JOHN SHATTUCK: Good afternoon and welcome to the John F. Kennedy Library. I'm John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation. On behalf of myself and Deborah Leff, Director of the Kennedy Library, I want to say how honored we are to be able to present this extraordinary forum this afternoon. I want to thank the sponsor of the Kennedy Library’s distinguished American program, Boston Capital and its president Jack Manning, as well as the other sponsors of our Kennedy Library Forums, Fleet Boston Financial, the Lowell Institute, The Boston Globe, WBUR, and Boston.com.
One of the missions of a presidential library is to bring our nation's history to life. There is no more effective way to do that than through speaking to one of our great former presidents.
I was privileged to serve in President Clinton's administration, and we are deeply honored by his presence here today. Before we begin I just want to say a very few words about how we plan to proceed. President Clinton will be introduced by one of the greatest legislators of all times, our own Senator Edward Kennedy-- [applause] Following the president's remarks he will have a conversation with one of our country’s leading presidential historians, the award-winning author, Michael Beschloss, and then he will take a few selected questions from the audience. Members of the Kennedy Library staff will be collecting questions during the first half of the program. We ask that there be no photography or audio-visual recordings of today’s program, and that you kindly turn off any electronic devices.
And now it is my great privilege to invite you to join me in welcoming to the Kennedy Library stage and podium, Senator Edward M. Kennedy and President Bill Clinton. [applause]
SENATOR KENNEDY: It’s a very special honor to welcome President Clinton back to this library that means so much to all of us in the Kennedy family. In so many ways, Mr. President, your years in the White House made my brother’s vision for a better America and a better world come alive again.
[applause]
Tomorrow would have been Jack’s eighty-sixth birthday, and I know how touched he would be to have you grace his library with your presence.
You’ve been a wonderful friend to our family, Mr. President, and a wonderful friend to the people of Massachusetts and communities across our state. We’re proud of Massachusetts reputation as Clinton country, and especially proud that in 1996 we gave you the highest percentage of the vote of any state in the nation, no recount needed here. All your visits to Massachusetts have meant so much to the people of our state. They love you in Boston, and Worcester, and Springfield, Lowell and Cape Cod. They love you at Framingham High School, at Kennedy Park in Fall River, at Mike’s City Diner in the South End, in the Jackson-Mann Elementary School in Brighton. They still remember your visit to Walden Woods in Lincoln, and they still talk about you at the Orchard Gardens Community Center in Roxbury.
The same is true in many other states, Mr. President, and it’s easy to understand why. Your years in the White House were a resounding success, and you’d still be there today, Mr. President, if our Republican friends in congress hadn’t been so mad at Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940’s that they amended the constitution to limit presidents to two terms. At least for your two terms, Mr. President, we had a president who said he’d put people first, and did it. Whether the issue was ending the recession and jumpstarting the economy, turning deficits into surpluses, fighting for good healthcare, improving education, advancing civil rights, protecting the environment or reducing crime, we all advance together. No voodoo economics, no supply side economics, no trickle-down economics, and all of America soared.
Under President Clinton we had the longest, uninterrupted period of uninterrupted growth and price stability in U.S. history, the largest deficit reduction, and the highest rate of home ownership in the nation’s history, more than 20 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in three decades, the lowest poverty rate in two decades, the largest drop in child poverty since the 1960s, a higher minimum wage, long overdue protections for health and safety in the workplace. Pollsters didn’t even have to ask the right direction, wrong direction, right track, wrong track question. We all knew we were on the right track.
We had a real education president. We put 100,000 new teachers in modern technology in classrooms around the country. We reduced class size and improved teacher training. We built new schools, and renovated old ones. We encouraged large numbers of Americans of all ages to do more for their community and their country. Millions of low-income children began to see college as a reality in their own lives, not just as an impossible dream.
We may not have succeeded in enacting overall health reform, but we put the issue of the uninsured on the agenda, and took major steps to get there. The list goes on and on. Under President Clinton’s leadership we broke the strangle hold of the National Rifle Association at least for a brief moment, and enacted measures to prevent the sale of assault weapons and restrict the sale of handguns. We put 100 thousand new police officers on the streets. We protected a woman’s right to choose. Passed the Violence Against Women Act, and began the fight against the vicious hate crimes that continue to plague our nation.
Mr. President, we were all proud to have been a part of your team. Today on so many of these vital issues as the saying goes, "When we see the darkness, it reminds us of the light." You’ll long be remembered as a president who was not afraid of change and not afraid to do battle with those who always ask what our country can do for them, and never ask what they can do for our country.
You’re a real profile in courage. And Massachusetts is proud of you.
My brother’s thousand days in the White House were all too brief, but they left a lasting mark. And of all he did, he would take the highest pride in the young Americans he inspired, and whose lives he touched so deeply. Especially the teenager from Arkansas in Boy’s Nation who shook his hand in the Rose Garden 40 years ago this summer, and went on himself to become President of the United States. I know that day was forever marked in your heart and mind, Mr. President, and it is an important day to all of us here at the library as well.
In the museum the final exhibit room is called The Legacy Room. It’s dedicated to the many aspects that are the lasting legacy of my brother’s presidency and public service. The final item on display in that room is one of the best reminders of Jack’s legacy, and I’d like all of you to see it now.
[video]
[applause]
SENATOR KENNEDY: That brief video is special to you Mr. President, and it’s special to our family, as well, because it reminds us of the inspiration that President Kennedy gave to so many others and how much they achieved in their own lives. It’s a great honor to have you here today, Mr. President, to share your own years in the White House, and on the presidency as a whole. It’s a special privilege to introduce you now, President Bill Clinton.
[applause]
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you very much, Senator Kennedy, for the wonderful introduction, the walk down memory lane, for your friendship, for the heroic work that you have done now for more than four decades in the senate. I have said this before, and I will say it again, there are not ten people who have ever served in the United States Senate in the history of the republic, who have done more good with their service than Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. [applause]
I thank you for your remarkable ability to get things done, to work with Republicans even as they demonize you in television ads, and to keep standing up for what you believe in. I thank you for being a friend and mentor to the junior senator from New York-- [laughter]
--who I also think is doing a pretty good job. [applause]
Jean, thank you for coming and the wonderful job you did in Ireland. Pat, thank you for coming. Kara, Steve thank you all for being here. To all my friends who were part of the administration and who helped me to get elected. John Shattuck, I’m glad to see he got a good and more stable job than trying to convince the Republicans that human rights was a good thing to advocate. Eli and Phyllis, I’m glad to see you here. I thank so many people here who helped me to get elected, the Mannings, the Cullinanes, and others. Thank you all for coming.
I really looked forward to this today. I feel particularly nostalgic for two reasons. First of all, this is almost the fortieth anniversary of the summer when I met President Kennedy. And secondly, I just had the topping out ceremony a couple of days ago at my own library down in Little Rock, and I hope that we will be able to do the job that you have done here, in bringing together people to discuss important ideas, and to advance important causes.
I’ve been at this work a long time. Governor Dukakis came in and said hello to me a couple of minutes ago, and I thought about how long ago it was that we began to serve as governors together, and how fortunate I have been to have had a long life in public service.
President Kennedy had a painfully short time in the White House, but he did a lot of things with it. He gave us an economic policy that created jobs and spread growth, the nuclear test ban treaty, the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, the remarkable handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, steadfast support for integration and forcing federal court orders. Perhaps as important as his specific achievements, was his ability to inspire a new generation of Americans, including me, to reach new frontiers. His inaugural challenge that seems so jarring today when we see the decisions made by the congress, that we should ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country.
