← Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson
Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson
BONUS: A Conversation with Bill Clinton on “Citizen: My Life After the White House”
00:57:43
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- [00:02]
Jesse
Hi, it's Jesse. Listen, I have something really exciting for you. It's not an extra episode of Dinner's on Me, but it's equally exciting. I recently had the chance to go to Little Rock, Arkansas, to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Clinton Library. And while I was there, I had the chance to sit down with former President Bill Clinton to talk to him about his latest book, My Life after the White House, which is, as you guessed it, about his transition from a lifelong politician to a private citizen. Bill Clinton was candid about his family, his friendships, and his life as a private citizen who also just happens to be the 42nd President of the United States of America. It was a really special conversation that I was so honored to be a part of. Here's a piece of our chat, which was edited for clarity and length. Okay.
- [00:56]
Bill Clinton
Thank you. Whoa.
- [01:02]
Jesse
That was all for you. You got a run for office. I gotta run for office. It's so. You know, I know that you've had so many incredible moderators doing your book tour. Shonda Rhimes, Billy Crystal, Cory Booker. And they're all unbelievable. And they've got to do these unbelievable cities. But I am so honored that I get to do the best city on your book tour. This is incred to be in a space where so many people who just adore you are gathered. You adore the city. I was able to see the Library today. The 20th anniversary is now. I mean, it's just an incredible time to be here, and I'm just so.
- [01:47]
Bill Clinton
Thank you.
- [01:48]
Jesse
Honored to be asked.
- [01:50]
Bill Clinton
It's a great city.
- [01:52]
Jesse
I do come back a lot, I assume.
- [01:53]
Bill Clinton
Yep. Every chance I can. Yeah, I've been busy the last few months, you know, but now they'll have more time next year, it looks like.
- [02:03]
Jesse
Yeah. Yeah. I do want to offer my condolences, though. When I was coming in, our driver did tell me that the McDonald's that she left was shut down and turned into a chick fil a. So I'm sorry, it's a bit of a hysterect.
- [02:21]
Bill Clinton
The whole McDonald's thing was way overrated. But I did stop for coffee there every day on my morning room.
- [02:26]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I was at the library, it was such a great reminder of, obviously, your incredible career that you had in the White House. And your book obviously talks about your years after the White House. But I thought it'd be an interesting way to sort of set the stage and just kind of remind everyone your passion. Because being a president, I don't. So many of you probably relate to this. When I sit at home sometimes I'm like, oh, God, who wants that job? That is a hard job. And yet there are people who need to step up and do it. What made you want to be in politics and ultimately president?
- [03:02]
Bill Clinton
Well, when I was a boy, I was always interested in it. I remember we got a television when I was 10, and by the way, we didn't get a television until I was 10. And I think it's one reason I got to be president, because when I was born, we lived in a conversational culture. And if one of the things that I think is wrong with America today is the way we talk about each other and talk past each other and basically categorize each other as two dimensional cartoons, if you live up in an oral. If you live in a oral culture, it's harder to do that, particularly if you're living in a small town. You know, people. Linda Johnson said that he was happy after all the years at the pinnacle of Washington power to go home to Johnson City, because it was a little place where people know when you're sick and care when you die. And I thought that was a part of my life. But anyway, I did watch. I remember sitting on the floor in front of our new television at age 10, watching the Democratic and the Republican conventions on television. And it's when President Kennedy ran for the vice presidential nomination in a floor challenge to Estes Cafar and he lost. And it's the best thing that ever happened to him. I mean, it had a lot to do with, you know, how he basically jumped into the leadership in the primaries in 1960. It was interesting. So I liked it. And I remember I didn't really make a decision until I was 16. And I was. I thought about being a doctor, and I loved music. You know, I love my saxophone, and I played it well by local standards. And I remember looking into the mirror one day saying, you could be a really good doctor, but you'll never win a Nobel Prize. You could make a living playing saxophone, but you'd never be as good as John Coltrane. And back then, if you were a jazz musician, it didn't matter how many hit records you had, you couldn't make a living unless you did the clubs, which meant that you stayed up all night and slept till noon. And your chances of becoming drug dependent were roughly twice as good as your chances of building a successful family. And I wanted to become a father. I wanted to have a normal life. I wanted to be a good partner. So I said, you know, I Think I could be really good at politics. And I just thought because. And I was. It's not true that I knew I was going to be president and all that. When I shook John Kennedy, Kennedy's hand, my original aspiration was to be a senator. And then after I served as Attorney General, I wanted to be governor because I like doing things. I like, you know, taking responsibility for solving problems, seizing opportunities. I was fascinated, and still am, about how things work. One of the reasons I think our people are easily, easily turned cynical by the, you know, all this stuff that's in the modern communications ecosystem is that we talk too much about what are you going to do and how much money you're going to spend off on it, and not enough about how are you going to do it, and then let yourself be grilled, Let people ask you the hard questions, work through, because how you do something makes all the difference in the world. So that's how I got involved with politics. I thought I could do that maybe better than anybody I'd ever met. And I just wanted to see if I could do it. And I had a good time doing it.
