Thank you dear friends, very much. Reverend, thank you so much for that gracious introduction. I always love it when a man of God introduces me because I know I've got a head start as I begin.
There are some people who hesitate about the intersection of government and politics and religion, but the people that founded this country, they looked to God as an inspiration and remember what they said in the very first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, "we hold these truths to be self-evident" that everybody's created equal by—not from some group of politicians, not from even some group of philosophers—but as an endowment from our creator, amen, from the good Lord. We've forgotten that at some times; we forget it at our peril because our faith is a sign of our strength. I was impressed as I looked at the biographies of the six people we are honoring today by your service and each one of them proudly lists membership in a given church as a part of who they are. It certainly is a part of who they are.
Incidentally, I'm jumping ahead of myself, but this week I'm introducing a bill with a colleague from Pennsylvania that will increase the opportunity for the federal government to carry out public policies through what we call "faith-based organizations", through churches. Because the work of government is best when it's coming together with the work of people of faith. Anyway, Reverend you inspire me in all that and God bless everybody.
I am so delighted to be here and honored to be here to pay tribute to the six {baby cries}…Now this makes me feel right at home. Incidentally, you may have thought that the Reverend was not quite right, but he was right. My oldest granddaughter—only in America—is Tennessee Lieberman. How did this happen? Reggie {Beamon} knows Matt Lieberman, my oldest son, and Matt met and married a woman from Tennessee. We go to Temple for the naming of the baby. Matt, who is something of a character, gets up there and says, "I want to tell you the baby's Hebrew name first; it's Nesta which in Hebrew means "miracle from God". It was beautiful, everybody thought. Then they said "before I announce the baby's other name, the English or American name, I want to tell you that I don't think any other baby has received this name in this temple". Then he stops and he says, "as a matter of fact, I don't think any baby has received this name in any temple." So I'm beginning to get… I didn't know, you see, it was a surprise. Then he says, "I've decided to name my first child after the beautiful state from which my beautiful wife comes. I give you, Tennessee Lieberman." My 82 year old mom is sitting next to me and says, "he's kidding?!" And I said no. So we have a Tennessee, God bless her she's so cute. Of course, after about three days, Tennessee was just her name. She's a beautiful little girl. So anyway, you can see I feel at home.
Seeing Reggie I have so many memories from Waterbury and Reverend mentioned that in 1988 I only won by 1% of the vote when I was elected to the U.S. Senate. I seem to remember that I was a real long shot and most people didn't think I could win. I wasn't so sure I could win myself, to tell you the truth. But the tremendous spirit and support and faith that came out that night, I'll never forget it. Forgive me Reggie, you've probably heard me tell this story ten times, but when I got to Washington as the unexpected Senator, all these groups had supported my opponent. That night, a friend of mine -- who had supported my opponent-- told me a story. A little boy was walking along with a wagon when all four wheels fell off. And the little boy shouts out, "I'll be damned." Then he puts the wheels back on the wagon and, again, the wheels fall off. This time he's really angry and he shouts out "I'll be damned!" Well, his minister comes by, according to this story, at this moment and he says, "son, when something bad happens, you should not swear. You should affirm your faith in God." So the little boy dutifully put the wheels back on the wagon, pulls it along a little further, and again the wheels fall off. But this time—his minister is still right there—and he remembers what the minister said. He shouts out, "Praise the Lord!". And the wheels jump up off the sidewalk and they attach themselves back on the wagon. And the minister says, "I'll be damned!" So this fellow says to me, "Senator, that's the way we here in Washington felt about your election. Election night, we all said, ‘I'll be damned'." But it was people like Reggie and so many others of you in the room, in one way or another, who had faith in me and made it possible. I can never really thank you enough.
I'm so happy to be able to be here to thank Reggie and Reverend Gatling, Jim Murray, Joyce Petteway, Dorothy Stewart and Thelma Williams for the tremendous service that they have done and the honor that they so richly deserve and that they're receiving today. As I said, in a way when talking about the Declaration of Independence, America is about opportunity. That's the central, driving moral—morality—principle of America. But opportunity doesn't just come automatically. Opportunity is there, but an outcome is not guaranteed unless you get involved and we make something better happen for ourselves, for families, for our community. That's what America does.
I was thinking as I was driving over here today, this may be nostalgic, but the very first statewide I was ever involved in began right here in Waterbury with the black community. It was 1962 – I wasn't running, I was 20 years old—and I was a college student and I wanted to work on a campaign that summer and I called up Senator Ribicoff, who was running for the Senate for the first time, his office, and the State Central Committee and they said, I got involved early and after the convention they said, "we have a candidate that we're going to support for State Treasurer this year. Gerry Lamb." Gerald Lamb, God bless him, from Waterbury. So they assigned me to Gerry Lamb and it was actually the first statewide campaign I ever worked on. I went around the state and what a fine man. He broke new ground. I remember Abe Ribicoff saying that he very much wanted Gerry Lamb to succeed and he said, "America is like a ladder". When one goes up, we all go up. This is not, as we say now, a zero sum game, we can help each other. And I have great memories of that. I actually went to work for Senator Ribicoff the following summer as an intern in Washington, 1963. That's probably the summer I formed these crazy dreams about being a U.S. Senator someday. I never would have told anybody about it, it was very presumptuous.
