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9 NATIONAL SHERIFFS' ASSOCIATION
10 ANNUAL CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION
11 ATLANTA, GEORGIA
12 6:00 P.M., JUNE 22, 1997
13 RENAISSANCE WAVERLY HOTEL
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1 (Introduction of Newt Gingrich)
2 THE HONORABLE NEWT GINGRICH:
3 Thank you, Bill, for that very, very nice
4 introduction, although I must say to all of
5 you, while you emphasize my courage, I notice
6 he didn't say I could have been a sheriff, so
7 I've got to talk to Bill Byrne later. I feel
8 like I got slightly short-changed here on the
9 quality introduction, but Sheriff Hutson does
10 a marvelous job. He's a remarkable leader in
11 law enforcement in Cobb County. And we are
12 very honored. Also, I have to tell you a
13 side story. When this Galleria Center was
14 first being developed, there was a great deal
15 of question about whether or not it would get
16 filled up. As it happens, once it was
17 developed, it now has a waiting list and is
18 crowded every single night. But the first
19 major convention to agree to come here,
20 Sheriff Hutson delivered when he announced
21 that you would be coming here. So you
22 represented a greater sigh of relief to the
23 community than you can imagine at a time when
24 people thought maybe this would be vacant.
25 So we were doubly delighted when we knew you
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1 were coming. And, of course, the size of
2 your turnout, as your president has
3 indicated, is truly a great tribute I think
4 to your organization and to the drawing power
5 of Atlanta and the relative ease of getting
6 here.
7 It is good to be here with
8 the Attorney General. I am very grateful
9 that she would come to Atlanta tonight.
10 We're always thrilled to have her here. It
11 was great to have Lt. Governor Howard here
12 earlier. Everything that Bill Hutson said
13 about Bill Byrne is right. The fact is that
14 Bill Byrne is doing a fabulous job as our
15 commission chairman. And we're glad to have
16 him here to welcome you.
17 Before we were told that
18 story about the young man who had a new
19 opportunity to meet sheriffs, I was looking
20 out here thinking to myself, "This is about
21 as secure a crowd as I've been in since I
22 dined with the 82nd Airborne at Ft. Bragg.
23 You have this notion, looking at this many
24 sheriffs, that somehow you're in a relatively
25 safe environment.
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1 And I was also thinking that
2 we don't communicate often enough why you
3 matter, not just matter in the sense of law
4 enforcement, but the "shire reeve" is an
5 early medieval concept. It evolved trying to
6 combine the notion of security and freedom.
7 And it evolved in a way that while the king
8 in the middle ages could establish law for
9 the whole country, the law was, as a matter
10 of routine, enforced only at the local level
11 by the local sheriff. And it was the
12 combination of the local "shire reeve," or
13 sheriff as it became, with the local jury
14 trial which established the core principle
15 that we both had a right to expect security
16 from danger and security from the state.
17 And, in fact, it's very important, for
18 example, that we never resemble the French or
19 others who have a truly national police
20 force. While the Federal Bureau of
21 Investigation and other agencies do a very
22 important job at the national level, they are
23 not local law enforcement. They are not the
24 first line of defense, defense both against
25 crime and against a state which might at some
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1 point become dictatorial. And it is this
2 unique institution, growing first in England
3 and then transported across the Atlantic, of
4 local sheriffs providing local security in a
5 local setting and accountable to local
6 citizens, which makes you such a unique part
7 of the American tradition and of the
8 tradition of freedom. And so I am delighted
9 to be here tonight to have a chance to share
10 with you and to recognize just how important
11 you are to the very core fabric of freedom
12 which is at the heart of being American.
13 In Washington, we're trying
14 to prepare for the 21st century, just as you
15 are in your offices. We're trying to do it
16 in a very principled way -- that is, we're
17 trying to really think through what are the
18 principles at stake, and then implement
19 activities. To give you an example, we
20 believe that the principle of work matters.
21 And so we set out several years ago to reform
22 welfare to reestablish the work ethic. We
23 believe that if you're going to pursue
24 happiness, which our Declaration of
25 Independence says God has endowed every
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1 American with the right to do, that you have
2 to have a work ethic in order to pursue. "To
3 pursue happiness" is an active concept. And
4 so, through several years of struggle, we
5 wrote a welfare reform bill emphasizing
6 leaving welfare to go to work and emphasizing
7 leaving poverty to move towards prosperity.