- [07:16]
Jesse
You did a pretty good job. I know when you left the White house, you were 54. I'm going to be 50 next year. I'm looking at the age of 54. It's not too far away. And that's a young age to consider retiring. It's also an older age to consider what next. When you left the White house, you had 25 years of experience as a politician behind you, and yet you didn't know what was behind the door. I find it so inspiring that you took what you learned and what you had accomplished already and then forged a new path outside of the White House. What advice would you give to people like me who, you know, are always wanting to grow and always wanting to change and always want to contribute, like, you know, how do we forge those paths when we don't see the path in front of us?
- [08:14]
Bill Clinton
I tried to outline this in the. In the book. I think that, first of all, you have to discipline yourself and steel yourself not to waste a day wishing you could do something you can't do anymore. I mean, I really admire Magic Johnson because when he had to retire from basketball and there was still a lot of fear about people who were HIV positive, and he lived for several years on the discipline of his maintenance of health before the antiretrovirals were available. But he thought for years while he was playing basketball about what he could do. And he said, I want to see if I can make a career in business. I believe I'd be good at it. And he turned out to be good at it. And he did a lot of good. He had a lot of interest in New York City for a while. He owned theaters and other things he just cared about and he did a good job. So the first thing you have to say is, do I have to stop doing what I'm doing or do I want to stop doing what I'm doing? If so, you have to commit yourself to your new life. Then I think you have to decide what you want to do. And then maybe most important of all, you have to decide how are you going to keep score. Truth is, everybody in this audience keeps score all the time. And a lot of times we keep score wrongly in ways that set ourselves up for fear and disappointment or resentment. But I decided that I would try to keep score as a private citizen the way I had when I was in politics or people better off when you quit than when you started. Do children have a brighter future? And are we coming together instead of being torn apart? If that's how you keep score and you can honestly answer yes to those three questions, it doesn't matter much if you have ups and downs and setbacks and you back people who don't get elected or, you know, you get frustrated. And then I tried to learn everything I could about what it would be like to build a non governmental career, to be an ngo, a non governmental organization. And I learned a lot from Hillary because she was always involved in other things and she was always really good at it. And I remember one day I was shaving and a few months after I left office and I was staring in the mirror and I said, my God, I've become an ngo. And we had, we had, we changed positions in life and I had a great time helping her in politics. And I have loved building this foundation. And we're celebrating the 20th anniversary of the library here and just kept trying to find something useful to do. And I was so proud here of all the people that worked in and with the library when we delivered almost a million meals during the COVID Yeah, Jose. But there's all kind of stuff out there to do. There's always something to do because there's always a gap between what the government can provide and the private sector will produce. And the best non governmental organizations find ways to work with government and the private sector to do things faster, better, at lower costs. And so I've had a good time trying.
- [12:14]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah, you brought up, obviously, all these incredible institutions you've built since leaving the White House, the Clinton Global Initiative, and also the Clinton Health Access Initiative. My parents weren't involved in show business. My mom was an OB gyn. My dad was a microbiologist, and he actually helped set up TB labs in Tanzania and AIDS research labs, which I know that's work that you also did after he retired. And I think that there's a sort of expectation or hope from parents sometimes that their children are going to follow in their footsteps. And I certainly did not do that with my family. But, you know, Chelsea, who's such a dear friend of mine, and her and her husband Mark are such different with Justin of mine. And, you know, it's really. I think it's so wonderful that she's taken such an active part in your work as well. What does it mean to have your daughter working so closely with the Clinton Foundation?