His magnificent speech in Berlin, which had that line that is my personal favorite, "Freedom has many difficulties, and our democracy is far from perfect, but we never had to put up a wall to keep our people in." His call at American University was for peaceful competition and cooperation, not nuclear confrontation.
Those of us over 50 can recall almost as if it were yesterday what it was like to have John Kennedy as our president. Many who, like me, met him only for the briefest of moments will still never forget it. When even today we see a film of a speech or listen to a tape of a conversation that he had with his advisors at the White House, we not only remember, we actually feel the energy, the enthusiasm, the optimism of that era.
Now, of course, there are some cynics who look back and say, "Well, it wasn’t all that good. Before you know it we had the Vietnam War, riots, the generation gap, and America came apart at the seams." Then there are the optimists who say, "Yeah, but if he had lived, we would have extricated ourselves sooner from Vietnam, healed the racial divide, and we would not have alienated the young." Not surprisingly, I am more closely aligned with the latter camp than the former, but I think that if President Kennedy were here today he would say, "What a ridiculous thing to ponder. Do not waste your time asking what if. Instead ask what now."
What do we do now about the challenges of today, of terror and weapons of mass destruction, of global poverty, disease, ignorance, and climate change? Of racial and religious conflicts, and here at home with economic inequality and stagnation, the concentration of power and wealth, and the disparagement of honest debate. Though a student of history, for President Kennedy the importance of history primarily was to inform the decisions of the present in order to make a better future.
Our democracy has survived a lot. It has survived civil wars and the assassinations of our presidents, depression and destructive partisanship, short-sighted self-interest, and the occasional triumph of raw power over public purpose. We have survived over all these years, because in the end free people answered the "what next" questions right. They continue to form a more perfect union, and so must we today.
Consistent with the idealism, the optimism, and the values of President Kennedy, how should we analyze three of the present problems? Let’s just mention three, the economy, our nation’s proper role in the world, the importance of citizens service, and a sense of collective responsibility about our future.
Today the entire debate over the economy is about tax cuts, so we’ll begin with that. First in 2001 we were told we had a huge surplus and the money belonged to the American people, not the government, and the American people were entitled to their money back. Then we were told we had to have another big tax cut because the surplus had disappeared. And the economy was bad, so we had to have a tax cut to spur it. The real reasons for the tax cuts and their particular design in 2001 and 2003 was ideological, almost theological. The notion that we are all just put upon by this onerous government of ours, taking our hard earned money away. There’s no such thing as a bad tax cut, and no such thing as a good spending program unless it lays concrete or builds a missile.
Now, the problem with the tax cuts is that one, they were grossly unfair. Too much of the money went to people in the top 1%. I love this. I never had any money before I got out of the White House. Now that I pay it, I can save it. But it’s ridiculous. The top 1% get half the money, we don’t need it, and we’re complicating the future. And as an economic matter, even if you accept the canny proposition that, in times of economic slowdown, it’s appropriate to run deficits in order to stimulate the economy, these tax cuts are too small in the short run to do any good, and way too big in the long run to avoid serious harm. We get the worst of both worlds. All we get out of this tax cut is a continued maldistribution of wealth, which satisfies a theological argument about the evil of taxes as a burden on the poor, overtaxed Americans, especially those of us in upper income groups who are terribly burdened. I noticed none of us are dying to move anywhere else.
Now, as a consequence of this, we have compromised the long-term future of Social Security, Medicare, and the retirement prospects of the Baby Boomers. I am the oldest of the Baby Boomers. I hate it, but I am. And so I turn 65 in 2011. And in about eight years after that, there’ll only be about two people working for every one person drawing retirement, unless we have a dramatic increase in the birth rate, the immigration rate, or the number of older people still in the workforce. Only the last thing is likely to happen. That is quite likely to happen, but it’s the only thing likely to happen. I left enough money in the treasury to pay Social Security out until 2053, without any changes. With modest changes you could run it out 75 years; to pay Medicare out to 2030 through the life expectancy of the Baby Boomers. It’s coming down as well.
These tax cuts have been paid for already by some cuts. Senator Kennedy mentioned the program we passed to repair schools, the first one since World War II. The program we passed put 100,000 teachers in the schools. They’ve both been eliminated. The bill that he worked so hard on with President Bush that was signed with such great fanfare, to such great bipartisan support for education, they’ve now been told it will not be funded for seven more years; no new money.
And this year’s tax cut, how will it be funded? Senator Kennedy talked about how we funded 100,000 police on the street. We did. 88,000, according to the Ashcroft Justice Department, 88,000 of those police are still on the street today, working. They propose to fund my tax cut by getting rid of all the money that pays those 88,000 police, and all the money that pays to train them, $2 billion dollars a year. At the very time when many cities are already laying off police officers because they’re broke, and the prime rate is going up. But I have to have my tax cut. It’s more important than your having police on the street.
Most scandalous of all, this last tax cut is supposed to be paid for by kicking 500,000 poor children out of their after-school programs. Oh, it’s regrettable, but I have to have this tax cut, man. That dividend cut, I need that really bad.
And lamentably, there are some good things in this tax package: speeding up the marriage penalty elimination I like, increasing the child credit to a thousand dollars I like. The problem is all those people are going to lose their tax cut as soon as the economy starts to grow again, because interest rates will go up like crazy, because the government will be competing with the private sector for money. And then all these average people who actually will get something out of the marriage penalty elimination or the child tax credit will have higher interest payments for home mortgages, car payments, college loan payments, credit card payments, you name it, the works, small business loan payments.
When it’s all said and done, and all the smoke clears, the only people that are going to be better off are those of us that didn’t need it in the first place, because this tax cut is being dictated by ideology instead of evidence and argument.
Now, President Kennedy had tax cuts, and all the Republicans tell us that every time they want to cut taxes. What they don’t tell you is they were smart. They made sense. They lead to economic growth, and they eventually produced the last surplus we had until I became president.
Now, we’d done it their way before, and we quadrupled the debt in 12 years. When practical people find themselves in a hole, they stop digging. When ideological people find themselves in a hole, they ask for a bigger shovel. The design and scope of the 2003 tax cut is the bigger shovel. And the accounting gimmicks with which it was passed to look like $350 billion dollars would have made the accountants for Enron blush. It is in fact bigger than originally proposed. Do you really think all this stuff is just going to go away in two or three years?
And our children and our grandchildren will take the hit most. We have not asked what we could do for our country. We have said, "Give me mine now. My government is bad, and I am good and entitled."
I never talk to anybody, Republican or Democrat, in my maximum tax bracket, who believes in this stuff. I ask people all the time. I beg people to make me one good argument for it, and I can’t find anybody with a straight face to defend it. But we all go on thinking that we’re not supposed to question that, and just line up and compromise the future of our country and our children.
So, what would be the analog of President Kennedy’s tax cuts if we wanted to have smart ones today? You could make a case. The economy is still slow. You could make a case for them. What would you do? You would cancel the 2001 tax cut going forward for the top bracket. By the way, don’t feel sorry for us. We already have ten times as much as the average person’s ever going to get. Cancel the rest of it for us. Scrap this whole thing that’s just been passed. And pass a two year tax cut that basically is a tax holiday for middle class people, so they can pay their credit cards down and start spending money again, and provides a two year credit for people in small and medium sized business to hire more people, or invest in new equipment. And then make it go away after two years so we can return to the path of fiscal responsibility, keep interest rates down, and have a little money in the treasury to invest in our children’s education and healthcare, and do other things we need. That would be a smart tax cut. But it is inconsistent with ideology, and is supported only by evidence.
