Someone in Silicon Valley once described software development as “building the plane while you fly it.” Those early postpresidential years were like that for me—starting over without really stopping.
My first year out of office was full: the first Clinton Foundation projects and my first missions as an ex-president; paid and unpaid speeches; commemorations and celebrations which often took me to other countries; fundraising and planning for my presidential library; moving from the transition office in Washington to a new permanent one in Harlem; and spending weekends with Hillary when her Senate schedule and work with her constituents allowed.
Just six days after I left office, my first opportunity for postpresidential service came when a massive earthquake struck the Indian state of Gujarat, killing 20,000 people and destroying thousands of homes, schools, hospitals, health clinics, and other buildings in cities, towns, and small villages.
Because I had dealt with many natural disasters as governor and president, I called Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and volunteered to help. I had a high regard for Vajpayee, formed when we worked together to restore strong ties badly frayed by decades of Cold War strain. He was a selfless, ascetic, lifelong bachelor who had kept in check the most destructive impulses of his Hindu nationalist party and supported the booming growth of India’s high-tech centers. Vajpayee had a clear grasp of the challenges ahead. He said he had the capability to repair the largest cities but lacked the money and organization to restore the towns and villages, many of which were wiped out. He asked me to help organize the Indian American community to do that.
At the time, Indian Americans had the highest education levels and per capita incomes of all of America’s many immigrant groups. They had done well in all the professions, especially medicine, high-tech, and finance. There were also a large number of self-made business owners large and small: for example, Indian Americans owned one third of all the hotel rooms in the United States.
Many were already involved in worthy activities in their home communities, but there was no national group able to do what the prime minister had asked. To create one, we reached out to people across the country. Soon the American India Foundation (AIF) was born, with a board composed of prominent members of the Indian diaspora. Lata Krishnan, an IT entrepreneur from Northern California, agreed to become the first president. The group quickly raised $4 million, with fundraisers in New York, California, and Chicago, and gifts from individuals and organizations from coast to coast; established partnerships with effective Indian nongovernmental organizations; and set to work. In April, I visited India with other AIF board members to see some of the hardest-hit areas, where we had worked with the NGOs to provide immediate food, water, shelter, and wheelchairs for the disabled, and to determine what to do next.
In Bhuj, then a city of more than a hundred thousand people, virtually all the stone buildings had crumbled; the rubble was everywhere. Schoolchildren had been marching in a parade in a narrow street with buildings tightly packed together on both sides when the quake hit. The falling stone had killed two hundred of them. People were still living in the debris, without clean water, much less the ability to resume their livelihoods. To help them, we clearly had to raise a lot of money.
With the support of some pharmaceutical companies, AIF had already assisted a group of doctors and nurses from the Stanford Medical Group who had come to India to perform emergency surgeries. We went to visit with them and the people they were helping in a large still-standing open building the Red Cross had turned into a hospital. After getting a report from the medical staff on their work, we thanked them and visited with the patients and families who wanted to say hello and tell us what had happened to them.
As I made my way through the group, I noticed a man at the far end of the room, in a section not well lighted. He was sitting on his bed talking to a woman I assumed was his wife. I glanced at him a few times, wondering why he hadn’t come forward. When the man turned to see the goings-on, I understood why.
He had no face. A falling stone had sheared it away. His brows, nose, and lips were gone. I tried to imagine what he must feel, losing parts of himself essential to his health, to his ability to relate to others, to his very identity. Still his gaze was steady and riveting. Whether he stayed in his bed because of embarrassment, pain, or both, I couldn’t know. But I knew there was still a person inside. I bowed to him slightly and returned to the people nearby. When I got to the door to leave, I looked at him again. This time he slowly raised his hand in greeting. I waved back, moved by the dignity and courage of a man still hanging on.
His image stayed with me as I traveled to Ahmedabad to visit Mohandas Gandhi’s ashram and talk with young Indian leaders about whether Gandhi’s vision for India as a peaceful haven for all its people, regardless of their ethnic or religious heritage, could still become a reality. Today, India is enjoying brisk growth and has become the world’s most populous country, but the persistence of internal divisions, especially between Hindus and Muslims, leaves open the question of whether Gandhi’s vision will ever be fully realized.
