Friday, Jul 4, 2008
In a speech made earlier this month at Yale University, the former president reflects on "the first great struggle for the soul of the 21st century."
Oct 25, 2001 | Thank you very much, Mr. President, thank you for that wonderful introduction. And thank you for coming out in such large numbers today at such an important time for Yale and the United States. I would like to thank the mayor of New Haven, John DeStefano, and my great friend and former colleague, your member of Congress, Rosa DeLauro, for being here. I have two other friends, who like me are no longer in public office, but who made a great difference in what we were able to do. Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore. My great partner, Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico. Thank you for being here. I also have seen today a lot of people who were members of our administration. There are five or six of them out there, and so I appreciate Yale giving us a pretext for holding a Clinton alumni meeting today.
I was privileged to study here for exactly 1 percent of Yale's 300 years. I loved the law school. I liked my professors, and have stayed in touch with many of them over all these long years. One of them I was able to put on the Court of Appeals. One of them I tried to torment in class with disagreements and he lived to torment me -- my constitutional law professor, Robert Bork. We had great debates 30 years ago. Now that I replay them in my mind, they seem fresh today. I was fortunate enough to be here at Yale Law School with a phenomenal number of outstanding men and women who were my fellow students. One of them did become the United States senator from New York. Senator Schumer went to Harvard. Meeting Hillary was the best thing that happened to me at Yale, and maybe the only thing that really stuck over all of these 30 years.
I understand there was some discussion in the Yale community about whether this Tercentennial should go forward in the aftermath of the awful events of September the 11th. I thank you for going forward. It is what President Bush asked us to do when he asked to us get on with our lives, and it is particularly important at this time.
Marking 300 years of learning at any time would be a significant event. But marking it at this time, with a commitment to be a truly global university, is obviously profoundly important. For 300 years, beginning three quarters of a century before the Declaration of Independence, Yale has taught young people the wisdom of the past, the analysis of the present and the importance of looking to the future. Yale has asked hard questions and looked for honest answers. That is what I found here 30 years ago, and that is what I see when I look out on this vast array of faces today.
America is full of hard questions now. I have spent a great deal of the last three weeks in Manhattan, visiting the crisis center, ground zero, fire stations and police headquarters, and three schools -- two of them double schools because half the children were blown out of their own schools by the events of September the 11th. And I have found so many questions. Hillary and I went to an elementary school in lower Manhattan, where 9- and 10-year old students asked me these questions: "Why do they hate us so much anyway?" "How did that guy get all those people to commit suicide?" I never thought I would hear a 9-year-old ask a question like that.
The other day, I had a conversation with Mack McLarty, who was my first chief of staff and my oldest friend of 50 years. We were talking about the events of September the 11th. We had a conversation I believe thousands and thousands of Americans our age have had in the last three weeks. I said, "Mack, if we had been on that plane over Pennsylvania, do you think we would have had the guts to take it down?" He said, "I think so, and I hope so."
I have gotten calls from women friends of Hillary's and mine, who are mothers of young children from all over America with a simple question: "Bill, is it going to be all right? Tell me it's going to be all right." Well, first of all, it's going to be all right. I can tell you that.
Terrorism -- the killing of innocent people for political or religious or economic reasons -- is as old as organized combat. It's been around a very long time. If we look through history honestly, we find it in uncomfortable places. In the Crusade in which the European Christians seized Jerusalem, they burned a mosque, slaughtered 300 Jews and killed every mother and child on the Temple Mount who was a Muslim. But no campaign of terror standing on its own, without organized military combat, has ever succeeded in all of human history. Indeed, it is not the purpose of terror to succeed militarily. It is the purpose of terror to terrify, and I would guess that a lot of young people in this audience today who have never lived through such a difficult crisis have been understandably terrified.
Our country is highly diverse -- we have people here today from just about every country, every racial and ethnic group and every religious heritage. What terrorists seek, first of all, is to make us afraid of each other. And secondly, to make us afraid of the future: afraid to plan; afraid to invest, afraid to trust. That is what they seek. Therefore, terrorism cannot prevail unless we cooperate. It is not a military strategy, it is a psychological and human one. We have to give the people who attacked us permission to win, and I do not believe we are about to grant them that permission.
Mr. bin Laden and his allies misjudge America. They think we are fundamentally a weak, greedy, selfish, materialistic people. They think we are weakened by our lack of a national religion and imposed social order. But they are wrong. All Americans have been proud in these last days of the performance of our leaders, from the president, to the governor, to the mayor of New York; and yes, to the senators. I am very proud of my wife and her colleagues in the House and the Senate, and especially proud of the people.
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