(bell chimes)
- Well, good morning.
It's my pleasure and privilege to welcome
all of you to Gaston Hall for this
in the third of the Clinton
lectures at Georgetown.
I wish to thank all of you for being here
and offer a special word of welcome
to our distinguished
guests and attendants,
including the Honorable Tom Vilsack,
the Secretary of Agriculture,
and Congressman John Delaney.
We're honored to have
you with us this morning.
We've had the privilege over the course
of the past few decades to
welcome President Clinton
back to Georgetown on
a number of occasions,
notably for a series of lectures in 1991,
while he was the governor of Arkansas
and Democratic candidate for president,
on the steps of old North for an address
to the diplomatic corps in 1993,
just days before his inauguration,
and now for this series.
In the first lecture of this series,
President Clinton spoke
about the significance
of those 1991 lectures,
now known as the New Covenant speeches,
on responsibility and rebuilding
the American community,
economic change, and American security,
not only to his campaign,
but also for his vision for our future.
He explained that these
lectures enabled him to quote,
"Think about where we were,
where we wanted to go,
and how we proposed to get there."
We've come together today
and on two other occasions
in this series to engage
the wisdom and insights
of one of the most accomplished
global leaders of our time
and to hear his perspective gained
from a lifetime of service to our nation.
As president, he presided over
the longest economic
expansion in American history,
including the creation of
more than 22 million jobs,
the reform of the welfare
and healthcare systems,
new environmental regulations,
peacekeeping missions in
places such as Bosnia,
and a federal budget surplus.
In the years since his
two-term presidency,
the first for a Democrat since
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
he has focused his efforts
on improving global health,
education, and economic
development around the world
through the Bill, Hillary, and
Chelsea Clinton Foundation,
which he founded in 2001.
In these lectures, he brings
to bear these experiences
and those of his youth and
early political career.
A 1968 alumnus of our
School of Foreign Service,
a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale Law graduate,
Attorney General, and
then governor of Arkansas.
Father Otto Hentz,
longtime and beloved member
of our Theology department,
who taught President Clinton
during his first year here at Georgetown
has described him as someone
who quote, "thinks deeply."
Father Hentz explained,
speaking of President Clinton,
"When people are well informed
and deeply reflective,
"that gives them a security and freedom
"to listen to a wide spectrum of opinions.
"Clinton is not a man who
was closed in his thinking
because he thinks deeply."
It's only fitting that for this lecture
on the theme of purpose,
Father Hentz will serve
as our moderator during the
question-and-answer session
that will follow President
Clinton's remarks.
With this theme, purpose,
President Clinton turns to each of us
as he did during those
formative New Covenant speeches
to speak to all of you,
future leaders of our nation,
to think deeply about
our own responsibilities,
about where we are, where we want to go,
and how we propose together to get there.
He asked, and I quote from
his 2013 lecture here,
"What is required of us?
"How do we compose and live a life
where service is important?"
Today we come together to
consider enduring questions.
How do we understand our purpose
and our responsibilities,
our service to the common
good, and to each other?
Ladies and gentlemen, it's
now my privilege to welcome
to the stage the 42nd
President of the United States
and a true son of Georgetown,
President Bill Clinton!
(audience applauds and cheers)
- Thank you very much, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, thank you.
Thank you, President
DeGioia for having me back.
Thank you, Father Hentz for
agreeing to ask me questions.
I'll give better answers than
I did 50 years ago, I hope.
Thank you all for coming,
students, faculty,
friends of Georgetown.
Secretary Vilsack, thank
you very much for being here
and for your long career
in public service.
Congressman John Delaney,
who was a shining hope
for the possibility of
bipartisan cooperation.
He's got a bill to repatriate
all this loose cash
that's hanging around overseas
that has as many Republican as
Democratic sponsors, I think.
Some people think there's
something wrong with that.
I think that's pretty good
idea, so I thank him for that.
I want to thank my classmates
and friends who are here and
get the show on the road.
Two years ago I came here, in April,
intending to give a series
of three or four lectures
on composing a life in public service,
whether that's in elected
or appointed office
or in the private sector
or working for a
non-governmental organization.
In the first talk, I said there
are four essential elements
to any successful service,
a focus on people, policy,
politics, and purpose.
In that first lecture,
I was primarily focused
on the importance of
people-centered service,
on the necessity of understanding
how different people view themselves
and the world they're living in.
Without understanding people,
it's pretty hard to
develop the best policies
and to build and maintain
support for them.
As I said then, I grew up
in a storytelling culture,
so I told you stories
about people who taught me
that everybody has a story
and kept me focused on
how to help other people
have better stories.
I told you stories about
my family and my teachers,
beginning in junior high and
running through Georgetown,
about people I'd worked
with over the years,
people I'd met who were dealing with
their own life struggles.
The second lecture covered policymaking
and the compromises that
are almost always involved
when trying to do what Machiavelli called
the most difficult thing
in all of human affairs:
to change the established order of things.
We discussed how policymaking
was done when I was president
in developing the economic plan in 1993,
which reversed 12 years
of trickle-down economics
and gave us the only period in 50 years
when all sectors of the
American economy grew robustly
and the bottom 20%'s income rose 23.6%,
the same at the top 5%.
We talked about crafting the
Welfare Reform Bill of 1996,
what compromises were acceptable,
what wasn't, what's
worked over the long run,
what still needs to be changed.
And we talked about the pursuit
of peace in the Middle East.
I hope that talk convinced you
that policy actually matters,
that ideas when implemented
have consequences,
and different ideas have
different consequences.
A great deal of political
rhetoric is devoted
to blurring that,
to pretending that if
something good happens
and the other guy did
it, it was an accident,
and if something bad
happens and you did it,
well, it couldn't have been
because you pursued the wrong policy.
And because so much of
our voting habits today
are determined by the
culture in which we live
and the conditions in which
we experience the world,
we tend to blur all that.
So I hope I convinced you that
whenever you're trying to evaluate policy,
you should try to ask yourself,
"Is there a difference between
the story and the storyline?"
Always look for the story.
Sometimes it's in the storyline
and sometimes it's not.
There is a difference
between the headlines
and the trend lines.
Typically, for perfectly
understandable reasons,
bad news makes better news than good news.
But sometimes the trend
lines are much better
than the headlines,
and we may have occasion to revisit that.
Today I want to talk about
the purpose of public service,
driven by concern for people,
manifest in policies one is advocating,
and about the politics of
turning concern and good policy
into real changes that
fulfill your purpose.
