(bell ringing)
- [Presenter] Please welcome
to the stage John J. DeGioia,
President of Georgetown University
(audience clapping)
and President Bill Clinton,
founder of Clinton Foundation
and 42nd President of the United States.
(audience cheering)
(DeGioia clapping)
- Good morning.
It's my pleasure and privilege to welcome
you here today for the inaugural
lecture in a new series,
The Clinton Lectures at Georgetown.
This marks the beginning of a journey
we will take together over
the course of the coming years
to learn from one of the most accomplished
global leaders of our time
and someone we're proud to
call a son of Georgetown.
(audience applauding)
President Clinton it's an
honor to welcome you back
to the Hilltop and we're deeply grateful
for your sustained
commitment to Georgetown,
for all you've contributed
to our community
throughout the decades,
and of course for the extraordinary impact
that you have had throughout
our nation and our world.
I wish to welcome our colleagues here
from the Clinton Foundation
and the Clinton Global Initiative
and I wish to welcome everyone
watching on our webcast,
especially our friends at
the University of Arkansas
Clinton School of Public Service.
After President Clinton
delivers his lecture,
he will take questions from both
our students here at Georgetown
as well as students
from the Clinton school.
Clara Gustafson,
a senior in our School of Foreign Service
and our past president of
the Georgetown University
Student Association
will join the President on stage
to ask him your questions.
This is an historic day on our campus.
We celebrate the inaugural lecture
in a series that we
believe will have a deep
and meaningful impact,
not just within our University community,
but throughout the Academy and the world
of policy, politics, and global affairs.
We're privileged here to call one of the
greatest public servants
and political practitioners of our time,
a member of the Georgetown family.
From his days as an
International Affairs major
in the School of Foreign Service,
through his years as a
Rhodes scholar at Oxford
and a law student at Yale,
to his tenure as Governor of Arkansas,
to his eight years in the White House,
and his extraordinary
post-presidency and work through
the Clinton Global Initiative,
President Clinton has
demonstrated an unmatched
political mind and ability
to bring people together
to forge real tangible change
and to discern with extraordinary clarity
lasting solutions to
our most pressing needs.
For example, during his presidency,
he helped to reform the welfare system,
strengthen environmental regulations,
and turned a massive federal
budget deficit into a surplus.
He also helped to expand
international trade,
intervened to end ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia,
and to promote a framework
for peace in Northern Ireland.
In more recent years
through the innovative model
of the Clinton Global Initiative,
he has brought together more
than 150 heads of state,
20 Nobel prize laureates,
and hundreds of leaders
from multiple sectors
to address some of our
worlds greatest challenges.
To date,
the Clinton Global Initiative members
have made more than 2300
commitments which have
improved the lives of more
than 400 million people
in more than 180 countries.
President Clinton represents the very best
of our tradition at Georgetown,
a tradition that is guided by our Catholic
and Jesuit identity
and that calls us to seek deeper
understanding of ourselves
and our world and to use that knowledge
for the betterment of humankind.
One of the great forums for this work
is a lecture series such as this one.
In these forums,
we look to eminent leaders
thinkers to distill
their experiences and to
share with us their insights,
lessons learned and vision for the future.
President Clinton himself offered such
a series of lectures
here once before in 1991,
as then Governor of Arkansas
and as a candidate for President,
he presented three new covenant speeches
to students in Gaston Hall
on responsibility in rebuilding
the American community,
on economic change and
on American security.
He's also returned here many more times
throughout his presidency
and post-presidency
speaking to our community
about such topics
as the responsibility of citizenship
and the Clinton-Gore
economics of the 1990s.
Through the series we launch today,
President Clinton will
continue the conversation
he's had with us throughout the decades
and will also continue the tradition
of so many iconic members of our community
who have shared the wisdom of
their careers and their lives
through defining courses and lectures.
President Clinton has recalled such icons
from his time as a student here:
Carol Quigley and his
lectures on public authority,
Father Joseph Sebes and his
classes on world cultures,
and Ulrich Allers on the
history of political thought.
In fact it was Carol Quigley
who coined the concept,
future preference,
the act of sacrificing the
present for the future.
President Clinton called upon this idea
in his acceptance speech for
the Democratic nomination
and it's an idea that would serve as
a guiding theme throughout his career.
In 1993,
he addressed members
of the diplomatic corps
from the steps of Old North,
explaining that Professor
Quigley taught him, quote,
"That the future can be
better than the present
"and that each of us has a personal,
"moral responsibility to make it so."
President Clinton has lived these words
throughout his career
and he joins us today
coming full circle from
his days as a student
to begin a series that
continues this tradition
of great lectures within our community.
We're deeply honored by
his presence here today
and by his continued
commitment to Georgetown,
to our nation and to our global family.
Ladies and gentlemen,
it's my pleasure and
privilege to introduce to you
President Bill Clinton.
(audience applauding)
It's all yours.
- Thank you very much, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, President DeGioia.
Thank you for the walk
down memory lane that you
gave me.
I want to thank in advance
Clara Gustafson for
presenting your questions.
I told her she could
ask whatever she wanted.
I often say the great thing about being
a former president is you can
say whatever you please,
(audience laughing)
and sad thing is, nobody
has to care anymore.
(audience laughing)
I want to thank
my friends who are here,
my Georgetown classmates and
members of my administration,
people I have known for many years,
sometimes in both categories.
I am delighted to be back here.
The speeches I gave at Georgetown in
late 1991,
setting the stage for my
presidential campaign and also for
actually what I would do if I got elected,
were
very important,
not only to shape the
campaign, but for me.
They forced all of us
who were trying to win that election
to think about
where we were, where we wanted to go,
how we propose to get there.
I thought it might be helpful
to the students here in this
talk.
It's mainly directly to you.
I understand some of you showed up at 4:30
to make sure you got a seat
and I hope you didn't also get pneumonia.
But
(audience laughing)
I'm honored that you took trouble to come.
You can see that I have prepared this.
No one has written this for me.
I have thought a lot about this and
what I would like to do
is to talk about organizing a life
for service and the public good,
whether as an elected official,
a career public servant,
or someone in private life who wants to do
public good as a private citizen.
I have given a lot of thought to this
and I've had a lot of time to do it.
In just a few days I'll be
coming back to Georgetown
for my 45th reunion.
Those 45 years pass quickly.
I am
grateful that
a whole set of chance circumstances
brought me here today.
I only applied to one
college when I was in high school.
I knew I wanted to come here
(chuckles) and I wasn't
accepted until June.
(audience laughing)
That's not the June.
That's the June before the...
(audience laughing)
And (chuckles) I think when I showed up...
As a matter of fact,
the first Jesuit I met
said,
"What does a Southern
Baptist from Arkansas
"with no foreign language except Latin
"doing in this school of foreign service?"
And I said, "Father,
"we'll just have to figure
it out as we go along."
(audience laughing)
I knew why I wanted to come here.
When I was 16, and I'll
say more about this later,
I literately made a decision that
although there was no basis
based on my family or circumstances
to think I'll succeed,
that I wanted to go
into politics if I could
and the typical route to
that when I was a young man
was to go to the state university,
make all the friends you could,
and then look for your chance.
I thought it was more
important to be well prepared
and I felt the world was getting smaller
and that I needed to
understand things things
that I could never learn
if I never left the borders of my state.
I had come to Washington
in the summer of 1963.
I was with the American
Legion Program Boys Nation
and I wanted to come back in
the School of Foreign Service.
It had the reputation of
being the best and also
most cosmopolitan undergraduate
program in the city,
and so I just applied
and I waited and waited and
(chuckles) waited, and waited,
(audience laughing)
and they let me in.
I'm very glad they did
and I'm glad I came.
After I left Georgetown,
I spent five more years, sort
of preparing to live my life.
I went to
Oxford as President DeGioia
said and then I came back
to law school at Yale and
that's where I met Hillary and
then I went home and briefly taught
in the Arkansas Law School and
started my political career.
With the interruption of
two losses and campaigns,
I was involved in politics for 27 years
and then after I left,
I set up the Clinton Foundation and
I've done that since
and that was interesting to me because
Hillary was the person in our
family who was always involved
in foundation activities,
in doing public good as a private citizen,
working in the legal clinic
when we were at Yale,
setting up the first
legal clinic we ever had
in the Northwest part of our state
when we came home to Arkansas,
organizing a group called
The Arkansas Advocates
for Families and Children
which is still is doing well today
in our state which was, when we came home,
49th in per capita income,
taking the Children's Hospital to
one of the 10 biggest children's hospitals
in the country.
