Remarks at a Dinner for Hillary Clinton

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 9, 2000

October 4, 2000

Thank you. You are doing nothing to disabuse people of their stereotypes about Irish politicians--[laughter]--nothing. I want to thank Ted and Vicki for letting us come to this beautiful place, and thank you all for being here for Hilary.

The things that Ted says are so brazen, it's almost hard to get up and talk after him. [Laughter] I mean, you've got to go some to have more of that whatever that is than I do. [Laughter] He makes Terry McAuliffe look repressed. [Laughter] I'm having a good time, actually, going out and campaigning for other people. Now, 6 years ago, I went to Massachusetts to campaign for Senator Kennedy. It was more fun then, because it was quite bracing. He actually had a race then, and Massachusetts was the only place I was still popular. [Laughter] So we needed each other. It was wonderful. [Laughter] It was great.

I'd like to begin by once again thanking Senator Kennedy for 8 years of support, advice, friendship, prodding, and stunning production, for being one of those people that didn't go in a hole and feel sorry for himself when we went from being in the majority to the minority in the Senate but just got up the next day and tried to figure out a new strategy to get done what we needed to get done and to stop those things from being done that we oppose. There is nobody like him in the Congress, nobody.

When I was a young man, one day in the summer of 1966, I received a call from a man named Lee Williams, who was then the administrative assistant to Senator Bill Fulbright. And he said, "How would you like a job working on the staff of the Foreign Relations Committee?" I was an undergraduate at Georgetown. And I, frankly--as it turned out, it was just a few months before I discovered that my father had cancer, and we were going to be in terrible financial straights, and if I hadn't gotten this job, I couldn't finish college, it turned out.

So he offered me a job. He said, "Are you interested in a job?" I said, "Sure I am." I had slept about 2 hours the night before. You know, I was 19 years old. I thought I was going to live forever. And he said, "Well, you can have a part-time job for $3,500 a year, or you can have a full-time job for $5,000 a year." I said, "I'd like two part-time jobs"-- [laughter]--which I thought wasn't bad for 2 hours sleep. So he laughed, and he said--this was a Friday morning--he said, "You're just the guy I'm looking for; be here Monday."

So I packed my bags, and I went to Washington. And I was not quite 20 years old, and I was just full of awe for everything. And there were some truly great figures in the United States Senate then, people who argued about civil rights and argued about foreign policy, including the war in Vietnam, and argued about what we ought to do to help the poor and how we were going to deal with the great issues of the day. And it made a searing impression on me.

Those 2 years I worked in the Senate, in my last 2 years at Georgetown, I watched the Foreign Relations Committee hold those great hearings on Vietnam, on whether there was a domino theory, what China's future was going to be. And I watched, obviously, a President that I admired very much, President Johnson, try to push through legislation I believed in and kept getting in deeper and deeper trouble over Vietnam. I learned a lot about America and American politics.

And I saw the young and handsome Senator Edward Kennedy inspiring all these young people, along with his brother Robert, to public service in those years. It's a long time since then. And I want you to know, I asked him a question at dinner, and everybody around the table heard it. I said, "Are you as idealistic today about our country and our system as you were when you entered the Senate, shortly after your brother was elected President?" lie said, "More." That's why he's one of the 8 or 10 greatest Senators in the history of our country.

And by the way, I said, "Me, too." I feel I will leave office more idealistic than I was the moment I took my hand off the Bible from taking the oath of office on January 20, 1993. I will. I feel that way about our country. Just look at the last 8 years. We've got a lot of evidence that our challenges as a people yield to intelligent, sustained effort in the same way that all other challenges of life do.

So that brings me to how come you're here and why he threw this party for us. When Hillary--I'll never forget this--the last thing in the world I expected to be doing about a year and a half ago was this. [Laughter] I mean, I thought, we were talking about what a great last year we were going to have; we were going to take all these trips together; we were going to do all this stuff and how great it would be. And then Senator Moynihan announced that he wasn't going to run. I can't remember exactly when that was. And then a few days later, Charlie Rangel and, I don't know, several other House Members, called Hillary and said, "You really ought to think about doing this." They knew that we were going to move to New York when we left, I think, and so they said that.