For obvious reasons, I
don't intend to talk much
about electoral politics,
(audience chuckles)
but it's important to
remember as Secretary Vilsack
and Congressman Delaney can tell you,
there is plenty of politics
when the election is over,
in trying to implement policy,
and there's plenty of politics
if you're not in elected office,
if you're working in a private business
or you're working for an NGO.
That's the kind of politics
I want to talk about.
How do you have the skills
to actually turn your ideas into action?
In every public service success,
leadership requires the
vision of a better future,
where the purpose of public
service is made plain
in the circumstances of the moment,
a clear understandable plan
to realize that vision,
and the ability to actually
implement the changes,
if at all possible, by the inclusion
of all the stakeholders the process.
This is becoming more
important than ever before
in an interdependent world.
Whether we like it or not,
inclusive politics is necessary
to have inclusive economics,
and inclusive discussion
with various stakeholders
is necessary to affect
positive social change.
Asia has three interesting,
very vigorous leaders at the moment,
and the president of China, President Xi,
who's trying to grow the
Chinese economy internally more
by resuming population growth,
by modifying the one-child policy,
and trying to eliminate
some of the corruption
that has been endemic to the system.
And Prime Minister Abe of Japan,
who is trying to overcome
his own country's reluctance
to alter their culture by
allowing widespread immigration,
by putting more women into the workforce,
and enabling people to work longer.
And Prime Minister Modi of
India, who has written a book
called Inclusive Politics,
Inclusive Governance,
and who recognizes that his
country's big problem is
it has grown like crazy
for the last 20 years
in and around its tech prosperity centers,
but only 35% of the people are
being reached by that effort,
and that India needs
to develop the ability
to aggregate and deploy capital
so that 100% of the people of India
can have a chance to
benefit from the enterprise
that is now driving dramatic prosperity
for just 35% of them.
So this inclusion issue is going to become
bigger and bigger and bigger
in the lifetime of the
students who are here.
But let me try to illustrate
the success of leadership
and the pitfalls with
a few recent examples.
Recent in my terms,
not to students' terms.
Helmut Kohl was the Chancellor of Germany
when the Berlin Wall came down.
He had a vision, borne of
a lifetime of experience
that included obviously
living through World War Two,
of a united peaceful
and prosperous Germany
in a united, democratic, peaceful Europe.
Both these developments
may seem normal to you.
They were virtually unimaginable
for most of European history,
in which Germany was
not a separate country,
but a collection of city-states,
and then united under Bismarck.
Kohl became the second
longest-serving chancellor
in German history in the
pursuit of his vision,
second only to Bismarck.
And he had a strategy,
which he pursued with
extraordinary discipline.
It was first to unite Germany
and for the wall to come down,
which required very
large transfers of money
from West Germany to East Germany
to begin the long process
of equalizing the economic opportunities
on both sides of the former divide.
Second, to expand and
strengthen the European Union.
He wanted all of Central
and Eastern Europe
to come into the EU,
so that Germany would be
in the middle of Europe,
not on the edge where it had
been a source of instability
and conflict throughout the 20th century.
Third, he wanted to expand NATO
and strengthen the transatlantic
ties of the United States
because he thought that was important
to building a prosperous
democratic future for Germans
and to the rest of Europe.
And fourth, often forgotten,
he became the most vigorous
supporter of Russia
after the end of Communism,
its economic recovery,
its democracy building, and
its increasing cooperation
with the EU and the US.
It's hard to believe
given today's headlines,
but that was the order
we were all trying to
build then in the 1990s,
and it worked for quite a while.
In the beginning, it worked very well,
but there were two central problems
with implementing Kohl's
vision after he left office.
One is that much of the European Union,
although not every member,
adopted the euro as a currency.
They had a Eurozone currency,
which was adopted before
those in the Eurozone
had a common economic
policy, common social policy,
and a common public investment policy.
Which meant it worked great
when Europe was growing wealth
and Greeks could borrow money
at German interest rates essentially,
but when the economy turned down,
it no longer worked very well,
partly because the German
voters didn't understand
how much gain they had gotten
out of all those good years
when Greece and Spain
and Portugal and Italy
got to borrow money at
common interest rates
and buy German exports.
And Germany is, by the
way, still the number one
rich country in the world
in the percentage of its GDP
tied to exports and tied to manufacturing.
In no small measure but a good
lesson for the United States
because of its dramatic success
in involving small- and
middle-sized businesses
in the export market,
having a continuous
lifetime training program,
and having a program that pays employers
to keep people working instead of paying
unemployed employees
unemployment benefits.
So it worked fine, but when Greece failed
and Ireland failed and Spain
had skyrocketing unemployment,
all for slightly different reasons,
although basically was just
a real-estate boom going bust
in Ireland and Spain,
and Portugal and Italy
had their own troubles,
the automatic response of the EU
was to try to impose austerity on Greece
because they had governments
that had for years
made promises to people
they couldn't keep,
and because they had a country in which
rich people didn't pay taxes.
In fact, constitutionally
the shipping companies
are exempted from taxes,
something a lot of people don't know.
So that if you were a cab driver in Athens
or a fisherman in the Aegean,
you felt like a chump if
you did pay your taxes.
But Greece began a program
of austerity in 2009.
When they started, their
public debt was 120% of GDP.
Today they made all these payments
and their public debt's about 180% of GDP.
Which means that the
fundamental laws of economics
have not been repealed.
If inflation is lower than interest rates,
there's insufficient demand
and more austerity will
get you in a deeper hole,
not get you out of it.
So, that happened,
and there was no provision made
at the creation of the Eurozone
for how to get out without
collapsing the whole,
or without spooking the markets,
and that was probably an error.
If they weren't prepared
to have common economic
and social policy and
some sort of investment,
they should have made an exit strategy
part of the beginning,
then the market hazards
wouldn't have been so great.
The typical thing for a little country,
the kind of trouble that Greece is,
is to devalue, take all the hard medicine,
then start growing again.
That's what Iceland did,
which is not in the Eurozone.
Iceland wasn't a particularly tragedy.
Its banks were far more
leveraged in American banks,
but they also had more
self-made millionaires,
mostly in tech and retail businesses
as a percentage of their population
than any other European country.
So they devalued and
started building again
and got out of this mess
they were in in a hurry.
So that doesn't mean that
Kohl's European idea was wrong.
