



			   THE WHITE HOUSE

		    Office of the Press Secretary

____________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                                 April 11, 1994 


		       REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
		      AT THOMAS JEFFERSON DINNER


			Benjamin Franklin Room
			 Department of State



8:20 P.M. EDT


	     THE PRESIDENT:  Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your 
attention, please?  We thought of how we might best honor Mr. 
Jefferson on this evening.  And I did a little research and 
discovered that in addition to this being the end of our observation 
of the 250th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth, it is also the 
200th anniversary of the birth of Edward Everett, who -- like Thomas 
Jefferson and Warren Christopher -- served as Secretary of State; and 
whom you will all remember was supposed to be the person who 
delivered the real Gettysburg Address -- at least according to Gary 
Wills.  (Laughter.)  
	     
	     And so I thought I could follow Edward Everett's lead 
and speak for two hours tonight.  (Laughter.)  And then I decided I 
wouldn't do that, that tonight should belong to Thomas Jefferson.  
	     
	     Let me say that any person who is fortunate enough to be 
Secretary of State, or Ambassador to France, or Vice President, or 
President feels immediately, in many ways, a great debt to Thomas 
Jefferson.  But in a larger sense, every citizen who ever benefitted 
from the powerful ideas of the Declaration of Independence, the 
devotion to education embodied in the founding of the University of 
Virginia, the belief in the First Amendment enshrined in the statutes 
of religious liberty -- all of us are in his debt.
	     
	     Tonight, I ask you to think of only one or two things as 
we begin this fine evening.  Jefferson had the right tensions and 
balances in his life, and that is why he seems so new to us today.  
He believed that life had to be driven by fixed principles -- life, 
liberty, the pursuit of happiness -- but that we all had to be 
willing to be constantly changing; life belongs to the living.  
	     
	     He believed that we all had a right to a radical amount 
of freedom, in return for which we had to assume a dramatic amount of 
responsibility.  He always was trying to accomplish very big things, 
but the richness and texture of his life, and the reason it seems so 
relevant to us today, is that he took such great joy in all the 
little things of daily life.  And it was those things that enabled 
him to be not just a philosopher and a politician and a lawyer, but 
also an architect and a scientist -- a person who enjoyed the large 
and the small; who believed that life should be driven by eternal 
principles in constant change; who would gladly have given his life 
for freedom and who exercised that freedom so responsibly.  Oh, if 
only we could do as well.
	     
	     On this 200th anniversary of his beginning -- at the end 
of a wonderful year which included, for me and Hillary and our 
administration, the fact that we got to start our inaugural at 
Monticello -- let us raise our glasses in a toast not to the memory 
of Thomas Jefferson, but to the vitality of his spirit and his ideas, 
and our own lives and those of our countrymen and women for all time 
to come.  (Applause.)
		  

				 END8:24 P.M. EDT

