Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (79 page)

Since it is native to America and nowhere else in the world, and common to every state in the Union, I present the American marigold for designation as the national floral emblem of our country.

At a reception in Washington, D.C., in 1994, President Clinton told the anthologist: “I have a copy of your collection of speeches on my night table, and I learn a lot from it.” (The President, known to flatter authors frequently in that way, is said to have a night table the size of a football field.) I replied that the next edition would have one of his speeches in it, and he quickly asked, “Which one?” Without the deliberation over the collected works that such a decision deserves, I blurted, “Memphis?” Mr. Clinton nodded approval, adding: “Especially toward the end.”

On November 13, 1993, Mr. Clinton flew to Memphis, Tennessee, to make a noontime talk to five thousand ministers, mostly black, at the Convocation of the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ. Because he tended to ignore texts when speaking to audiences he knew, speechwriter Carolyn Curiel prepared only a three-page series of talking points, including highlights of addresses of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.; it was at this church that Dr. King had preached his last sermon before his 1968 assassination.

However, on Air Force One flying to the event, staff members urged the President to stay “on message” to the traveling press corps, devoting some time to his support of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Preprinted signs about NAFTA were set to be held by children during Atlanta appearances. Accordingly, the President cobbled together half a speech that included a review of blacks appointed by his administration, reminders that poor families had been given a tax cut, and five long paragraphs
about the job benefits of NAFTA. He delivered it uncomfortably and knew it was received only politely; none of that is included in the text that follows.

But speaking in a Pentecostal church, in front of a white-robed choir, the person in the pulpit is expected to speak as the spirit moves him—which means no prepared text. Working from his terse list of prompts, but “winging it,” Mr. Clinton then gave the second half of his speech, which was the most moving long passage of his presidency. Daring to place himself in Dr. King’s shoes, he challenged the audience to assume moral responsibility to teach nonviolence to meet “the great crisis of the spirit that is gripping America today.”

Clintonian oratory usually runs long. In some cases, as in his 1992 Democratic convention speech, the length seemed self-indulgent; it was as if he recalled his boring 1988 convention speech, in which the only applause came at the words “in conclusion,” and was determined to milk his winning convention for all the applause in it. Two other long speeches, however—on religious liberty, made to the James Madison High School in Vienna, Virginia, on July 12, 1995, and on affirmative action made one week later—were thoughtful, persuasive presentations of his views on these most controversial topics. (Clinton credited Ms. Curiel with the affirmative action drafting; Jonathan Prince worked on religious liberty.)

The final portion of his Memphis speech, however, is what Clintonites like to think of as quintessential Clinton: personal, impassioned, anecdotal, self-questioning, colloquial (“bitty”), and—with Bible-quoting Southern Baptist cadences—uplifting. On Ms. Curiel’s wall is a picture of audience members, many with hands in chins, in pensive rather than revivalist mood. “This had not been billed as a major speech,” she recalled, “but on the way back, we all knew something major had happened.”

Just before mounting the pulpit, Mr. Clinton listened to a lone saxophonist play the hymn “Amazing Grace.” He heard himself introduced as “Bishop Clinton” and immediately played off that in his opening.

***

…YOU KNOW, IN
the last ten months, I’ve been called a lot of things, but nobody’s called me a bishop yet. [
Laughter
.]

When I was about nine years old, my beloved and now departed grandmother, who was a very wise woman, looked at me and she said, “You know, I believe you could be a preacher if you were just a little better boy.” [
Laughter
.]

Proverbs says, “A happy heart doeth good like medicine, but a broken spirit dryeth the bone.” This is a happy place, and I’m happy to be here. I thank you for your spirit.

By the grace of God and your help, last year I was elected president of this great country. I never dreamed that I would ever have a chance to come to this hallowed place where Martin Luther King gave his last sermon. I ask you to think today about the purpose for which I ran and the purpose for which so many of you worked to put me in this great office. I have worked hard to keep faith with our common efforts: to restore the economy, to reverse the politics of helping only those at the top of our totem pole and not the hard-working middle class or the poor; to bring our people together across racial and regional and political lines, to make a strength out of our diversity instead of letting it tear us apart; to reward work and family and community and try to move us forward into the twenty-first century. I have tried to keep faith….

If Martin Luther King, who said, “Like Moses, I am on the mountaintop, and I can see the promised land, but I’m not going to be able to get there with you, but we will get there”—if he were to reappear by my side today and give us a report card on the last twenty-five years, what would he say? You did a good job, he would say, voting and electing people who formerly were not electable because of the color of their skin. You have more political power, and that is good. You did a good job, he would say, letting people who have the ability to do so live wherever they want to live, go wherever they want to go in this great country. You did a good job, he would say, elevating people of color into the ranks of the United States armed forces to the very top or into the very top of our government. You did a very good job, he would say. He would say, you did a good job creating a black middle class of people who really are doing well, and the middle class is growing more among African-Americans than among non—African-Americans. You did a good job; you did a good job in opening opportunity.

But he would say, I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed. I did not live and die to see thirteen-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. That is not what I came here to do. I fought for freedom, he would say; but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon, not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children walk away from them and abandon them as if they don’t amount to anything. I fought for people to have the right to work but not to have whole communities and people abandoned. This is not what I lived and died for.

