President Clinton was in a jovial mood as he welcomes a reporter into his sprawling office atop an office building at 125th Street in Harlem.

Scattered around the bookshelves are mementos of an astounding political life, but nothing inside is more wonderful than the view from his window, which looks down the length of Manhattan.

I was eager to ask the 42nd president about the controversy over the new national gathering to be convened in October by a minister of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan. Called the Millions More Movement, its aim is to bring millions of African-Americans to Washington, D.C., to train a national spotlight on the problems that beset their communities.

The announcement of the gathering drew immediate objections from the Anti-Defamation League, which has called Minister Farrakhan an anti-Semite.

Mr. Clinton, who has a solid reputation in the Jewish community – he won support from 80% of Jewish voters in 1992 and from 78% in 1996 – endorsed the Millions More Movement not long after it was announced, just as he had the Million Man March a decade ago – though at that time he denounced Minister Farrakhan as having made anti-Semitic statements.

Now Mr. Clinton seems to be much more concerned with the message rather than the messenger.

“I like the idea of a march,” Mr. Clinton said, “but I think it would also be good at the march for [the organizers] to say, ‘We want to call your attention to this problem and here’s something else you can do.'”

Mr. Clinton suggested that the threeday gathering could serve as a forum to address issues such as high incarceration rates, the disparity in health care, and low voter turnout among African-Americans.

The ADL’s national director, Abraham Foxman, sent Mr. Clinton a letter recently expressing his concerns. The ADL has also urged black leaders not to participate in the event. But Mr. Clinton seems unfazed by the ADL’s objections.

Nor is he the only white political leader to endorse this year’s movement.

The Democratic National Committee chairman, Howard Dean, has said the goals of the march are admirable and has suggested that the ADL and Minister Farrakhan sit down and start a dialogue. That is unlikely to happen, as Mr. Foxman has declined offers for a meeting with the minister.

Minister Farrakhan has said the purpose of this year’s event is to promote self-help and personal responsibility, topics the entertainer Bill Cosby has been touting in recent months. That kind of rhetoric isn’t new in the black community. It has long been a staple of black nationalism, articulated by such prominent black figures as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and W.E.B. DuBois.

While the rhetoric of self-help isn’t new, there are many of us who recognized that the Million Man March of a decade ago was symbolically transformative because black men – for so long labeled by white America as the national bogeyman – had actively decided to resist such a caricature.

The march participants vowed to register to vote, to go back to church, and to get more involved in their children’s lives. They pledged to clean up their communities, and they vowed to stay away from the criminal justice system.

I have often wondered whether some enterprising doctoral student might try to figure out whether the Million Man March played a part in the extraordinary decline in reported crime rates that were recorded nationally in the late 1990s. It certainly seemed that way. At least for a period of time following the march, crime went down in most urban areas – particularly among black gang members.

Today, however, the situation among black men, and in the black community in general, is dismal. That is the logic of Minister Farrakhan’s timing with the Millions More Movement. Even without the opposition of the ADL, Mr. Farrakhan’s movement won’t much matter if the high incarceration rates, high unemployment, and low school test performances of African-Americans don’t start to turn around.

Reflecting on the first march, Mr. Clinton said he doesn’t quite understand all the brouhaha over this year’s gathering.

“They were basically standing up for the dignity of family and asking African-American men and fathers to be more responsible,” Mr. Clinton said. “It was totally nonviolent and got a big participation and it showed, frankly, a face to a part of America that is not as sympathetic to the problems that African-Americans in the cities and the poor rural areas have.”

Mr. Watson is executive editor of the New York Amsterdam News. He can be reached at jamalwats@aol.com.