February 15, 2021 • 59 mins
In commemoration of Presidents Day, President Bill Clinton traces the evolution of the presidency from America’s founding through modern history and explores how the best presidents used the office to build an America that more closely resembled our highest ideals and aspirations.
This special episode, from the original version of “Why Am I Telling You This?”, features President Clinton’s keynote speech from the 2019 Presidential Ideas Festival at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. For this episode, David Blight, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” and Professor of American History at Yale University, provides original commentary on President Clinton’s speech. Professor Blight says the speech is a “rare blend of learned history and lived experience... a reminder of what the future of the institution of the presidency can still be.”
This episode was originally released in July 2019.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello. My name is David Blight. I teach American history
at Yale University, and welcome to a special episode of
Why Am I Telling You This? The Clinton Foundation Podcast.
As a historian, I've spent much of my career studying
the ever evolving ways that Americans and groups of Americans
(00:21):
have told the story of who we are and how
we got here. For generations, there has been a hunger
for a unifying narrative that answers those questions. But history
is not so simple. Since our founding America has been
shaped by triumphs and tragedies, progress and reaction, inclusion and exclusion.
(00:44):
Our history is complicated, in contradictory because it was made
by real human beings who, by our very nature, are contradictory.
As frustrating as that may be when we want quick
and easy answers from the past, it gives us all
a great deal to think about, debate, interpret, and reinterpret,
which is what history does. And in a time when
(01:06):
the dangers of historical ignorance are all too evident, it
is an investment that's worth the effort. So why am
I telling you this? Well, a few weeks ago I
listened to President Bill Clinton's keynote speech from the Presidential
Ideas Festival hosted by the University of Virginia's Miller Center.
I found the speech remarkable for the president's serious engagement
(01:28):
with the text of the Constitution, but even more so
for his historical grasp of this institution of the presidency
over time. President Clinton traces the evolution of the presidency
from our founding through the present day, and explores how
different presidents at key moments used the office and its
(01:49):
powers to build an America that more closely resembled our
highest aspirations, as well as how some presidents may have
misused or stretched their powers. Early in the speech, President
Clinton argues that every president has consciously or not made
two essential decisions that shaped the direction of his presidency.
(02:13):
One who constitutes we the People? And two what does
a more perfect union look like? Much like American history
has been marked by alternating periods of progress and reaction,
President Clinton argues that some presidents have governed with broad
definitions of who is included in We the People and
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others with much narrower ones. Indeed, it is worth our
remembering the two thirds of our presidents before Abraham Lincoln
were either slaveholders or sympathizers with slavery, and worked to
preserve that institution. He covers a vast subject with impressive nuance,
and having seen some of the handwritten notes he prepared,
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there was a lot more he hoped to address in
just an hour long speech, from the role of the
civil rights movement and other citizen led crusades as drivers
of change, to the many achievements of President Carter and
President Obama in expanding the definition of we the people.
President Clinton's speech is unique because it is a rare
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blend of learned history and lived experience. Only forty five
people have ever been President of the United States, and
only five of them are alive today. To hear one
of them reflects so thoughtfully on the institution is a
treasure and a bracing reminder of why history matters. As
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the Great James Baldwin wrote in the nineteen essay, history
is not merely something to be read, and it does
not refer merely or even principally to the past. On
the contrary, the great force of history comes from the
fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled
by it in many ways. And his three is literally
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present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise,
concluded Baldwin. Since it is to history that we owe
our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspiration. That passage,
perhaps as much as any, captures the value of studying history. Ultimately,
President Clinton's speech is not a retelling of the past,
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but a challenge to meet the demands of the president.
Past and present are always mingled. This speech is a
reminder of what the future of the institution of the
presidency can still be, especially as we celebrate Independence Day.
I hope you'll enjoy listening as much as I did.
(04:49):
Thank you. I think it's really important you're having this
presidential ideas, is really important for you to decide what
is the job, what do you expect of the president,
what the president is supposed to do. I want to
start by saying this, I'm I'm very proud of the
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job that Governor mc collo did as governor, but I
was never more proud of him and then at Charlottesville,
because one of the jobs that we need, when our
conflicts are laid bare and our future is uncertain, is
for somebody to just stand up and say, look, we
do or don't favor division and by race, by religion,
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by politics, by gender, bisexual identity, but you name it
and we do, or we don't favor bullying, beating, and
in one sad case, here killing people who don't see
things the way we do. Sadly, the response that we
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got at that time from the White House was, well,
there were a lot of nice people on both sides,
But the governor of Virginia on that day was my
president when he said there was no place in this
commonwealth for racism, for anti semitism, for any form of
religious bigotry, for bullying, and for violence. Get out of
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here and do not come back. So I did. Ok Now,
(06:52):
let's try to put this that into the context of
the whole sweep of American history. I hope when I've finished,
you will be more optimistic than you might be after
the news of the last couple of days. Uh. I
want to thank Bill Antholis in the Middle Center for
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open organizing the session and for a really truly serious
and devoted study of the presidency. For all the hundreds
of thousands of pages that have been written about the
presidency and specific presidents, there's still a quite amount of
mystery about it. It remains an intensely debated institution and
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it's always evolving. And that's the one thing I want
you to focus on today, that it's the Constitution talks
about the presidency. But we know that what people thought
that was two hundred years ago was not what they
think it is today. We know that many of our
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early press and thought that they should have a restrained
view of the office. John Kennedy saw it as the
vital center of action. We know that we feel close
to some presidents alienated from others, and that the further
they get away from us, the more we see them
through a filter that somebody else built for us. So
(08:21):
I want you to just think tonight today, I mean
about the institution, the job. When I was in the
White House, I had there's a little room off the
White House, off the Oval Office that presidents have used
for various things. But I put an old fashioned bookshelf
up and I filled it with biographies and histories featuring
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my predecessors, mostly my left well known predecessors. I made,
over the course of eight years, a genuine effort to
understand what their strengths and weaknesses were, and how they
did or did not fit with the time and have
define what it meant to be the president. One thing
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about the University of Virginia. I talked with some of
you about it already today. Thirty years ago this year,
I was here at one of the most rewarding endeavors
of my public life, the National Education Summit, called by
President George H. W. Bush, with prior agreement of all
the governors, to bring the governors here with the charge
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of spending an elevated couple of days in the physical
and psychic shadow of Thomas Jefferson, to develop national education
goals for the country. I'm telling you this, and I
think you know I am becoming a traga ut. You know,
I've lived in a time no longer relevant for the
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current circumstances, and I know there's just a big tendency
for people that used to be something or another two
spend too much time I'm reminiscing thinking about how well
they did. I I have really tried hard not to
do this. I try every day to live in the
present and live for the future. But I do think
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history is important in trying to get to where we
understand what is the potential of the presidency, what are
the obligations of the presidency, What are the choices before
us today? So the first interesting thing about the presidency
is that the Famers created what was at the time
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a fairly unique position, a democratically elected title that is
both a job chief executive and the position head of state,
the voice of the nation. Now we all know that
when we started, the Framers were obsessed with preventing abuses
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of power that they found inherent and monarchies, whether they
were hereditary or host So they tried to give us
a government that was strong enough to do important things,
flexible enough to adapt to change the circumstances, but full
enough of checks and balances to prevent a slide into tyranny.
I think, and I hope they did a good job
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of all three. They were sobered by the French Revolution,
and so they distrusted unrestrained popular opinion and provided instead
for the selection of a president through electors selected by
state legislatures, with the right to vote just being advisory anyway,
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and still confined to white male property owners. And if
God forbid. After all, these barriers were unsuccessful in giving
us unappropriate selection, and there was a tie in the
electoral college as Thomas Efferson and arin Burg discovered the
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decision was deferred to the House of Representative Imagine what
would happen today there where we have a margin of
forty and we would still lose because every state only
gets one vote, no matter how big it is. It's
even more unequal than the electoral college. I mean, we
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my party. But they were trying to limit abuses of
power and to slowly make the country ready for democracy. Well, thankfully,
as we all know the franchise that's gone away beyond
the quite male property owners. The voices of the electors
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at least now have to reflect a popular vote in
their states. But the electoral college does make us less democratic.
Small D Article two states the basic powers and responsive
always the Presidency, commander in chief. The armed forces can
call Congress into special session, as the ability to enter
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treaties and nominate judicial and executive officials with the advice
and consent of the Senate, and can issue pardons from
time to time. The President is required to give information
to Congress on the state of the Union and must
faithfully execute the law. Beyond that position is the head
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of State, which in effect requires every president in some
form of fashion to align all the policies, appointments, and
initiatives into a larger mission being the voice of the nation,
a role most important in dealing with other countries and
in speaking to and for all Americans and trying times,
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I think the best guide for what the mission of
the head of state is is found not an article too,
but in the simple one sentence preamble to the entire document.
Since every new president, let's wear an oath to uphold
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the whole shebang, We the people of the United States,
in order to form a more perfect union, established justice,
insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the
general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves
and our prosperity. Do ordain and established this constitution for
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the United States, we the people. That becomes the responsibility
of the president to work for read the people in
forming a more perfect union. So to do that, every
single president from George Washington's Donald Trump, consciously or not,
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has had to define what more per for union means.