She lived this stuff
and she was on all kinds of other boards.
When I was President,
she got me to start meeting
with civil society leaders
as I travel to countries around the world,
not just to meet with the leaders
and the leaders of the
political opposition,
but the non-government
organization leaders.
I did it in India, in Turkey,
and various African countries
and in Latin America.
This was really her life and it was one
I had never imagined living.
I'll never forget
sometime in the first year
after I left the White House,
I got up in the morning and I was shaving
and I looked in the mirror and I said,
"My God, I have become an NGO."
(audience laughing)
(chuckles)
So anyway,
I say that because
I've had the opportunity to
see from the grassroots up
how politics works through dramatic
changes in our country's life.
The year I graduated
from Georgetown, 1968,
was probably the most tumultuous year
since the end of World War II,
except for 2001 in 9/11,
perhaps even more than
the tumult that occurred
in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Then I've had the opportunity to
start and attempt to build
a non-government organization
with a very specific focus
who works in more than 100
countries around the world.
So this whole thing is very, I mean,
extremely interesting to me,
and
especially these last 12 years,
I've really had a good time.
People always ask me,
"Don't you miss being President?,"
and I tell the truth.
Once in a while, I do.
Once in a while,
when there's some
problem that I think I
know a lot about or some
dilemma that I feel particularly
well-suited to solve,
I think I kinda like to do that.
But I think it is foolish,
and I hope all of you will remember this,
it is foolish to spend
one day of your life
wishing you could do anything
you can no longer do.
Our days are limited.
Like I said, these 45
years passed quickly.
So it's always best to focus on
what's at hand, and what you can do,
and to imagine,
and sometimes reimagine
the task that you're involved with.
I really had a great time doing this,
but I realize I am part
of something much bigger.
One of the great good news stories of
the turn-of-the-century
in the early 21st century
is the explosion of the
non-governmental movement.
The United States has
about a million foundations
of various sizes,
down to community foundations
up to The Gates foundation,
which is not only the wealthiest,
but arguably the best.
They do wonderful work.
That doesn't count the 355,000
religious institutions
all across our country
of all different faiths
that try to do public good
as a part of their mission.
Half of those foundations have
been established since 1995
and you see it in India.
Half a million active NGOs based in India
and there are a lot more registered
that may or may not be activated,
I think depending on
the financial needs of
the people who registered.
China has about a quarter
of a million registered
and probably at least that
many more not registered
for fear of political reprisals
in one kind or another.
Russia used to have 150,000,
but Mister Putin seems to
think they're a threat,
and in some ways they are,
ways that by and large are quite positive.
I remember
thinking about the freedom
component of the NGO movement
when (chuckles) there was a
hilarious cartoon that appeared
in many newspapers in America
at the end of
middle of my second term
when I was in a long-running battle
with the Republicans special
counsel, Kenneth Starr.
So
in this cartoon,
I'm talking to the president
of China, Jiang Zemin,
and I said,
"You know, you ought to
allow more political liberty.
"In our country these people
you keep putting in jail,
"they'd be out there speaking
on the street corner."
He said, "Yeah, and in out country,
"Kenneth Starr would be in
jail making tennis shoes."
(audience laughing)
(chuckles)
That was the (chuckles) cartoon.
So (chuckles) it was really funny.
(audience laughing)
It made me reconsider my
whole position on liberty.
But anyway, no.
The point I'm trying to make is
this NGO movement has also
been a thorn in the side of
governments and their like anybody else.
They're not always right,
but they basically have
pushed the envelope
of liberty and political responsiveness
in a way that I think is very positive.
So now having had the benefit of
about 40 years of experience
in politics and in NGOs,
I have reached a firm conclusion
that 21st century citizenship requires
every thoughtful person to
try to do some public good
even if they are in private life.
When we all came here,
almost half century ago now,
the definition of good citizenship was
pretty much something like this.
You should stay in
school as long as you can
and do as well as you
can, and when you get out,
you need to go to work.
If you have a student
loan, you should repay it.
You should try to do a good
job at whatever your work is
and if you start a family,
you should try to do a good job of that
because raising children is
society's most important work.
You should pay your taxes
and otherwise obey the law
and be informed enough to cast
an intelligent vote at election time.
Now even then they were
lots of people involved in
public service as private citizens.
There was the local United Way,
that people volunteering in their schools.
There was
wealthy people would give money
to art institutions and things like that,
but nothing like today.
It was viewed as a nice thing,
but not the imperative of every citizen.
Today with the explosion of
Internet giving,
of cell phone giving through text,
the tsunami was the first great
international disaster
where the United States
gave a billion dollars
and the median contribution was $56
cause half the people
gave over the Internet.
In Haiti after the earthquake,
the American people gave $1 billion.
The median contribution was $26
because so many people texted
Haiti and then a number for the Red Cross,
or the Clinton-Bush Haiti fund,
or any number of other things.
The empowerment of
technology has also imposed
more possibilities and
more responsibilities.
So I have reached the conclusion that
whatever your politics and
whatever you do with your life,
21st-century citizenship
requires us to add to that
litany that I brought with
me in my head to Georgetown,
some way of doing public
good as a private citizen,
around the corner or around the world,
in office or out.
And so
what I wanted to do with
this series of talks
of which I think there will be four
is to talk about how to compose and live
a life where service is important.
I think that
it is so important
because the world is so interdependent.
It is so full of opportunities.
Did you see the other day that
two more planets sighted
a constellation far
outside our solar system,
appear to be far enough
away from their sun,
dense enough to support life?
I'd love to be your age just to figure out
if I could live long enough to find out
If we are in the universe alone.
I almost give up being president
to take my chances on one
again just to find out.
(audience laughing)
We have constant new discoveries
in particle physics thanks to the
superconducting supercollider
in CERN in Switzerland,
which should've been in Texas
but I lost it as part of
the economic agreement
that brought the economy back in 1993.
The human genome
discoveries and applications
are already stunning.
I was at St. Jude's Hospital in Memphis,
the biggest Children's
Cancer Center in the country
where they open source
all their developments as
soon as they have been.
They send them to every
cancer hospital in the world
on every continent
and they had just discovered because
of their ability to do genomic testing
the answer to a terrible riddle.
There was a relatively rare but extremely
dangerous form of childhood brain cancer
for which there was a drug
already approved by the FDA
which was 100% effective, 100% cure rate,
except when it wasn't
and it seemed to be causing the
death of all the other kids,
about 25% of the people
who had this condition
and because they were able
to do genomic testing,
they found that in the cluster of kids
that were not responding
positively to the medicine,
there was a different set of genomes.
And then, almost as an act of God,
they just decided to
give the minority group
that were all perishing,
kids that came in that had that profile,
half a dose of the approved medicine.
They all got well.
Then they said,
"Well, maybe we were
giving everybody too much,"
so then they gave the half the
dose to the majority group,
and it didn't help any of them.
They had to have the whole dose.
The point is this
apparently simple solution
was made possible
by the exploration
of the billions of
genomes in the human body.
I spent $5 billion of your money
(audience laughing)
to sequence the human genome.
It now cost them $5000 a
person to do the tests.
It will soon be down to 3500
and the hospital told
me they expect it to be
at a thousand less than five years.
So it's an exciting time to be alive.
But we all know the world
is full of many challenges.
There is too much
inequality and instability.
It's a terrible constraint
on growth, and opportunity,
and investment
and there aren't enough
jobs being created,
not even for college
graduates across the world.
One of the reasons for the demonstrations
of young people in Tahrir Square is that
the Egyptian higher
education system is producing
400,000 college graduates a year
and nowhere near 400,000
jobs for college graduates.
Mexico, under the recently
departed President Calderon,
set up 140
tuition-free public universities,
which last year produced,
in a country whose population is about
a little more than 30% of ours,
113,000 engineers.
Stunning achievement,
but will there be enough jobs for them
and will there be enough investment
so that the poor will also
find their path out of poverty?
We have to do something about this.
There's too much inequality
and too much instability.
