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Wall Street Journal Centennial 6/22/89 [1]
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Wall Street Journal Centennial 6/22/89 [1]
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Originally Processed With FOIA(s):
foia Number:
S
FOIA
MARKER
This is not a textual record. This is used as an
administrative marker by the George Bush Presidential
Library Staff.
Record Group/Collection:
George H.W. Bush Presidential Records
Collection/Office of Origin:
Speechwriting, White House Office of
Series:
Speech File Draft Files
Subseries:
Chron File, 1989-1993
OA/ID Number:
13492
Folder ID Number:
13492-008
Folder Title:
Wall Street Journal Centennial 6/22/89 [1]
Stack:
Row:
Section:
Shelf:
Position:
G
25
6
3
5
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: WALL STREET JOURNAL CENTENNIAL
WINTER GARDEN -- NEW YORK
THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1989, 8:30
THANK YOU, WARREN [[PHILLIPS, CHAIRMAN OF DOW
JONES]], FOR THAT WARM INTRODUCTION. I'M DELIGHTED TO
BE HERE TONIGHT. [[THERE'S NOTHING LIKE CELEBRATING
ANOTHER'S HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY TO MAKE A MAN FEEL
YOUNG. ]] [[PAUSE]]
- 2 -
[[TALK ABOUT A BIG EVENT. THIS MORNING I SAW
WILLARD Scott ON TV -- HOLDING UP A BIRTHDAY SNAPSHOT
OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. [[PAUSE]]
SPEAKING OF TELEVISION, BEFORE WE LEFT THE WHITE
HOUSE, I TOLD MY 13-YEAR-OLD GRANDSON I'D BE SPENDING
THE EVENING WITH THE MEDIA ELITE. HE ASKED ME TO GET
AN AUTOGRAPH FROM -- MORTON DOWNEY. ]] [[PAUSE]]
- 3 -
[[SERIOUSLY, THIS IS AN IMPRESSIVE AUDIENCE. BUT
IF ANYTHING CATASTROPHIC HAPPENS TO THE WINTER GARDEN
TONIGHT, THE FORTUNE 500 WILL BE LUCKY TO KEEP THE LIST
IN DOUBLE DIGITS. ]] [[PAUSE]]
100 YEARS AGO -- WHAT WAS IT LIKE? IT WASN'T CARS,
BUT CARRIAGES, THAT CROWDED NEW YORK'S COBBLESTONES ON
JULY 8, 1889. TELEPHONES AND ELECTRIC LIGHTS WERE JUST
CATCHING ON.
- 4 -
IT WAS THE YEAR THE OKLAHOMA TERRITORY OPENED,
JOHNSTOWN FLOODED, AND MARK TWAIN PENNED A CONNECTICUT
YANKEE. ANOTHER YEAR WOULD PASS BEFORE SITTING BULL
WOULD PERISH IN THE SIOUX UPRISINGS.
AND AS THE SUN ROSE OVER MANHATTAN ON THAT HOT JULY
MONDAY, JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER WAS PREPARING TO CELEBRATE
HIS 50TH BIRTHDAY.
- 5 -
UPRIVER, 10,000 BASEBALL FANS FILLED THE NEW POLO
GROUNDS -- WITH ANOTHER 5,000 CROWDING THE NEARBY
BLUFFS -- TO SEE NEW YORK DOWN PITTSBURGH, 7 TO 5.
AND FROM A MODEST OFFICE NOT FAR FROM WHERE WE
STAND, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WAS DISTRIBUTED TO A FEW
HUNDRED READERS FOR TWO CENTS A COPY. AND THE FIRST
FRONT PAGE CONTAINED ANOTHER HISTORIC FIRST -- YOUR
FIRST TYPO. [[PAUSE]]
- 6 -
IT WAS IN A STORY ABOUT JOHN L. SULLIVAN'S VICTORY
IN THE BARE-KNUCKLE, HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP -- WON
AFTER 75 GRUELING ROUNDS. [[IT WAS TO BE THE NATION'S
LAST SUCH DRAWN-OUT, BARE-KNUCKLE FIGHT -- UNTIL THEY
INVENTED "LEVERAGED BUY-OUTS" AND "PRESIDENTIAL
PRIMARIES. "]] [[PAUSE]]
- 7 -
FROM THOSE MODEST BEGINNINGS, THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL EMERGED TO BECOME AMERICA'S LEDGER SHEET --
CHRONICLING WAR AND DEPRESSION AND PROSPERITY, AS WE
GREW FROM A FRONTIER SOCIETY TO THE FRONTIERS OF
SPACE -- THE WORLD'S DOMINANT FINANCIAL POWER.
ARTHUR MILLER OBSERVED THAT "A GOOD NEWSPAPER IS A
NATION TALKING TO ITSELF." THE JOURNAL IS LIKE THAT.
- 8 -
IN A CHANGING WORLD THAT OFFERS 64 CHANNELS OF CABLE
TELEVISION, THE SIX GRAY COLUMNS OF THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL ARE AS FAMILIAR AS THE MORNING COFFEE AT
AMERICA'S BREAKFAST TABLES.
[[ITs PAGES TELL THE STORY OF OUR TIMES. ONLY ONCE
IN 100 YEARS DID IT CARRY A BANNER HEADLINE -- THE DAY
AFTER PEARL HARBOR. [[PAUSE]] SEPTEMBER 7, 1941 --
MAKE THAT DECEMBER 7.11
- 9 -
AFTER THE WAR, THE JOURNAL CAME TO TEXAS THE SAME YEAR
I DID -- 1948 -- WHEN IT BEGAN PRINTING IN DALLAS.
YOUR CHAIRMAN, WARREN PHILLIPS, HAD BEEN HIRED AS A
COPY READER THE YEAR BEFORE -- IN TIME TO SEE THE FIRST
OF THE PAPER'S 13 PULITZERS.
NOT THAT EVERY ARTICLE WAS A PULITZER PRIZE WINNER.
IN 1967, A FRONT PAGE STORY ON CHINA PREDICTED THE
COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT WOULDN'T LAST THE YEAR. [[PAUSE]]
- 10 -
A DECADE LATER -- IN 1979 -- THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL BECAME THE LARGEST CIRCULATION DAILY IN THE
NATION. [[BUT ONE RIVAL COMPLAINED THAT IT WAS ONLY
BECAUSE so MANY SUBSCRIBERS WERE AT AN AGE WHERE THEY
FORGET TO CANCEL. ]] [[PAUSE]]
- 11 -
[[SPEAKING OF AGE AND APROPOS OF NOTHING, AT THE
JOE GIBBS CHARITY DINNER BoB HOPE TOLD OF TWO VERY OLD
MEN SITTING ON A PARK BENCH.
FIRST: "Do YOU KNOW HOW OLD I AM?"
SECOND: "STAND UP. TURN AROUND. DROP YOUR
TROUSERS. DROP YOUR SHORTS. Now PAT YOURSELF ON THE
POSTERIOR. OK, PULL UP YOUR SHORTS -- YOUR TROUSERS --
SIT BACK DOWN ON THE BENCH.
"Your 93 YEARS OLD AND FOUR MONTHS." "
- 12 -
FIRST: "How'd YOU KNOW?"
SECOND: "You TOLD ME YESTERDAY. "I]
[[ANYWAY, ON THE DAY AFTER THE 1980 ELECTION -- THE
LEAD EDITORIAL CELEBRATED "RONALD REAGAN'S MANDATE.'
AND PRESIDENT REAGAN TOLD ME MY DAY WOULD COME. AND IT
DID. THE DAY AFTER I WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT, THE
HEADLINE READ -- AND I KID YOU NOT -- "JIM WRIGHT'S
MANDATE. "]]
- 13 -
[[BUT I TOLD AL HUNT HOW MUCH I ENJOY THE JOURNAL.
HE ASKED IF IT'S THE FRONT PAGE, THE CONSERVATIVE
EDITORIALS, OR THE NEWS COVERAGE. I SAID IT'S BECAUSE
YOU DON'T CARRY DOONESBURY. ]] [[PAUSE]]
[ [AND YOU HAVE A DISTINCTION NO OTHER PAPER IN
AMERICA CAN CLAIM: No MATTER HOW SLOW THE NEWS, YOU
NEVER RAN A PUPPY PHOTO. ]] [[PAUSE]]
ALL KIDDING ASIDE, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL HAS A
PROUD AND ENVIABLE TRADITION.
- 14 -
ALTHOUGH YOU DEAL IN THE WORLD'S MOST PERISHABLE
PRODUCT -- NEWS -- POLLS HAVE REPEATEDLY SHOWN THAT
YOUR PAPER IS ONE OF AMERICA'S MOST TRUSTED
PUBLICATIONS.
A REPUTATION LIKE THAT CAN ONLY BE EARNED BY
ADHERENCE TO YOUR FOUNDERS' PLEDGE TO ALWAYS HAVE THE
NEWS "HONEST, INTELLIGENT AND UNPREJUDICED."
- 15 -
IN MODERN TIMES, YOUR REPORTERS HAVE CARRIED THIS
PLEDGE BEYOND BUSINESS REPORTING, IN COVERAGE OF EVENTS
LIKE THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE -- AND THE RECENT
TRAGEDY IN BEIJING -- CARRYING ON A PROUD AMERICAN
TRADITION OF BRAVING INTIMIDATION TO BRING THE TRUTH
INTO THE LIGHT.
- 16 -
AND MANY AT THE JOURNAL HAVE GONE BEYOND THEIR
PROFESSIONAL OBLIGATIONS -- AND SET EXAMPLES OF ANOTHER
OLD-FASHIONED TRADITION THAT IS VERY MUCH ON MY MIND
TODAY. THE TRADITION OF PUBLIC SERVICE.
THREE YEARS AGO, JOHN FIALKA [[FEE-ALL-KA]] WROTE A
COLUMN-ONE STORY CALLED "SISTERS IN NEED" --
CHRONICLING THE POVERTY THAT HAD BEFALLEN THE GROWING
RANKS OF RETIRED CLERGY IN AMERICA.
- 17 -
IT PROVOKED A SWELL OF READERSHIP RESPONSE. AND so
JOHN AND OTHERS AT THE JOURNAL FOUNDED "SOAR" --
"SUPPORT OUR AGING RELIGIOUS" -- AND RAISED MORE THAN
$1 MILLION TO AID 30 DIFFERENT ORDERS.
A SIMILAR PUBLIC RESPONSE OCCURRED IN 1987 AFTER
THE PUBLICATION OF "URBAN TRAUMA" -- ALEX KOTLOWITZ'S
[[cot-Lo-witz]] MOVING ACCOUNT OF THREE MONTHS IN THE
LIFE OF LAFAYETTE WALTON -- A 12 YEAR-OLD BOY
STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE IN A DANGEROUS CHICAGO PROJECT.
- 18 -
ALEX STAYED IN TOUCH WITH LAFAYETTE. AND LAST
SUMMER THEY PASSED THE HAT AT THE JOURNAL -- AND GAVE
LAFAYETTE AND HIS BROTHER A SEASON OF PEACE IN THE
WOODS OF A WISCONSIN BOYS CAMP.
PERSONAL GESTURES. PROFOUND ACTIONS. SOMETIMES
LIFE-CHANGING IN THEIR EFFECT. THESE ARE THE WORKS OF
MEN AND WOMEN WHO KNOW THAT PROSPERITY WITHOUT PURPOSE
MEANS NOTHING.
