[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 50 (Monday, December 18, 2000)]
[Pages 3045-3048]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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

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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 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 Capital, 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 capital 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

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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 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.

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