When the story first broke in January 2020 about cases of a coronavirus in China, I asked Chelsea about it. She said it was very serious, less deadly than Ebola but much more dangerous than the flu and far more likely to spread rapidly. And she said she thought the United States was especially vulnerable, unprepared, and our response would likely be slow, inadequate, and lead to a lot of deaths.
Besides being a wonderful daughter, wife, and mother, Chelsea’s our in-house health authority. She’s the vice chair of both the Clinton Foundation and CHAI, where she’s served on the board for ten years. She also taught public health at Columbia University for a decade, and has three advanced degrees in global health. She’s rigorous, blunt, and hyper-conscientious. She’s one of those “experts” it’s become fashionable in the U.S. to dismiss, until we need people who actually know something. I’m really proud of her, but this time, I was hoping she was wrong. She wasn’t, of course.
Soon the director-general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, asked Ira Magaziner to send some of our CHAI staff to the WHO headquarters in Switzerland to assist them in supporting countries that needed lots of help to fight the virus. The WHO, being a collection of humans, with a large variety of contributors and diverse constituents, is not perfect, but it does have a dedicated staff and an able and well-motivated leader in Tedros, whom I’ve known and respected for years from working together when he was health minister, then foreign minister, of Ethiopia. The WHO’s response to this pandemic was more rapid and comprehensive than its initial Ebola actions, in spite of the limitations it faced in getting information and full cooperation from China.
I opposed the Trump administration’s threat to cut off funding for and withdraw from the WHO, and was heartened when President Biden signaled his intention to continue U.S. membership and financial support. Whatever your politics, you should feel that way, too, because unless future health challenges are handled well in other countries, they will eventually spread to the United States and around the world. I strongly supported CHAI’s efforts at the WHO, its work on the ground in twelve African countries, where our staff went all in to help governments and citizens deal with the virus, and in India, where CHAI had 215 people working at high risk, dealing with a severe oxygen shortage and other challenges. And, like Chelsea and Hillary, I wanted my country to lead the way in getting vaccines to as many people as possible, fairly dispersing any surplus we didn’t need, and rapidly increasing the ability of reputable manufacturers around the world to make more.
In Washington, Congress passed and President Trump signed a bill backed by a large bipartisan majority to fund Operation Warp Speed to develop and deploy vaccines. There were daily briefings on the rising infections and deaths and what we could do to minimize them. And there was a big effort to build up essential medical supplies and equipment for healthcare workers and first responders, in part because the stockpiling of such things that I had begun in the late 1990s had not been maintained.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institutes of Health effort to develop a vaccine, and Dr. Deborah Birx, whose work on AIDS started in the Obama White House, conducted the briefings and did their best to keep us informed, urging social distancing and mask wearing until we could be vaccinated. For a while, President Trump attended briefings and often disrupted the flow of information with bizarre comments, from his assertion that Covid would soon disappear, to his reference to the healing powers of bleach, to his putdowns of his own experts. This was all the more ironic when Trump got a serious case of Covid and recovered with the help of lifesaving medicine and treatment. I felt especially bad about Fauci’s treatment because he’s given his entire professional life, fifty-four years, to the NIH. He oversaw the development of the first AIDS medicine when I was president and helped organize the PEPFAR program for President George W. Bush, who gave him the Medal of Freedom. He served into his eighties, leaving his last post as President Biden’s chief medical advisor at the end of 2022.
On the home front, the Clinton Foundation did what we could to help. In Little Rock, the café at the Clinton Presidential Center worked with José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen, the city, the county’s two school districts, and others to feed children who were getting breakfast and lunch in the schools before they closed, the homeless, older people living alone, and others who needed food. The staff and more than five hundred volunteers, including fourteen AmeriCorps members, would prepare and package the meals, then leave them outside to be picked up and delivered to distribution centers. Everybody followed the health protocols, and the program, which ran from March through August of 2020 and again from December through February 2021, distributed a total of 718,480 meals. From June 2020 through the end of the year, the center also supported the distribution to families of more than 69,000 multi-meal food boxes provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farmers to Food Box Program. Those boxes pushed our distribution to more than a million meals.
I wish I could have done something to help the millions of small businesses who didn’t get a dollar of the $680 billion congressional fund designed to save them, including the ninety-two-year-old McClard’s Bar-B-Q in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a landmark run by the same family since it opened in 1928 and visited by people from all over America. They tried to get help from the payroll support program, to no avail. They had twenty-eight employees in a relatively small space that was often jam-packed, so reopening with social distancing would never cover costs. Happily, a local businessman bought the restaurant and got them over the hump. It’s still managed by the McClard family and is even expanding.
I was also moved by the story of Burnell Cotlon, who ran a small market in New Orleans, catering to his neighbors in the Lower Ninth Ward. I called him when I learned he needed help, and sent him a little. His business has survived. There are stories like McClard’s and Cotlon’s in every state, red and blue. Many made it through Covid, but too many didn’t.
In New York, our foundation’s Too Small to Fail program, led by Patti Miller, added more than 50,000 children’s books and home instruction materials for non-English-speaking parents to the feeding programs in city neighborhoods.
When Covid was raging in New York, Hillary and I were at home, with Chelsea, Marc, and our three grandkids next door in our guesthouse. Our Clinton Foundation staff all worked from home, keeping our projects going, including helping the faith leaders involved in our opioid alliance encourage their members to follow safe practices through worship and in daily life. The staff also moved our annual Clinton Global Initiative University, originally scheduled for the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 2020, to an online format with panels and interviews on the pandemic in the United States and around the world. In 2021, we held another virtual conference with Howard University on how to build a more inclusive, more fairly shared economy during the recovery.
When the outbreak extended into the heartland, the spread was faster and the fatalities higher than they would have been had people not resisted wearing masks and getting vaccinated. In early February 2021, two of my high school classmates who lived on my block in Hot Springs embodied our national trauma. One, Carolyn Staley, my next-door neighbor and a Baptist minister, went to get her first vaccine shot at a local hospital, where she left a note for the other, Mike Karber, who was a patient there on a respirator. He died the next day—a man of great faith who rose before dawn to pray and help people in need before going to his day job, delivering the mail. COVID-19 proved we are all in this together, like it or not.
In spite of Covid’s terrible toll, it was a blessing for Hillary and me in some ways. I loved having our family so close. It was such a kick to have then six-year-old Charlotte and four-year-old Aidan barge into the house and insist that Hillary and I stop whatever we were doing and play their favorite games, read books, or be characters in the plays they created. Seven-month-old Jasper happily observed the chaos.
I spent time exploring the internet—the magnificent music, the comedy routines, the humorous video clips, memes, and photos. (Did you see the guy singing “Don’t Be Cruel” to two white cockatoos perched on a couch and rocking along to the music? Or the man out west who gives a ride in the backseat of his old convertible to a buffalo?) Hillary and I finally got into the streaming craze, spending Valentine’s Day 2021 binge-watching Bridgerton all night long. We later binged Ted Lasso in smaller bites.