My fellow Americans, he would say, I fought to stop white people from being so filled with hate that they would wreak violence on black people. I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other black people with reckless abandon.

The other day the mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, a dear friend of mine, told me a story of visiting the family of a young man who had been killed—eighteen years old—on Halloween. He always went out with little bitty kids so they could trick-or-treat safely. And across the street from where they were walking on Halloween, a fourteen-year-old boy gave a thirteen-year-old boy a gun and dared him to shoot the eighteen-year-old boy, and he shot him dead. And the mayor had to visit the family.

In Washington, D.C., where I live, your nation’s capital, the symbol of freedom throughout the world, look how that freedom is being exercised. The other night a man came along the street and grabbed a one-year-old child and put the child in his car. The child may have been the child of the man. And two people were after him, and they chased him in the car, and they just kept shooting with reckless abandon, knowing that baby was in the car. And they shot the man dead, and a bullet went through his body into the baby’s body, and blew the little bootie off the child’s foot.

The other day on the front page of our paper, the nation’s capital, are we talking about world peace or world conflict? No, big article on the front page of
The Washington Post
about an eleven-year-old child planning her funeral: “These are the hymns I want sung. This is the dress I want to wear. I know I’m not going to live very long.” That is not the freedom, the freedom to die before you’re a teenager is not what Martin Luther King lived and died for.

More than thirty-seven thousand people die from gunshot wounds in this country every year. Gunfire is the leading cause of death in young men. And now that we’ve all gotten so cool that everybody can get a semiautomatic weapon, a person shot now is three times more likely to die than fifteen years ago, because they’re likely to have three bullets in them. A hundred and sixty thousand children stay home from school every day because they are scared they will be hurt in their schools.

The other day I was in California at a town meeting, and a handsome young man stood up and said, “Mr. President, my brother and I, we don’t belong to gangs. We don’t have guns. We don’t do drugs. We want to go to school. We want to be professionals. We want to work hard. We want to do well. We want to have families. And we changed our school because the school we were in was so dangerous. So when we showed up to the new school to register, my brother and I were standing in line
and somebody ran into the school and started shooting a gun. My brother was shot down standing right in front of me at the safer school.” The freedom to do that kind of thing is not what Martin Luther King lived and died for, not what people gathered in this hallowed church for the night before he was assassinated in April of 1968. If you had told anybody who was here in that church on that night that we would abuse our freedom in that way, they would have found it hard to believe. And I tell you, it is our moral duty to turn it around.

And now I think finally we have a chance. Finally, I think, we have a chance. We have a pastor here from New Haven, Connecticut. I was in his church with Reverend Jackson when I was running for president on a snowy day in Connecticut to mourn the death of children who had been killed in that city. And afterward we walked down the street for more than a mile in the snow. Then, the American people were not ready. People would say, “Oh, this is a terrible thing, but what can we do about it?”

Now when we read that foreign visitors come to our shores and are killed at random in our fine state of Florida, when we see our children planning their funerals, when the American people are finally coming to grips with the accumulated weight of crime and violence and the breakdown of family and community and the increase in drugs and the decrease in jobs, I think finally we may be ready to do something about it.

And there is something for each of us to do. There are changes we can make from the outside in; that’s the job of the president and the Congress and the governors and the mayors and the social service agencies. And then there’s some changes we’re going to have to make from the inside out, or the others won’t matter. That’s what that magnificent song was about, isn’t it? Sometimes there are no answers from the outside in; sometimes all the answers have to come from the values and the stirrings and the voices that speak to us from within.

So we are beginning. We are trying to pass a bill to make our people safer, to put another 100,000 police officers on the street, to provide boot camps instead of prisons for young people who can still be rescued, to provide more safety in our schools, to restrict the availability of these awful assault weapons, to pass the Brady Bill and at least require people to have their criminal background checked before they get a gun, and to say, if you’re not old enough to vote and you’re not old enough to go to war, you ought not to own a handgun, and you ought not to use one unless you’re on a target range….

We need this crime bill now. We ought to give it to the American people for Christmas. And we need to move forward on all these other
fronts. But I say to you, my fellow Americans, we need some other things as well. I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society until people who are willing to work have work. Work organizes life. It gives structure and discipline to life. It gives meaning and self-esteem to people who are parents. It gives a role model to children.

The famous African-American sociologist William Julius Wilson has written a stunning book called
The Truly Disadvantaged
in which he chronicles in breathtaking terms how the inner cities of our country have crumbled as work has disappeared. And we must find away, through public and private sources, to enhance the attractiveness of the American people who live there to get investment there. We cannot, I submit to you, repair the American community and restore the American family until we provide the structure, the values, the discipline, and the reward that work gives.

I read a wonderful speech the other day given at Howard University in a lecture series funded by Bill and Camille Cosby, in which the speaker said, “I grew up in Anacostia years ago. Even then it was all black, and it was a very poor neighborhood. But you know, when I was a child in Anacostia, a 100 percent African-American neighborhood, a very poor neighborhood, we had a crime rate that was lower than the average of the crime rate of our city. Why? Because we had coherent families. We had coherent communities. The people who filled the church on Sunday lived in the same place they went to church. The guy that owned the drugstore lived down the street. The person that owned the grocery store lived in our community. We were whole.” And I say to you, we have to make our people whole again.