- 19 -
EARLIER TODAY, I ANNOUNCED A NEW INITIATIVE --
CALLING ON ALL LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT -- AND BOTH
SECTORS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE -- TO ENLIST IN A NEW
CRUSADE TO BRING NATIONAL SERVICE INTO EVERY CORNER OF
AMERICA.
THAT CRUSADE BEGINS WITH A SIMPLE TRUTH: FROM NOW
ON, ANY DEFINITION OF A SUCCESSFUL LIFE MUST INCLUDE
SERVING OTHERS.
- 20 -
AND I MAY NEVER HAVE AS IMPORTANT AN AUDIENCE TO
CARRY THIS MESSAGE To, AS YOU WHO ARE GATHERED AT THE
WINTER GARDEN TONIGHT. THE AMERICAN BUSINESS COMMUNITY
HAS SUPPORTED CONSERVATIVE POLICIES. WE ARE ENJOYING
PROSPEROUS YEARS. BUT NOT ALL AMERICANS ARE PART OF
THAT PROSPERITY, AND I ASK THAT BUSINESS DO ITS PART.
PROSPERITY CANNOT BE TRULY ENJOYED UNLESS THE POINTS OF
LIGHT ABOUT WHICH I'VE SPOKEN SHINE ON EVERY AMERICAN
IN NEED.
- 21 -
MANY OF YOU ARE CEO's, WITH GALAXIES AT YOUR
COMMAND. AND IT IS MY REQUEST -- I SUBMIT, YOUR
OBLIGATION -- TO DONATE THE SERVICES OF THE TALENTED
AND THE ENTERPRISING WITHIN YOUR RANKS. MANY ARE DOING
THIS NOW. EVERYONE SHOULD DO THIS NOW.
SHORTLY AFTER THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WAS FOUNDED,
100 YEARS AGO, THE CENSUS BUREAU DECLARED THAT THE
"FRONTIER" NO LONGER EXISTED IN AMERICA.
- 22 -
BUT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL HAS PROVEN THEM WRONG -- BY
ADVANCING ACROSS EVER NEW FRONTIERS OF TECHNOLOGY,
GEOGRAPHY, AND INNOVATION. AND I SAID IT A WEEK AGO,
LOOKING EASTWARD ACROSS AMERICA FROM THE FOOT OF THE
GRAND TETONS: THE CHALLENGES AHEAD ARE IN THE
FRONTIERS OF THE MIND -- AND IN THE GOOD THAT HARD WORK
AND THE HUMAN IMAGINATION CAN BRING TO PASS.
- 23 -
NOT LONG AFTER BRINGING HOME THE JOURNAL'S FIRST
PULITZER PRIZE, WILLIAM GRIMES EXPRESSED A SIMPLE
CREED. HE WROTE: "WE BELIEVE IN THE INDIVIDUAL, IN
HIS WISDOM AND HIS DECENCY." " Now THAT IS A WORTHY
TENET -- ONE WE CAN ALL CARRY FORTH FROM TONIGHT'S
CELEBRATION -- AND ON TO A RENEWED COMMITMENT TO
SERVICE TOMORROW.
- 24 -
To ALL AT THE JOURNAL, I WISH YOU CONGRATULATIONS
ON THIS LANDMARK -- AND SUCCESS AS YOUR "SECOND
CENTURY" BEGINS. AND TO ALL HERE TONIGHT -- God BLESS
YOU -- AND GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES.
#
#
#
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: WALL STREET JOURNAL CENTENNIAL
WINTER GARDEN -- NEW YORK
THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1989, 8:30
THANK YOU, WARREN [[PHILLIPS, CHAIRMAN OF DOW
JONES]], FOR THAT WARM INTRODUCTION. I'M DELIGHTED TO
BE HERE TONIGHT. [[THERE'S NOTHING LIKE CELEBRATING
ANOTHER'S HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY TO MAKE A MAN FEEL
YOUNG. ]] [[PAUSE]]
- 2 -
[[TALK ABOUT A BIG EVENT. THIS MORNING I SAW
WILLARD SCOTT ON TV -- HOLDING UP A BIRTHDAY SNAPSHOT
OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. [[PAUSE]]
SPEAKING OF TELEVISION, BEFORE WE LEFT THE WHITE
HOUSE, I TOLD MY 13-YEAR-OLD GRANDSON I'D BE SPENDING
THE EVENING WITH THE MEDIA ELITE. HE ASKED ME TO GET
AN AUTOGRAPH FROM --- MORTON DOWNEY.]]
[[PAUSE]]
- 3 -
[[SERIOUSLY, THIS IS AN IMPRESSIVE AUDIENCE. BUT
IF ANYTHING CATASTROPHIC HAPPENS TO THE WINTER GARDEN
TONIGHT, THE FORTUNE 500 WILL BE LUCKY TO KEEP THE LIST
IN DOUBLE DIGITS. ]] [[PAUSE]]
100 YEARS AGO -- WHAT WAS IT LIKE? IT WASN'T CARS,
BUT CARRIAGES, THAT CROWDED NEW YORK'S COBBLESTONES ON
JULY 8, 1889. TELEPHONES AND ELECTRIC LIGHTS WERE JUST
CATCHING ON.
- 4 -
IT WAS THE YEAR THE OKLAHOMA TERRITORY OPENED,
JOHNSTOWN FLOODED, AND MARK TWAIN PENNED A CONNECTICUT
YANKEE. ANOTHER YEAR WOULD PASS BEFORE SITTING BULL
WOULD PERISH IN THE SIOUX UPRISINGS.
AND AS THE SUN ROSE OVER MANHATTAN ON THAT HOT JULY
MONDAY, JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER WAS PREPARING TO CELEBRATE
HIS 50TH BIRTHDAY.
- 5 -
UPRIVER, 10,000 BASEBALL FANS FILLED THE NEW POLO
GROUNDS -- WITH ANOTHER 5,000 CROWDING THE NEARBY
BLUFFS -- TO SEE NEW YORK DOWN PITTSBURGH, 7 TO 5.
AND FROM A MODEST OFFICE NOT FAR FROM WHERE WE
STAND, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WAS DISTRIBUTED TO A FEW
HUNDRED READERS FOR TWO CENTS A COPY. AND THE FIRST
FRONT PAGE CONTAINED ANOTHER HISTORIC FIRST -- YOUR
FIRST TYPO. [[PAUSE]]
- 6 -
IT WAS IN A STORY ABOUT JOHN L. SULLIVAN'S VICTORY
IN THE BARE-KNUCKLE, HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP -- WON
AFTER 75 GRUELING ROUNDS. [[IT WAS TO BE THE NATION'S
LAST SUCH DRAWN-OUT, BARE-KNUCKLE FIGHT -- UNTIL THEY
INVENTED "LEVERAGED BUY-OUTS" AND "PRESIDENTIAL
PRIMARIES. "]] [[PAUSE]]
- 7 -
FROM THOSE MODEST BEGINNINGS, THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL EMERGED TO BECOME AMERICA'S LEDGER SHEET --
CHRONICLING WAR AND DEPRESSION AND PROSPERITY, AS WE
GREW FROM A FRONTIER SOCIETY TO THE FRONTIERS OF
SPACE -- THE WORLD'S DOMINANT FINANCIAL POWER.
ARTHUR MILLER OBSERVED THAT "A GOOD NEWSPAPER IS A
NATION TALKING TO ITSELF." THE JOURNAL IS LIKE THAT.
- 8 -
IN A CHANGING WORLD THAT OFFERS 64 CHANNELS OF CABLE
TELEVISION, THE SIX GRAY COLUMNS OF THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL ARE AS FAMILIAR AS THE MORNING COFFEE AT
AMERICA'S BREAKFAST TABLES.
[[ITs PAGES TELL THE STORY OF OUR TIMES. ONLY ONCE
IN 100 YEARS DID IT CARRY A BANNER HEADLINE -- THE DAY
AFTER PEARL HARBOR. [[PAUSE]] SEPTEMBER 7, 1941 --
MAKE THAT DECEMBER 7.11
- 9 -
AFTER THE WAR, THE JOURNAL CAME TO TEXAS THE SAME YEAR
I DID -- 1948 -- WHEN IT BEGAN PRINTING IN DALLAS.
YOUR CHAIRMAN, WARREN PHILLIPS, HAD BEEN HIRED AS A
COPY READER THE YEAR BEFORE -- IN TIME TO SEE THE FIRST
OF THE PAPER'S 13 PULITZERS.
NOT THAT EVERY ARTICLE WAS A PULITZER PRIZE WINNER.
IN 1967, A FRONT PAGE STORY ON CHINA PREDICTED THE
COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT WOULDN'T LAST THE YEAR. [[PAUSE]]
- 10 -
A DECADE LATER -- IN 1979 -- THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL BECAME THE LARGEST CIRCULATION DAILY IN THE
NATION. [[BUT ONE RIVAL COMPLAINED THAT IT WAS ONLY
BECAUSE so MANY SUBSCRIBERS WERE AT AN AGE WHERE THEY
FORGET TO CANCEL. ]] [[PAUSE]]
- 11 -
[[SPEAKING OF AGE AND APROPOS OF NOTHING, AT THE
JOE GIBBS CHARITY DINNER BoB HOPE TOLD OF TWO VERY OLD
MEN SITTING ON A PARK BENCH.
FIRST: "Do YOU KNOW HOW OLD I AM?"
SECOND: "STAND UP. TURN AROUND. DROP YOUR
TROUSERS. DROP YOUR SHORTS. Now PAT YOURSELF ON THE
POSTERIOR. OK, PULL UP YOUR SHORTS -- YOUR TROUSERS --
SIT BACK DOWN ON THE BENCH.
"Your 93 YEARS OLD AND FOUR MONTHS."
- 12 -
FIRST: "How'd YOU KNOW?"
SECOND: "You TOLD ME YESTERDAY. "]]
[[ANYWAY, ON THE DAY AFTER THE 1980 ELECTION -- THE
LEAD EDITORIAL CELEBRATED "RONALD REAGAN'S MANDATE.'
AND PRESIDENT REAGAN TOLD ME MY DAY WOULD COME. AND IT
DID. THE DAY AFTER I WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT, THE
HEADLINE READ -- AND I KID YOU NOT -- "JIM WRIGHT'S
MANDATE. "]]
- 13 -
[[BUT I TOLD AL HUNT HOW MUCH I ENJOY THE JOURNAL.
HE ASKED IF IT'S THE FRONT PAGE, THE CONSERVATIVE
EDITORIALS, OR THE NEWS COVERAGE. I SAID IT'S BECAUSE
YOU DON'T CARRY DOONESBURY.]] [[PAUSE]]
[[AND YOU HAVE A DISTINCTION NO OTHER PAPER IN
AMERICA CAN CLAIM: No MATTER HOW SLOW THE NEWS, YOU
NEVER RAN A PUPPY PHOTO. ]] [[PAUSE]]
ALL KIDDING ASIDE, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL HAS A
PROUD AND ENVIABLE TRADITION.
- 14 -
ALTHOUGH YOU DEAL IN THE WORLD'S MOST PERISHABLE
PRODUCT -- NEWS -- POLLS HAVE REPEATEDLY SHOWN THAT
YOUR PAPER IS ONE OF AMERICA'S MOST TRUSTED
PUBLICATIONS.
