At Gathering, Clinton Urges U.S. to Keep Lit ‘the Fire of Freedom’

President Clinton summoned the republic to keep lit “the fire of freedom,” as the nation’s capital greeted the arriving millennium with a 14-hour festival saluting the American century and a dazzling midnight display of fireworks set against the Washington Monument.

Offering a medley of somber reflection and celebrity, Washington marched into the new year and new century with its unique party face: hour after hour of talk--four speeches by the president alone during the day--and, in war rooms across the city, busy dens of workers beavering away against potential Y2K glitches.

But at the stroke of midnight, a fuse extending more than 2,000 feet above the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument was lit, igniting fireworks that climbed a scaffolding attached to the spire’s gleaming white facade.

Clinton completed his five-minute speech at one minute before midnight.

Harking to the spirit that has undergirded the nation since its founding and with the famed statue of Abraham Lincoln as his backdrop, a tuxedo-clad Clinton declared: “We Americans must not fear change. Instead, let us welcome it, embrace it and create it.

“The sun will always rise on America as long as each new generation lights the fire of freedom. Our children are ready. So again the torch is passed to a new century of young Americans.”

The contemplative tenor of Clinton’s comments coexisted easily with the festive mood of a Fourth of July transposed onto the winter landscape of barren trees.

Throughout the day, crowds in the tens of thousands swirled about the Mall’s historic public spaces, flocking to lectures on Thomas Jefferson and abolitionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to the music of B.B. King and to a discussion of the nation’s fascination with basketball--all under the guise of honoring the past and imagining what the future could bring.

The music brought the audience, buoyant yet sober despite holiday tradition, to an over-the-head hand-clapping fervor throughout the evening. But it was not entirely friendly: When First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was introduced, a pronounced boo rippled across a segment of the audience.

The president and first lady had helped kick off the festival’s opening ceremony, returned to the White House for a black-tie dinner saluting American creativity in the 20th century and, finally, were among the honored guests at the three-hour, day-ending, year-ending, century-ending talent show that turned the steps of the Lincoln Memorial into “The Ed Sullivan Show” writ large.

The White House dinner of caviar, lobster, foie gras, oysters and rack of lamb was long on politicians and friends of the Clintons, along with a cavalcade of celebrities.

Jack Nicholson, asked why he chose the White House over a Hollywood soiree, spread his arms wide and said, “This is America, honey.”

At the Lincoln Memorial, the crowd--tens of thousands brought out by unseasonably mild weather--reached back nearly six long blocks.

Earlier in the day, the president, in speeches saluting the new century, called for a “true changing of the times” and not just a changing of the calendar.

The world, he said, can remain silent in the face of threats to peace and human dignity, but in an age of instant global communications, “no longer can we choose not to know.”

Sounding as though he were campaigning yet again for office--perhaps that of global chief executive--Clinton said that in the new century “we may not be able to eliminate hateful intolerance, but we will see the rise of healthy intolerance of bigotry, oppression and abject poverty in our own communities and across the world.”

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Times staff writers Vicki Kemper and Robin Wright contributed to this story.