Throughout CITIZEN you’ll see references to events, projects, initiatives, offices, funding, and other support over the years since leaving the White House. As I mentioned in the Acknowledgements, none of that would have been possible without the help of funders and people on the ground doing the hard work, and I didn’t have room in the hardcover edition of CITIZEN to mention as many of people and as much of the work as I would have liked. 

I hope you’ll take a moment to look over this website and get a deeper sense of the many people whose vast expertise, dedication, and hard work were so crucial to much of my post-presidential life. 

Disaster Recovery 

Haiti 

The small UN team for the Haiti earthquake relief included Jéhane Sedky, an Egyptian national, as communications director, and the welcome addition of Garry Conille, a Haitian doctor who had once had a well-known radio show in Haiti but was now working full-time for the UN. 

My then-chief of staff, Laura Graham, became our Haiti person almost by default. My personal staff was small, all the other Foundation people had assigned tasks, and she got along with the Haitian leaders and genuinely cared about the people. She came from a working-class family on Staten Island, and identified with the struggles of Haitian families and children. Over the next couple of years Laura helped us accomplish a lot of good things, and adopted two Haitian children. She traveled to Haiti several times without me to check on things, often staying at the home of Prime Minister Bellerive’s sister. When Laura left my office to take care of her kids, Greg Milne, who had been helping with Haiti issues, took over, did a great job, and is still supporting the Haiti Action Network. 

Because of the frustrations with domestic politics and the dominance of entrenched elites, I came to believe that we could do more good by directly helping independent business people and improving educational opportunities. They can still make a big difference. 

Magalie Dresse and her husband Joel started Caribbean Craft in 1990, and made it a majority-women-owned business in 2006. The company makes high-quality arts and crafts products mainly using papier-mâché. At the time of the quake, the business had never closed, even in the midst of severe storms and political violence. When their production facility and the homes of many of their workers were damaged in the earthquake, Magalie and Joel opened their home to their artisans who needed a roof over their heads. And they kept 200 workers going in tents in their backyard and in still-usable space in their factory. 

We supported the expansion of Magalie’s operations, especially in building partnerships with suppliers and retailers, including West Elm and Donna Karan’s Urban Zen, and provided four loans that allowed her to fill much larger orders from West Elm. Donna Karan got so excited about Haiti’s potential that she started producing Haitian products of her own. I especially like her vases made from tobacco leaves. They’re beautiful and sturdy, and she found a safe use for tobacco! Her deep commitment to Haiti was widely known in fashion and craft circles, and drew in others to try to help. 

Today, Caribbean Craft employs more than 300 artisans who repurpose recycled materials to create high-quality home décor and artisan products. Through all the ups and downs of nature and politics, including a local politician’s threat to her expansion when he wasn’t paid off, Magalie has kept a smile on her face and her eye on the ball. She has also inspired other women entrepreneurs, her customers, and all the rest of us to keep pushing. 

Shelley Clay came to Haiti in 2008, a spunky blond-haired American with a couple of interesting tattoos and the desire to adopt a child. When she saw how many mothers wanted to keep their children but were too poor to take care of them, she changed her mind. Now she wanted to enable poor parents to raise their own kids. She founded Papillon to give parents the chance to do that by providing training, materials, and working space to make artisan goods—jewelry, children’s clothing, pottery, ceramics, and household items—out of recycled and natural materials. Their first necklaces and bracelets were made of recycled cereal boxes! They were attractive, sturdy, and felt like beaded jewelry. Papillon also provided onsite daycare, medical benefits, a living wage (as of 2017, three times the minimum wage), and language, literacy, computer, and software training. Clay also started an NGO, the Apparent Project, which gives job skills to parents who don’t work at Papillon. 

The Clinton Foundation gave Papillon one grant to buy kilns so they could produce real ceramic products, and another to buy solar panels to power the kilns, and light the workspace and daycare center. Papillon gave good jobs to 300 artisans, whose products are now sold by retailers like Urban Zen and Chan Luu, making it possible for a lot of mothers to keep their kids and raise them well. 

