by George Bush *
THANK YOU, Mr. Mayor. Your Majesty and Your Royal Highness, Barbara and I thank you and the people of the Netherlands for the warm welcome that has been given to us. I’m glad to be back with my cousins, because we fondly remember Aunt Abigail back there those many years ago.
The Netherlands is an old friend, an honored ally of the United States. And the friendship between our nations is older than the American Constitution, and the United Provinces were one of the models that our founders looked to in creating a nation from 13 sovereign States.
It’s a pleasure to visit Leiden, a city whose very name has symbolized for centuries Dutch determination and the struggle for freedom against the forces of occupation. And for Americans, too, Leiden is a special city, a place where we trace our origins. So many of the individuals who shaped the modern world walked the cobbled streets of Leiden. It was here that Hugo de Groot, known to the world as Grotius, the father of modern international law, studied in the Nation that is today the home of the International Court of Justice.
IT WAS here that Rembrandt lived and worked and created a world of beauty that moves us still today. And it was here to Leiden that the Pilgrims came to escape persecution — to live, work, and worship in peace. In the shadow of Pieterskerk, they found the freedom to witness God openly and without fear. And here, under the ancient stones of the Pieterskerk, the body of John Robinson, the Pilgrims’ spiritual leader, was laid to rest.
It was from this place the Pilgrims set their course for a New World. In their search for liberty, they took with them lessons learned here of freedom and tolerance. And the Pilgrims faced a dangerous passage; but carried on the winds of hope, they arrived. And on the rocky coast of New England, at the edge of a wild and unsettled continent, they planted the seeds of a New World, a world that became America.
WHATEVER the odds, freedom will succeed. It’s a lesson the world has learned several times this century, a lesson that you know so well, that the Dutch know so well. The Netherlands will never forget the nightmare of occupation. Some of you here today suffered through those long years.
And even then freedom endured. Pieterskerk — behind these walls, above the rafters — resistance fighters, university students took refuge from the forces of occupation and found safe haven in this church. Daily acts of heroism — the church sexton who brought them food, the neighborhood grocer who collected extra ration stamps — kept them alive, kept the spirit of dignity and human decency alive throughout the Netherlands’ dark night.
And why? Why would people endanger themselves to save others? They did it for the simplest, most human of reasons. In the words of Jan Campert, poet of the Dutch resistance, they acted because “the heart could not do otherwise.” Freedom can never be extinguished — not then, not now.
* George Bush visited Leiden in the summer of 1989, three months before the Berlin Wall fell. These are excerpts from his speech in Pieterskerk. He was referring to Abigail Jenney, born in Leiden. Bush descended from the families Beekman, Loper, Hardenberg, Vanderburgh, Melyn, Van Slechtenhorst, De Boogh and Albertsen, all from the Netherlands.