A REPUTATION LIKE THAT CAN ONLY BE EARNED BY
ADHERENCE TO YOUR FOUNDERS' PLEDGE TO ALWAYS HAVE THE
NEWS "HONEST, INTELLIGENT AND UNPREJUDICED."
- 15 -
IN MODERN TIMES, YOUR REPORTERS HAVE CARRIED THIS
PLEDGE BEYOND BUSINESS REPORTING, IN COVERAGE OF EVENTS
LIKE THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE -- AND THE RECENT
TRAGEDY IN BEIJING -- CARRYING ON A PROUD AMERICAN
TRADITION OF BRAVING INTIMIDATION TO BRING THE TRUTH
INTO THE LIGHT.
- 16 -
AND MANY AT THE JOURNAL HAVE GONE BEYOND THEIR
PROFESSIONAL OBLIGATIONS -- AND SET EXAMPLES OF ANOTHER
OLD-FASHIONED TRADITION THAT IS VERY MUCH ON MY MIND
TODAY. THE TRADITION OF PUBLIC SERVICE.
THREE YEARS AGO, JOHN FIALKA [[FEE-ALL-KA]] WROTE A
COLUMN-ONE STORY CALLED "SISTERS IN NEED" --
CHRONICLING THE POVERTY THAT HAD BEFALLEN THE GROWING
RANKS OF RETIRED CLERGY IN AMERICA.
- 17 -
IT PROVOKED A SWELL OF READERSHIP RESPONSE. AND so
JOHN AND OTHERS AT THE JOURNAL FOUNDED "SOAR" --
"SUPPORT OUR AGING RELIGIOUS" -- AND RAISED MORE THAN
$1 MILLION TO AID 30 DIFFERENT ORDERS.
A SIMILAR PUBLIC RESPONSE OCCURRED IN 1987 AFTER
THE PUBLICATION OF "URBAN TRAUMA" -- ALEX KOTLOWITZ'S
[[COT-LO-WITZ]] MOVING ACCOUNT OF THREE MONTHS IN THE
LIFE OF LAFAYETTE WALTON -- A 12 YEAR-OLD BOY
STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE IN A DANGEROUS CHICAGO PROJECT.
- 18 -
ALEX STAYED IN TOUCH WITH LAFAYETTE. AND LAST
SUMMER THEY PASSED THE HAT AT THE JOURNAL -- AND GAVE
LAFAYETTE AND HIS BROTHER A SEASON OF PEACE IN THE
WOODS OF A WISCONSIN BOYS CAMP.
PERSONAL GESTURES. PROFOUND ACTIONS. SOMETIMES
LIFE-CHANGING IN THEIR EFFECT. THESE ARE THE WORKS OF
MEN AND WOMEN WHO KNOW THAT PROSPERITY WITHOUT PURPOSE
MEANS NOTHING.
- 19 -
EARLIER TODAY, I ANNOUNCED A NEW INITIATIVE --
CALLING ON ALL LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT -- AND BOTH
SECTORS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE -- TO ENLIST IN A NEW
CRUSADE TO BRING NATIONAL SERVICE INTO EVERY CORNER OF
AMERICA.
THAT CRUSADE BEGINS WITH A SIMPLE TRUTH: FROM NOW
ON, ANY DEFINITION OF A SUCCESSFUL LIFE MUST INCLUDE
SERVING OTHERS.
- 20 -
AND I MAY NEVER HAVE AS IMPORTANT AN AUDIENCE TO
CARRY THIS MESSAGE To, AS YOU WHO ARE GATHERED AT THE
WINTER GARDEN TONIGHT. THE AMERICAN BUSINESS COMMUNITY
HAS SUPPORTED CONSERVATIVE POLICIES. WE ARE ENJOYING
PROSPEROUS YEARS. BUT NOT ALL AMERICANS ARE PART OF
THAT PROSPERITY, AND I ASK THAT BUSINESS DO ITS PART.
PROSPERITY CANNOT BE TRULY ENJOYED UNLESS THE POINTS OF
LIGHT ABOUT WHICH I'VE SPOKEN SHINE ON EVERY AMERICAN
IN NEED.
- 21 -
MANY OF YOU ARE CEO's, WITH GALAXIES AT YOUR
COMMAND. AND IT IS MY REQUEST -- I SUBMIT, YOUR
OBLIGATION -- TO DONATE THE SERVICES OF THE TALENTED
AND THE ENTERPRISING WITHIN YOUR RANKS. MANY ARE DOING
THIS NOW. EVERYONE SHOULD DO THIS NOW.
SHORTLY AFTER THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WAS FOUNDED,
100 YEARS AGO, THE CENSUS BUREAU DECLARED THAT THE
"FRONTIER" NO LONGER EXISTED IN AMERICA.
- 22 -
BUT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL HAS PROVEN THEM WRONG -- BY
ADVANCING ACROSS EVER NEW FRONTIERS OF TECHNOLOGY,
GEOGRAPHY, AND INNOVATION. AND I SAID IT A WEEK AGO,
LOOKING EASTWARD ACROSS AMERICA FROM THE FOOT OF THE
GRAND TETONS: THE CHALLENGES AHEAD ARE IN THE
FRONTIERS OF THE MIND -- AND IN THE GOOD THAT HARD WORK
AND THE HUMAN IMAGINATION CAN BRING TO PASS.
- 23 -
NOT LONG AFTER BRINGING HOME THE JOURNAL'S FIRST
PULITZER PRIZE, WILLIAM GRIMES EXPRESSED A SIMPLE
CREED. HE WROTE: "WE BELIEVE IN THE INDIVIDUAL, IN
HIS WISDOM AND HIS DECENCY." Now THAT IS A WORTHY
TENET -- ONE WE CAN ALL CARRY FORTH FROM TONIGHT'S
CELEBRATION -- AND ON TO A RENEWED COMMITMENT TO
SERVICE TOMORROW.
- 24 -
To ALL AT THE JOURNAL, I WISH YOU CONGRATULATIONS
ON THIS LANDMARK -- AND SUCCESS AS YOUR "SECOND
CENTURY" BEGINS. AND TO ALL HERE TONIGHT -- GOD BLESS
YOU -- AND GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES.
# # #
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
DATE:
FROM THE PRESIDENT
To:
Jim C
I have knoched out
several personal refereces.
I included a Bob
Hope john
Do not include
Johns in press text.
Good length
4 speech for
the occassons
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
1239
June 20, 1989
INFORMATION
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT
THROUGH:
CHRISS WINSTON
cu
FROM:
EDWARD E. McNALLY grui
SUBJECT:
KEYNOTE ADDRESS FOR THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (BLACK TIE)
I. SUMMARY
At approximately 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 22, 1989, you
are scheduled to arrive at the Winter Garden in lower Manhattan
to give the keynote address for The Wall Street Journal's 100th
Anniversary Gala.
II. DISCUSSION
Attached for your consideration and review are draft remarks
for the 15-minute address expected by The Wall Street Journal for
their Gala in New York. Your speech -- the only one of the night
-- will be before dinner, and will be on teleprompter.
The audience -- a black tie group of approximately 600 -- is
expected to include some of the leading members of America's
corporate, advertising, and news media communities. *
In keeping with the guidance received from Marlin Fitzwater,
the press office, Al Hunt and others at the Journal, the remarks
are essentially light, humorous, and personal -- focusing on the
paper's history and including one message -- an echo of the day's
earlier call for corporate involvement in national service.
*
E.g., including: William Agee, Steven Jobs, Bill Moyers,
Joseph Flom, Richard Holbrooke, Woody Allen, Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger, Rupert Murdoch, Roone Arledge, Bryant Gumble, David
Rockefeller, Peter Ueberroth, Norman Lear, Pete Teeley, Malcolm
Forbes, Mort Zuckerman, Ben Bradlee, Kate Graham, Don Hewitt,
Mike Wallace, Bill Buckley, Robert Bork, Carl Icahn, and Armand
Hammer.
THE PRESIDENT HAS SEEN
6/21/89
(McNally/Simon)
June 20, 1989, 7:00 p.m.
Draft Four (WSJ)
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: WALL STREET JOURNAL CENTENNIAL
WINTER GARDEN -- NEW YORK CITY
THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1989, 8:30 P.M.
Thank you, Warren [PHILLIPS, CHAIRMAN OF DOW JONES] for
that warm introduction. I'm delighted to be here tonight.
There's nothing like celebrating another's hundredth birthday to
make a man feel young.
Talk about a big event. This morning I saw Willard Scott on
TV -- holding up a birthday snapshot of the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking of television, before we left the White House, I
Bear
told my grandkids I'd be spending the evening with the media
He asked me to get an autograph from - - -
elite. They want to know which one of you is Morton Downey.
1
Seriously, this is an impressive audience. But if anything
catastrophic happens to the Winter Garden tonight, the Fortune
500 will be lucky to keep the list in double digits. [[PAUSE]]
Forgive RIE if I seem a bit distracted. I just heard that,
during the cocktails, Donald Trump bought Air Force One.
Gee -- I wonder what he's going to name it? [PAUSE]]
Don is the only quy in America whose car has a dashboard
new
statue of Frank Lorenzo. [[PAUSE]]
100 years ago - what wasit liho?
lead
of
course, It wasn't cars, but carriages, that crowded New
York's cobblestones on July 8, 1889. Telephones and electric
lights were just catching on. It was the year the Oklahoma
Territory opened, Johnstown flooded, and Mark Twain penned A
2
Connecticut Yankee. Another year would pass before Sitting Bull
would perish in the Sioux uprisings.
And as the sun rose over Manhattan on that hot July Monday,
John D. Rockefeller was preparing to celebrate his 50th birthday.
Upriver, 10,000 baseball fans filled the new Polo Grounds -- with
another 5,000 crowding the nearby bluffs -- to see New York down
Pittsburgh, 7 to 5.
And from a modest office not far from where we stand, the
Wall Street Journal was distributed to a few hundred readers for
two cents a copy. And the first front page contained another
historic first -- your first typo. [[PAUSE]]
It was in a story about John L. Sullivan's victory in the
bare-knuckle, heavyweight championship -- won after 75 grueling
rounds. It was to be the nation's last such drawn-out, bare-
knuckle fight -- until they invented leveraged buy-outs.
"ghol"
OA
"presidential primaries"
From those modest beginnings, the Wall Street Journal
emerged to become America's ledger sheet -- chronicling war and
depression and prosperity, as we grew from a frontier society to
the frontiers of space -- the world's dominant financial power.
Arthur Miller observed that "a good newspaper is a nation
talking to itself." The Journal is like that. In a changing
world that offers 64 channels of cable television, the six gray
columns of the Wall Street Journal are as familiar as the morning
coffee at America's breakfast tables.
3
Its pages tell the story of our times. Only once in 100
years did it carry a banner headline -- the day after Pearl
Harbor. [PAUSE] I must have missed that Make one.
sept 71941 -
that
December
7
After the War, the Journal came to Texas the same year I did
-- 1948 -- when it began printing in Dallas. Your chairman,
Warren Phillips, had been hired as a copy reader the year before
-- in time to see the first of the paper's 13 Pulitzers.
Not that every article was a Pulitzer Prize winner. In
1967, a front page story on China predicted the communist
government wouldn't last the year. [ [PAUSE] And On Pearl
Harbor I was only off by three months.
