I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon. - Jimmy Carter

One of the most surprisingly controversial presidential decisions I made was to return the Crown of Saint Stephen to the people of Hungary. It was said to have been given by the Pope in the year 1000 to Stephen, the first king of Hungary, as a symbol of political and religious authority and was worn by more than fifty kings when they were vested with power. A distinctive feature was that the cross on top was bent. As Soviet troops invaded Hungary, toward the end of the Second World War, some Hungarians delivered to American troops the crown and other royal regalia, which were subsequently stored in Fort Knox alongside our nation’s gold. The Soviets still dominated Hungary when I announced my decision to return the crown. There was a furor among Hungarian-Americans and others, and I was denounced as accepting the subservience of the occupied nation. I considered the crown to be a symbol of the freedom and sovereignty of the Hungarian people. I returned it in January 1978, stipulating that the crown and insignia must be controlled by Hungarians, carefully protected, and made available for public display as soon as practicable. A duplicate of the crown was brought to The Carter Center as a gift for me in March 1998 and is on display in our presidential museum. Rosalynn and I led volunteers to build Habitat houses in Vác, Hungary, in 1996, and we were treated as honored guests of the government and escorted to the Hungarian National Museum to see the crown and the stream of citizens who were going past it, many of them reciting a prayer as they did so. We were told that more than 3 million people pay homage to the crown each year. A few years later it was moved to its permanent home, in the Hungarian Parliament Building.

In closing, I want to ask you to do one more thing, and that is that since you've bound yourselves together in a common purpose, understanding one another and overcoming the differences that exist among you, that now you try to understand the special needs of the nonhandicapped, to understand the needs of other handicapped people. It's not a time for hatred or lashing out or recrimination or condemnation of the nonhandicapped for the long delays in meeting your needs, because many people who are not handicapped can't understand those special needs. So, it's a time of education both ways, and for a realization that only when we work together--the handicapped who are leaders, the handicapped who will always be dependent, the potentially handicapped child who wants to have that prevented and the nonhandicapped adult leader--when we work together, we can continue to make even greater progress.

This last few days has been one of great activity around the White House, which is not different from most weeks. I'm putting the final touches on my own welfare reform proposal, which I will complete after meeting with Chairmen Russell Long and Al Ullman next week. I've spent a good bit of time on that recently, and we've been working on this with a great deal of enthusiasm and, I think, a good success ever since I've been in office. We hope that the House and Senate, very quickly now, will take final action on the Department of Energy. They're making good progress on the overall energy policy. I think the House is very likely to finish that work before the mandatory summer recess. I've been meeting frequently with foreign leaders. I think, so far, we've had 15 heads of state who have come here on official visits with me, and I've learned a lot from them. On my visit to Europe, I had about the same number with whom I met just a few minutes or extensively-a couple of hours, and I have a good relationship there.