Look at what happened
with the financial crisis.
You want some instability.
You want the possibility of failure.
Otherwise,
the successes in the free market won't be
rewarded properly and invested in.
But if there's too much instability
and too much inequality,
the whole thing shuts down.
The world we're living in
is clearly unsustainable.
We have serious Atlantic warming.
Serious melting this year.
There was a 90% of the area of Greenland,
which has 8% of the world's freshwater,
90% of it melted last
summer, had some melt.
Typically for more than 100 years
since we've been measuring,
the maximum is 50%.
The oceans are becoming
more acidic because
they're trying to absorb more carbon
to help us stay in balance
and it's interrupting a
lot of the fishing stocks
of the world,
and fish provide protein,
the main source of protein for
more than a billion people.
So for the last two or three years,
it's the first time in history
that more fish had been grown
on fish farming operations
than caught naturally in
the oceans, the lakes,
the streams, the rivers of the world.
There is as yet no
international conference
saying what they can and cannot be fed,
as a result of which
we're going to have bad consequences,
the details of which we don't yet know.
So the way we
produce and consume energy
and other local resources
have put us on an unsustainable
path to the future.
I don't know how many of you
saw the New York Times article
the last two weeks about
how many Chinese parents
are desperate to find a way
to leave China because
their children are all getting
asthma and they're sick,
and how many who have the money to do so,
put their children in schools
where the athletic fields
are covered with tents,
these great balloon-like tents
with serious air filters in them
so the children can get what
passes for outdoor exercise.
I could give you lots of other examples.
But the point is the world is
a washed in too much inequality,
and instability and unsustainability.
And finally,
in this modern world where we can
look at planets 120 million
light years away and think
that might be my great
great grandchild's home,
where we can imagine further
advances in the human genome
and nanotechnology
that I also spent a lot of your money on,
(audience laughing)
allowing all of us to have
four physicals a year by just stepping
into canisters that will
measure us up and down
and find all the malignancies before
they can possibly be
big enough to kill us.
I'll make you a prediction.
Within 15 years,
one of the great debates
in medical practice
will be
when to zap out tumors
because all of us have cancerous
cells in our bodies all the time
and our bodies just
dispose of most of them.
So it's an amazing time.
But what is really tearing the world up
are the oldest divisions,
the religious divisions,
the political division.
Yesterday we read that there might be
a new civil war in Iraq
because finally the Sunnis,
having rejected the extremism
of Al Qaeda in Iraq,
are now organizing around the old Baathist
ideology and people who are there
and they don't think the Shia
majority have been fair to them.
We just read today,
this morning when I got up the story
the Nigerian military virtually wiping out
a village in northern Nigeria
in their ongoing war against Boko Haram,
the militant Muslim organization
which feels that it's people
have not been fairly treated
in the Confederation, which is Nigeria,
and on, and on, and on.
You know all this.
But it is very interesting
that in spite of all this globalization,
in spite of our being thrown together,
in spite of the opportunities that I see,
in spite of the diversity
I see in this crowd,
we still see the world
put at risk when things don't work out
so well in America for
two young brothers from Chechnya
who were given a chance to
get an education and come here
and apparently it didn't work out so well,
and so you had the
Boston Marathon incident.
A young man who tried to blow up the
car bomb in Times Square
a couple of years ago,
he and his wife both
got university degrees
in this country and were
made to feel welcomed in it.
For a while,
they had a good job, and a home,
and a mortgage like all of
us do when we start out.
And then it didn't work out and
he decided an appropriate response was to
go back to Pakistan and
learn how to make a bomb and
take it to Times Square.
One of the things we learned
in the genome is that,
the study,
is that all people are 99.5% the same.
Even the gender differences are rooted
in just 0.5% of our genome.
We got people in this room
today from all over the world
and if you just look around,
every difference you can
see between somebody else
and yourself is rooted in 1/2
of 1% of your genomic makeup,
and yet, every one of us,
even those of us who
are fairly apolitical,
spend 99.5% of our time worrying about
that 1/2 of a percent
of us that's different.
Now we can all laugh about it.
I wish you were taller,
or thinner, or faster.
If I'd had a four foot vertical jump,
I might have had a different life.
(audience laughing)
But the differences do matter.
That tiny bit of difference
gave Albert Einstein
a brain bigger than most people imagine
could be carried safely
inside a human skull
and he put it to pretty good use.
I could give you lots of other examples.
I can say that
I was 99.5% the same as Mohandas Gandhi,
but he had a pretty remarkable life with
whatever was in that little
0.5% that was different.
On the other hand,
most of the truly (chuckles)
great people who had ever lived
taught us how to connect
the little bit of us
that is different with the big part of us
we have in common.
So you are going to live in a world
where you have to figure out
how to reconcile all these challenges
with all the opportunities
and I believe you will
have no choice but to do
public service,
whether you're in private life or not.
A thing that it will make a big difference
for two reasons.
One.
There's always a gap between what
the private sector can produce
and the government can provide
that you need non-governmental
groups to try to fill.
Two.
In the poorest countries
systems have to be built
and the richest countries'
systems have ossified
and had to be reformed
and very often, it can't be
done entirely from within.
So the new 21st-century mission
for non-governmental organizations,
the whole reason for
being of our foundation
is to figure out how to work
with government and with
the private sector to do
things faster, cheaper, better,
to break through the limits
that the current arrangements impose
on people all over the world.
But to do any of that as well as possible,
it is necessary
to think about what you're
doing and have some idea.
It seems to me that if you
want to take service seriously,
whether you want to be a
political candidate or just
a person who does right,
there are four requirements.
You should be obsessively
interested in people,
especially people who
are different from you.
You should wanna understand them.
You should wanna understand
how they perceive the world
and how they perceive what they need
and what their dreams are.
Two.
You should care about
principles about
the end of all this.
What is the purpose of service?
What's the role of government?
What's the role of NGOs?
How do you organize this in your mind?
Why are you doing this?
Three.
What are the policies
that you believe will
advance those purposes?
And four.
Whether you're running
for anything or not,
what are the politics of the situation?
How are you gonna turn
your good intentions
into real changes?
So I want to talk about people, purpose,
policies and politics.
But to me, the most
important thing is the first.
Most people get in real
trouble and abuse power
when they forget that the
purpose of their power
is not to impose their will on others,
but to let other people be empowered
to live their own lives
better or as I always say,
to have better stories.
So I wanna start with that.
People ask me all the time,
"How in the world
"did you ever get elected President?
(chuckles) That's a mystery to me too.
(audience laughing)
Only two governors of small
states have ever been elected
and as I say when I was born in Arkansas
at the end of World War II,
I think our per capita income was 56%
of the national average.
Only Mississippi was poor.
No one in my direct family
had ever been to college.
My father was killed in a
car wreck before I was born.
My mother went back to nursing school.
My grandparents raised me till I was four
with a lot of help from my
great uncle and his wife.
People talk about that
like it was a disadvantage.
It was actually probably the
key to all my later success.
You can't imagine life without
a cell phone and a computer.
I was born to a (chuckles) dual
family without a television,
without even a private telephone line.
We were on what we call party lines.
You heard about all the snoops today?
Your neighbors could just
pick up the phone and listen
to who you were chewing out
(audience laughing)
and you had to wait till your
neighbor got off the phone.
So it was by conventional standards poor,
and it was deeply segregated.
But in both the black
and white communities,
families were more coherent
up and down the economic
spectrum than they are today.
There were more two-parent households.
There was less divorce.
There was more
character building, if you will, at home.
I have employed at one time or another
four members of the Kearney family,
an African-American
family from a tiny town
of a thousand in Southeast Arkansas.
There were 19 of them:
17 kids, a mom and dad.
The dad was a sharecropper.
The mother was a domestic.
13 of the 17 kids got college degrees.
The other four did real well.
One of them joked that
he made more than almost
all of his college graduate siblings.
All of them had a first
name that started with a J.
When I made the chairman
of the public service
commission in Arkansas,
he graduated from Harvard
in Harvard Law school.
One was my diarist in the White House.
One worked for me in the
Attorney's General's office
and another one I gave
a big appointment to.
I always said as long as I got
the Kearney family to vote for me,
I couldn't lose any election.
