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“I
admired him. I liked him. On the occasions when we disagreed,
I loved arguing with him. I never loved getting in an argument
with anybody as much in my entire life as I loved fighting
with Bill Fulbright.”
President
William Jefferson Clinton
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Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you
very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Madame President! Has a
good ring to it. I hope we get to hear that more and more as the
years go by. Chancellor White, Dean Bobbitt, Mr. Ambassador, Mr.
McCloy, Ms. Adenauer, Gretta, congratulations on the beautiful statue.
To all the members of Senator Fulbright’s staff who are here,
so many of whom I worked with well over thirty years ago, and who
became part of my political family as well. The members of the Fulbright
family, including his wonderful daughters. I’m so glad you
came. I wish your mother were here, too. I bet she’d get a
big kick out of this. I want to thank the members of my administration
who came: former Secretary of Transportation, Rodney Slater. General
Wesley Clark, thank you for your leadership for freedom and peace
in Bosnia and Kosovo. Marsha Scott, Bruce Lindsey and others who
were with me in the White House.
J.W. Fulbright, when I was a boy, was my Senatorial role model.
Later, thanks to a fateful conversation I had on a Thursday morning
with about two hours sleep, when I was twenty years old, with Lee
Williams as Chief of Staff, he became my employer. I had received
this call after I had been up to a rather late hour, and it was
early in the morning. So, Lee Williams calls and he says, “We’ll
give you a job as a clerk, assistant clerk on a foreign relations
committee under Senator Fulbright’s patronage. I was flat broke.
I needed to work. I said, I accept. He said, “Wait, you’ve
got a choice.” I said “O.K., what is it?” He said,
“You could have a part-time job for thirty five hundred a year,
or you could have a full time job for five thousand a year.”
I said I would like two part time jobs. He said, “You’re
just the guy we’re lookin’ [for] here. Be here Monday
morning.” And, so began my relationship with Senator Fulbright.
Employer, mentor, eventually supporter and friend.
I admired him. I liked him. On the occasions when we disagreed,
I loved arguing with him. I never loved getting in an argument with
anybody as much in my entire life as I loved fighting with Bill
Fulbright. I’m quite sure I always lost, and yet he managed
to make me think I might have won. I am also quite sure that had
I not received that fateful phone call in 1966, I never would have
become President. Therefore, it is probably fitting that so many
of the same people hated both of us so much. I am especially grateful
among all the supporters of the Senator and his endeavors for the
support we have received over the years, from the German government
and the German people for the Fulbright Program and the support
they have given us, which have brought us to this present day.
Recently, I was invited to Germany to speak at the unveiling of
the restored Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. It was one of the most
wonderful nights of my life. What was once the symbol of the Berlin
Wall and the division of a world between communism and freedom,
was now a
symbol of hope. The opened door to the 21st century world. Senator
Fulbright always believed that freedom and free markets, that education
and dialogue, would eventually triumph over communism and oppression
and ignorance and division. He would be so thrilled by what has
happened in a Germany both free and united. By Germany’s leadership
in the European Union, and integrating Russia with the West and
expanding NATO and bringing us all closer together, and standing
up for freedom in Kosovo and Bosnia and in Afghanistan. And, because
he was a politician, he would probably not be all that upset by
the current rift between our two countries over how best to deal
with the challenge of Iraq. After all, as he said over and over
again, the purpose of an education is to learn how to think, not
what to think. That implies that once in a while, people who are
thinking will have differences of opinion. Otherwise, the world
will grow very dreary and boring, and we will all do stupid things
together.
I will be brief this morning. I want you to ponder a simple question:
The United States stands at a unique moment in human history. There
have only been rare periods when you could say of all the peoples
of the world, one nation is truly dominant, politically, economically
and militarily. That is clearly true of the United States at this
moment. It is also clearly a fleeting moment. Within thirty years
the Chinese economy should be as big or bigger than ours. The Indian
economy could be as well if they will stop fighting with Pakistan
and wasting money on armaments. Within thirty years, if the European
Union continues to unite and become more a union, politically and
economically, it may well be more influential politically as well
as economically. And the United States will be judged based on how
we used this “magic moment.” Did we try to drive the world
into the 21st century? Did we make up our mind to resolutely exterminate
every threat we saw and force people to live by our vision? Or,
did we instead try to build the world where, when we’re no
longer, as we say down here, the “biggest dog on the block,”
people will still treat us the way we like to be treated because
of the way we treated them, at our moment of ascendancy.
