[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 35 (Monday, August 31, 1998)]
[Pages 1660-1664]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on the 35th Anniversary of the March on Washington in Oak 
Bluffs, Massachusetts

August 28, 1998

    Thank you very much. First of all hasn't this day made you proud to 
be an American? [Applause] I want to thank Dr. Ogletree and the entire 
committee--Skip Gates, Anita Hill, Judge Higginbotham. I want to thank 
Sebastian for doing a superb job of reminding us of the important facts 
of Martin Luther King's life. Marianne, thank you for your work and your 
words today. I thank Sabrina and Elza for leading us in the singing, and 
Giles, Olivia, and Mia for reading from the ``I Have A Dream'' speech. 
Rebecca, thank you for the books. Mr. Bryan, thank you for making us 
welcome in your congregation.
    And should I say, Reverend Lewis? John, I would not be a bit 
surprised if when we walk out these doors today every chicken on this 
island will be standing out there--[laughter]--in the street waiting for 
their leader. [Laughter]
    John Lewis has been my friend for a long time--a long time. A long 
time before he could have ever known that I would be here. And he stood 
with me in 1991 when only my mother and my wife thought I had any chance 
of being elected. So you have to make allowances and discount some of 
what he says. [Laughter] But I treasure the years of friendship we have 
shared. I have boundless admiration for him. He and Lillian have been an 
incredible source of strength and support for Hillary and me, and our 
country is a much, much better place because of the road John Lewis has 
walked.
    The summer of 1963 was a very eventful one for me, the summer I 
turned 17. What most people know about it now is the famous picture of 
me shaking hands with President Kennedy in July. It was a great moment. 
But I think the moment we commemorate today--a moment I experienced all 
alone--had a more profound impact on my life.
    Most of us who are old enough remember exactly where we were on 
August 28, 1963. I was in my living room in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I 
remember the chair I was sitting in. I remember exactly where it was in 
the room. I remember exactly the position of the

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chair when I sat and watched on national television the great March on 
Washington unfold. I remember weeping uncontrollably during Martin 
Luther King's speech, and I remember thinking when it was over, my 
country would never be the same, and neither would I.
    There are people all across this country who made a more intense 
commitment to the idea of racial equality and justice that day than they 
had ever made before. And so, in very personal ways, all of us became 
better and bigger because of the work of those who brought that great 
day about. There are millions of people who John Lewis will never meet 
who are better and bigger because of what that day meant.
    And the words continue to echo down to the present day, spoken to us 
today by children who were not even alive then. And God willing, their 
grandchildren will also be inspired and moved and become better and 
bigger because of what happened on that increasingly distant summer day.
    What I'd like to ask you to think about a little today and to share 
with you--and I'll try to do it without taking my spectacles out, but I 
don't write very well, and I don't read too well as I get older--is what 
I think this means for us today. I was trying to think about what John 
and Dr. King and others did, and how they did it, and how it informs 
what I do and how I think about other things today. And I would ask you 
only to think about three things--the hour is late and it's warm in 
here, and I can't bring the chickens home to roost. [Laughter]
    But I think of these three things. Number one, Dr. King used to 
speak about how we were all bound together in a web of mutuality which 
was an elegant way of saying, whether we like it or not, we're all in 
this life together. We are interdependent. Well, what does that mean? 
Well, let me give you a specific example.
    We had some good news today: Incomes in America went up 5 percent 
last year. That's a big bump in a year. We've got the best economy in a 
generation. That's the good news. But we are mutually interdependent 
with people far beyond our borders. Yesterday there was some more news 
that was troubling out of Russia--some rumor, some fact, about the 
decline in the economy. Our stock market dropped over 350 points. And in 
Latin America, our most fast-growing market for American exports, all 
the markets went down, even though, as far as we know, most of those 
countries are doing everything right. Why? Because we're in a tighter 
and tighter and tighter web of mutuality.
    Asia has these economic troubles. So even though we've got the best 
economy in a generation, our farm exports to Asia are down 30 percent 
from last year, and we have States in this country where farmers, the 
hardest working people in this country, can't make their mortgage 
payments because of things that happened half a world away they didn't 
have any direct influence on at all. This world is being bound together 
more closely.
    So what is the lesson from that? Well, I should go to Russia, 
because, as John said, anybody can come see you when you're doing well. 
I should go there and I should--[applause]--and we should tell them that 
if they'll be strong and do the disciplined, hard things they have to do 
to reform their country, their economy, and get through this dark night, 
that we'll stick with them. And we ought to meet our responsibilities to 
the International Monetary Fund and these other international groups, 
because we can't solve the world's problems alone. We can't even solve 
our problems alone, because we're in this web of mutuality. But I 
learned that from the civil rights movement, not from an economics 
textbook.
    The second thing, even if you're not a pacifist, whenever possible 
peace and nonviolence is always the right thing to do. I remember so 
vividly in 1994--John writes about this in the book--I was trying to 
pass this crime bill. And all the opposition to the crime bill that was 
in the newspapers, all the intense opposition was coming from the NRA 
and the others that did not want us to ban assault weapons, didn't 
believe that we ought to have more community policemen walking the 
streets, and conservatives who thought we should just punish people more 
and not spend more money trying to keep kids out of trouble in the first 
place. And it was a huge fight.