And in order to do that must first decide who,
according to the preamble, constitutes we the people. And I'm
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telling you you can analyze every president from George Washington
to Donald Trump. If you can answer, who did they
think constitutes we the people that they work for? An
answer to? And what do they believe or did they
believe if they passed on constituted a more perfect union? Now?
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Who is we the people? Suggest the people who supported
and voted for you? Is it all the people who
are eligible to vote but otherwise can't do anything for you?
Is it just people who look like you, pray like you,
love like you, speak the same other tongue as you do?
And do you really believe that's the declaration of independence
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is right and that we are all created equal, entitled
to the same rights and freedoms, worthy of every opportunity
to freely make our own future and the life of
our country, or instead, do you think the most important
thing is the current dominant position of your crowd, however
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you define that? And do you think it's okay to
have one set of rules for you in your crowd
and a different set for everybody else? Now, this question
has been answered vastly differently over two hundred years, some
more than two hundred, and sometimes even differently within a
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single presidency, depending on what the question is it's best
not to be too sanctimonious about this, but it's still important.
It's very hard for democracy and doer if you really
believe you can institutionalize one set of rules for your
crowd and another for everybody else. So at best, when
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you have a presidential election anyway, it's it's a vast
job interview, the greatest job interview in the world. And
all the people who vote are your employers. They get
to hire you or somebody. And the greatest thing is
every four years, beyond the bare words of the Constitution,
you get hired to do a job that they define
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every four years. So you got to keep on your toes.
If you run more than once, because you're not, it
doesn't work what you did before. You got to keep
up with the changes in effect. The American people say,
at this moment in history, here are problems, solve them.
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Here are opportunities, seize them. Here are fears, ease them,
Here are our dreams, make them come true. And then
we have an election to argue about what all that means.
Today's complex national elections, with the rides of social media
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and the difficulties of cybersecurity and all this stuff. You know,
a lot about are still largely determined by the culture
and the predisposition. Members of a given culture have to
vote in a certain way by the conditions extent at
the time of the election, which includes not just the
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condition of the economy, but the condition of the election apparatus.
What are you the clean air is good, whether in
flint they could get water for their kids, conditions, then
the candidates and their campaigns, and finally the coverage of
them and both traditional and social media, because the more
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people who are in the electorate, the further away you are,
the more dependent you are on someone else's filter. Then, still,
through a institution that I lived, it's usefulness a long
long time ago, the electoral college. We figure out who's
going to be president, and then you know how the
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leader defines with the people and how to find form
a more perfect union. Will the new president take us
forward or backward? Will the new president make us more united?
Are more divided? We all feel heard valued seeing no
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matter who we voted for. Oh, we just sit around
and mope till the next election. I think the best
presidents have sought to define we two people in a
way that broadens both the idea and the reality of
who counts in this country. They have basically committed, each
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in their own way, given the options before them, given
the constraints they faced, to see we the people expand
from the few to the many. So far, all of
our presidents having acknowledged an opplcation not to block off
entire parts of the nation who didn't vote for them,
not to deprive people in those places of their rights,
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or restrict their participation in the life of the nation.
So far, they've had enough humility to know that no
one is right all the time, and power must be
exercised with some care. And they've had enough confidence to
accept Benjamin franklin Dry observation that our enemies are our
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friends where they sow us our faults. As President, my
often stated definition of making our union more perfect was this.
I thought my job was to widen the circle of opportunity,
to deepen the meaning of freedom, and to strengthen the
bonds of our community. I believe cooperation works better than conflict.
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I'd be diverse groups make better decisions, and homogeneous ones
and loan geniuses. I believe, over the long run, in
an interdependent world full of vast opportunities and profound challenges,
including not just climate change, but the fastest way of
species destruction, destruction and ten thousand years. I think we
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need all hands on deck, and we need a climate
in which we are looking for anybody that knows anything
with any kind of new idea. So let's just think
a real quick walk through history and look at a
few of our presidents and see whether, by any reasonable definition,
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but take mind, they succeeded in forming a more perfect union.
George Washington started with a blank slate and the big agenda,
and he was wildly popular. He won. He gave life
to the constitution, definition of the union, building in their
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national capital, establishing the first Executive office and cabinet, appointing
the first Supreme Court, supporting the creation of a national economy,
and with special attention to the symbolic power of being
head of state, voluntarily leaving office after two terms. I
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think he did a pretty good job of making our
union more perfect. Thomas Jefferson began slowly to expand the
idea of the we the people, to go beyond just land,
honored owners and the financial elite to include more of
the ordinary farmers and small business people of our then
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growing country, and then he vastly expanded the size of
America by buying Louisiana from Napoleon for fifteen million bucks.
And so I'm pretty indebted to him because if he
hadn't done that, I could have never become president. But
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he also expanded our imagination of what the country could
become through the Lewis and Clark expedition. It is very
interesting that in spite of the fact that he created
the first political party and was a good politician subject
to significant personal attacktion rumormongering, he was pretty tough, and
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he created a prey to essentially destroyed the Federalist Party
that grew up around George Washington and included Alexander Hamilton
and Chief Justice Marshall. Nevertheless, he wanted on his tombstone
none of the stunning array of federal positions he held,
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think about it, Thomas Jefferson, President, Vice President, Secretary of State,
Envoy de France. Instead, he wanted it knowing that he
wrote the Declaration of independence in the Statute of Virginia
for religious freedom, and that he was the father of
the Streat University. He left this simple idea that the
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life of the mind was important. What you thought and
what your values were mattered, and that public service was
not necessarily of greater value than a life well lived
in another arena. We had a lot of stability given
the electorate. We should have, I guess, But in our
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first forty years we had six presidents for from Virginia.
Three were strong times of this university, good thing for you.
We didn't have an anty trust law back then, so
they built the initial institutions required by Article two, beginning
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the with the inclusion of the common man with we
the people. But they still debated just about everything else,
and it was still the common man, not men and women,
and the common men were all white, not black or
Native Americans. In the mid nineteenth century, at the anti
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slavery movement really rose to gain traction, and massive waves
of immigrants flocked to the United States from our London, Germany. Principally,
some presidents and would be presidents insisted on for the
first time narrowing the idea of the people that we
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should right into law explicit exclusions of foreigners and African Americans.
But the opening shots at Fort Sumter, ironically, many of
the formerly disparaged immigrants who had been dissed themselves, found
themselves in places like New York City promoting sedition against
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the national government because they were terrified at having finally
found a tiny foothold in New York and a job
with a steady rage that if Lincoln won the war,
he'd free the slaves and they would all come to
New York and throw them out of work. Sound fromilire.
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So presidents had to deal with it. There were real
questions about not only the current carbronation, but the role
of the national government and dealing with all this. They
came to the head in the Civil War, and thank god,
Abraham Lincoln won. He ended slavery, preserved a union, vindicated
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government of by and for the people with the dramatically
enlarged conception of who the people were. After issuing the
Emancipation Proclamation, he gathered the votes the fast the thirteenth Amendment,
and in his last speech, just three days before he
was assassinated, he became the first president to raise the
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idea of full citizenship for African Americans. A last John
Wilkes Smooth was in the audience for the speech. Lincoln's
remarkable legacy expended actually well beyond the minor matters of
saving the Union and freeing the slaves, and included a
vision of post war America. In America, he hoped to
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lead to a broader future, to heal the wounds of
war and ease the anxieties that had driven it. He
signed the Homestead Act, supported the Transcontinental Realms System, and
established land grant universities. The one in my home state
was the first one established west of the Mississippi. At
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the cost of his life, he didn't make our union
more perfect. After Lincoln's death, the fourteenth and fifteenth Amendment
granted newly freed slaves full set of jeb equal protection
of the laws, and the right to vote unlesses grant.
A deeply underrated general and I think often underrated president
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faithfully tried to implement Lincoln's vision of reconstruction. He went
after the Clue Klux Klan and defeated him soundly. He
protected the right of to vote, and there was a
very large number A lot of Americans today still don't
know that there are really a very large number of
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African Americans elected to state and federal office in the period.
Whether reconstruction was being properly in force, then, as always
came their reaction, and in eighteen seventy six the government
New York, Samuel Tilden, a Democrat, was reported as winning
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the popular vote by two hundred people. There was to
be fair a lot of dispute about whether the goats
in the South were fully counted in where African Americans
were legitimately able to vote, but in the beginning the
votes of Florida and two other southern states were hotly contested,
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and Congress agreed to set up a special amission to
look into it and then to decide that whatever the
commission rules would be, how the votes would be counted.
There were to be seven Republicans, seven republic Democrats, and
a judge on the Supreme Court. They had a rotation
system for such things, so the first judge was a
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had been with the Democrat from Illinois who was a
friend of Abraham Lincoln's in pro Union. So the people
who were trying to make this happen actually got him off,
and he gave with an appointment to the Senate, and
they appointed someone who would certainly vote to see the
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Republican president. Rutherford Hayes So, a man who lost the
popular vote by quarter of a million in a country
which was about five as populist as it is today,
so the margin was quite a bit bigger than it was.
