THE STATE OF THE UNION 1995 : EXCERPTS: U.S. ‘Stronger Than It Was 2 Years Ago’

Here are excerpts from President Clinton’s State of the Union Address:

Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, members of the 104th Congress, my fellow Americans, again we are here in the sanctuary of democracy, and once again our democracy has spoken. So let me begin by congratulating all of you here in the 104th Congress and congratulating you, Mr. Speaker.

If we agree on nothing else tonight, we must agree that the American people certainly voted for change in 1992 and in 1994. And as I look out at you, I know how some of you must have felt in 1992.

But, I must say that in both years we didn’t hear America singing, we heard America shouting, and now all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, must say, “We hear you. We will work together to earn the jobs you have given us.”

. . . In another time of change and challenge I had the honor to be the first President to be elected in the post-Cold War era, an era marked by the global economy, the information revolution, unparalleled change and opportunity and in security for the American people.

. . . I am also proud to say tonight that our country is stronger than it was two years ago.

Record numbers of Americans are succeeding in the new global economy. We are at peace, and we are a force for peace and freedom throughout the world.

We have almost 6 million new jobs since I became President, and we have the lowest combined rate of unemployment and inflation in 25 years.

Our businesses are more productive, and here we have worked to bring the deficit down, to expand trade, to put more police on our streets, to give our citizens more of the tools they need to get an education and to rebuild their own communities.

But the rising tide is not lifting all boats. While our nation is enjoying peace and prosperity, too many of our people are still working harder and harder for less and less.

While our businesses are restructuring and growing more productive and competitive, too many of our people still can’t be sure of having a job next year or even next month. And far more than our material riches are threatened, things far more precious to us: our children, our families, our values.

. . . Our government, once a champion of national purposes, (is) now seen by many as simply a captive of narrow interests, putting more burdens on our citizens rather than equipping them to get ahead. The values that used to hold us all together seem to be coming apart.

So tonight, we must forge a new social compact to meet the challenges of this time. As we enter a new era, we need a new set of understandings, not just with government but even more important with one another as Americans.

‘New Covenant’

That’s what I want to talk with you about tonight. I call it the “new covenant,” but it’s grounded in a very, very old idea: that all Americans have not just a right but a solemn responsibility to rise as far as their God-given talents and determination can take them, and to give something back to their communities and their country in return.

Opportunity and responsibility, they go hand in hand; we can’t have one without the other, and our national community can’t hold together without both.

Our “new covenant” is a new set of understanding for how we can equip our people to meet the challenges of the new economy, how we can change the way our government works to fit a different time, and above all, how we can repair the damaged bonds in our society and come together behind our common purpose.

We must have dramatic change in our economy, our government and ourselves.

My fellow Americans, without regard to party, let us rise to the occasion. Let us put aside partisanship and pettiness and pride.

As we embark on this new course . . . regardless of party label we are all Americans. And let the final test of everything we do be a simple one: Is it good for the American people?

Let me begin by saying that we cannot ask Americans to be better citizens if we are not better servants. You’ve made a good start by passing that law which applies to Congress all the laws you put on the private sector, and I was proud to sign it yesterday.

But we have a lot more to do before people really trust the way things work around here. Three times as many lobbyists are in the streets and corridors of Washington as were here 20 years ago.

The American people look at their capital and they see a city where the well-connected and the well-protected can work the system, but the interests of ordinary citizens are often left out.

. . . So tonight, I ask you to just stop taking the lobbyist perks. Just stop. We don’t have to wait for legislation to pass to send a strong signal to the American people that things are really changing. But I also hope you will send me the strongest possible lobby reform bill, and I’ll sign that too . . . .

Political Reform

And as I have said for three years, we should work to open the airwaves so that they can be an instrument of democracy, not a weapon of destruction, by giving free TV time to candidates for public office.

When the last Congress killed political reform last year, it was reported in the press that the lobbyists actually stood in the halls of this sacred building and cheered. This year let’s give the folks at home something to cheer about.

. . . The “new covenant” approach to governing is as different from the old bureaucratic way as the computer is from the manual typewriter.

The old way of governing around here protected organized interests. We should look out for the interests of ordinary people. The old way divided us by interests, constituency or class.

The “new covenant” way should unite us behind a common vision of what’s best for our country.