(audience laughing)
They had a family reunion
that included a stop in the
White House when I was there
and 15 of these 17 kids were still alive
and so was the dad at 102.
I say that because
I could give you lots
of other examples that
people are not defined just
by their per capita income
and there are
incredibly powerful,
dignified
people who manage to compose
a life out of their poverty
and from them we can learn
how to help them and their
children get out of poverty,
and this is true all over the world.
My great grandfather
whom I used to love and go and stay with,
the longest living man
in my (chuckles) family
who lived to be 76,
everybody since then,
nobody's made it as long as I have.
So I like to emulate my great-grandfather,
but it seems impossible.
He was never out of
overalls and hobnailed boots
and he lived in an old
house out in the woods
in the country that was a wooden house,
unpainted, built up off the ground.
You had to have a storm cellar in Arkansas
because it was the turning
the capital of America then.
It was a hole in the ground
with a cot and an oil lantern.
I used to go down there very often
accompanied by snakes that
would slither in and out.
He was a very, very good man,
as was my great-grandmother, a good woman.
I learned a lot from them,
things that are still
valuable to me today.
But most of the lessons
I got from childhood,
I got from my grandfather
and my great uncle.
My grandfather in the Great Depression,
to give you an idea of how
different then and now was,
even though a lot of
you may be worried about
student loan debt, and
finding jobs, and all this.
In the Great Depression,
25% of Americans were out of work
and my grandfather worked on an ice truck.
Back then refrigerators
were called ice boxes
and they actually took ice blocks
and put them in part of the refrigerator
and kept the rest of the food
cold.
So my grandfather who
weighed about 150 pounds
carried 200 pound blocks
of ice on his back
with thongs
that he hooked under the
ice and put it on his back.
So fast forward.
This is why stories are important.
1976, I was running for
attorney general of Arkansas.
I went back to this little
town where I was born
and I went to see this guy who's a judge
and he was an elected judge
so he could be active in politics.
He said, "I have to be for you,
"whether I wanted to or not.
I said, "Why?
He said, "Because in the
Depression when I was 10 years old,
"your grandfather, who
had no money himself,
"still hired boys like me
to ride on that ice truck,
"one a day with him, and
he'd pay us a quarter,"
and we thought a quarter was
all the money in the world.
He said, "As a matter of fact,
"the first time I got paid
"when your granddad gave me a quarter,
"I asked him if I could
instead have two dimes
"and a nickel so I would
feel richer walking home."
(audience laughing)
And he said, "Walking
home I started shaking
"the coins in my pocket and
one of the dimes fell out
"into the grass by the sidewalk."
And he said,
"I looked for that thing for an hour
"and a half until I had to go home.
"It got dark, I never found it."
And he said,
"I never go by that spot
that I still don't stop
"to look for that dime."
(audience laughing)
I say that because we
take certain things for
granted and
I see that because
it's very important for you,
if you want to do this work,
to realize something I learned from
my grandfather and from my uncle
which is that everybody has
some kind of story like that.
My uncle had a sixth grade
education and 180 IQ, at least.
He was the smartest man in my family and
was a fireman and a farmer.
I used to go out even after
everybody moved to towns
in Arkansas after the Depression.
People remember the Depression
and so if they could afford it,
keep an acre of land out in the country
and grow as much of their
own food as they could and
I used to go out there when I
was a kid and farm with them.
Then we'd have these meals
and he was one of the funniest
people I've ever seen,
and his kids were funny.
I would sit there with them
and laugh until I cried,
just listen to him talk about
ordinary people in our town:
the guy that ran the grocery
store, the bookstore,
somebody that worked at the
Factory that my aunt worked at.
Why am I telling you this?
Because people ask me all the time,
"Where did you learn
to speak?, and I said,
"I learned to speak by
learning to listen."
In our family, nobody
could afford a vacation.
There was one movie theater in our town.
It didn't change movies very often.
My family had hunting, fishing,
and dinner meals
and the meals were a feast because
people just told stories.
When you were a kid like me,
you couldn't tell a story unless
you proved you could listen to one.
So somebody tell a story and then
my uncle or my aunt would look to me.
"Do you understand that?
I said, "I think so.
"What did you just hear?"
Once you did that two or three times,
then if you had something
to tell, you could tell it.
But what I learned in
this whole thing is that
everybody has a story
and everybody's life
has things about it that
are inherently interesting
and valuable to the rest of us,
even though most people can't get it out
because they're too self-conscious,
or shy or whatever.
But the point is,
in the beginning I learned
that you can't really
speak unless you can first listen,
not in a way that people can hear.
I see it today when I see a lot of
these verbal spats going
on here in Washington.
Whenever you see fit,
wherever it's coming from,
ask yourself, "Did this
person say that thing
"to genuinely be heard
"by people who disagree with him or her?
Or, "Did this person say
that thing in that way
"because they wanted to be on television
"or because they wanted to
reassure their own crowd
"that they were carrying
the spear forward?"
In a free society,
if you want democracy to work
people have to be able to hear each other
and whether someone can
hear you depends in part
on what you say,
but maybe even more on how you say it
and whether you have
first listened to them.
So I learned all these stories.
When my great uncle was nearly 90,
he could still remember
the names of hunting dogs
(chuckles) he had had in the 1930s:
who sold him the dogs,
the way he bargained for them,
how they ran
in the springtime when the
cold and the frost lifted.
And to me,
I could've been listening
to Pavarotti sing
because of the way he told the story
and he made his life have
meaning and interest.
So this per capita income was low
and I'm not trying to romanticize poverty.
I would like everybody who gets rid of it.
That's not what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to get you
not to belittle people
who know less than you
do, have less than you do,
or less credential than you are.
There is a reason why
the Jesuits have spent
centuries now serving the poor.
There's a reason why all the Scriptures
of all the different faiths acknowledge
that what we have in common
in our soul is important
and it helps me today
when we try to help farmers
in Rwanda and Malawi,
to have heard the stories
of people who seem to be poor,
but in fact were rich when I was young.
Don't ever romanticize poverty.
It is way overrated.
But don't denigrate the
people who live in it
because there is a mountain
of evidence that there
is a lot of dignity there,
and I saw those stories when I was young.
When I was a little
older I moved to a town
that was the polar opposite
to the one I was born in.
Hot Springs was a National Park,
the first land set aside under
Andrew Jackson as a national reserve,
before there were any national parks.
Thomas Jefferson sent
a friend of his there
to look at these
hot sulfur springs to see
what their properties were
because they had people bathing in them
since the 16th century when
Hernando de Soto came there
and thought he had discovered
the fountain of youth.
When World War II ended
and Eastern Europe was being taken over,
a large number of people left
and found their way to my little hometown.
So there was in the middle of
Arkansas where the doctor
running a restaurant
who was from Czechoslovakia,
with vibrant Greek Orthodox
community with two synagogues,
with the Muslims coming from
Syria and elsewhere all
in my little hometown.
So I saw a little microcosm of the world
even though I was living
in the segregated South
with all of its problems.
I was at that time still
trying to figure out
what was going on and I was
without a television since I was 10,
but I still learned more from the stories
of the kids I went to school with,
the people I saw on the
street and my teachers.
And I
would just like to
just give you a flavor
(chuckles) of what it was like.
I had a science teacher and
I've told this story many times,
but it's the most important
thing I can tell you.
I had a science teacher
in the eighth grade
who was a retired coach
and to put it charitably,
he was not a handsome man.
(audience laughing)
He was overweight, and his
clothes were too tight,
and he had coke-bottled thick glasses,
and he smoked cheap cigars
out of a plastic cigar holder
which squinched his mouth up.
He had a beautiful wife
who was a history teacher
and she had a beautiful sister
who was my geometry teacher.
So the family was there and
they were terrific people.
But the old science
teacher (chuckles) said
near the end of our course when I was 13.
This was 53 years ago.
I remember this like it was yesterday.
He said,
"Kids,
"you're not gonna remember
anything I taught you in science.
"So if you don't remember anything else,
"you just remember this.
"Every morning I get up
and I go into the bathroom,
"put shaving cream on my face,
"shave, wash the shaving cream off,
"I look into the mirror and I say,
"'Vernon, you're beautiful.'
(audience laughing)
He said, "You gotta remember that.