After a stop in Mumbai to see political and business leaders, I went to Calcutta, or Kolkata as it’s now known, to keep a promise I had made to Mother Teresa before her death in 1997 to visit her Shishu Bhavan, or Homes for the Children. As her successor toured me around, I saw many children with disabilities and others who appeared mixed-race, all either without parents or whose parents were too poor to take care of them. They had found a loving home.
My last stop was in a village ninety minutes north of New Delhi where my friend Vin Gupta grew up and his father was still the village doctor. Vin had built a successful targeted mass mailing business in America and was determined to bring more economic and educational opportunity to people in and near his home village. We dedicated a new nursing school he named for Hillary and Vin announced he would replace the local high school’s ill-equipped fifty-seven-year-old chemistry lab with a modern science and technology facility. He did that, too. The high school’s performance in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—courses went way up and the nursing school graduates all find jobs that pay well.
There were so many Indian Americans and other friends of the nation already working on their own similar projects in India that I flew home confident that we could do what Prime Minister Vajpayee requested. The AIF quickly raised another $30 million and over the next couple of years built more than 1,350 houses, dozens of schools, three hospitals, a primary health center, and held workshops for thousands of artisans skilled in metal sculpting, woodworking, and making clothes. The group also increased the availability of microcredit loans, training for women entrepreneurs, and support for workers on farms, in salt mines, and in poor urban areas. Then, working with sixty Indian NGOs, AIF made information technology available to more than 200,000 students, increased the artisans’ ability to produce and market their products, and began to send young Americans, mostly of Indian heritage, to serve as fellows to work with their NGO partners.
AIF is still going strong. Lata Krishnan is still there and has been board cochair for several years. It has been highly rated by Charity Navigator, and continues to attract strong support. Lata’s own children were eight and eleven when she started with AIF. They grew up watching their mother, and supportive father, AJ, prove you can do well and make a difference to others. I had no idea what would happen when I started. But I’m grateful I had the chance to help them get organized, to support their critical decision to work with dedicated local NGOs, and to encounter the man with no face and feel the grace of his greeting. In many ways AIF was a precursor to the work I would do in the future, not only in other natural disasters, but in other Clinton Foundation programs and through the Clinton Global Initiative.
When you leave the White House, even though no one plays a song when you walk in the room anymore, the government does provide support for your transition—six months for a temporary office in Washington, rent, staff salaries, and health insurance for your permanent office staff. My transition office was located in a small building on Jackson Place just across from the White House, and staffed with former White House aides, led by Karen Tramontano, the last of my deputy chiefs of staff in the White House. The first couple of weeks were marred by negative stories that set off a feeding frenzy in the press. The first to hit were stories that, as we moved out of the White House, I had taken two large bedside tables from the master bedroom in the White House; that the “W” key had been removed from the computers and typewriters in the West Wing; and that on my flight to New York on the former Air Force One after President George W. Bush’s inauguration, our passengers destroyed government plates and other utensils. The White House staff asked me to take the tables, saying they didn’t want to keep or store them, and no one on Air Force One destroyed government merchandise. I didn’t know about the alleged removal of the “W” keys, but the whole thing bothered me because I had made it clear that I wanted a smooth, cooperative transition and we had done exactly that. Within a few days some people finally went on the record to say that either no damage had occurred or that the allegations of “W” mischief were greatly exaggerated.
The most serious attack on me was for my pardons of Marc Rich and his partner Pincus Green. Rich was a wealthy Republican oil broker who had strong ties to Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East. He was accused of misstating the income from his business to lessen the taxes he owed to the U.S. by nearly $50 million. Here’s why I decided to do it. First, Rich was charged under a racketeering statute, which had been barred by the Justice Department from being used in such cases not long after he was charged. Second, he and the government had agreed that his wholly owned business would pay $200 million in taxes and penalties (four times what the government had said he owed) in a full settlement of the case that allowed him to continue doing business. Third, Israeli leaders from both major parties, Labor and Likud, asked me to do it because of his help with the Palestinians.