It doesn't and the EU and
the strengthening of it
and for many older Europeans,
even the boring and bureaucratic nature
of the cumbersome machinery
in Brussels of the EU,
is a godsend, far better
than uncertainty and war
and endless intrigue with
destructive consequences.
The other thing that happened
to Kohl's vision, of course,
is that Russia took a more
unilateral and authoritarian turn
as manifest most vividly
in what happened in Ukraine
and what continues to happen there.
But on balance, you would have to say
he was the most important European leader
since World War Two,
because of the good things that happened
and the bad things that didn't happen,
and I still believe over the long-run
we will return to the path
that he advocated for so long.
Second example, Lee Kuan Yew,
the founding prime minister of Singapore,
recently passed away at 91,
and I was asked along with
Henry Kissinger and Tom Donilon
to represent the United
States at his funeral
because I had known him and
had a lot of contact with him
and so I went.
When Lee took office more
than 50 years ago in 1962,
he was the leader of a small city-state
of a few million people
with a per capita income
of under $1,000 a year.
It had recently broken off from Malaysia
and there was a lot of
uncertainty about two things.
One was whether this little city-state
that was heavily majority
Chinese with a big Malay minority
and a smaller but still
noticeable Indian minority
and then Filipinos and
others in this diverse state
could ever make a go of it,
and two, whether a state that small
could withstand the
debilitating consequences
of the corruption which was then endemic
to most of the Asian rising countries.
Lee had a strategy.
First, his vision was
to have a prosperous,
unified, secure nation, and he knew
that Singapore had the
most important thing of all
at the time he came of age, location.
It was located at a critical juncture
for all the major sea lanes in Asia.
He knew the Asian
economy was going to boom
and he wanted to be there.
So his strategy was, first,
to govern Singapore on
terms of equal treatment
for all its citizens without regard
to their ethnic background.
There were 10 speakers at his funeral.
His son, the Prime Minister, spoke first
about his leadership.
His second son spoke last about
what a good father he was.
In the middle, there were representatives
of every ethnic group in Singapore
who talked about how he
had made a home for them.
Inclusion.
He also was so rigorous in
the pursuit of corruption,
from cabinet ministers
to minor functionaries
overcharging people for fines,
that he allowed people who were part
of his own political
movement to go to prison,
but he got rid of corruption
and Singapore soon gained a reputation
as the place to invest, the
place where people wanted to be,
where everything was on the up-and-up,
things were on the level.
It made a huge difference.
The third thing he wanted to do
was to have an alliance
with the United States
for security purposes,
but to get along with
everybody in the neighborhood,
which he proceeded to do.
And finally, he launched a
constant organized effort
to modernize the country,
educationally, economically,
technologically,
and to maintain social cohesion,
with methods that most of us
the United States often thought
was pretty severe,
including caning mal-doers,
but it worked.
I remember once there was a
lot of joking in the press
about the fact that
Singapore banned chewing gum.
They got mad because kids
were leaving chewing gum
under desks and under seats
on public transportation
and things like that, but
they got rid of the problem.
And they built by common consensus
one of the five best education
systems in the world.
A few years ago,
a small country with only
six-plus million people
allocated three billion dollars
to biotechnology research,
same amount of your money I spent
to sequence a human genome.
So did it succeed?
Well, when he took office,
the per capita income
was under $1,000.
When we celebrated his life
at his memorial service,
Singapore's per capita income was $55,000,
one of the most remarkable
economic success stories ever.
Ernesto Zedillo became sort of
an accidental president of Mexico.
The person his party
favored for the presidency
was killed early in the campaign season
and he was picked to succeed him,
but he was a very well trained economist
and he wanted to build a
modern economy for Mexico
and a modern political nation.
That was his vision.
So he set about building a modern economy
by opening Mexico to
competition and investment,
and promoting responsible,
more honest behavior.
Early in this effort,
through no fault of his own,
they had a horrible economic crisis.
They were about to go broke
and the United States stepped in.
I was president, it was 20 years ago.
We stepped in and gave him a loan,
which on the day I gave it
was opposed by something like
80% of the American people
who thought about Mexico's yesterdays
instead of its tomorrows.
Zedillo repaid that loan
to the United States
three years early
with more than 500 million
dollars in interest.
It was one of the best
investments we ever made.
We still have disagreements with Mexico,
but think about your own life.
It's one thing to have a
disagreement with a friend
and another to have a
disagreement with an adversary,
and the consequences are
dramatically different.
Maybe more important, he
recognized that his country
could never become fully modern
unless it was more
politically competitive,
and his party, the PRI, had
enjoyed a monopoly on power
for 70 years.
He opened the field of competition,
had an honest election.
It was won by Vincente Fox,
and he handed over power peacefully
for the first time in seven decades
to a member of the opposite party.
Did it work?
Well, Mexico's not free of problems,
but it's worth noting
that one of his successors
built 140 tuition-free universities
and last year they graduated
more than 100,000 engineers,
and that the economic
growth was sufficient
to keep Mexicans home
between 2010 and 2014.
For the first time in my lifetime,
there was no net in migration from Mexico.
Nelson Mandela's vision was to build
a modern democratic state
that would survive and thrive
after the end of apartheid
and the end of his term.
His strategy included his now-famous
reconciliation commission,
where people who had committed crimes,
even murderous crimes
during the apartheid era,
could come and testify, make their actions
a part of the public record,
and then be reconciled to
the rest of the country
so they could participate in the future.
It was an astonishing thing.
He said, "Well, you
know, we don't have time
"to build any more jails
and worry about this.
We got to go forward."
Something that was copied largely
in a slightly different form
though local community courts
by Rwanda after the Rwandan genocide
and a capacity that is beyond
the culture of many other countries.
Interestingly enough, we are
now seeing the ongoing efforts
of the president of
Colombia, President Santos,
to resolve the last remaining
conflicts there with the FARC
and the big hang-up is who's going to be
held responsible for what.
And this is something we all
have to deal with in our lives
and we have to deal
with in other cultures,
but accountability is important,
but so is going beyond.
And different people, different cultures,
draw the balance in different ways.
There's no doubt in my mind
that Mandela did the right thing
for South Africa.
The second thing he did which
was arguably just as important
was practice the politics
of radical inclusion.
That to most of us was symbolized
when he invited his jailers
to his inauguration,
but far more important was
that he put the leaders
of the parties that supported
apartheid in his cabinet.
