Citing the heroic deeds of three New Yorkers in last week's fatal shootings aboard a Long Island commuter train, President Clinton Monday urged all Americans to follow their example and show a new intolerance for violence in this country.
In a poignant appeal delivered at a fund-raiser on behalf of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., Clinton said plainly, "I can't make us come back together all by myself. This has got to be a deal we do together."Striking a familiar theme to one he has sounded in recent weeks concerning violence and crime in the country - one he says is due to a lack of economic opportunity and a developing "outerclass" - Clinton said he had summoned the three men to his hotel suite earlier to "figure out how these guys do this - take responsibility."
The three - Kevin Blum, 42, Michael O'Conner, 32, and Mark McEntee, 34 - met with their families and Clinton for about a half-hour before Clinton attended the dinner. Each of the men played a critical role in subduing Colin Ferguson, the man accused of turning a packed commuter train car into a bloodbath last week, killing six and wounding 17.
"They started talking, how each one of them made their decision kind of simultaneously and not together, to do this and finally they just knew it was insane not to act," Clinton reported.
"In the moment of that encounter they all of a sudden realized that by a simple act of heroism, they had also come to an understanding which now imposes responsibility on them they didn't feel before they did it," he added. "That is what I ask of you."
Clinton wove the moving appeal into a speech in which he frequently cited Moynihan as a politician who had seen the country's current problems coming decades ago.
Clinton's appearance at the black-tie, $1,000-a-plate dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was, in part, a return favor for the Senate Finance Committee chairman's critical help in last summer's budget battle.
After attending a similar payback session earlier in the day in Pennsylvania, Clinton was quite reflective but his message was insistent.
"The time has come to stop worrying about what you feel is politically correct and just say what you believe is right to put this country back together again. You must become more intolerant of things we take for granted. . . . The intolerance I ask for is your intolerance of conditions, not of people.
". . . We must become intolerant in a consistent way, in a compassionate way and we must believe that what worked for so many of us will work for tomorrow's children, too. If we believe that and we act on it, then intolerance can give our country a new birth," he said.
The president made the case that large numbers of Americans are increasingly becoming "very poor and not very educated" by often being born into families out of wedlock.