So why was the pardon controversial? For starters, because the wealthy Rich stayed in his house in Switzerland or confined his travel to nations that wouldn’t extradite him to the United States. And because his ex-wife, Denise, a friend and supporter of mine who, more than a year earlier, had contributed $450,000 to my presidential library fund, wrote to me recommending the pardon. I wish Denise hadn’t written to me, for her sake and mine. I knew she had made plenty of money on her own, did not get along with her ex-husband, and didn’t know he would apply for a pardon when she gave money to the library fund. I suspected and later confirmed that she sympathized with him because when their much loved daughter died of cancer, the U.S. attorney wouldn’t let Rich come home to her funeral without the threat of arrest to prevent his leaving the country. He wanted to visit her grave before he died.
Then Israel got into the act, with leaders of both their dominant parties, including the prime minister, urging Rich’s pardon because of his work to support Israel in defusing security threats and solving problems with the Palestinians. Eric Holder, the deputy attorney general and later attorney general in President Obama’s administration, said that the foreign policy considerations made him “neutral, leaning yes” toward approving the pardon, in spite of the U.S. attorney’s continuing opposition based largely on Rich’s refusal to come home.
I decided to grant the pardon because I thought it was the right thing to do: he’d paid four times what the government said he owed, the Justice Department had barred the law he was charged under from ever being used in such cases again, and Israeli officials from left to right said he helped them save lives and preserve the peace process. The press reaction was predictably negative. There was a congressional hearing and I was interviewed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I welcomed the chance to answer all their questions and I did. The investigation died a quiet death, and the press began to cover the new president. As a condition of the pardon, I required Rich to agree to be charged civilly as others had been. Despite the lower burden of proof in a civil case, he was never charged. I never met him, and he died of a stroke in 2013, without ever seeing his daughter’s grave.
The third controversy involved my office space. After reviewing a number of options, my team had recommended the Tower at Carnegie Hall. I was concerned about the cost and the ritzy-sounding address, but the owner had offered us a good price by Manhattan standards. Still, Representative Ernest Istook (R-OK) criticized the rent and Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) was urging a full-scale investigation if the lease wasn’t abandoned. After the dustup began, New York Democrat Charlie Rangel suggested I come to Harlem.
I thought about it for a couple of days and I decided I’d rather be in Harlem than anywhere else, anyway. More than thirty years earlier, when I was a student at Oxford and flew to New York on my way home to Arkansas, I’d stopped in Harlem and walked through the streets, imagining what it was like in the golden age of the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem was included in one of the first Empowerment Zones created as part of my economic plan in 1993, and during my presidency the unemployment rate there fell from more than 20 to 8 percent. I called Charlie and asked, “Can you find me an office in Harlem?” He replied, “Not before tomorrow morning.”
We got out of the Carnegie Hall lease. I’m sure the owner was glad to be out of the story, especially since he’d given us a good deal and could make more from someone else. Soon we had a lease on bare space at the top of 55 West 125th Street, also called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, near the intersection with Malcolm X Boulevard. Karen found a local architect, Navid Maqami, and a gifted young designer, Sheila Bridges, who crafted my personal office as it is today. The Studio Museum, just down the street, agreed to rotate the work of their artists, which would make the office more attractive and expose their art to people from all over the world.
On July 30, 2001, we finally opened the office, with a big Welcome to Harlem ceremony organized by Congressman Rangel and emceed by the wonderful Cicely Tyson. I had long been a fan—entranced by her performance in Sounder and impressed that she spent nearly a decade married to the brilliant but difficult Miles Davis. There were a few thousand people in the streets, lots of music and welcoming speeches, even a nice proclamation of William J. Clinton Day in Harlem from the Republican governor, George Pataki. I made brief remarks about walking down 125th Street as a young man, how I always wanted to play the Apollo Theater, just down the street, and how I’d try to be a good neighbor. The joyous event ended with all of us joining a jazz group in singing “Stand by Me.” I felt like I was home. And I stayed.