"Everybody wants to
believe they're beautiful,"
everybody, and he said,
"If you remember that,
"it'll keep you out of trouble
"and bring a lot of
possibilities to your life."
53 years later,
that is what I remember
about my science class.
(audience laughing)
In my hometown
all those years ago, 50 years ago,
I met the first person I knew was gay.
He was a teacher.
It was unthinkable 50 years
ago that he would come out,
but all of his students
knew and we loved him
and there was a sort
of practiced hypocrisy,
at least in my hometown,
about it that as long as you didn't say,
you would be accepted.
It was an interesting thing
and it started half a
century of thinking about
identity in a way I had never
thought about it before.
When I came to Georgetown,
I was most influenced by the fact that
for the first time in my life I
was around students from everywhere,
including
places in America I've
never been like New York.
My roommate at Georgetown, I thought,
"Oh I'm going to liberal Georgetown
"and I'm going to escape
Arkansas which was (mumbles)."
I was afraid vote for Barry
Goldwater over Linda Johnson.
I get to my room in
Loyola Hall, 225 Loyola,
and there's a Goldwater for
President bumper sticker
(audience laughing)
on my door.
Everybody thought I would
be a southern redneck.
I was for Johnson.
I thought, "Oh my god, I came
all the way up here for this?"
(audience laughing)
My roommate was an Irish
Catholic guy from Long Island
whose father was a member
of the conservative party
and elected judge.
He actually thought Goldwater
was a little too liberal.
(audience laughing)
Fast-forward, I lived with
that guy for four years.
I still talk to him all the time.
I'll see him at the reunion.
He's as good a person as
I ever met in my life.
One day his politics came to
conform with his private life.
Through a set of family misfortunes,
his wife's sister had a
child with cerebral palsy
and she couldn't raise.
My friend and his wife took her in
and raised her as their own.
She's built a successful
and pretty independent life.
When he was a pilot living
in Orange County, California,
their idea of a vacation
was to go to Mexico and help
poor people build their houses.
He called me one day when
I was having my fight
with the pre-tea party tea party
(audience laughing)
one night in '95 and I was
trying to decide to veto their budget and
everybody's said, "Oh, if you
do this, they'll kill you.
"They just won at Congress.
"You'll be a one term-er."
One night this man,
a book I might've judged by its cover,
called me and he said,
"Let me get this straight.
He said, "I'm an airline
pilot with a good living.
"The budget the Congress proposes
"wants to give me a tax cut
"in return for which
they would cut spending
"on programs that help
disabled kids like my daughter?
I said, "Yeah, that's it.
He said, "For example,
he said, "my daughter's best friend
"who also has cerebral palsy,
they go to school together,
"her mother is a minimum-wage worker
"who travelers one hour a day to work
"and one hour a day home
"on public transportation.
"Now as I understand this, Bill,
"it's gonna cut the
transportation subsidies
"so her bus ride will be more expensive.
"It's gonna cut subsidies for
"her child's wheelchair and shoes,"
and by the way,
then, at least,
children with cerebral palsy regularly had
to get about six pairs of quite
expensive shoes every year.
"They're gonna take all that
away to give me a tax cut?
I said, "That's right.
"That's what's gonna happen.
He said, "Bill, that's immoral.
"You can't let it happen.
"You gotta veto that budget."
My friend's Catholic values overcame
his political upbringing.
His story overwhelmed
the circumstances under which he lived.
I did
and when I got elected President,
I may have been the only
Democrat he ever voted for,
but
(audience laughing)
it was no longer the case.
He saw a live child he had taken to raise
who had a friend who is
just like his daughter,
except she had no money,
and he knew what would really happen.
So it wasn't a theoretical discussion.
The story pierced his
heart and changed his mind.
I could give you lots of other stories.
Father Hanser just
celebrated his 75th birthday.
He actually took me to Howard
Johnson's for a hamburger
when I was a freshman
and asked me if I ever
thought about becoming a Jesuit.
(audience laughing)
I asked him if I had to
become a Catholic first.
(audience laughing)
(audience clapping)
He said, "What do you mean?
I said, "I'm a Southern Baptist.
"I'm not eligible.
(audience laughing)
He said, "I've read your test papers.
"It's not possible.
"You think like a Catholic."
(audience laughing)
So we agreed it was only
because of his overpowering
skills as a professor that
he had reworked my mind,
but nonetheless I was who I was and
I didn't become a priest and
I think life worked out
pretty well for both of us.
(audience laughing)
But
I love the Jesuits for reasons that
I don't know would even be popular today.
There were two Hungarian professors
who'd gone to the fourth grade together
in a little town in Hungary.
One taught International Economics.
One Father Sebes later became
the Dean of the School of Foreign Service
and he taught world religion.
It's a class of 200 students.
All non-Catholics took it.
It was affectionately called
Buddhism for Baptists.
(audience laughing)
At the end (chuckles) of the course,
Father Sebes gave an oral
exam in 12 languages.
He said, "If you don't feel comfortable
"writing this exam,
"I'll give you
"an oral,"
and he started reeling off the languages
he would given oral in.
I thought, "You know,
"I would like to be
educated in a tradition that
"used that much of my brain."
Father Zurini taught Economics.
He taught five classes
of sophomore economics
with 40 people is how I remember
and you had to sit in an assigned seat.
Attendance was mandatory
until Thanksgiving,
after which you never had to come back,
and if you did, you could
sit wherever you want.
I am not making this story up.
(audience laughing)
Five (mumbles).
So flash forward, we're at the
end of the second semester,
and I am walking down the hall with
one of my classmates named Neil Grimaldi
who later hated overseas
people for my campaign.
So Grimaldi had...
Zurini, he said,
"Can I come see you?
"I'm worried about the exam.
And Zurini looked at him and said,
"Well, what do you expect?
"You've missed three classes."
He had, from the beginning of
school through Thanksgiving,
memorized every student
and developed a system which
would enable him to tell him
which of the 200 were there
and where they had been.
I couldn't believe it.
For a long time I thought it
was some sort of magic trick.
(audience laughing)
So 10 years later when I was Governor,
I came back to see Father Zurini
and I was in his office.
I just ran into him, so he said,
"Come up and have a talk,"
so I'm in his office.
This woman called him who
was a year older than me
and asked him for a job reference.
He said, "What's the job?,
and he told her, he said,
"Yes, send me the information.
"I'll write you a job reference.
He hangs that phone and he
said, "Do you remember her?
I said, "Yes.
"I didn't know her well, but I do.
He said, "You know,
"she made a B the first semester
"and a B plus the second
sentence semester."
No computers.
So he's got this card
catalog stack with him,
this card deck,
and he goes down to her class
and pulls out her card and shows it to me
and she made a B and B plus.
I wanted to be able to
think 1/10th that well.
There was a big movement at the end of my
time at Georgetown to
liberalize the curriculum,
which I think has been done (chuckles).
You need to know, all my
classmates and I were here,
we did not have a single elective
until the second semester
of our junior year,
no electives.
And because of the influence
of these professors,
I was opposed to changing it,
which made me about as popular
as you name it
(audience laughing)
with my fellow classmates.
Well, I became a lifetime
friend of Father Sebes.
After he left Georgetown,
he went to the Vatican
and lived in a little room
and did his own research.
When he died,
I got a lovely letter from a young
priest who found him who said he kept a
roll of letters from his former students
and mine,
the letters I wrote to him when I was
Governor were in there
and he sent them to me,
copies of them,
and he sent me an account of his last days
and the last picture taken
of him in the Vatican.
I still have it in my files.
Why am I telling you this?
Because when these boys, Sebes and Zurini,
grew up and went into
the order,
their lives took different turns.
Sebes went to Asia because he spoke
all these Asian languages
and the Communist Chinese didn't like it
that he was doing his missionary work.
They put him in a four by four foot hole
and he lost a lot of his stomach.
So when he came out,
needless to say he was
pretty anti-Communist.
So he thought the Vietnam
War was a great deal
and he knew I thought it
was a terrible mistake.
He looked to me one day and he said,
because of all these
fights on campus, he said,
"We have these terrible disagreements,
"but we will be friends.
(audience laughing)
I said, "Why?
He said, "Because we have
all the same enemies."
(chuckles)
(audience laughing)
How weird is that?
(audience laughing)
Why am I telling you this?
Why am I telling you this?