A decade later -- in 1979 -- the Wall Street Journal became
the largest circulation daily in the nation. But one rival
complained that it was only because so many subscribers were at
an age where they forget to cancel.
insert
That same year, reporter Jim Perry celebrated the paper's
"A"
90th birthday by exhuming a family nickname that had béen dead
for 30 years. [[PAUSE]] "Poppy" Bush. [ PAUSE]] Thanks Jim.
A
Anyway
-- on the day after the 1980 election -- the
lead editorial celebrated "Ronald Reagan's mandate." And
President Reagan told me my day would come. And it did. The day
after I was elected President, the headline read -- and I kid you
not -- "Jim Wright's Mandate."
At least now that I'm President, the Journal doesn't call me
"Poppy " [[PAUSE]] Now they call me "George Herbert Walker Bush."
But I told Al Hunt how much I enjoy the Journal. He asked
4
if it's the front page, the conservative editorials, or the news
coverage. I said it's because you don't carry Doonesbury.
And you have a distinction no other paper in America can
claim: No matter how slow the news, you never ran a puppy photo.
All kidding aside, the Wall Street Journal has a proud and
enviable tradition. Although you deal in the world's most
perishable product -- news -- polls have repeatedly shown that
your paper is one of America's most trusted publications.
A reputation like that can only be earned by adherence to
your founders' pledge to always have the news "honest,
intelligent and unprejudiced." In modern times, your reporters
have carried this pledge beyond business reporting, in coverage
of events like the civil rights struggle -- and the recent
tragedy in Beijing -- carrying on a proud American tradition of
braving intimidation to bring the truth into the light.
And many at the Journal have gone beyond their professional
obligations -- and set examples of another old-fashioned
tradition that is very much on my mind today. The tradition of
public service.
Three years ago, John Fialka wrote a Column-One story called
"Sisters In Need" -- chronicling the poverty that had befallen
the growing ranks of retired clergy in America. It provoked a
swell of readership response. And so John and others at the
Journal founded "SOAR" -- "Support Our Aging Religious" -- and
raised more than $1 million to aid 30 different orders.
5
A similar public response occurred in 1987 after the
publication of "Urban Trauma" -- Alex Kotlowitz's moving account
of three months in the life of Lafayette Walton -- a 12 year-old
boy struggling to survive in a dangerous Chicago project.
Alex stayed in touch with Lafayette. And last summer they
passed the hat at the Journal -- and gave Lafayette and his
brother a season of peace in the woods of a Wisconsin boys camp.
Personal gestures. Profound actions. Sometimes life-
changing in their effect. These are the works of men and women
who know that prosperity without purpose means nothing.
Earlier today, I announced a new initiative -- calling on
all levels of government -- and both sectors, public and private
-- to enlist in a new crusade to bring national service into
every corner of America.
That crusade begins with a simple truth: From now on, the
definition of a successful life must include service to others.
And I may never have as important an audience to carry this
message to, as you who are gathered at the Winter Garden tonight.
The American business community has supported conservative
policies. We are enjoying prosperous years. But not all
Americans are part of that prosperity, and I ask that business do
its part. Prosperity cannot be truly enjoyed unless the points
of light about which I've spoken shine on every American in need.
Many of you are CEO's, with galaxies at your command. And
it is my request -- I submit, your obligation -- to donate the
services of the talented and the enterprising within your ranks.
May are doing this now. Everyone should do this now
6
Shortly after the Wall Street Journal was founded, 100 years
ago, the Census Bureau declared that the "frontier" no longer
existed in America. But the Wall Street Journal has proven them
wrong -- by advancing across ever new frontiers of technology,
geography, and innovation. And I said it a week ago, looking
eastward across America from the foot of the Grand Tetons: The
challenges ahead are in the frontiers of the mind -- and of the
good that hard work and the human imagination can bring to pass.
Not long after bringing home the Journal's first Pulitzer
Prize, William Grimes expressed a simple creed. He wrote: "We
believe in the individual, in his wisdom and his decency." Now
that is a worthy tenet -- one we can all carry forth from
tonight's celebration -- and on to a renewed commitment to
service tomorrow.
To all at the Journal, I wish you congratulations on this
landmark -- and success as your "Second Century" begins. And to
all here tonight -- God bless you -- and God bless the United
States.
#
#
#
INsert
speaking of which h and
R apropos of nothing RB at the
Joe Gibbs charity duin Bob
Hope told of 2 very old men
sitting On the pack bench.
First Do you know how
old I ann?"
3tand up" Furnoval
second ** Drop your
trousers, drop your shouts" NOW
pat yourself on the postrian"
OK pull up your shorts - your
trousurs - the sit
bad dom on the bruch
You're 93 years +
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
June 21, 1989
Please note that this speec
4 wonth old
Am
MR. PRESIDENT:
is on teleprompter.
Jim Cicconi
How'd you know?
m
You told we
yesturday.
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
June 20, 1989
INFORMATION
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT
THROUGH:
CHRISS WINSTON
cu)
FROM:
EDWARD E. McNALLY grui
SUBJECT:
KEYNOTE ADDRESS FOR THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (BLACK TIE)
I. SUMMARY
At approximately 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 22, 1989, you
are scheduled to arrive at the Winter Garden in lower Manhattan
to give the keynote address for The Wall Street Journal's 100th
Anniversary Gala.
II. DISCUSSION
Attached for your consideration and review are draft remarks
for the 15-minute address expected by The Wall Street Journal for
their Gala in New York. Your speech -- the only one of the night
-- will be before dinner, and will be on teleprompter.
The audience -- a black tie group of approximately 600 -- is
expected to include some of the leading members of America's
corporate, advertising, and news media communities. *
In keeping with the guidance received from Marlin Fitzwater,
the press office, Al Hunt and others at the Journal, the remarks
are essentially light, humorous, and personal -- focusing on the
paper's history and including one message -- an echo of the day's
earlier call for corporate involvement in national service.
*
E.g., including: William Agee, Steven Jobs, Bill Moyers,
Joseph Flom, Richard Holbrooke, Woody Allen, Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger, Rupert Murdoch, Roone Arledge, Bryant Gumble, David
Rockefeller, Peter Ueberroth, Norman Lear, Pete Teeley, Malcolm
Forbes, Mort Zuckerman, Ben Bradlee, Kate Graham, Don Hewitt,
Mike Wallace, Bill Buckley, Robert Bork, Carl Icahn, and Armand
Hammer.
(McNally/Simon)
June 20, 1989, 7:00 p.m.
Draft Four (WSJ)
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: WALL STREET JOURNAL CENTENNIAL
WINTER GARDEN -- NEW YORK CITY
THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1989, 8:30 P.M.
Thank you, Warren [ [PHILLIPS, CHAIRMAN OF DOW JONES]], for
that warm introduction. I'm delighted to be here tonight.
There's nothing like celebrating another's hundredth birthday to
make a man feel young.
Talk about a big event. This morning I saw Willard Scott on
TV -- holding up a birthday snapshot of the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking of television, before we left the White House, I
told my grandkids I'd be spending the evening with the media
elite. They want to know which one of you is Morton Downey.
Seriously, this is an impressive audience. But if anything
catastrophic happens to the Winter Garden tonight, the Fortune
500 will be lucky to keep the list in double digits. [[PAUSE]]
Forgive me if = seem a bit distracted. I just heard that,
during the cocktails, Donald Trump bought Air Force One.
Gee -- I wonder what he's going to name it? [ [PAUSE]
Don is the only guy in America whose car has a dashboard
statue of Frank Lorenzo. [[PAUSE]]
of course, it wasn't cars, but carriages, that crowded New
York's cobblestones on July 8, 1889. Telephones and electric
lights were just catching on. It was the year the Oklahoma
Territory opened, Johnstown flooded, and Mark Twain penned A
2
Connecticut Yankee. Another year would pass before Sitting Bull
would perish in the Sioux uprisings.
And as the sun rose over Manhattan on that hot July Monday,
John D. Rockefeller was preparing to celebrate his 50th birthday.
Upriver, 10,000 baseball fans filled the new Polo Grounds -- with
another 5,000 crowding the nearby bluffs -- to see New York down
Pittsburgh, 7 to 5.
And from a modest office not far from where we stand, the
Wall Street Journal was distributed to a few hundred readers for
two cents a copy. And the first front page contained another
historic first -- your first typo. [[PAUSE]]
It was in a story about John L. Sullivan's victory in the
bare-knuckle, heavyweight championship -- won after 75 grueling
rounds. It was to be the nation's last such drawn-out, bare-
knuckle fight -- until they invented leveraged buy-outs.
[[OR: "presidential primaries"]
From those modest beginnings, the Wall Street Journal
emerged to become America's ledger sheet -- chronicling war and
depression and prosperity, as we grew from a frontier society to
the frontiers of space -- the world's dominant financial power.
Arthur Miller observed that "a good newspaper is a nation
talking to itself." The Journal is like that. In a changing
world that offers 64 channels of cable television, the six gray
columns of the Wall Street Journal are as familiar as the morning
coffee at America's breakfast tables.
3
Its pages tell the story of our times. Only once in 100
years did it carry a banner headline -- the day after Pearl
Harbor. [ [PAUSE] I must have missed that one.
After the War, the Journal came to Texas the same year I did
-- 1948 -- when it began printing in Dallas. Your chairman,
Warren Phillips, had been hired as a copy reader the year before
-- in time to see the first of the paper's 13 Pulitzers.
Not that every article was a Pulitzer Prize winner. In
1967, a front page story on China predicted the communist
government wouldn't last the year. [[PAUSE] ] And on Pearl
Harbor I was only off by three months.
A decade later -- in 1979 -- the Wall Street Journal became
the largest circulation daily in the nation. But one rival
complained that it was only because so many subscribers were at
an age where they forget to cancel.
That same year, reporter Jim Perry celebrated the paper's
90th birthday by exhuming a family nickname that had been dead
for 30 years. [ [PAUSE] "Poppy" Bush. [[PAUSE]] Thanks, Jim.
A year later -- on the day after the 1980 election -- the
lead editorial celebrated "Renald Reagan's mandate." And
President Reagan told me my day would come. And it did. The day
after I was elected President, the headline read -- and I kid you
not -- "Jim Wright's Mandate."
At least now that I'm President, the Journal doesn't call me
"Poppy." [[PAUSE]] Now they call me "George Herbert Walker Bush." "
But I told Al Hunt how much I enjoy the Journal. He asked
4
if it's the front page, the conservative editorials, or the news
coverage. I said it's because you don't carry Doonesbury.
And you have a distinction no other paper in America can
claim: No matter how slow the news, you never ran a puppy photo.
All kidding aside, the Wall Street Journal has a proud and
enviable tradition. Although you deal in the world's most
perishable product -- news -- polls have repeatedly shown that
your paper is one of America's most trusted publications.
A reputation like that can only be earned by adherence to
your founders' pledge to always have the news "honest,
intelligent and unprejudiced." In modern times, your reporters
have carried this pledge beyond business reporting, in coverage
of events like the civil rights struggle -- and the recent
massacre in Beijing -- carrying on a proud American tradition of
braving intimidation to bring the truth into the light.
And many at the Journal have gone beyond their professional
obligations -- and set examples of another old-fashioned
tradition that is very much on my mind today. The tradition of
public service.