Even got to be president, and there was quite an
outrage about it. So Rutherford Face, who was a pretty
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distinguished union officer, made a reasonably good president. Some ways.
He started civil service from him, and he promised to
leave after four years. But the main thing he did
was to keep the burden of the deal that removed
the judge from the rotation by giving him a U. S. Senatecy,
and he got to the Union troops out of the South.
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The minute that happened, reconstruction was over, and all these
laws began to be clawed back in factor in practice.
In the case of Pussy D. Ferguson in the Supreme
Court finally legitimized a ruling. When you worry about the
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Supreme Court going hayward, if you are like me, it's
not like it's the first time it's happen. We've always
fought over these things. Who is meet that people anyway?
So Pussy says, you can absolutely practice legal segregation as
long as it's separate and equal. But everybody knew it
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was definitely separate and most definitely unequal. So there we
were reconstructions over the lost caused rears its ugly head.
In the South again Jim Crow becomes the order of
the day. Meanwhile, we've still got the emigrants coming in.
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Now they're from southern Europe and China and Eastern Europe,
reshaping our demographics. Just as we were entering the Industrial
Revolution in response to the concentration of big business and
the migration to the cities. And there are factories of
working people who used to be on the farm, the
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long hours, low pay, and dangerous condition men and women
and child workers faced. The progressive movement emerged. Eddy Roosevelt
used his bullet pulpit to expand the government's power to
preserve competition and not to become a monopoly control of country,
to promote basic safeguards for labor, especially women and children,
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to provide for the poor, and protect our natural resources
from plunder. Roosevelt and others they made our union more
perfect in their time, even as gem Crow persisted in
the South and segregation was far from unknown and the
rest of the country, and still in half our country
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women we're not part of the people. For decades, the
suffrage movement work to secure the right to vote without
a genuine champion in the White House. Finally, one hundred
years ago this year, and the last great act of
the progressive era, the Nineteenth Amendment, was ratified. Then came
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the reaction. It was like a bad movie. It's like
groundhog Day. Immigration from parts of the world deemed undesirable
was sharply curtailed of a surgeant KKK. You couldn't keep
him down to save your life. Came back to life.
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Its peak membership was three million, and then John. After
World War One, we had our very first red scare.
Populist movements to unite poor sharecroppers and laborers foundered on
the rocks of division over race and pressure of lost jobs.
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Then we've got another chance. The depression came along. It's terrible.
That's something terrible has to happen for us to expand
the definition of we the people. But the depression came along.
Frank and Roosevelt moved to the White House. His Need
New Deal expanded the definition of we the people and
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included a vast diverse urban working class with poor farmers.
They had all been depressed and crushed from the dust
bowl to the Tennessee Valley up and down the East Coast.
Roosevelt used the power of the presidency to do something
never before dawn on this scale. He put many of
them back to work. Through the Works Progress Administration and
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the Civilian Conservation Corps, the elderly were given a basis
for dignity during Social Security. He encouraged the rise of
industrial unions to protect the rights of workers, and like
his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, he became what one author is
called a wilderness warrior to protect our natural resources. And
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after Pearl Harbor, he led us into and through World
War Two and envisioned the worldwide Organization of Nations committed
to avoiding another World war and another depression. By then,
it became obvious that we were the most important big
country in the world. So being president and defining we
the people both required us to acknowledge the unavoidable responsibility
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of the United States in the larger world. After President
Roosevelt did his part to make our union more perfect,
he died shortly after his fourth and auguration, and Harry
Truman led our transition into a peacetime economy, defended the
labor movement, made a serious attempt to get health care
for all, shouldered the burden of building the United Nations
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and the multinational organizations designed to restore our prosperity, rebuild
a bettered Europe, and contained the aggression of the Soviet Union.
President Eisenhower into the Korean conflict, protected South Korea, supported
the Supreme Court important to me in ordering Federal truth
to enforce Brown versus Board of Education and Little Rock,
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Arkansas byte integrating Little Rock Central High School. Shortly before
he was killed, President Kennedy asked Congress to pass the
sweeping civil rights bill, and Leonard Johnson did it when
some of his advisers urged him to go slow, fearing
that if he pushed civil rights, he would anger the
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Southern leaders in Congress. Derail is the entire legislative agenda
and cause God only knows what other kinds of crisis,
and Johnson reportedly snapped back at them, well, what the
hell is the presidency for that question? Is what this
confidence is all about. He knew the National Unity sponsor
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sparked by Kennedy's assassination, his big re election victory, his
big margin in Congress, him a lot of power, and
as he famously said, I intend to use it, and
use it he did for the Civil Rights Act, of
Voting Rights Act, that open housing law, any poverty legislation, Medicare, Medicaid,
head Start, and more, including an increase in the number
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of immigrants coming to this country. He knew he had
made our union more perfect. But LBJ was no dummy.
He also knew that he had destroyed his party's hold
in the South. He said, for at least a generation,
he was being conservative. Post LBJA, years passed proved that
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he was right. Beginning in nine eight with the election
of Richard Nixon and the strong showing of George Wallace
as white working class voters south and north, the Light
began to make their way into a party that previously
had not shown much interest in their economic well being,
but was eager to validate their of cultural promises and
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reinforced their opposition to what was going on in the
other party. Thanks to that, the problems of Vietnam, the
riots in the street, the increasing radicalism and of then
the left not the right, and sanctioning violence, we had
(39:24):
a big shift in America. For most of the twentieth century,
each party had a political basis about the other twenty
would decide who our president was, and usually they reflected
about how the people felt, even though they may or
made out of voted that way. All of a sudden,
one party had at base the other had of forty.
(39:45):
I know because I was in the forty. So between
sixty eight and ninety three we had twenty years of
more conservative presidents than one four year term for President Carter.
Then by two thousand, when the when the political basis
were basically even, we had what was essentially an even
(40:08):
election decided by the Supreme Court in an opinion that
you can decide whe do you think. I think it
clearly restricted with the people, and I don't want to
take any time talking about it. You should go back
and read it and ask yourself. How could we have
such a momentous opinion and be told by the Supreme
Court this is a one off. You can never cite
(40:29):
this again. This has no presidential value. It basically said,
we have to stop a recount. We need a recount
by a uniform standard, but we can't do it because
day after tomorrow the electors have to be named according
to a statute in response to a natural disaster. That
statute had already by court order been ignored because who
(40:52):
cared about it? I mean lots of time to name electors.
It was a deliberate attempt to restrict the definition of
we the people. So where does all that leave us?
We have to decide now some fundamental things. We are
living the most independent time in history, and we are
(41:15):
still the best position country in the world for the
twenty century. But we are not as big as China,
and we are not going to be able to keep
them down. But we should be able to keep them
honest in trade deals and in matters the national security
involving particularly cybersecurity. So what's the best way to do that?
(41:40):
How can we make our Chinese American friends and other
Ethian emigrants feel that they have a place here that
we How can we convince the Chinese that we have
no interest in embarrassing them, but we would like it
now that they have risen so far so fast, if
we could protect intellectual property and not be forced to
(42:01):
share our technology, and we don't like being interfered with
cuber attacks. Can we cut a deal or not? Is
there any way we'll ever be able to have what
happened when I represented the Republicans that the Education Conference
here will there ever be enough either verification or trust
(42:23):
or both for us to solve this problem. These are
serious problems. We do need an infrastructure program. It shouldn't
be a partisan issue. If we're going to be competitive.
There are all these things that we should be talking
about that could benefit everybody. We have not had anything
(42:46):
but increasing intensity of partisan discord by and large since
the eighties. But until now, even in the toughest times,
there were always manifestations of expanding are more perfect union.
Ronald Reagan signed immigration reform in George Bush signed a
(43:07):
bill strengthening the Clean Air Act amendments. He signed the
Americans with Disabilities Act. He did a good job bringing
an end of the Cold War and trying to support
democracy in Russia, and he didn't do anything that hastened
the result we're a little with today. Richard Nixon signed
(43:31):
a bill creating the Environmental Protection Agency. Even presidence you
might not think of as being making our union more perfect.
They did things, every one of them. George W. Bush
passed PEP far, something I've done a lot of work
with because of my foundation, and it's safe. Lord knows
(43:51):
how many lives around the world and made people think
differently of the United States, and who also tried to
get immigration reform. We are unlikely friends. I made friends
with his dad and I called them after you got Alexa.
I said, I know you don't like me because I
beat your father. It's okay, I said, but I love
(44:11):
him too, and I'll make you a deal. I will
never talk about you the way you're guys talk about me. Never.
My wife's in the Senate, she's on the Armed Services Committee.
I may disagree with you, but I will always treat
you with respect and just simply say why I disagree.
If I can ever help you, I'd like to. We
(44:32):
then commenced a period of two conversations a year, last
thing thirty or forty five minutes, which lasted the remainder
of verse presidency. I did to a three errands for him.
