pd08au94 Remarks to Health Security Express Participants...

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[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents]
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[Page i-ii]
 
Monday, August 8, 1994
 
Volume 30--Number 31
Pages 1581-1636
 
Contents

[[Page i]]

Weekly Compilation of

Presidential

Documents





[[Page ii]]


Addresses and Remarks

    American Legion Boys Nation--1581
    Anniversary of the passage of the economic program--1628
    California earthquake assistance, teleconference--1605
    Health Security Express participants--1611
    Missouri, Health Security Express participants in Independence--1588
    New Jersey, health care rally in Jersey City--1597
    Ohio
         Arrival in Cleveland--1591
         Reception for Joel Hyatt in Mayfield Heights--1592
    Radio address--1586
    U.S. shipbuilding industry initiatives--1603
    Young American Medal winners--1625

Appointments and Nominations

    Interim National AIDS Policy Coordinator--1611
    U.S. District Court, judges--1633
    Veterans Affairs Department, Under Secretary for Health--1633

Communications to Congress

    Continuation of export control regulations, message--1586
    Iraq, message--1608
    Rwanda, letter--1602

Communications to Federal Agencies

    Civil rights working group, memorandum--1627

Interviews With the News Media

    News conference, August 3 (No. 68)--1614

Proclamations

    50th Anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising--1600
    Helsinki Human Rights Day, 1994--1601
    National Neighborhood Crime Watch Day, 1994--1607
    National Scleroderma Awareness Month, 1994--1585

Resignations and Retirements

    Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Media Affairs--
        1611

Statements by the President

    See also Appointments and Nominations; Resignations and Retirements
    Crime legislation--1600
    Death of John Britton and James Barrett--1585
    Senate action on health care reform legislation--1611

Supplementary Materials

    Acts approved by the President--1635
    Checklist of White House press releases--1634
    Digest of other White House announcements--1633
    Nominations submitted to the Senate--1634


              WEEKLY COMPILATION OF
          ------------------------------
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[[Page 1581]]




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[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents]
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[Page 1581-1584]
 
Monday, August 8, 1994
 
Volume 30--Number 31
Pages 1581-1636
 
Week Ending Friday, August 5, 1994
 
Remarks to the American Legion Boys Nation


July 29, 1994

    The President. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Welcome to the 
White House. I want to say a special word of welcome to your president, 
Thomas Whitehead, and your vice president, Robert Mattivi, and to Jack 
Mercier, George Blume, and Ron Engel. And to all of you, welcome and 
congratulations.
    I have a special treat for you today. This has been a remarkable 
week for America, a great week for you to be here. We had the signing of 
the agreement between the King of Jordan and the Prime Minister of 
Israel ending the state of war between them, the announcement that 
Russia would withdraw all of its troops from Central and Eastern Europe, 
for the first time since the end of World War II, by the end of August. 
We had the announcement today that our economy grew 3.7 percent in the 
last quarter, that jobless claims are down, that the robust growth is 
continuing. It's produced now 3.8 million new jobs in the last year and 
a half.
    And yesterday we had the historic agreement by the Senate and the 
House on what will be the toughest and smartest crime bill in the 
history of the country, that will put 100,000 more police officers on 
the street, ban assault weapons, provide a ``three strikes and you're 
out'' law, and provide billions of dollars to young people for 
activities to give our kids something to say yes to as well as to punish 
people who do the wrong thing.
    And then today we had an historic event just about an hour ago, 
where a new Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer, 
was confirmed. And I thought it would be a nice thing if Mr. Justice 
Breyer, accompanied by Senator Kennedy and Senator Hatch, would come 
here and make his first public appearance to you. So I'd like to ask 
Justice Breyer and Senator Kennedy and Senator Hatch--[applause].
    I wanted to say just a word about this, and then I'd like to ask 
Justice Breyer to come up here and speak to you for a moment or two, and 
then they'll all have to go back to work.
    Let me thank Senator Kennedy and Senator Hatch and Chairman Biden 
and the other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who recommended 
Judge Breyer by a unanimous vote to the Senate as a whole.
    This gentleman has set a standard of excellence and fidelity to the 
law and the Constitution of which every American can be proud. When he 
came before the Senate, there was a very broad spectrum of praise for 
his appointment among Democrats and Republicans alike, among people who 
consider themselves liberals and people who consider themselves 
conservatives.
    I have now had the honor to appoint two people to the United States 
Supreme Court. Justice Ginsburg and Justice Breyer have now shown that 
we can have excellence on the Supreme Court that unites the American 
people, rather than divides them.
    Let me say that--we were joking a little out here--the Founding 
Fathers in their wisdom said that there had to be somebody hanging 
around to resolve these fundamental constitutional disputes, and so they 
created the Supreme Court. And they didn't want the Supreme Court to be 
subject to undue pressure, so they gave the Justices of the Supreme 
Court a lifetime term, so they could say no to everybody, including the 
President. And we were laughing on the way out that Senator Kennedy and 
Senator Hatch are running for reelection, and of course, the President 
gets a 4-year term. Now Justice Breyer has a lifetime term. You are 
looking at the only man in America that you've met lately with total job 
security. [Laughter]
    There is a reason for it. Someone needs to be free to decide what 
the Constitution

[[Page 1582]]

requires of the rest of us without the pressures of day-to-day politics. 
But that imposes on the President and on the United States Senate a very 
heavy responsibility to pick someone with the character and wisdom to 
use that awesome power and that lifetime guarantee in the interests of 
our Constitution, our values, and all the American people, without 
regard to their race, their income, and their background. I believe 
Justice Breyer will be that kind of person, and it's an honor for me to 
introduce him to you at this time.