Maryse Kedar is president of Royal Caribbean Cruise’s Haiti affiliate. She has been Haiti’s Minister of Tourism, Minister to the European Economic Union, and Ambassador to Belgium. But I know her as the co-founder and president of the Foundation for Progress and Development, or PRODEV, which operates schools and education centers in underserved communities. She also works with the Partners in Health schools in the Central Highlands and helped Denis O’Brien and Digicel keep their commitment to build 175 schools after the earthquake. 

The PRODEV schools have what every child deserves: safe spaces, modern technology, extracurricular activities, and scholarships to those in need. They pay fair wages and offer relevant teacher training. Maryse took me on a tour of the PRODEV school built by Digicel in Cite Soleil, a poor neighborhood that has often been torn by riots and violence. It was safe behind a wall that protected the buildings and quite a bit of play space. The Clinton Foundation gave them money to complete the kindergarten budget, fund operating costs for two years, and pilot a teacher training program that includes STEM education, experimental science, and French. 

After her government career, Maryse Kedar could have landed an interesting job and a comfortable life far from Haiti’s poverty, earthquake destruction, and dysfunctional politics. But she is always thinking about what Haiti could and should be. She has been a true friend to me and all of us in the Clinton Foundation and our CGI members. Someday, if this remarkable woman’s schools keep growing and do their jobs, there will be enough Haitians like her to make it happen. 

And there were dedicated male entrepreneurs with their own successes, including Duquesne Fednard, a long-time CGI member, who runs a vocational school, CETEMOH, with his brothers that provides marketable skills from auto and machine repair to computer programming and clean stove technology, and Conor Bohan who founded HELP, which provides university scholarships for bright students from the poorest, most remote areas, helps them find work afterwards, then enlists them to support the next batch of students. Ben Stiller was so impressed he gave them a million dollars. 

Katrina 

The Bush-Katrina Fund was chaired by Alexis Herman, my Secretary of Labor and Don Evans, President Bush’s Secretary of Commerce. The board included Mack McLarty and Bob Nash. Constance Newman was the president of the fund and did a terrific job. And all the services from accounting to legal to printing were donated. Operation Hope was established and run by the remarkable John Bryant. The Children’s Health Fund was led by Irwin Redlener, did an amazing job in New Orleans and throughout the region in bringing mental health and primary health services to the people through mobile health clinics. Henry Juszkiewicz and the Gibson Guitar company launched a program called Music Rising, led by Bob Ezrin and U2’s brilliant guitarist The Edge, to get instruments back into the hands of the city’s musicians, so central to the recovery of the culture and tourism. They made and sold 300 guitars out of wood collected after the storm. All told they raised $7 million, including $500,000 from our fund. 

 

The Clinton Foundation 

CHAI 

Our early funding came from the governments of Ireland, Canada, Jordan, Norway, Greece, Australia and the UK, and individual contributors from the US, Canada, and the Caribbean. CHAI was born at the beginning of a rapid increase of funding for global health generally, powered by many different kinds of entities: new international institutions like the Global Fund on AIDS, TB & Malaria, PEPFAR, UNITAID, the Global Vaccine Alliance (GAVI), and UNICEF; the increasing involvement of national aid efforts, especially the UK Department for International Development; and both traditional and new foundation donors, led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others which made substantial investments in CHAI’s work, including the IKEA Foundation (Denmark), the Dutch Postcode Lottery, the AIDS Life Ball (Austria), the Children’s Investment Fund and the Elton John Foundation (UK), and foundations based in America like the ELMA Foundation, one of our earliest partners, the Susan T. Buffett Foundation, Catholic Relief Services, the Sean Parker Foundation, and the American Cancer Society. 

Over the years we also continued to receive a lot of help from individuals. After seeing CHAI’s work in Africa, J.B. Pritzker, now governor of Illinois, and his wife M.K. gave 3 million dollars. Ray Chambers, a CHAI board member and WHO Ambassador for Global Strategy, led a committee to provide several million dollars a year to meet unforeseen expenses and provide bridge financing when government funders approved a project to begin after the start of a new year but couldn’t release the money to pay for it for several months. 