And now my favorite project and my foundation, is the
leadership program we run together where we take people from
both parties that have or in mid career have important
projects and we bring them together at all these presidential
(44:55):
libraries and make them work together for six months and
then we there's moltentions. He links. When it's over, we
have a commencement, so he meets with him once. I
meet with him once than we did the commencement together
after the commencement. So far there has been no exception
(45:16):
of this. We've done it four or five times. The
Republicans come up to me, and the Democrats go up
to him and thank us, because they didn't know anybody
like the people they've been working with existed. Because for
all of our interdependence and all of our growing diversity,
we've been raising walls in our minds, partly because of
(45:39):
the curious information ecostructure in which we live, and for
all kinds of other reasons. I don't want to get
into that. All I want to say is that it
is my experience that it is almost impossible to extinguish
the urge to make our union more perfect. But there
are forces us who would by making sure that it
(46:04):
becomes more ideological, more racially homogeneous, let's engage with the
rest of the world, and more dedicated to having one
set of rules for them and another set for us.
There are lots and lots and lots of members of
the other party they don't agree with that they're lying.
There now some people in our party who thinks we
(46:25):
should be. We should take a page out of that book.
Here's what I know. I'm seventy two and I'm not
running for anything. Zero sum solutions in an independent world
do not work as well as positive solutions. Diverse groups,
committed to the rule of law and believing in growing
(46:49):
we the people will make better decisions over any relevant
amount of time than homogeneous groups or even longeniuses. We
can build a future together. A lot of the differences
of opinion could be resolved easily. What you worry about
(47:09):
today is the product of demographics in politics. Look, we
can all piss, you know when pest actually when we're
not running for anything. But everybody's ever been in politics
who wanted to make change has had to feed the
beast a little bit. Do you know how much do
(47:30):
you have to do to keep the power of reaction
at bay while you're trying to make politics do something good?
Don't forget Fdr, whom I admired very much, turned back
to St. Louis, full of desperate Jews trying to find
a place to live. Before he thought America was ready
to go into World War Two, he imprisoned Japanese citizens,
(47:52):
including a two camps in my home state. And he
waited quite a long while mh to get into the
war and made it look like Pearl Harbor required that.
Teddy Roosevelt did a lot and progressive movement, but basically
(48:13):
and he was pretty good on race at home. He
had Booker T. Rock Washington come to the White House,
but he didn't think much of four people around the world,
and he was kind of an imperialist. Lincoln even bless
his soul in his first inauguration, and a desperate attempt
to save the Union, actually promised never to free the slaves.
(48:39):
Jefferson was a smart fellow, and he said and notes
on the State of Virginia, of which I have two
first editions, and they have read very carefully, that when
he thought of slavery, he trembled to think that God
is just, but he didn't tremble enough to go sign
the paper free in all his slaves. Then, people that
(49:03):
at least for me, weren't interested in broadening read of
people enough would sometimes do something that would just floor you,
Like I was glad President Reagan signed that immigration reform.
I was glad George W. Bush wanted to have immigration reform,
and he knew darnwell. The reason we weren't getting it
(49:24):
was because his political base didn't have the same level
of confidence that he did that he could go with
me to South Texas and have any kind of community
meeting and he could walk out of there with enough
boats to beat me. That's what he believed. In other words,
he wasn't afraid to treat people like they had half
(49:45):
good sense, like you could make arguments and and we
could do this together. We should celebrate this. This is
an old documentary's constitution, it's an old office of presidency,
yet it's still knew every day because it's just carrying
your hopes for a more perfect union. When I served,
(50:05):
that's what I try to do. I tried to work
with everybody. So I think we need to think about
taking another bite at this inclusion apple. This is a
war in America between inclusive tribalism and devisive tribalism. Y'all
clapped when I said it was great, U V A
(50:27):
one n C double A. But you didn't want to
go of duct the teams that it had to be
to get to the championship, right. I hope that's right,
but you get the point. I'm trying to make we there.
We're all tribal. Heck that we do identity. We have identities.
That's fine, and there are good reasons why some people
(50:47):
have resentment. But I'm just telling you we need the
president to speak for a bigger we two people, not
a smaller one. So I want you to think about
all that. I also want you to know that no
president ever can win them all. And I kept score
when I served. I kept score in a very deliberate
(51:12):
way about my progress for meeting those things. I know
what I didn't do. I wish I'd been able to
pass universal health care. I wish I had clothed the
whole door on the Middle East tea steel. I wish
we'd gone into Rwanda earlier. I wish you know a
lot of things like that. I have very specific ideas
(51:33):
I wish I'd been able to do, And because when
I kept score, I know how much we did get done.
It's good to keep score, but it's also important to
know that if you try and fail, if you keep
on trying, things will be better than the otherwise would.
In the first four years after I left office, for example,
(51:54):
there were three times as many violent related deaths among
the Israelis, and the palace then ends. And in the
previous eight years when I was there, why because they
all gave up on the peace process. They stopped trying
for four years. And I could give you a billion
other examples of this. That's the last thing I want
to say. We had this year, twenty years ago, we
(52:17):
had I think it was the twenty years ago. The
thirtieth anniversary of the moonwalk would be fifty years ago,
like nineteen nine, isn't that right? So NASA brings me
a moon rock in a vacuumpact deal and it's carbon
dated thirty years old, and we're all sitting nerve appropriately
odd and taking pictures, and the surviving astronauts were there,
(52:41):
and I said, how is that thing? And they said, well,
I've been carbon dated at three point six billion years.
I said, may I borrow it? We can't just go
pick up a moon rock, you know. And I said, now,
I'll give it back to you, and I've got it
well guarded as you can see. I said I really
need this rock, and they looked at me like, oh
(53:04):
my god. The presidents lost his mind. I said, I
really need this rock. So the next day I had
a delegation from Congress come to see me. This is
after the whole one impeachment deal was done, and the
Republicans were sitting here and the Democrats was sitting here,
and all of a sudden they started fighting. And I
(53:25):
listened to him, talked to three minutes. I said, wait
a minute, everybody, take a deep breath. Look at that rock. Yeah,
and look, I said, at rock. I just got it.
It came off the moon and at three point six
billion years old. I said, now we are all just
passing through. What do you say was settled down and
get something done? And I said, be so. I think
(53:55):
the job of the president to help make our union
more perfect. I think the position of head of state
on some rare but significant days is even more important
than the job of chief executive. That's when I started
with what Governor mccaullull said, Petrew Charlottesville. I think life
(54:17):
is short and that should make you feel bigger, not smaller.
And if you have a period of time when you're
not sure you believe that we can make our union
more perfect, when you're not sure that you can find
somebody to be president who will lift this up instead
of tear us apart. When you're not sure where you
should keep knocking on the door of the current administration,
(54:40):
think about this. We just got to see a picture,
every one of us, not that everybody in this audience did,
in the newspaper, the first photograph ever made available to
Earthlings at least, of the black hole in the universe,
fifty five million light years away, in one of the
(55:01):
one billion plus not planets galaxies in our universe. We're
on this little piece of there are the third rock
from the Sun, in one tiny little solar system, in
one galaxy of a billion. A couple years ago, Hillary
and I went to Hawaii to the see the Keck
(55:23):
telescope for the biggest one in the world. And we
were up there talking to the scientists, and I never forget.
It was January. It was eighty nine degrees on the
ground and eighteen to the time we got up there,
and I'm looking into Andromeda in the telescope. And then
we go back and we start, you know, we had
a cup of coffee with torn I said, you guys
(55:43):
ever argue about where there's life on other planets? He said,
oh yeah, I said, is there are a difference of opinion?
They said huge. I said how much? He said, oh,
there are those of us who think it's eighty five likely,
and those of us who think it's ninety five percent,
like m H. And he said, if you look at it,
(56:04):
that's quite a large range, because there's a lot of
stuff out there now. While I trying to say that,
when I get really discouraged, I try to think of
something big like that that puts our little fastened lives,
and that the black hole has such a powerful it's
(56:27):
so big, and its magnetic pool is so great that
if fire entire solar system went by close enough, it
would be sucked in and disintegrated immediately into a pile
of dirt that could fit in a thumble. I think
of that. If that's true, not so important to be
(56:47):
on Mount Rushmore? Is it so? When? Really, it does
not make the life of any public service less significant.
It makes the trappings, the image the bs less significant.
(57:10):
You've just got a little bit of time. I got
through a lot of taking pictures with all your undergraduates here.
Then I thought, man, I remember this like it was yesterday,
But it wasn't yesterday. It was more than fifty years ago.
It does not take long to live a life, and
we are so blessed to be here. We're blessed. You
were blessed that Thomas Jefferson thought this was important that
(57:32):
to put on his tombstone we are blessed to be
born in America. When we did, we should not be
despairing if we're worried about America being divided. There have
never been permanent gains, are permanent losses and human affairs,
and we got a lot of hay in the barn.
We just need to saddle up. I mean they so
(58:00):
I asked you to think of this. Do not return
the meaning rhetoric with de meaning rhetoric. Gove's people nice crazy,
just start raving crazy when you're not to him and
they show out. Did you know that? But that's not
what we shouldn't do it. He shouldn't do it. Because
(58:21):
here we are on this little planet, leading a miraculous
life in a time of discovery, given the responsibility to
keep expanding with the people and keep making our union
more perfect. If we do our part, chances are we'll
(58:41):
get a president he and I hope to God someday
she who certainly will do the same. Thank you, Thanks
for listening. For more, listen on Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(59:02):
you listen to podcasts in the meantime. Learn more about
our work to improve lives across the country and around
the world at Clinton Foundation dot org.