Three years ago, John Fialka wrote a Column-One story called
"Sisters In Need" -- chronicling the poverty that had befallen
the growing ranks of retired clergy in America. It provoked a
swell of readership response. And so John and others at the
Journal founded "SOAR" -- "Support Our Aging Religious" -- and
raised more than $1 million to aid 30 different orders.
5
A similar public response occurred in 1987 after the
publication of "Urban Trauma" -- Alex Kotlowitz's moving account
of three months in the life of Lafayette Walton -- a 12 year-old
boy struggling to survive in a dangerous Chicago project.
Alex stayed in touch with Lafayette. And last summer they
passed the hat at the Journal -- and gave Lafayette and his
brother a season of peace in the woods of a Wisconsin boys camp.
Personal gestures. Profound actions. Sometimes life-
changing in their effect. These are the works of men and women
who know that prosperity without purpose means nothing.
Earlier today, I announced a new initiative -- calling on
all levels of government -- and both sectors, public and private
-- to enlist in a new crusade to bring national service into
every corner of America.
That crusade begins with a simple truth: From now on, the
definition of a successful life must include service to others.
And I may never have as important an audience to carry this
message to, as you who are gathered at the Winter Garden tonight.
The American business community has supported conservative
policies. We are enjoying prosperous years. But not all
Americans are part of that prosperity, and I ask that business do
its part. Prosperity cannot be truly enjoyed unless the points
of light about which I've spoken shine on every American in need.
Many of you are CEO's, with galaxies at your command. And
it is my request -- I submit, your obligation -- to donate the
services of the talented and the enterprising within your ranks.
6
Shortly after the Wall Street Journal was founded, 100 years
ago, the Census Bureau declared that the "frontier" no longer
existed in America. But the Wall Street Journal has proven them
wrong -- by advancing across ever new frontiers of technology,
geography, and innovation. And I said it a week ago, looking
eastward across America from the foot of the Grand Tetons: The
challenges ahead are in the frontiers of the mind -- and of the
good that hard work and the human imagination can bring to pass.
Not long after bringing home the Journal's first Pulitzer
Prize, William Grimes expressed a simple creed. He wrote: "We
believe in the individual, in his wisdom and his decency." Now
that is a worthy tenet -- one we can all carry forth from
tonight's celebration -- and on to a renewed commitment to
service tomorrow.
To all at the Journal, I wish you congratulations on this
landmark -- and success as your "Second Century" begins. And to
all here tonight -- God bless you -- and God bless the United
States.
#
#
#
(McNally/Simon)
June 16, 1989, 1:00 p.m.
Draft Three (WSJ)
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: WALL STREET JOURNAL CENTENNIAL
WINTER GARDEN -- NEW YORK CITY
THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1989, 8:30 P.M.
Thank you,
, for that warm introduction. I'm
delighted to be here tonight. There's nothing like celebrating
another's hundredth birthday to make a man feel young.
Talk about a big event. This morning I saw Willard Scott on
TV -- holding up a birthday snapshot of the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking of television, before we left the White House, I
told my grandkids I'd be spending the evening with the media
elite. They want to know which one of you is Morton Downey.
Seriously, this is an impressive audience. But if anything
catastrophic happens to the Winter Garden tonight, the Fortune
500 will be lucky to keep the list in double digits. [[PAUSE] ]
Forgive me if I seem a bit distracted. I just heard that,
during the cocktails, Donald Trump bought Air Force One.
Gee -- I wonder what he's going to name it? [ [PAUSE] ]
Don is the only guy in America whose car has a dashboard
statue of Frank Lorenzo. [PAUSE] ]
of course, it wasn't cars, but carriages, that crowded New
York's cobblestones on July 8, 1889. Telephones and electric
lights were just catching on. It was the year the Oklahoma
Territory opened, Johnstown flooded, and Mark Twain penned A
Connecticut Yankee. Another year would pass before Sitting Bull
would perish in the Sioux uprisings.
2
And as the sun rose over Manhattan on that hot July Monday,
John D. Rockefeller was preparing to celebrate his 50th birthday.
Upriver, 10,000 baseball fans filled the new Polo Grounds -- with
another 5,000 on the nearby bluffs -- to see New York down
Pittsburgh, 7 to 5.
And from a modest office not far from where we stand, the
Wall Street Journal was distributed to a few hundred readers for
two cents a copy. And the first front page contained another
historic first -- your first typo. [[PAUSE] ]
It was in a story about John L. Sullivan's victory in the
bare-knuckle, heavyweight championship -- won after 75 grueling
rounds. It was to be the nation's last such drawn-out, bare-
knuckle fight -- until they invented leveraged buy-outs.
[[OR: "presidential primaries"]
From those modest beginnings, the Wall Street Journal
emerged to become America's ledger sheet -- chronicling war and
depression and prosperity, as we grew from a frontier society to
the frontiers of space -- the world's dominant financial power.
Arthur Miller observed that "a good newspaper is a nation
talking to itself." The Journal is like that. In a changing
world that offers 64 channels of cable television, the six gray
columns of the Wall Street Journal are as familiar as the morning
coffee at America's breakfast tables.
Its pages tell the story of our times. Only once in 100
years did it carry a banner headline -- the day after Pearl
Harbor. [ [PAUSE] I must have missed that one.
3
After the War, the Journal came to Texas the same year I did
-- 1948 -- when it began printing in Dallas. Your chairman,
Warren Phillips, had been hired as a copy reader the year before
-- in time to see the first of the paper's 13 Pulitzers.
Not that every article was Pulitzer Prize material. In
1967, a front page story on China predicted the communist
government wouldn't last the year. [[PAUSE]] And on Pearl
Harbor I was only off by three months.
A decade later -- in 1979 -- the Wall Street Journal became
the largest circulation daily in the nation. But one rival
complained that it was only because so many subscribers were at
an age where they forget to cancel.
That same year, reporter Jim Perry celebrated the paper's
90th birthday by exhuming a high school nickname that had been
dead for 30 years. [ [PAUSE] ] "Poppy" Bush. Thanks, Jim.
A year later -- on the day after the 1980 election -- the
lead editorial celebrated "Ronald Reagan's mandate." And
President Reagan told me my day would come. And it did. The day
after I was elected President, the headline read -- and I kid you
not -- "Jim Wright's Mandate."
At least now that I'm President, the Journal doesn't call me
"Poppy." Now they call me "George Herbert Walker Bush."
But I told Al Hunt how much I enjoy the Journal. He asked
if it's the front page, the conservative editorials, or the news
coverage. I said it's because you don't carry Doonesbury.
4
And you have a distinction no other paper in America can
claim: No matter how slow the news, you never ran a puppy photo.
All kidding aside, the Wall Street Journal has a proud and
enviable tradition. Although you deal in the world's most
perishable product -- news -- polls have repeatedly shown that
your paper is one of America's most trusted publications.
A reputation like that can only be earned by adherence to
your founders' pledge to always have the news "honest,
intelligent and unprejudiced." In modern times, your reporters
have carried this pledge beyond business reporting, in coverage
of events like the civil rights struggle -- and the recent
massacre in Beijing -- carrying on a proud American tradition of
braving intimidation to bring the truth into the light.
And many at the Journal have gone beyond their professional
obligations -- and set examples of another old-fashioned
tradition very much on my mind. The tradition of public service.
Three years ago, John Fialka wrote a Column-One story called
"Sisters In Need" -- chronicling the poverty that had befallen
the growing ranks of retired clergy in America. It provoked a
swell of readership response. And so John and others at the
Journal founded "SOAR" -- "Support Our Aging Religious" -- and
raised more than $1 million to aid 30 different orders.
A similar public response occurred in 1987 after the
publication of "Urban Trauma" -- Alex Kotlowitz's moving account
of three months in the life of Lafayette Walton -- a 12 year-old
boy struggling to survive in a dangerous Chicago project.
5
Alex stayed in touch with Lafayette. And last summer they
passed the hat at the Journal -- and gave Lafayette and his
brother a season of peace in the woods of a Wisconsin boys camp.
Personal gestures. Profound actions. Sometimes life-
changing in their effect. These are the works of men and women
who know that prosperity without purpose means nothing.
Earlier today, I announced that I will shortly sign an
Executive Order directing all executive branch officials to
devise programs to involve themselves and their employees in
community service. Direct -- not ask.
It begins with a simple truth: From now on, the definition
of a successful life must include service to others.
And I may never have as important an audience to carry this
message to, as you who are gathered at the Winter Garden tonight.
The American business community has supported conservative
policies. You have enjoyed prosperous years, and applauded my
pledge not to raise taxes. But business must do its part.
Prosperity cannot be truly enjoyed unless the points of light
about which I've spoken shine on every American in need.
Many of you are CEO's, with galaxies at your command. And
it is my request -- I submit, your obligation -- to donate the
services of the talented and the enterprising within your ranks.
Shortly after the Wall Street Journal was founded, 100 years
ago, the Census Bureau declared that the "frontier" no longer
existed in America. But the Wall Street Journal has proven them
wrong -- by advancing across ever new frontiers of technology,
6
geography, and innovation. And I said it a week ago, looking
eastward across America from the foot of the Grand Tetons: The
challenges ahead are in the frontiers of the mind -- and of the
good that hard work and the human imagination can bring to pass.
Not long after bringing home the Journal's first Pulitzer
Prize, William Grimes expressed a simple creed. He wrote: "We
believe in the individual, in his wisdom and his decency." Now
that is a worthy tenet -- one we can all carry forth from
tonight's celebration -- and on to a renewed commitment to
service tomorrow.
To all at the Journal, I wish you congratulations on this
landmark -- and success as your "Second Century" begins. And to
all here tonight -- God bless you -- and God bless the United
States.
#
#
#
(McNally/Simon)
June 17, 1989
9:00 p.m.
Draft Two
(WSJ)
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS:
WALL STREET JOURNAL CENTENNIAL
THE WINTER PALACE GARDEN
NEW YORK CITY
THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1989
8:30 P.M.
Thank you,
/ for that warm introduction. I'm
delighted to be here tonight. There's nothing like celebrating
another's hundredth birthday to make a man feel young.
Talk about a big event. This morning I saw Willard Scott on
TV -- holding up a birthday snapshot of the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking of television, before we left the White House, I
told my grandkids I'd be spending the evening with the media
elite. They want to know which one of you is Morton Downey.
Seriously, this is an impressive audience. But if anything
happens to the Winter Garden tonight, the Fortune 500 will be
lucky to keep the list in double digits. [[PAUSE]]
Forgive me if I seem a bit distracted. I just heard that,
during the cocktails, Donald Trump bought Air Force One.
Gee -- I wonder what he's going to name it?
Don is the only guy whose car has a dashboard statue of
Frank Lorenzo.
But -- as Don has shown -- competition today is intense in
"no
every field. I hear the Journal's abandoning its photo policy
and coming out with its first swimsuit issue. [[PAUSE]] I
just
don't know if their public is ready for Lee Iacoca in thongs.
2
Competition was tough a hundred years ago, too. New York
City. July 8, 1889. Telephones and electric lights were just
catching on. It was the year the Oklahoma Territory opened,
alma
Johnstown flooded, and Mark Twain penned A Connecticut Yankee.
1988 almanar
Newspapers wrote of Kodak's new camera and wondered whether Jack
Webstas Bio.
the Ripper would kill again. And another year would pass before
Dict. Sitting Bull would perish in the Sioux uprisings.
Websters
And as the sun rose over Manhattan on that hot July Monday,
weather
am Bios.