- [13:15]
Bill Clinton
Well, first of all, I'm really proud of her. She. She followed her heart. She went to Stanford, I think, thinking she would become a physician. And she called me one night when she was, I don't know, freshman or sophomore. She said, dad, I don't know. She said, I've got really good grades in a history class and an English class, and I'm doing okay in science, but I'm thinking about practical ways to use what I care about in health care. And she said, you got any advice? And I said, I think you should do what makes you happy, because most people are happiest doing what they're best at. And. And I remember a few years ago, I looked at her and I said, you know, briefly, when you were in high school, you thought you knew more than your parents did about everything. And I said, alas, it is finally true. Yes, you do know more than we do about everything. And it was. It's a joy, you know, just kind of hanging around, watching her mull things over.
- [14:39]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah.
- [14:40]
Bill Clinton
And having the occasional argument still. And every now and then I win one, but not too often.
- [14:48]
Jesse
I know you spoke in the book about, you know, when. When the COVID 19 virus was sort of creeping in you, the first person you went to was Chelsea.
- [14:55]
Bill Clinton
Just information. I called her. I remember when I read about the first case in China, and I write about this in the book. I said, so I picked up the phone, I called Chelsea because she was already teaching her course at Columbia and doing all these other things. And I said, chelsea, how bad is it going to be? She said, dad, I just pulled up a picture of it on the Internet, and I've been studying it. She said, I think it's going to be horrible. She said, I think it's going to be not as deadly as Ebola, but much worse than the flu, and it's going to spread like wildfire. And I do not think we organized to handle it. And there'll be a lot of people who will be tempted to go into denial and act like it's not that big a deal and we could ignore it. And I'm just afraid we are not organized to respond. And we know now that we got the best and the worst of both of her analyses. That is, Congress passed this big bill to develop a vaccine, and President Trump signed it. And we developed a vaccine in a hurry. And then people were pushing back and in denial about it. And so we didn't do a very good job of getting it out there as quick as we could, although it saved an enormous number of lives. And the evidence is clear that in the areas where the vaccine was most heavily used, there was far less hospitalization, far fewer people put on ventilators, and the death rate was much lower. But there are still people who say that they're all bad vaccines. And I just don't believe that. And I think the evidence points that way. And the most troubling thing we have now, in a time where people have lots of reasons to be skeptical about anything they read that has any political tinge to it, is there are still people who act like this was not a positive thing. And God knows how many people are alive today because of that vaccine. And I think so. And every time they do a variant or an upgrade, you know, because I'm a creaky old guy now, I'm supposed to run in a hurry and get this, the newest variant vaccine. So I get stuck and I'm grateful.
- [17:41]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah. You know, your time right out of the office. You speak so much in the second part of your book, specifically about all the work that you or amazed. The first part of the book, the work that you did with sitting presidents, explain to me. I imagine there must be a lot of nuance that you have to sort of have to when you're trying to help or when you're offering help to a sitting president. Is it. Are there boundaries that you may be afraid to cross? I mean, did you learn something from the way your friend Bush 41 maybe helped you while you were sitting president? I just imagine there must be some. Are you ever worried about, like, overstepping the boundary?