Hello. My name is David Blight. I teach American history
at Yale University, and welcome to a special episode of
Why Am I Telling You This? The Clinton Foundation Podcast.
As a historian, I've spent much of my career studying
the ever evolving ways that Americans and groups of Americans
(00:21):
have told the story of who we are and how
we got here. For generations, there has been a hunger
for a unifying narrative that answers those questions. But history
is not so simple. Since our founding America has been
shaped by triumphs and tragedies, progress and reaction, inclusion and exclusion.
(00:44):
Our history is complicated, in contradictory because it was made
by real human beings who, by our very nature, are contradictory.
As frustrating as that may be when we want quick
and easy answers from the past, it gives us all
a great deal to think about, debate, interpret, and reinterpret,
which is what history does. And in a time when
(01:06):
the dangers of historical ignorance are all too evident, it
is an investment that's worth the effort. So why am
I telling you this? Well, a few weeks ago I
listened to President Bill Clinton's keynote speech from the Presidential
Ideas Festival hosted by the University of Virginia's Miller Center.
I found the speech remarkable for the president's serious engagement
(01:28):
with the text of the Constitution, but even more so
for his historical grasp of this institution of the presidency
over time. President Clinton traces the evolution of the presidency
from our founding through the present day, and explores how
different presidents at key moments used the office and its
(01:49):
powers to build an America that more closely resembled our
highest aspirations, as well as how some presidents may have
misused or stretched their powers. Early in the speech, President
Clinton argues that every president has consciously or not made
two essential decisions that shaped the direction of his presidency.
(02:13):
One who constitutes we the People? And two what does
a more perfect union look like? Much like American history
has been marked by alternating periods of progress and reaction,
President Clinton argues that some presidents have governed with broad
definitions of who is included in We the People and
(02:35):
others with much narrower ones. Indeed, it is worth our
remembering the two thirds of our presidents before Abraham Lincoln
were either slaveholders or sympathizers with slavery, and worked to
preserve that institution. He covers a vast subject with impressive nuance,
and having seen some of the handwritten notes he prepared,
(02:56):
there was a lot more he hoped to address in
just an hour long speech, from the role of the
civil rights movement and other citizen led crusades as drivers
of change, to the many achievements of President Carter and
President Obama in expanding the definition of we the people.
President Clinton's speech is unique because it is a rare
(03:18):
blend of learned history and lived experience. Only forty five
people have ever been President of the United States, and
only five of them are alive today. To hear one
of them reflects so thoughtfully on the institution is a
treasure and a bracing reminder of why history matters. As
(03:39):
the Great James Baldwin wrote in the nineteen essay, history
is not merely something to be read, and it does
not refer merely or even principally to the past. On
the contrary, the great force of history comes from the
fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled
by it in many ways. And his three is literally
(04:01):
present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise,
concluded Baldwin. Since it is to history that we owe
our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspiration. That passage,
perhaps as much as any, captures the value of studying history. Ultimately,
President Clinton's speech is not a retelling of the past,
(04:24):
but a challenge to meet the demands of the president.
Past and present are always mingled. This speech is a
reminder of what the future of the institution of the
presidency can still be, especially as we celebrate Independence Day.
I hope you'll enjoy listening as much as I did.
(04:49):
Thank you. I think it's really important you're having this
presidential ideas, is really important for you to decide what
is the job, what do you expect of the president,
what the president is supposed to do. I want to
start by saying this, I'm I'm very proud of the
(05:11):
job that Governor mc collo did as governor, but I
was never more proud of him and then at Charlottesville,
because one of the jobs that we need, when our
conflicts are laid bare and our future is uncertain, is
for somebody to just stand up and say, look, we
do or don't favor division and by race, by religion,
(05:37):
by politics, by gender, bisexual identity, but you name it
and we do, or we don't favor bullying, beating, and
in one sad case, here killing people who don't see
things the way we do. Sadly, the response that we
(06:00):
got at that time from the White House was, well,
there were a lot of nice people on both sides,
But the governor of Virginia on that day was my
president when he said there was no place in this
commonwealth for racism, for anti semitism, for any form of
religious bigotry, for bullying, and for violence. Get out of
(06:24):
here and do not come back. So I did. Ok Now,
(06:52):
let's try to put this that into the context of
the whole sweep of American history. I hope when I've finished,
you will be more optimistic than you might be after
the news of the last couple of days. Uh. I
want to thank Bill Antholis in the Middle Center for
(07:13):
open organizing the session and for a really truly serious
and devoted study of the presidency. For all the hundreds
of thousands of pages that have been written about the
presidency and specific presidents, there's still a quite amount of
mystery about it. It remains an intensely debated institution and
(07:35):
it's always evolving. And that's the one thing I want
you to focus on today, that it's the Constitution talks
about the presidency. But we know that what people thought
that was two hundred years ago was not what they
think it is today. We know that many of our
(07:59):
early press and thought that they should have a restrained
view of the office. John Kennedy saw it as the
vital center of action. We know that we feel close
to some presidents alienated from others, and that the further
they get away from us, the more we see them
through a filter that somebody else built for us. So
(08:21):
I want you to just think tonight today, I mean
about the institution, the job. When I was in the
White House, I had there's a little room off the
White House, off the Oval Office that presidents have used
for various things. But I put an old fashioned bookshelf
up and I filled it with biographies and histories featuring
(08:44):
my predecessors, mostly my left well known predecessors. I made,
over the course of eight years, a genuine effort to
understand what their strengths and weaknesses were, and how they
did or did not fit with the time and have
define what it meant to be the president. One thing
(09:04):
about the University of Virginia. I talked with some of
you about it already today. Thirty years ago this year,
I was here at one of the most rewarding endeavors
of my public life, the National Education Summit, called by
President George H. W. Bush, with prior agreement of all
the governors, to bring the governors here with the charge
(09:26):
of spending an elevated couple of days in the physical
and psychic shadow of Thomas Jefferson, to develop national education
goals for the country. I'm telling you this, and I
think you know I am becoming a traga ut. You know,
I've lived in a time no longer relevant for the
(09:49):
current circumstances, and I know there's just a big tendency
for people that used to be something or another two
spend too much time I'm reminiscing thinking about how well
they did. I I have really tried hard not to
do this. I try every day to live in the
present and live for the future. But I do think
(10:11):
history is important in trying to get to where we
understand what is the potential of the presidency, what are
the obligations of the presidency, What are the choices before
us today? So the first interesting thing about the presidency
is that the Famers created what was at the time
(10:33):
a fairly unique position, a democratically elected title that is
both a job chief executive and the position head of state,
the voice of the nation. Now we all know that
when we started, the Framers were obsessed with preventing abuses
(10:54):
of power that they found inherent and monarchies, whether they
were hereditary or host So they tried to give us
a government that was strong enough to do important things,
flexible enough to adapt to change the circumstances, but full
enough of checks and balances to prevent a slide into tyranny.
I think, and I hope they did a good job
(11:17):
of all three. They were sobered by the French Revolution,
and so they distrusted unrestrained popular opinion and provided instead
for the selection of a president through electors selected by
state legislatures, with the right to vote just being advisory anyway,
(11:39):
and still confined to white male property owners. And if
God forbid. After all, these barriers were unsuccessful in giving
us unappropriate selection, and there was a tie in the
electoral college as Thomas Efferson and arin Burg discovered the
(12:04):
decision was deferred to the House of Representative Imagine what
would happen today there where we have a margin of
forty and we would still lose because every state only
gets one vote, no matter how big it is. It's
even more unequal than the electoral college. I mean, we
(12:24):
my party. But they were trying to limit abuses of
power and to slowly make the country ready for democracy. Well, thankfully,
as we all know the franchise that's gone away beyond
the quite male property owners. The voices of the electors
(12:45):
at least now have to reflect a popular vote in
their states. But the electoral college does make us less democratic.
Small D Article two states the basic powers and responsive
always the Presidency, commander in chief. The armed forces can
call Congress into special session, as the ability to enter
(13:08):
treaties and nominate judicial and executive officials with the advice
and consent of the Senate, and can issue pardons from
time to time. The President is required to give information
to Congress on the state of the Union and must
faithfully execute the law. Beyond that position is the head
(13:30):
of State, which in effect requires every president in some
form of fashion to align all the policies, appointments, and
initiatives into a larger mission being the voice of the nation,
a role most important in dealing with other countries and
in speaking to and for all Americans and trying times,
(13:53):
I think the best guide for what the mission of
the head of state is is found not an article too,
but in the simple one sentence preamble to the entire document.
Since every new president, let's wear an oath to uphold
(14:14):
the whole shebang, We the people of the United States,
in order to form a more perfect union, established justice,
insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the
general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves
and our prosperity. Do ordain and established this constitution for
(14:35):
the United States, we the people. That becomes the responsibility
of the president to work for read the people in
forming a more perfect union. So to do that, every
single president from George Washington's Donald Trump, consciously or not,
(14:57):
has had to define what more per for union means.