The old way dispensed services through large, top-down, inflexible bureaucracies. The “new covenant” way should shift these resources and decision-making from bureaucrats to citizens, injecting choice and competition and individual responsibility into national policy . . . .

Our job here is to expand opportunity, not bureaucracy, to empower people to make the most of their own lives--and to enhance our security here at home and abroad.

We must not ask government to do what we should do for ourselves . . . .

Our job is to get rid of yesterday’s government so that our own people can meet today’s and tomorrow’s needs, and we ought to do it together.

You know, for years before I became President I heard others say they would cut government and how bad it was, but not much happened. We actually did it.

We cut over a quarter of a trillion dollars in spending, more than 300 domestic programs, more than 100,000 positions from the federal bureaucracy in the last two years alone.

. . . Under the leadership of Vice President Gore, our initiatives have already saved taxpayers $63 billion . . . .

FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has gone from being a disaster to helping people in disasters.

You can ask the farmers in the Middle West who fought the flood there or the people in California who’ve dealt with floods and earthquakes and fires, and they’ll tell you that . . . .

Now, there are a lot of other things that I could talk about; I want to just mention one because it’ll be discussed here in the next few weeks.

University administrators all over the country have told me that they are saving weeks and weeks of bureaucratic time now because of our direct college loan program, which makes college loans cheaper and more affordable with better repayment terms for students, costs the government less and cuts our paperwork and bureaucracy for the government and for the universities. We shouldn’t cap that program; we should give every college in America the opportunity to be a part of it.

. . . It’s time for Congress to stop passing on to the states the cost of decisions we make here in Washington. I know there are still serious differences over the details of the unfunded-mandates legislation, but I want to work with you to make sure we pass a reasonable bill which will protect the national interest and give justified relief where we need to give it.

For years Congress concealed in the budget scores of pet spending projects. Last year was no different.

There was a million dollars to study stress in plants and $12 million for a tick removal program that didn’t work. It’s hard to remove ticks; those of us who’ve had them know. But I’ll tell you something, if you’ll give me the line-item veto, I’ll remove some of that unnecessary spending.

But I think we should all remember, and almost all of us would agree, that government still has important responsibilities. Our young people--we should think of this when we cut--our young people hold our future in their hands. We still owe a debt to our veterans. And our senior citizens have made us what we are.

Now my budget cuts a lot, but it protects education, veterans, Social Security and Medicare, and I hope you will do the same thing. You should and I hope you will.

And when we give more flexibility to the states, let us remember that there are certain fundamental national needs that should be addressed in every state, North and South, East and West.

Immunization against childhood disease. School lunches in all our schools. Head Start, medical care, nutrition for pregnant women and infants. . . . All these things are in the national interest.

I applaud your desire to get rid of costly and unnecessary regulations, but when we deregulate, let’s remember what national action in the national interest has given us: safer food for our families, safer toys for our children, safer nursing homes for our parents, safer cars and highways, and safer workplaces, cleaner air and cleaner water.

. . . Should we cut the deficit more? Well, of course we should. Of course we should. But we can bring it down in a way that still protects our economic recovery and does not unduly punish people who should not be punished and instead should be helped.

I know many of you in this chamber support the balanced-budget amendment. I certainly want to balance the budget. Our Administration has done more to bring the budget down and to save money than any in a very, very long time.

If you believe passing this amendment is the right thing to do, then you have to be straight with the American people. They have a right to know what you’re going to cut, what taxes you’re going to raise and how it’s going to affect them.

We should be doing things in the open around here. For example, everybody ought to know if this proposal is going to endanger Social Security. I would oppose that, and I think most Americans would.

Nothing has done more to undermine our sense of common responsibility than our failed welfare system. This is one of the problems we have to face here in Washington in our “new covenant.”

It rewards welfare over work; it undermines family values; it lets millions of parents get away without paying their child support; it keeps a minority, but a significant minority, of the people on welfare trapped on it for a very long time.

I’ve worked on this problem for a long time, nearly 15 years now. As a governor, I had the honor of working with the Reagan Administration to write the last welfare reform bill back in 1988.

In the last two years, we made a good start in continuing the work of welfare reform. Our Administration gave two dozen states the right to slash through federal rules and regulations to reform their own welfare systems and to try to promote work and responsibility over welfare and dependency.