I loved the buildout of my office—lots of wood, shelves that I filled with books about other presidents and pivotal moments in U.S. history, with a section on civil rights history, heroes, and the persistence of racism amidst our growing diversity, and in the conference room, books about Harlem, biographies of leaders I’d served with and admired, and books about Ireland and Northern Ireland, where I’d worked hard for peace. I’ve loved working there, having guests and feeding them good meals from local restaurants.
In 2005, the Clinton Foundation took over the thirteenth floor, added more space on the eleventh floor in 2008, and stayed until 2011. The Clinton Global Initiative was growing so fast it needed its own space, which was donated by the French property management company Calyon, from 2005 to 2013. The foundation and CGI both moved several times over the next few years as needs grew and space became available. In late 2023, both moved to their current home in the NoMad neighborhood, right on Madison Square Park.
Through it all, I’ve kept my former president’s office in Harlem, hosting visitors from all over, from Make-A-Wish kids and student groups to political, business, and NGO leaders, foreign and domestic. I enjoy sharing my view of Harlem’s main drag, including Marcus Garvey Park just across the street, where great youth league baseball is played; the still unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the world’s largest Gothic church; the north end of Central Park, and all Manhattan beyond. I still love Harlem more than fifty years after I first walked down 125th Street.
Back in November of 1999, at the beginning of Hillary’s Senate campaign, we’d bought our home in Chappaqua, New York, an old farmhouse built in the late 1890s, and expanded in the 1980s. I really liked the place, but it needed some work. The rooms in the old part of the house were small and there wasn’t enough closet space, so we took out the decorative doors and windows between the living room and the glassed-in porch to make a bigger, lighter space and expanded the upstairs closet. We also glassed in a screened-in porch just off the kitchen to make it a usable breakfast room year-round. The third floor had a sauna, which we took out to make a nice office for Hillary, a good-sized den for TV and book space, and two little side rooms, one of which became a music room. It’s packed with my saxophones, including two made by Adolphe Sax in the 1860s, with enough space for me to play music, lots of pictures of my favorite musicians, and other memorabilia, including an autographed scarf Elvis Presley wore at a California concert, a drumhead signed by Mick Fleetwood, and an autographed John Coltrane album. The expansion space is mostly two large rooms—a big den on the ground floor with crowded bookshelves, including many old editions I’ve collected over the decades, and a big bedroom on the second floor with large windows dominating three sides of the room and French doors opening to the back porch.
There was also an old red barn close to the house, which had been converted into an apartment for the previous owner’s parent, with outside steps leading up to a converted loft. The Secret Service liked the loft as a site for their office, and I turned the downstairs into an office for me and a gym.
I knew the age of the house, the septic tank system, and other issues would present problems, but I wanted to buy the house from the minute I saw the bedroom. It was bathed in light. I told Hillary that this house would help her win the Senate election, because she’d wake up in a good mood even on cloudy days with all the light streaming in the bedroom windows. Also, I thought we’d have a good time working to make it ours. For more than twenty years now, we have done just that, restoring, remodeling, and reinforcing the house, improving the grounds, planting trees, shrubs, flowers, and a vegetable garden, putting up outdoor sculptures, fixing the plumbing, you name it. We’ve now lived there longer than any other place. Our home is obviously not a designer creation. It’s filled with photographs, art and crafts from our travels, and our old books, all evoking memories of our public and private lives, our families and friends.
Hillary and I both love living in Chappaqua and feel blessed to live in a county where every town of any size has its own public library with free WiFi, the schools are really good, and the parks and wilderness preserves offer nature’s bounty to people who can’t afford to go far or spend much to find it. All these public spaces, plus our local bookshop, good new and well-established retail stores and restaurants, the Chappaqua Village Market, and Lange’s Delicatessen, have given me countless opportunities to meet my neighbors, their kids, and lots of other people, listen to them and answer their questions. Now these neighbors often show me photos they took of me with their kids fifteen or twenty years ago, then tell me what they’re doing these days.
