BILL CLINTON

Bill Clinton served as the forty-second president of the United States. After leaving office in 2001, he created the William J. Clinton Foundation, which operates programs around the world aimed at having a significant impact on a wide range of issues, including economic development, climate change, health and wellness, and the rights of girls and women. The foundation builds partnerships among businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals to work faster, better, and leaner; to find solutions that last; and to transform lives and communities from what they are today to what they can be tomorrow.

I met Bill Clinton in 1987, when we were seated next to one another on a flight from Little Rock to Washington, D.C. I campaigned across the country during both his presidential and reelection bids. He hosted the launch of the play based on my book, Speak Truth to Power, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2000, and he has been a constant source of support for our work at RFK Human Rights.

Kerry Kennedy: Mr. President, you just got off a plane, as usual….

Bill Clinton: I was home in Arkansas for four days at our annual health conference. I’ll tell you about some of the really interesting things we’ve been doing.

We have this childhood obesity project that we started years ago, and now we’ve been in thirty-some-thousand schools with twenty million kids; originally it was about working with the staff on exercise programs, nutrition, and those basic things, but we realized we needed to expand our reach, so we started working in the communities. We’ve got seven or eight communities now where we bring in all the health care people, including public health, and they help us identify other community problems we can work on.

We have a special program for schools and after-school time, and we’ve reduced the calories going to these kids from drinks, both soft drinks and processed fruit juices, which have a lot of sugar. We did that with no taxes and no regulations. We got all the major producers together and said, “Do you realize that a lot of these kids, when they’re in their midthirties, are going to be sitting in wheelchairs with amputated legs from type 2 diabetes if you don’t do this? We know you don’t intend to be hurting people, but these kids can’t take this much sugar, especially this corn fructose, so you need to find a different way to make money.” We got an agreement with the companies that advanced the public health which benefits everybody, including the people who need to make money from selling sodas and juices. They put in fruit-flavored waters; they got rid of all full-size fruit juices and soft drinks; and now we have two independent surveys that show the agreement cut the kids’ calories from drinks in schools by 90 percent.

We’re trying to capture outcomes on weight reduction, but so far we only have three independent studies—two in California and one in Arkansas. All those studies showed that if schools worked for three years to both change the diet and up the exercise, there’s a marked reduction in obesity. So now I’m trying to figure out how to get some foundation to study other states. I’d like to study one in Appalachia, because West Virginia has been pretty active on this problem, and possibly one in Mississippi to see if we can have the same impact in places where the adult rate of obesity is still very high. We know that in some of the areas we’re in, the adult obesity rate isn’t very high, so there’s a reasonable chance that a lot of these kids are getting positive support in their homes or neighborhoods. That might not be true in the towns and rural areas that are most profoundly affected: the predominantly black areas of the South and the predominantly white areas in Appalachia and the Upper Midwest.

Our public health connection has led to all kinds of other stuff we can do. In a lot of places now we’re working on the opioid epidemic. There’s a wonderful little company, Adapt, that produces the first-ever nasal spray version of stuff that reverses an overdose. You can literally be clinically dead and be brought back to life if you get this Naloxone. Then you have an hour when there’s no danger of a relapse, so there’s time to get real medical attention.

The most surprising thing to me is that Jacksonville, Florida, which is the third-largest city in America in terms of land mass, has the second- or third-largest rate of pedestrian deaths in the country.

The city and county governments have merged; it’s one entity. So you can come to the end of a residential street in the old city of Jacksonville, and suddenly you’re in the county, and the cars, instead of driving twenty-five miles per hour, are going sixty, while people are still walking, running, and biking. So a lot of people have been hit who never realized they’d left the city limits and stepped into a more dangerous situation. We’re trying to help them fix that.

So when you start to look at childhood obesity as a public health issue, you get connected to other public health issues. That’s just what I was doing before I got here today.

KK: As a politician, you fought vigorously against George W. Bush’s policies, but as a former president you have worked closely with him and his dad. Talk about that.

BC: Yes. There’s a program I’m doing with George W. Bush, his and his dad’s and Johnson’s and my libraries, where we pick sixty people a year to meet and work together on common objectives who would otherwise never talk to each other. For example, we had two severely wounded Iraq War veterans—both of them had lost a leg—working with a group that included the African American woman who heads the gay rights movement in Little Rock, and we had people who represent just about everything in between. These people never would have spoken, and they wound up loving each other. They were stunned at how much they agreed on things they could accomplish together. This is just my little effort to push back against all this polarization that’s going on. It’s really been good.