Last year, I introduced the most sweeping welfare reform plan ever presented by an Administration.

We have to make welfare what it was meant to be--a second chance, not a way of life. We have to help those on welfare move to work as quickly as possible, to provide child care and teach them skills if that’s what they need, for up to two years. But after that, there ought to be a simple, hard rule: Anyone who can work must go to work.

If the parent isn’t paying child support, they should be forced to pay. We should suspend driver’s licenses, track them across state lines, make them work off what they owe. That is what we should do.

Governments do not raise children, people do, and the parents must take responsibility for the children they bring into this world. I want to work with you, with all of you, to pass welfare reform. But our goal must be to liberate people and lift them up from dependence to independence, from welfare to work, from mere childbearing to responsible parenting.

Our goal should not be to punish them because they happen to be poor . . . . We shouldn’t cut people off just because they’re poor, they’re young, or even because they’re unmarried.

. . . And I know all the arguments pro and con, and I have read and thought about this for a long time. I still don’t think we can in good conscience punish poor children for the mistakes of their parents.

. . . And I am telling you, the people who are trapped on it know it doesn’t work. They also want to get off.

. . . I just don’t want to punish poverty and past mistakes. All of us have made our mistakes, and none of us can change our yesterdays, but every one of us can change our tomorrows.

And America’s best example of that may be Lynn Woolsey, who worked her way off welfare to become a congresswoman from the state of California.

I know the members of this Congress are concerned about crime, as are all the citizens of our country. But I remind you that last year we passed a very tough crime bill, longer sentences, “three strikes and you’re out,” almost 60 new capital punishment offenses, more prisons, more prevention, 100,000 more police.

And we paid for it all by reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy and giving the money back to local communities to lower the crime rate . . . .

But let’s not go back on the things that we did last year that we know work, that we know work because the local law enforcement officers tell us that we did the right thing, because local community leaders who’ve worked for years and years to lower the crime rate tell us that they work.

Let’s look at the experience of our cities and our rural areas where the crime rate has gone down, and ask the people who did it how they did it. And if what we did last year supports the decline in the crime rate, and I am convinced that it does, let us not go back on it, let’s stick with it, implement it.

. . . I don’t want to destroy the good atmosphere in the room or in the country tonight, but I have to mention one issue that divided this body greatly last year.

The last Congress also passed the Brady bill and, in the crime bill, the ban on 19 assault weapons. I don’t think it’s a secret to anybody in this room that several members of the last Congress who voted for that aren’t here tonight because they voted for it.

. . . The members of Congress who voted for that bill and I would never do anything to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms, to hunt and to engage in other appropriate sporting activities. I’ve done it since I was a boy, and I’m going to keep right on doing it until I can’t do it anymore.

But a lot of people laid down their seats in Congress so that police officers and kids wouldn’t have to lay down their lives under a hail of assault weapon attack, and I will not let that be repealed.

I’d like to talk about a couple of other issues we have to deal with. I want us to cut more spending, but I hope we won’t cut government programs that help to prepare us for the new economy . . . .

The very best example of this is the national service corps, AmeriCorps.

It passed with strong bipartisan support, and now there are 20,000 Americans, more than ever served in one year in the Peace Corps, working all over this country, helping people person-to-person in local, grass-roots volunteer groups, solving problems and in the process, earning some money for their education.

This is citizenship at its best. It’s good for the AmeriCorps members, but it’s good for the rest of us too. It’s the essence of the “new covenant,” and we shouldn’t stop it.

All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants; the public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.

That’s why our Administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.

In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.

The most important job of our government in this new era is to empower the American people to succeed in the global economy. America has always been a land of opportunity, a land where if you work hard, you can get ahead.

We’ve become a great middle-class country. Middle-class values sustain us. We must expand that middle class and shrink the underclass . . . those who work and lift our nation must have more of its benefits.

Today too many of those people are being left out; they’re working harder for less, they have less security, less income, less certainty that they can even afford a vacation, much less college for their kids or retirement for themselves. We cannot let this continue.

If we don’t act, our economy will probably keep doing what it’s been doing since about 1978 when the income growth began to go to those at the very top of our economic scale, and the people in the vast middle got very little growth, and people who worked like crazy but were on the bottom then fell even further and further behind in the years afterward, no matter how hard they worked.