- [18:22]
Bill Clinton
When I think I was. When you're president, you almost by definition can't overstep them. You call people, you ask them to help, and they say yes or no, or you talk about an issue. But I think when you're not president, you have to respect the fact that there can only be one president at a time. If, in good conscience, you can't agree with the existing president, I think any disagreement should still be respectfully voiced. I remember once I was having a talk with President Bush because I did a little errand for him, and I never do that without asking. But shortly after George Bush took office, W. Bush, you may remember, there was a big broujah with China because an American spy plane had crashed on a Chinese island. And there's a hot phone, there's a red line, you know, between the two countries, but it wasn't used. And President Bush said something about, you know, it's our plane. Give it back. And then Jiang Zhimang, then the President of China, who's I think a very good man, said, you know, he said something pretty hateful. But. So in the middle of all this, I got invited to go to Hong Kong. A friend of mine who sadly passed away. Now, he was sponsoring this meeting, and he asked me to come give a speech. So I called Condi Rice, who was later Secretary of State, but was then the president's national security advisor. Condi was Chelsea's chancellor at Stanford, and she did what she could to protect Chelsea's privacy, which I always respected and was grateful for. So I called Condi and I said, look, Conde, you know, I got invited to go to Hong Kong and give this speech, and it's a pretty good fee. And, you know, I said. And I said, you know, you guys bankrupted me when I was president. And she laughed because she knew it was true. And I said, so I got bills to play and things to do. I need this speech, but I'm an American first, so if I go, I'll have to see President Jiang Zemin because he's going to be there. And I know we're fighting now, and he's my friend. I can't go and not see him. But tell me what you want the administration to communicate, and I'll say what you want. I won't, you know, twist it or lie about it or anything. And I said, but I got to do it if I go. If you don't want me to do that, then just tell me and I won't. And she said, well, let me check with the president. I'll call you. So then she calls me back in about a half an hour and said, we want you to go. And I said, well, what do you want me to tell. He said, tell him to give us our plane back. And then. And, and. And promise him that as soon as you do, you'll have a good talk and we'll start again. So I'm there with Jean Germain, And I said, Mr. President, before we get into all the personal stuff, let's talk about this airplane. And I started into my spiel, you know, that I was gonna. And he stopped. He said, wait a minute. He said, this is not nearly as bad as when you blew up my embassy in Belgrade, which we did do. We had an out of date map that said that it was a Serbian intelligence center. And when I was trying to stop the carnage in Bosnia, we bombed it, and three Chinese citizens who had nothing to do with it were killed. And there were riots in the street and everything. He said, but what did you do? He said, first you apologize, and then you tried to call me, and there were riots in the street. And he said, and you understood that we had our politics, too. Just because we're communists doesn't mean we don't have politics. So he said, you knew why I couldn't take your call. So you apologized again, and you tried to call again. The third time you called, I took the call. The demonstrations went away, and I told you that I understood. He sort of understood. I called him. I said, it's all this work we've done together, you and me, you don't really believe that I would intentionally bomb an embassy. He said, no, I don't. But he said, the American CIA and other intelligence agencies. You guys are too smart. You couldn't make a mistake like this. It's interesting. It's the first time I ever realized you could be punished for being smart. He just. He didn't believe that we could have made a mistake. And I said, well, if that happened, I'll find out. But I think it was honestly a mistake. I said, you know, nearly all people make them from now on. The again. And so, anyway, I called back, told George Bush, he called him, they gave the plane back. Oh, and Josh, man was funny. He says, he says, nobody thinks you should we shot your plane down, do they? He said, no. He said, it was an accident, crashed, but it crashed on our island. And you can't blame us for taking a look at it. You spy on us, we spy on you. Everybody knows it, but if we can get a little advantage without having to shoot anybody, it's not a bad thing. So. And we're having this totally, you know, non dogmatic conversation. So anyway, they talked and that was the end of it. So Bush called to thank me and I told him, I said, Mr. President, I know you don't like me because I defeated your father. And I said, that's okay with me. I like people who love their parents. But you have to understand, I like him too, a lot. But I had a severe policy disagreement with him when he was at over 70% approval after the first Gulf War and he was pursuing an economic policy that was going to bankrupt our country and was already driving down middle income incomes and lower income working people. I said, I just wanted me to use the power to do it. So we had this disagreement, we ran and I won. And I understand that. But I want you to know that I will never talk about you the way your guys talked about me. And I'm not complaining. Politics is tough business. It's a brutal contact sport. It's a zero sum game. But I said, I'm an American first. Now Hillary's in politics and you'll do things that I don't agree with. And because she's in politics, I may have to comment on them, but I will never do it disrespectfully. And if you ever need me and I can do it, in good conscience, I will do what I can. And he started calling me. He started calling me twice a year and we talked normally for about 45 minutes about everything under the sun. And he told a lot of people that one reason he came to trust me was I never leaked the conversations. And then I finally, with his permission, told.
- [26:31]
Jesse
Leaked the conversation. No, I'm just kidding.