Because
as you wander through life,
if you just pay attention,
you'll be amazed how many
encounters like that you can have
and it will serve you well.
The thing that bothers me
about modern politics is that
we'd made all this progress,
less racist, and sexist, and
homophobic than we used to be.
We just have one remaining
bigotry in America.
We just don't want to be around
anybody who disagrees with us.
You're laughing, but it's true.
I mean the people are organizing
massive living patterns in this country
around being with somebody
that agrees with them.
You don't believe me, read
the Big Sort by Bill Bishop.
First, in 1976,
when President Carter and President Ford
had a very close election,
only 20% of America's counties voted for
either one of them by more than 20 points,
so 1976.
28 years later in 2004
when now Secretary of State
John Cary and President Bush
had a close election and
Bush's reelection was the
narrowest marginal victory
for a reelected president since
Woodrow Wilson since 1916.
Nonetheless,
48% of America's counties voted for
one or the other of them by more than 20%.
So Americans are not
hearing enough stories
from other people
and it's a big mistake.
If we had all the time in the
world I could keep you here
till tomorrow morning
telling you these stories.
When I was in Oxford,
I took myself all the way to Russia
even though I didn't speak Russian,
couldn't even reads Cyrillic script
and because I had a friend there,
I wound up at Lumumba University,
which the Russians and Soviets
had built for Third World.
That's what the called them then students.
I was with Nigerian students
in the first week of 1970
when their bloody Civil War
which killed millions of people ended.
The major contesting tribes
were the Igbos and the Yorubas
and there were students
there from both tribes
whose families were fighting
each other back home.
There had been no war
when they came there.
Over the radio they announced
the war ended and I saw people
crying at each others arms
whose families were back
home killing each other.
It struck me that most of the
things we kill each other over
are not worth it
and whenever I ask myself,
"Is this worth it?,"
I think about those young people
who were basically like
put in a test tube and pushed
away from their country
because they could still
see and hear each other.
So as we go along, and we
talk about the politics of it,
I'll tell you some more about
what happened and what I
learned through stories.
But I hope you will remember this:
the purpose of service
is to help other people,
not to make you feel good about
yourself, although you will,
not to impose everything
you think should be done
on other people,
but to create a world where we can all
live together because
it's so interdependent.
If we don't,
the consequences to us, to our families,
to our future will be adverse and severe.
Everyplace in the world
people are trying to cooperate,
they're doing pretty well.
Everyplace in the world,
people elevate our differences
over our common humanity,
everyplace in the world
where we can no longer hear
what people who are
different from us are saying,
where our ears are closed
and our minds more closed,
there is trouble.
So do I think it matters
what the purpose is there
are to your politics,
and what policies you adopt,
and how you conduct politics
in or out of the political arena?
Oh, I think all that matters.
But you have a much better chance
of living both a successful
and a rewarding life of service
if you begin
by finding
something to learn from
everybody you run into
if you begin by believing
there is a certain inherent
dignity to people
who will never be on television,
never be in a newspaper article,
or just the statistic to most people
who talk about politics,
so I will close with one last story.
When I was working on that tsunami
with first President Bush,
I got very attached to
China, Indonesia,
and to the Maldives and to Sri Lanka
and the UN asked me to
stay on for two more years,
and so I did.
One of the ways that I
(chuckles) disappointed people
is that I couldn't immediately
solve the housing problem,
just like it's a problem for Haiti,
just like there's some
people in the Katrina area
who don't have homes back again.
It is always the hardest
thing in any natural disaster.
So we were gonna miss a deadline on the
Aceh in Indonesia and
the housing, and I said,
"I got to go there and
tell them face-to-face."
I want them to know we
haven't forgotten about them
and when we're gonna do this,
so we went to the biggest camp.
They were probably,
I don't know,
by then still 10, 12,
15,000 people in this camp.
Every one of these camps
had an elected president,
so I arrived at the camp.
The president is there,
his wife was there,
just a simple man who was
trusted by other people to
be the president of the camp.
His son was there.
The boy I still believe is the single most
beautiful child I have
ever seen in my life,
this Indonesian boy.
He was breathtaking.
He was just luminous and
so I asked my interpreter who had been
a very interesting young Indonesian woman
who gave up her job on television,
a promising career on television,
just to be an interpreter to help
until her country was put back together.
We were walking down the way
after I meet the president,
and his, wife and son,
and I said,
"I believe that's the best looking boy
"I've ever seen in my life.
"He's just gorgeous.
She said, "Yes, he's very beautiful."
Before the tsunami,
he had nine brothers and sisters
and they're all gone.
Now here is what I observed.
I never said a word to them about it.
But pretty soon the
boy and his mother left
and this man who had lost
nine of his 10 children,
a man with no formal education,
a man who'd never been more than
a few miles away from
his home his entire life,
led me through his camp
and every place,
all he ever talked about
was what the people there needed.
He knew them.
He knew their stories
and he eased his own pain
by advancing their lives.
It was one of the most
astonishing examples of service
I have ever seen.
And then we get to the end of this tour
and because they knew about
my foundation's work and healthcare,
they saved the clinic till last.
So we got to the clinic, we're
talking about health care,
and all of a sudden the
president of the camp's
wife shows up again
with her son,
but she's holding a baby.
The lady starts talking
and the interpreter says,
"What she's telling you is
"that they're very grateful
that you've come to the camp
"and listened to their concerns,"
this is the news,
this is the most recently
born baby in this camp,
"and we want you to name the baby
"because we appreciate your coming."
She went on to say
that in their culture
when a woman had a baby,
she got to go to bed for
40 days without getting up.
I thought, "Boy, if that
gets out in America,
"we're all toast."
(audience laughing)
But anyway, (chuckles) she...
So
that's why the mother didn't come herself.
She was in her period of reclining.
So I looked at the mother and I said,
"Do you have a word in your
language for new beginning?,"
and I was afraid it might
cause her to cry because
she'd lost nine of her children.
So the young woman interpreted
for me and she said this,
and she got this huge smile
on her face, and she said,
"Oh, yes.
"It's lucky for you that in
our language, unlike English,
"the word dawn, D-A-W-N,
the word for dawn,
"is a boys name, not a girls name.
"We will need this way,
Dawn, the woman said,
"and he will be the symbol
"of our new beginning."
Have you ever met anybody in
any position of importance
with any level of wealth
who could've dealt with the
loss of nine of her 10 children
with more dignity and honor
and other oriented-ness?
The stories,
if you want to serve,
you have to begin with the stories.
Thank you very much.
(audience laughing)
- Well thank you President Clinton
for your stories this morning,
encouraging us to listen by
sharing some of those moving
stories was particularly compelling to me.
We have a few questions from
the audience here at Georgetown
and also back in Little
Rock at your school,
so we'll start with a
question from a student
here at Georgetown, jip-sul kuh-bran.
Sorry if I mispronounce any of your names.
If you're a professor at Georgetown,
what class would you teach and why?
- Oh I would like to teach a class
in International Economics and Politics
because I believe that it's very important
that every person in your
generation have a worldview.
Whether you are a
conservative, or a liberal,
or Republican, or
Democrat, or Independent,
or you come from another country and you
are in a different political tradition,
we need a common understanding
of what is the nature of the modern world.
What are its biggest opportunities?
What are its biggest challenges?
What evidence do we have about
how best we can deal with them?
So that's what I would teach now.
Although when I was in Georgetown,
I think my favorite
course was
a course in
Great Ideas of the Western World,
which was taught by a
Palestinian professor.
It was a two-hour seminar.
We met once a week
and there were 14 students,
14 weeks, 14 books.
Every student got a book
and every seminar started off with
a 10- minute presentation by the student.
If you talk more than 10 minutes,
he will cut you off and say,
"You obviously didn't understand the book
"or you could've explained
it in 10 minutes."
Though I love that, but
if I were Professor now,
that's what I would teach.
- All right,
and the second question
is from Little Rock, from your school,
from Andre Bro.
I'm a first-year student at your school.
This summer, I'll be doing
my service project in Haiti.
I have a two-part question.
First,
recognizing your support of building
Haiti's textile economy,
how would you defend against
criticism that this approach
benefits American interests
more than Haitian interests?
And second, will you come visit me?