I enjoy doing events that matter to people in Chappaqua, from marching with Hillary in our annual Memorial Day parade, to supporting Edward and Maya Manley’s Making Headway Foundation, which supports families dealing with brain and spinal cord tumors and other brain-related traumas, to meeting with New York City kids who come up during the summer to visit our county, which has the largest amount of greenspace of any suburban county in the United States.
In the first half of 2001, while the office was being prepared and the office work was still being handled out of our transition headquarters in D.C., I kept busy making our home more livable, giving my first paid speeches, negotiating a book contract with the late Sonny Mehta of Knopf to write my autobiography with the late, legendary Bob Gottlieb as my editor, and signing on with the Harry Walker Agency in New York to handle my paid speeches.
Because Knopf had offered me a big advance on my memoir and the speech offers were coming in, I was feeling better about being able to pay my bills. I wanted to pay off millions of dollars in legal fees as soon as possible. It had embarrassed me to have a legal defense fund in the White House, and to ask my friend Terry McAuliffe to cosign my first mortgage on the Chappaqua house. Thankfully, now we could even afford a second home in D.C.
Hillary had found a wonderful place to live in Washington when the Senate was in session. It’s at the end of Whitehaven, a street just off Massachusetts Avenue that runs uphill for just over a block and dead-ends at Dumbarton Oaks Park. You can walk right out the door and into the park, which we’ve happily done for more than twenty years.
The three-story red-brick structure, built around 1950, sits right on the street but has a beautiful backyard, with a nice swimming pool on the right and on the left a yard with a fish pond and trees in the back. The backyard borders the grounds of the British and New Zealand embassies. The across-the-street neighbors are the Danish embassy, the Hellenic Institute, and the Italian embassy, and down the street on our side are Polish, Brazilian, and Sri Lankan properties. The house was a godsend for Hillary in her Senate and secretary of state years, and for her mother, Dorothy, in the last years of her life.
Normally, when the Senate was in session, Hillary would spend Monday through Thursday in Washington, take the shuttle or Amtrak home Thursday night, and stay in Chappaqua or travel the state through the weekend, then go back to D.C. Monday morning. Of course, there were times when one or both of us traveled outside New York or the U.S., so we had to rely on phone calls as we grew into our new roles. For years I had watched her making positive changes as a citizen activist while I tried to do the same in politics. It struck me one morning when I was shaving that, in essence, we had switched places. I looked into the mirror and blurted out, “My God, I’ve become an NGO! Now what?”
When I was sure I was going to be able to pay my debts and the costs of maintaining our homes in Chappaqua and in Washington, I began to devote about 10 percent of my speechmaking income to the Clinton Foundation every year, as well as 10 percent of our total earnings to our family foundation to support the foundation and our other charitable interests.
Thanks to Don Walker and the Harry Walker Agency and other requests, I began making speeches in the United States and all over the world. Among the most welcome early ones came from Jewish groups across the country, and eventually from Latin America and Europe. They appreciated my support for Israel and for peace in the Middle East. Over the ensuing years, the largest number of non-U.S. speech offers by far have come from Canada, where I have a lot of friends and supporters, and there is a culture of inviting speakers in communities spanning the country. I’ve also given speeches across Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, and in Nigeria and South Africa.
I’ve really enjoyed the speeches and have learned a lot from the people I’ve met, who often have unusually perceptive comments and questions. I almost never tell war stories about the White House years unless asked about them in the question period that follows, or in interviews when sponsors prefer that format. Instead, whether the audience was a hundred or fewer or thousands at big conventions, I always started with an overview of how I view the world.
I’d tell them we had entered a new era of global interdependence being shaped by positive and negative forces. Among the positive ones were advances in science, led by the sequencing of the human genome, which would extend the length and improve the quality of life; the explosion of information technology, which would lower the cost and increase access to information and create unlimited new opportunities to use it; the increase of travel, trade, and immigration, which could build diversity, fuel economic expansion, and reduce racial, religious, and ethnic turmoil; new educational and economic opportunities for women and girls; and a sharp reduction in extreme poverty.