8 And several interesting things happened,
9 which I think give me hope for the near
10 future. The first was that welfare
11 applications began to decline a year before
12 the bill was signed, because as people heard
13 the debate, they said to themselves, "Oh.
14 You mean you don't want us to be on welfare?
15 You would like us to go to work? Well, why
16 didn't you say so?" In one Oklahoma county,
17 there was a 40 percent drop in welfare
18 applications in one year. Under Governor
19 Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, welfare
20 applications, welfare rolls, have declined by
21 over 50 percent since he first became
22 governor. People went to work. They got
23 educated. They acquired responsibility. And
24 recently, to their credit, the New Republic,
25 a relatively liberal magazine, ran an
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1 editorial saying they were wrong, that in
2 fact their fear of welfare reform was a
3 misdiagnosis of the problem, and in fact they
4 had come to the conclusion that about 60
5 percent of the people -- this is their number
6 -- about 60 percent of the people on welfare
7 just needed to be shoved towards work. That
8 left, in their estimate, 40 percent who are
9 hard-core unemployed. And I would argue that
10 has to get us into faith-based and other
11 kinds of charitable outreach to transform
12 people who are hard-core unemployed. But,
13 nonetheless, for a liberal publication to
14 admit they had been wrong in their analysis
15 and that at least 60 percent of the people
16 could go to work simply by being encouraged
17 that that was the right behavior, I think
18 when you come later, as I will in a few
19 minutes, to drugs and to crime and to
20 children being born outside of marriage to
21 teenagers, there are a number of
22 opportunities here where just saying the
23 right thing has an enormous impact and can,
24 in fact, begin to change things. And then,
25 as we did, if you actually pass laws to begin
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1 to shift the reward system, to begin to shift
2 the incentives, to begin to set rules and
3 regulations moving us in the right direction,
4 I think we could be very pleased in a few
5 years with how far we've moved back towards a
6 country that is healthier and more stable.
7 Just this coming week, we
8 will pass the first balanced budget in
9 twenty-nine years with the commitment from
10 the President to sign it. We passed one two
11 years ago, but as you know, we collided for
12 partisan reasons. It was vetoed. We have
13 worked together in a bipartisan team this
14 spring. And so this coming week, we will
15 pass a balanced budget. And I would argue
16 that that is a moral as much as a financial
17 decision. We do not have the right in
18 peacetime to spend our children and
19 grandchildren's money. We have an obligation
20 to live within the means we're prepared to
21 raise. And this will be a major step in the
22 right direction.
23 We will also pass this
24 coming week a bill to save Medicare. This
25 was a very radical bill two years ago.
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1 Virtually the identical bill passed out of
2 the Ways and Means Committee a week ago by
3 thirty-six to three on a huge bipartisan
4 majority because as people talked it through,
5 they came to believe that senior citizens
6 should have the same right to choose their
7 health care as their children and
8 grandchildren. They came to believe that
9 medical savings accounts were an important
10 choice that should be made available. They
11 came to believe that hospitals and doctors
12 should be able to form provider-sponsored
13 networks to compete with health maintenance
14 organizations. They came to believe that
15 senior citizens should be recruited --
16 engaged in, if you will -- to help fight
17 fraud. There's an estimate that as much as
18 ten percent of Medicare and Medicaid is
19 fraud. And so this kind of reform, which two
20 years ago was very controversial, came out of
21 the Ways and Means Committee by thirty-six to
22 three. And I believe it will pass this
23 coming Thursday and go to conference.