Just when the worst of the pandemic seemed behind us, and we were beginning to reopen the country, George Floyd was killed by a policeman who sat on his back with his knee pressing down on his neck for over nine minutes, although Floyd was lying on his belly on the ground handcuffed, no threat to anyone. The other three policemen there didn’t try to stop it. Thank goodness the whole thing was caught on video, including the policeman, his hand in his pocket, adjusting his position to put even more pressure on Floyd. We would learn even more when the trial opened in March 2021, thanks to the eyewitness accounts of people who simply described what they saw and held up well under cross-examination. The officer who killed Floyd was convicted of second-degree murder and two lesser offenses. The prosecution did a masterful job of calmly presenting the evidence and arguing for the conclusion that flowed from it. And a lot of credit goes to Darnella Frazier, the young woman who bravely filmed the whole incident.
I was proud of the countless thousands of people who took to the streets in peaceful protest all over America, and those who stood with them across the world. The crowds looked like America, as people of every race demanded justice for Floyd and other African Americans slain while being arrested, detained, or just stopped, and supported reforms to curb police abuses of minorities. Donald Trump, instead of condemning the indefensible and calling for national unity, tried to play politics with it, including having federal officials shove and gas protesters to clear a path between the White House and Lafayette Square so he could walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church, hold up a Bible, say something forgettable, and walk back.
It was a shallow, unfeeling show. More than 780 retired high-ranking officers and national security leaders, including five former secretaries of defense, condemned the use of the military to stop American citizens from legally protesting. Still, Trump did finally finish a wall: reinforced fencing that protected the White House from Americans engaging in peaceful protest. I couldn’t wait for it to be taken down.
In ways I still don’t fully understand, the coronavirus and its stay-at-home imperative and the uprising changed me, and I suspect, you, too, especially in where and how we work and how much time we spend with family and friends. I laughed at the internet, then cried as I called friends who lost a spouse, a brother, parents. I worried with the people I work with and other friends, praying their infected family members would recover.
Yet I became more hopeful that—in our shared grief and worry, in our shared cheering for the bravery and devotion of those on the front lines who often don’t look like us, in our shared laughter that makes the awful bearable, in our collective efforts to survive in a crippled economy, and in the outpouring of support for Floyd’s family and for others whose loved ones were killed while being stopped, chased, or arrested, and for the idea that Black lives do matter—we might be recovering a sense of our common humanity, humility, and gratitude. The jury’s still out on that. It could have the reverse effect, making too many of us even more determined to withdraw from each other and the rest of the world.
On June 22, 2020, my friend and longtime foundation supporter Steve Bing jumped to his death off a tall building in Los Angeles. His fifty-five years were turbulent, self-destructive, and isolated, yet full of kindness, generosity, and love. Less than a week earlier, I’d had a good talk with the Steve I usually saw. He was upbeat about a film he was doing on the life and work of Sam Phillips, the legendary founder of Sun Records and Sun Studios in Memphis, one of the only white promoters at the time to give Black musicians the chance to record their music in the heavily segregated city, and the producer of the first recordings of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Steve wanted Mick Jagger and me to be coproducers. After Steve’s death I had a good talk with Jerry Lee, who was heartbroken and said he’d do anything he could to finish the film. Sadly, we didn’t even have a memorial. His father was adamantly against it and there were squabbles over what was left of his estate. Maybe we can still do the documentary. Lord knows there are enough of us who owe it to him to try.
Two thousand twenty was, of course, a big year in politics—the race for president, for the House and Senate, and another Supreme Court vacancy. In 2016, seventeen Republicans had run to succeed President Obama. This time, more than twenty Democrats sought the nomination to take on President Trump, the largest field ever. By November 24, 2019, there were twenty-nine of them, but by the Iowa caucuses, there were just eleven left. Pete Buttigieg won the most delegates in Iowa, lost to Bernie narrowly in New Hampshire, and Bernie came out on top in Nevada.
Then came South Carolina, where Congressman Jim Clyburn threw his support to Joe Biden. Clyburn liked Biden and was sending a signal that Biden was the most, perhaps the only, electable candidate. That did it. Biden won almost half the vote in South Carolina and it was all downhill after that. He was clearly the candidate most likely to beat Trump.
The virtual Democratic convention was good, showcasing the broad base of our party and Biden’s significant and popular proposals, including a big infrastructure bill and allowing Medicare to bargain for lower drug prices, as the Veterans Administration already did.
The GOP followed its 2016 playbook: a critical smearing book by Peter Schweizer, a woman accusing Joe Biden of sexual assault, and accusations about Hunter Biden’s business deals, in Ukraine and China. Unlike 2016, the political press, instead of signing partnerships with Steve Bannon and Breitbart, didn’t take the bait. The coverage was light-years better and more on the level.
For the first time, Trump’s Republican Party offered no platform. They just went after Biden and the Democrats as if the entire party was defined by its most liberal members. They closed the campaign saying Biden and the Democrats favored socialism and defunding the police. Neither was true, but they’re better branders than we are.
The Covid-driven efforts to make it easier to vote prompted a record turnout for both parties. People who didn’t want to vote for Trump heard Biden say he wasn’t a socialist and didn’t want to defund the police, but the House Democrats lost about half their majority margin through the GOP strategy of painting our mainstream candidates as something they weren’t. They weren’t socialists or for defunding law enforcement, but their more moderate voters were vulnerable to the divide-and-conquer strategy that doesn’t work in the solidly liberal enclaves that elect the progressives. The loss I regretted most was Donna Shalala, who had done an excellent job representing a closely divided district in Florida.
The GOP strategy didn’t work so well in the Senate races. After the victories of Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in hotly contested runoffs in Georgia, the Democrats picked up three seats to tie the Senate, which would give them a 51–50 majority when Senator Harris took her place as vice president and as president of the Senate, who can cast tie-breaking votes.
Before he lost the majority, Mitch McConnell gave President Trump, the Federalist Society, and the far right a big parting gift. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lost her long fight with cancer, less than two months before the election, McConnell rushed the nomination for her replacement through the Senate with a vote of 52–48, confirming Amy Coney Barrett just before the election. When Obama was president, McConnell said eight months was too close to the election to confirm a justice without giving voters a say. But this time, two months was fine. So much for giving the voters a say.
Not long before Justice Barrett joined the Supreme Court, when the political press was preoccupied with the presidential race, the Court, in Rucho v. Common Cause, ruled 5–4 that North Carolina had blatantly diluted the impact of Democratic voters (e.g., in 2012 the GOP got only 49 percent of the total vote for House candidates but won nine of the thirteen House seats) and in Benisek v. Lamone that Maryland had done the same on a smaller scale to help get an extra Democratic seat. But the Court said they couldn’t do anything about it, because they couldn’t decide how much gerrymandering was too much, and besides, the Constitution gave state legislatures the responsibility to draw district lines.