I hope that, if you feel that I’m right, you will find somebody to tell this to. And if you think I’m wrong, by all means argue with me. But I do have some evidence on my side, that I’m at least peripherally acquainted with what it takes to run a good economy. [applause]
The second point I want to make is that President Kennedy made clear that, in his last State of the Union address, listen to this, that tax cuts alone would never be a sufficient economic strategy. And I quote, "Tax reduction alone, however, is not enough to strengthen our society, to improve the lives of 32 million
Americans who live on the outskirts of poverty. This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor." He went on to argue for investments in our young people and healthcare. He preached smart tax cuts, and also investment in immunization programs, health insurance for the aged, funds for school construction, investment in science and technology, expansion of parks and wilderness areas. He said, "Wealth is a means, and people are the ends. All our material riches will avail us little if we do not use them to expand the opportunities of our people." Because he followed that notion, he was right that a rising tide lifts all boats.
Deficit spending fueled by tax cuts heavily weighted upper income people do not lift all boats. In the 1980s we had rising economic inequality, and we quadrupled the national debt. Fourteen million jobs were produced. In the 1990s we produced 22 million jobs, balanced the budget, and ran a surplus. But the more important thing to me is, in the 1980s only 70 thousand people were moved out of poverty. In the 1990s, 7.8 million were. One hundred times as many people moved out of poverty in the Democratic recovery of the 1990s because the rising tide did lift all boats, and because what was fair and decent was also practical. It worked better. Fiscal responsibility and investment in people work better.
So, the evidence is there. And it bothers me when America acts against its own self interest, because we forget President Kennedy’s admonition that we will all be better if we do what is good for our country, rather than what is good for ourselves in the moment.
The second major question we face today is what should America’s role be? We have, practically speaking, the only military in the world right now, the only military of any massive consequence, and the dominant political and economic influence in the world. Well, what are our options? Our options, it seems to me, are three. One is unilateralism. We’re the biggest kid on the block and we can do what we please. When we cooperate with other people, it’s always inconvenient because we don’t get our way all the time. Sometimes when we don’t get our way we really dislike it. We’re all that way.
So there’s the go-it-alone thing. That’s the impulse that you see in the withdrawal from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Climate Change Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Negotiations to Strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention, the ABM Treaty.
Then there’s what I would call the semi-cooperation, which is Iraq. We go to the United Nations and we say, "It is crazy to let Saddam Hussein not be accountable for four years for whether he has chemical and biological weapons. Let’s start the inspections again, and tell him that from now on the penalty for not disarming can be regime change, not just sanctions." The whole world agreed. Let’s not forget about that. Everybody voted for that. Then what happened was everybody got buyer’s remorse, except the British. The British believed in it because what they wanted was a stronger U.N. to maintain the American European alliance and to disarm Saddam Hussein. But the French, the Germans, Russians, and others, they concluded that there’s no way he could present a danger to anybody. He couldn’t use or give away this stuff as long as the inspectors were there. So they said, "We don’t want to vote for force," and there were elements in the administration who were more concerned about deposing him than disarming him anyway. So the coalition frayed apart. The U.N. resolution gave us the authority to move against Saddam Hussein, and then we said, "We’re not going to let Mr. Blix decide when the inspections are over. His inspector will decide when the inspections are over," that’s what I recall, "and we want everyone to agree with us." Semi-cooperation. And if you don’t agree with us you can’take a flying leap. And we’ve been displaying our displeasure with the French, the Germans, the Canadians, the Mexicans, and the Chileans in various ways.
Then the third thing is what I would call cooperation. It’s what I tried to do in expanding NATO, and what President Bush tried to do in expanding NATO, what we do in trying to support the World Trade Organization, what I tried to do in helping Columbia to fight its terrorism problems, and what President Bush tried to do in helping Columbia, and the Philippines to fight terror. It may yet be reflected in the commitment of the president and the congress to triple AIDS funding, while it’s too soon to say exactly how the money is going to be spent.
But the point is that it’s not clear to me that the administration has made up its mind whether our role should be unilateral, semi-cooperation, or cooperative. But I favor the latter, obviously, for all kinds of reasons. First of all, most of our problems cannot be solved in any other way.
SARS is a case in point. Starts in a Hong Kong hotel with a guy sneezing on February 21st. It involves the World Health Organization and a great doctor, Dr. Carlo Orbino, who gave his life. He died from SARS, to warn the world, a United Nations employee. It involved the Center for Disease Control and gave the new president of China the leverage he needed to force a greater openness in China, because they had to have cooperation, and to get cooperation they had to tell the truth about what was going on with SARS. You can’t zap a microbe with a missile, and night vision goggles won’t protect you against it.
And the same thing is true with AIDS, which is spreading more now, more rapidly in the former Soviet Union, the Caribbean, India and China, than in Africa. And the same thing is true with global poverty. And the same thing is true with terrorism. An amazing amount of progress has been made in particular arrests against Al Queda members since September 11th in no small measure because of extraordinary international cooperation.
When I was in law school, the professors always used to say hard cases make bad law. We are way over reading the disagreement with us on Iraq. I’m just going to give you a few facts here- that I think are never in any of these stories- concerning how we’re being so hard on the Germans, the French, the Canadians. Let me remind you, number one, every one of the countries voted to go after Osama Bin Laden, and not a shred of evidence that the Iraq thing had anything to do with September 11th.
Number two, French, German and Canadian soldiers are all in Afghanistan today. Number three, the new Afghan army is being trained by a cooperative effort of French and American soldiers. Did you know that? I never see that in the press when we’re telling everybody how sorry the French are, and how terrible they are, and all that. We’re going to change the name of French fries, and all that.
Look, I don’t agree with what the French did. I think they mishandled it, and hastened the onset of the conflict, but that’s not the point. The point I’m trying to make is the trend line is toward cooperation. What is going on in Afghanistan is far more representative of the future, or should be, than the disagreement we had over Iraq.
So the Canadians and the Chileans didn’t agree with us. We need Mexico. We need to cooperate on regulating trafficking, on immigration, on economics. We need Chile. If we’re worried about the Andes being taken over by drug traffickers and terrorists, we have a trade deal with them. We need that. We need to build all the free countries of the Americas into an alliance. This is sort of the last step of President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.
So I favor the cooperative approach. We can never completely give up our sovereign right to act alone, or to follow semi-cooperation. But SARS and AIDS and poverty and debt relief and the law enforcement work of terrorism are much more representative of the kids of problems that we will face and must face together in the twenty-first century.
Now, the final thing I’d like to say is, what is the role of citizens in all this? President Kennedy wanted us to think of our work as citizens, as voters, and citizen servants, as a way of advancing humanity’s common cause. He sought to unite more than to divide. He spoke not so much about good versus evil, but instead said, and I quote, "No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered lacking in virtue. So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct our common interest to the means by which those differences can be resolved. For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breath the same air. We all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal."
If that is true, then it means not only that we should try to influence our government’s policies, but that we have obligations ourselves. Tonight the Senator and I are going to the City Year banquet. City Year, as some of you know, became the model for AmeriCorps, which was sort of our domestic Peace Corps, and by the time I left office, already over 200,000 young people had worked in our country in citizen service. All over the world today a great deal of the important work being done is not being done by governments, anymore, but by so-called NGOs, non-governmental organizations, in which many people in this room are involved. My foundation works on economic opportunity in India and Africa, on AIDS in three African countries and 16 Caribbean countries. We work with governments, but citizens are doing this all over the world. The two best AIDS clinics I’ve been in recently are in Haiti, both run by citizens, one of them a professor on the side at Harvard.