John D. Rockefeller was preparing to celebrate his 50th birthday.
Baseball Hall
X
607-547-9989
of
Fame Across the river, the new Polo Grounds baseball stadium opened on
team name
that day. The home team won.
oppens?
score
And from a modest office not far from where we stand, the
WSI:
Wall Street Journal was distributed to a few hundred readers for
The 1st
102 years two cents a copy. And the first front page contained the paper's
first typo. [[PAUSE]]
Sullivan
almonac
It was in a story about John L. Louis' victory in America's
X
OK
+ of AP final, bare-knuckle, heavyweight championship -- won after 75
Beek
Days
grueling rounds. It was to be the nation's last such drawn-out,
bare-knuckle fight -- until they invented leveraged buy-outs.
[[OR: "presidential primaries"]].
From those modest beginnings, the Wall Street Journal
emerged to become America's ledger sheet -- chronicling war and
depression and prosperity, as we grew from a frontier society to
the frontiers of space -- the world's dominant industrial and
financial power.
3
Barneric Notice
Book of
Arthur Miller observed that "a good newspaper is a nation
to itself." The Journal is like that. In a changing
world that offers 64 channels of cable television, the six gray
columns of the Wall Street Journal are as familiar as the morning
coffee at America's breakfast tables.
Its pages tell the story of our times. Only once in 100
milistones
years did it carry a banner headline -- the day after Pearl
Harbor. [[PAUSE]] I must have missed that one.
WSI
After the War, the Journal came to Texas the same year I did
press
--
release
1948 -- when it began printing in Dallas to supplement the New
York and San Francisco editions. Your chairman, Warren Phillips,
WSI
milestores
had been hired as a copy reader the year before -- in time to see
the first of 13 Pulitzers earned by your correspondents.
1-30-67
Not that every article was Pulitzer Prize material. There
WSJ
were some real doozies. [[PAUSE]] In 1967, as the paper's 80th
birthday approached, a front page story on China predicted the
communist government wouldn't last the year. [[PAUSE]] And I
3
was only off by two months on Pearl Harbor.
WST
milistone
A decade later -- in 1979 -- the Wall Street Journal became
the largest circulation daily in the nation. But one rival
complained that it was only because so many subscribers were at
an age where they forget to cancel.
WSJ
That same year, 1979, correspondent Jim Perry celebrated the
7-6-79journal's 90th birthday by exhuming a high school nickname that
had been dead for 30 years. [[PAUSE]] "Poppy" Bush. [[PAUSE]]
Thanks, Jim.
4
A year later -- on the day after the 1980 election -- the
lead editorial celebrated "Ronald Reagan's mandate." And
President Reagan told me my day would come. And it did. The day
was after I was elected President, the headline read -- and I kid you
11-9-88
not "Jim Wright's Mandate."
But I told Al Hunt how much I enjoy the Journal. He asked
whether it was the front page features, the conservative
editorials, or the economic coverage. I said it's because you
don't carry "Doonesbury."
And you have a distinction no other paper in America can
claim: No matter how slow the news, never once did you run a
puppy photo.
Actually, for a while we put old copies of the Journal under
the puppies. Big mistake. Now Millie is the only dog I know who
has her own broker. [[PAUSE]] I guess she confused puppies with
Yuppies.
At least now that I'm President, the Journal has stopped
calling me "Poppy." Now they call me [[SLOWLY]] "George Herbert
Walker Bush. " [[PAUSE]] Real progress.
And I think Jim Perry to make it up to me after the
X
election. In the recent series on the paper's "Second Century,"
he had one scenario where 1996 found the deficit gone, inflation
WSJ
Elect
at three percent, and Vice President Quayle winning back 45
5-15-8
states and control of the Senate. [[PAUSE]] Now that's good,
solid reporting.
5
All kidding aside, the Wall Street Journal has a proud
tradition and enviable reputation. Although you deal in the
world's most perishable product -- news -- polls have repeatedly
1st wss yours 100
shown that the Wall Street Journal is America's most trusted
publication.
P.
A reputation like that can only be earned by adherence to
your founders' pledge to always have the news "honest,
p.12
intelligent and unprejudiced." In modern times your reporters
have carried this pledge beyond business reporting, in coverage
of events like the 1960's civil rights struggle for racial
justice and equality.
6-16-8981
And as recently as this week's headlines, the Journal's Jim
WIJ Sterba and Adi Ignatious -- and their colleagues from many
6-15-89 P.A.C
different news organizations in China -- have carried on a proud
American tradition of bringing the truth out into the light.
And many at the Journal have gone beyond their professional
obligations -- to set examples of another old-fashioned tradition
that is very much on my mind today. The tradition of public
service.
uss
Three years ago, John Fialka wrote a column-one story called
5-19-86,
"Sisters In Need" -- chronicling the poverty that had befallen
the growing ranks of retired religious workers in America. It
provoked a swell of readership response. And John and others at
the Journal were unable to leave the story behind.
John Fialka
And so they founded "SOAR" -- "Support Our Aging Religious"
and raised more than $300,000 for needy members of the clergy.
6
A similar public response occurred in 1987 after the
publication of "Urban Trauma" -- Alex Kotlowitz's moving account
of three months in the life of Lafayette Weaver Walton -- a 12 year-old
WSJ
X
10-27-87
boy struggling to survive in one of Chicago's most dangerous
housing projects.
gerry Seit
Alex stayed in touch with Lafayette. And last summer Alex
passed the hat at the Wall Street Journal -- and gave Lafayette
Heart
and his brother a season of peace in the woods of a Wisconsin
wl
boys camp.
Personal gestures. Profound actions. Sometimes life-
changing in their effect. These are the works of men and women
who know that prosperity without purpose means nothing.
Earlier today, I announced that I will shortly sign an
Executive Order directing all executive branch officials to
devise programs to involve themselves and their employees in
community service. Direct -- not ask.
It begins with a simple truth: From now on, the definition
of a successful life must include service to others.
And I may never have as important an audience to carry this
message to as the captains of industry, media and advertising
that are gathered at the Winter Garden tonight.
The American business community has supported conservative
policies. You have enjoyed prosperous years, and applauded my
pledge not to raise taxes. But business must do more.
Prosperity cannot be truly enjoyed unless the points of light
about which I've spoken shine on every American in need.
7
that
Many of you are CEO's, with galaxies at your command. And
it is my request -- I submit, your obligation -- to donate the
services of the talented and the enterprising within your ranks.
And to consider volunteerism in hiring, compensation, and
promotion decisions. And to begin a literacy program that
teaches each employee how to read.
Shortly after the Wall Street Journal was founded, 100 years
The 100 WSJ 1st
ago, the Census Bureau declared that the "frontier" no longer
monexisted
in America. But the Wall Street Journal has proven them
wrong -- by advancing across ever new frontiers of technology,
geography, and innovation. And I said it a week ago, looking
speed
6-12-89
eastward across America from the foot of the Grand Tetons: The
challenges ahead are in the frontiers of the mind -- and of the
good that hard work and the human imagination can bring to pass.
100
Not long after bringing home the Journal's first Pulitzer
Prize, William Grimes expressed a simple creed. He wrote: "We
30
P.
believe in the individual, in his wisdom and his decency.' " Now
that is a worthy tenet -- one we can all carry forth from
tonight's celebration -- and on to a renewed commitment to
service tomorrow.
To all at the Journal, I wish you congratulations on this
landmark -- and success as your "Second Century" begins. And to
all here tonight -- God bless you -- and God bless the United
States.
#
#
#
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(New York, New York)
For Immediate Release
June 22, 1989
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL'S
100TH ANNIVERSARY DINNER
Winter Garden
World Financial Center
New York, New York
8:49 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you, Warren, and all of you
at Dow Jones Wall Street Journal for inviting Barbara and me to be
with you. tonight. And I really am pleased to be here. I'm delighted
to see so many friends, including this one right up here -- Lionel
Hampton. This is a nonpartisan evening, but politically, we've been
together for a long, long time.
Your 100th birthday. Talk about a big event. This
morning, I saw Willard Scott on TV holding up a birthday snapshot of
The Wall Street Journal. And speaking of television, I told --
Barbara and I have, staying with us, our grandson, George P., our
oldest grandson, from Florida. And I told him I'd be spending the
evening with a lot of famous people in the media, the media elite.
He asked me to get an autograph from Morton Downey. (Laughter.)
But seriously, this -- Warren was telling me about this
get-together, and this is an impressive audience. And as I look
around, if anything catastrophic happened in the Winter Garden, the
Fortune 500 would be lucky to keep in the just double digits.
But 100 years ago -- what was it like? It wasn't cars,
but carriages, that crowded the New York cobblestones on July 8,
1889. Telephones and electric lights were just catching on. It was
the year that the Oklahoma Territory opened and the Johnstown flooded
and Mark Twain penned A Connecticut Yankee. Another year would pass
before Sitting Bull would perish in the Sioux uprisings.
And as the sun rose over Manhattan on that hot July
Monday, John D. Rockefeller was preparing to celebrate his 50th
birthday. And upriver -- I saw Eli Jacobs here, and he'll be
interested in this -- upriver, 10,000 baseball fans filled the new
Polo Grounds -- with another 5,000 crowding the nearby bluffs -- to
see New York down Pittsburgh 7 to 5.
And from a modest office not far from where we stand, The
Wall Street Journal was distributed a few
- 2 -
Arthur Miller observed that "a good newspaper is a nation
talking to itself." Well, in my view The Journal is like that. In a
changing world that offers 64 channels of cable television, the six
columns of The Wall Street Journal are as familiar as the morning
coffee at our breakfast tables. And its pages tell the story of our
times. Only once in 100 years did it carry a banner headline.
The
day after Pearl Harbor, September 7th, 1941 -- (laughter and
applause) -- make that December 7th, 1941.
But after the war, The Journal came to Texas the same
year I did 1948 -- when it began printing in Dallas. Your
Chairman, Warren Phillips, had been hired as a copy reader the year
before -- in time to see the first of the paper's 13 Pulitzers. Not
that every article was a Pulitzer Prize winner. In 1967, a
front-page story on China predicted the communist government wouldn't
last a year.
A decade later, in 1979, The Wall Street Journal became
the largest circulation daily in the nation. But one rival
complained that it was only because so many subscribers were at an
age where they forgot to cancel. (Laughter.)
Speaking of age -- and literally apropos of absolutely
nothing Bob Hope told this story about aging at the Joe Gibbs
Charity Dinner in Washington this week that Barbara and I attended
and that our guest here, Kay Graham's son sponsored. Two men, two
old men, sitting on a park bench -- and the first one said, "Do you
know how old I am?" The second one said, "Stand up, turn around,
drop your trousers down. Now pat yourself on the back. Okay, pull
up your trousers, sit back down here on this bench." The man said,
"Well, how old am I?" He said, "You're 93 years old, four months and
three days." The first guy said, "How did you know that?" He said,
"You told me yesterday." (Laughter.)
Well, anyway, on the day after the 1980 election, the
lead editorial -- the 1980 election -- the lead editorial celebrated
Ronald Reagan's mandate. And President Reagan told me, "Well, one
day your day will come." And it did. And the day after I was
elected President, the headline read -- and I kid you not -- Jim
Wright's Mandate. (Laughter.) Go look it up. (Laughter.)