- [26:34]
Bill Clinton
No. With his permission, I told the story about my conversation with him when we went together to the Pope's funeral, Pope John Paul's funeral, and I talked him into giving generic medicine a chance to prove that it worked. Because the American drug companies who were big supporters of the Republicans, were saying, you can't allow this to happen. Our drugs are better. Theirs are only 60% as effective. And so he, Bush said this, and I said, I know they say that, but you know, first, as smart as they are, they ought to understand math since our drugs are less than 10% as expensive, even if they're only 60% as effective. I think the math is we save six lives for everyone. They save for a given amount of money spent. So I told the head of Pfizer, then I said, I don't believe I'd make that argument anymore. If I were you, somebody's liable to do the math there right over dinner and then you be. So I said, I tell you what I'll do. I said, what about if I submitted every drug we put in any human body anywhere to the American Food and Drug Administration, if they say it's safe and effective, Would you say to the countries you help through his program, pepfar, which I loved and we work with them. But I said, you're spending all this money and you're only in seven countries and you're doing it because you're spent paying too much for these drugs. So I'm not asking you to do anything. Just let the Food and Drug Administration analyze. He said, that sounds like a fair deal to me. And he didn't stop and talk to his aides. If he had, they'd have just croaked, you know, because it was bad politics. And the Food and Drug Administration, to be fair to them, didn't sit on it. They conducted all the tests and quickly they said that they approved 22 of the 24 drugs. And Bush was as good as his word. He sent word out to every country that if they wanted to use these drugs, they could. Today, 97% of the drugs purchased with money from PEPFAR, the American program, are generic drugs. 97%. And immediately, immediately, once the 22 were approved, PEPFAR went from being involved in seven countries to 15 countries without spending one penny more of tax debtors money. Now if people would just talk to each other and treat each other in good faith and have some verification procedure that they trust, we could do a bunch of stuff like that in many areas. But if you live in an environment where anybody can tell his or her supporters that what the other side says is false, always, it's hard to get anything done. And George Bush proved that he really did want to be a compassionate conservative when it came to people dying with aids. And I'll always be grateful for it.
- [30:08]
Jesse
I think so many people are in a way fascinated with your friendship with, with George Bush 41. You know, I always, I mean, Justin and I talk about this all the time. Representation matters so much. Having people actually see the action, you know, seeing us together as a couple and raising kids together means something. I really feel like for so many of us, seeing you two genuinely bond and work together even after your presidency was so important and very meaningful too, just to see these people who were on opposite sides of the aisles work together for the same America. And I was always very inspired by your friendship. And I know he meant so much to you. And you speak so eloquently about your friendship in the book. And it's one of my favorite parts that you wrote about, but just to sort of give a taste. Now, tell us a little bit about, like, why he was so important to you.
- [31:12]
Bill Clinton
First of all, I liked him. When I was governor, I was the senior governor in the country, even though I was the second youngest. And the people here were good enough to keep me on. You know, nobody can ever say I couldn't hold down a job. I stayed here. So, anyway, what really solidified our friendship with me in the beginning was that as Vice President, George Bush hosted the governor's conference in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he had a summer home. And all of us were there. And it was 1983. I remember like it was yesterday. Chelsea was three years old. And I said, come on, Chelsea, I want you to meet Vice President Bush. He's our host. So I introduced her, and she reached up and took his hand, and she said, where's the bathroom? And George Bush took her by the hand and took her to the bathroom with only a stop so she could shake hands with his mother, who was, I think, nearly 90 then. But, you know, it just. Even when we were running, when we were having these tough debates and when they were trying to tear my guts out, I always remembered that however much we disagreed and however hard he hit me, the guy that took my daughter to the restroom was there. He was there, too. You know, I don't get mad at politicians very much. It's a contact sport. If you're going to complain about being hit, it's like being a quarterback in pro football, saying they shouldn't have tackled you. But I do think that the people who are posing as referees should attempt to be fair and always accurate. And the real problem that has been plaguing America, worse and worse, going all the way back to Watergate. A lot of people in the political press, they realize they make a lot of money, you know, if they bring somebody down. And so it became sport even before Fox News, to figure out how you can take somebody out. And I remember when I was running in 1992, when I was. I hadn't even finally decided. Somebody called me from the White House and said, look, here's how Washington works. Press has to have somebody at every election, and they're pretty elitist, so they'll believe anything we tell them about Arkansas. I mean, the guy didn't even. This guy was calling me from the White House, and so he Said, you're the only one that can beat us because you're different. You got the fastest growing or second fastest growing economy in the country. Then after 10 hard years when we'd been with massive unemployment and we worked hard on it, and he said, your schools have improved more since you became president than almost anybody else. Your crime rate's down, you got an interesting welfare reform program. You're different. You can beat us. And so since the press has to have somebody at every election, we're going to give them you and we're going to do it early and you will never know what hits you. And I thought, oh my God, I'm going home and I'm going to do wills and hundred dollar divorces, you know, spend the rest of my life doing this. But I told him, I said, you know, you guys have been in too long. You think those parking spots in the West Wing belong to you? He said, well, that's a pretty speech, but you just remember I warned you, we like you here and we don't want to take your head off, but we don't have a choice. And they were as good as they were. They did everything they could. And I just decided that I needed a high plane threshold and I needed to keep a smile on my face and say, you know, listen to all that stuff, this is not true, that's not true. And the main thing is they're trying to take the election away from you. When I was a kid growing up, my mother said, anybody who tries to make you mad all the time is not your friend. They don't want you to think. I want you to think. And I trust you. And it was really interesting because it's one reason that I kept the support. A lot of working class people who now have abandoned the Democrats because they've been successfully branded. But all those people had been in situations where people made assumptions about them that weren't true. And I think we should all remember that it doesn't hurt anything to give somebody the benefit of the doubt as long as you can and treat them like a person.