KK: I was going to ask you to talk about my father, but I think you’ve already been doing that…

BC: I know. Well, here’s something that’s more directly about your dad. It’s about my friend who was the prime minister of Japan, Keizō Obuchi.

In his last year as attorney general, your father gave an interview to a young Japanese journalist who wound up becoming prime minister of Japan.

I served with seven Japanese prime ministers, and Obuchi was my favorite. I just loved the guy, and we became good friends. Obuchi got interested in politics because your father gave him fifteen minutes.

Obuchi was the first Japanese prime minister to do that sort of mass hand-to-hand campaigning. He said he did it because he saw the pictures of Bobby Kennedy in ’68 and because he had noticed that I would stop the car and go out and talk with people. He was very restrained, but he decided “we’re going to downtown Tokyo.” It was obvious it was all orchestrated, but for Japan it was a spontaneous event. They had all these schoolkids in their uniforms at designated places waving Japanese and American flags, and we got out and shook hands with them. This was so many years after Bobby Kennedy’s death, and he was still influencing this prime minister of Japan and it was so touching. And of course it wasn’t just about doing informal handshaking in a campaign; it was about an approach to people that was different from what had been the usual thing in Japan. Obuchi died too young from a stroke. It was very sad. His successor had been a close friend of his, but had nowhere near Obuchi’s speaking ability. Everybody was shocked that he gave such an eloquent eulogy. He said, “When we were young we talked about our dreams. I do not know what happens when one leaves earth, and I wonder if my friend still dreams. If he does I hope all his dreams are coming true.”

It was very moving. There was a silver tray with white flowers, and first his family and then his government officials and then everyone there put a flower down in a pile that grew and grew—thousands of flowers. It was an unbelievable tribute. All this was because your father gave Obuchi a fifteen-minute meeting. Isn’t that amazing?

KK: That is beautiful. Thank you for that story. I never knew my father was an inspiration to the prime minister of Japan. But my parents always talked about their trip there. My mother, to this day, can sing all the words to the Waseda University fight song. Daddy had a famous encounter with students during that trip—I don’t recall if it was in Japan or Indonesia—but they were anti-American. He always wanted to meet with students, and he never shied away from those who didn’t share his perspective. He listened thoughtfully and respectfully to a long-winded attack. And he responded quietly and directly, “I appreciate that you’ve been frank in your assessment. And I am sure you expect the same from me.” Then, with a wide grin and sparkling eyes, “And you’re gonna get it.” The film clip is very funny.

Daddy had a great sense of humor and absolute disdain for dictators. He went to Indonesia on that same trip, and was forced against his will to sit through an endless formal dance at Sukarno’s palace. Afterward, he suggested that the Americans would like to return the favor and perform an American routine. He then asked Susie Wilson, the very charming and always-game wife of the deputy director of the US Information Agency and the very uptight and solemn young US foreign service officer Brandon Grove to do the twist. Of course he knew full well that, just a few months earlier, doing the twist had been declared a crime under the lewd-and-lascivious-conduct statutes of Indonesia.

I think that combination of seriousness of purpose and playfulness, or recognition of the absurdity of life, are vitally important to effective leadership.

I wonder if you could tell me more about how my father affected you.

BC: First of all, I supported integration in the South, so I followed what your father was doing as attorney general. As a lawyer and a southerner, I was mightily impressed by the record he made and how he achieved it. When he was elected to the senate I was thrilled; I thought he would be great; but it really hit me again when he went to South Africa and when he went to Appalachia and when he went to the Mississippi delta. I loved what he did in New York City with the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which is the community development organization your father was a major force in getting started. When Hillary ran for the Senate in New York, I said the best thing about it was that she might win Bobby Kennedy’s seat. This year in the campaign, one of the places I made sure to visit when I was campaigning in the city was the Bed-Stuy Corporation. That has done so well, and it’s still doing great work today. New York is a totally different place now, and a lot of it is happening in Brooklyn and the Bronx. I think your father would be very happy seeing all these young people from all over the world, living together, and proving that diverse groups make better decisions than homogeneous ones. What I loved most was what he did on the campaign in 1968. He had both the courage and the good sense to realize that you couldn’t have change without gathering into our base people who had more traditional values. He tried to figure out a way to give the same speech to people in Indiana and people in Los Angeles. That’s been our great challenge ever since, because after he was killed, Nixon was elected, and we saw the beginning of the triumph of conservative populism. It’s had more and less kind faces as it’s gone on through Reagan and Bush and Newt Gingrich to Trump. The whole essence of it is the idea that we live in an “Us and Them” world in which I’m determined to make sure we win and they lose. That’s the core of it, and simultaneously the media has come to depend on that construct as a reliable way to increase audience attention and participation.