[At this point, Justice Stephen Breyer made brief remarks.]

    The President. Well, I am glad we were able to do that, and I hope 
you enjoyed it.
    As all of you know, we share a common bond. I sat where you are 31 
years ago, and Senator Kennedy's brother was here as President. 
Ironically, Senator Kennedy pulled out the record of what President 
Kennedy said to us when I was here where you are, and on that day he 
happened to be meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So he brought 
them out to meet the Boys Nation delegates. And so you'll now always be 
able to remember this, and I think as Justice Breyer goes on to a long 
and distinguished career on the Supreme Court, when you read about him 
or you hear some decision that he's written, I hope you will always 
remember this day with pride and with some amount of joy.
    I was thinking a little today about how different the world is now 
from what it was like 31 years ago when I was here. We were in the 
middle of the cold war; Russia was still the Soviet Union; our troops 
faced each other, divided, in Berlin. We still had huge amounts of legal 
segregation in large parts of the United States. There were all kinds of 
problems. But at the same time, we had enormous faith in the capacity of 
our economy and our people to solve those problems.
    Now the cold war is over. We had all those good events I told you 
about this week. We have been working very, very hard to try to deal 
with the horrible tragedy in Rwanda. And again, I have been so impressed 
with and grateful for our military in their capacity to move quickly 
over there to take a terrible situation--we have delivered 20 million 
packets of oral rehydration therapy to try to help the people with 
cholera. We've gone from zero to 100,000 gallons of water a day to serve 
the people there almost overnight.
    We have all these things going on. And yet we know that there's 
still a sense of foreboding, of worry in our country because we do have 
a lot of problems. There's still a lot of people that want jobs that 
don't have them. There are people who have jobs who are insecure in 
those jobs. We have people who are growing up in mean streets and tough 
neighborhoods where there's too much crime and violence. There was a 
study last week which showed young people between the ages of 12 and 17 
are 5 times more likely than people younger than or older than them to 
be victims of violent crime, that even in cities where the crime rate is 
going down, often it's going up among young people.
    So there is a disturbing as well as a hopeful atmosphere in the 
country. The thing I always love about Boys Nation is that I can look 
out and be guaranteed I'll see 96 optimists. And that's a very important 
thing for our country because a great deal of how we live and whether we 
go forward depends upon our willingness to view the future with 
possibility and hope. And a big part of the battle I fight around here 
as President every day is to try to keep people's spirits up and their 
eyes on the future and thinking about big things, not little things, and 
believing that we can make a difference. And I believe that.
    I ran for President because I was very concerned about the direction 
of the country. We had the economy going down and the deficit going up, 
middle class people being burdened more, while we weren't investing 
enough in our young people, in our future. The country was coming apart 
when I thought we ought to be coming together. And my simple mission is 
to make sure that the American dream is there for you in the 21st 
century and to do it by restoring the economy, rebuilding our sense of 
community, empowering individuals to take responsibility for themselves 
and to do it by putting the power of Government on the side of ordinary 
Americans.
    The first thing I tried to do was to get our economic house in 
order. We had quadrupled the debt of the United States in 12

[[Page 1583]]

years. You were facing a prospect, by the time you were my age, we'd be 
spending a third or more of all your tax money just paying off our 
deficit.
    Now, we've had the biggest deficit reduction program in history. We 
have reduced the size of the Federal Government dramatically. By the end 
of this decade, your National Government will be under 2 million people 
in size for the first time since I came here when President Kennedy was 
President--smallest Federal Government in 30 years. We will have 3 years 
of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since Harry Truman was 
President of the United States. And it's produced 3.8 million jobs and a 
1\1/2\ percent drop in the unemployment rate. Last year, we had the 
largest number of new businesses started in the United States since the 
end of World War II, in any year. So we're moving the economy in the 
right direction.
    What else do we have to do? We've got to make sure young people are 
ready to compete in it. We need a system of lifetime learning in which a 
young person, who will change jobs on average seven or eight times in a 
lifetime, will know that he or she can always, always get the training, 
the skills, the knowledge that you need if you have to make a change.
    You know, when you make changes in life, they can either be very 
frightening or very exciting. And usually, changes are a little bit of 
both, aren't they? Usually changes are a little bit of both. And what 
keeps our country going is knowing that changes always have more hope 
than fear in them, that there's more excitement than there is 
reservation. And every time in our country we come to the end of one era 

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