Remarks by Former Attorney General John Ashcroft to Project Safe Neighborhood Conference 2007 Closing Ceremony
Atlanta, Georgia – September 26, 2007

MR. ASHCROFT: Thank you very much. Thank you. Please be seated. Thank you. Thank you for standing up, thank you for sitting back down. So frequently, especially in politics, a standing ovation is a cover for a mass exodus and, so far as I can tell, nobody left. So I'm thrilled to be here.

And it is just beyond my description to have the opportunity to be with you again. So many of you are -- remain as members of a team which I once participated in in a very direct way. And it's the greatest honor I've ever had in my life. I hope I shall always remember it with the kind of clarity and vividness which is in my mind right now and what a nice introduction. I thank you for mentioning all those kind things and not mentioning a single election I lost. You know, I lost elections in the '70s and '80s and '90s. And I'm the only person in the history of the United States Senate ever to have lost his Senate seat to a deceased opponent. (Laughter.)

You know, so my friends, they don't even mention it. (Laughter.) It's just great.

Speaking of friends, I want to tell you, some of you remember very well part of the brain trust which I leaned so heavily on in the Department of Justice, David Ayres (phonetic), Lori Sharpe Day (phonetic), Susan Richmond (phonetic), and Tracy Henke (phonetic), they are all with me in a group we call the Ashcroft Group now. So they send their best. And they are today, if you were to take out the eight-color box and you were to color them in, you would need to color them green, because they are green with envy because I have the opportunity to be back here with you.

I must say to you that I don't miss many things about the Justice Department. I seem to be able to live quite well without them. But I do miss the relationships of this department. And I had the privilege of saying many times in our opportunity to serve together you will never be with a group of individuals who will mean more to you in your life than the people with who you are associated in the Justice community. And I say that word "community" broadly, because it is more than the Justice Department. It is a community of people who have regarded the ancient scripture's admonition to love mercy and to walk humbly and to do justice. What a phenomenal privilege that is.

When the President of the United States made it possible for me to serve the United States of America as the Attorney General of the United States, it was the greatest privilege I have ever enjoyed or could ever have anticipated.

The Declaration of Independence starts profoundly with the words: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Nothing -- nothing more pervasively threatens the promise of the Declaration of Independence, the promise of the endowment by the creator than the reckless indifference toward life reflected in the gun violence that has characterized too much of America's recent history.

There is no more noble work that can be done at the hand of man than to protect that life, to preserve that liberty, and to make it possible for people in freedom to pursue happiness.

It is the task which you share. It is the opportunity which you enjoy. It is an endeavor in which we work together. And I am tremendously honored to have the privilege of saying to you, thank you. And to say to you that you have won this war in so many respects. And you are to be commended for it.

You know, when I left the office of Attorney General, I wrote the President of the United States a letter. And because I didn't want it to be compromised in any way, in terms of its information being available in advance of the President's release of it, I wrote it by hand. I wrote, I think, it was about a six- or seven-page letter. Said -- in the letter, I said, I am writing this letter by hand so that there won't be any leakage of the letter. And that was sort of a signal to the White House it shouldn't be leaked either until the President wanted it to be revealed.

In the letter I said that we had won the war on terror. I said, we have fought and waged the war on terror and we have won the war on terror. And there were a number of sort of drawn breaths. There were people -- how could you say that? And I felt like I could say that because we had been successful, thank god and thanks to the hard work of so many of you, in preventing additional attacks in the United States of America, attacks on our soil, attacks that would have disrupted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And they said, how can you say we've won it; we're still fighting it. And for me, I had to relate my understanding that the most important battles of life are won but not finished. You can win the battle without ending the battle.

In some respects, that's tremendously unfortunate. It would be nice perhaps for us to say, that's it, we've taken care of crime. I guess we'll have to move on to something else.

On the other hand, the beckoning of a noble cause is something worthwhile in life. And so I said to the President, we have won the war on terror but we will have to win it again and again and again.

In that same way, I want to commend you for your winning in the war of violent disruption of the liberties and opportunities and lives of the American people. But it's going to have to be won over and over and over again. It is the noble work of fulfilling the dream of the declaration of the founders that we have the privilege of doing that is so engaging.

