WASHINGTON — With the century opened with a peaceful worldwide jubilee, the United States enters the new millennium ready to provide the world "a guiding light" in the quest for democracy, peace and prosperity, President Clinton said Saturday.
New Year's morning found the government's Y2K crisis centers with little or no crisis to handle and crews ready to dismantle the apparatus that transformed the Washington Monument into a blazing tower of fireworks.
There was dancing until dawn at the White House in a millennium-ending revel by hundreds of creative and celebrated Americans, politicians, Hollywood stars and Clinton friends.
Along the National Mall and the reflecting pool leading to the Lincoln Memorial a midnight throng numbering hundreds of thousands of people saw a giant 1999 become a giant 2000 as fireworks leaped down the water to ignite the 555-foot monument in a cascade of light, etching it as a towering exclamation point against the night sky.
Fireworks exploded overhead, the flash-freeze moment in a three-hour millennium gala that vied for television attention with the traditional Times Square event.
The president offered a serious counterpoint, voicing hope that the 21st century will tell a story of triumphant freedom "wisely used, to bring peace to a world in which we honor our differences and even more, our common humanity."
Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is running for a New York Senate seat, broadened that theme in a New Year's Day radio address, with the president also expressing gratitude "that the celebrations were both jubilant and peaceful, both here and around the world."
"Millions of Americans and billions of others across the globe watched on television as midnight broke first in Asia, then in Europe, then Africa, South America, finally here in North America," President Clinton said.
The fact that the world is becoming so interwoven is "the key to understanding where we're going, and what we must do in the new millennium," he said.
"To advance our interests and protect our values in this new interconnected world, America clearly must remain engaged," he said. "We must shape events, and not be shaped by them."
"We begin the 21st century well-poised to be that guiding light," the president said.
"Never have our values of freedom, democracy and opportunity been more ascendant in the world."
President Clinton left the White House party and went to bed shortly before 4 a.m., although some guests stayed well past that hour.
On New Year's Day, the president offered congratulation's to Russia's new acting president, Vladimir Putin. In a 10-minute telephone call, he said Putin's peaceful accession to power under the terms of the Russian constitution is a sign democracy is taking hold in the former Soviet Union, White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said.
President Clinton planned to spend the day at home with his wife, their daughter, Chelsea, and other family members. Lockhart said they included the president's brother, Roger, his wife and daughter; and Hillary Clinton's brother, Hugh Rodham.
The highlight of the president's New Year's Day: college football with the University of Arkansas playing the University of Texas in the Cotton Bowl.
The long anticipated Y2K bug, the subject of countless hours and billions of dollars of meticulous preparation, failed to throw the nation into a much-feared time warp in which computers might confuse the year 2000 with the century old 1900, and simply crash.
There was no computer crash, not in electricity, gas, telephones or in airline or banking service. And that left the government's crisis managers with little to do but talk to each other and reporters, watch the advancing hours on the clock, and, in one case, pop a catastrophe movie into one of their own computers for a change of pace.
As campaigner and president, President Clinton repeatedly called for the building of a "bridge to the 21st century." But at the Lincoln Memorial, moments before the gateway to that bridge swung open, he looked back to founding father Benjamin Franklin and his worry two centuries ago about whether the American sun was rising or setting.
Like the optimistic Franklin, President Clinton had an answer.
"We know the sun will always rise on America as long as each new generation lights the fire of freedom," he said.