Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 18, 1993 TAG: 9301180090
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A10 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
MONTICELLO A PAUSE THAT IMPRESSES
During a Sunday morning that exhausted many of his hearers if not himself, William Jefferson Clinton paused at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello for an hour that proved instructive to him as well as the country.Clinton looked to reinforce his similarities to the third president as he and Hillary started the last lap to his inauguration Wednesday.
For 20 minutes, the Clintons and Al and Tipper Gore toured the mansion with a guide while a crowd waited on the straw-strewn lawn. Underfoot, it had the feel of a stockyard.
Visitors had begun gathering long before dawn. The pillared portico, flood-lit to a chalk-white, seemed to be a mock-up, a movie set. "It is like a postcard," said Trish Snopkowski of Charlottesville. (Most of the throng was local. The Charlottesville Municipal Band played mightily.)
Clinton was rapt, nearly mute as he learned from Monticello Director Daniel Jordan about Jefferson, a one-man renaissance with a creative touch for everything. He was nearly holistic, getting the right amount of exercise, food and sleep to stay at a creative pitch until he died at 83, the guide said.
Clinton is a jogger, but Jefferson would look askance at his Quarter-Pounders-with-Cheese and late-night Solitaire games.
"When did he go to bed at night?" Clinton asked, intent.
"That depended on the company he was keeping and the book he was reading," said the guide.
Later, one of eight students who won an essay contest for the right to speak to him asked Clinton why Jefferson was so special to him.
"I believe more than any other American leader he made the most of everything," Clinton said. "I wish I could do half as well as he did in making the most of each day."
At 70, said Clinton (recalling the lecture), Jefferson was still riding horseback seven miles a day.
Jefferson and Clinton are alike in espousing education. The former worked nearly all his life, in vain, to persuade the Virginia General Assembly to adopt a state school system. Clinton, as governor, sponsored school reforms in Arkansas that are still on paper in Virginia.
In an increasingly complex world, a good education is necessary "just to function," Clinton said.
And striving to ensure an educated, informed electorate, Jefferson wrote a friend: "If once the people become inattentive to public affairs, you and I and Congress and assemblies, judges, governors, shall become wolves."
It was on just such an occasion as Sunday's that a teen-age Clinton met John F. Kennedy and set his sights for the Oval Office.
Jefferson, Clinton told the youths, "believed in public service . . . and I just want to remind you that any public service you render has merit.
"You might reach for the presidency some day, but Jefferson believed that what is most important happens on the local level . . . He believed in the smaller offices, too, where people's lives may be touched personally."
Clinton never quit reaching.
Questioned about Jefferson's greatest achievement, Clinton noted "his absolutely unshakable conviction" that given freedom from outside oppression, you could assure personal freedom within to think and grow and learn, that any kind of problem could be solved, that progress could be made and life could be interesting and fun and rich.
The notion that problems can be resolved appears to animate Clinton, too.
As the Clintons and Gores parted, Jordan suggested they might return on April 13, Jefferson's birthday. Clinton's eyes lighted up at the prospect.
A formal invitation already is in the mail, so perhaps there will be an April rendezvous.