The Gates Foundation is CHAI’s largest donor. It also helps to finance the Global Fund, GAVI (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), and other international institutions. Those who seek and gain their support, as CHAI does, are provided reasonable but not excessive administration costs, expected to achieve clear objectives, and are monitored and evaluated on their success in meeting them. Over the years since Hillary and I sponsored the first White House Conference on Philanthropy in 1999, when Bill Gates said he thought it would be harder to give his money away wisely than it was to make it, he and Melinda have made giant contributions to improving global health, becoming increasingly knowledgeable and more deeply involved in both the policy details and the human impact of what they do along the way. I made a few stops in Africa with them several years ago and was impressed by the straightforward, direct way they interacted with men and women in small villages whose lives were on the line. Melinda was better than Bill and I were in asking hard questions and getting straight answers about their sexual practices and willingness to reduce the risk of transmission. 

Elton John’s foundation has accomplished impressive gains in improving AIDS treatment and care in Africa, many of them in partnership with CHAI. He’s been a good friend to Hillary and me, helping the foundation and supporting Hillary in her two campaigns for President. But when it comes to investing, his foundation is all business. CHAI has to win and keep its support on the merits. The same is true with all the other support we receive, as it should be. 

CHAI has also been working in many countries on a wide range of issues, thanks to the generosity of other donors, including another large donor with innovative financing, the Dutch Postcode Lottery, which has now established similar programs in Sweden, the U.K., and Germany. Unlike U.S. lotteries, where huge winnings go to individual ticket buyers, the Dutch Postcode Lottery draws a postcode number ten times a month and all ticket holders in the winning postcode (similar to a zipcode in the US) share the bounty. The Dutch lottery sets aside up to a third of funds raised for charitable donations in the Netherlands and around the world, and is a significant donor to international health efforts. It’s fully transparent about all its project funding and has done an enormous amount of good. I wish we had one like it in the U.S. 

The CHAI people who work in the field and other dedicated people who support them have made the most of these opportunities. Many of the senior management team have been with CHAI for a long time. Sixty of them who joined in the first five years, 2002-2007, like Alice Kange’ethe, Trevor Peter, and Rick Zall, are still there. With more programs and more people in more countries, CHAI also has had to invest more in human resources, management, and keeping up with the different tax and regulatory systems, while trying to keep overhead costs as low as possible. 

Eric Goosby is a major figure in the struggle for global health equity. He served in my administration as founding director of the Ryan White CARES Act and director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy. In the Obama administration, he was appointed United States Global AIDS Coordinator, charged with implementing PEPFAR, which expanded on his watch to millions in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia. He then became the UN Special Envoy on Tuberculosis and served on the Biden administration’s COVID 19 Advisory Board during the presidential transition. He currently serves on the board of the Clinton Foundation, and is a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, where he leads its Center for Global Health Delivery, Diplomacy, and Economics. 

CHAI’s China effort was was made possible by funding for the programs from Norway, Australia, UNITAID, and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation in the U.K. Our costs to operate were fully funded for a few years by the generosity of Fred Eychaner, who had already provided essential support when we started in the Caribbean, and who felt a strong connection to China. And we were blessed with a gifted staff and partners, especially Eric Goosby and Pangea; Ruby Shang, a Chinese-American who was our country director in 2004 and 2005, then our regional director in Southeast Asia through 2011; Sabina Brady, a longtime American expat who succeeded Ruby; and Christina Ho, a Chinese-American lawyer who had her first child in China and had first come into our orbit working with Hillary on healthcare in the White House years. 

Ed Wood led our efforts to work with Indian pharmaceutical companies on generics. Ed was an amazing person who stayed with CHAI and away from retirement for far more years than he intended, solving problems in ways no one else could. He passed away in September of 2020, mourned and celebrated by the CHAI community and many others who knew how many lives he saved with his skills, dedication, and heart. 

