‘In the Moment,’ Where King Last Spoke, Clinton Reclaimed His Voice

Bill Clinton carried with him only three pages of talking points when he stepped into the pulpit at the cavernous Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn., on Nov. 13, 1993. But he had other things on his mind. He had just read a Washington Post story about an 11-year-old girl whose neighborhood was so riddled by violence that she was already planning her own funeral. Kurt Schmoke, the mayor of Baltimore, had recently told him about an 18-year-old boy who was shot and killed--by a 13-year-old on a dare--while trying to lead younger children safely through trick-or-treating on Halloween. And the president knew one last thing: The pulpit in which he stood was the one from which Martin Luther King Jr. had preached his last sermon, on the stormy night before he was murdered in April 1968.

It was a damp, warm Saturday morning. About 5,000 men and women, mostly black, many of them ministers, crowded into the huge sanctuary, the headquarters of the fast-growing Church of God in Christ. Many tried to cool off by fanning themselves with their programs. A pigeon circled overhead. A lone saxophonist (perhaps in Clinton’s honor) stirred the crowd with an impassioned rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Then, in a swell of enthusiasm, the president was introduced as “Bishop Clinton.”

What happened next was entirely unexpected. No one on Clinton’s staff had told the reporters traveling with him to look for a major address. Yet over the next 31 minutes, Clinton delivered the most important and memorable speech of his presidency--one especially worth recalling today, on the day that America honors King.

The speech began unremarkably. Clinton opened with a routine recital of his accomplishments: the number of minorities he’d appointed, the positive trends in the economy, the bills he had passed through Congress. Then he touted the ill-starred health care plan he had unveiled a few weeks earlier and made a pitch for the North American Free Trade Agreement, which faced an imminent vote in the House.

On most mornings, Clinton might have stopped there. Instead, on that day, with the stories about murdered children and images of King swirling in his head and the soaring gospel music still pounding in his chest, Clinton shifted direction.

“What I really want to say to you today,” he began, “is that we can do all of this and still fail unless we meet the great crisis of the spirit that is gripping America today.”

What Would King Think of Progress?

With those words, it was as if Clinton had broken through a wall, from the dry language of lobbying into the passion of prophecy. He had no text, and he was long beyond his talking points. “I was frankly overcome by the emotion of the moment,” Clinton recalled in an interview last week. “I was thinking of Martin Luther King getting killed; I was thinking of what it was like that last night in the church, and . . . it literally just came to me in the moment. I thought . . . this is what presidents are for.”

In a burst of inspiration, Clinton asked his audience: If Martin Luther King could “reappear by my side today and give us a report card on the last 25 years, what would he say?” King, Clinton mused, might praise America for increasing the number of African American elected officials, for dismantling segregation and for moving more blacks into the middle class.

“But he would say, ‘I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed,’ ” Clinton said to the first ripples of applause. “ ‘I did not live and die to see 13-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down 9-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others.’ ”

Applause rang out again. Clinton pushed on: “ ‘I fought for freedom,’ he would say, ‘but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon; not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children walk away from them and abandon them as if they don’t amount to anything.’ ” More applause erupted. “ ‘I fought for people to have the right to work, but not to have whole communities and people abandoned. That is not what I lived and died for.’ ”

As he finished, Clinton felt exhilarated. (“When you have reached people, you know,” he said last week.) Indeed, no white Democrat in decades had spoken as passionately and candidly about the corrosive trends afflicting parts of black communities. Yet the speech owed its power not only to its surging emotion but also to its inspired mix of ideas.

Clinton spoke urgently about both the need for greater personal responsibility--a theme usually championed by conservatives--and government’s responsibility to expand opportunity, a traditional liberal priority. Correctly, Clinton insisted the two ideas were not antagonistic but complementary. Impoverished neighborhoods, he said, needed changes “from the outside in”--more investment, more jobs, better schools. But even these initiatives would fail without an end to self-destructive behavior--what he called changes “from the inside out.”

Liberal orthodoxy had long focused on white racism as the core of the problems facing blacks (an instinct still evident in Bill Bradley’s sermons about “white-skin privilege.”) Clinton, just as committed to racial reconciliation, did not ignore racism or the need for government action to secure equal opportunity. But he also recognized the need for moral renewal in troubled communities--as did the ministers applauding his words. “I just thought to myself, ‘I’m going to do all this work, turn the economy around, pass all these bills . . . and what difference is it going to make if these kids keep killing each other?’ ” Clinton recalled.

Clinton’s legacy forever will be shrouded by his own moments of irresponsibility. But he also deserves to be remembered for his breakthrough (and now widely embraced) idea that social policy--in everything from welfare and crime to education--must be built on linking opportunity and responsibility. An ethic of mutual responsibility between government and individuals offers the best prospect both for bipartisan agreement in Washington and for tangible progress on the nation’s toughest streets. And Clinton never made the case for it more eloquently than he did on the morning in Memphis when he summoned the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. to judge the nation he left behind.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.

See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.