Remarks at the Faces of Hope reunion luncheon

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 12, 1995

June 9, 1995

Thank you very much. Congratulations, Leslie, that's a--[laughter]--Mr. Vice President, that may be your most memorable example of reinventing Government there. [Laughter] I promised you a personal service administration, and there's a living example of it.

Let me say, it is wonderful to be here with all of you today. I want to thank the people who have worked so hard to keep this group together and in contact with us. I appreciate Sue Hazzard and Ann Walker and all the rest of you who worked on this. Let me thank you, because these are really very disparate people, living very different lives all over the country, and getting even further and further apart. One of you has since moved to Alaska since we've started--came back. I thank you for being here.

Before we start, I'd like to just say that four of the people who were our Faces of Hope in 1992 have since passed away. Josh Cox, who was mentioned earlier, Sheri Kohlenberg, who came to see me with her husband and her son, Sammy--they're here. And Sammy left me something I thought was a dinosaur. He said it just looks like one, but anyway it's still in the White House over there. Sarah Weber, whose mother and sister are here; and Michael Quercio, whose partner is here. And Michael and I jogged together right before I became President, and I got to see him when I dedicated the new Kennedy Library. I miss them all very much; I know all of you do. And I'd like to ask if we could just have a moment of silence for them.

[At this point, a moment of silence was observed.]

Amen.

You know, all of you, in various ways, inspired us in this--when we ran for President, but you have very different stories: Some of you struggle to overcome great personal adversity; some of you still struggle with it; some of you struggle with your children; some of you were people who led what looked on the outside to be ordinary lives, but performed extraordinary service for others; some of you achieved very great things in your own lives, but took time to do things for others. There are a lot of different kinds of stories here. But the one thing that struck me about all of you was that you fundamentally decided that you would take an affirmative view of your life and life in general, that you decided that you would try to look for what could be done tomorrow to make it better, instead of just wallowing in what didn't happen yesterday or things that were beyond your control. You decided that you would make a constructive contribution to your own life and to the lives of others. You lived with hope. And that is a very important thing. You had a lot of influence on this administration, as the Vice President said. I think of all of you every time when I go someplace out of the country and our national service AmeriCorps people are there because that's what they do.

I was in Texas the other day with people who are in the AmeriCorps program, all doing national service, earning money to go to college. One of them was a within who retired from the military, said she never had a chance to go to college. She had the GI bill, but she wanted to do this service in her community before she went back to college--with two young people who had babies out of wedlock, as teenagers were on welfare, got themselves off welfare, got high school diplomas and were then contributing to AmeriCorps before going to college so they could help other people avoid the kind of problems they've had. And with one young girl who was a college graduate who was raised the child of a mother on welfare who decided after getting out of college she still ought to do the national service program because she ought to help other people.

Now, everything--and I kept asking myself today, you know, what has all this got--how does it tie together? And I think, for me, all of you represent people who try to make something good happen. You didn't just talk; you acted. You tried to get on the solution side of--what I call being on the solution side of whatever your problems or challenges were, whether it was in your own family or in your community.

And one of the biggest problems we have in Washington and one of the reasons politics is such a turn-off to people today is that it comes across to the American people over the air waves as being nothing but rhetoric and conflict and not being on the solution side. No one would run a family, a business, a charitable enterprise the way it appears that things here are run often. It would just run right off the tracks. You know that. You remind me here every day of what we should be doing.

And you had another influence that hasn't been mentioned yet that you ought to know. When I became President, I put a lot of time and effort into making sure we had good people who were well organized in our casework division, when we get letters from people just like you all over America just asking for help with a problem or advice. About once a week, I get letters that I personally sign from ordinary American citizens who wrote the White House and asked for some problem. Everything--they have a sick child, they don't qualify for Government help, to, my father was supposed to get a medal in World War II, and he never got it, and all kinds of things in between. And I organized this because I made up my kind that I did not want to forget about people like you and the work that we do here.