So I would say to you this: The world we’re living in, even when you disagree with your government’s policies, still contains enormous opportunities for people, especially young people, to have an impact. There is more opportunity for people in their capacity as citizens to have an impact on affairs, than perhaps at any time in my lifetime, through this whole non-governmental organization route, at home, and around the world. I am very hopeful that we will see more of this.
My friends in City Year and I have started out a Clinton Democracy Fellow program to bring citizen service to South Africa. We’ve got the second group of young people coming over from South Africa, and they should be at our dinner tonight. There are tons of things like this to be done.
The one thing that I’m worried about-- I think our young people get a bum rap as being selfish, and the X generation, and all that. The truth is this generation of young Americans has provided more citizen service than any generation in the history of our republic. They are more likely to serve in their communities than any generation in the history of our republic. However, they are also less likely to vote, partly because of cynicism. It bothers me that so many people think it doesn’t matter. I mean, after 2000, after the election happened, how could anybody think it doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t say this, but I’m not running for anything. I can say what I want. I told somebody the other day, the only good thing about the 2000 election was it gave the Supreme Court an unusual opportunity to stand up for minority rights. [applause]
So, I’m a little worried that the quality of our traditional citizenship is suffering from this lack of voting, lack of involvement in the political process, and the corresponding sort of atmosphere where we’re not supposed to debate things anymore, and where people are treated like they’re not patriots if they don’t tow the party line. Some of you are probably still trying to figure out how Max Cleland, who gave up two legs and an arm in Vietnam, was voted out in Georgia because he wouldn’t stand up for the security of the people of Georgia. How could they possibly believe that? And you know what it was about, don’t you? It was about the homeland security bill. The political problem for the opposition party in the last election was that 100% of the Democrats voted to go into Afghanistan, and two thirds of them voted for the President to have the authority to go into Iraq, so they had no security operation issue against the Democrats. So in the eleventh hour they decided they would be for Senator Lieberman’s homeland security bill, which they had opposed for eight months. Once they changed their position, 24 hours later if you hadn’t changed yours you weren’t for protecting America. And that was the buzz saw with which they chewed up Max Cleland. I mean, it was a great con job, and as soon as the election was over the bill flew through because the administration compromised on some odious provisions that were previously in it.
How could people do that? Because they were scared. We are still psychically scarred from September the eleventh. Here’s the point I want to make about that. The last point I want to make in challenging the young people to be active in traditional politics. Fear is not a bad emotion. You know, if you have no fear you’ll be stupid. You’ll do dumb things if you have absolutely no fear. But if your life is governed by fear, you are doomed to disappointment and failure. So the trick is how to have a healthy measure of fear, but always be overcoming. That’s what John Kennedy did for everybody in my generation. He said don’t worry about this. We can overcome this. We can overcome our racial problems. We can overcome the threat of communism. We can overcome the danger of nuclear war. We can overcome it.
When you are afraid it is most difficult to think, but it is most important to think. Not just in politics, but in personal life. What if your car goes into a skid on a wet highway? It’s most important to think, and hardest to think. Always most important. And it bothers me to hear all this climate today disparaging debate. You know, if you look at the whole history of America, about half the time, the dissenters have been right. If the dissenters had never been right, we would have never changed the civil rights laws, we would never have changed the women’s rights laws, we would never saved the environmental laws if the dissenters weren’t right.
So, I wanted to say to you today I think it is a time for traditional political activity and for people not to feel that their patriotism has been impugned if they have a different take on things. We need more thinking and more debate now.
Not long before Senator Moynihan died he wrote a remarkable article in the Washington Post calling "for a return to the power of openness." It was for a specific thing that he was upset about. He was really upset that, in the aftermath of September the eleventh, all these beautiful federal buildings had been closed to visitors in Washington. He said, "My God, the taxpayers pay for this stuff. Now they can’t come in and look at it because they’re a security threat." There’s something to be said for not responding to the crisis in a way that compromises the character of the country. That was the point he made. The larger point didn’t have anything to do with federal buildings. The larger point was the point that President Kennedy’s whole life bore testament to, which is the secret to a successful life is overcoming your fears. To reach out in common humanity across the lines that divide us.
Let me just say in closing, I have no doubt that I’m not right about everything. It never occurred to me that I was in sole possession of the truth. The Bible that I read said that I wasn't. It said that we all see through a glass darkly, and know in part, and only after this life is over will we know even as we are known. But we face those who have exclusive claims to the truth, and who believe their differences are more important than our common humanity. I believe that we need the vision, the vigor, and the optimism of President Kennedy. I believe in that simple little statement he made, "The problems of human destiny are not beyond the reach of human beings." Because he lived and served, we are left with a legacy of the power of his ideas, the eloquence of his word, the strength of his hope. What if he had lived, some still ask. But he does, in the hearts of those who remember, and the young who still learn. And he speaks, too, when instead of asking what if, we ask what now?
Thank you very much.
[applause]
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: We’ve got about a half an hour, and I think the idea is that we’ll have a little conversation about some of the issues raised by President Kennedy’s life and career. I’m hoping that we’ll have a little bit of time for questions from the audience at the end.
One comment. I was watching the film that I've seen so many times of President Clinton in the rose garden in 1963, and you may know this, President Kennedy was taking a real risk to meet with the Boys Nation group because apparently a group of kids who had been in the garden just before then, they were so excited to see him that they stole his cufflinks and his tie clasp. So, if you see in the film that the president is sort of holding back a little bit, that may have been on his mind.
PRESIDENT PRESIDENT CLINTON: We were way too straight for that.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Apparently the cufflinks were there and the tie clasp after the Boys Nation group, so it spoke very well for all of you.
This is not President Clinton’s first visit to the Kennedy Library. His first visit was not long after you became president, when he came for the reinstallation of the exhibition hall here. But we were talking earlier. I think in a way his first visit was in 1964, when he was just beginning at Georgetown University. He had a friend who knew President Kennedy and so deep was his feeling for the president that they actually went down to the national archives where Evelyn Lincoln, the late president’s secretary, was going through his papers and artifacts. They were able to get her to show them the rocking chair and some of the things that are so identified with the Kennedy period.
I thought I’d run through a few things, and then, at the end get a few questions from the audience. I guess one thing that occurs to me, just to the beginning of the Kennedy presidency, as you know when John Kennedy ran in 1960 he was in a nominating process that took about seven months. It was not really known who would win the nomination, actually until Ted Kennedy was standing in the Wyoming delegation at the end of the role call on the first ballot. In those days a president was nominated, as you know, in primaries, caucuses, and conventions. It took a long time. The process next year will probably take about four weeks. It’s going to be very front loaded. Do you think the new process is better for choosing a president, or would you like to see some elements of the old one?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I’d like to see some elements of the old one. That’s one reason I think it would be a mistake to keep front-loading this process and eventually to dispossess Iowa and New Hampshire. Now, I know there’s a lot of arguments that Iowa and New Hampshire are not representative. But the thing that they have going for them is that they’re small. I know you could say that this is not biased, because I’m from a small state, but I’ve watched Senator Kennedy here in Massachusetts, even though Massachusetts is not a
small state, he does a lot of what I would call retail politics. He knows the names of most of the people in this room. You heard him quote the places that I have been in the cities where we campaigned.