Lower Taxes

We’ve got to have a government that can be a real partner in making this new economy work for all of our people, a government that helps each and every one of us to get an education and to have the opportunity to renew our skills . . . .

The second thing we ought to do is to help people raise their incomes immediately by lowering their taxes. We took the first step in 1993 with a working family tax cut for 15 million families with incomes under $27,000, a tax cut that this year will average about $1,000 a family. And we also gave tax reductions to most small and new businesses.

Before we could do more than that, we first had to bring down the deficit we inherited, and we had to get economic growth up. Now we’ve done both, and now we can cut taxes in a more comprehensive way.

But tax cuts should reinforce and promote our first obligation, to empower our citizens through education and training to make the most of their own lives.

The spotlight should shine on those who make the right choices for themselves, their families and their communities. I have proposed the “middle-class bill of rights,” which should properly be called the Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, because its provisions only benefit those who are working to educate and raise their children, and to educate themselves.

It will, therefore, give needed tax relief and raise incomes in both the short run and the long run in a way that benefits all of us. There are four provisions.

First, a tax deduction for all education and training after high school . . . .

Second, we ought to cut taxes $500 for families with children under 13. Third, we ought to foster more saving and personal responsibility by permitting people to establish an individual retirement account and withdraw from it tax free for the cost of education, health care, first-time home-buying or the care of a parent.

And fourth, we should pass a GI Bill for America’s workers. We propose to collapse nearly 70 federal programs and not give the money to the states, but give the money directly to the American people, offer vouchers to them so that they, if they are laid off or if they are working for a very low wage, can get a voucher worth $2,600 a year, for up to two years, to go to their local community colleges or wherever else they want to get the skills they need to improve their lives.

. . . Well, any one of us can call for a tax cut, but I won’t accept one that explodes the deficit or puts our recovery at risk. We ought to pay for tax cuts fully and honestly.

Just two years ago it was an open question whether we could find the strength to cut the deficit. Thanks to the courage of the people who were here then, many of whom didn’t return, we did cut the deficit . . . by over $600 billion, about $10,000 for every family in this country . . . .

In the budget I will send you, the “middle-class bill of rights” is fully paid for by budget cuts in bureaucracy, cuts in programs, cuts in special interest subsidies, and the spending cuts will more than double the tax cuts.

My budget pays for the “middle-class bill of rights” without any cuts in Medicare and I will oppose any attempts to pay for tax cuts with Medicare cuts. That’s not the right thing to do . . . .

Minimum Wage Hike

The goal of building the middle class and strengthening the underclass is also why I believe that you should raise the minimum wage. It rewards work.

Two and a half million Americans, often women with children, are working out there today for four-and-a-quarter an hour.

In terms of real buying power, by next year that minimum wage will be at a 40-year low. That’s not my idea of how the new economy ought to work.

Now, I’ve studied the arguments and the evidence for and against a minimum wage increase. I believe the weight of the evidence is that a modest increase does not cost jobs and may even lure people back into the job market.

But the most important thing is, you can’t make a living on $4.25 an hour . . . .

Members of Congress have been here less than a month, but by the end of the week, 28 days into the new year, every member of Congress will have earned as much in congressional salary as a minimum wage worker makes all year long.

Now everybody else here, including the President, has something else that too many Americans do without, and that’s health care.

Now, last year, we almost came to blows over health care, but we didn’t do anything, and the cold, hard fact is that since last year, since I was here, another 1.1 million Americans in working families have lost their health care.

And the cold, hard fact is that many millions more, most of them farmers and small businesspeople and self-employed people, have seen their premiums skyrocket, their co-pays and deductibles go up; there’s a whole bunch of people in this country that in the statistics have health insurance, but really what they’ve got is a piece of paper that says they won’t lose their home if they get sick.

Now, I still believe our country has got to move toward providing health security for every American family . . . but I know that last year, as the evidence indicates, we bit off more than we could chew. So I’m asking you that we work together.

. . . We can work to help workers who lose their jobs at least keep their health insurance coverage for a year while they look for work. And we can find a way--it may take some time, but we can find the way--to make sure that our children have health care.

. . . Now that the Cold War is past, it’s tempting to believe that all the security issues, with the possible exception of trade, reside here at home, but it’s not so.

Our security still depends upon our continued world leadership for peace and freedom and democracy. We still can’t be strong at home unless we’re strong abroad.

