THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Highfill, Arkansas)
_______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release November 6, 1998
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT OPENING CEREMONIES OF
NORTHWEST ARKANSAS REGIONAL AIRPORT
Highfill, Arkansas
3:05 P.M. CST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much, Secretary Slater,
for your support of this project and your terrific work. Thank
you, Administrator Garvey, Senator Hutchinson, Congressman
Hutchinson, Senator-elect Blanche Lambert-Lincoln. Now, up here
in Northwest Arkansas, from my point of view she's got the best
of all worlds. She's a Democrat with a Republican last name.
(Laughter.) I want you to get to know her, you'll like her a
lot.
Congressman Dickey, Congressman Hammerschmidt. Mr.
Green, thank you for your marvelous work here. Mr. Bowler, thank
you for bringing American Eagle here. I want to thank the
Springdale Band and the Fayetteville Choir. I thought they both
did a superb job. (Laughter.)
You know -- I've got all these notes, but I don't
really want to use them today. I was flying home today, and I
have to begin by bringing you greetings from two people who were
with me this morning who, for different reasons, wanted to come
and couldn't -- one is the First Lady, Hillary, who wanted me to
tell her friends in Northwest Arkansas hello and to say she
wished she could be here. (Applause.) And the other is Senator
Bumpers, who has a sinus condition and was told by his doctor not
to get on the airplane, although I told him I thought it was a
pretty nice plane I was trying to bring him down here in --
(laughter) -- and that we were trying to demonstrate that
Northwest Arkansas had a world-class airport. But he asked to be
remembered to you.
I want to thank my good friend, former Chief of
Staff and our Envoy to Latin America, Mack McLarty, for being
here. And all of you all out here -- I've been looking out in
this crowd at so many people I've known for 25 years, many more
-- I've been sort of reliving the last 25 years. I think I
should begin by saying that in every project like this, there are
always a lot of people who work on it. Rodney mentioned that
many years ago, Senator Fulbright, who was my mentor, had the
idea of there ought to be an airport here. I know how long
Congressman Hammerschmidt has worked on this. This project
started in the planning stage under the Bush administration, and
we completed it. We had bipartisan support and as Senator
Hutchinson said, invoking our friend, Senator McCain, we had
bipartisan opposition to it as well. (Laughter.)
And I have found that there is in any project like
this a certain squeaky wheel factor; there are people that just
bother you so much that even if you didn't want to do it, you'd
go on and do it anyway. And I would like to pay a certain
special tribute to the people who were particular squeaky wheels
to me -- starting with Alice Walton, who wore me out. (Laughter
and applause.) Uvalde and Carol Lindsey, who guilt-peddled me
about every campaign they'd ever worked for me in. (Applause.)
And Dale Bumpers, who made me re-live every favor he'd ever done
for me for 20 years. (Laughter.) Now, there were others as
well, but I want to especially thank them.
I want to say to all of you, I'm delighted to see
Helen Walton here and members of the Walton family. I, too, wish
Sam were here to see this day. I thank J.B. Hunt, who talked to
me about this airport. George Billingsly once said, you
remember, I gave you the first contribution you ever got in
Benton County, now build that airport. (Laughter.) I have a lot
of stories about this airport. I want you to understand how high
public policy is made in Washington. (Laughter.) And we're all
laughing about this, but the truth is, this is a good thing and
it needed to be done.
You know, when I was a boy growing up in Arkansas --
Tim talked about how we were all raised to believe you could
build a wall around Arkansas -- we thought in the beginning, for
a long time that roads would be our salvation. Forty-two years
ago President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act into
law, a bill sponsored by the Vice President's father, Albert
Gore, Sr., in the United States Senate. And it did a lot of good
for America and a lot of good for Arkansas -- and a lot of
trucking companies in this state did a lot of good with it, and a
lot of poultry companies, like Tyson's and others, made the most
of those roads.
And then we began to see that air traffic was
important as well. And Secretary Slater talked a lot about that.
And I got tickled when Senator Hutchinson was talking about
transporting apples from Hiwassee by railroad in the '20s. I
thought to myself, I wonder if I'm the first President who has
ever known how to get to Hiwassee? (Laughter.)
But I got to thinking about that and how now we move
from interstates to highways, and the people -- all these people
I mentioned today -- Senator Hutchinson, Senator Bumpers, Senator
Pryor, certainly Congressman Hammerschmidt and Congressman
Hutchinson now, and Secretary Slater, and before him, Secretary
Pena, and all the people in Northwest Arkansas and their
supporters -- understand today if you can't fly you can't
compete. But if you can fly, you can soar to new heights. Today
in a sentence, at long last Northwest Arkansas can fly.
