Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much. Mr. Bersoff, thank you for your comments and for the outstanding example of the family business you…”

“Thank you very much. Mr. Bersoff, thank you for your comments and for the outstanding example of the family business you have built to such a remarkable extent. Thank you, Sally Katzen. Before I begin, as a matter of personal privilege, I would just like to say a brief word about the death of my good friend Les Aspin. Hillary and I grieve his loss, and along with all other Americans, we thank him for the remarkable service he rendered to our country as a distinguished Congressman from Wisconsin, as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee of the House, as Secretary of Defense, and as head of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He did a lot of work to keep us safe through a turbulent time, and we are all very, very much in his debt. Let me thank the Members of Congress who are here. You know, I've got to say, I was sitting here listening to Mr. Bersoff talk, and I thought, it'll be a miracle if we get this on the news tonight, because this is something we did without anybody fighting. [Laughter] And the real reason this languished around for 5 years was because nobody was fighting anybody else about it. And after I got here, I discovered some of the best ideas in Washington were not being implemented simply because there was no anger attached to them. It's a sad thing to say, but it's absolutely right. And so, sometimes energy is not behind things that hang around here for years, because there's no real brutal conflict.…”