(audience laughing)
- Well,
the answer to the second
question is I go once a month,
so I'll doubtless be there
when the student is there,
and I'd be happy to see her
or him.
You didn't say what was the name.
On the textile front,
I disagree with that.
For decades,
Haiti had all these textile jobs.
They were just cut-and-sew jobs
because labor was cheap.
This is going to be different.
This Korean company, SAE-A,
which is a huge complex,
is moving the first textile
mill the country has ever had
whether this company stays or goes.
Now they will have the capacity
to produce their own clothing.
They never have had it in
the history of the country.
They're doing it because Haiti has
duty-free access to the United States
and because they believe
we have a chance to do it.
You can't turn down the
potential of 20,000 jobs
if you can get it
and you think they're
gonna make a living wage in
an environmentally safe way.
So I don't think that this aids
the American economy
anymore than any other
clothing imports do.
It's a big difference for
Haiti because now they'll have
the potential to develop
their own indigenous
clothing operation
because this will be
their first textile mill.
- The third question comes
from a Georgetown student,
Amy Tenant.
Which public policy
instituted during your tenure
are you most proud of?
- That's hard to answer.
I love AmeriCorps,
the National Service program
and I think it should be bigger
and I think more people
should have a chance to do it.
But I think that
before the recession,
welfare reform did way
more good than harm,
even though there was some
things in it that the Republican
Congress insisted on I
thought were not good.
Though the problem with the
welfare reform law was we capped
payments to states,
so what they were getting
in February of '94
when the welfare rolls
were an all-time high.
When they dropped 60%
when I was President,
the states had a lot of money
which they were supposed to
put into education, and
training, and other things.
What happened is after I left office,
a lot of them were permitted
to stop spending that money
on poor people which I think
was a terrible mistake,
but I'm still very proud that we did it.
But I'm most proud I think of the
economic policy that we began
with the passage by one vote
in both Houses of my economic plan of '93
because that drove down interest rates,
drove up investment,
accelerated new jobs
particularly in technology,
and most important of all to me,
we had like 30% more jobs in my years,
40% more than in President Reagan's term,
but we had 100 times
as many people move from
poverty to the middle class.
It's the only period of
shared prosperity we've had
in the last 35 years
and I was very proud of that
and it still means a lot to me
because I still have people
come up to me and tell me that
they worked their way from
welfare into a good solid job
and they raised their children
to have a better life,
and that's still the most
important thing to me.
It's gone surprisingly
little notice and surprisingly
little academic analysis
how come the economic path we chose
and the economic path
chosen by my predecessors.
Both Bush administration,
they had recession, so poverty increased,
so I don't count that.
It's just Reagan's years plus mine,
we had 100 times as many
people move from poverty
into the middle class.
That's what I'm really proud of.
We gave people a chance
to make their own stories.
- So you were to become
an International Economics
Professor at Georgetown,
would that be your path of research?
- If I was what?
- If you were to become
the International Economics
Professor at Georgetown,
would that be your path of research
contribution to academia?
- No.
(audience laughing)
No because I know the story
and because it wouldn't be as trusted.
I'd rather have somebody
else do it and figure out why
then have somebody else do
it, and disagree with them,
and "You now do it."
I shouldn't be.
It would be too self-serving
for me to do it.
Now if I were
here in my research,
I would be focused on
what we could do to increase the level
of employee growth
around the world because
one of the real problems
of having IT driven
growth,
and believe me I think
it's been a godsend.
When we rebuilt the
fishing industry in
Indonesia and Sri Lanka
and we put all these men and
women back in fishing boats,
we gave them cell phones
for the first time
and their incomes averaged at 30% increase
cause they could find
out what the real price
of fish was everyday and no
one could lie to them anymore.
We started rebuilding Haiti and
90% of the people were un-banked
and the banks didn't want
to fool with them because
they could make all the money they needed
because 19% of Haiti's income every year
is from remittances from the
United States, and Canada,
and Bermuda, and Dominican
Republic, and France.
So the banks can just charge a fee
to convert those currency into gourdes
and they won't have to worry
about serving poor folks,
making loans to little businesses.
So,
I would like to talk
about things like that.
How we started a small
business loan program there
and how we started home
mortgage program there.
We need the best minds we can
to think about how we're going to create
more jobs because what I was gonna say is
in spite of all these joys of IT,
they do make everybody
so much more productive
that every year,
not just in manufacturing
but in other things,
you can do more with fewer people.
So how are we going to find
sustainable employment
in both poor countries,
rich countries and in
the rising countries?
How are we going to do this
and how are we gonna
make the adjustments for
different cultures, and
different possibilities,
and different levels of natural resources?
I think there's way too
little research on that
and we all...
When I got elected President,
I had been Governor of
a state which never had
an unemployment rate
below the national average
until I ran for President, ironically.
In that year,
we were first or second
job growth every month,
but we worked 10 years
to rejigger the economy.
The American people need some sense
of how we're gonna do this
and so to people throughout the world.
we don't
know enough to know
how these new realities
are different from what we did in the 90s,
but I'm quite sure that if I
did everything we did then,
it wouldn't produce jobs we need.
I have some ideas, but I
think we should do more.
- Another question from a
student here at Georgetown
is from Salvador Rosas.
During your time as president in 1996,
you passed the Immigration Reform Act.
What do you believe it will take
for us to pass a comprehensive
Immigration Reform
that would help solve current problems
with our immigration system?
- Well, you only have
two obstacles really.
Will there be a filibuster in the Senate
and will the Speaker of the House allow
any bill that passes the Senate
to be voted on the House floor
if a majority of the
Republicans are not for it.
That had been their
policy more or less since
Newt Gingrich was speaker
and it was formalized
under Dennis Hastert.
But John Boehner deserves a lot of credit.
He varied from that policy
three times this year already,
including to allow the House to vote on
the Violence Against Women Act,
which did pass by a day
bipartisan majority,
but not by a majority within
the Republican caucus.
So I think they're gonna
pass this immigration reform.
I think,
and I'll be surprised if it doesn't
get 70 votes in the Senate,
because just the pure
demographics of it.
The Republicans I think know they can't
be a national party if they lose 72,
75% of the Latino vote
three or four more times.
The numbers are only gonna get bigger
and so I think the same
thing is true of Asians.
When we had a huge influx
of Asian immigrants,
a lot of the Vietnamese were a bit
militantly anti-Communist and came here
and were inclined to
vote Republican because
they perceived that the
Republicans were more
anti-Communist and the Democrats
and that the Democrats had
driven the country's disengagement
from Vietnam even though
President Ford was in office
when the last troops were withdrawn.
All of that's changed over
all this immigration business
so that now
the Democrats tend to get a big majority
of the Asian vote too and
they're growing like crazy.
So I think just for
sheer demographic reasons,
we're gonna get it.
Also keep in mind,
there are economic imperatives here.
The United States,
one of the things that gives
me hope about our economy
is that we are younger than Europe.
We are younger than Japan.
We are not resistant to
immigrants, historically.
Only Ireland is younger than we are.
Thanks to the Catholics, they
still got a high birthrate.
(audience laughing)
By the way,
and
now that you're laughing,
and you should know
that the Irish were very
open to immigration.
There was a huge variety of immigrants
in Ireland in their boom years
and a lot of those folks went home,
mostly to central Europe.
But they'll come back again
if things pick up again,
so this is an economic imperative for us.
I do believe it will pass.
I think it is possible,
depending on the details of the past,
the citizenship,
I think it's possible that there won't be
a majority of the Republican
House caucus for it
and then they'll have to decide
whether to let it come
to the floor or not,
but I really think this will pass.
- The next question is also
from a Georgetown student,
Jessica Albert from Barker, Colorado.
What was your motivation for
starting the Clinton Foundation
and what distinguishes it in your mind
from other humanitarian initiatives?
- Well I started the
foundation with a kind of a...
It wasn't a vague notion.
I had a very clear notion,
but I didn't have the details filled in.
I knew when I left office
I did not want to spend most of my time
just talking about current
political issues or
talking about my record or legacy.
I wanted to spend time
on issues I had cared a
lot about as President
where I could still have an impact.
Now there are a lot of things
I care about as President,
but I have relatively small impact,
like will there be peace between
the Palestinians and Israelis.
I have spent a fair amount
of time in the Middle East
since I left office.
I still keep contacts there.