(Applause.)
And this means a lot to me. When I was landing
here, I called all my Secret Service detail leaders together and
I said, I want you guys to look out the window. This is where I
started my political career. I've been on every one of these
roads. And we were sitting here, Congressman Hammerschmidt
reached over and he said, "You know, your career, the career that
led you to the presidency, really started 24 years ago last
Tuesday." What he didn't say was, comma, "when I beat you like a
drum up here -- (laughter.)
But I learned a lot in that race, and ever since,
driving into all the little towns and hamlets in this area. Then
as governor, flying in and out of Northwest Arkansas and all the
airports that were up here. I have known for a long time that
this could bring opportunity and empowerment, access to markets,
a boom to tourism --all of this will happen. And what I'd like
to ask all of you to think about is to think of this airport --
and it's not just going from here to Chicago, but from here to
tomorrow. I am glad to tell you that the FAA will release today
a $5-million letter of intent for continued development of this
airport. (Applause.)
I'm glad to say that we have not abandoned our
bipartisan commitment -- we Arkansans -- to other kinds of
transportation. When the Congress passed with the vote of every
member of Congress here present, and I signed the Transportation
Equity Act this year, it will mean $100 million more a year over
the next six years to the state of Arkansas alone. And it, too,
will do a lot of good to take us to the future. (Applause.)
We are committed also to modernizing the air traffic
system. Our air traffic control system, with the new investments
we're making in aviation service and infrastructure, will now be
able to better handle the -- listen to this -- the 50-percent
increase in global air travel we expect in just the next seven
years.
Our policy has helped our airlines and aerospace
industries return to profitability. Now we're finalizing new
means to promote more competition and lower fares at home. We've
signed more than 60 agreements to expand air service with other
nations, opening skies above as we open markets below.
We're also trying to do more to make sure those
skies are safe and secure. Under the Vice President's
leadership, with the joint efforts of the FAA and NASA and the
airline industry, we're working to convert our air traffic
control system to satellite technology, to change the way we
inspect older aircraft and, most important over the long run, to
combat terrorism with new equipment, new agents, new methods.
In the world of the future we'll need great
airports, we'll need wonderful airplanes, we'll need well-trained
-- well-trained pilots and people to maintain those airplanes.
Our prosperity more and more will depend upon keeping the world's
skies safe, secure and open.
I've got to mention one other personal thing. I saw
Lt. Governor Rockefeller here, and he probably has to hide it
around election time, but when we were younger men we studied in
Oxford, England together -- when people typically took a boat.
Now, people our age then look at me when I tell them I took six
days to get from here to England and they think I need my head
examined. We are moving around very fast now.
And the last thing I'd like to ask you to think
about is where we are going and how we're going to get there.
We'll have better roads, we'll have better airports, we'll have
safer air travel. But to me -- as I have seen all the people
before me speak, the people that really did the work -- all I had
to do as President was to make sure my Budget Office didn't kill
these requests and to make sure everybody I knew, knew that I was
personally supportive of this. But the members of Congress and
the others here present, the citizens, they did all the work.
And all of you who worked on this -- I saw the
leaders stand up when their names were called -- to me, this
symbolizes America at its best; people working on a common
objective, across party lines, putting people first, thinking
about the future. It's a symbol of what I have tried to do in
the six years I have been in Washington. And I learned most of
what I know driving around on these back roads.
And I just want to tell all of you that I thank you
for the role that you have played in helping to bring this
country to the point where we not only have a surplus for the
first time in 29 years, but the lowest percentage of people on
welfare in 29 years, the lowest unemployment in 28 years, the
lowest crime rate in 25 years, the highest home ownership in
history, with the smallest government in Washington since the
last time John Glenn orbited the Earth. And I am proud of that.
(Applause.)
And what I ask you to think about is that we are
--all of us -- living in a smaller and smaller world, where our
independence and our own power depends upon our constructive
interdependence with our friends and neighbors beyond our borders
--the borders of our region, our state, our nation. If we're
going to build a pathway to the future, we have to build it with
air travel, we have to build it with the Internet, we have to
build it with modern medical and scientific research, and we have
to build it by giving every child -- without regard to income,
race, region, or background -- a world-class education.
We have to build it by recognizing that -- all the
differences that exist in this increasingly diverse country. I
know there are churches here in Northwest Arkansas that now have
services in Spanish on Sunday, which would have been unthinkable
24 years ago, when I first started traipsing around on these
roads. All of that is a great blessing -- if we decide when we
soar into the future, we're all going to take the flight
together.
You built this airport together. Take it into the
future together. Thank you, and God bless you all. (Applause.)
END 3:15 P.M. CST
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