One of the things that bothers me about the whole presidential nominating process is the more you front-load it, the more you put it into big primaries, the more you consign these candidates to spending all their time raising money or just stopping on tarmacs and going to rallies. But the presidential campaign is supposed to be enlightening for the candidate as well as for the voters. It was good for John Kennedy to have to go to West Virginia and see all those white poor people, all those protestants living in the hills and hollows, good for him to have to go to the inner cities, good to have the time and the obligation to go and listen to the stories of people who are different from you.
That’s the thing I loved about New Hampshire. For all of its quirkiness, it was beautiful to me because they had a sense that they owed the country something. They owed the country a good decision, and they were determined to give everybody a listen. And you had to listen.
In every election the American people speak in a slightly different voice. You have to pick up the rhythms of it if you want to represent the country. And so, from my point of view, I think it’s a-- And I understand why nobody wants to get counted out. I understand why California and New Jersey and Ohio don’t want to be at the end of the process anymore. I get all that. I got it. But frankly, I just think it’s going to be tragic if we frontload this thing so much that there’s no time for the candidates to learn anything about the country even as they let the country learn something about them.
This campaign, if it’s done right, is as valuable to the candidates as it is to the voters.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I think another thing-- You know, we historians tend to focus very much on the successes of a president and his triumphs, especially as election victories. One thing that John Kennedy said, I always felt was very interesting, he said that you never really understand politics until you’re defeated. Did you find that?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I sort of agree with Bear Bryant. He said, "I’ve won and lost, and I like winning better."
[laughter]
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: President Kennedy wouldn’t have disagreed.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: No, I think there’s something to that. I lost two elections. One, it was sort of like I really won because I came from so far back when, in my first race for congress I ran against a guy who had 85% approval rating. I ended up getting 48.5% of the vote.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: That was 1974.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Yeah. That was one of the three best campaigns I ever ran. I think still, in defeat, if you care, you can learn a lot. But you can’t make yourself into a victim. You can’t be resentful. Even though I don’t approve of the argument that was made in the last congressional elections, I don’t really blame the Republicans. They’re supposed to try to beat us. I blame us for letting them do it. Our job is to beat them. You can’t get mad at them when they do what they’re set out to do. They think they should defeat us, and they should be there and not us. I just blame us for not analyzing the situation well enough in figuring out how to flip it on them.
But I do think you learn something from defeat. I think there’s a rhythm in public life, particularly if you’re a Democrat or if you’re a progressive, you want to change things. You have to have a sure sense of how much you can change. If you stop pushing you will betray the purpose of your mission. And if you push too hard, the thing will come down around your ears. I’ve made both kinds of mistakes, more the latter than the former.
I think when you lose-- After I got beat for governor in 1980, I actually spent a lot of time going around my state just talking to people in little country towns, coffee shops, and letting them say whatever they wanted to say. And they said everything they wanted to say. And it was exceedingly valuable. But I don’t know that most people who lose are as young as I was, or as hard headed as I was, or wanted to keep going as I was. But when President Kennedy didn’t win that vice presidential nomination from Estes Kefauer, I think he learned something from that. But he was young and vigorous and determined to go on. So I think if you’re in that position, you can learn a lot from defeat.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: And he always felt that if he had won the nomination he might have been blamed for Stevenson’s defeat that year, and might not have gone on to be president. So I think--
PRESIDENT CLINTON: That was one of those deals where life’s greatest curse is answered prayers. It’s a good thing he didn’t win, really.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Yeah, absolutely. Another thing that comes up in history is that presidents sometimes have a better time serving at a certain time of history than another. You sort of think of, we’ve talked about this a little bit, Franklin Roosevelt, had he been in the 1920s, would have been frustrated because the people were not ready for a strong president, and perhaps someone like Dwight Eisenhower who had certain strengths in the 50s would have, say, had a harder time mobilizing the nation, explaining to them why they had to fight in World War II because that was not his great strength.
You were once quoted as saying, "In a certain way, I wish I were president in World War II." What were you thinking of?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: First of all, I think some presidents are particularly well suited to the times in which they served. Lincoln was especially well suited to the time in which he served. It’s really interesting. Lincoln had serious depression problems. When he lost his son in Illinois, then he lost his son in the White House, and his wife lost three of her half brothers fighting for the Confederacy, and she suffered all of her trauma, and he had all the blood of the Union streaming from his decisions, something happened to him that is very rare for human beings who suffered the way he did. He got stronger as he took on the suffering of others. He got stronger as he absorbed the pain of others. Somehow this place, whatever that gnawing sense of selfdoubt and depression was that ate on him. And yet because he had, himself, suffered, he had an uncommon feeling for human frailty and for other people. So he literally was psychologically and intellectually perfect for the moment in which he served. It was an astonishing fit in history. He would have been an interesting, remarkable fellow whenever he served. But if he’d been in kind of a blah, blah time, you know, he might have been--
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: We wouldn’t be talking about him.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Yeah. He would have been looking for Prozac 100 years before it was developed. But it’s an extraordinary thing for a man to be able to take on the suffering and pain of others, and in the process of doing it to purge himself of pain on his own psyche and heart and soul. That’s an extraordinary thing.
Roosevelt-- You know, Geoffery Ward wrote a book about Roosevelt before he became president called A First Class Temperament, and it tells the story about Roosevelt coming out of his polio and recognizing he’s never going to walk again, and being in those heavy, steel braces, and finally taking a job in a Wall Street high-rise. So, he comes to work the very first day, and he’s determined once he gets helped out of the car, he’s going to walk across this marble floor of the office building to the elevator. And he falls. The first day, after months and months of therapy, he falls. His crutches fall away. He was in these heavy braces that won’t bend. They rush to pick him up, and he won’t let anybody pick him up. He pushes himself up on his powerful shoulders, throws his head back, and laughs. Laughs in the face of his own pain and humiliation, pulls himself across the marble floor to a place against the wall where he can get some perches, and pulls himself up.
Roosevelt later said in the White House that a president had to be America’s greatest actor. Roosevelt transformed himself to the way he confronted that, and therefore he became the perfect person to be the president in the Depression and World War II, because he could keep everybody in good humor because he had worked on keeping himself in good humor for many years by then.
So for me, I was raised in the backwater of World War II, if you will, the back draft of it. I got it. I got that sort of, you know, it’s fun to be a coach on the team. There’s good guys and bad guys, and it was both a black and white problem while the world was unfolding, and yet a set of complex intellectual problems in managing the war, and then the planning of a whole different, more integrated world after the war. I just thought it was a time when the kind of mind I have might have worked pretty well.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Was it also a time when there was more respect for presidents, and presidents didn’t have to operate in as tough a time as, perhaps, the last 20 years or so?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Oh yeah. I kept thinking I never hear any of these people who condemn the politicians, although they sobered up now, maybe even too much now. But we had a period from the disillusion of the Vietnam War and Watergate, up through my presidency when there was a lot of cynicism and everything was personal attack, and nobody was sincere about anything and everybody wanted to be judgmental.
I think September 11th sobered the country up a lot and made everybody think politics mattered again. And I think that’s good. Again, though, I don’t think the press any more than the politicians should check their brains at the door. We should still keep thinking and talking and reporting what we believe to be the truth. But I think that, when things are going along alright, and there seems to be no systemic threat to America, it’s easy to take politics and politicians and public service for granted, especially if you think trashing them helps improve your position, whether you’re a politician or in the press. And I just think that happened. I didn't particularly begrudge that. Actually, I was fairly well suited to serve when I did, because I have a higher pain threshold than most people.