And in order to do that must first decide who,
according to the preamble, constitutes we the people. And I'm
(15:17):
telling you you can analyze every president from George Washington
to Donald Trump. If you can answer, who did they
think constitutes we the people that they work for? An
answer to? And what do they believe or did they
believe if they passed on constituted a more perfect union? Now?
(15:42):
Who is we the people? Suggest the people who supported
and voted for you? Is it all the people who
are eligible to vote but otherwise can't do anything for you?
Is it just people who look like you, pray like you,
love like you, speak the same other tongue as you do?
And do you really believe that's the declaration of independence
(16:06):
is right and that we are all created equal, entitled
to the same rights and freedoms, worthy of every opportunity
to freely make our own future and the life of
our country, or instead, do you think the most important
thing is the current dominant position of your crowd, however
(16:27):
you define that? And do you think it's okay to
have one set of rules for you in your crowd
and a different set for everybody else? Now, this question
has been answered vastly differently over two hundred years, some
more than two hundred, and sometimes even differently within a
(16:47):
single presidency, depending on what the question is it's best
not to be too sanctimonious about this, but it's still important.
It's very hard for democracy and doer if you really
believe you can institutionalize one set of rules for your
crowd and another for everybody else. So at best, when
(17:09):
you have a presidential election anyway, it's it's a vast
job interview, the greatest job interview in the world. And
all the people who vote are your employers. They get
to hire you or somebody. And the greatest thing is
every four years, beyond the bare words of the Constitution,
you get hired to do a job that they define
(17:33):
every four years. So you got to keep on your toes.
If you run more than once, because you're not, it
doesn't work what you did before. You got to keep
up with the changes in effect. The American people say,
at this moment in history, here are problems, solve them.
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Here are opportunities, seize them. Here are fears, ease them,
Here are our dreams, make them come true. And then
we have an election to argue about what all that means.
Today's complex national elections, with the rides of social media
(18:19):
and the difficulties of cybersecurity and all this stuff. You know,
a lot about are still largely determined by the culture
and the predisposition. Members of a given culture have to
vote in a certain way by the conditions extent at
the time of the election, which includes not just the
(18:40):
condition of the economy, but the condition of the election apparatus.
What are you the clean air is good, whether in
flint they could get water for their kids, conditions, then
the candidates and their campaigns, and finally the coverage of
them and both traditional and social media, because the more
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people who are in the electorate, the further away you are,
the more dependent you are on someone else's filter. Then, still,
through a institution that I lived, it's usefulness a long
long time ago, the electoral college. We figure out who's
going to be president, and then you know how the
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leader defines with the people and how to find form
a more perfect union. Will the new president take us
forward or backward? Will the new president make us more united?
Are more divided? We all feel heard valued seeing no
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matter who we voted for. Oh, we just sit around
and mope till the next election. I think the best
presidents have sought to define we two people in a
way that broadens both the idea and the reality of
who counts in this country. They have basically committed, each
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in their own way, given the options before them, given
the constraints they faced, to see we the people expand
from the few to the many. So far, all of
our presidents having acknowledged an opplcation not to block off
entire parts of the nation who didn't vote for them,
not to deprive people in those places of their rights,
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or restrict their participation in the life of the nation.
So far, they've had enough humility to know that no
one is right all the time, and power must be
exercised with some care. And they've had enough confidence to
accept Benjamin franklin Dry observation that our enemies are our
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friends where they sow us our faults. As President, my
often stated definition of making our union more perfect was this.
I thought my job was to widen the circle of opportunity,
to deepen the meaning of freedom, and to strengthen the
bonds of our community. I believe cooperation works better than conflict.
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I'd be diverse groups make better decisions, and homogeneous ones
and loan geniuses. I believe, over the long run, in
an interdependent world full of vast opportunities and profound challenges,
including not just climate change, but the fastest way of
species destruction, destruction and ten thousand years. I think we
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need all hands on deck, and we need a climate
in which we are looking for anybody that knows anything
with any kind of new idea. So let's just think
a real quick walk through history and look at a
few of our presidents and see whether, by any reasonable definition,
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but take mind, they succeeded in forming a more perfect union.
George Washington started with a blank slate and the big agenda,
and he was wildly popular. He won. He gave life
to the constitution, definition of the union, building in their
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national capital, establishing the first Executive office and cabinet, appointing
the first Supreme Court, supporting the creation of a national economy,
and with special attention to the symbolic power of being
head of state, voluntarily leaving office after two terms. I
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think he did a pretty good job of making our
union more perfect. Thomas Jefferson began slowly to expand the
idea of the we the people, to go beyond just land,
honored owners and the financial elite to include more of
the ordinary farmers and small business people of our then
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growing country, and then he vastly expanded the size of
America by buying Louisiana from Napoleon for fifteen million bucks.
And so I'm pretty indebted to him because if he
hadn't done that, I could have never become president. But
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he also expanded our imagination of what the country could
become through the Lewis and Clark expedition. It is very
interesting that in spite of the fact that he created
the first political party and was a good politician subject
to significant personal attacktion rumormongering, he was pretty tough, and
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he created a prey to essentially destroyed the Federalist Party
that grew up around George Washington and included Alexander Hamilton
and Chief Justice Marshall. Nevertheless, he wanted on his tombstone
none of the stunning array of federal positions he held,
(24:20):
think about it, Thomas Jefferson, President, Vice President, Secretary of State,
Envoy de France. Instead, he wanted it knowing that he
wrote the Declaration of independence in the Statute of Virginia
for religious freedom, and that he was the father of
the Streat University. He left this simple idea that the
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life of the mind was important. What you thought and
what your values were mattered, and that public service was
not necessarily of greater value than a life well lived
in another arena. We had a lot of stability given
the electorate. We should have, I guess, But in our
(25:05):
first forty years we had six presidents for from Virginia.
Three were strong times of this university, good thing for you.
We didn't have an anty trust law back then, so
they built the initial institutions required by Article two, beginning
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the with the inclusion of the common man with we
the people. But they still debated just about everything else,
and it was still the common man, not men and women,
and the common men were all white, not black or
Native Americans. In the mid nineteenth century, at the anti
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slavery movement really rose to gain traction, and massive waves
of immigrants flocked to the United States from our London, Germany. Principally,
some presidents and would be presidents insisted on for the
first time narrowing the idea of the people that we
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should right into law explicit exclusions of foreigners and African Americans.
But the opening shots at Fort Sumter, ironically, many of
the formerly disparaged immigrants who had been dissed themselves, found
themselves in places like New York City promoting sedition against
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the national government because they were terrified at having finally
found a tiny foothold in New York and a job
with a steady rage that if Lincoln won the war,
he'd free the slaves and they would all come to
New York and throw them out of work. Sound fromilire.
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So presidents had to deal with it. There were real
questions about not only the current carbronation, but the role
of the national government and dealing with all this. They
came to the head in the Civil War, and thank god,
Abraham Lincoln won. He ended slavery, preserved a union, vindicated
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government of by and for the people with the dramatically
enlarged conception of who the people were. After issuing the
Emancipation Proclamation, he gathered the votes the fast the thirteenth Amendment,
and in his last speech, just three days before he
was assassinated, he became the first president to raise the
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idea of full citizenship for African Americans. A last John
Wilkes Smooth was in the audience for the speech. Lincoln's
remarkable legacy expended actually well beyond the minor matters of
saving the Union and freeing the slaves, and included a
vision of post war America. In America, he hoped to
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lead to a broader future, to heal the wounds of
war and ease the anxieties that had driven it. He
signed the Homestead Act, supported the Transcontinental Realms System, and
established land grant universities. The one in my home state
was the first one established west of the Mississippi. At
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the cost of his life, he didn't make our union
more perfect. After Lincoln's death, the fourteenth and fifteenth Amendment
granted newly freed slaves full set of jeb equal protection
of the laws, and the right to vote unlesses grant.
A deeply underrated general and I think often underrated president
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faithfully tried to implement Lincoln's vision of reconstruction. He went
after the Clue Klux Klan and defeated him soundly. He
protected the right of to vote, and there was a
very large number A lot of Americans today still don't
know that there are really a very large number of
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African Americans elected to state and federal office in the period.
Whether reconstruction was being properly in force, then, as always
came their reaction, and in eighteen seventy six the government
New York, Samuel Tilden, a Democrat, was reported as winning
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the popular vote by two hundred people. There was to
be fair a lot of dispute about whether the goats
in the South were fully counted in where African Americans
were legitimately able to vote, but in the beginning the
votes of Florida and two other southern states were hotly contested,
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and Congress agreed to set up a special amission to
look into it and then to decide that whatever the
commission rules would be, how the votes would be counted.
There were to be seven Republicans, seven republic Democrats, and
a judge on the Supreme Court. They had a rotation
system for such things, so the first judge was a
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had been with the Democrat from Illinois who was a
friend of Abraham Lincoln's in pro Union. So the people
who were trying to make this happen actually got him off,
and he gave with an appointment to the Senate, and
they appointed someone who would certainly vote to see the
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Republican president. Rutherford Hayes So, a man who lost the
popular vote by quarter of a million in a country
which was about five as populist as it is today,
so the margin was quite a bit bigger than it was.