That was the summer also of the March on Washington. I was lucky enough to be there, in Washington that day, I was in the March, I was at the Memorial when Martin Luther King—Dr. King—gave that incredible "I Have A Dream" speech. I'll never forget it, it really changed my life. When I came back—I was at Yale—I came back to Yale and a little later in the fall a group of us got together with Al Lowenstein who was a real troublemaker in a good sense at Yale. I'll never forget it. Marian Wright, who was a Yale Law student, now of the Childrens' Defense Fund was there and they asked us would we bring a group of Yale students to Mississippi to help register voters for a mock election. Of course, black people couldn't vote in Mississippi then. The idea was to try to show the authorities there, but really the country, this nonsense that black people didn't want to vote was a lie. What an experience. I'd never been anywhere like it. It was an interesting experience because I'd grown up in Stamford, had a lot of African-American friends, but this was the first time in my life, when I was in Mississippi, that I felt more comfortable in the black community than in the white community because we were outside invaders in a way, for the white community.
A wonderful man named Aaron Henry—he was a druggist, a pharmacist—ran for governor. We learned a lot. We got up one morning and found our car wouldn't start. It was because somebody had put—no big deal—put dirt in our gas tank to remind us that we weren't welcome. And a lot of little things like that. But Aaron Henry got well over 100,000 votes in that mock election. Pretty amazing.
When I came back, I heard that Dr. King was going to be in Bridgeport- it was about three or four weeks later in the fall. He was a little late and they knew that I'd been to Mississippi and they asked me to talk about what had happened in Mississippi. I spoke just to fill time. And as I finished my remarks, I walked off the stage and Dr. King came on. I'd never met him before. And I can remember it like it was yesterday. The voice that was so unusual, so spiritual. He said, "very good, young man." I must tell you, it was a little like the voice of Moses.
Anyway, I learned a lot then and committed myself to be involved in public life and tried over the years, working with so many people here in Waterbury and elsewhere, to expand the realm of opportunity and to provide for better outcomes.
I've had the honor of working, over the last few years, with Jim- Congressman Jim Maloney, just a wonderful human being, committed to all the right principles and not a lot of… I was about to say BS… He's for real and I think you know that. He'll give you his word and follow through. He just cares about people. He's experienced himself, sometimes we talk about his family ancestry. He saw some opportunities and he worked hard and he took them. I won't hold it against him that he went to Harvard, I try to be open-minded about these things. He's one of our best representatives and we dearly need him back and we'll work hard to help him.
This has been an extraordinary seven and a half years. The Clinton-Gore administration, in my opinion, has been the most productive that we've had in the modern history of our country. Just look at the economy and the strength of leadership on the economy. The number of people who are working today who were not working, the number of people who are better off than they were seven and a half years ago. A government that has really reflected America. And this President, who I've known for thirty years since he volunteered for my campaign for State Senate, believe it or not, in 1970, and he's a remarkable person. He just… we're not going to see his likeness for a while in American politics. He deeply cares about people and has been smart enough to understand the issues in great detail and then person enough, a good enough people-person, a politician, which is after all what it takes, to turn the ideas into reality, one after another. I think people are better than they were seven and a half years ago.
Al Gore is a different sort of person. I heard the President say a while ago that somebody got up and said, "there'll never be another one like you." So he said, "I've been lucky. Maybe one of my gifts is communication. When I was growing up in Arkansas, we learned to tell stories. A person told who he was by his stories. That may be one of my gifts." And he said, "Al Gore has so many talents that I don't have and he cares about the same things that I care about. He's brilliant, he's honorable, we have a wonderful opportunity this year to keep the good times going."
So as you today honor these six, thank you for your leadership, let me just say that as far as we've come, we know that we have a ways left to go until we realize the ideals that the framers set out in the Constitution more than 200 years ago. That as much as economic times are better, there are still children who are not receiving an adequate education to help them make their way in America, that there are still people who are not being given decent health care in this wealthiest of all nations in the world, that there are still people living in housing that is inadequate, still fearful of crime, still assaulted by environmental pollutants. So we've come a long ways, but there's a ways to go. It has been said, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." We've come a ways, but there's a ways to go. With the help of this great Waterbury Black Democratic club, the six you honored today, Congressman Maloney, and hopefully the next President of the United States, Al Gore, for America and for all of us, with God's help, the best is yet to come. Thank you.
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