I must tell you I've had a lot of opportunities since I left the Department of Justice. I mean, I've helped, counseled and advised and been participant in about $40 billion worth of mergers, acquisitions. I've counseled corporate entities on integrity issues and how they can be compliant and how they can avoid difficulties, how they can be involved in a variety of settings. I've helped bring new products to the marketplace of national security and homeland security. I've met with prime ministers. I've had an opportunity to be around the world. But nothing exceeded the value and importance and nothing exceeded the nobility of the job that I had with you and the job which you focus on in your responsibilities now, the job of public safety. The fundamental responsibility of securing for people their opportunity to live life and to live it in peace and in the pursuit of happiness.

Now, there is a reason for your success. And I would just like to commend you for those reasons. In large measure, because I think our successes provide models for us to follow in other settings. One of the reasons for your success is your understanding of the problem. You have understood that an overwhelming majority of the crime is committed by a fractional minority of the people. And if you get the worst folks and you can detain them and you can incarcerate them and you can take the weapons out of their hands, you will be saving lives and saving lives in significant numbers. And that understanding of the problem is the basis for our attack on the problem and the nature and strategy of our attack is another thing that ought to be modeled as we address other issues.

The first thing that I think is very important bout the way the job has been done is, at least at the federal level, we had a -- a new rededication and commitment to an ideal which has never been fully realized, but which has been very substantially approached in your efforts, and that is the ideal of cooperation. In the Justice Department alone, the ATF, the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, the DEA, the U.S. Attorneys offices, at the federal level. I'm sure that those of you from the state and local governments have from time to time looked up the ladder of government and said, what are they thinking up there? One hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing.

And I think this is an arena in which we have begun to tap the kind of synergism that comes when the team operates with an awareness and sense of cooperation that is brought on by the urgency and nobility of the task and the cooperation of federal agencies has been superior, at its best here.

The immigration authorities have participated in this. And I might add that I'm sure I'm missing some. But the point is this, that cooperation has been a keystone of the success that has been understood in this endeavor.

The second thing that I would indicate in addition to cooperation is the idea of integration. For so long, the federal government sort of acted as if its sphere of operation in terms of the safety and security of the people of the United States was to be divorced from, distinct from and different from state and local law enforcement officials. Perhaps it was the exigency of terror that forced me or at least brought me face to face with the realization that the 750,000 or more state and local law enforcement officers together with a host of prosecutors and other officials were a phenomenal resource that perhaps meant more to the United States of America and its ability to survive and succeed and to fulfill the dream of the Declaration saying that we had been endowed by the creator with the inalienable right to pursue life, liberty and happiness. And perhaps these officials were even more important than people at the federal level. Perhaps is probably not the right word.

I came to the realization -- I used to say occasionally in my speeches that it's more important to have people out there with their feet on the street than people in Washington with their feet on the desk. And I only know that because U.S. attorneys kept reminding me of that all the time. But it is important for us not only to have the cooperation among federal agencies, even agencies within the same department, but it is important for us to have an integrated effort that goes from those officials at the state and local level who really have their feet on the street and understand what the problems are, what the circumstances are, can help us identify where the perpetrators are of the most vicious and difficult circumstances, where we need to be able to move people who are perpetrators like that into settings where they don't threaten our communities any longer. It's so important to have an integrated effort, vertical integration, as well as the cooperation that came from a horizontal understanding of the way we should work together in Washington.

But perhaps most profoundly in what we do, we need to help people realize the dream of American independence by helping them be free. And freedom is the ability to make choices which controls the future -- which control the future, rather than to be dictated circumstances which control you. And there was a time, I think, when some had given up. Some had sort of thought that the only way to live in a safer neighborhood was to pick up and go. That there were some places that we would have to sort of write off. Not quite like Central and South America where terrorist organizations literally control parts of the country. But there were parts of American cities and parts of communities -- and I remember this from my time as governor -- when you just wondered whether there was any hope there, whether the way to change things was to leave them, to abandon them. And certainly that's not the kind of freedom anticipated or contemplated in the writings of those who founded this great nation.