24 In addition, we will pass
25 the first tax cut in sixteen years. Now,
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1 this is going to be a fairly comprehensive
2 tax cut. It's not everything I would like,
3 but it's a significant step. It will include
4 a $500 per child tax credit, which is
5 basically a simple definition, that parents
6 are more important than bureaucrats in taking
7 care of children, and, therefore, at the
8 margin, we ought to get the money to the
9 parents so they can do the work rather than
10 have higher taxes to hire more bureaucrats to
11 do for the kids what the parents can't do
12 because they had to go to a second job to be
13 able to pay the taxes to hire the
14 bureaucrats. We don't think that's the right
15 model, so we are deliberately cutting taxes
16 with a bias towards children. We also will
17 have educational tax credits as the President
18 recommended, along with some other
19 educational incentives to encourage people to
20 go to college and vocational-technical
21 school. We will have a cut in the tax on
22 savings, job creation and investment called
23 capital gains, and we will have zero capital
24 gains if you sell your house, if it's below
25 $500,000 in value, so people will not have to
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1 pay any capital gains if they've owned their
2 own house and sold it. And they won't
3 automatically have to buy another house. And
4 we have a reduction in the death tax on the
5 premise that you should not have to visit the
6 undertaker and the IRS the same week, and
7 that families should not have to sell their
8 business or their farm. We believe it is
9 good for grandparents and parents to save for
10 their children and grandchildren, not
11 something which should be punished. And so
12 these are first steps in the right direction.
13 Now, normally you would
14 think a week in which you were passing a
15 balanced budget, a major tax cut and saving
16 Medicare would be a fairly big week. But I
17 want to suggest to you that there are some
18 underlying lessons to be learned. We believe
19 cutting taxes has a moral purpose. The goal
20 is to leave more money in your pocket so you
21 have more take-home pay and more free time,
22 so you can be more of a parent, more of a
23 citizen, more of a volunteer. And I have no
24 problem looking every American in the eye and
25 saying to them, "If America has been good to
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1 you, you have an obligation to be good to
2 other Americans." And I think that's the
3 real model that works. Not let's have a
4 bureaucrat for every problem, but let's find
5 a way to organize ourselves at the local
6 level. I was with President Jimmy Carter
7 last Monday in Kentucky building houses. I
8 wear a Habitat for Humanity pin and an
9 Earning by Learning pin. And Habitat is a
10 perfect model of what I'm describing. It's
11 what Tocqueville wrote about in Democracy in
12 America. It's what Marvin Olasky wrote about
13 in the Tragedy of American Compassion.
14 Habitat, first of all, screens people for
15 character so they reestablish that character
16 matters. Then they require them to work a
17 hundred hours on somebody else's house to
18 prove their commitment. Then they require
19 them to work three hundred hours building
20 their own house. Then they require them to
21 take a twenty hour course on how to be a
22 homeowner because, by definition, if you've
23 never owned a house, it is a major learning
24 experience. Then they require them to pay
25 for the house. It's a no-interest loan. But
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1 over twenty years, they pay the house off.
2 This is not giving things to people who then
3 can be victims and sit there and pity
4 themselves. This is reaching out a helping
5 hand to a person who has already proven that
6 they will reach out a helping hand. And the
7 result is a totally different attitude and a
8 totally different approach. And I might say,
9 when they have the dedication ceremony with a
10 Bible and a prayer to turn over the key, the
11 family has been transformed. The Habitat
12 motto is to grow the family as well as build
13 the house.
14 It is in that tradition that
15 I came here today to encourage your
16 association to join with us in taking on
17 three great challenges and to open my door
18 and say that sometime this fall, I would like
19 very much to have a meeting where we could
20 follow up on this, if, over the next few
21 days, you decide it's the right direction.
22 But I want to paint a word
23 picture for a minute. Imagine that it is
24 January 1, 2001, the first day of a new
25 millennium, the first day of a new century.
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1 It happens to be a Monday morning. Imagine
2 you woke up that morning, and you lived in a
3 country which was virtually drug free, in
4 which practically every child was learning at
5 their best rate, and in which children are
6 either born into or adopted into families
7 that could care for them. Now, how much
8 healthier would America be if we were
9 virtually drug free, every child was
10 learning, and children routinely were in
11 families that cared for them instead of
12 abused them? And what is it worth to us to
13 make this real?
14 These are not just the words
15 of a politician. I come here tonight after a
16 four-year effort in which we said we would
17 reform welfare, balance the budget, cut
18 taxes, and save Medicare. We're in the habit
19 of keeping our word.
20 This is not about a new
21 government bureaucracy. I'm not here tonight
22 to say to you, "Give us more money in
23 Washington so we can build five more
24 bureaucracies, and we will achieve these."