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    And so they came to see me, and they said, ``Well, John Lewis is not 
going to vote for this bill.'' And I said, ``Why?'' And they said, 
``Because it increases the number of crimes subject to the Federal death 
penalty, and he's not for it. And he's not in bed with all those other 
people, he thinks they're wrong, but he can't vote for it.'' And I said, 
``Well, let him alone. There's no point in calling him, because he's 
lived a lifetime dedicated to an idea.'' And while I may not be a 
pacifist, whenever possible it's always the right thing to do--to try to 
be peaceable and nonviolent.
    What does that mean for today? Well, there's a lot of good news. 
It's like the economy. The crime rate is at a 25-year low; juvenile 
crime is finally coming down. Yesterday we put out a handbook to send to 
every school in the country to try to increase the ability of teachers 
and others to identify kids in trouble, to try to stop these horrible, 
although isolated, examples when young people wreak violence on others. 
We've got all over the country now these exciting community-based 
programs that are dramatically reducing violence among young people--the 
school uniforms and curfew programs and summer school in Chicago now is 
the sixth biggest school district in America--the summer school. Over 
40,000 kids are now getting three square meals a day in the schools of 
that city. There's a lot of great things going on. But it is still a 
pretty violent world.
    A black man was murdered recently in Texas in the most horrible way, 
because people not representative of that community, but people living 
in that community, were driven crazy through their demonic images of a 
man of a different race.
    We have more diversity than ever before. It's wonderful, but there 
are still--we now see different minority groups at each other's throat 
from time to time, not understanding their racial or their cultural or 
their religious differences. And again, there is this web of mutuality.
    Half a world away terrorists trying to hurt Americans blow up two 
Embassies in Africa. And they kill some of our people, some of our best 
people, of, I might add, very many different racial and ethnic 
backgrounds--American citizens, including a distinguished career 
African-American diplomat and his son. But they also killed almost 300 
Africans and wounded 5,000 others.
    We see their pictures in the morning paper--two of them who did 
that--we're bringing them home. And they look like active, confident 
young people. What happened inside them that made them feel so much 
hatred toward us that they could justify not only an act of violence 
against innocent diplomats and other public servants but the collateral 
consequences to Africans whom they would never know? They had children, 
too.
    So it is always best to remember that we have to try to work for 
peace in the Middle East, for peace in Northern Ireland, for an end to 
terrorism, for protections against biological and chemical weapons being 
used in the first place.
    The night before we took action against the terrorist operations in 
Afghanistan and Sudan, I was here on this island, up until 2:30 in the 
morning, trying to make absolutely sure that at that chemical plant 
there was no night shift. I believed I had to take the action I did, but 
I didn't want some person, who was a nobody to me but who may have a 
family to feed and a life to live and probably had no earthly idea what 
else was going on there, to die needlessly.
    It's another reason we ought to pay our debt to the United Nations, 
because if we can work together, together we can find more peaceful 
solutions. Now, I didn't learn that when I became President. I learned 
it from John Lewis and the civil rights movement a long time ago.
    And the last thing I learned from them on which all these other 
things depend, without which we cannot build a world of peace, or one 
America in an increasingly peaceful world, bound together in this web of 
mutuality, is that you can't get there unless you're willing to forgive 
your enemies.
    I never will forget one of the most--I don't think I've ever spoken 
about this in public before, but I--one of the most meaningful, personal 
moments I've had as President was a conversation I had with Nelson 
Mandela. And I said to him--I said, ``You know, I've read your book, and 
I've heard you speak, and you spent time with my wife and daughter, and 
you've talked about inviting your