Really, it’s important. Not everybody has a high pain threshold. My friend Vince Foster committed suicide partly because the Wall Street Journal wrote some nasty editorials about him, that only four people he ever met read. I don’t mean to diminish his pain, I’m just pointing out that-- Woodrow Wilson once wrote something like, painful words can be more hurtful than bullets, or something. There are all these quotes like that. We all are hurt when we think people say things about us that aren’t true, or when they say things about us that are true sometimes. But they’re said for the purpose of injury, not enlightenment.
There’s a lot of particularly impressive things, particularly in Jewish theology about words that are said for the purpose of wounding, not enlightenment or correction. Because of my upbringing, I had a particular tolerance for it, that made it easier for me to survive it. So maybe that’s why I was slotted in at this moment in history.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: We were talking earlier, historians have to deal with some of the same issues. As you know Robert Dallek was on this stage a week ago promoting his new book on President Kennedy. Is that a book you’ve read?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: No, you know I asked you about the Perret book on Kennedy, which I did read. I read almost every book that’s written about the Kennedy years.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: And most other presidents--
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I read a lot. When I was in the White House I read a lot of books about the so-called minor presidents. I tried to go back and read about-- You know, I read a great book about Rutherford Hayes. You may laugh about that, but I think one of the things that I learned is that every one of these people who was president was trying to do a good job, and do the best they could. And sometimes our historical take on them changes.
For example, during the time when I was president Grant got ratcheted up quite a bit, thanks to Perret’s book and Jean Edward Smith’s book. So, because I had developed a big respect for Perret when he wrote the book on Grant, I read his book on President Kennedy. I have not read the Dallek book yet, so I can't
comment. I read his books on President Johnson, and I thought they were quite good.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Yeah, I did too. From this, having been president, how much do historians have to deal with private lives when they’re trying to evaluate a president? Is it necessary? Can you write about a president’s official life and not get into that?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: No, I think you do have to deal with it to some extent if you’re a historian, and there are things that you know, and you believe they had some bearing on it. Or if you’re a biographer and you’re trying to tell a story of a life, a person’s life is a life.
There’s a lot of difference in writing a story about somebody that has been, in the case of Grant, dead over a hundred years, and basically just every day trying to turn a public person into a private piñata without regard to the bearing of whatever it is you’re doing on the discharge of the person’s responsibilities.
So, I think that there’s a whole lot of difference between writing a retrospective biography of somebody when all the records are in and half the people are gone, then just essentially feasting on them under the guise of trying to enlighten the public when it has nothing to do with enlightening the public. It’s a grab for power, ratings, or position. If you read that book, The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz, he says that whenever someone says something about you, whether it’s good or bad, it’s never about you. It’s always about them. If they say you’re wonderful, it may be true, but that’s not why they said it. And if they say you’re a no good SOB, it may be true, but that’s not why they said it. Whenever somebody says something about you, it’s about them. And that’s certainly true in this case, I think.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: It reminds me a little bit, also, about the guy who said whenever you hear someone say it’s not about money, it’s always about money.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: When someone tells you it’s not a money problem, they’re invariably discussing someone else’s problem.
[laughter]
PRESIDENT CLINTON: You know, how many times have you heard this? Poverty’s not a money problem, but tax cuts are. Same deal.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: One poignant thing is that President Kennedy never had the privilege of becoming an ex-president. You’ve studied a lot of them. What kinds of things were surprises to you when you became a former president?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well for a couple of months I was disoriented when I walked into a room, and they didn’t play a song anymore. [laughter]
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I didn’t know where I was. I’ll tell you what, I was surprised by a couple of things. First of all, I loved being president so much, I think I was genuinely surprised by how happy I was to have my life back. Every phase of my life, I’ve really enjoyed, I’ve been grateful for. And I never felt entitled to be president. I’ve had a very improbable life. I think Franklin Pierce and I are the only two governors of small states ever to have been elected president. So I never felt entitled to live there. I loved every day I lived in the White House. I loved going to Camp David. I loved flying on Air Force One, but I never felt entitled to any of it.
And so, when time came for me to go, I was ready to go. And I was glad to have my life back. I enjoyed being able to go downtown in this little town where I live, and drink coffee. I enjoyed being able to go home to Arkansas and stay up half the night with my friends telling stories about our childhood and playing cards if I wanted to. I enjoyed being able to, three nights ago, take Hillary out to a movie if I want to. I just enjoyed having my life back, having the rhythms of an ordinary life.
So, I think that surprised me. It also surprised me how much fulfillment I could find, after having worked like a demon for 30 years, just having a few months where I mostly just traveled and read, and absorbed other things.
What I miss most is the work and the people. I’d have done the work until I dropped, you know. It’s a good thing we’ve got the term limits. You’d have had to throw me out. But I think the term limits are okay. I think since people are living much longer it wouldn’t affect me, but for future generations that twenty-second amendment should probably be modified to say two consecutive terms instead of two terms for a lifetime, because we’re all living longer. There may come a time when we elect a president at age 45 or 50, and then 20 years later the country comes up with the same sort of problems that the president faced before and the people would like to bring that man or woman back, and they’d have no ability to do so. I’d kind of like to see it changed. I don’t have terribly strong feelings about it.
I think what surprised me was how much I liked having my life back, and how at the same time I still, on occasion, really missed the work, and the people. You know, when you’re president anybody will come see you. It’s pretty great.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: The other thing you were talking about Franklin Pierce, there were also very few presidents as young as you were who completed two terms when they left the presidency. Were there any models you looked at in history or thought of consciously?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Yeah. It’s a pretty good list, not a very long list, of presidents who made a substantial contribution to our country after they left the White House. John Quincy Adams made an astonishing contribution by serving almost eight full terms in the House, and becoming the leading spokesman for abolition. And of course William Howard Taft went on the Supreme Court. Herbert Hoover became a great public servant again, did the Hoover Commission and several other things. Theodore Roosevelt essentially started another national movement, which while it did not prevail in the presidential election, contributed to the movement of the country, I believe, toward progressive policies. In modern times, of course, Jimmy Carter has had the most remarkable record of service for an ex-president, and won a well-deserved Nobel Prize for doing so last year.
So, I think of all those people. I think I’m a little more political in some ways, in the sense that I go give speeches like this. So in that sense I do what President Roosevelt did, but I also have-- I’ve spent more than half my time with my foundation doing the kind of work President Carter did. As I said, I work on economic development in India. I rebuild schools, hospitals, economic development enterprises there. I work on that in Africa with the great Peruvian economist, Hernando Desoto. I do work on AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. So I do a lot of that work. I do work in Harlem and other places in America. I do a blend of those two, and I’m just trying to figure it out as I go along. And I’m writing a book, which if it’s not good you have to blame me because I have no ghostwriter. I’m just writing the thing.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Which is quite unusual in history.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: You may know why nobody else does it when I come out.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Presidents like to blame the ghostwriters.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Who will I blame?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: What do you think is the best presidential memoir thus far published?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Oh, Grant s, no question.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: And you might tell the story of how that was written.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: First of all he was a better president than he got credit for. You have to understand, unlike most of you, I grew up in the south where we thought Grant was a drunk who just had a big army and a lot of cannons. And the only reason he conquered the brilliant Robert E. Lee and all of his generals on their shining horsebacks, was that he had more guns and he just mowed everybody down.