25 This is about an American crusade. This is a
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1 great country filled with good people. And
2 if we arouse the spirit of the American
3 people, we can solve these. And, by the way,
4 I think all three are related. It's no
5 accident that 70 percent of the children in
6 juvenile delinquency come out of families
7 with no fathers. It's no accident that girls
8 whose mothers grew up without a father have a
9 high percentage likelihood of becoming
10 pregnant. It's no accident that children who
11 don't do well at school tend to end up on the
12 street and then tend to be into drugs or
13 violence or both. So all three come
14 together. If you save the children, the
15 children are saved. If the children are
16 saved, they're not in prison. So they all
17 relate. It's all the same community. It's
18 all the same story.
19 Now, I'm really speaking to
20 you tonight more in the tradition of Wesley
21 and the Methodist movement, of Wilberforce
22 and the anti-slavery movement, of those great
23 awakenings which aroused a country to change
24 itself. And yet, you know in your
25 communities that the potential is there. We
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1 know under Reagan and Bush that drug use
2 dropped dramatically. We know that it began
3 rising in late 1992, I think largely because
4 we failed to educate the next generation.
5 And so we've had what I think will prove in
6 the end to be a temporary increase, but I
7 believe we can win the struggle on drugs.
8 Recently I had the
9 opportunity to meet with General Barry
10 McCaffrey, the so-called drug czar. And I
11 don't mean this in the sense of denigrating
12 him, but the fact is, he's really the senior
13 advisor on drugs. He doesn't control. A
14 czar would control all the assets. He's in
15 fact a senior advisor. He's a brilliant man.
16 He was a great combat general. And I asked
17 him to create a World War II style,
18 unconstrained victory plan. Don't tell me
19 how we can do okay. Don't tell me how we can
20 get fairly far. Tell me what it will take to
21 be drug free by January 1, 2001. And I don't
22 mean utopian, no drugs anywhere in America.
23 But when I was in high school in 1960, drug
24 use was under three percent. There were
25 remarkably few children born outside of
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1 marriage. And there was an expectation you
2 could read the diploma before they gave it to
3 you. So we're talking not about a utopia,
4 but about a country that most of us in this
5 room lived in. And General McCaffrey was
6 very excited about this idea.
7 Now, when I say
8 "unconstrained," I have a portrait on my wall
9 in the office in the Capitol of Dwight David
10 Eisenhower in his general's uniform standing
11 in front of a picture of Omaha Beach.
12 Normandy was the largest, most complex
13 activity every undertaken by human beings,
14 far bigger than going to the moon or anything
15 we've done since, far, far bigger than Desert
16 Storm, and done without computers, done by a
17 country which in 1939 had the 13th largest
18 army in the world, done by a country which
19 said, once its attention was aroused at Pearl
20 Harbor, we would do everything. And what I
21 mean by "doing everything" is simple. The
22 American way of war is to lay out a vision of
23 where we're going, to design strategies to
24 implement that vision, to create projects
25 which are definable, delegate-able
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1 achievements and give them to people with
2 remarkable abandon, and then tactically to
3 work our tails off every single day, cutting
4 through the red tape and getting it done.
5 The American way of war is to focus enormous
6 energy and enormous resources and simply
7 drown the problem in resources. Eisenhower's
8 model at Normandy was simple: we couldn't get
9 knocked off the beach. And so he simply
10 threw everything Britain, America, Canada and
11 our allies could get into one huge effort
12 that was literally physically not stoppable.
13 The Germans could never have stopped it
14 because of the sheer weight.
15 Well, let me suggest to you,
16 we have six areas: educate our children not
17 to use drugs; rehabilitate those who are
18 using drugs; enforce the law locally; seal
19 off the border; interdict and destroy sources
20 before they reach the border; and go after
21 the money sources to bankrupt the drug lords.
22 The American way of war would say, "Fine.
23 Drown all six. Do what it takes. Win."
24 You know, it's fifteen years
25 since Reagan first used the phrase, "The war
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1 on drugs." It's estimated we've spent over
2 $279 billion. But we've repeated Vietnam.
