shot Jim in Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate President Reagan, Jim and Sarah had crusaded for sensible gun-safety laws. They had worked for seven years to pass a bill requiring a waiting period for all handgun purchases so that the buyers’ backgrounds could be checked for criminal or mental-health problems. President Bush had vetoed an earlier version of the Brady bill because of the intense opposition of the NRA, which said it infringed on the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. The NRA believed the brief waiting period was an unacceptable burden on lawful gun buyers and declared that we could achieve the same result by increasing the penalties for illegally buying guns. Most Americans were for the Brady bill, but once it passed, it was no longer a voting issue with them. By contrast, the NRA was determined to defeat as many members of Congress who voted against them as possible. By the time I left office, the Brady background checks had kept more than 600,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers from buying handguns. It had saved countless lives. But, like the budget, it exposed many of those brave enough to vote for it to harsh attacks, which were effective enough to drive several of them from office.
Not everything positive I did was controversial. On the sixteenth, I signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was intended to protect a reasonable range of religious expression in public areas like schools and workplaces. The bill was designed to reverse a 1990 Supreme Court decision giving states more authority to regulate religious expression in such areas. America is full of people deeply committed to their very diverse faiths. I thought the bill struck the right balance between protecting their rights and the need for public order. It was sponsored in the Senate by Ted Kennedy and Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, and passed 97–3. The House adopted it by a voice vote. Though the Supreme Court later struck it down, I remain convinced it was a good and needed piece of legislation. I always felt that protecting religious liberty and making the White House accessible to all religious faiths was an important part of my job. I assigned a member of the White House public liaison staff to be our bridge to the religious communities. I attended every one of the National Prayer Breakfasts that are held each year as Congress begins its work, speaking and staying for the entire event so that I could visit with the people of different faiths and political parties who came to pray for God’s guidance in our work. And every year when Congress resumed after the August recess, I hosted an interfaith breakfast in the State Dining Room that allowed me to hear the concerns of religious leaders and share mine with them. I wanted to keep open the lines of communication to them, even those who disagreed with me, and work with them whenever I could on social problems at home and humanitarian problems around the world.
I believe strongly in separation of church and state, but I also believe that both make indisputable contributions to the strength of our nation, and that on occasion they can work together for the common good without violating the Constitution. Government is, by definition, imperfect and experimental, always a work in progress. Faith speaks to the inner life, to the search for truth and the spirit’s capacity for profound change and growth. Government programs don’t work as well in a culture that devalues family, work, and mutual respect. And it’s hard to live by faith without acting on the scriptural admonitions to care for the poor and downtrodden, and to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”
I was thinking about the role of faith in our national life in mid-November when I traveled to Memphis to address the convocation of the Church of God in Christ at Mason Temple Church. There had been a number of news reports about the rising tide of violence against children in African-American neighborhoods, and I wanted to discuss with the ministers and laypeople what we could do about it. There were obvious economic and social forces behind the disappearance of work in our inner cities, the breakdown of the family, the problems in schools, and the rise of welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock births, and violence. But the crushing combination of difficulties had created a culture that accepted as normal the presence of violence and the absence of work and two-parent families, and I was convinced that government alone could not change that culture. Many black churches were beginning to address these issues, and I wanted to encourage them to do more.
When I got to Memphis, I was among friends. The Church of God in Christ was the fastest-growing African- American denomination. Its founder, Charles Harrison Mason, received the inspiration for his church’s name in Little Rock, on a spot where I had helped lay a plaque two years earlier. His widow was in the church that day. The presiding bishop, Louis Ford of Chicago, had played a leading role in the presidential campaign.
Mason Temple is hallowed ground in the history of civil rights. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached his last sermon there, on the night before he was killed. I evoked the spirit of King and his uncanny prediction that his life might not last much longer to ask my friends to examine honestly “the great crisis of the spirit that is gripping America today.”
Then I put away my notes and gave what many commentators later said was the best speech of my eight years as President, speaking to friends from my heart in the language of our shared heritage: If Martin Luther King were to reappear by my side today and give us a report card on the last twentyfive 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 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…. He would say you did a good job creating a black middle class… 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.
I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other black people with reckless abandon…. 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…. 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….
Where there are no families, where there is no order, where there is no hope… who will be there to give structure, discipline, and love to these children? You must do that. And we must help you. So in this pulpit, on this day, let me ask all of you in your heart to say: We will honor the life and the work of Martin Luther King…. Somehow, by God’s grace, we will turn this around. We will give these children a future. We will take away their guns and give them books. We will take away their despair and give them hope. We will rebuild the families and the neighborhoods and the communities. We won’t make all the work that has gone on here benefit just a few. We will do it together, by the grace of God. The Memphis speech was a hymn of praise to a public philosophy rooted in my personal religious values. Too many things were falling apart; I was trying to put them together. On November 19 and 20, I went back to putting things together, flying to Seattle for the first-ever leaders’ meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization. Before 1993, APEC had been a forum for finance ministers to discuss economic issues. I had suggested that the leaders themselves should meet every year to discuss our common interests, and I wanted to use our first meeting, on Blake Island, just off the coast of Seattle, to pursue three objectives: a free- trade area covering the Americas and the Asian Pacific nations; an informal discussion of political and security issues; and the creation of habits of cooperation, which clearly were going to be more important than ever in the twenty-first century. The Asia-Pacific nations accounted for half the world’s output and presented some of its most challenging political and security problems. In the past, the United States had never dealt with the region with the kind of comprehensive approach we followed toward Europe. I thought it was the moment to do so.
I enjoyed my time with the new Japanese prime minister, Morihiro Hosokawa, a reformer who had broken the Liberal Democratic Party’s monopoly on power and who had continued to open Japan economically. I was also glad for the chance to talk at length with China’s president, Jiang Zemin, in a more informal setting. We still had differences over human rights, Tibet, and economics, but we had a shared interest in building a relationship that would not isolate but integrate China into the global community. Both Jiang and Hosokawa shared my concern about the looming crisis with North Korea, which seemed determined to become a nuclear power, something I was determined to avoid and would need their help to accomplish.
Back in Washington, Hillary and I hosted our first state dinner, for South Korean president Kim YongSam. I always enjoyed the official state visits. They were the most ritualized events to occur at the White House, beginning with the official welcoming ceremony. Hillary and I would stand at the South Portico of the White House to greet our guests as they drove up. After greeting them, we would walk out onto the South Lawn for a brief receiving line, and the visiting dignitary and I would stand onstage, facing an impressive array of uniformed men and women from our