The truth is that Grant affected the first revolution in infantry warfare since Napoleon. He was the finest horseman in the army. At West Point he jumped a horse over a fence higher than any American ever had done until that time. There’s not a single shred of evidence that he was ever drunk an hour on the job. He was five foot four, and frail. His nerves were like this. He chain-smoked ten thousand cigars in the Civil War. It ultimately killed him. He would drink when he had time off. He was so exhausted from staying up late that just a little bit of liquor would knock him out. But he was never drunk on the job as far as we know.
So I always thought old Grant got a bad rap in history, and now he’s being written up in, as I mentioned earlier, two biographies by Jeffery Perret and Jean Edward Smith, who also wrote a great biography of John Marshall.
So Grant is-- But he wasn’t much of a business man, and he really wanted to come back to the White House one more time. When that was thwarted and Benjamin Harrison was elected president, he tried to make money on Wall Street in New York, and it didn’t work out. He knew he was ill, so he wanted to write his memoirs. Mark Twain took a great interest in him because he admired Grant and he thought the country had treated him very shabbily. They didn’t give him a big enough pinch, and enough honors, and enough support. And then Twain analyzed his publishing deal and discovered that his publisher had shafted him. So Twain got him a better publishing deal, and then helped him and encouraged him all the way through. And he basically worked on these memoirs, virtually up until the moment of his death. In the end he was in so much pain and to stay awake he would go outside, sit on a porch, wrap himself in a blanket, and write his memoirs with a scraggily old pencil. He was very courageous in the way he wrote.
If you read his memoirs they read just like one military memo after another. It’s like being on the receiving end of a machine gun, almost. And it’s principally about the Civil War, but they’re still the best memoirs because he wrote them, they’re real, they’re vivid, they’re alive, and it’s him.
Harry Truman’s official memoirs are not very good. His great memoirs are the oral history he did with Merle Miller, Plain Speaking, which for modern readers were probably the best.
But I think it’s a mistake, because you get a big advance and you have a publisher deadline, and because you don’t want to make a mistake, just to, in effect, serve up sort of a rehash of what you did, and defending all your policies, and trying to get even with all your adversaries, and trying to make sure there’s some place in some library somewhere that your side of the story is told.
So, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m just sort of telling what happened, and having a great time doing it. But it’s really scary. I think every person who turns 50 or more should sit down on weekends and write the story of his or her life, if only for your children and grandchildren. We tend to get so caught up in our video--
Especially kids, they live on television and video games and all this. I think the story telling tradition of America may suffer. I think family history is very important. I really do believe that even if you think that you would never publish it, there would never be a commercial market for your memoirs, you ought to write them for your children and grandchildren. Everyone who turns 50 ought to do it. It would mean something more than you can possibly know to your family to do it. It’s something I have learned from having done it myself. Also, it’s good exercise. Kind of scary, but good exercise.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Most former presidents do not enjoy the process as much as President Clinton seems to be with his book. One think about the Kennedy Library. As you know, there are a lot of tapes of conversations. There’s a wonderful treasure-trove of records of that period. Do you think that nowadays because presidents don’t tape their conversations, and there are fewer records, and they don’t put things on paper, that people in my line of work are going to have a harder time understanding what a president did in office?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Absolutely. But again that may be correcting itself. It may have reached the high-water mark when I was there. Between the press and the Republicans in congress, people were scared to write anything down. They looked at you like you were dirty if you asserted any confidentiality privilege. It may be again that that’s begun to turn in the other direction. I personally think the problem today is far more excessive secrecy. It’s changed with a dramatic flair.
But when I was there it-- For example, I think it’s great, these taped meetings of the cabinet meetings here at the library, they’re fascinating. We would never have done that. Ever. Couldn’t have done it because they would have been out in two days. And then I could never have gotten a straight answer out of any cabinet member again, who said anything unconventional or unpopular, or potentially difficult. It would have been over.
I try to leave a lot of records, and I’m going to open mine sooner than we’re required. The other guys in the previous two administrations are closing theirs. I’m opening mine. But you’ve got to say there must be something to what they’re doing because the way the public perception of who’s opened and closed, and honest or not is different from what the factual evidence would tend to indicate. So arguably, no good deed goes unpunished, but I’m still going to open them.
I wrote on a lot of mine, memos. I didn’t send emails, because I thought all the young people who were sending them often made the mistake of saying the first thing that came into their head, which once they were released to the press might look bad even though it might have been totally innocent. Whereas I found that if I actually had to take the time to write on the memo, as far as I know in eight years there was only one thing that I wrote that anybody could even make to look bad retrospectively. Because just the act of taking the pen in your hand and putting it on the paper and thinking about just that split second, I think leads to a little more reflection. So, I didn’t do that, but I do think, on balance, you won’t have quite the record in the future that you have in the past.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Were you told not to keep a diary at the beginning of the presidency?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: No, but you didn’t have to be as bright as a tree full of owls to figure out what was going on in Washington at the White House.
No, as a matter of fact, I did an oral history. Once a month I went over all the events of the previous month and made more or less contemporaneous comments. But I didn’t keep a daily diary. I had a diarist at the White House for the last five years I was there, to give us a little local color, of what was going on. But I didn’t keep a daily diary. Kind of wish I had in a way. It wasn’t worth it, just the hassle.
Lyndon Johnson once told my senior senator, Dale Bumpers, that the difference between republicans and democrats is that republicans were primarily interested in cutting taxes for their friends, and investigating Democrats. And as near as I could see, that was about it. And it didn’t matter if there was anything there or not. As a matter of fact they almost seemed to be happier when there wasn’t anything there because it gave them the excuse to keep on going.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: You’ve read an awful lot of presidential history and unlike most historians, you’ve also been president. Are there certain things that you understand having been president that no historian can understand from the outside?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I’m not sure about that. I think a personally secure, intellectually honest, and empathetic historian can get it pretty close. I think the point is, you don’t want to get too cute like some of these books that had tricks in them. I don’t think you want to get too cute.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: What do you mean by tricks?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, devices. Like that device in the Reagan book, you know?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Edmund Morris who pretended to be [simultaneous conversation]
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Yeah. I don’t think-- That was interesting reading, but I don’t think it necessarily got us closer to getting Reagan. But I think a historian or biographer wants to be, even if you don’t like the person you’re writing about, you have to be empathetic at least to give a fair picture. So if you’re empathetic and you’re kind of grown up, and you’re not working out your own deal when you’re writing this book, you don’t have some ulterior motive, I think you can get pretty close.
Senator Kennedy and I were talking about this earlier. I think one of the things that will help this is if we build up in America larger and larger oral histories, where not only presidents, but other people are interviewed about how it actually worked. Because one of the things that I think that you’d have no idea about at the time that it’s unfolding is how a human being, who happens to be president, is dealing with the fact that you may have a sick child, and a crisis in Russia, and people stranded in some godforsaken place halfway around the world, and it’s against all this background that the press or the Republicans, or whoever’s fighting you, is focused on something entirely different.
The thing that I think is difficult to convey is how everything happens at once, and how you’re supposed to keep centered in an almost Zen-like state, no matter what the incoming fire is, so that you can do first, every day, for the eight years or the four years that you’re there, what seems best for the country and the future of the world.
That’s the one thing that I think is almost impossible to capture for an outsider, just the way it all happens at once, and how you can’t allow your brain to become like scrambled eggs. You have to be a sorter.