- [36:39]
Jesse
You'Re presenting as. You're very good at letting go of grudges, which is really impressive to me because I am not. I just think it's natural for people to sort of hold things, you know, And I sure you talked about one of the stories that you talked about that I didn't know too much about this excuse me while I look at my notes because I want to make sure I get all this right, but you expounded upon Working relationships that were active with people that were active adversaries. When you're, during your time in the White House, Representative Bob Inglis, is that, how am I saying his last name right? Bob, Bob Inglis, yeah.
- [37:13]
Bill Clinton
He's a great guy.
- [37:14]
Jesse
Well, now this is very interesting. I mean, you know, he was one of your adversaries and like.
- [37:20]
Bill Clinton
Well, Bob Inglis is an interesting place. He was elected to Congress as a Republican and overwhelmingly Republican district. A deeply religious, born again Christian, very pro life, very pro gun. And he won overwhelmingly. And he served three terms and he said he believed in term limits. So he laid out, then he came back and won again, got about 80% of the vote. But in the middle of all this, he had been through a terrible personal crisis. He fell in his bathroom and his open jaw hit the sink and drove his teeth up into his head and they had to pull him down, wire his jaw shut. And for months he lived through a straw. So Inglis comes back to the Congress. By then, President Obama's in office and one of those South Carolina congressmen, you may remember, screamed out in the State of the Union address that Obama was a liar. Remember that? So English decided that he was going to run again because he was healthy. And he said, you know, I have always believed that I owed it to my constituents to be straightforward with them and if I changed my mind about something, I owed it to him to tell them. So I have changed my mind about two things and you're entitled to know. He said, the first thing is I think that our senior senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John McCain are right about climate change. I think it's real, I think it's man made. But I'm a conservative. I think we can develop market based solutions that will create lots of new jobs, lots of new businesses. But I'm not going to deny it. It's just, I just, the evidence is overwhelming. And he said, the second thing is I think this hating President Obama is a bad thing. It's bad for us. He said, you know, he's Christian, not a Muslim. He's American born, not born in Indonesia. He loves his family and he loves our country. And I vote against him on nearly everything. But I am not going to say he's a bad person just because we disagree. Otherwise, I'm just who I always was. I'm old fashioned Bob Inglis. I'm a born again Christian and a conservative. A man named Trey Gowdy, who was a prosecutor in Spartanburg, ran against him and beat him 72 to 29 in a Republican primary that would tell you how polarized we'd become there, because he didn't hate President Obama and he wasn't prepared to deny climate change, and so he couldn't represent them. So, anyway, all of a sudden, one day, I get this letter from Bob Inglis up in New York saying he'd like to talk to me. So I called him. He said, I would like to come and see you. I said, come on. So a couple days later, he shows up in my office in Harlem. And anyway, and I thanked him for what he said about. For his statements. He said, but I didn't come here for that. I came here to apologize to you. I said, why? He said, well, I was elected when you were, and I was committed to impeaching you for. I knew what I was mad at you about, because I had been totally carried away by Newt Gingrich and his Little Red book, saying, giving us 100 words like sick, perverted, twisted, we were always supposed to use, talking about Democrats. And there you were, a Southern Baptist from Arkansas, eating our lunch with stuff that I just couldn't stand it. And I was committed to getting rid of you. And I was wrong, and I want you to forgive me. And by then, he had started working with a woman whom he had defeated for Congress, named Liz Patterson. She was the daughter of a South Carolina governor back when Democrats could still get elected governor in South Carolina. And they started having a lunch once a month, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, and they would start by agreeing on a problem they wanted to solve and then see if they could get to consensus. He said, it's just a little thing, but it's all I can think of to do now. And they're still doing it, but that's who Bob Inglis says. And so we became friends. And Hillary used to make fun of me. She said, you know, you are Irish to the core in so many ways, and you played a big role in the Irish peace process, but you have forgotten the importance of Irish Alzheimer's. And I said, what's that? She said, all you remember is the grudges.