3 We didn't spend $279 billion in a one-time
4 spasm campaign of decisive victory. We
5 fought the same war every year. And I will
6 give you a minor example. And I mean no
7 disrespect by this, but when I learned it, I
8 was startled. I still find it hard to
9 believe it's true, but I checked it again
10 today. The Immigration and Naturalization
11 Service union work rules state that if you
12 believe there's a body in a car, a person in
13 a car, you can open the trunk. If you
14 believe that there are drugs in the car, you
15 have to call over a customs agent. Can you
16 imagine the Normandy invasion if we had said,
17 "Now, if you belong to the Coast Guard and
18 you need a shot fired, call for an Army guy
19 to come over, but don't shoot it yourself
20 because your union work rule is to drive the
21 boat. And if you're an Army guy and the boat
22 is sinking, don't bail because that's not
23 your assignment." In Normandy, the American
24 pragmatism said, "Get it done. Do what makes
25 sense. Cut through the red tape. Cut
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1 through the baloney." And I can assure you
2 if that work rule is not changed with
3 remarkable speed, we will pass a law to
4 change it because we are going to focus every
5 day of every week from now until we win the
6 war on drugs, we're going to change every law
7 we need to change, we're going to reorganize
8 every bureaucracy we need to reorganize,
9 we're going to invest power at whatever
10 levels we need to, because for the greatest
11 country in the world to fail to do this is
12 nuts.
13 And part of what I'm asking
14 from you is both advice on the big picture,
15 take your county, imagine that three years
16 from now or four years from now, we're drug
17 free, every child is learning, and kids are
18 not involved in getting pregnant outside of
19 marriage. How did that happen? What do you
20 need? What can we do to help you? But I'm
21 also going to ask you at a tiny level. We
22 have a program chaired by Dave Camp of
23 Michigan called Corrections Day. If you find
24 some small glitch in the law, some small
25 glitch in a bureaucracy, we need to know
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1 that, too, so we can get it fixed, so we can
2 cut through the baloney and get things to
3 work.
4 But let me give you just one
5 or two examples. Senator Lott and I have
6 introduced a bill which is very
7 straightforward. If you cross the American
8 border carrying a commercial quantity of
9 illegal drugs and it is the first time you
10 have done so, you get life without parole.
11 If, on the other hand, the jury concludes
12 you're a professional narcotics trafficker
13 who has repeatedly crossed the border, you
14 get a mandatory death sentence.
15 Sealing the border is
16 largely a mechanical problem. There are
17 borders sealed all over this planet. The
18 fact is, if Mexico will not seal the border
19 from their side, we have an absolute national
20 security obligation to seal the border from
21 our side. We should say to the Mexicans very
22 straightforward, "If you want to cooperate,
23 we will have much less resistance on the
24 border. If you don't want to cooperate,
25 we're going to do what it takes. If that
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1 means National Guard engineer battalions
2 spend all summer building fences, we will
3 build the fences. If that means backup with
4 helicopters, we'll backup with helicopters."
5 To say that this country cannot protect its
6 border is nonsense. It just takes willpower
7 and direction.
8 In terms of deep
9 intelligence assets, you don't have to have
10 P-3's and AWACS for twenty years. If you
11 have to, you put satellites up. The fact is,
12 again, when we took the Russians seriously,
13 we covered their country with satellites. We
14 could put a geostationary satellite over the
15 Caribbean and have a hundred percent coverage
16 and have infrared look-down as well as radar
17 look-down. And yes, it would be expensive,
18 but it would be cheaper than losing 30,000
19 more kids to heroin and cocaine, and it would
20 be cheaper than losing police.