I told Al Hunt, though, how much I enjoy The Journal. He
asked if it's the front page, the conservative editorials, or the
news coverage. I said, "No, none of those, none of the above. It's
because you don't carry Doonesbury. (Laughter and applause.)
All kidding aside, The Wall Street Journal has a proud
and enviable tradition. And although you deal in the world's most
perishable product -- news -- polls have repeatedly shown that your
paper is one of America's most trusted publications.
A reputation like that can only be earned by adherence to
your founders' pledge to always have the news "honest, intelligent,
and unprejudiced.' In modern times, your reporters have carried this
pledge beyond business reporting, in coverage of events like the
civil rights struggle -- the recent tragedy in Beijing -- carrying on
a
proud
American
tradition
of
braving
intimidation
- 3 -
raised more than $1 million to aid 30 different orders.
A similar public response occurred in 1987 after the
publication of "Urban Trauma" -- Alex Kotlowitz's moving account of
three months in the life of a kid, Lafayette Walton -- a kid, a
12-year-old boy struggling to survive in a dangerous Chicago project.
And Alex stayed in touch with Lafayette. And last summer
they passed the hat at The Journal -- and gave this kid and his
brother a season of peace in the woods of a Wisconsin boy's camp.
Personal gestures. Profound actions. Sometimes
life-changing in their effect. These are the works of men and women
who know that prosperity without purpose means nothing.
And earlier today, I announced a new initiative --
calling on all levels of government -- both sectors, public and
private -- to enlist in a new crusade to bring national service into
every corner of America.
And that crusade begins with a simple truth: From now
on, any definition of a successful life must include serving others.
And I may never have as important an audience to carry
this message to, as you who are gathered in the Winter Garden
tonight.
The American business community who has supported
conservative policies -- we're enjoying prosperous years. But not
all Americans are part of that prosperity, and I ask that business do
its part. Prosperity cannot be truly enjoyed unless the points of
light about which I've spoken shine on every American in needs.
Many of you are CEOs with galaxies at your command. And
it is my request -- and I believe, your obligation -- to donate the
services of the talented and the enterprising within your ranks.
Many of you are setting the pace. Many of you are doing this now.
Everyone should do this now.
And shortly after The Wall Street Journal was founded,
100 years ago, the Census Bureau declared that the "frontier" no
longer existed in America. But The Wall Street Journal -- you've
proven them wrong -- by advancing across ever new frontiers of
technology and geography and innovation. And I said it a week ago,
looking eastward across America from the foot of those majestic Grand
Tetons: The challenges ahead are in the frontiers of the mind -- and
in the good that hard work and the human imagination can bring to.
pass.
Not long after bringing home the Journal's first Pulitzer
Prize, William Grimes expressed a simple creed. He wrote: "We
believe in the individual, in his wisdom and his decency." Now,
that's a worthy tenet -- one we can all carry forth from tonight's
celebration -- and on to a renewed commitment to service tomorrow.
To all at The Journal, I send you my heartfelt congratulations on
this landmark, wish you success as your second century begins. And
to all here tonight, thank you, God bless you, and God bless the
Document No.
WHITE HOUSE STAFFING MEMORANDUM
89 JUN21 A9: 27
6/21/89
DATE:
ACTION/CONCURRENCE/COMMENT DUE BY:
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: WALL STREET JOURNAL CENTENNIAL
SUBJECT:
ACTION FYI
ACTION FYI
VICE PRESIDENT
MCCLURE
SUNUNU
NEWMAN
SCOWCROFT
PORTER
DARMAN
STUDDERT
BATES
UNTERMEYER
BREEDEN
ROGERS
CARD
WINSTON
CICCONI
PINKERTON
PETERSMEYER
DEMAREST
BOSKIN
FITZWATER
GRAY
HAGIN
REMARKS:
The attached has been forwarded to the President.
RESPONSE:
James W. Cicconi
Assistant to the President
and Deputy to the Chief of Staff
Ext. 2702
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
1839 20 THIS
June 20, 1989
INFORMATION
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT
THROUGH:
CHRISS WINSTON
cu
FROM:
EDWARD E. McNALLY you
SUBJECT:
KEYNOTE ADDRESS FOR THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (BLACK TIE)
I. SUMMARY
At approximately 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 22, 1989, you
are scheduled to arrive at the Winter Garden in lower Manhattan
to give the keynote address for The Wall Street Journal's 100th
Anniversary Gala.
II. DISCUSSION
Attached for your consideration and review are draft remarks
for the 15-minute address expected by The Wall Street Journal for
their Gala in New York. Your speech -- the only one of the night
-- will be before dinner, and will be on teleprompter.
The audience -- a black tie group of approximately 600 -- is
expected to include some of the leading members of America's
corporate, advertising, and news media communities. *
In keeping with the guidance received from Marlin Fitzwater,
the press office, Al Hunt and others at the Journal, the remarks
are essentially light, humorous, and personal -- focusing on the
paper's history and including one message -- an echo of the day's
earlier call for corporate involvement in national service.
*
E.g., including: William Agee, Steven Jobs, Bill Moyers,
Joseph Flom, Richard Holbrooke, Woody Allen, Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger, Rupert Murdoch, Roone Arledge, Bryant Gumble, David
Rockefeller, Peter Ueberroth, Norman Lear, Pete Teeley, Malcolm
Forbes, Mort Zuckerman, Ben Bradlee, Kate Graham, Don Hewitt,
Mike Wallace, Bill Buckley, Robert Bork, Carl Icahn, and Armand
Hammer.
(McNally/Simon)
June 20, 1989, 7:00 p.m.
Draft Four (WSJ)
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: WALL STREET JOURNAL CENTENNIAL
WINTER GARDEN -- NEW YORK CITY
THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1989, 8:30 P.M.
Thank you, Warren [PHILLIPS, CHAIRMAN OF DOW JONES] for
that warm introduction. I'm delighted to be here tonight.
There's nothing like celebrating another's hundredth birthday to
make a man feel young.
Talk about a big event. This morning I saw Willard Scott on
TV -- holding up a birthday snapshot of the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking of television, before we left the White House, I
told my grandkids I'd be spending the evening with the media
elite. They want to know which one of you is Morton Downey.
Seriously, this is an impressive audience. But if anything
catastrophic happens to the Winter Garden tonight, the Fortune
500 will be lucky to keep the list in double digits. [[PAUSE]]
Forgive me if I seem a bit distracted. I just heard that,
during the cocktails, Donald Trump bought Air Force One.
Gee -- I wonder what he's going to name it? [ [PAUSE] ]
Don is the only guy in America whose car has a dashboard
statue of Frank Lorenzo. [[PAUSE]]
Of course, it wasn't cars, but carriages, that crowded New
York's cobblestones on July 8, 1889. Telephones and electric
lights were just catching on. It was the year the Oklahoma
Territory opened, Johnstown flooded, and Mark Twain penned A
2
Connecticut Yankee. Another year would pass before Sitting Bull
would perish in the Sioux uprisings.
And as the sun rose over Manhattan on that hot July Monday,
John D. Rockefeller was preparing to celebrate his 50th birthday.
Upriver, 10,000 baseball fans filled the new Polo Grounds -- with
another 5,000 crowding the nearby bluffs -- to see New York down
Pittsburgh, 7 to 5.
And from a modest office not far from where we stand, the
Wall Street Journal was distributed to a few hundred readers for
two cents a copy. And the first front page contained another
historic first -- your first typo. [[PAUSE]]
It was in a story about John L. Sullivan's victory in the
bare-knuckle, heavyweight championship -- won after 75 grueling
rounds. It was to be the nation's last such drawn-out, bare-
knuckle fight -- until they invented leveraged buy-outs.
[[OR: "presidential primaries"]].
From those modest beginnings, the Wall Street Journal
emerged to become America's ledger sheet -- chronicling war and
depression and prosperity, as we grew from a frontier society to
the frontiers of space -- the world's dominant financial power.
Arthur Miller observed that "a good newspaper is a nation
talking to itself." The Journal is like that. In a changing
world that offers 64 channels of cable television, the six gray
columns of the Wall Street Journal are as familiar as the morning
coffee at America's breakfast tables.
3
Its pages tell the story of our times. Only once in 100
years did it carry a banner headline -- the day after Pearl
Harbor. [[PAUSE] I must have missed that one.
After the War, the Journal came to Texas the same year I did
-- 1948 -- when it began printing in Dallas. Your chairman,
Warren Phillips, had been hired as a copy reader the year before
-- in time to see the first of the paper's 13 Pulitzers.
Not that every article was a Pulitzer Prize winner. In
1967, a front page story on China predicted the communist
government wouldn't last the year. [[PAUSE] ] And on Pearl
Harbor I was only off by three months.
A decade later -- in 1979 -- the Wall Street Journal became
the largest circulation daily in the nation. But one rival
complained that it was only because so many subscribers were at
an age where they forget to cancel.
That same year, reporter Jim Perry celebrated the paper's
90th birthday by exhuming a family nickname that had been dead
for 30 years. [ [PAUSE]] "Poppy" Bush. [[PAUSE] ] Thanks, Jim.
A year later -- on the day after the 1980 election -- the
lead editorial celebrated "Ronald Reagan's mandate." And
President Reagan told me my day would come. And it did. The day
after I was elected President, the headline read -- and I kid you
not -- "Jim Wright's Mandate."
At least now that I'm President, the Journal doesn't call me
"Poppy." [ [PAUSE] ] Now they call me "George Herbert Walker Bush."
But I told Al Hunt how much I enjoy the Journal. He asked
4
if it's the front page, the conservative editorials, or the news
coverage. I said it's because you don't carry Doonesbury.
And you have a distinction no other paper in America can
claim: No matter how slow the news, you never ran a puppy photo.
All kidding aside, the Wall Street Journal has a proud and
enviable tradition. Although you deal in the world's most
perishable product -- news -- polls have repeatedly shown that
your paper is one of America's most trusted publications.
A reputation like that can only be earned by adherence to
your founders' pledge to always have the news "honest,
intelligent and unprejudiced." In modern times, your reporters
have carried this pledge beyond business reporting, in coverage
of events like the civil rights struggle -- and the recent
massacre in Beijing -- carrying on a proud American tradition of
braving intimidation to bring the truth into the light.
And many at the Journal have gone beyond their professional
obligations -- and set examples of another old-fashioned
tradition that is very much on my mind today. The tradition of
public service.
Three years ago, John Fialka wrote a Column-One story called
"Sisters In Need" -- chronicling the poverty that had befallen
the growing ranks of retired clergy in America. It provoked a
swell of readership response. And so John and others at the
Journal founded "SOAR" -- "Support Our Aging Religious" -- and
raised more than $1 million to aid 30 different orders.
5
A similar public response occurred in 1987 after the
publication of "Urban Trauma" -- Alex Kotlowitz's moving account
of three months in the life of Lafayette Walton -- a 12 year-old
boy struggling to survive in a dangerous Chicago project.
Alex stayed in touch with Lafayette. And last summer they
passed the hat at the Journal -- and gave Lafayette and his
brother a season of peace in the woods of a Wisconsin boys camp.
Personal gestures. Profound actions. Sometimes life-
changing in their effect. These are the works of men and women
who know that prosperity without purpose means nothing.
Earlier today, I announced a new initiative -- calling on
all levels of government -- and both sectors, public and private
-- to enlist in a new crusade to bring national service into
every corner of America.
That crusade begins with a simple truth: From now on, the
definition of a successful life must include service to others.