Senator Fulbright was imminently quotable, and I won’t give
you too many, but I would like you to see how fresh and current
these words are. He said that the best thing America could do was
to be an intelligent example of the world through material helpfulness
without moral presumption. That we should make our own society an
example of human happiness.  Make
ourselves the friend of social revolution, and go beyond simple
reciprocity in the effort to reconcile hostile worlds. He would
far prefer to see us be a sympathetic friend of humanity, rather
than its stern and prideful schoolmaster. Darn, he was smart, wasn’t
he? Now, of what relevance is that in the present day? Does that
mean America should never have a military? No. Does that mean we
should never use it? No. Does that mean there is never an occasion
when force is required to save massive numbers of lives? No. But,
it does mean that we should be humble enough to remember that there
are rarely any final solutions in human affairs. And, therefore,
quite often the way we do something is as important as what it is
we do. And, that what we are trying to do in this world, I hope,
is to recognize that our interdependence, while a wonderful thing
for those of us well positioned to take advantage of it, is still
very much a mixed blessing. For our openness to one another in a
world so full of political and religious and economic and social
division also increases our vulnerability and the pain and alienation
of those who feel shut out from its blessings.
After all, on September the 11th, the al-Qa’ida used the same
open borders and easy travel and access to information and technology
that we take for granted as a blessing everyday, to kill 3,100 people
from 70 countries, including over 200 Muslims. And so the question
is: What is America’s responsibility at this moment of our
dominance? To build a world which is not only interdependent but
also an integrated global community of shared responsibilities and
shared benefits and shared values. What can we learn from the life
and teachings and examples of Bill Fulbright? Not only the experience
of Senator Fulbright as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee,
but the experience of a young man riding the backcountry roads of
the Ozark Mountains, running for Congress for the first time, to
bring to this moment in our history?
You could lead a horse to water, but it’s hard to make him
drink. You could catch more flies with honey than vinegar. All those
old-fashioned sayings may have some bearing on the world we seek
to build. If he were here today, giving this speech, I am quite
sure he would say that the United Nations is an organization still
becoming, still imperfect. That even we have not always done our
part in it but it is all we have and now that we live in an interdependent
world, it must be the lead institution in building an integrated
global community. If he were here today, I am quite sure he would
say that we ought to be stern in using the power of America in dealing
with the people who mean us harm and who murdered 3,100 people here.
But, we should remember the example of General Marshall and the
Marshall Fund and the Fulbright Program and try to build a world
that has more friends and partners and fewer terrorists. That is
the purpose of foreign aid and debt relief and of fighting AIDS
and putting all the children in the world in school. If he were
here, I think he would caution us not to be too utopian in our expectations,
but always utopian in our values and vision.
It is quite interesting, I think, that from the dawn of human society
up to the present time, we have always been bedeviled by at least
one common curse. The compulsion people have to define the meaning
of their lives in positive terms with reference to those who are
like them, racially, tribally, culturally, religiously. And by negative
reference to those who are different. And then to oppress the different
if they’re small enough and powerless enough not to prevent
it. The whole course of human history has been a constant struggle
for humanity to expand the definition of who is “us,”
and to shrink the definition of who is “them.” So, one
of the things that I had to live 40 or so more years to learn is
that when Senator Fulbright set up the Fulbright Exchange Program
to increase the civilized way people treated each other through
education and human contact, to reduce the influence of great power
politics, all those words you just hear. He said it was, modestly,
the most ambitious undertaking to change human society conceivable.