As Justice Kagan pointed out in her dissent, this was the first time in American history the Court had refused to remedy a constitutional violation “because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.” She noted that both the lower courts, which included Trump appointees, and other states, red and blue, had come up with fairer district maps based on easily developed computer models, and North Carolina refused them all to get its district splits to 10–3 in 2016, Republican over Democratic, regardless of how its citizens voted.
When the New York legislature tried to offset the GOP gerrymandering in other states by creating three districts more favorable to Democrats, its own Supreme Court overturned the plan based on the state constitution’s equal protection mandate and a Republican judge substituted a plan even less favorable to Democrats than their existing map. The new map opened the door for several Republican pickups in 2022. Thankfully, state courts in North Carolina and Ohio moderated the extreme gerrymandering in those states, giving Democrats a chance to win two more districts, which they did.
The Rucho decision was the latest in a line of Supreme Court political decisions that helped Republicans, beginning with Bush v. Gore in 2000, which stopped the recount in Florida with Gore trailing by a few hundred votes, and was sufficiently embarrassing that the justices who voted for it said it could never be cited as a precedent in future cases. In the Citizens United case in 2012, the Court’s conservative majority said the First Amendment’s free speech provision prohibited limits on corporate contributions to “independent” political advertising. Corporations were no longer creations of the state, subject to state and federal restrictions. Now they were “just people” like you and me. Citizens United led to an increase in spending by such groups from $300 million to well over $1 billion by 2020. Then came Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which gutted the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act and led to a slew of restrictions on voting across the country.
Reading all the recent Supreme Court political decisions together, the Court seems to be saying that states can do as they please in making it harder for people to vote, in purging voter rolls, restricting eligibility to vote, and in gerrymandering to give more seats to a preferred party, but once the people vote and there’s no credible evidence of fraud, don’t expect us to overturn a legitimate election just because you don’t like it. Otherwise, have at it.
While there’s a lot of cynicism, and divisions remain in all corners of America today, we still need to believe we can move toward an economy with benefits and burdens, opportunities and responsibilities more fairly shared; a society committed to inclusive tribalism, rooted in the conviction that what we have in common is even more important than our interesting differences; and politics in which more people vote, the votes are honestly counted after every election, and on all the days in between, all people count and have their voices heard. That’s what the American people voted to do in 2020, by a large popular vote margin, but another close vote in the Electoral College.
All those efforts toward a shared America are made harder when one party believes that the primary purpose of power is to hang on to it as long as you can, and when they’re in charge will try to change the rules to make that happen. When I was dealing with Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America crowd in my second term, Gingrich told Erskine Bowles, my chief of staff who also led my budget negotiations, that I was a great politician but was at a disadvantage in dealing with the more militant Republicans because I wasted time and energy on efforts that didn’t increase the Democrats’ power, like restoring benefits for illegal immigrants (the term we used back then) who paid taxes but couldn’t vote. He said to Erskine, “The president really believes we should all live under the same set of rules, doesn’t he?” Erskine replied, “Yes. We think that’s what a real democracy requires.” Gingrich responded, “We don’t believe that. We think everyone we elect or appoint should first do what’s best for our party. Then we can talk about the rest.” During the Trump presidency, Senator McConnell proved that by rushing through the Barrett confirmation after stonewalling a vote on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for more than eight months.
The most extreme example of this single-minded determination to grab and hold on to power at all costs manifested itself on January 6, the day both houses of Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Trump’s claim to be the real winner of the race produced a large angry crowd that he whipped into a frenzy with his claims that the election was stolen from him, even though judges across the country, including some appointed by him, had quickly found the charges baseless. The judges were following the law—did all voters have an opportunity to vote and were the votes properly counted? But Trump and his supporters didn’t keep score that way. The only question that mattered to them was: Did we win?
There was a method to Trump’s madness. He’d lost Arizona by about 10,000 votes, Georgia by just under 12,000, and Wisconsin by just over 20,000. If he could have had those states’ votes overturned, the electoral vote would have been tied, sending the election to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote, and Trump would have been reelected, despite losing by about seven million votes in the huge turnout. At least Putin’s social media efforts to get people to vote for Jill Stein or stay home didn’t go well this time. Perhaps our intelligence community had figured out how to plug at least one hole in our democracy’s dike.
As I watched the crowd of thousands make its way toward Capitol Hill on live television, I couldn’t help but think of the mayhem that had broken out in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally a few years earlier, and its tragic result. The January 6 crowd included professionals, business owners, police officers, and retired and serving military, all fired up by Trump’s lies and on the move to try to stop the democratic process in its tracks.
In 2017, I had written a review of Ron Chernow’s compelling biography of President Grant for The New York Times Book Review. The Charlottesville events had given relevance to Grant’s efforts during Reconstruction to establish the Justice Department and his strong support of its successful effort to dismantle the Ku Klux Klan. I wrote that, in the wake of Charlottesville, the events of Grant’s presidency seemed in many ways “as much a mirror as a history lesson.” Three and a half years later, the January 6 effort to overturn the vote count offered an even more chilling parallel.
Much has been written about the events that transpired when those thousands of people, egged on by Trump, reached their destination. The images are seared into our memory—for me, the photo of the Arkansan with his feet on what he thought was Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk and a stun gun in his waistband was particularly piercing. Richard Barnett, a retired firefighter from the northwest Arkansas town of Gravette, was convinced that, in the words of the prosecutors, “the United States would be taken over by communists if President-Elect Biden became president and was prepared to do ‘whatever it takes,’ including occupying the Capitol, to prevent that from happening. He prepared for that violence by arming himself with a stun device and a ten-pound steel pole, both capable of inflicting serious bodily injury. And then he traveled to Washington, D.C., with those weapons.”
Barnett is serving four and half years in prison for his actions, and as I write this 1,413 people have been charged with crimes related to the attack on the Capitol, with 881 people sentenced. The Justice Department has estimated that around 2,000 people committed crimes, and their investigations are ongoing. All of these ordinary people, from all walks of life and convinced they were patriots, were so moved by Trump’s lies, promoted by right-wing media, that they attacked their own government.
Many of the Republican members of Congress who hid behind desks, stacked furniture against office doors to keep rioters out, or fled to safety, denounced the attacks right after they occurred. Sadly, after Trump denied what happened, even criticizing the law enforcement officers who risked their lives to protect members of both parties, most Republicans completely changed their tunes. Trump asked them the question we’ve all heard in bad jokes: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Those who looked to Trump and said, “You, Master,” lived to fight another day. Of the few who stuck with their lying eyes, most either left government service or were tossed out by the voters in their gerrymandered districts. It was almost comical to watch some of the GOP members who’d been photographed defending themselves whitewash the entire episode. The Republicans’ alleged support for the police mysteriously evaporated when it came to the officers who were killed or injured defending the Capitol and members of both parties from Trump’s foot soldiers.
Of course, Trump didn’t invent this capacity to cast the law and facts aside to cling to power, but it was a parade he was glad to lead. Some people saw strength and conviction in Trump’s denial—that’s how democracy disappears from the inside out.