The financial crisis in Mexico is a case in point. I know it’s not popular to say it tonight, but we have to act, not for the Mexican people, but for the sake of the millions of Americans whose livelihoods are tied to Mexico’s well being.

If we want to secure American jobs, preserve American exports, safeguard America’s borders, then we must pass the stabilization program and help to put Mexico back on track. Now let me repeat. It’s not a loan, it’s not foreign aid, it’s not a bailout.

We’ll be given a guarantee like co-signing a note, with good collateral that will cover our risk. This legislation is the right thing for America. That’s why the bipartisan leadership has supported it. And I hope you in Congress will pass it quickly.

It is in our interest, and we can explain it to the American people, because we’re going to do it in the right way.

You know, tonight, this is the first State of the Union Address ever delivered since the beginning of the Cold War when not a single Russian missile is pointed at the children of America. And along with the Russians, we’re on our way to destroying the missiles and the bombers that carry 9,000 nuclear warheads.

We’ve come so far so fast in this post-Cold War world that it’s easy to take the decline of the nuclear threat for granted, but it’s still there, and we aren’t finished yet.

This year I’ll ask the Senate to approve START II to eliminate weapons that carry 5,000 more warheads. The United States will lead the charge to extend indefinitely the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to enact a comprehensive nuclear test ban and to eliminate chemical weapons.

Combat Terrorism

To stop and roll back North Korea’s potentially deadly nuclear program, we’ll continue to implement the agreement we have reached with that nation. It’s smart. It’s tough. It’s a deal based on continuing inspection, with safeguards for our allies and ourselves.

This year I’ll submit to Congress comprehensive legislation to strengthen our hand in combatting terrorists, whether they strike at home or abroad. As the cowards who bombed the World Trade Center found out, this country will hunt down terrorists and bring them to justice.

. . . We must and we will pursue a comprehensive peace between Israel and all her neighbors in the Middle East. Accordingly, last night I signed an executive order that will block the assets in the United States of terrorist organizations that threaten to disrupt the peace process.

It prohibits financial transactions with these groups. And tonight I call on all our allies and peace-loving nations throughout the world to join us with renewed fervor in a global effort to combat terrorism. We cannot permit the future to be marred by terror and fear and paralysis.

From the day I took the oath of office, I pledged that our nation would maintain the best-equipped, best-trained and best-prepared military on Earth. We have, and they are.

They have managed the dramatic downsizing of our forces after the Cold War with remarkable skill and spirit. But to make sure our military is ready for action, and to provide the pay and the quality of life the military and their families deserve, I’m asking the Congress to add $25 billion in defense spending over the next six years . . . .

Community Values

We ask a very great deal of our armed forces.

. . . Just think about what our troops have done in the last year, showing America at its best: helping to save hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda, moving with lightning speed to head off another threat to Kuwait, giving freedom and democracy back to the people of Haiti.

We have proudly supported peace and prosperity and freedom from South Africa and North Ireland, from central and eastern Europe to Asia, from Latin America to the Middle East. All these endeavors are good in those places, but they make our future more confident and more secure.

Our fortunes and our posterity also depend upon our ability to answer some questions from within, from the values and voices that speak to our hearts as well as our heads . . . .

We see our families and our communities all over this country coming apart, and we feel the common ground shifting from under us--the PTA, the town hall meeting, the ball park--it’s hard for a lot of overworked parents to find the time and space for those things that strengthen the bonds of trust and cooperation.

Too many of our children don’t have parents and grandparents who can give them those experiences that they need to build their own character and their sense of identity.

We all know that while we here in this chamber can make a difference on those things, the real differences will be made by our fellow citizens where they work and where they live and it’ll be made almost without regard to party.

When I used to go to the softball park in Little Rock to watch my daughter’s league, and people would come up to me, fathers and mothers, and talk to me, I can honestly say I had no idea whether 90% of them were Republicans or Democrats.

When I visited the relief centers after the floods in California, in Northern California last week, a woman came up to me and did something that very few of you would do. She hugged me and said, “Mr. President, I’m a Republican but I’m glad you’re here.”

. . . For our corporate and business leaders, we’re going to work here to keep bringing the deficit down, to expand markets, to support their success in every possible way. But they have an obligation when they’re doing well, to keep jobs in our communities and give their workers a fair share of the prosperity they generate.