It’s a really interesting point of recent history: when the politicization of the media got started. I think it started in the early 1970s, and I think it got worse because Robert Kennedy wasn’t elected president. I think if he had lived he would have won. I think he would have faced a divided country and a lot of opposition, but at least he understood that the culturally conservative and the culturally liberal should both want a society in which we can all live, work, and prosper. That’s why I think he was really the first New Democrat. He thought you had to both care for the poor and expect them to be responsible if given an opportunity, because a job is always better than welfare. If the Democrats just took care of people without nurturing their aspirations, they would get into trouble. The same if the Republicans took advantage of the prejudice of working-class and middle-class people who thought other people were going to get things they didn’t deserve and deprived them of help so they’d never have a chance to achieve their aspirations. It’s better to take care of people than let them wither on the vine, but that’s never going to be enough to empower them. If you don’t enable people to grow and achieve, sooner or later we’ll have a society in which we don’t take care of people at all. Inequality will be massive. We’ve been fighting this yin-yang battle ever since 1968.

KK: The political media, both Left and Right, reflects that conservative view by pitting people against each other in a zero-sum battle; there can be no reconciliation.

BC: They’re smart. As the attention span of the electorate gets shorter, everybody wants things to happen quickly. Our brains are hardwired for “Us and Them” and for conflict more than for unity. When President Kennedy was elected, the average news program was an hour long, and there were three networks, enough competition for them to keep each other honest and enough guaranteed market share to hire real journalists and allow them to dig out the facts and provide context for them. Over time, that’s changed. Now the average time you hear a president’s voice on television is about eight seconds. We’re told that’s about the average amount of attention people give before they think of something else.

You can’t really just blame the media, though; they’ve got to make a living. The problem is that nobody believes anything about anybody anymore, and “fake news” is the natural spawn of the cynical environment. I think in a way Robert Kennedy understood what was already happening. He understood that if you wanted real change it had to be rooted in bedrock values. He understood that in order for people to feel common ground they had to know you didn’t look down on them and that you were pulling for them and you respected them. He understood that you couldn’t just tell people what they wanted to hear; you had to give the same speech to everybody.

When I ran for president in 1992, I did an experiment. I gave a speech in Macomb County, which was supposed to be the home of the Reagan Democrats in Michigan, and then I went directly to an AME church in downtown Detroit and gave the exact same message. It went over because I didn’t sugarcoat it. I didn’t pretend. I said, “Look, I think work is better than welfare and the best social program is a job. On the other hand, if you think people are going to be able just to get up and go to work when they’ve never had an education, they’ve never had training, they don’t have any child care, they don’t have any support system, you’re wrong.” When I took on the NRA, I did it with respect for gun owners. I said, “Look, nobody is going to take away the gun you have for self-protection, or for sport shooting or hunting, but we need your help here. They’re playing on your paranoia to get you to deny the most elementary safety precautions in this country, and you may not know anybody who’s dying, but if you went with me you would: those kids growing up on blocks dominated by gang violence, a lot of them getting killed anonymously, getting shot in cross fires, getting shot by young kids who’re told they can’t get into a gang if they don’t kill somebody.” I said, “If I were you I’d want to help give those kids their future. I’m just asking for your help.” Now, I had the advantage of having grown up in that culture, so it was more credible, but Bobby Kennedy understood that you had to communicate with people who didn’t vote for you. They could never think you were pulling against them. What happens if you create a cynical environment for a short-term media advantage is that pretty soon no one can hear you when you talk straight anymore. It’s just us or them.

Bobby Kennedy was of a time when in spite of all we’d gone through in the sixties there was still an innate yearning among enough Americans to put together a coalition of people who could be for change while also honoring family, faith, and work, people who could believe child rearing was the most important job of a society but that women should not be denied opportunities available to men.

As you know your dad started off working for two congressional committees; he worked for Senator [John] McClellan, who was a hard-core conservative, and they got after the Teamsters union leaders [Dave] Beck and [Jimmy] Hoffa, and a lot of it needed doing, and it was tough, and your father had to be tough and he learned to be tough. He started from where he was and grew and grew until his last day on earth. That’s another thing I respect. I think that it’s a great mistake to say, “We’re all fixed in stone, we are who we are; you show me a guy who’s no good at twenty, and he’ll die a miserable, no-good guy at eighty.” That’s just not always true. If your heart and your mind are open, you grow.

KK: Daddy grew. And his roles changed, so his responsibilities were different, from the time he served on those committees until he was attorney general and then senator and presidential candidate. Growing means changing, and changing your mind in politics is criticized as flip-flopping. How have you changed your mind?