In 2021, Hillary and I were happy to attend the inauguration of President Biden, after we had voted for him in the Electoral College in Albany. He got off to a good start, appointing a diverse, impressive cabinet, many quite young, and an experienced White House staff, several of whom, including Ron Klain, Gene Sperling, Janet Yellen, Steve Ricchetti, and Bruce Reed, had served in my administration, and several others whose service began in the Obama administration.
In June, Jim Patterson and I launched a book tour for our second effort, The President’s Daughter, about the kidnapping of a former president’s college-age daughter in the U.S. by a terrorist group with a score to settle with her father for an attack on them when he was president. It explores the problems created when the adult daughter loses Secret Service protection after her father leaves the White House, the ex-president’s smaller Secret Service detail and what they can and can’t do, and the ambivalence of the current president who defeated him in mounting an all-out effort to rescue her former opponent’s daughter. The book also describes an interesting aspect of postpresidential life in an age of terror: when a president leaves office, though you have much less security, and none for your adult children, you don’t necessarily leave your enemies behind.
In July, I began taping the History Channel series on the presidency, which I edited and narrated with a lot of support from Sean Wilentz, a distinguished historian at Princeton, and the History Channel crew led by Jeff Cooperman. The first episode covered President Eisenhower’s 1957 decision to federalize the Arkansas National Guard to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling to integrate Little Rock Central High School, and others touched on how some U.S. presidents have exerted executive power over the economy, the ways in which our presidents have tried to extinguish—and sometimes, to fan—the flames of extremism, and how presidents have wielded America’s power in the world. Each episode gave me an opportunity to explain a piece of presidential history, why I found it fascinating, and hoped that those who watched it would, too.
On July 10, Hillary and I went to Plains, Georgia, to the celebration of Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter’s seventy-fifth wedding anniversary. We had both worked in his presidential campaign forty-seven years ago, and though the long years had included both high and low moments in our relationship, we admired the Carters and were proud of our early support for them. I was glad to reunite with many old friends and to see the Carters still in good spirits and very much in love.
After our traditional family August vacation in Amagansett, near the eastern end of Long Island, I began to prepare for teaching my MasterClass. If you’ve never seen a MasterClass, via subscription through the internet, they’re beautifully filmed sessions featuring different “teachers” explaining how they thought about and worked to succeed in their various fields.
I was looking forward to but a little nervous about my class on “How to Be an Effective Leader.” It had been decades since I’d taught law at the University of Arkansas, and I wanted to cover the ground in a way that would be both substantive and engaging.
Hillary had filmed her own MasterClass a few weeks earlier, and told me how impressed she was with the sets and the energetic, talented crew. On the first day of shooting, I saw why. The set included a desk modeled on the one I used as president, a comfortable chair off to the side so I could speak directly to viewers, and walls covered with photos and memorabilia borrowed from my home and office. The crew was friendly and professional, particularly the director, Davis Carter, who worked with me for three days, sitting directly behind the camera and asking questions that helped me give answers in a more concise, conversational way.
There were sessions on organization, conflict mediation and negotiation, public speaking, dealing with criticism, assembling and leading diverse teams, and—something we found essential at CGI—how to measure success. I wanted everyone who watched the class to believe that whatever their day job, they could play a role in making better tomorrows. Hillary and I also did a joint session, relating our memories of things we worked on together.
I enjoyed relating the lessons I’d learned in politics and life, including stories of my trip to North Korea to bring the journalists home, my work with President Bush 41 after the tsunami, my experience with the artists after the Haiti earthquake, and what I learned from my work and friendships with Mandela, Rabin, and others.
I especially enjoyed describing a lesson I learned from my eighth-grade science teacher, Vernon Dokey. He was a good teacher, intelligent and engaging, but not a conventionally handsome man. Arkansas teachers were poorly paid, and when he gained weight as he aged, his clothes got tighter and he didn’t buy new ones. He wore big Coke-bottle-thick glasses in the days before contact lenses, and smoked cheap cigars in a plastic cigar holder clenched in his teeth in a way that gave his face a pinched look.
On the last day of class, Mr. Dokey said we might not remember much about what we learned in eighth-grade science, but “if you don’t remember anything else, remember this. Every morning when I get up, I go to the bathroom, throw water on my face, put my shaving cream on, shave, wipe my face, then look in the mirror and say, ‘Vernon, you’re beautiful.’ Remember that. Everyone wants to believe they’re beautiful. If you just remember that one thing, it’ll take you a long way.” Sixty-four years later I remember that as if it were yesterday. Vernon Dokey was a beautiful man.
I tell the Vernon Dokey story often as an antidote to the current obsession to tell people we disagree with, in words, treatment, or tone of voice, how ugly, stupid, or inferior they are. Everyone wants to believe their lives have meaning, that they are special in some way, and can add their own particular piece to the puzzle of life. It may be out of fashion today, so full of identity-based grievances and attacks that leave no stones un-thrown, no wounds un-salted. Yet after two thousand years, the Golden Rule still works.
In 2022, David McRaney wrote How Minds Change, a compelling account of successful efforts to bridge political and social divides. In essence he says persuasion is “changing a mind without coercion.” People you’re trying to persuade need to feel that you respect them and that you’re trying to win them over but they have to make the decision. That’s what makes change possible. It’s hard work but better than name-calling.
Shortly after wrapping the MasterClass in October, I was on the way to Southern California for two Clinton Foundation fundraisers when I got a bad case of chills and shakes. I had been a bit tired for a few days but had consistently tested negative for Covid. When I got to my friend Nima Taghavi’s house for a supporter dinner, I took some Advil and slept hard until just before it started. I felt better, but soon after the guests went home, the chills and shakes came back. So I went to the UC Irvine Medical Center, which thankfully was only a few miles away. By the time I got there, I was delirious, and the staff quickly determined that I had sepsis, caused by the spread of an infection in my bladder that had been treated a year earlier with a week’s worth of antibiotics that didn’t kill it. The wily bacteria had gone into hiding and had escaped detection in two previous tests. The excellent team at UCI Medical Center, led by Dr. Alpesh Amin, immediately put me in the ICU, determined the antibiotics that would defeat the infection, and started me on a thirty-day course. Hillary and Chelsea flew out from New York, and stayed by my side as my head cleared and I was allowed to walk around the hospital floor. After six days, with instructions for what to do until the treatment was complete, we flew home to New York where two fine, experienced nurses and my longtime medical team did the rest.
I had lost a good friend and a close cousin to sepsis, so I knew I had been very lucky. Nima’s house was near the Cal Irvine hospital, and Dr. Amin was a specialist in my particular infection and the bacteria that caused it. The quick response kept the sepsis from spreading, and the emergency quickly passed. I’m eternally grateful to all the people who gave me such good care and yet another chance to go on.
Meanwhile, the country was reeling from Covid, running behind the vaccination schedule, and still burdened with significant underemployment. The Biden administration launched an aggressive effort to increase vaccinations and provided funding for the infrastructure to deliver them. The number of people vaccinated went up a lot, and communities began to reopen.