For people in the entertainment industry in this country, we applaud your creativity and your worldwide success, and we support your freedom of expression. But you do have a responsibility to assess the impact of your work and to understand the damage that comes from the incessant, repetitive mindless violence and irresponsible conduct that permeates our media all the time.

We’ve got to ask our community leaders and all kinds of organizations to help us stop our most serious social problem, the epidemic of teen pregnancies and births where there is no marriage . . . . government can only do so much. Tonight I call on parents and leaders all across this country to join together in a national campaign against teen pregnancy to make a difference. We can do this, and we must.

And I would like to say a special word to our religious leaders . . . . These people who lead our houses of worship can ignite their congregations to carry their faith into action, can reach out to all of our children, to all of our people in distress, to those who have been savaged by the breakdown of all we hold dear, because so much of what must be done must come from the inside out.

. . . Most of us in politics haven’t helped very much. For years we’ve mostly treated citizens like they were consumers or spectators, sort of political couch potatoes who were supposed to watch the TV ads, either promise them something for nothing or play on their fears and frustrations. And more and more of our citizens now get most of their information in very negative and aggressive ways that are hardly conducive to honest and open conversations.

Common Ground

But the truth is, we have got to stop seeing each other as enemies just because we have different views. If you go back to the beginning of this country, the great strength of America . . . has always been our ability to associate with people who were different from ourselves, and to work together to find common ground.

And in this day, everybody has a responsibility to do more of that . . . .

I want to finish up here by pointing out some folks that are up with the First Lady that represent what I’m trying to talk about--citizens--I have no idea what their party affiliation is or who they voted for in the last election, but they represent what we ought to be doing.

Cindy Perry teaches second-graders to read in AmeriCorps in rural Kentucky . . . .

She was married when she was a teen-ager. She had four children, but she had time to serve other people, to get her high school equivalency, and she’s going to use her AmeriCorps money to go back to college.

Steven Bishop is the police chief of Kansas City. He’s been a national leader--stand up, Steve.

He’s been a national leader in using more police in community policing, and he’s worked with AmeriCorps to do it. And the crime rate in Kansas City has gone down . . . .

Cpl. Gregory Depestre went to Haiti as part of his adopted country’s force to help secure democracy in his native land.

And I might add, we must be the only country in the world that could have gone to Haiti and taken Haitian Americans there who could speak the language and talk to the people, and he was one of them, and we’re proud of him.

The next two folks I’ve had the honor of meeting and getting to know a little bit: the Rev. John and the Rev. Diana Cherry, of the AME Zion Church in Temple Hills, Md. I’d like to ask them to stand. I want to tell you about them. In the early ‘80s, they left government service and formed a church in a small living room in a small house. . . . Today that church has 17,000 members.

It is one of the three or four biggest churches in the entire United States. It grows by 200 a month. They do it together, and the special focus of their ministry is keeping families together.

This is the kind of work that citizens are doing in America; we need more of it, and it ought to be lifted up and supported.

. . . The last person I want to introduce is Jack Lucas from Hattiesburg, Miss. Jack, would you stand up?

Fifty years ago, in the sands of Iwo Jima, Jack Lucas taught and learned the lessons of citizenship. On Feb. 20, 1945, he and three of his buddies encountered the enemy and two grenades at their feet.

Jack Lucas threw himself on both of them. In that moment he saved the lives of his companions and miraculously in the next instant a medic saved his life.

He gained a foothold for freedom, and at the age of 17, just a year older than his grandson--who is up there with him today, and his son, who is a West Point graduate and a veteran--at 17 Jack Lucas became the youngest Marine in history and the youngest soldier in this century to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.

All these years later, yesterday, here is what he said about that day. “Didn’t matter where you were from or who you were, you relied on one another. You did it for your country.”

We all gain when we give and we reap what we sow.

That’s at the heart of this “new covenant,” responsibility, opportunity and citizenship, more than stale chapters in some remote civics book, they are still the virtue by which we can fulfill ourselves and reach our God-given potential and be like them, and also to fulfill the eternal promise of this country, the enduring dream from that first and most sacred covenant.

I believe every person in this country still believes that we are created equal, and given by our Creator the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This is a very, very great country and our best days are still to come.

Thank you and God bless you all.