One of the things I think was good about President Kennedy. He was very smart, but he had sort of a synthetic intelligence. I think analytical intelligence is very important for a president, because you’ve got 50,000 things happening here, and you need to have someone who can see patterns and consequences, and see around corners, and somehow simplify, distill, and order the chaos of events, because everything’s happening at once. I think that’s the one thing I would say is very hard to capture if you hadn’t been there.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: My final question, then I’ve got one or two from the audience, is do you think the process of history, writing about presidents in the end really works? We would say that it may take 40 years, it may take 60 years, but in the end historians, if they’re serious and conscientious can cipher away the unimportant things from the important and cipher away the politics from the partisanship that you were talking about. In the end do you think that really happens with presidents?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I think two things. I think in the end it either works, and it usually does because it s
like everything else in our country. Most things that matter work in the end, otherwise we wouldn’t still be here. We’re still a pretty vibrant society for a country that got started in 1776. We still have a lot of juice. We’re just getting started. So, in the end most every important thing works out to the way it’s supposed to, I think.
On the other hand, if it doesn’t, maybe it doesn’t matter all that much, unless a grievous historical lie is established. That’s bad. It’s bad for a country to live with a grievous historical lie, but if a president has written a little bit down-- If I’m a little better than everybody says I was, or they say I’m a little better than I really was, I’ll be dead and gone and it won’t really matter that much. The only thing that really matters is what did you do that changed the lives of people for the better. And that’s the echo that lives throughout history, anyway. It’s the way that people’s lives are changed.
The press decided that I was interested in my legacy so they always said that’s what I was obsessed with. But I actually never was as obsessed with it. I was more obsessed with getting stuff done while I was there, and I did overload the system a couple of times because I was-- I never worried too much about the legacy. I had on my desk in the Oval Office a moon rock, brought off the moon in 69 that was carbon dated at 3.6 billion years old. And whenever the Democratic leaders or Republican leaders would come into my office and they’d start fighting I’d just stop them and say, "See that rock? It’s 3.6 billion years old. Now we’re just passing through. Chill out here."
That’s what I believe about legacy. All our books will be dust someday, and the only thing that really endures is the sort of human quality and impact of what you do anyway. No one else’s assessment can change that. The reason it’s important to get history right is that it helps to continue to strengthen the best things about our country.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Are there any grievous lies you think that do endure in history, or presidents who got a particularly bum rap from your reading?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Presidents that I think-- I think Grant was written down too much, but I think-- You know, it took a hundred and whatever years, but he’s about where he ought to be now. Perret and Jean Edward Smith have bumped him up a little bit. They said he had a very distinguished cabinet except for one clinker, and he wasn’t nearly as bad a president as everybody said. He was one hell of a general. And they bumped him up a little bit.
And I think President Johnson is being bumped up a little, which I think is really good. I think he did make a terrible mistake in Vietnam. I think he got his pride involved, and interrupted his otherwise ruthlessly clear political instincts. But you know, when President Kennedy died, he had an opportunity, because of the margin that we had in the congress and the grief of the country in the aftermath of the president’s death, to do some remarkable things. And he did them. Not everyone would have. And he did. And he should be written up in history.
So I think these things are-- This is a continuous process. We normally figure it out.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Or argue it without end. Two quick audience questions then I want to call on Senator Kennedy for a final word.
Question number one, the questioner asks, "As a Canadian, President Clinton, I was pleased to hear you stress the importance of cooperation between countries. What vision is required to eliminate terrorism?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I think you have to do several things. You have to go after the known terrorist cells. You have to improve homeland defense. You have to secure the known biological and chemical and nuclear stocks, and destroy those which you can. And occupy people, who would otherwise be vulnerable to being employed, in positive things.
There’s a bill that was sort of a pre-terrorism bill adopted in 1991 by the congress before I came in, but mostly implemented by me called the Nunn-Lugar Bill, where we spent a lot of your tax money in the former Soviet Union to bring all the Russian nuclear missiles back into Russia and out of the other Soviet states, to decommission the missiles, to destroy the materials we could, and in some years we employed, with your tax money, one half of all the Soviet scientists and technology workers in nuclear, chemical, and biological fields.
Last year, after September 11th, I talked to Chad Edwards from Texas, a Democratic congressman who has responsibility over this area in his subcommittee in the House, and urged him, and he did recommend expanding Nunn-Lugar to every other country in the world that wants to work with us on chemical, biological and nuclear areas. The administration opposed it last year, but I hope that there’ll be some effort to deal with that this year. I think prevention is very important.
Then I think, the other thing is, we just have to keep working to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists.
This new round of AIDS help, the provision, if we could have another round of debt relief for countries with high health bills, all these, fighting global warming, all these things that you might not think of as relating to our security, relate very directly to our security if they help us build a world with more friends and fewer enemies. The work we do for the peace process in the Middle East, for example, I think the president’s going over there pretty soon and I hope that we get the peace process going again.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: The final question, and this sort of links into what you said in your speech about when President Kennedy went to Berlin in 1963, which he called the best day of his presidency seeing the spirit of the Berliners, the questioner says, "When you, President Clinton, visited Belfast for the first time, it was said that you described the day you switched on the Christmas tree lights at the city hall as the best day of your presidency. Could you speak about this?"
PRESIDENT CLINTON: First of all I have to thank Jean Kennedy Smith for her role as our Ambassador there, fighting off all the people in our government who thought we had slipped a disk when we gave Gerry Adams a Visa, and got involved in the peace process.
First of all, the Irish had been fighting for a long time, and a lot of people had died. The Irish, the cease fire, and the progress we began to make on peace when I went the first time in December of 95 has to be seen against the backdrop of my sending troops to Bosnia. Remember that was when NATO had to move into Bosnia. We were then going in to make the peace and end the ethnic slaughter there, and the ongoing efforts to make peace in the Middle East. So it was a happy day for me because I was an Irish protestant whose mother’s family came from . . .(inaudible). It was a happy day for me because the Irish were happy, and not behaving badly, but happily.
I felt nostalgic about it, and it was a happy day for me because I thought if we could get it right in Northern Ireland, it might change the atmosphere across the globe. It might make other people see that they, too, could get beyond their differences. So it was an ecstatically happy day, and I feel comfortable saying that the town I love so well, we were in Derry, and then I quoted-- All the streets of Derry were filled. There were 30 thousand or so people there, and I quoted him. And then when we got down to Dublin that night-- I quoted Seamus Henry in Derry, and he came over to Jean’s house, the Ambassador’s house, and gave me a copy of the poem from the . . .(inaudible) of Troy that I had read in my speech, which I have on my desk at home today in New York. I look at it every single day of my life.
So yeah, it was one of the great days of my presidency and one of the great days of my life, and a reminder that even in the darkest hours you can make some good things happen.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I assume we’ll get to read about all of this in your memoirs, which are being published a year from this fall, fall of 2004?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Maybe I’ll get them out before then. I’m going to try. I’m working like a demon on them. Besides that, I’m going to get bored with my life if I don’t get it over with. [laughter]
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I think most historians would say misery loves company. We’re glad you’re doing it. Anyway, thank you very much. [applause]
SENATOR KENNEDY: I think all of us would like to thank Michael Beschloss very much for being here and making this very special. Thank you President Clinton for your extraordinary statement and speech, comments about President Kennedy, and thank you for returning here to President Kennedy’s library. We thank you for all that you’ve done for our country, and all that you continue to do for mankind. We’re very grateful for your presence.
I have just a very small gift, which is the speech that President Kennedy gave at the Rose Garden that afternoon, the remarks President Kennedy made, the Boy’s Nation. It’s a small token, but it has special meaning. [applause]