President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan provided direct payments of $1,400 to taxpayers (though, unlike Trump, he didn’t sign the checks); loans to employers to keep workers on the payroll; a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures; an increased and refundable child tax credit; and funds for state and local governments to compensate for lost revenue (which could be used to hire and train more cops), money for schools from kindergarten on through eighth grade to safely reopen, and subsidies for Covid testing and vaccination programs. Every Republican voted against it, even though many would later show up at ribbon cuttings for new projects, or applaud the state tax cuts and surpluses the recovery act made possible. Still, Biden was on a roll.
Then things went haywire, as a small progressive bloc in the House blocked a vote on the popular infrastructure bill, $1 trillion to rebuild crumbling roads and bridges, upgrade railroads, seaports, and airports, improve the electric grid, replace lead pipes that polluted drinking water in old systems, and provide funds for affordable high-speed internet access to every family in America. It would create a lot of high-paying jobs and support domestic manufacturing and supply chains, including a network of 500,000 recharging stations for electric vehicles. It also extended the Abandoned Mine Land reclamation fund, boosting employment in coal country, which had continued to lose jobs in coal mining under Trump, in spite of his promise to reverse the trend.
The most liberal House members thought that by holding up the infrastructure bill they could pressure two Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to vote for all of President Biden’s Build Back Better program. They couldn’t, as Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democratic House members tried to tell them. Trump had carried Manchin’s West Virginia by 30 points, while Biden had won Sinema’s deeply divided Arizona by just over 10,000 votes, the first Democrat to do so since I did in 1996, and only the second time since 1948 the state hadn’t voted for a Republican.
Eventually, the bill passed in November 2021. Within six months there were 4,300 projects underway. Nineteen GOP senators, almost 40 percent of them, voted for the bill, but only thirteen of their House members did, about 6 percent of their caucus.
In that long gap between the proposal and the enactment of the infrastructure bill, three things happened that drove President Biden’s approval rating down and made the 2021 off-year elections tougher for Democratic candidates: the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan; the constant coverage of the paralyzing split within the Democratic Party between the House “progressives” and Senators Manchin and Sinema; and a new round of culture war attacks.
I thought the Democrats should have passed the infrastructure bill first. Getting the projects up and going was the right thing to do for the American people, would have established a “can-do” image for the party and President Biden, and would have strengthened our candidates in Virginia and New Jersey going into the 2021 off-year elections. It was especially important to Virginia, which is plagued by traffic congestion, and where my friend, former governor Terry McAuliffe, was locked in a tight race with Glenn Youngkin, a wealthy conservative who had made his money in the Carlyle Group.
Youngkin was also boosted by the troubles of our Afghanistan withdrawal, because Virginia’s electorate has the highest concentration of retired career military personnel in the nation. Many of them agreed that it was time to end our twenty-year involvement, but thought the withdrawal should be orderly and include all the Afghans who had supported us, not just our translators, drivers, and other staff, but also the women and girls whose rights, perhaps even their lives, would be at risk when the Taliban took over. We now know their worries were well founded as the Taliban government continues to restrict opportunities for women and girls in education and employment.
President Biden had said he would withdraw during the campaign and he was determined to keep his promise. Unfortunately, doing it in the best way possible was made much harder by the virtual surrender agreement that President Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, had signed with the Taliban in 2020, in which he pledged that the United States would leave even earlier than Biden eventually did and, unbelievably, would help the Taliban raise money! It shouldn’t have surprised anyone when so many Afghan soldiers stopped fighting after the U.S., in effect, quit without even involving the Afghan government.
Biden had no intention of helping the Taliban as Pompeo had agreed to do, but the United States couldn’t achieve an orderly withdrawal by the agreed deadline when there were no longer enough troops left to operate the U.S. airport at Bagram or secure the twenty-plus miles of roadway linking it to Kabul. Thankfully, a lot of other governments and concerned citizens, including Hillary, worked hard to get planes to take more people out and other countries to take more people in. Hillary worked her heart out on this, including persuading Albania to take a good number of Afghan women and their families. I was proud of her and all those who worked to get Afghans out, but it was still a big problem. The Biden administration probably did as much as they could, given their lack of control over Bagram and the road to it, eventually helping more than 120,000 Afghans to leave.
The third big problem was that the Republicans, especially Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, Governor Greg Abbott in Texas, and candidate Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, had demonstrated a genius for discovering or creating hot-button issues that would move votes to them that otherwise would have gone to Democrats. As I said earlier, the GOP had already won the last two weeks of 2020 on “socialism” and “defund the police” when there were very few Democrats in Congress for either. The Republicans would tie the entire Democratic Party to a small minority of its most left-wing members to get the support of voters who disagreed with the vast majority of the GOP congressional members on economic, social, and political issues that affect far more people. In 2021 in Virginia, Youngkin managed to convince a fair number of voters that a single high school teacher’s requirement that her students read Toni Morrison’s Beloved represented a dangerous attempt to impose “critical race theory” on tender minds because the novel included a slave owner raping a slave.
How did they convince swing voters that they had more to lose from phantom Democrats than real Republicans? They’re good at this and, consciously or not, the political press often helps them by giving a day’s coverage to GOP leaders’ radical and unpopular positions, hyping the stands of the social-media-savvy left-leaning Democrats, and saying the normal thing to do in midterms is to vote against the president’s party, especially when there’s inflation in food and fuel prices.
When President Biden finally signed the big infrastructure bill in late November of 2021, it was too late to help Terry McAuliffe in his Virginia gubernatorial bid (or Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey, who barely survived) but not too late to help millions of Americans in red and blue states.
The new year that began with hope soon turned to heartbreak. On February 21, my chief of staff, Jon Davidson, called to tell me that Paul Farmer had just died in Rwanda. After more than a year of Covid confinement at home in South Florida—cherished time with his wife, Didi, and their three kids—he was eager to get back to work. Paul was in Butaro to deliver the inaugural address at the new medical school Partners in Health built, visit the students, and, as always, care for the patients. After seeing his last patient of the morning, a very ill Rwandan girl, he was feeling really tired and had his colleagues check him out. They said his vital signs were good and he should just go home and get some rest. So he went back to his room, lay down for a nap, and never woke up. He was only sixty-two.
The first person I called was Chelsea, who was devastated. After that I called Hillary, who had invited Paul to the White House when he needed help to gain access to Russian prisons where tuberculosis was rampant and he knew he could fix it. Then I went to my office in the hundred-year-old barn next to our house and cried for thirty minutes until I could get my bearings.
President Kagame sent a plane to carry Didi to Rwanda to bring Paul home. On February 26, his funeral was held at the beautiful St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Coral Gables. Didi, Paul’s mother, Ginny, and his five siblings asked me to speak. By then I had twenty years of memories, starting in 2003, when CHAI’s funding did what Paul had been demanding for years—bring high-quality, low-cost AIDS medicines to Haiti’s poor—and also including our work together for the U.N. in Haiti before and after the earthquake; my asking him to go to Rwanda for a few months, which turned into an epic adventure so long that he and Didi had two more kids there; and his long, essential service on our CHAI board, where he worked to embed a culture of genuine openness, honesty, and cooperation.