The problem with this new world in which borders look more like nets than walls is that we’re all also exposed to the negative forces of interdependence: the world is too unequal in income and in access to education, health, housing, and the capital necessary to create wealth; it’s too unstable because of vast differences in nations’ governmental capacity, levels of corruption, and willingness to help those hurt by the changing economy, and internal racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts; and it’s unsustainable because of our shared vulnerability to climate change, terror, weapons of mass destruction, disease, the opioid epidemic and other health problems, destabilizing cyberattacks, divisive, often dishonest social media sites, and the downsides of artificial intelligence.
The United States is in an excellent position to lead the world to a new era of shared peace and prosperity because of our relative youth, diversity, universities, community colleges and other training opportunities; achievements in science and technology; a powerful network of businesses large and small; a highly productive, trainable workforce; and our massive potential to produce clean energy and increase efficiency. But to make the most of our advantages, it’s imperative to address our own problems with inequality, instability, unsustainability, internal conflicts, a sharp decline in our birth rate and in life expectancy for people under sixty-five, and a resistance to increasing our capacity to properly evaluate, accept, or reject the new immigrants, especially those who show up at the southern border. We have to deal with these challenges, help others to do the same, and keep building networks of cooperation.
That in a nutshell has been my speech. I’ve also told audiences that I filter the questions I’m asked, or ask myself, through a simple screen: Will this or that action increase the positive and decrease the negative forces of our interdependence, or do the reverse? Once I could answer that, I could determine what I was for and what I was against. I ask the people in my audiences to develop their own framework, so that the blizzard of often evolving and conflicting headlines doesn’t become for them the political equivalent of chaos theory in physics, and so that they can compare the headlines with longer-term trendlines, which are often better.
After 9/11, I also told my audiences at home and abroad that since we are living in an interdependent world where we can’t kill, jail, occupy, or wall ourselves off from all our adversaries, we need to keep building a world with more friends and fewer enemies. We have to fight terror, but do it in a way that doesn’t compromise the character of our nation or the future of our children.
Easier said than done, as we have seen with U.S. treatment of captives in places like Abu Ghraib, Putin’s war on Ukraine, the Hamas slaughter on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli attacks on Gaza that followed. And that’s just a highly abbreviated list of the violence embroiling our world over the last twenty-five years.
Many of these abuses have driven people from their homelands, creating by far the largest migration across national borders since World War II. Wars, economic collapse, racial, ethnic, and religious repression, climate-change-driven drought, floods, wildfires, and storms, and deep cultural conflicts reduce our chances of building a world of shared peace and prosperity. All this was evident even before the global rise of divisive, populist nationalism. The United States, despite repeated threats from the far right after Reconstruction ended in the 1870s and in every decade since, was in the best position of all large countries to resist the poison, but for reasons embedded in our divided political culture, our uneven economic geography, our twisted information ecosystem, and the Electoral College’s built-in advantage for divisive tribalism in the less populous states, we fell victim to it in 2016.
I’ve always tried in my appearances to incorporate the latest developments in science, or persuasive arguments made in new books, and to explain why cooperation works better than conflict for economic, social, and security reasons, hoping I could help people embrace a more inclusive way of looking at things. For example, after the sequencing of the human genome proved that all humans are genetically about 99.5 percent the same, I began asking audiences, especially the more diverse ones, to look at each other and let it sink in that every non-age-related difference they could see was rooted in one half of one percent of our biological makeup. Then I’d ask them why we spend 99.5 percent of our time focused on that half a percent? Shouldn’t we all think more about the 99.5 percent that we share with our fellow humans? It always seems to have some effect.
I began to recommend books I found interesting and valuable, beginning with Robert Wright’s Nonzero and Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue, then The Social Conquest of Earth, by the late, great naturalist and insect biologist E. O. Wilson, and more recently, Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. Wilson argues that since the fall of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, our planet’s most durable species are ants, termites, bees, and people, because they have proved to be the best at adapting to changed circumstances that threatened their existence. They have done so, Wilson maintains, by developing life-saving and -enhancing habits of cooperation. Humans have done best because we have both consciousness and a conscience.