I do what I can,
but
that is more the province of
governments as facilitators
in the case of the United States,
but also what the leaders
of those countries
and the people of those
countries want to do.
So it would be foolish I think for me
to just be one more of
the voices saying that,
believe me they (chuckles)
all know what I think about
it, but it doesn't matter.
I don't have the position
anymore to have as much impact.
But in all these other things, I do,
so what it did was I started out
with that in mind and then
I began working with Nelson Mandela
in AIDS when there was no
global fund on HTB and malaria.
There was no PEPFAR program.
The United States when I
left off has been providing
about I think 28% of all the
money that we all were spending
to fight AIDS and it was a pittance,
and so we were trying to raise more money.
From there I got into being asked to
deal with the systematics
challenges facing the Caribbean,
which then had the second
fastest growth rate of AIDS
in the world after Africa and
everything else just kind of
fell into place after that.
A few years later,
I got interested in whether...
One of my staff members suggested to me
we ought to have a meeting
like the Davos meeting
at the opening of the UN
because people could come
and meet with the people
who'd come from the UN
and leaders of business and all of that.
I said,
"Who would pay to come to New York
"during the UN when its already
has traffic in the world?
I said, "I got a bright idea.
"We'll make it even harder for them.
I'll say, "If you come to our meeting,
"you have to promise to do something
"to help somebody somewhere
"and you gotta keep the promise
if you wanna come back."
The first meeting of this kind
ever where we ask people to
meet with different people
and make commitments
and it's worked out pretty well,
but it was a wild leap.
These things have come up and then I
deliberately took up the
cause of childhood obesity
cause I think it's a public
health problem in the country.
So I tried to chart these programs
within the framework of my record
and my passions as President
where I could still have an impact
and have the discipline to try to
stop doing things
when I thought I could have an impact
and turned out not to work
so that we just keep trying to
measure for impact and do that.
- And final question
is from another student at
your school in Little Rock
and it ties very nicely
back to the theme of
your talk today.
Nate Kennedy asks,
I've heard you say that,
and we heard you again
today also say this,
that the last remaining widespread
bigotry is toward those with whom
we have ideological differences.
What can we do to bring people together?
- Well,
it's very interesting.
I'll never forget.
I had a very interesting encounter when I
was attempting to change the
Pentagon policy on gays in the military
20 years ago
and everybody knows we failed with it.
Most people don't know
what really happened
or what it was designed to do,
but that's not important now.
There was a survey that came out
on this issue
and it said that
in the population of the United States
as it existed in 1993, which
is very different from now,
we're much more diverse now in
every way than we were then,
the public was about evenly divided
and I had pushed it to where
in this survey it was
48 to 45 for my position
on allowing people to serve
without regard to sexual orientation.
But it was a political loser because
the 45 who disagreed with me,
33% of them were intensely opposed
and only 16% of the people who were for me
were intensely for it.
So the real political
vote was 33 against 16 for
and that's the problem that
my friends who are trying to pass
this gun legislation are having.
I don't agree with them anymore,
but before when
I passed an assault weapons ban that had
a 10-bullet ammunition on them,
and it did just fine
and it was a sick day for me
when it was allowed to expire in 1994.
But what happened
in the Congressional elections of '94
was that the people who were
for what I did, the majority said,
"Thank you very much.
"I think I'll vote on something else."
The people who were against it said,
"I'm gonna kill you.
"I wouldn't vote for you if you
"were the last candidate on earth."
So that the fact that
we had majority support
didn't amount to anything.
It's always the intensity of support
that you have to measure.
So that's like when people say,
"Russia's 90% support for this.
"How could the most against it?"
Because they all believed
that the opposition is more
heated
and I think they're wrong
this time, by the way.
You know the old story about it.
The problem with the cat
that sits on a hot stove
is that that cat will never
sit on a hot stove again,
but also it will never
sit on a cold stove.
I think this is a cold
stove and we could do this,
this background check business,
but that's what the problem is in a way.
I didn't answer, what was it?
- [Clara] But in terms of
(audience laughing)
- I didn't answer your question.
- So in term...
How then do you engage that
intensity of opposition
and how do you
- I was there when he showed
his first signs of dementia.
What, what?
(audience laughing)
- How do you then engage that intensity
of opposition?
- Well here's what I think
you have to do.
First of all you got to realize,
for the legitimate differences,
let's say over gun control,
basically it's an urban-rural deal.
There are some people you can't reach.
But if you live in a city,
you're way better off and you think
you need protection in your home?
You're way better off with a
shotgun than an assault weapon.
Trust me (chuckles), it's not even close.
So this is mostly a rural-urban deal.
Do you know Senator
Murkowski talking about how
in the far reaches of Alaska,
if somebody wants to sell a
gun to their next-door neighbor,
how could you possibly ask
for a background check?
Keep in mind the Constitution
set Congress up this way
so that rural states have
disproportionate influence
in the United States Senate cause
every state gets two senators.
So I just think they need
to keep talking about it.
I think they can do that.
I think the President
having these two dinners
with the Republican
senators is a good thing.
I think the President
meeting with the women
senators was a good thing.
I read the other day an
article saying that in
one of these dinners
it would seem too stilted cause everybody
had something they wanted to say to him
and so it took the whole two hours
they had set aside for the dinner.
But I spent (mumbles)
endless hours just to listen to the people
and just digging, and
digging, and digging.
It doesn't always work.
I mean one of the reasons we're in a mess
we're in in the Middle East today is that
I spent eight years listening and I
proposed a peace proposal
when Israel said yes
and Arafat wouldn't say yes or no,
even though he told me he was going to,
and it was the most colossal
political error of my lifetime
and a lot has flowed out of this.
One of the reasons that
we're still stuck is that the
mi-ser-ah-bahs for whom
I have a lot of respect
said he wanted
a settlement freeze.
So Hillary and other people went out
and got a settlement freeze for 10 months.
It was a big deal.
This government sends his whole base
to support with the West Bank sellers
and they wouldn't talk to them.
They waited until the 10 months
was over and then he said,
"Now give me another 10-month freeze
"and maybe I will talk to him."
Bad move,
and so you just...
It doesn't always work.
Second thing I want to tell
you if you get into politics,
nothing lasts forever.
It's a human creation.
So people come to me all the time and say,
"Weren't you sick that
President Bush reversed
"your economic policies and we went from
"surplus to as far as the eye could see
"to doubling the debt?
And I say, "Yeah
(chuckles), it made me sick,
"but the American people
made it possible."
I'm constantly amazed when people vote
and then they're surprised
that people they vote for
do what they promised to do.
It wasn't like he made a
secret of what he was gonna do.
That's the other thing I want to tell you.
Most politicians
actually do try to do what
they say they're gonna do,
which should be the basis for
this kind of communication.
But I just don't know how
much these people would talk
and it may not be possible,
but I just know this.
Look at where America has come back.
San Diego, the human
genome center of America.
Orlando, the computer
simulation center of America.
Even in Cleveland with all that trouble,
the Cleveland clinic and the
community college are training
the hardest unemployed population we have,
middle age non-college educated people
to do jobs that will grow
in the health care industry
whatever happens and however
the health care bill is implemented.
You just look around the country.
The places which are doing well are places
where there's creative cooperation.
One of the problems these people have
in Washington today is that the
Congressional districts are drawn
so that the most liberal
and the most conservative
of our members in Congress
have to worry far more
about being pure
and being defeated by a primary challenge,
than losing a general
election because they did not
work with people from the
other side to get things done.
So that the political reality
in a lot of these House districts
is very different than the national
political reality than
the screaming hunger
of the American people to see people make
honorable compromises and
get the show on the road.
But my advice is
you can't get tired of listening.
You just have to keep coming at people.
You have to figure out
where they're coming from,
what their motives are,
what their interests are.
When I was at all these peace
deals I tried to work out,
I never
argued so much about what I
thought was right or wrong
as I did about why I thought
it was in their interest to take it
and there's no easy answer here,
but disengagement is a recipe for failure.
So my view is you just gotta get it.
You just can't get tired
of just reaching out and
bowling ahead with it.
- Wonderful, two final words.
First, audience here in Gaston,
please stay here until
President Clinton has departed
and finally,
help me in thanking President
Clinton for joining us today.
(audience applauding)