I did my best, saying Paul surpassed Maya Angelou’s observation that “People might forget what you said. They may even forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.” For me and so many others, “I just thank God that he lived. I loved him for what he did. I loved him for what he said. And like all of you, I’ll never forget how he made me feel.”
If you want to know more about Paul, read Tracy Kidder’s marvelous biography, Mountains Beyond Mountains. Or read one of the dozen books Paul wrote. Or watch the 2017 documentary Bending the Arc. Or Google the tributes of his daughter Catherine and those who worked with him. Before you know it, he’ll be sitting on your shoulder, urging you to do good and have a good time doing it.
To support Democrats running in the midterms, in October 2022, I campaigned in New York, deep South Texas, and Nevada. It was toughest in New York. The Democrats were getting hammered on rising crime and cashless bail for people with minor, first-time offenses in a state where voters didn’t think they could lose the right to choose, even after the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Too many Democratic candidates waited too long to respond to attacks on crime. I campaigned for Sean Patrick Maloney, Josh Riley, and Pat Ryan. Only Ryan survived, becoming the first graduate of West Point to represent the Military Academy in Congress. I was sorry for Riley, who ran a close race and will be back, and heartsick over Maloney’s loss. He had a district with 70 percent new voters, a GOP opponent from Westchester County who presented himself as a moderate, and faced a ferocious negative campaign centered on a statement supporting cashless bail he’d made years ago, when running for attorney general, a position that he had long since recanted but was not effectively answered in the campaign. I pointed out that he opposed defunding the police and the Republicans were swooning over Governor DeSantis in Florida, where the crime and murder rates were still far higher than in New York. It didn’t work.
In Laredo and Edinburg, Texas, I campaigned with Henry Cuellar and supported Vicente Gonzalez, two moderate-to-conservative Democrats who won their primaries and general elections handily, and with Michelle Vellejo, a progressive Democrat who won her primary by thirty-five votes, but lost to Monica De La Cruz in a redrawn district much more favorable to Republicans. She still carried the southernmost counties and ran a good campaign. I hope we’ll see more of her.
Then I went to Nevada to campaign for Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, who had accomplished a lot in her first term but was trailing her opponent, former attorney general Adam Laxalt, until late in the campaign. She closed strong and won by about 8,000 votes. We did a hard charge through Las Vegas, where about half the votes are, and I watched her become more effective at every event. I carried Nevada twice and Hillary won there in 2016, but this was the first time any of us were trying to win without Harry Reid. I enjoyed doing the events and seeing the voters think hard about their choices.
The Supreme Court was a big factor in the election, though perhaps not in the way its very conservative majority wanted. By 2021, the Court had already established the most right-wing record since 1931, and in 2022, it doubled down with more decisions reversing established law. Of course, the most highly publicized was Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade after forty-nine years. The Court said that Roe had robbed the states of their historic role in regulating abortion, including their ability to place “undue burdens” on a woman’s right to have one. The opinion quoted Justice Scalia’s previous argument from Casey that “undue burden” was “inherently standardless.”
The reaction was swift. In deep-red Kansas and Oklahoma, referendums passed that protected the right to choose in the state constitution. In Michigan, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer was in a tight race for reelection, the Democrats put the right to choose on the ballot and their candidates ran on it. The Republicans opposed it. It was a clean sweep for the Democrats. Whitmer won by 10 points, and the Democrats won the other state offices and majorities in both houses of the state legislature for the first time in nearly forty years. I believe the GOP attempts to control women’s lives will continue to benefit Democrats in most but not all states.
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a 108-year-old New York State law requiring applicants for a concealed carry permit to show a special need for it. With gun-related deaths and mass shootings rising and nearly 80 percent of New Yorkers supporting the law, the Court threw it out anyway, saying it was too much of a burden. Apparently, states are permitted to ban all abortions but not to take reasonable steps to protect those already born. It seems this new Court has no problem finding “inherently standardless” “undue” burdens to uphold or strike down, depending on their political preferences. The same thing goes for their decision on who does or doesn’t have standing to sue. Whether you have standing or just have to sit it out depends on what side you’re on.
The 2022 election gave the Democrats their best performance in a president’s first midterm election in forty years, in spite of inflation’s negative impact on President Biden’s poll ratings. Democrats gained one Senate seat and lost nine seats in the House, aided by the loss of several seats in New York thanks to court-ordered reapportionment and a belated and insufficient response to the spike in crime there over the previous two years. But all over the country, most Republican election deniers who ran for governor and secretary of state saying they wouldn’t certify voting results they disagree with, lost.
So what did the results tell us? Election denying and disrespectful rhetoric were wearing out their welcome, though not enough to mortally wound the right-wing Republicans, as Democrats still struggled to define themselves as the party of common sense. The GOP won the House, though by fewer than 7,000 votes across the five closest contests, with the largest margin in those five being 0.8 of a percentage point. But Democrats won several close ones, too.
In effect, voters have given both parties another chance. They’re thinking again. The mainstream press coverage is more on the level. A lot of people have figured out that inflation and the deficit will go down, and crime will, too, if we adopt the right policies. But losing our democracy, letting disturbed people buy weapons that can kill a lot of schoolkids in a hurry, failing to address climate change, and keeping America divided could be devastating for a very long time.
As I finish writing this book, President Biden has decided not to seek reelection, and Vice President Kamala Harris has been nominated to face off against Donald Trump. By the time you read Citizen, we’ll know who won. I hope enough people will have chosen the benefits of inclusive economic and social policies, and of preserving democracy against abusive power, to turn the tide.
During this tumultuous period, we worked hard to save—and where possible, to expand—our charitable work. Since 2015, CGI had been fighting back against a blizzard of false charges. Donna Shalala was a great foundation president, steering us through 2017, when she returned to Florida to run for Congress. Kevin Thurm, her deputy when she was secretary of health and human services, stepped into the leadership role and has done a fine job keeping us going through Covid and being active in a very different environment. When Tina Flournoy left my office after eight active and productive years to become Vice President Harris’s chief of staff, Jon Davidson took over the role. He, Angel Ureña, Rich Vickers, Corey Ganssley, and our staff in Arkansas made sure I did my part to support all our efforts.
We had downsized in 2016, when we stopped holding the annual CGI meetings, but didn’t lay anyone off during Covid, thanks to loyal supporters and our endowment’s investment income, and we kept getting top marks from the charity ratings agencies. Then, after the 2020 elections and the success of the vaccines, things changed. You could feel all the energy building for a return to a more normal life, in work, education, travel, and, yes, in grassroots do-gooding.
