lot 
of you still won't be able to do what you can do to make the most of 
your lives and the people you're trying to help. So I hope that when 
people look at you and think about people like you, they will say, the 
answer to that is both. I'll do my part, but you guys do yours.
    The second big debate is whether, even though we have to do things 
together, the Government is so clumsy, inefficient, and inept, we ought 
to throw it away and just tell everybody to behave right in their 
private charities, ``Do good. Go forth and do good.''
    My answer to that is, that is also a bogus debate. It's interesting 
to me that all of the people who work in charitable work say they'd like 
the Government to be a partner, that we need more charitable 
contributions, we want people to give more, but we need to have a 
partnership.
    We have other debates like that. Is it more important to balance the 
budget or to invest money in the education of our people so they raise 
their incomes and generate more tax revenues because we've got more 
people in higher efforts? My answer is, we have to find a way to do 
both. And what you do in your private lives is you balance--a lot of 
your balance all these conflicts all the time, these kinds of conflicts, 
and you go on and live your life. That's what we have to do here. And 
that's what you inspire me to do.
    You know, I was so moved, for example, after the horrible tragedy in 
Oklahoma City by how much work the private charities were also doing 
there, and how they did things that we could not have done, but we did 
things that they needed us to do.
    A lot of you, I have seen you in your literacy centers or your work 
to help kids, older kids. And you get funds from the private sector, but 
you also need us to do our part.
    And you know, when we showed up here, we really tried to shrink the 
size of Government, to reduce bureaucracy, to bring the deficit down, 
and we've done that. But we also tried to invest more in helping people 
make the most of their own lives. And it seems to me, that is the 
fundamental responsibility of we have, and that is what we're trying to 
do here.
    There are 90 million Americans who volunteer. And some of you are 
some of them, and God bless them. We need more of it. But the main thing 
we need to do is to make practical decisions here that work right, not 
have a lot of theoretical debates that drive a stake through the heart 
of America's citizenry.
    And you know, a lot of things are going on here I don't really 
understand. But I'm doing my best to remember you. And every time I come 
up to one of these decisions to say, what is best for the American 
people? What is best for the American people?
    And it's sometimes very hard and very frustrating because we just 
came from an event where the Vice President had a John

[[Page 1007]]

Deere dealer from West Texas talking about what we were going to do to 
reduce reporting requirements on the income tax system and how we'd 
reinvented Government. And the John Deere dealer whispered to me, he 
said, ``You know, Mr. President, this all sounds real good, but you need 
to reinvent what you're saying to the people because it ain't getting 
out out there.'' It was funny.
    The reason is, the way we talk up here doesn't really often square 
with the way you live out there. But let me just give you an example on 
what's going on. We have people here in Washington in important 
positions who say that we should drastically cut the amount of money 
we're investing in poor folks because we're just corrupting them and 
making them dependent. I haven't noticed anybody who really likes 
poverty very much, but that's what they're saying.
    My belief is we have had some programs that made people dependent, 
and I want to change them. I want to change the welfare system and 
support people who are putting people to work. I don't think anybody 
wants to be on welfare, and if they do, they shouldn't. So I have no 
problem with tough requirements to get people into training programs, 
require them to work. I think that's good. But to say you can do it for 
free, I think, is wrong.
    Then we have people, some of the same people who say we should cut 
back on the Government's investment in these kind of public endeavor, 
they say, ``Well, the charities should do more. We should just give more 
money to charitable contributions.'' But now I wonder whether they 
really mean that.
    I just want you to understand the difference between where you live 
and what's going on here. For example, last week I heard about this 
letter--listen to this--a letter that was sent to the chief executive 
officers of 82 of the biggest companies in this country. And it warned 
these chief executive officers that they were in serious danger of 
giving money--the letter implied that they were sure these poor men were 
ignorant, maybe there were some women on the list, I haven't seen the 
whole list--maybe they were ignorant, but they were in serious danger of 
giving money to private organizations that were promoting the welfare 
state, undermining the free enterprise system, eroding the fabric of our 
country. I quote, the letter said, ``You are giving charitable 
contributions which support the expansion of the welfare state.''
    Now these are people that want to give the Government less, right? 
So I was surprised to find out this letter was not for some fringe 
group. Now, this was a letter signed by the majority leader of the House 
of Representatives on very official looking stationery. So I couldn't 
wait to get my hands on a list of these subversive groups that were 
getting money from big American companies. Here are some of the groups 
that were on the list: The American Cancer Society, the American Heart 
Association, the American Lung Association--what do they have in 
common--the League of Women Voters, a dangerous outfit--[laughter]--the 
B'nai B'rith, the NAACP, the Nature Conservancy--they help States buy 
lands so people will be able to enjoy it forever, with enormous business 
support.
    Now, I asked myself when I read about this, and I saw this letter, 
how can we have the Government give less money and then have a major 
leader of the Congress tell people that they ought to give less--big 
corporations ought to give less to groups dedicated to reducing disease, 
fighting racism, protecting the environment, and promoting jobs and 
encouraging Americans to vote? Why? Because there's probably some 
segment of the political base there that really likes that stuff and 
pumps a bunch of money into it, and because maybe these people are 
advocating things that some of the big organized power groups here don't 
like.
    But don't you see what I'm trying to say is, this doesn't have 
anything to do with the way you live. And we have got to get Washington, 
DC, back on the solution side of America's challenges to help people 
make the most of their own lives, to help people who, through no fault 
of their own, cannot care for themselves, to really support work and 
family and community instead of talking about it and then just keep 
trying to drive stake after stake after stake through the American 
people to divide us and dissolution

[[Page 1008]]

us and convince each other that we're enemies.
    At the end of the Civil War, just shortly before he was 
assassinated, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in which he said--and we had 
had a pretty good fight then; we really were divided--he said, ``We 
cannot be enemies. We must be friends.'' Now, that's the way you live, 
and you are entitled to a political system that reflects the hope that 
you gave to the four of us. That's what we're trying to give you.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 2:15 p.m. on the State Floor at the White 
House.