You'd think, "Well, that
happens all the time.
National unity government."
Mandela ran for president
with 18 opponents
and got 63% of the vote,
and the first time black South Africans
had voted in 300 years.
And his whole term occurred
when I was president.
So we did a lot of business together
and I always let him call me late at night
because of the time difference.
He'd like to go to bed early
and he knew I'd stay up late,
and so he'd call me late at night.
So he called me one night and he said,
"Oh, they were giving me hell."
And I said, "Who, the Boers?"
I was always kidding him
about the Afrikaners,
their whole history and everything.
He said, "Oh, no no, my own people."
I said, "Well, what are they saying?"
"They're saying, how
can you put these people
"in the government?
"You won 63% of the vote!
"They kept you in prison and
while you were in prison,
"they were beating us up, shooting us,
"killing a bunch of us.
Now, you're going to give
them government ministries?"
And I said, "What did you tell them?"
He said, "I said, well,
you know we just voted
"for the first time in 300 years.
"So let me ask you, can we
run the financial system
"all by ourselves?
"Can we run the military all by ourselves?
"Can we run the police all by ourselves?
"Is there one thing in this whole country
"we can run all by ourselves?
"The answer is no.
"Maybe someday.
This is not that day."
He said, "If I can get
over it, so can you.
We're going to do this together."
You'd be surprised if somebody
gave a speech like that
in Washington, wouldn't you?
(audience laughs)
It's important to recognize,
and not to be too sanctimonious here.
Mandela had paid a remarkable price
and learned astonishing lessons,
and he had the stature
to do that and not fall.
There was a third now often
overlooked part of his strategy,
which was wise that hasn't worked out yet.
He named as his deputy
president a much younger man,
Thabo Mbeki, who was the
most gifted economist
in South Africa
because he knew it would
take his entire term
and he was determined
only to serve one term.
He was already well into his 70s
and he paid a pretty stiff physical price
for the first years of his imprisonment.
So the other part of the strategy
was to be succeeded by
Mbeki so he could build
a modern economic state and
increase trade and investment
across Africa in a way that
would stabilize South Africa.
That part of the plan didn't work,
for reasons beyond his control.
South Africa first became the epicenter
of the world AIDS crisis
and was made worse by
the troubles in Zimbabwe
and other places, which
led to even more people
coming into South Africa
who were HIV positive.
Meanwhile, and still to
me somewhat mystifying,
Mbeki denied for a long time
the nature, the dimensions,
the cause, and the remedies of the crisis.
I knew this because our
foundation helped them
to come up with an AIDS plan
and they were doing fine in the cities.
They had prosperous cities
and great health systems,
but they really had to get
out into the countryside.
And when we celebrated Mandela,
I can't remember, maybe his 80th birthday,
his 80th or his 85th birthday.
I was down there and we had 50 people
who worked with our
Health Access Initiative
dressed up and ready to go to South Africa
to implement a plan that the government,
the cabinet, had adopted
and it all was canceled,
and it was a bizarre story
of local politics gone awry.
The third most important person
in South Africa's political hierarchy,
after the president and
the deputy president,
is the treasurer of the
African National Congress,
because he funds all
their political operations
and it was effectively a
one-party dominant state.
His wife was the health minister.
She had been trained as a
physician in the old Soviet Union
and she thought AIDS was
sort of a Western plot
to make pharmaceutical
companies more money
and said all this could be cured
by eating native roots and yams.
Sounds crazy now, but they believed that,
and Mbeki felt, perhaps accurately,
that he couldn't let her
go and hold on to power
so even though he had a
wonderful woman working for him
in his office who wanted
to do something about it,
they didn't.
But the point is, that's
another thing to remember
in whatever you do.
Mbeki took office intending to build
a modern economic state.
He was gifted enough to do it.
He knew enough to do it.
But he didn't deal well
with the incoming fire.
When something happens you
didn't intend to happen,
AIDS explodes, you can't
play like it didn't happen.
I always say, you know when
President Bush and Al Gore
ran for president in 2000,
nobody asked either one of them,
"What are you going to do when
the Twin Towers are blown up,
"the Pentagon's attacked,
and another plane aimed for
the Capitol crashes in Pennsylvania?"
He could have said, "I'm sorry,
that's not what I ran to do.
I ran to reverse Bill Clinton's
economic policy, I'm sorry."
(audience laughs)
"I can't do that."
You're laughing, but you see, don't you?
I mean, that's basically what
happened in South Africa.
And that's important to
remember not just in politics
but in anything.
There's always going to
be something happening
you weren't planning for
and you have to learn to deal with that
and pursue your original
vision at the same time.
But Mandela still deserves
history's applause
because South Africa is still a democracy,
it's still operating,
it's still doing a lot of good.
President Zuma, who has his own problems,
has been great dealing
with AIDS, really great.
And Mandela proved that inclusion
is better than constant conflict,
so I think all that works.
Now let's talk about
some non-state actors.
Wangari Maathai, who
died a couple years ago,
won the Nobel Prize in 2004
for creating the Green
Belt Movement in Kenya.
She was a good friend
of Hillary's and mine,
and she was an amazing woman.
But she knew that the Kenyan tree cover
had gone all the way
down to 1% of the land,
that it was eroding the topsoil,
destroying agricultural productivity.
That it was going to cause
endless political conflicts
in the country, fuel the corruption.
And she had a vision of
repairing that damage
so that Kenya could take its
considerable other strengths
and grow in a way that pursues
broad-based prosperity.
But what she won the Nobel
Prize for was figuring out,
"I need to figure out
something everybody can do
"to advance this vision.
"I don't need to just
be in the Parliament,
"advocate these changes.
I need to do something that
will involve everyone."
And so she got thousands and thousands
and thousands of people to plant trees,
tens of millions of trees.
Single-handedly, from the grassroots up,
she began to try to reverse
a debilitating trend
that we're still working on today.
So her vision as a
citizen organizing an NGO,
she didn't have the power
to do it all herself,
but now the government has
supported policies finally
that are allowing us to map the country,
to plan in a strategic way to do things,
and they asked my foundation to go there
because of, I think, our
long friendship with her
and what we'd done.
But that's a way to look at her life
and say she made a real difference
and she did it by
empowering individual people
to do something that sounds simple
and doing it on a scale that
would catch the attention
of the world.
I'll give you another example.
A Republican American businessman,
now sadly, he passed away a few years ago.