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jailers to your inauguration.'' And I said, ``It's very moving.'' And I 
said, ``You're a shrewd as well as a great man. But come on, now, how 
did you really do that? You can't make me believe you didn't hate those 
people who did that to you for 27 years.''
    He said, ``I did hate them for quite a long time. After all, they 
abused me physically and emotionally. They separated me from my wife, 
and it eventually broke my family up. They kept me from seeing my 
children grow up.'' He said, ``For quite a long time I hated them.'' And 
then he said, ``I realized one day, breaking rocks, that they could take 
everything away from me--everything--but my mind and my heart. Now, 
those things I would have to give away. And I simply decided I would not 
give them away.''
    So, as you look around the world you see--how do you explain these 
three children who were killed in Ireland, or all the people who were 
killed in the square when the people were told to leave the city hall, 
there was a bomb there, and then they walked out toward the bomb? What 
about all those families in Africa--I don't know, I can't pick up the 
telephone and call them and say, ``I'm so sorry this happened.'' How do 
we find that spirit?
    All of you know, I'm having to become quite an expert in this 
business of asking for forgiveness. It gets a little easier the more you 
do it. And if you have a family, an administration, a Congress, and a 
whole country to ask, you're going to get a lot of practice. [Laughter]
    But I have to tell you that in these last days, it has come home to 
me, again, something I first learned as President, but it wasn't burned 
in my bones, and that is that in order to get it, you have to be willing 
to give it.
    And all of us--the anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the desire 
for recrimination against people you believe have wronged you, they 
harden the heart and deaden the spirit and lead to self-inflicted 
wounds. And so it is important that we are able to forgive those we 
believe have wronged us, even as we ask for forgiveness from people we 
have wronged. And I heard that first--first--in the civil rights 
movement: ``Love thy neighbor as thyself.''
    What does it all mean and where do we take it from here? I'm so glad 
John told you the story of the little kids, of whom he was one, holding 
the house down. I want to close with what else he said about it, because 
it's where I think we have to go in order for the civil rights movement 
to have a lasting legacy.
    In the prolog of John's book, he tells the story about the kids 
holding the house down. And then he says the following: ``More than half 
a century has passed since that day. And it has struck me more than once 
over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in 
that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, 
the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart. It 
seemed that way in the 1960's when America felt itself bursting at the 
seams; so many storms.
    ``But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran 
away. They stayed. They came together. They did the best they could, 
clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was 
weakest. And then another corner would lift, and we would go there. And 
eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle and the house would still 
stand. But we knew another storm would come and we would have to do it 
all over again. And we did. And we still do, all of us, you and I. 
Children holding hands, walking with the wind. That is America to me. 
Not just the movement for civil rights, but the endless struggle to 
respond with decency, dignity, and a sense of brotherhood to all the 
challenges that face us as a nation as a whole.''
    And then he says this: ``That is a story, in essence, of my life, of 
the path to which I've been committed since I turned from a boy to a man 
and to which I remain committed today, a path that extends beyond the 
issue of race alone, beyond class as well, and gender and age and every 
other distinction that tends to separate us as human beings rather than 
bring us together. The path involves nothing less than the pursuit of 
the most precious and pure concept I have ever known, an ideal I 
discovered as a young man that has guided me like a beacon ever since, a 
concept called `the beloved community.' ''

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    That is the America we are trying to create. That is the America 
John Lewis and his comrades on this day 35 years ago gave us the chance 
to build for our children.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:54 p.m. in the Union Chapel. In his 
remarks, he referred to Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., professor, Harvard 
University Law School; Henry L. Gates, Jr., W.E.B. DuBois professor of 
humanities, Harvard University; Anita Hill, former professor, University 
of Oklahoma Law School; A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., former Chief Judge, 
Third Circuit; author Marianne Larned; performers Sabrina Luening and 
Elza Minor; students Sebastian Corwin, Giles Welch, Olivia Lew, Mia 
Gonsalves, and Rebecca Chastang; James H. Bryan, president, Union 
Chapel; Representative John Lewis and his wife, Lillian; and State 
President Nelson Mandela of South Africa.