In the ups and downs of the last twenty-plus busy years, I lost a lot of people I cared about, most but not all to old age or serious illness. Remarkably, only two young people doing foundation work were killed in the line of duty. Both were dedicated members of our CHAI family working in Africa.
On November 25, 2006, Ellen Verwey, a thirty-six-year-old nurse, was in Lesotho training doctors and nurses on how to care for HIV/AIDS patients. She and her husband and two other Clinton Foundation workers were spending the weekend at the home of Lesotho’s trade and industry minister. She was killed by an AK-47 attack as they got out of the minister’s car, apparently the unintended victims of an assassination attempt gone awry. Even after a healthy reward was offered for information, her case was never solved. Ellen came from a large farm family and had followed her dream to see the world and serve the poor. She deserved a much longer life, but she lived a very good one.
On September 21, 2013, four masked al-Shabaab terrorists opened fire in the Westgate Mall in Kenya, killing sixty-seven people, including Dr. Elif Yavuz, who was working out of CHAI’s Tanzania office on malaria, vaccines, and diarrhea, and her partner, architect Ross Langdon. They were in Nairobi because she was eight months pregnant and it was the best nearby place to give birth.
I had met Elif just a few weeks earlier, with the rest of the CHAI staff in Tanzania. She was glowing in her coming motherhood. After her death, her coworkers helped her mother choose an orphanage for HIV-positive children in Nairobi to receive donations in honor of Elif, Ross, and baby Alicia. In 2017 in the Netherlands, I got to meet Elif’s mother, Lia, and thank her for raising such a remarkable daughter. Elif and Ellen and thousands of others serving in CHAI in the last twenty years saved or improved millions of lives, as did those who built and grew CGI and brought it back in 2022, and all who’ve contributed to our other foundation efforts over the years.
What does it all mean in the grand scheme of things? I keep trying to figure it out. I got an inkling in early 2018, on our trip to Hawaii, when Hillary and I got a tour of the Mauna Kea summit, home to a number of the world’s most powerful telescopes peering into the far reaches of outer space. We visited the largest ones there, the twin Keck telescopes, sponsored by American scientific groups and NASA. When our journey started at sea level, it was eighty-eight degrees. By the time we got to the mountaintop observatory, it had fallen to eighteen. After getting warm coats from our hosts, we looked through one of the Keck lenses at the universe well beyond the Milky Way galaxy, which contains our solar system and the stars that sparkle on clear nights.
Afterward we went back to the base for a talk with the staff over a hot cup of coffee. We had lots of questions, which they patiently answered. When I asked if they ever discussed the likelihood of life on other planets, the leader, a native of Germany, said, “Of course.” Then I asked whether they had disagreements about it. He said, “Yes, big ones.” So I asked “How big?” He said, “Some of us think it’s 85 percent likely and others think it’s 95 percent likely.”
The conversation was mind-bending. When we left to drive back to sea level, I thought about our fleeting time on earth, a four-billion-year-old planet in a fourteen-billion-year-old universe with a billion galaxies. It’s still expanding, and still full of surprises waiting to be discovered. Later we saw pictures of black holes, including one 55 million light-years away, bordered by a ring of fire. It was so large, with a gravitational pull so great that if our entire solar system passed by close enough it would be quickly sucked in and crushed into dust that would fit into a large thimble. Makes you think it doesn’t matter so much who’s on Mount Rushmore.
As I said early in this book, I’m fascinated by how the universe works, about the potential of human genome research to prolong and enrich life, and about the evident and likely future consequences of climate change. I’ve read books by Stephen Hawking, Lisa Randall, Brian Greene, Katie Mack, Steven Johnson, Steve Brusatte, E. O. Wilson, David Attenborough, and others. Though I don’t fully understand everything I read, especially on physics, each effort has taught me something valuable, made me want to keep learning, and reminded me that they’re far smarter than I am and how wise they are to argue for less certainty and more common humanity.
Recently, I discovered the lucid prose of the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. I’ve read three of his books, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Helgoland, about quantum physics, and There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, a book of essays and articles that go beyond his scientific work. One of the essays is titled “Why I Am an Atheist.”
Here’s his argument: “I don’t like people who behave well because they fear otherwise they might end up in Hell. I prefer those who behave well because they value good behavior. I don’t trust those who are good for the sake of pleasing God. I prefer those who are good because they genuinely are good…. I don’t like those whose belief in God gives them access to the Truth, because I believe in reality they are as ignorant as I am. I think the world is still a boundless mystery to us; I don’t like those who have all the answers. I prefer those who are asking questions, and whose answer is ‘I don’t really know.’ I don’t like those who say they know what is good and what is evil because they belong to a church that has monopolized God…who tell others what they should be doing because they have God on their side. I prefer those who make humble suggestions, who live in impressive ways I can admire, who make choices that move me and make me think.”
Like all Rovelli’s writing, it’s eloquent, moving, and made me think. I agree with much of what he wrote, but I don’t think his argument disproves the existence of a creator God. The case for atheism can’t be made based on the frailties and illusions of believers, especially those whose hunger for worldly political power seems to be the real goal of their religious zeal.
The believers Rovelli doesn’t like, at least the Christians, ignore Saint Paul’s most important lesson—that love of our fellow humans is a greater virtue than even faith, because in this life we all “see through a glass darkly” and only “know in part.” The Christian New Testament says faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen,” and that its two most important traits are, first, to love God with all you’ve got, and second, “like unto it,” to love your neighbor as yourself. The Torah tells Jews that turning your back on a stranger is like turning away from the most high G-d. The Quran says Allah put all the different people on earth not to hate one another but to know and learn from each other. The Dhammapada of the Buddha says you’re not fully human until you can feel an arrow piercing another’s skin as if it were piercing your own. All these faiths are telling us to love our neighbors and to be open to people who are different from us. That’s the God I felt when I looked into the universe through the Keck telescope.
My life after the White House, when they don’t play a song when I walk in the room anymore, is filled with deep gratitude to the family, friends, foundation and personal staff, and partners who’ve made it possible to do things that save and improve lives, give children better futures, and try to keep bringing people together in the face of raging divisive populism.
Since that’s the way I keep score, I’m happy. I still believe that despite our struggles with identity issues, most people are basically good, that we should live and work with hope, that the end of life is a homegoing, and that in the meantime, we should relish every chance to get caught trying. The song that matters most is the one you sing to yourself.