Because, from the dawn of time until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989,
it was never really possible to build a global community where we
found ways to work together and celebrate, not just tolerate but
celebrate our diversity. On the simple theory that our differences
make life interesting, but our common humanity matters more. And
yet, that was the whole idea behind the Fulbright Program; the whole
idea behind the lifetime of commitment to education; the whole idea
behind a certain humility and the conduct of foreign affairs. It
was the idea behind the establishment of the United Nations, which
the Fulbright resolution called for. The product of his only term
in the House of Representatives. But when the UN was set up, it
was not possible because of the Cold War. So, in the 1970’s,
China starts moving toward the rest of the world. In 1989, the Berlin
Wall falls. In all of human history, we’ve had thirteen years
to work on finding practical expressions of the dream that Bill
Fulbright harbored in his heart and spoke so eloquently of his whole
public life.
We have a lot of young people in this audience today. I know many
of you are concerned about the current debates. We’ve got a
lot of us who are older who waited a long time for America to be
in an interdependent, cooperative world who think we ought to be
working together with other countries on banning nuclear testing
and environmental cooperation and international criminal matters
and other things. But, today I want to ask you to step back from
that and realize that in all of human history, most people have
defined the meaning and value of their lives and shaped their politics
by positive reference to their own crowd, and negative reference
to those who were different. That’s how racists got elected
to the South for years, saying things they knew better than. They
knew better than. We had institutionalized hypocrisy here until
Martin Luther King and the rest of the civil rights movement made
us get rid of it. It was just a way of defining our worth by demeaning
someone else. In the end, that is at the basis of all these exclusive
religious claims that led to train burnings and disembowelments
in India, a place I love, and worked in, recently. That keep people
apart in the Middle East, that led to astonishing tribal slaughters
in my time in Africa.
 So,
today, I ask you to disengage just a hair from the specific issues,
and think about the general trend of humanity. I think Senator Fulbright
would be very happy today that in the last 13 years, the European
Union has grown together, the United Nations has proved to have
greater capacity to deal with problems in the Balkans and elsewhere,
and that at least people have spoken against the madness of the
continuing problems. I also think he would tell us that we should
be humble when after all, the benefits of peace in Northern Ireland,
which I worked so hard for, are apparent, they still riot because
there are just some people that can’t take “yes”
for an answer. There are some people that just can’t live if
they don’t have an enemy, and somebody to be mad at, and some
reason to feel disenfranchised and disrespected. This has been a
long struggle.
But the solution Bill Fulbright proposed has finally found its moment
in history. We now have no choice but to learn to live together,
to understand one another, to respect one another, to celebrate
our differences but only in the context of our common humanity.
If he were here giving this talk today, wearing his little Medal
of Freedom that I gave him, that’s what he’d tell you.
He’d probably tell it with a little drawl and he might say
a little Ozark story to go along to illustrate it. But, when it
comes all down to it, human affairs are pretty simple. Everyone
deserves a chance, everyone has a role to play, we all do better
when we work together. We’re not as different as we think,
the differences are not as important as we pretend they are. Life
is a fleeting thing and we’re all passing through. The best
thing we can do is to give everyone a chance to experience its richness
and its rhythms, and not to impose the notion that somehow we have
the right to oppress anyone. Now, he would also remind us that we
do not yet have the institutions to run that kind of world. That
is the work of politics and in that work there will always be differences
of opinion, always be conflicts of interest and values, and simple
evaluation of the evidence.
But, I would say to you, on balance, I think the world is moving
in the right direction, because it has become inconceivable to assert
that a religious, a political, any economic difference is more important
than our common humanity. And it has become inconceivable that we
can solve the problems of the world without solving them together.
That, ultimately, is what will bring Fulbright out on top. The argument
he made about the way we live, the way we learn and the way we reach
out will ultimately be vindicated. All of us should do our part
to see that it happens as soon as possible.
Thank you and God bless you.
Above, left to right: President Clinton shakes hands
with Fulbright Interim Dean Donald Bobbitt; Clinton speaks to Ambassador
Wolfgang Ischinger and his wife, Jutta; Clinton with the dedication
platform party in front of Old Main.
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