In mid-2021, when New York City restaurants finally began to open for outdoor dining, Hillary and I joined another couple for dinner one night in midtown Manhattan. Our outdoor table was open to the street, and two people I didn’t know strolled by in quick succession and virtually shouted, “You need to bring back CGI. We all need something to work together on!” After two close, contentious presidential campaigns, and continuing divisiveness in Congress, at least these two people thought we should get back together to work on worthy projects.
I asked Bob Harrison to check it out. He had done a fine job leading CGI for years and was on the Clinton Foundation board. Bob talked to some of our biggest sponsors and reported back that about half would be supportive. Others thought the continuing economic and political uncertainty made CGI’s successful return questionable, but the NGOs who made the commitment model work were more optimistic.
I really wanted CGI to come back, but in a format more relevant and attractive to younger social activists. Kevin Thurm and I asked Greg Milne, with the help of Luke Schiel, then leading our CGI Action Networks, to oversee the effort. We didn’t have the staff to do the kind of massive commitment preparation of our halcyon years, but we had enough to do quite a bit. We shortened the program and recruited enough sponsors to cut the admission fee 75 percent and cover more expenses for mostly young NGO leaders from the U.S. and beyond.
We held our “new and improved” CGI at the Hilton in Manhattan on September 19 and 20. Our longtime partner the Sheraton was long booked, but the Hilton had good facilities for both the big plenaries and smaller meetings, and space for potential partners to meet and develop joint commitments. Thankfully, we also got lots of volunteers to help with the actual meeting, many of whom had done the same thing at the CGIs from 2005 to 2016. The Hilton was all in, going above and beyond to make things work. When the event was over, the Hilton staff was so excited about CGI that their employee fund contributed $5,000 to it.
More than 2,000 people came in 2022, with hundreds more on the waiting list. All told, 144 new Commitments to Action were made, addressing inclusive economic growth, health equity, climate change, and the refugee crisis, far more than the 96 commitments made in 2016. The largest was a $1 billion commitment by Water.org, led by Matt Damon and Gary White, to bring clean water to 100 million people across the world. We also had our first in-person CGI U meeting at Vanderbilt since 2018. Seven hundred eighty-seven students from ninety-two countries came.
The September 2023 CGI meeting drew 2,370 people from more than eighty countries to focus on the theme Keep Going. We opened with a Zoom conversation with the pope, with whom I’d had a meeting at the Vatican that summer. The Holy Father spoke about his children’s hospital helping young people injured in Ukraine and invited CGI partners to help meet the rising need. We had already developed nine commitments for Ukraine, most of them to meet the health needs of children and families and other victims. Now we’re working to help the pope with his hospital.
The 160 new commitments took us well beyond 500 million people helped over the life of CGI. Chelsea led a great panel with U.N. Under-Secretary-General Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), where she works to achieve universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, and care. After Hillary had a discussion about the post-Covid economy with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, she ended the meeting with a moving conversation with Michael J. Fox, who told us that genomic research into Parkinson’s, which he has bravely and openly lived with for more than three decades, had brought us close to breakthrough treatment and perhaps even a cure. He was in strong voice and good humor, a fitting finale to the theme of perseverance.
In 2023, there were events both personal and political that highlighted the ongoing conflicts within and among nations between divisive and inclusive tribalism, between the drive for domination through division and the belief in the peaceful resolution of differences and shared responsibility for security and prosperity. On my trip to Northern Ireland in April to mark twenty-five years of peace, the ceremonies were hosted by Queen’s University in Belfast, where Hillary had just succeeded George Mitchell as chancellor, who had urged her to take the post. Queen’s did the honors because the long-dominant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) had been defeated in the most recent election by Sinn Féin, which ran on an inclusive progressive program and offered new leadership through two young female leaders, Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill. However, the Good Friday Agreement requires both the top two parties to cooperate in government as first minister and deputy first minister, and the pro-U.K. DUP refused to join, saying it had concerns about Brexit’s impact on their rural economy. I’m convinced the holdouts just couldn’t believe they lost and didn’t want to sit second chair. George Mitchell, still a powerful presence at eighty-nine, gave a great speech, and Hillary did a fine job keeping the show on the road, well prepped by her long years of supporting the Irish peacemakers, especially through Vital Voices.
Thankfully, both Ireland and Northern Ireland are moving forward. In February of 2024, the DUP agreed to join a new government, with Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill as first minister and DUP’s Emma Little-Pengelly as deputy first minister.
In July of 2023, I went back to Oxford for the fifty-fifth anniversary of my Rhodes Scholar class and the 120th anniversary of the scholarships. The first day I met with 250 current students, including Rhodes Scholars and others in affiliated programs, a group of young women and men from all over the world who are committed to an inclusive future and determined to meet challenges, not use them to divide people and destroy cooperation. The next day I was asked to speak for all the alums who had come to remember their years at Oxford. In my remarks, I urged them to use whatever time and talents we had left to give our children and grandchildren a future of democracy, freedom, and cooperation, and to deal with climate change while it is still an opportunity to build shared prosperity and security, and avoid a real-life sequel to the postapocalyptic Road Warrior movies.
Next I went to Albania, which in just thirty years had gone from the last Stalinist communist dictatorship to a growing, thriving democracy led by Prime Minister Edi Rama, an artist and former basketball star who governs with a cabinet and parliament full of young women and men who support their inclusive politics and programs. The prime minister presented me with one of Albania’s high honors, the Great Star of Public Gratitude, in front of attendees that included young people who had been named for Hillary and me for what we did to help save Kosovo’s overwhelmingly Albanian population from ethnic cleansing in 1999, and what Hillary did as senator and secretary of state to support them afterward.
The most awful thing to happen that fall, of course, was the terrorist attack on Israel committed by Hamas from Gaza, which killed more Israelis, including many children and frail elderly citizens, in a single day than Israel had lost in any day of its several wars. I was very proud of the initial response of the American people and of President Biden and his administration and members of both parties, affirming both our unbending commitment to Israel’s security, the imperative of minimizing the loss of innocent Palestinian lives in the retaliation, and all sides’ efforts to prevent the conflict from exploding into a regional war.
Arab states had largely abandoned the Palestinians after Arafat squandered the best chance for Mideast peace in a generation. That story bears retelling. With a little less than two months left in my term, Yasser Arafat came to the Oval Office for a private visit. I told him I was preparing a final peace proposal that was better for the Palestinians than anything that had been discussed the previous June in Camp David, and I thought Prime Minister Ehud Barak, his cabinet, and the people of Israel would accept it. It gave Palestinians a state on 96 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, including the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem, their own capital in East Jerusalem, 4 percent of Israel to compensate for the settlers occupying land just over the U.N.-recognized 1967 borders, and the right of about 20,000 Palestinian refugees from camps in Lebanon to return to northern Israel, where their ancestors had been for more than 2,000 years.
However, as I mentioned when I related the story of the trip to rescue the American journalists, we also had a chance to resolve important security issues with North Korea that would open the possibility of dramatic positive changes in Northeast Asia. To do that, I would have to go to North Korea and to South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia. The trip would require almost two weeks at the very time I would need to be in Washington and the Middle East if we were going to sell a final peace deal.