In the early 1960s, Ken
Iverson founded a company
called Nucor.
It was a steel company.
His vision was to make steel,
not in original casting,
the way it was largely done
in and around Pittsburgh,
but by melting down existing
steel and then reforming it.
And the technology was
developed so the steel
could then be rolled
in one-inch thick rolls
instead of four-inch thick rolls,
making it much more
malleable, much more suitable
for converging into a variety of purposes.
That's not the important thing.
Iverson decided that if
he wanted his company
to last for the long run
and to be able to adapt,
that 40% of their success would be rooted
in their technology and
60% in their people.
So he adopted the most
radical egalitarian culture
of any company of which
I'm aware in America,
and like I said, the reason I know this
is I recruited the company to Arkansas
and I liked him and I'm pretty
sure he never voted for me
'cause he was a really
conservative Republican.
He didn't want the government
to tell him to do this,
but this was the communitarian's
dream, what he did.
First of all, when he had
11 steel mills in America,
they had no corporate headquarters.
They rented office space in an office park
in Charlotte, North Carolina.
They had a grand total of 22
people in the central office,
with 11 steel mills.
The workers were paid
a salary that averaged
65 to 75% of the industry average,
but they got a weekly bonus
based on production totals
and the non-production workers
got a bonus based on another formula.
In addition to that, there
was a profit-sharing plan
of 10% of the profits,
unavailable to top management.
Everybody else participated.
In addition to that, if you had a child
who wanted to go to college
and you were a Nucor employee,
they would pay the equivalent
of a year's tuition
in community college for the child to go.
One man in Darlington, South Carolina
educated eight children working for Nucor
and it had no adverse effect
on your pay or your bonus.
In addition to that, they
had a no layoff policy.
So, I've still got the
letter Ken Iverson wrote
to all his employees in the only year
in the 1980s when Nucor made less money
than they did the year before.
They never lost money
till the financial crash,
but their profit margin went down,
so he sent a letter which
said something like this:
"As you know, the world steel
businesses in a terrible slump
"and so our sales went down 20% this year.
"This is not your fault.
"You did everything I asked you to do.
"It is, however, my fault.
"I should have been smart
enough to figure out
"how we could be the
only company in the world
"not to have our profits decline.
"As you know, I have a no layoff policy,
"so everybody's income is
going down 20% this year,
"but since it's my fault, not yours,
I'm going to cut my income 60%."
It was a big article in Fortune or Forbes.
It was kind of mixed tone,
pointing out how he was now
by a light year the
lowest-paid Fortune 500
company executive in America.
He wore it like a badge of honor.
When I was president, he
wrote a little management book
called Plain Talk.
It's still my favorite one.
He said, "I can go down
the street in New York
"where all these corporate offices are
"and I can watch people go to work
"and look in in five minutes at their desk
and tell you whether that
company is succeeding or not."
And he said, long before it
became the problem it is today,
"I don't want short-term
investors in Nucor.
"They want somebody committed
to turning a quick profit,
"they should invest somewhere else.
We're in it for the long run."
And it's very interesting to see,
he had a very inclusive process.
There were only three
management layers below him
and the employee making the steel
and every employee had
president's phone number and his,
and you could call him on the phone,
but only if you had talked
to your supervisor first.
The point is he created a
culture of radical inclusion
and it worked and it's working today.
They have the same
culture today, except now,
the education benefit is higher
and if you've got a spouse
who wants to go to college,
your spouse is eligible,
and if you want to go
after work, you can go.
And none of it takes a penny away
from either your wages or your bonus.
So I would say that guy was a success.
By the time I became president,
Nucor was the third biggest
steel company in America
and he did it with a vision,
with a plan, with execution,
and radical inclusion.
And, I'll give you another example,
Bill and Melinda Gates.
They have a simple vision.
Their vision is that
every life has equal value
and therefore we should create a world
where people have equal chances.
That's their vision, it's simple.
They have a strategy.
"We got a lot of money
"and we're going to invest
it to achieve that vision,
"but we're going to invest it
"through people who do
things that we can't do.
"We don't want to hire 100,000 people
to implement all these things we fund."
So, for example, Melinda Gates and Hillary
recently announced before
she left the foundation
that all this data research they'd done
on the condition of women
and the disparities in the
conditions of women and men
in the United States and around the world.
Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation
invest a lot of money every year
through our Health Access
Initiative to solve problems
and I love the way he's
totally iconoclastic.
He just wants to do what works.
He said to me a few years ago, he said,
"You know, the world
shouldn't need what you do.
"The World Health Organization
ought to be able to do this,
but it can't and so we do it."
But it's very interesting to watch,
if you listen to him, he'll say,
"We find it harder to give this money away
"than it was to make it
"because our goal is simple and clear.
We want to create a
world of equal chances."
And they, I think, have
been most successful
in their health investments
around the world.
Where the Millennium Development
Goals had been exceeded
for declining infant mortality,
declining maternal mortality,
and any number of other
measurements there.
I'll give you one other example,
or two in healthcare,
because they're important.
I recently went to Haiti
where I've been working for many years
to visit a project I supported
on the grounds of the oldest
AIDS clinic in the world.
The first AIDS clinic in the world
was established in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
by a doctor named Bill Pape,
who is a native of Port-au-Prince.
Port-au-Prince was a city built in a bowl
for about 200,000 people and
now three million live there,
so a lot of people live
essentially out on the field.
100,000 people just live in
what should be out in the water.
This makes the possibility
of waterborne diseases
much more likely
and that's what cholera
turned out to be actually
when it basically entered
the water stream in Haiti
because the country
doesn't have good sewer
and water systems.
So Bill Pape took the money that he got
from a variety of sources
and built a modern
cholera treatment center.
Most important thing is this.
This guy spent his
whole life treating AIDS
and then when the earthquake occurred,
all the land he had around
his little hospital,
he gave over to a tent city,
but he realized that cholera could be
just as debilitating to his country,
so he designed a hospital
to maximize the success of treatment.
Maximum light, sanitation, no infections,
and he treated the
water and the sanitation
above the ground because
of the characteristics
I just described.
He developed this absolutely
beautiful treatment system
covered in plants and greenery
which got 99% of the bacteria
out of the waste system
and then they covered it with
chlorine and got up to 99%
before it could ever be
released into the ground.
This one man in one place doing something
at an affordable price
that could be scaled
and could save countless
lives around the world.
