Hillary receiving the Edmund S. Muskie Distinguished Public Service Award in september 1998. (Part ½)
… that’s why it’s so appropriate that tonight we honor someone who is just such a champion and a leader. The role of First lady or First spouse does not come with a job description. What you do, where you go, whether you make a difference depends entirely on who you are and what you believe. So we have come to know a lot about Hillary Rodham Clinton. Here at home, we have learned of her commitment to education health care child care and civil rights. And at the conference in Beijing we heard her raise the sights and lift the spirits of women and girls everywhere. And images from remote villages and city slums we have seen her carry the message that every person in every part of the world is entitle to dignity, access to knowledge and the right to participate in making the decisions that shape their lives. In her writings, she has taught us in dramatic and human terms the need for communities to come together to build civil society and taught us that true democracy requires more than ballot boxes and parliaments, but must in the words of de Tocqueville ‘be nurtured and sustained by habits of the heart in the way people live their lives and in the lessons they teach their children’. In her book, the First Lady begins one chapter with the inscription that a candle loses nothing of its light by lighting another candle and starts another by quoting the Greek proverb, ‘A civilization flourishes when people plant trees under whose shade they will never sit’.
Hillary Clinton has been lighting candles and planting trees around the world. And in so doing, she has inspired hope and instill courage in millions and she has been the best unofficial ambassador for America that any Secretary of state. could possibly desire. Moreover, she has lived for almost six years in a world where the pressures have been constant to drive her from herself to force her to fit someone else’s image of her personality and role, but she has stayed true, understanding, as Eleanor Roosevelt once said that you can never really live anyone else’s life, the influence you observe is through your own life and what you become yourself. A young person growing up almost anywhere in the world might ask,’ should I look to the crowd for instruction or should I insist that the author of my life be me?’ By her integrity and her courage, Hillary Rodham Clinton has set an example of true leadership for which we will all long be grateful. And I cannot imagine a worthier recipient of the E. S. Muskie Distinguished Public Service Award. I now invite you to watch a short video in her honor and then it will be my privilege to introduce the First Lady of the United States…
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