- [42:53]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [42:53]
Bill Clinton
He said, you're the worst. He said, you can't even remember from one day to the next who you're supposed to be mad at, but I have found it liberating.
- [43:05]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [43:06]
Bill Clinton
You know, it took me, as I. And I apologize in the book, I said, it took me two full years to get over what I consider to be the most dishonest press coverage in the history of my lifetime anyway, which is all that stuff about the emails and Jim Comey talking about the. Donald Trump's State Department said Hillary sent a grand total of zero classified emails and received on her private phone a grand total of zero. That was the number one attack on her in 2016. The number one. And they knew the people who were pushing it the day after they started that the rules specifically allowed her to do it. And, you know, then Comey broke 70 years of FBI policy. Even J. Edgar Hoover never did what he did, saying that he had reopened a criminal investigation, which he knew 99% there was nothing there. And then said right before the election, well, there's nothing there. Which, of course made Donald Trump say, well, he just sold out the deal. And I knew Trump was going to fire him because he didn't like having somebody around. That reminded him why Willie got elected president, because she dropped five points overnight, and in the end it was three points, and according to Nate Silver, four and a half points in all the swing states. It was a personal tragedy for her, a real tragedy for the country, I think. But mostly. But mostly the. It made people cynical about anything they read. And all that cynicism always helps the far right because they think that's okay.
- [45:15]
Jesse
The chapter where you sort of disseminate from your point of view, 2016, it's hard to read because it is. It's very. It's obviously very factual, but it's also. It's coming from a place of, you can tell, deep personal hurt. And I can only imagine that was hopefully somewhat. Writing that down was maybe hopefully somewhat of a release for you. The last time I saw you in the same room was during the dnc and you gave a very powerful speech. There was a lot of optimism in that room. There was a lot of positivity. Looking back on it now after the election results, I can sort of identify a lot of that optimism, was sort of tentative optimism. And as I go back and listen to some of those speeches which I have done to give me some hope, I can hear, like, be careful, this could happen. Obviously, your book came out before these election results. If there was another chapter to write about where we are now, what would you say about these last few months?
- [46:30]
Bill Clinton
All these elections are different, by the way. And the American people essentially are like music composers, and in every election, they write a different piece of music, and you have to hear it if you want to win. And they may be concerned about the same issues or may not, but essentially, this has not been a good time for credentials, you know, and I'm being serious. If you are repeatedly frustrated and you think you're not getting a fair shake at work, or you're not respected in the country or whatever. It's very easy, whether you're on the left or the right, to think that nothing is legitimate. The problem is that if you're cynical about everything, it makes you extremely vulnerable to being manipulated. So if you believe everything, you're naive and wrong. That is, if you're not capable of thinking some institution that you otherwise respect can make a mistake, that's a bad deal. But if you think that anybody that disagrees with you is by definition lying, that's also a bad deal. And that's why it's so hard to get people together. I wrote about this in the book. But one of the things that I'm proudest of is another partnership I have with George W. Bush. It's called the Presidential Leadership Scholars. And we take people who are more or less between. We got some of them here, a lot of them are from Little Rock. I probably overdid my quota anyway. But every year we take people who are usually between 29 and 40. He picks 30, I pick 30. And they go to his library and mine, and we meet with them and answer questions, and then they go to George H.W. bush's library and the President Johnson's library, and they study some aspect of presidential decision making. Then they break up into more or less evenly divided smaller groups and they pick an issue that they all agree they'd like to do better with, they'd like to see the country solve. And they work on that. And it's stunning. About 70 plus percent of the time they reach total consensus. You have people from the far left, people from the far right, people in the middle. People very often surprise themselves. But what happens, they become people to each other. They're three dimensional human beings, not cartoons. They meet over and over again, they talk through things and they somebody makes a point that the other side never considered. And they just kept on working until they work something out. And every year Bush and I do the commencement together. We alternate it between here at our library and at his down in Dallas. And so it's fascinating, this is just one example, but