BC: I’ve changed my mind on a lot of things. I was always against bigotry against gay people because I knew gay people when I was a little boy, but I was limited in my understanding. My drama teacher in the sixties was gay, and we knew he had to be in the closet, and we all loved him. The South was a great place for gay people because hypocrisy was so enshrined because of race; as long as you’d be hypocritical, they let you do it, whatever it was. Later I realized my position on gay marriage was silly, and that was mostly because of Chelsea. She made a lot of friends when she went to work at McKinsey, the management consultants, and many of them weren’t from America. They’d never celebrated Thanksgiving, so Chelsea invited them to our house. She also had friends who lived across the country and couldn’t go home, so we started feeding them too. One time we had like four gay couples there out of twenty-five people; that’s a pretty high percentage. I came to love all these people, I was interested in their lives and what they were doing. Finally, Chelsea looked at me, and she said, “You can’t be against gay marriage anymore; it just doesn’t make any sense. You need to change, so don’t be proud, you know you’re wrong.” And I said, “You’re right. It’s not about me, it’s about them,” and she said, “Exactly, Dad.” She said, “Almost every prejudice in the world is perpetuated by people who think it threatens their identity, but their identity is not the question; it’s the other person’s identity.”

I went to the NAACP in early 2015, before Hillary announced for president, and I said, “You know, this crime bill I signed did a lot of good and most AME leaders and clergymen endorsed it because the primary problem at the time was black-on-black violence by gangs. That crime bill changed policing in America for the better and we got a twenty-five-year low in the crime rate, a thirty-year low in the murder rate, and a forty-seven-year low in the illegal gun homicide rate. A lot of people lived who would otherwise have died. But we made a mistake on the sentencing thing; even though the federal government has fewer than 10 percent of the people who are in jail at any given time and we weren’t the first, it’s wrong, and we need to fix it. There are a lot of Republicans who know we overdid it too, so we have to try. A lot of you were with me on that, but we need to change it.” The cost was horrendous. President Obama did something really good at the end of his term that a lot of people didn’t notice. He issued an executive order that started phasing out prisons run by private contractors. It’s terrible that the Trump administration has reversed that order, and maybe people haven’t noticed either. We still have to take the profit out of incarceration. I’ve become pretty comfortable saying I was right about this and wrong about that, and I’ve changed my opinion to what I think is right now.

All this stuff I’ve been talking about is completely consistent with the message your father presented in 1968. I think we’d be living in a different country if he had won the election. People said that to be for traditional values of work and family and faith but also to believe the government ought to empower people to make the most out of their own lives meant trying to have it both ways. That combination made no sense in terms of “Us versus Them” politics.

I remember very clearly what I thought about Bobby Kennedy when I was twenty-two years old. I thought, “This guy is no cardboard cutout. This is a complicated, real-life, red-blooded human being who’s wrestled with his own demons, wrestled with America’s demons, sought forgiveness for his sins, and is trying to make one hell of a difference, and I hope people listen.” I thought he was for real; I never had any doubt about it.

It’s hard, and it’s harder now than it was then, to do what your father was trying to do, but it’s the only thing worth doing in American life.

I remember when your dad announced, I was still working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I remember this like it was yesterday. He didn’t announce for president sooner, because people would have said it was just a grudge match between him and LBJ, so by not announcing sooner he exposed himself to the same thing people always said about Hillary: “Oh, you’re driven by ambition and just slid by because Gene McCarthy did all the dirty work.” In fact, Johnson had won the New Hampshire primary, but he got only 42 percent of the vote. Johnson beat McCarthy reasonably well, but it wasn’t a majority, and psychologically he had lost, which made him vulnerable. Instead of trying to answer those charges against him every day, that it was McCarthy who had shown the courage to challenge Johnson, Bobby just kept talking about what he was for and who he was trying to help and how he wanted to bring us all together. Instead of wearing a hair shirt for an eight-second cut because he once supported the Vietnam War, he talked about what was happening and what went wrong and what we needed to do now. He knew that every election is about the future and you can’t let the narrative freeze-frame you. In a competitive media environment of eight-second sound bites like we have today, everybody wants the freeze-frame; the pressure for that is even greater than it was then. What happens with freeze-frames is you drown out the possibility of the future. People can’t really hear that message; it takes more than eight seconds. That makes it hard to know for sure exactly how someone like Bobby would fare in an environment like this, but I know that in his time he made the most of it. He gave us a chance to create a new future, and that’s what we all needed. It’s what we all need now.