Our problem is that we tend to take our intelligence and progress for granted, become arrogant, and push things to the edge of destruction. So far our conscience has kicked in to save the day. But we can’t take it for granted, Wilson cautions, so we have to keep widening the circle of “us” and shrinking the circle of those we brand “them.” Wilson offered these observations before America began to go off the rails in 2014, although there was lots of evidence, going back to the 1990s, and certainly since the midterm elections in 2010, that we were heading toward the cliff again.
I got interested in particle physics and the discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle, which holds atoms together that otherwise would fly apart. I also worked to understand astrophysics and the latest theories of how the universe began, why it continues to expand, how life on our planet began, and the evidence that our planet, solar system, Milky Way galaxy, and eventually our entire universe would come to an end, though no one knows when. I was fascinated by the first photos of a massive black hole 55 million light-years away, identifiable because it was bordered by a fiery rim. The accompanying article said it was so large and its gravitational pull so powerful that if our entire solar system passed by close enough, it would be sucked in and instantly crushed into a tiny pile of dust that would fit in a thimble.
When I describe this to my audiences, I also tell them a story I mentioned in My Life about a rock Neil Armstrong picked up during his first moonwalk in 1969. It had been carbon-dated as 3.6 billion years old and had been sealed in a clear, vacuum-packed case. When Armstrong brought it to a White House event in 1994 marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the moon landing, I asked to borrow the rock for the rest of my term. I put it right in the middle of the table that sits between the facing couches in the Oval Office. Whenever people sitting there arguing got so angry they were shedding more heat than light, I would interrupt the flow of words with something like, “Wait a minute. See that moon rock? It’s 3.6 billion years old. We’re all just passing through. Let’s settle down and try to get something done.” It often worked, even during the bitter partisan fights with the Gingrich Congress.
I told those stories and others like them to try to pierce the barriers we all put up when confronting the “other,” hoping my audiences would listen to each other, actually hear what was being said, and become more open and inclusive. Sometimes it helped, sometimes it didn’t, but I kept working at it, trying to reach people with “I never thought about it that way” moments that made them see themselves in a bigger picture, one that opens them to move outside their “caste” as the journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson calls it, to discover and embrace what they have in common with people beyond it. I had spent a lifetime trying to bridge the divide between “us” and “them.” Now, with no political office and red alerts still flashing all around, my speeches seemed a good way to keep doing it.
It’s hard to say which speeches I enjoy the most, but the college and other school appearances, large and small, in states red and blue, always leave me optimistic about the future. I could write a whole book about the students and teachers I’ve met, their unique cultures, achievements, and challenges. Most of them don’t fit the stereotypes which have drawn them into the culture wars. In their own ways, almost all of them hope to help build and succeed in a nation and a world we can all share, widening the circle of opportunity, expanding the meaning of freedom, and strengthening the bonds of community.
And I’ve also had many great chance encounters. On my first postpresidential shuttle out of LaGuardia, the flight attendant, a young Black woman, told me her husband was a music teacher and jazz musician in D.C. who always supported me. But she said what really mattered to her was the Family and Medical Leave Act. She said her parents had both gotten sick and there was no one to take care of them but her and her sister. If it hadn’t been for family leave, she wouldn’t have been able to do it and keep her job. The bill had been vetoed twice during the previous administration and in 1992 I had promised to sign it if elected. In February 1993, I did. It was my very first bill and perhaps the most popular because of its impact on so many people. I’ll never forget the last thing the flight attendant said to me that day: “You know, a lot of politicians talk about family values, but I think how your parents die is an important family value.”
In 2023, I was invited back to the White House by President Biden for the thirtieth anniversary of the Family and Medical Leave Act. It’s now been used more than 460 million times and enjoys near universal support. It’s a good starting point in freeing America from the crazy—but sadly often effective—culture wars and returning to our founding mission, to form a more perfect union.