Arafat blurted out, “You can’t go to Asia.” I asked if he needed me to stay so that I would be seen pressuring him to accept my proposal and then have time to make the plan as attractive as possible to his people and the region. When he said yes, I told him I understood, but said he had to tell me the truth. If he wasn’t going to close the deal, I owed it to America and our friends in Asia to get the deal a trip there would produce. I said I wouldn’t tell anyone, but I had worked very hard for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East and if he was going to back away, I had to know.
Arafat, with tears in his eyes, said, “If we don’t do this now, it would be five, ten, fifteen years, maybe longer, before the chance comes again. We have to do it now.” I didn’t go to North Korea and gave both sides my two-state peace plan. Israel accepted it. But Arafat stalled until I was out of office and Prime Minister Barak was defeated. Then, four days before President Bush announced his own Road Map initiative, Arafat said he would accept my parameters. By then he had an Israeli government unwilling to agree to them, an Israeli public that no longer trusted him, and a U.S. government that wanted nothing to do with him. In the end, the press paid little attention to Arafat’s statement.
In the years that followed that failed peace plan, Arab states now wanted to do business with Israel and to partner with it to block progress in the region by Iran and its proxies. That led to the Abraham Accords with the Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan recognizing Israeli legitimacy even though the Israeli government was dependent on a coalition that included right-wing parties committed to a hard line against Palestinian claims, and then under President Biden to an effort to forge an agreement to normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and offer the Saudis additional security guarantees, access to advanced weaponry, and civil nuclear cooperation.
The future for those initiatives and any others is unclear, but I’m glad the United States is back to publicly advocating a two-state solution, which has been embraced by former prime minister Ehud Barak and should now have more resonance, even with Likud and other less extreme elements of the Israeli right, but only if most Israelis believe they have a partner for peace.
Israel cannot be expected to make peace with Hamas after October 7. Hamas’s goal is not to gain a Palestinian state but to make Israel unlivable, as its open partnership with Iran and its affiliates, the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, demonstrates. On the other hand, the Palestinians cannot remain stateless, and if all Palestinians in still-occupied Gaza and the West Bank were to become Israeli citizens, Israel would no longer be a majority Jewish nation. Today Israel has about 7.3 million Jewish citizens, including 700,000 settlers in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, and 2 million Palestinian citizens who live within the 1967 borders and are Israeli citizens eligible to vote. There are also 3 million more Palestinians in the West Bank and 2 million in Gaza. In other words, the Holy Land is about 50-50.
The Palestinian Authority implicitly accepted severe limits on the “right of return” when they supported the Oslo Accords in 1993, which was designed to produce a two-state solution. By contrast, Hamas never accepted Israel’s right to exist, and rejoiced in seeing it run by increasingly fragile right-wing coalitions, including fringe parties that denied the legitimacy of Palestinian claims to statehood, even to control more land on the West Bank set aside for them when I was in office. What I proposed in 2000 is probably no longer practically possible, because of the massive expansion of settlements over the last twenty-plus years. But the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has continued to oppose terror and embraced cooperation through it all. I hope the Hamas attacks will revitalize the Palestinian Authority with a resolute determination to reject terror and revive efforts to find a creative two-state solution. Soon, there will be more Palestinian Arabs than Jews in the Holy Land, making Israel’s claim to be a democracy moot and its security more precarious.
Yitzhak Rabin saw this all coming, and gave his life to prevent it. Ehud Barak saw it coming, and sacrificed his political career and the viability of the Labor Party to prevent it. So eventually did Ariel Sharon, who set up a new peace party, Kadima, and unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. Now, someone will have to step into the breach, perhaps the revitalized Palestinian Authority committed, as the government of former Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayad was, to a peaceful path to statehood.
The Palestinians are an immensely gifted people. They have done well all over the world. When I was in office, it seemed there were no permanently poor Palestinians outside their homeland. They and their children deserve their chance, too, and America should help them find a way, and once more abandon our own ill-fated adventure into the fantasies of division and domination. Only then can our honest differences give us better tomorrows.
Meanwhile, in America, we have our own work to do. The House Republicans remain hostage to their most right-wing members and the Democrats have to flip the immigration issue by giving undocumented people who pass our longstanding legal test for acceptance into the country—that they are here because they’re threatened by dangerous conditions in their home countries—the right to legally work so they can pay taxes and settle where they’re needed and wanted. In the meantime we need to bolster our underfunded and understaffed facilities to house them safely and securely at the border until they can be properly processed.
We need to do this. Our current birth rate of about twelve per thousand people is below replacement level, and the lowest since the 1930s. Immigrants create six more jobs for U.S. citizens than they take, since so many become business owners. This is especially important in areas where there’s already a labor shortage, including construction and the installation of green energy solutions. New immigrants are 80 percent more likely than native-born Americans to start new businesses. Most Americans are not anti-immigration. They’re anti-chaos. We also need to take in more skilled immigrants if we expect to remain competitive across a wide range of high-tech fields, including A.I. and replacing outdated power lines with newer ones having twice the carrying capacity.
That’s why it’s tragic that the compromise President Biden and conservative Senate Republicans agreed to—a limit on immigrants accepted at the border in return for the necessary facilities and personnel to process them without breaking up families but with thorough vetting—was blocked by the House, then by the Senate GOP sponsors, when their Higher Power, Donald Trump, rejected it. They don’t need solutions. Remember, solutions don’t work for them. They need unresolved problems to complain about.
So where are we? There is no peaceful alternative to inclusive tribalism, with shared responsibilities that produce more security and more widely shared prosperity, through cooperation and compromise. Surely the current carnage in Israel and Gaza and chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives make that clear. If enough people on both sides want inclusive tribalism, they can find a way. We have to.
When I was a young man studying at Georgetown, Robert Kennedy, then running for president, famously quoted a line from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” in his speeches and later in a book: “ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” He made young people feel thrilled about the world’s possibilities during an intensely troubled time. Looking back on those years from decades later, I’m struck by the fact that “Ulysses” wasn’t written as a clarion call to the young. It was really about an old lion who gives his kingdom to his son but doesn’t want to be idle for the rest of his life. So he brings what’s left of his crew together for one last, great adventure, saying they are “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will,” still determined “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” for “some noble work of note may yet be done…’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
There will always be conflicts between people, fueled by their politics, their faiths, or their other differences. Some will lead to violence and heartbreaking loss. Our oldest demons are patient ones, always eager to manifest themselves in new clothes, and, if we let them, to turn back our progress toward a more equal, sustainable, and peaceful planet. So many of our victories have to be refought and won again and again. The important thing is that, like Ulysses, we keep striving, keep seeking, and never yield. That’s the only way to secure a peaceful, normal life for the Jewish and Arab children of the Holy Land, and for the children in a deeply divided America. It’s the only path forward for us all.