Some began profoundly to whisper and to say, you know, you don't have to live -- you don't have to move to live in a safer neighborhood. Implicit in that statement is the understanding that we can be in control rather than them being in control. And freedom is the difference between a victim where someone else is in control, and being someone who shapes the circumstances when you are in control.

And the most profound benefit that has come as a result of Project Safe Neighborhood is the fact that people have been liberated to shape their future and their destinies rather than free merely to abandon their location so they would have a different set of circumstances. I hope I'm communicating this effectively.

That the real benefit we give to the American public, the real value of justice, the real value of law enforcement, the thing that thrills me about the opportunity I had to be involved in public safety and a colleague of yours, was that we could help bring the concepts of the American Revolution and the great statements of the founders about the purposes for which we were created, we could bring them into reality. And the idea that you don't have to move to live in a safer neighborhood is a profound idea that says you are free, you can control circumstances. Community can be controlled and shaped; it is not something that can only be abandoned.

And across America, when citizens came to that realization, we've added a concept to the concept of cooperation between federal agencies and a concept to the concept of integration between state and local agencies, we added the concept of participation and liberation for the American people to, in their freedom, begin to define circumstances instead of have circumstances define them.

And very frankly, I just want to give you a hand for having done so, because you made that possible. I believe that's the profound achievement.

Now, I had the privilege of when I was leaving the office of Attorney General, to look at some of the data and statistics. And frankly, the numbers, the numerics in terms of lives saved here, are mind boggling. They were so profoundly great, I wondered if they could really be true. That we hit an all-time peak of jeopardy, injury, damage and carnage with crime rates in the early '90s. And we began to mobilize these resources and to focus them and then to really hit hard about six or seven years ago. And what has happened is amazing. There are tens of millions of fewer people that are victims of violent crime.

And what I want to say to you is I know that we talked when I was leaving the office before you had taken even some of the more aggressive steps that you have taken since I had the privilege of working with you. That two-and-a-half million fewer were raped than would have -- raped and sexually assaulted than would have been, had the old rates continued.

The interesting thing to me about that kind of statistical data is you can't identify who didn't get hurt. And so the public is very unlikely to be able to say to you we know what the real value is of what you have done. But I think it's very important for you to know that when gun crime goes down and goes down significantly, when lives are protected, when individuals are uninjured and escape rather than being molested and mangled, it's very important and all of us or most of us may be in a condition of being able to say, I'm one who escaped.

We'll never know but for the grace of god and but for the outstanding effort to make sure that we reduce the level of violence that intimidates freedom and that makes it difficult for citizens to enjoy the privileges of liberty. We reduced that level of violence; we're not sure who is the beneficiary but we know that we all are.

And it is with that in mind that I am here to say to you my profound thanks. You have provided, as the ancient scripture suggests, that the purpose of government is the punishment of evildoers and the praise of them that do well. You've punished the evildoers and I am here to praise those of you that have done well.

Now, it is said by some that when there is a great need in the world, god looks down and he decides to have a baby born. Someday, that child grows up and meets the need. And I think the nobility of your achievements and the difficulty of the challenges that you have faced, the value of your mission, the satisfaction of the tasks that you've undertaken, I hope that at some time or another you've said to yourself, I was born for such a time as this; this is what I was born to do. It's that worth doing.

If that's true and if that's the way it works, that when a great job needs to be done, god causes a child to be born, it's a little chilling to consider what happens when a child is born and then instead of reaching a destination of the greatness for which it was created, it's lost to violence and carnage and unavailable for the greatness needed in our culture. I don't think we can countenance the potential of that happening at increasing levels.

We have to understand that, yeah, we've won the war, we've waged the war against carnage and death. But we've got to continue waging it. We can't stop. This is a war which will always be ours to fight and hopefully always be ours to win. And should we have the opportunity to do so, we literally make the words of the founders come true, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; values unachievable in the context of threatening violence, but values that provide a basis for human dignity when the efforts of individuals like those of us in the justice community prevail, and when we wage and win this fight over and over and over again.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

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