21 It is vital that we not
22 involve the military directly in the drug
23 trafficking, partly because they'll frankly
24 become corrupted, which has happened in every
25 other country, partly because it goes to the
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1 core of why you are important. Local laws,
2 local arrests, local enforcement; it should
3 be military backup and military intelligence,
4 but enforced at the local level by the
5 appropriate local authorities. But we can
6 build that team so that there is a seamless,
7 real-time transfer of information exactly as
8 needed and real-time backup with assets
9 exactly as needed, with the sheriff taking
10 the local lead while the military provide
11 more than enough backup anytime we have a
12 problem. And the fact is, we have to win
13 this. We cannot afford another generation of
14 decay and another generation of people going
15 to jail. The biggest cost of the last
16 fifteen years is the children who have become
17 drug addicts and the young men who have ended
18 up in prison. When we have as many African-
19 Americans in prison as we have today, it is a
20 national tragedy. If you're going to have a
21 dialogue on race, let's start with the idea
22 of wiping out the drug trade which has
23 destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands
24 of poor African-Americans, and let's save the
25 poorest kids in our community from being
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1 tempted by the drug dealer to earn a lot of
2 money without taxes and without education by
3 doing something totally illegal, which
4 becomes a trap at the end of which they are
5 destroyed and in prison, and their lives are
6 ruined. We owe it to the next generation of
7 those kids to seal off the temptation by
8 ending the flow of drugs and eliminating the
9 potential of them ending up in jail. That
10 has been the real cost of not having won this
11 war in the last decade or so.
12 We are going to more than
13 fully fund the President's request for media.
14 I think as Jim Burke of the Partnership for a
15 Drug-Free America will tell you, effective,
16 targeted media works. It dramatically
17 reduces drug usage. Tragically, where we
18 once had to target eighth graders, we now
19 have to target fifth and sixth graders. But
20 we're going to fund it. But it's not enough
21 by itself. We also need local community drug
22 programs. The sheriff is working with us on
23 one right here. I want to recommend to every
24 one of you, if you don't already have a local
25 coalition, get involved with one. If you
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1 haven't already brought in the Fellowship of
2 Christian Athletes, bring them in. You need
3 to have everything from the local
4 neighborhood, the local football or baseball
5 coach, the local active involvement of your
6 community leaders, up through what appears on
7 television, up through leadership from the
8 President and the other political leadership.
9 That kind of continuous message will
10 dramatically reduce drug use in the next
11 generation. We can do all this.
12 Let me give you one last
13 example of how we can do it. And I was
14 really encouraged by Kay Grainger, who is the
15 wonderful freshman member from Fort Worth.
16 She was the mayor of Fort Worth, and she
17 convinced me to be this daring and this bold.
18 She said she had a YWCA program for 800
19 teenage girls who were at risk: poor, public
20 housing; their mothers had gotten pregnant
21 outside of marriage as teenagers.
22 Statistically, 70 percent of those girls
23 should have gotten pregnant. They taught
24 them ambition and integrity and motivation.
25 They worked very hard to get them to see
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1 beyond themselves, to see that they had a
2 life beyond one night. The result was,
3 instead of having 560 girls get pregnant,
4 they only had two. So they have 558
5 additional girls who are going on to a job,
6 to college, to vo-tech school, to a future
7 where they can earn a living, find somebody
8 decent who will actually stay with them, and
9 have a chance to raise their family. Now,
10 I'm adopted, and both my father and my
11 stepfather were adopted. So I know that life
12 can be complex. My wife has both a brother,
13 who is now deceased, and a sister who are
14 adopted. So we come out of a background of
15 knowing that it's not always some simple,
16 easy, obvious answer. But when you look at a
17 program in one city that saves 558 and only
18 loses two, you have to say to yourself, "We
19 can get this done."
20 And I came here tonight to
21 urge you to take seriously as an association
22 the idea of setting the goals for 2001, the
23 idea of looking in your hearts and looking at
24 your counties, and you tell us from the front
25 line where you live, what do we need to
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1 change, what do we need to get it done? And
2 I will guarantee you that whether you do it
3 directly or through your national association
4 or through Sheriff Hutson, my time and
5 others' time will be available. And I can
6 assure you -- the Attorney General and I were
7 talking earlier tonight -- I talked to
8 General McCaffrey again this afternoon --
9 this is going to be a nonpartisan, total
10 commitment because I believe these are the
11 goals the American people want.
12 And all I ask you in closing
13 is to think about this. I have a nephew
14 named Kevin and three nieces, Lauren, Susan
15 and Emily. They're right before the age when
16 they begin to be vulnerable to drugs. And I
17 asked myself, "What is it worth to have none
18 of them hurt? What's it worth to see them at
19 twenty-five, never having been a drug addict,
20 never having been killed in a drive-by
21 shooting, never having been picked up and
22 gone to jail? What am I willing to do every
23 day, now, to try to change this country
24 enough that they have that kind of future?"