Even got to be president, and there was quite an
outrage about it. So Rutherford Face, who was a pretty
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distinguished union officer, made a reasonably good president. Some ways.
He started civil service from him, and he promised to
leave after four years. But the main thing he did
was to keep the burden of the deal that removed
the judge from the rotation by giving him a U. S. Senatecy,
and he got to the Union troops out of the South.
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The minute that happened, reconstruction was over, and all these
laws began to be clawed back in factor in practice.
In the case of Pussy D. Ferguson in the Supreme
Court finally legitimized a ruling. When you worry about the
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Supreme Court going hayward, if you are like me, it's
not like it's the first time it's happen. We've always
fought over these things. Who is meet that people anyway?
So Pussy says, you can absolutely practice legal segregation as
long as it's separate and equal. But everybody knew it
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was definitely separate and most definitely unequal. So there we
were reconstructions over the lost caused rears its ugly head.
In the South again Jim Crow becomes the order of
the day. Meanwhile, we've still got the emigrants coming in.
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Now they're from southern Europe and China and Eastern Europe,
reshaping our demographics. Just as we were entering the Industrial
Revolution in response to the concentration of big business and
the migration to the cities. And there are factories of
working people who used to be on the farm, the
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long hours, low pay, and dangerous condition men and women
and child workers faced. The progressive movement emerged. Eddy Roosevelt
used his bullet pulpit to expand the government's power to
preserve competition and not to become a monopoly control of country,
to promote basic safeguards for labor, especially women and children,
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to provide for the poor, and protect our natural resources
from plunder. Roosevelt and others they made our union more
perfect in their time, even as gem Crow persisted in
the South and segregation was far from unknown and the
rest of the country, and still in half our country
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women we're not part of the people. For decades, the
suffrage movement work to secure the right to vote without
a genuine champion in the White House. Finally, one hundred
years ago this year, and the last great act of
the progressive era, the Nineteenth Amendment, was ratified. Then came
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the reaction. It was like a bad movie. It's like
groundhog Day. Immigration from parts of the world deemed undesirable
was sharply curtailed of a surgeant KKK. You couldn't keep
him down to save your life. Came back to life.
(34:30):
Its peak membership was three million, and then John. After
World War One, we had our very first red scare.
Populist movements to unite poor sharecroppers and laborers foundered on
the rocks of division over race and pressure of lost jobs.
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Then we've got another chance. The depression came along. It's terrible.
That's something terrible has to happen for us to expand
the definition of we the people. But the depression came along.
Frank and Roosevelt moved to the White House. His Need
New Deal expanded the definition of we the people and
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included a vast diverse urban working class with poor farmers.
They had all been depressed and crushed from the dust
bowl to the Tennessee Valley up and down the East Coast.
Roosevelt used the power of the presidency to do something
never before dawn on this scale. He put many of
them back to work. Through the Works Progress Administration and
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the Civilian Conservation Corps, the elderly were given a basis
for dignity during Social Security. He encouraged the rise of
industrial unions to protect the rights of workers, and like
his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, he became what one author is
called a wilderness warrior to protect our natural resources. And
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after Pearl Harbor, he led us into and through World
War Two and envisioned the worldwide Organization of Nations committed
to avoiding another World war and another depression. By then,
it became obvious that we were the most important big
country in the world. So being president and defining we
the people both required us to acknowledge the unavoidable responsibility
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of the United States in the larger world. After President
Roosevelt did his part to make our union more perfect,
he died shortly after his fourth and auguration, and Harry
Truman led our transition into a peacetime economy, defended the
labor movement, made a serious attempt to get health care
for all, shouldered the burden of building the United Nations
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and the multinational organizations designed to restore our prosperity, rebuild
a bettered Europe, and contained the aggression of the Soviet Union.
President Eisenhower into the Korean conflict, protected South Korea, supported
the Supreme Court important to me in ordering Federal truth
to enforce Brown versus Board of Education and Little Rock,
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Arkansas byte integrating Little Rock Central High School. Shortly before
he was killed, President Kennedy asked Congress to pass the
sweeping civil rights bill, and Leonard Johnson did it when
some of his advisers urged him to go slow, fearing
that if he pushed civil rights, he would anger the
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Southern leaders in Congress. Derail is the entire legislative agenda
and cause God only knows what other kinds of crisis,
and Johnson reportedly snapped back at them, well, what the
hell is the presidency for that question? Is what this
confidence is all about. He knew the National Unity sponsor
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sparked by Kennedy's assassination, his big re election victory, his
big margin in Congress, him a lot of power, and
as he famously said, I intend to use it, and
use it he did for the Civil Rights Act, of
Voting Rights Act, that open housing law, any poverty legislation, Medicare, Medicaid,
head Start, and more, including an increase in the number
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of immigrants coming to this country. He knew he had
made our union more perfect. But LBJ was no dummy.
He also knew that he had destroyed his party's hold
in the South. He said, for at least a generation,
he was being conservative. Post LBJA, years passed proved that
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he was right. Beginning in nine eight with the election
of Richard Nixon and the strong showing of George Wallace
as white working class voters south and north, the Light
began to make their way into a party that previously
had not shown much interest in their economic well being,
but was eager to validate their of cultural promises and
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reinforced their opposition to what was going on in the
other party. Thanks to that, the problems of Vietnam, the
riots in the street, the increasing radicalism and of then
the left not the right, and sanctioning violence, we had
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a big shift in America. For most of the twentieth century,
each party had a political basis about the other twenty
would decide who our president was, and usually they reflected
about how the people felt, even though they may or
made out of voted that way. All of a sudden,
one party had at base the other had of forty.
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I know because I was in the forty. So between
sixty eight and ninety three we had twenty years of
more conservative presidents than one four year term for President Carter.
Then by two thousand, when the when the political basis
were basically even, we had what was essentially an even
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election decided by the Supreme Court in an opinion that
you can decide whe do you think. I think it
clearly restricted with the people, and I don't want to
take any time talking about it. You should go back
and read it and ask yourself. How could we have
such a momentous opinion and be told by the Supreme
Court this is a one off. You can never cite
(40:29):
this again. This has no presidential value. It basically said,
we have to stop a recount. We need a recount
by a uniform standard, but we can't do it because
day after tomorrow the electors have to be named according
to a statute in response to a natural disaster. That
statute had already by court order been ignored because who
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cared about it? I mean lots of time to name electors.
It was a deliberate attempt to restrict the definition of
we the people. So where does all that leave us?
We have to decide now some fundamental things. We are
living the most independent time in history, and we are
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still the best position country in the world for the
twenty century. But we are not as big as China,
and we are not going to be able to keep
them down. But we should be able to keep them
honest in trade deals and in matters the national security
involving particularly cybersecurity. So what's the best way to do that?
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How can we make our Chinese American friends and other
Ethian emigrants feel that they have a place here that
we How can we convince the Chinese that we have
no interest in embarrassing them, but we would like it
now that they have risen so far so fast, if
we could protect intellectual property and not be forced to
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share our technology, and we don't like being interfered with
cuber attacks. Can we cut a deal or not? Is
there any way we'll ever be able to have what
happened when I represented the Republicans that the Education Conference
here will there ever be enough either verification or trust
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or both for us to solve this problem. These are
serious problems. We do need an infrastructure program. It shouldn't
be a partisan issue. If we're going to be competitive.
There are all these things that we should be talking
about that could benefit everybody. We have not had anything
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but increasing intensity of partisan discord by and large since
the eighties. But until now, even in the toughest times,
there were always manifestations of expanding are more perfect union.
Ronald Reagan signed immigration reform in George Bush signed a
(43:07):
bill strengthening the Clean Air Act amendments. He signed the
Americans with Disabilities Act. He did a good job bringing
an end of the Cold War and trying to support
democracy in Russia, and he didn't do anything that hastened
the result we're a little with today. Richard Nixon signed
(43:31):
a bill creating the Environmental Protection Agency. Even presidence you
might not think of as being making our union more perfect.
They did things, every one of them. George W. Bush
passed PEP far, something I've done a lot of work
with because of my foundation, and it's safe. Lord knows
(43:51):
how many lives around the world and made people think
differently of the United States, and who also tried to
get immigration reform. We are unlikely friends. I made friends
with his dad and I called them after you got Alexa.
I said, I know you don't like me because I
beat your father. It's okay, I said, but I love
(44:11):
him too, and I'll make you a deal. I will
never talk about you the way you're guys talk about me. Never.
My wife's in the Senate, she's on the Armed Services Committee.
I may disagree with you, but I will always treat
you with respect and just simply say why I disagree.
If I can ever help you, I'd like to. We
(44:32):
then commenced a period of two conversations a year, last
thing thirty or forty five minutes, which lasted the remainder
of verse presidency. I did to a three errands for him.