Paul Farmer, my friend,
he's on the board of our health programs,
founded Partners in Health with Jim Kim,
who's now the head of the World Bank
and he figured out how to
serve an area of 200,000
with a health staff that would
normally only serve 20,000,
by building one good hospital
and then satellite clinics
and then beyond the satellite,
trained community medical workers.
And then he went to Rwanda at our request
and worked with our foundation
and built a hospital in
every region of the country.
They'd all been destroyed except
the one in the capital city
during the genocide.
The last hospital in Butaro
near the Ugandan border
is the only serious
cancer treatment center
in that part of Africa, but
they're all the same thing.
The simple system that can
be affordable and repeated
by countries at income
levels way below ours.
If you have a vision, a strategy,
and you have the support of
people at the grassroots level
because you're inclusive,
these kinds of things can be
done by ordinary citizens.
These are things we need to
be thinking about in America
as we work to restore
broad-based prosperity,
as we work to define our role
in a world of competition
from new and different
forces to define the future.
Arguably the most interesting
non-governmental organization today
which proves the importance of
inclusion by its shortcomings
but is formidable is ISIS.
ISIS is a terrorist organization, an NGO,
trying to become a state.
That is, they don't recognize
any of the boundaries
of the Middle Eastern
countries as legitimate.
They were all established,
drawn largely by Westerners
after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,
end of World War One.
And so when they go capture a place,
they set up their own judicial system,
they set up their own rule makings,
they set up whatever their
social services are going to be
and the only thing is you
can't disagree with them
or they'll kill you, as we have seen.
And sometimes they kill you,
they will allow just as the
Ottomans did in the Caliphate,
they'll allow a Christian or a Jew to live
if they agree to play a
fine or tax every year
to live within their hallowed kingdom.
But if they decide you're an apostate,
they just kill you, which
is why they authorize
the killing of other Muslims,
and while they went after
that tiny sect of Yazidis
who were totally powerless,
because they viewed them
as inherently apostate.
The only book I'm going
to recommend today,
a fascinating book written
on the minority religions
of the Middle East by a
retired British civil servant
fluent in both Arabic and Farsi called
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms.
It's about all the minority
religions in the Middle East
at one time.
There are still 200,000 Samaritans there,
so we surely there's a Good Samaritan,
we can repeat the parable.
It's fascinating, but the
point is ISIS is the opposite.
They have a vision, they have a strategy.
They think they're right.
But they are anti-inclusion in the extreme
and people are voting with
their feet as you see.
It will not be the future
but it cannot be ignored.
It has to be countered.
So as America charts
its course in the world
and tries to restore
broad-based prosperity
and opportunity at home,
tries to get back more
in the future business,
to accelerate all these
great technological
and biological developments
that are going on,
it is well to remember that.
We need to make our purposes clear
with a vision that is
inclusive of our own people
and also gives other people
a chance to be part of
constructive rather than
destructive partnerships.
For me personally, I've always
had a pretty simple purpose.
I always wanted at the end of my life
to be able to answer with a
resounding yes three questions:
are people better off when you
quit than when you started,
do children have a brighter future,
are things coming together
instead of being torn apart?
To me, all the rest is background music.
And I tried to develop
the political skills
and the ability to
constantly develop policy
that would enable me
personally to say that,
which meant at given times I
might have a different vision
for what the country had
to do at this point in time
or my native state had to
do at that point in time.
All of you have to do that.
When I was a student here,
and I quoted this in 1992
when I came here and gave my lectures
before I started my campaign,
I was deeply moved by
Carroll Quigley's statement
in the History of Civilizations
that the defining characteristic
of our civilization
was a simple belief that the future
could be better than the past
and that every person had a
personal moral responsibility
to contribute to making it better.
That no one had the truth,
so the great joy in life
was the constant search for the truth,
and it was the journey that
gave life dignity and meaning.
So I can't tell you what
your purpose should be,
but I can tell you you'll have
a lot more fun in your life
if you have one and if
it's bigger than you.
A couple of years ago,
right as the annual meeting
of our Global Initiative was beginning,
I was notified that a young woman
who worked for our Health
Access Initiative in Mozambique
and her fiance, a gifted architect,
had been among those
murdered by Al-Shabaab
in the attack on the mall in Nairobi.
She was a Dutch nurse.
Ironically, in all these years
I've been doing all this work
around the world, we've only
lost two people to violence,
and they were both Dutch nurses.
But this woman was a Dutch nurse
who was so good at what she did,
she took time off from working for us,
went back to Harvard and
got a PhD in public health
and came back to take
a management position
in our efforts in Africa.
Her name was Elif Yavuz.
She was eight-and-a-half months pregnant.
She went to Nairobi
because it's the best place
in that part of Africa to have a baby
and she and her husband were
just strolling down the mall
and they were killed.
The people that killed her doubtless think
they are righteous people,
but if you believe in an inclusive future
in an interdependent world,
it doesn't belong to them.
Nigeria has a new president
because a majority of people in Nigeria
don't like Boko Haram.
They believe in an inclusive future.
They don't think you have a right
to kill everybody who disagrees with you.
So anyway, when I was at
the Global Initiative,
I was very moved by this because
I had been with that woman
six weeks before she was
murdered, visiting our projects
and she was beautiful and
very pregnant, and we joked.
I said, "You know, I'm Lamaze father.
"If you've got an emergency here,
just call me in to play."
And we were joking and having fun
and six weeks later, she was gone.
None of us know how long
we're going to be here
or what we're going to do,
but her life had purpose
because she had a vision
and she developed a personal strategy
to make a difference, which she did.
So I told this story that I just told you
and when I told the story,
another woman came up to me
and she said, "You know,
more than 20 years ago,
"I was that young nurse.
"I was in Kenya, I was
working in Africa in an NGO,
and I was pregnant and I went
to Nairobi to have my baby."
She said, "My baby was born
healthy and I was blessed,
"but a few years ago he
was shot several times
in the Virginia Tech shooting,"
and she said, "Thank God he lived
"and it changed his whole life
"and all he wants to do now
"is work in a non-governmental group
to give children a safer future."
We all find our purpose in our own way,
but if you work at it, it'll come.
I wish you well.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
- [Father Hentz] Good to see ya.
Nice to see ya.
Mr. President, the students have submitted
some really excellent questions,
I think, very stimulating,
but the first one is a softball,
and I can't let you talk too long on it
'cause it's going to
be great fun, I think.