And I may never have as important an audience to carry this
message to, as you who are gathered at the Winter Garden tonight.
The American business community has supported conservative
policies. We are enjoying prosperous years. But not all
Americans are part of that prosperity, and I ask that business do
its part. Prosperity cannot be truly enjoyed unless the points
of light about which I've spoken shine on every American in need.
Many of you are CEO's, with galaxies at your command. And
it is my request -- I submit, your obligation -- to donate the
services of the talented and the enterprising within your ranks.
6
Shortly after the Wall Street Journal was founded, 100 years
ago, the Census Bureau declared that the "frontier" no longer
existed in America. But the Wall Street Journal has proven them
wrong -- by advancing across ever new frontiers of technology,
geography, and innovation. And I said it a week ago, looking
eastward across America from the foot of the Grand Tetons: The
challenges ahead are in the frontiers of the mind -- and of the
good that hard work and the human imagination can bring to pass.
Not long after bringing home the Journal's first Pulitzer
Prize, William Grimes expressed a simple creed. He wrote: "We
believe in the individual, in his wisdom and his decency." Now
that is a worthy tenet -- one we can all carry forth from
tonight's celebration -- and on to a renewed commitment to
service tomorrow.
To all at the Journal, I wish you congratulations on this
landmark -- and success as your "Second Century" begins. And to
all here tonight -- God bless you -- and God bless the United
States.
#
#
#
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
DATE:
FROM THE PRESIDENT
To:
Jim C
I have knoched out
several personal refereces.
I included a Bob
Hope john
Do not include
Johes in press text.
Good length
4 speech for
the occasion
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
1339
June 20, 1989
INFORMATION
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT
THROUGH:
CHRISS WINSTON
cu
FROM:
EDWARD E. McNALLY
grew
SUBJECT:
KEYNOTE ADDRESS FOR THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (BLACK TIE)
I. SUMMARY
At approximately 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 22, 1989, you
are scheduled to arrive at the Winter Garden in lower Manhattan
to give the keynote address for The Wall Street Journal's 100th
Anniversary Gala.
II. DISCUSSION
Attached for your consideration and review are draft remarks
for the 15-minute address expected by The Wall Street Journal for
their Gala in New York. Your speech -- the only one of the night
-- will be before dinner, and will be on teleprompter.
The audience -- a black tie group of approximately 600 -- is
expected to include some of the leading members of America's
corporate, advertising, and news media communities. *
In keeping with the guidance received from Marlin Fitzwater,
the press office, Al Hunt and others at the Journal, the remarks
are essentially light, humorous, and personal -- focusing on the
paper's history and including one message -- an echo of the day's
earlier call for corporate involvement in national service.
*
E.g., including: William Agee, Steven Jobs, Bill Moyers,
Joseph Flom, Richard Holbrooke, Woody Allen, Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger, Rupert Murdoch, Roone Arledge, Bryant Gumble, David
Rockefeller, Peter Ueberroth, Norman Lear, Pete Teeley, Malcolm
Forbes, Mort Zuckerman, Ben Bradlee, Kate Graham, Don Hewitt,
Mike Hammer. Wallace, Bill Buckley, Robert Bork, Carl Icahn, and Armand
THE PRESIDENT HAS SEEN
6/21/89
(McNally/Simon)
June 20, 1989, 7:00 p.m.
Draft Four (WSJ)
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: WALL STREET JOURNAL CENTENNIAL
WINTER GARDEN -- NEW YORK CITY
THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1989, 8:30 P.M.
Thank you, Warren [[PHILLIPS, CHAIRMAN OF DOW JONES] 11, for
that warm introduction. I'm delighted to be here tonight.
There's nothing like celebrating another's hundredth birthday to
make a man feel young.
Talk about a big event. This morning I saw Willard Scott on
TV -- holding up a birthday snapshot of the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking of television, before we left the White House, I
Bear
told my grandkids I'd be spending the evening with the media
A He asked me to get an autograph from - - -
elite. They want to know which one of you is Morton Downey.
Seriously, this is an impressive audience. But if anything
catastrophic happens to the Winter Garden tonight, the Fortune
500 will be lucky to keep the list in double digits. [[PAUSE]]
Forgive me if I seem a bit distracted. I just heard that,
during the cocktails, Donald Trump bought Air Force One.
Gee -- I wonder what be going to name it? [PAUSE]]
Don is the only quy in America whose car has a. dashboard
new
statue of Frank Lorenzd. [[PAUSE]]
100 years ago- what was it liho?
lead
Of course, It wasn't cars, but carriages, that crowded New
York's cobblestones on July 8, 1889. Telephones and electric
lights were just catching on. It was the year the Oklahoma
Territory opened, Johnstown flooded, and Mark Twain penned A
2
Connecticut Yankee. Another year would pass before Sitting Bull
would perish in the Sioux uprisings.
And as the sun rose over Manhattan on that hot July Monday,
John D. Rockefeller was preparing to celebrate his 50th birthday.
Upriver, 10,000 baseball fans filled the new Polo Grounds -- with
another 5,000 crowding the nearby bluffs -- to see New York down
Pittsburgh, 7 to 5.
And from a modest office not far from where we stand, the
Wall Street Journal was distributed to a few hundred readers for
two cents a copy. And the first front page contained another
historic first -- your first typo. [[PAUSE]]
It was in a story about John L. Sullivan's victory in the
bare-knuckle, heavyweight championship -- won after 75 grueling
rounds. It was to be the nation's last such drawn-out, bare-
X
knuckle fight -- until they invented leveraged buy-outs.
"ghd"
OA
'presidential primaries"
From those modest beginnings, the Wall Street Journal
emerged to become America's ledger sheet -- chronicling war and
depression and prosperity, as we grew from a frontier society to
the frontiers of space -- the world's dominant financial power.
Arthur Miller observed that "a good newspaper is a nation
talking to itself." The Journal is like that. In a changing
world that offers 64 channels of cable television, the six gray
columns of the Wall Street Journal are as familiar as the morning
coffee at America's breakfast tables.
3
Its pages tell the story of our times. Only once in 100
years did it carry a banner headline -- the day after Pearl
K
sept 71941 - Mahe that December
7
Harbor. [[PAUSE]] I must have missed that one.
After the War, the Journal came to Texas the same year I did
-- 1948 -- when it began printing in Dallas. Your chairman,
Warren Phillips, had been hired as a copy reader the year before
-- in time to see the first of the paper's 13 Pulitzers.
Not that every article was a Pulitzer Prize winner. In
1967, a front page story on China predicted the communist
government wouldn't last the year. [[PAUSE]] And on Pearl
Harbor I was only off by three months.
A decade later -- in 1979 -- the Wall Street Journal became
the largest circulation daily in the nation. But one rival
complained that it was only because so many subscribers were at
an age where they forget to cancel.
Insert
That same year, reporter Jim Perry celebrated the paper's
n
90th birthday by exhuming a family nickname that had béen dead
for 30 years. [[PAUSE]] "Poppy" Bush. [[PAUSE]] Thanks Jim.
A Anyway -- on the day after the 1980 election -- the
lead editorial celebrated "Ronald Reagan's mandate." And
President Reagan told me my day would come. And it did. The day
after I was elected President, the headline read -- and I kid you
not -- "Jim Wright's Mandate."
At least now that I'm President, the Journal doesn't call me
"Poppy " [[PAUSE]] Now they call me "George Herbert Walker Bush."
But I told Al Hunt how much I enjoy the Journal. He asked
4
if it's the front page, the conservative editorials, or the news
coverage. I said it's because you don't carry Doonesbury.
And you have a distinction no other paper in America can
claim: No matter how slow the news, you never ran a puppy photo.
All kidding aside, the Wall Street Journal has a proud and
enviable tradition. Although you deal in the world's most
perishable product -- news -- polls have repeatedly shown that
your paper is one of America's most trusted publications.
A reputation like that can only be earned by adherence to
your founders' pledge to always have the news "honest,
intelligent and unprejudiced." In modern times, your reporters
have carried this pledge beyond business reporting, in coverage
of events like the civil rights struggle -- and the recent
tragedy in Beijing -- carrying on a proud American tradition of
braving intimidation to bring the truth into the light.
And many at the Journal have gone beyond their professional
obligations -- and set examples of another old-fashioned
tradition that is very much on my mind today. The tradition of
public service.
Three years ago, John Fialka wrote a Column-One story called
"Sisters In Need" -- chronicling the poverty that had befallen
the growing ranks of retired clergy in America. It provoked a
swell of readership response. And so John and others at the
Journal founded "SOAR" -- "Support Our Aging Religious" -- and
raised more than $1 million to aid 30 different orders.
5
A similar public response occurred in 1987 after the
publication of "Urban Trauma" -- Alex Kotlowitz's moving account
of three months in the life of Lafayette Walton -- a 12 year-old
boy struggling to survive in a dangerous Chicago project.
Alex stayed in touch with Lafayette. And last summer they
passed the hat at the Journal -- and gave Lafayette and his
brother a season of peace in the woods of a Wisconsin boys camp.
Personal gestures. Profound actions. Sometimes life-
changing in their effect. These are the works of men and women
who know that prosperity without purpose means nothing.
Earlier today, I announced a new initiative -- calling on
all levels of government -- and both sectors, public and private
-- to enlist in a new crusade to bring national service into
every corner of America.
That crusade begins with a simple truth: From now on, the
definition of a successful life must include service to others.
And I may never have as important an audience to carry this
message to, as you who are gathered at the Winter Garden tonight.
The American business community has supported conservative
policies. We are enjoying prosperous years. But not all
Americans are part of that prosperity, and I ask that business do
its part. Prosperity cannot be truly enjoyed unless the points
of light about which I've spoken shine on every American in need.
Many of you are CEO's, with galaxies at your command. And
it is my request -- I submit, your obligation -- to donate the
services of the talented and the enterprising within your ranks.
May are doing this now. Everyone should do this now
6
Shortly after the Wall Street Journal was founded, 100 years
ago, the Census Bureau declared that the "frontier" no longer
existed in America. But the Wall Street Journal has proven them
wrong -- by advancing across ever new frontiers of technology,
geography, and innovation. And I said it a week ago, looking
eastward across America from the foot of the Grand Tetons: The
challenges ahead are in the frontiers of the mind -- and of the
good that hard work and the human imagination can bring to pass.
Not long after bringing home the Journal's first Pulitzer
Prize, William Grimes expressed a simple creed. He wrote: "We
believe in the individual, in his wisdom and his decency." Now
that is a worthy tenet -- one we can all carry forth from
tonight's celebration -- and on to a renewed commitment to
service tomorrow.
To all at the Journal, I wish you congratulations on this
landmark -- and success as your "Second Century" begins. And to
all here tonight -- God bless you -- and God bless the United
States.
#
#
#
INsert
speaking of which h and
A apropos of nothing R at the
Joe Gibbs charity duin Bob
Hope told of 2 very old men
sitting OA tha pack bench.
First Do you know how
old I an?" 3 3+and up" Furnoval
second
Drop your
trousers; drop yourshouts" " Now
pat yourself on the postrian
OK pull up your shorts - you
trousurs - the sit
bad dom on the bruch
You're 93 years +
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
June 21, 1989
Please note that this speec
4 wonth old
m
MR. PRESIDENT:
is on teleprompter.
Jim Cicconi
How'd you know ?
Am
You told we
yestuday.