I remember one year I had these two real burly veterans, both of whom had lost legs to roadside bombs in Afghanistan or Iraq. And they were very moving. And one guy still had serious shrapnel scars that had not all been removed by surgery. And they thanked me because they said, we're trying to build. Our whole goal in coming here was to Develop the skills to build a lot of public support to help veterans after they're back on the street and trying to put their lives together again. And one of your picks had all the skills we needed and was the most valuable person in our small group. And she was a very large, formidable leader of the gay rights movement in Arkansas. A tall black woman that they said, we would have never known anybody like her existed if we hadn't come here. And a lot of the Democrats say the same thing. The Democrats go up to him and the Republicans come up to me. That means we're doing the right thing. So we got to take a little time out to govern and to care for each other. Politics are fine. I love races. I love, you know, I worked hard in this last election, but you just gotta keep at it. You can't give up. You gotta keep going. And if you give up on people as people, we are totally shafted. And you gotta be careful what you believe just because it feeds into your friend elections. I literally had a lady come to me in western Pennsylvania in the last election in a little town that I loved. And I couldn't check this story out except at the local bakery. It was a heavily Republican town, and the Trumpers were there with their banners and stuff. And this lady came up to me, she said, you know, I always liked you so much. I voted for you twice. I voted for Hillary in 2016. I just don't know why you went so bad. And I said, you know, I don't either. I said, tell me what I did. I was respectful. I wasn't making fun of her. I said, tell me what I did. She said, you know, I said, no, ma'am, I don't. Tell me, or at least tell me where I can read about it. She said, I did my own research and I am sure. And so I went in a local bakery. For the Democrats in the audience, here's a little tip. If you're ever in a little country place that's overwhelmingly Republican, if there's a locally owned bakery, the chances are still better than 50 50. The person who owns that is a Democrat. So anyway, I went back to this bakery and I told the lady the story. She said, oh, I know her. She said, there is this crazy, crazy right wing website that is targeted toward people in really small places and everybody here has discovered it, and you think they found gold in California in the 1800s. And he said, and he said, you can't argue with him if it's on his website. It's just the God's honest truth.
- [54:02]
Jesse
And it's called Facebook.
- [54:06]
Bill Clinton
Well, it could, but my point is, think of all the money all these people are making, these big tech people keeping us torn up and upset. And Elon Musk and I've always kind of liked, you know, until all this happened, but he. The Tesla is a great gift to civilization in our fight against climate change. And he announces in his campaign that he's canceling all of his recharging stations. And I have a friend, a college classmate, who I just talked to today, who may still be here in the audience, but he's the largest provider of solar and wind energy in Central America and the Caribbean. But he just won a contract to build a massive recharging station in Queens in New York City, because our cab fleet has to be all clean energy by, I think, 2030 or 2035. So he built it, but that Musk basically chose political power and dominance over something he knew was right where he'd made a massive contribution. So that's the only thing what I'm really worried about is we can't treat each other right anymore if we don't even believe that we can get something that approximates the truth we will agree on. And there's all this stuff. It's not healthy. Yeah, boy. We have a lot of challenges before us.
- [55:54]
Jesse
We do. We do. I know we're almost out of time, and I owe it to the people of Little Rock to not leave it on Elon Musk. So I just want to. This is the first thing I highlighted in the book that I just wanted to read really quickly and sort of end with. And it's from a chapter called Introduction. It came on page three. But this really struck. I was like, oh, I'm in for a good read. Because I needed to hear words of encouragement. I think we all need that right now. And I do think, as you were just talking, we have so many future leaders in this room. I think it's so important to hear words like yours for inspiration and to have an adult in the room to look to. It's really very important because we don't always have that. And this is the first thing I highlighted in the book. Good job, Jesse. I'm an actor. Nevertheless, I continue to believe we all do better when we work together. But to do that in such a polarized environment, you have to be willing to work with people you don't like along with those who you do. Almost always, cooperation beats conflict. And when you do have to stand your ground, it's wise to leave the door open for reconciliation. The ability to do that distinguishes great leaders. You're a great leader.
- [57:25]
Bill Clinton
Thank you. God bless you.
- [57:32]
Jesse
Thank you. Satisfaction.