There's some other good ones coming along.
It's the teacher in me. (laughs)
"What did going to Georgetown mean to you?
How did it influence your purpose?"
- Well, I'll try to give
you the short answer because
I think I told this before,
but when I wrote my autobiography,
my editor made me take out 20 pages
that I wrote about Georgetown
and there's still a lot in there about it.
He said, "You can't possibly
remember all these people
and all these teachers and everything."
And I said, "But I do."
It had a profound impact
on me, first of all because
I met people from all over the world,
both my teachers and my fellow students,
that I would have never
met otherwise, you know,
and our class was the
only graduating class
I think in American history
that produced three presidents
of three countries.
When I became president, my
classmate Alfredo Cristiani
was the president of El Salvador.
When I left office, my classmate
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
was the president of Philippines,
and the whole time I was there,
our classmate Turki al-Faisal
was the head of the
Saudi version of the CIA,
later Ambassador to the United States
and Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
So I was here with fascinating people,
I was here at a fascinating time,
but it affected me mostly
because of the teachers I had
and people I went to school with
and the conversations we had
about what was going on in our classes
and the debates we had.
It was very different than now.
In my class, we did not have
in the School of Foreign Service
an elective course until
the second semester
of our junior year.
The big controversy.
But I loved it and I doubt very seriously
if I ever would have become president
had I not come to Georgetown
and I am certain I would not have done
whatever good I did do, I
would have done less well
if I hadn't been here.
- Thank you.
This is from Durea LaBizova,
a sophomore in the college.
Sort of two-pronged.
"Where do you see this
generation of young adults going?
In what way is our path going
to be different than before?"
- What has happened in
technology to this date
will look like child's play
over the next 20 to 30 years.
I think most of you will live
to be 90 years old or more
unless some accident befalls you,
or you have an
environmentally-caused cancer
we don't know how to treat yet.
I think that you will live in a time where
the technological revolution will extend
into artificial intelligence
and we'll be able to do
things we never imagined
being able to do before.
I think the combination of
nanotechnology improvements
and the continuing plumbing
of the mysteries of the genome
will lead us to have
affordable, four-times-a-year
health exams that will basically involve
going into a canister and being scanned.
And I think one of the
biggest debates in medicine
within 20 years will be, for example,
since we all have cancerous
cells rooting around in our body
all the time and most of
them are just destroyed
by the operations of our body,
one of the great questions will be,
"Now that we can see this
submicroscopic tumor,
should we zap it out
now or wait till later?"
I mean, your life will be
dramatically different.
I believe that you will
be given one final chance
to figure out how to avoid the
most calamitous consequences
of climate change and
I think there will be
even more economically-beneficial
ways to do it
than there are now.
I think you'll have to
worry a lot about water.
I think California is a
canary in the coal mine.
I think that'll be a big issue.
I think you have to
worry about how to feed
a planet of nine billion people
if we actually go that far.
If we modernize enough
in the developing world,
we may stop at eight billion,
because the one thing
that across all religions and cultures
that slows the birth rate
is the education of women
and the economic development of the poor.
So I think you live in an exciting time.
I think that it is unlikely that these
ideologically-driven
conflicts we're having now
with non-state actors
will be fully resolved.
I hope and pray that we
will leave behind a system
where we can say with some confidence
that we can keep really big
bad things from happening.
That's why this negotiation
with Iran is so important,
maybe for reasons that haven't
been much in the press.
For example, if they get a bomb,
then there's four or five Arab countries
that can afford one.
You got six more people
with nuclear capacity.
They're expensive to build and maintain
and very expensive to secure
and if you're going to have
a bomb that you can use,
you got to have excess fissile material
and that's what you'll have
to watch when you grow up.
What about the accidents?
Because any country that uses a big bomb
knows that it can be annihilated,
but that fissile material,
I consider it a minor
miracle of the modern world
that the fissile stocks of
Pakistan as far as we know,
even though Mr. Khan gave
all the nuclear technology
to North Korea and
others, as far as we know,
their materials have not been
stolen, sold, or given away.
So I think you'll have
to worry about all that.
But I believe that you will
live longer, have more options,
and we will probably not have
fully resolved the problem
between growing productivity
and adequate employment.
But I do think we'll do
a better job by the time
you're raising your own kids
and living your own lives.
I think we will do a
better job in figuring out
how to more fairly apportion
the wealth that we are creating.
I think there will be
more shared prosperity,
but what nobody can really tell you is
whether we've entered a period
where the technological
changes are so rapid
that we won't be able to
create enough employment
in a conventional sense
for 40 hours a week
to keep the populace employed
and so if that happens,
we'll have to think about
some radical changes
in the arrangement of labor and capital.
Carlos Slim said the other day,
he's pretty smart,
that he thought at some
time in this new century
we would maybe be down
to a three-day workweek
just because of the breathtaking
increases in productivity.
If so, have at it.
Have a lot of fun with your leisure time,
(Father Hentz and audience laugh)
and don't forget to serve.
- This may be the easiest
question or the toughest.
"What was your most difficult
decision as president
or otherwise?"
We can pass on that if you want.
- The ones that I had to make?
- [Father Hentz] Yep.
- Well, interestingly enough,
they weren't the ones that were
most politically unpopular.
Like I said, 80% of the people are against
what I did in Mexico.
Easy decision.
74% of the people were
against my first act
in the international arena as president,
which was to put together a
big aid package for Russia,
because they were then so poor in '93,
they couldn't even afford
to bring their soldiers home
from the Baltic States.
A majority was against what I
did in Bosnia when we started.
The most difficult decisions
were my version of Mbeki
and the AIDS crisis.
First I ran for president because
I thought trickle-down
economics was wrong.
We had a robust economic
climate for most of the 1980s
and ordinary people weren't
benefiting from it at all.
Poverty had gone up, wages were stagnant,
and I wanted to give the
middle class a tax cut
and right before I was elected,
the government said, "Oh by the way,
"the deficit's going to be twice as big
"as we told you it was.
Oh, by the way."
So I had a two choices.
I could play like it didn't happen
and just go ahead and
present my original plan,
or go back to the core strategy,
which was to get America growing again,
we had to bring interest rates down.
Because, keep in mind,
we had a normal economy.
That is interest rates were getting high
and it was going to drive
and they were higher than inflation.
So my gamble was, if I could
get interest rates down,
there'd be this huge amount
of private investment
which would overcome the
contractionary impact
of the economic plan I presented,
which called for both spending
cuts and tax increases.