And now my favorite project and my foundation, is the
leadership program we run together where we take people from
both parties that have or in mid career have important
projects and we bring them together at all these presidential
(44:55):
libraries and make them work together for six months and
then we there's moltentions. He links. When it's over, we
have a commencement, so he meets with him once. I
meet with him once than we did the commencement together
after the commencement. So far there has been no exception
(45:16):
of this. We've done it four or five times. The
Republicans come up to me, and the Democrats go up
to him and thank us, because they didn't know anybody
like the people they've been working with existed. Because for
all of our interdependence and all of our growing diversity,
we've been raising walls in our minds, partly because of
(45:39):
the curious information ecostructure in which we live, and for
all kinds of other reasons. I don't want to get
into that. All I want to say is that it
is my experience that it is almost impossible to extinguish
the urge to make our union more perfect. But there
are forces us who would by making sure that it
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becomes more ideological, more racially homogeneous, let's engage with the
rest of the world, and more dedicated to having one
set of rules for them and another set for us.
There are lots and lots and lots of members of
the other party they don't agree with that they're lying.
There now some people in our party who thinks we
(46:25):
should be. We should take a page out of that book.
Here's what I know. I'm seventy two and I'm not
running for anything. Zero sum solutions in an independent world
do not work as well as positive solutions. Diverse groups,
committed to the rule of law and believing in growing
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we the people will make better decisions over any relevant
amount of time than homogeneous groups or even longeniuses. We
can build a future together. A lot of the differences
of opinion could be resolved easily. What you worry about
(47:09):
today is the product of demographics in politics. Look, we
can all piss, you know when pest actually when we're
not running for anything. But everybody's ever been in politics
who wanted to make change has had to feed the
beast a little bit. Do you know how much do
(47:30):
you have to do to keep the power of reaction
at bay while you're trying to make politics do something good?
Don't forget Fdr, whom I admired very much, turned back
to St. Louis, full of desperate Jews trying to find
a place to live. Before he thought America was ready
to go into World War Two, he imprisoned Japanese citizens,
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including a two camps in my home state. And he
waited quite a long while mh to get into the
war and made it look like Pearl Harbor required that.
Teddy Roosevelt did a lot and progressive movement, but basically
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and he was pretty good on race at home. He
had Booker T. Rock Washington come to the White House,
but he didn't think much of four people around the world,
and he was kind of an imperialist. Lincoln even bless
his soul in his first inauguration, and a desperate attempt
to save the Union, actually promised never to free the slaves.
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Jefferson was a smart fellow, and he said and notes
on the State of Virginia, of which I have two
first editions, and they have read very carefully, that when
he thought of slavery, he trembled to think that God
is just, but he didn't tremble enough to go sign
the paper free in all his slaves. Then, people that
(49:03):
at least for me, weren't interested in broadening read of
people enough would sometimes do something that would just floor you,
Like I was glad President Reagan signed that immigration reform.
I was glad George W. Bush wanted to have immigration reform,
and he knew darnwell. The reason we weren't getting it
(49:24):
was because his political base didn't have the same level
of confidence that he did that he could go with
me to South Texas and have any kind of community
meeting and he could walk out of there with enough
boats to beat me. That's what he believed. In other words,
he wasn't afraid to treat people like they had half
(49:45):
good sense, like you could make arguments and and we
could do this together. We should celebrate this. This is
an old documentary's constitution, it's an old office of presidency,
yet it's still knew every day because it's just carrying
your hopes for a more perfect union. When I served,
(50:05):
that's what I try to do. I tried to work
with everybody. So I think we need to think about
taking another bite at this inclusion apple. This is a
war in America between inclusive tribalism and devisive tribalism. Y'all
clapped when I said it was great, U V A
(50:27):
one n C double A. But you didn't want to
go of duct the teams that it had to be
to get to the championship, right. I hope that's right,
but you get the point. I'm trying to make we there.
We're all tribal. Heck that we do identity. We have identities.
That's fine, and there are good reasons why some people
(50:47):
have resentment. But I'm just telling you we need the
president to speak for a bigger we two people, not
a smaller one. So I want you to think about
all that. I also want you to know that no
president ever can win them all. And I kept score
when I served. I kept score in a very deliberate
(51:12):
way about my progress for meeting those things. I know
what I didn't do. I wish I'd been able to
pass universal health care. I wish I had clothed the
whole door on the Middle East tea steel. I wish
we'd gone into Rwanda earlier. I wish you know a
lot of things like that. I have very specific ideas
(51:33):
I wish I'd been able to do, And because when
I kept score, I know how much we did get done.
It's good to keep score, but it's also important to
know that if you try and fail, if you keep
on trying, things will be better than the otherwise would.
In the first four years after I left office, for example,
(51:54):
there were three times as many violent related deaths among
the Israelis, and the palace then ends. And in the
previous eight years when I was there, why because they
all gave up on the peace process. They stopped trying
for four years. And I could give you a billion
other examples of this. That's the last thing I want
to say. We had this year, twenty years ago, we
(52:17):
had I think it was the twenty years ago. The
thirtieth anniversary of the moonwalk would be fifty years ago,
like nineteen nine, isn't that right? So NASA brings me
a moon rock in a vacuumpact deal and it's carbon
dated thirty years old, and we're all sitting nerve appropriately
odd and taking pictures, and the surviving astronauts were there,
(52:41):
and I said, how is that thing? And they said, well,
I've been carbon dated at three point six billion years.
I said, may I borrow it? We can't just go
pick up a moon rock, you know. And I said, now,
I'll give it back to you, and I've got it
well guarded as you can see. I said I really
need this rock, and they looked at me like, oh
(53:04):
my god. The presidents lost his mind. I said, I
really need this rock. So the next day I had
a delegation from Congress come to see me. This is
after the whole one impeachment deal was done, and the
Republicans were sitting here and the Democrats was sitting here,
and all of a sudden they started fighting. And I
(53:25):
listened to him, talked to three minutes. I said, wait
a minute, everybody, take a deep breath. Look at that rock. Yeah,
and look, I said, at rock. I just got it.
It came off the moon and at three point six
billion years old. I said, now we are all just
passing through. What do you say was settled down and
get something done? And I said, be so. I think
(53:55):
the job of the president to help make our union
more perfect. I think the position of head of state
on some rare but significant days is even more important
than the job of chief executive. That's when I started
with what Governor mccaullull said, Petrew Charlottesville. I think life
(54:17):
is short and that should make you feel bigger, not smaller.
And if you have a period of time when you're
not sure you believe that we can make our union
more perfect, when you're not sure that you can find
somebody to be president who will lift this up instead
of tear us apart. When you're not sure where you
should keep knocking on the door of the current administration,
(54:40):
think about this. We just got to see a picture,
every one of us, not that everybody in this audience did,
in the newspaper, the first photograph ever made available to
Earthlings at least, of the black hole in the universe,
fifty five million light years away, in one of the
(55:01):
one billion plus not planets galaxies in our universe. We're
on this little piece of there are the third rock
from the Sun, in one tiny little solar system, in
one galaxy of a billion. A couple years ago, Hillary
and I went to Hawaii to the see the Keck
(55:23):
telescope for the biggest one in the world. And we
were up there talking to the scientists, and I never forget.
It was January. It was eighty nine degrees on the
ground and eighteen to the time we got up there,
and I'm looking into Andromeda in the telescope. And then
we go back and we start, you know, we had
a cup of coffee with torn I said, you guys
(55:43):
ever argue about where there's life on other planets? He said,
oh yeah, I said, is there are a difference of opinion?
They said huge. I said how much? He said, oh,
there are those of us who think it's eighty five likely,
and those of us who think it's ninety five percent,
like m H. And he said, if you look at it,
(56:04):
that's quite a large range, because there's a lot of
stuff out there now. While I trying to say that,
when I get really discouraged, I try to think of
something big like that that puts our little fastened lives,
and that the black hole has such a powerful it's
(56:27):
so big, and its magnetic pool is so great that
if fire entire solar system went by close enough, it
would be sucked in and disintegrated immediately into a pile
of dirt that could fit in a thumble. I think
of that. If that's true, not so important to be
(56:47):
on Mount Rushmore? Is it so? When? Really, it does
not make the life of any public service less significant.
It makes the trappings, the image the bs less significant.
(57:10):
You've just got a little bit of time. I got
through a lot of taking pictures with all your undergraduates here.
Then I thought, man, I remember this like it was yesterday,
But it wasn't yesterday. It was more than fifty years ago.
It does not take long to live a life, and
we are so blessed to be here. We're blessed. You
were blessed that Thomas Jefferson thought this was important that
(57:32):
to put on his tombstone we are blessed to be
born in America. When we did, we should not be
despairing if we're worried about America being divided. There have
never been permanent gains, are permanent losses and human affairs,
and we got a lot of hay in the barn.
We just need to saddle up. I mean they so
(58:00):
I asked you to think of this. Do not return
the meaning rhetoric with de meaning rhetoric. Gove's people nice crazy,
just start raving crazy when you're not to him and
they show out. Did you know that? But that's not
what we shouldn't do it. He shouldn't do it. Because
(58:21):
here we are on this little planet, leading a miraculous
life in a time of discovery, given the responsibility to
keep expanding with the people and keep making our union
more perfect. If we do our part, chances are we'll
(58:41):
get a president he and I hope to God someday
she who certainly will do the same. Thank you, Thanks
for listening. For more, listen on Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(59:02):
you listen to podcasts in the meantime. Learn more about
our work to improve lives across the country and around
the world at Clinton Foundation dot org.
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