25 And I would just ask you, when you go back
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1 home, look at some child you love, and you
2 ask yourself, what is it going to be worth to
3 you? And if we could get every American to
4 develop that level of intensity, in two or
5 three years, we can break the back of this
6 problem, we can mop it up, and we can live in
7 a dramatically healthier, safer and freer
8 country. Thank you, good luck, and God bless
9 you.
10 (Applause)
11 NSA PRESIDENT, SHERIFF
12 HATHAWAY: Thank you, Speaker Gingrich. As a
13 token of appreciation for you being our
14 keynote speaker tonight, I would like to
15 present you with this plaque which prescribes
16 that you will be an honorary life member of
17 the National Sheriffs' Association. And I
18 present also with it your gold membership
19 card. Thank you very much.
20 MR. GINGRICH: Thank you
21 very much.
22 SHERIFF HATHAWAY: There
23 will be several awards presented tonight, but
24 the first award that I would like to make
25 this evening is the National Sheriffs'
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1 President's Award which was established in
2 1984. This award is made each year to
3 recognize an individual whose efforts have
4 led to greater cooperation between sheriffs,
5 sheriffs' offices, and criminal justice
6 agencies at all levels of government, thereby
7 contributing to the improvement of criminal
8 justice services. To receive the 1997
9 President's Award, I have selected United
10 States Attorney Janet Reno. If you will join
11 me here, I would like to read your bio.
12 (Applause)
13 SHERIFF HATHAWAY: I want to
14 just mention that Janet Reno was sworn in as
15 the nation's 78th Attorney General by
16 President Clinton on March 12, 1993. From
17 1978 to the time of her appointment, Ms. Reno
18 served as the State Attorney for Dade County,
19 Florida. She was initially appointed to the
20 position by the Governor of Florida and was
21 subsequently elected to that office five
22 times. She was born and raised in Miami,
23 Florida, where she attended Dade County
24 public schools. She received her A.B.
25 Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry from
30
1 Cornell University in 1960 and her LL.B.
2 Bachelor of Law degree from Harvard Law
3 School in 1963.
4 I might add that I believe
5 that the National Sheriffs' Association was
6 the first national organization to recommend
7 support for her to be the recipient of the
8 position that she now holds to President
9 Clinton.
10 Going along with that, it
11 gives me great pleasure to present this award
12 to the Attorney General of the United States,
13 Janet Reno. Do you want to say a few words?
14 (Applause)
15 ATTORNEY GENERAL RENO: Mr.
16 Speaker and Mr. President, this is a very,
17 very great honor for me. As I think some of
18 you know, the first real job I ever had was
19 in the Dade County Sheriff's Office. I
20 learned then about the tremendous
21 responsibilities of the sheriff, the
22 beginnings of the laboratory at the time, the
23 jail, the record system, the road patrol, the
24 homicide detective, the juvenile officer.
25 The sheriffs are on the front line across
31
1 America. Now, in these four years, I have
2 learned so much more about what sheriffs deal
3 with in different communities, in rural
4 areas, in more urban areas. You do so much
5 for this nation. And this award means a
6 very, very great deal to me. I will try my
7 very best to justify your confidence.
8 (Applause)
9 SHERIFF HATHAWAY: Speaker
10 Gingrich, if you'll join me at the other
11 podium, then we can make some further awards
12 at this time.
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1 32
2 C E R T I F I C A T E
3 COUNTY OF FULTON)
4 STATE OF GEORGIA)
5 I, Dana Grantham Lennox,
6 Certified Court Reporter and Notary Public in
7 and for the State of Georgia at Large, do
8 hereby certify that this is a true and
9 complete transcription of the above-entitled
10 proceedings and that I am neither of kin nor
11 counsel to any of the parties hereto nor
12 financially interested in the event of these
13 causes.
14 WITNESS my hand and official
15 seals at Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia,
16 this the 23rd day of June, 1997.
17
18
19
20
21 DANA GRANTHAM LENNOX, CVR-CM
22 Certificate No. B-1683
23 (SEALS)
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