But I hated to give up something
that I really wanted to provide
and I had to choose that
or doubling the Earned Income Tax Credit,
which benefited primarily
lower-income workers
who had children,
and I just don't think that
a society as rich as ours
should allow anybody to
have kids in the house
and work full-time and
still be in poverty.
I just think that's wrong.
So I did it, so all I
heard for two years was,
"Oh, he broke his promise on
the middle-class tax cut."
The interest rate
declines were worth $2,200
to the average family
in lower mortgage rates,
college loan rates, home mortgage rates,
and credit card rates.
And when we passed a Balanced Budget bill,
we also passed the middle-class tax cut,
but that was a hard decision.
It was hard for me not
to act alone in Bosnia.
We all knew what Serbia
was doing in Bosnia
and I sent my then-Secretary
of State Warren Christopher
around to Europe and asked them to help,
and they didn't want to do it
and the thousand reasons why.
And I decided I shouldn't do that,
because it wouldn't be sustainable.
The Europeans had to buy-in.
They had to own the
fact that if they wanted
a Europe that was united
and democratic and free
for the first time in history,
the Balkans were going to be part of it.
And so I waited until we
could get a unified response,
but it was a painful wait.
A lot of people died on that wait.
And some of the decisions that
I regret most were not hard,
but were wrong.
Like, we didn't even talk seriously about
whether we should send troops to Rwanda
because the public was
exhausted with what happened
at Black Hawk Down and in Somalia,
and because we were involved in Bosnia
and that was much more in the news,
and frankly we didn't have any idea
they could kill 10% of the country
in 90 days with machetes, essentially.
So, sometimes the things you regret most
were not hard at the time,
but it should have been a little harder.
I'll always regret we didn't have
a long drawn-out debate on it.
We didn't even really discuss it
and I've spent my life trying
to make up to the Rwandans
and I'm about to get there, I think.
I'm working at it.
- This is a question I wanted ask.
Early on, you committed
yourself to public service
and you outlined your fundamental purpose.
A vocational commitment like that,
did you ever go through a time
when you really questioned it
and say, "What what am I doing here?"
and attempted to withdraw?
- You mean, just to give it up?
- Public service, yeah.
- Well, I did a couple of
times when I was governor.
I was governor a long time.
'Least I proved I could hold down a job.
(audience chuckles)
But, you know, I served a very long time
and the people of my native
state were good enough
to elect me five times.
Based on recent events,
I don't know if I could
win again down there.
So there were times when I
just got burned out, you know,
but I'd always find something new to do.
And I told people, one of the reasons
I love being in public life,
it was like peeling an onion
that had no end.
There was always another layer,
it was always something new.
Always something interesting.
There was always something
to engage the imagination
and to stretch your capacities.
So I didn't,
and when Congress and the press and all
were all hot on that Whitewater business
and I realized, I knew,
wasn't on the level,
there was nothing to it,
and that there couldn't have been.
I invested in land deal and lost money.
The guy later went into the S&L business
and it failed.
It was the smallest S&L
business failure in the country
and I didn't ever borrow
any money from him,
it was a made-up deal.
It was heartbreaking to me to
see otherwise sensible people
treat it like it was something,
but it never made me want to quit.
I had an unusual upbringing,
but I was raised not to quit.
We're not big on quitting in my family.
You may have noticed that.
(audience and Father Hentz laugh)
So, it was awful, but I learned
to kinda just wall it off.
And, I think, I also felt,
maybe this was arrogant and I
shouldn't have felt that way
but I spent a long time
when I was president
reading the history of other presidencies,
including not well-known presidents,
and I realized that the
success of a given president
is first determined by the
times in which you live.
I mean, Washington was either
going to be a great president
or a flop depending on
whether he tried to be a king
or he gave us a democracy.
He made the right decision.
Therefore, even though
government had nowhere near
the range of things to
do that it does now,
he was a very great president
and he made really good
decisions on the big things.
Lincoln became president
when the whole question was
whether the Union would survive or not.
A lot of people thought it wouldn't.
A lot of people thought the
South had more talented generals
and the Union wouldn't hang
around long enough to do it,
and Roosevelt had the
Depression and World War Two.
But it also depends on whether
the skills and the psychology
of a person in a given
leadership position,
this is not just politics,
actually fit well with the challenges
of that particular moment.
And when I read all these histories
of the lesser-known presidents,
I realized some of them
were really well suited
to govern when they did
and others might have
been quite successful
had they governed at
another time, but not then.
Like, I'll just give you an example.
A lot of people think Franklin Pierce
is one of the worst
presidents we ever had,
and if you measure that
because he was elected
right before the Civil War
and he couldn't stop the
country's drift toward war
and he couldn't figure out a
stop to the spread of slavery
and he couldn't do this
and he couldn't do that,
that's absolutely true.
But he was an immensely successful soldier
in the Mexican War.
He was a successful member of Congress
and went home and became
governor of New Hampshire.
Only other governor of a small state
to be elected president.
And he was on his way to be inaugurated
with his only child.
Presidents were then inaugurated in March,
and he took a train from New
Hampshire down to Washington.
On the way there was a train wreck.
Nobody was hurt very bad.
There were a couple of broken bones,
except his 11-year-old
son who fell on his neck,
snapped it, and died.
Nobody else got more
than a little broken bone
and that's how he began his presidency,
with his wife in a virtually
catatonic state of grief.
So I always wondered whether
he had different circumstances
he might have been quite
a successful president,
ruled in a calmer time, and I'm not sure
that it was in the cards
for anybody to succeed
before the country split apart.
So anyway that's what I think about,
but by and large, I
think when you get tired
and want to bag it,
unless you're old and you think,
"I've got three years left
and I'd like spend it
doing something else,"
you ought to hang in
there and work through it.
Or if you believe you
made the right decision
in the first place and you ought to go,
somebody will push you
out one way or the other.
But you ought not to open the door
if your vision has not been fulfilled.
I'm not big on quitting.
I'd rather hang around
and fight it through,
and if you need to go,
somebody will kick you out.
- All right, Mr. President,
we're allowed one more question.
You've obviously read very
widely over a long time.
If you had to recommend
one book, what would it be?
- [President Clinton] One book?
- That's all you get.
You mentioned one earlier, but.
- The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
- [Father Hentz] He did it.
(audience laughs)
(audience applauds)