Our CHAI work in Rwanda was spearheaded by our CHAI Country Director, Beth Collins. Beth spent 17 years in the corporate world, as director at Disney Theatrical Productions, vice president at Universal Pictures, and CFO of Talk Media. She took a huge pay cut in 2004 at age 45 to take the Rwanda job after reading a book about the genocide, and realized she’d been so busy traveling the world for Disney she hadn’t even known there’d been a genocide. A colleague put her in touch with us, and Ira sent her where she wanted to go. She said she never had a moment’s doubt about her life-changing decision. I knew that if we could attract people like her, from both outside and within the countries we were working in, CHAI would do a lot of good. 

CHAI is now aiming for dramatic reductions in deaths caused by the major communicable diseases, AIDS, malaria, TB, and Hepatitis B and C; by cancer and cardiovascular disease, which are found about as frequently in developing countries as wealthy ones; and by premature deaths of children under 5, mostly from diarrhea, pneumonia, and “first day” deaths from complications of pregnancy, labor and delivery. 

With HIV/AIDS, CHAI wants to add to the 20 million people now on treatment another 10 million to reach near universal coverage with special focus on the prevention of mother-to-child transmission and HIV transmission among older adolescents, with care and treatment for children at levels equal to that of adults. 

Although the malaria death rate has been cut almost in half since 2000, malaria still causes 400,000 deaths a year. CHAI believes with more comprehensive testing and early intervention, it can be eliminated in Central Asia, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Southern Africa, and both child and adult mortality can be greatly reduced in West, Central, and East Africa where the rate of infection is highest. 

Tuberculosis remains among the top ten causes of death globally and is especially hazardous to people living with HIV. In India, for example, TB accounted for about three-quarters of all AIDS-related deaths in 2018. CHAI’s goal is to end TB deaths in cities with the highest TB incidence in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Nigeria, South Africa, and other high-infection urban areas, beginning with Chennai, India. 

Hepatitis C is one of the world’s most common infectious diseases, with 21 million people infected, 1.75 million new cases a year, and a death toll of more than 400,000 lives a year. In 2014, a new oral directly-acting antiviral (DAA) was approved which cures hepatitis C in twelve weeks. By 2016, the cost per cure had been reduced in 7 CHAI partner countries by 70 to 95 percent. CHAI believes it can lower the price more, enough to cure 16-20 million people, and eradicate Hepatitis C in CHAI partner countries by 2025. 

Hepatitis B affects more than 250 million people and kills more than 900,000 people a year. Unlike Hepatitis C it is vaccine-preventable, but not yet curable so that it requires lifetime ARV treatment, presently available to only 250,000 of the more than 15 million people who need it. It is mostly transmitted from mothers to children in utero or during delivery (70%). Birth Dose vaccination is 70-95% effective in preventing transmission among infants. CHAI aims to achieve a Hepatitis B-free generation through a large scale-up of Birth Dose vaccination and treatment to the 15-30 million people already living with it at prices similar to the cost of HIV medicines. 

CHAI also has ambitious plans for reducing cancer deaths, which are rising in low- and middle-income countries. As the efforts to reduce childhood deaths succeed, longer lives will bring more cancer. The work CHAI has done with Partners in Health at the cancer center in Rwanda proves that, with reductions in the costs of diagnosis, treatment and expensive therapies, and the expansion of routine services to more cancer patients, especially those with cervical and breast cancer, the disease need not be a death sentence in Africa and other poorly served countries in Asia. 

At the request of our partner nations in Southeast Asia and India, CHAI is developing a strategy to reduce and treat cardiovascular disease, a largely untreated cause of death there, and diabetes, already one of the top three causes of premature death in Southeast Asia and a major cause of blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, strokes, and lower limb amputations. 

And CHAI is committed to reducing premature deaths of children under 5, which accounts for a stunning 55% of all deaths under age 50 in Africa in 2015. That requires working with our partners to address the major causes of death, diarrhea and pneumonia; the rampant malnutrition that makes young kids more vulnerable; and a comprehensive effort to reduce the annual deaths of children in the first few days of life (nearly a million on their first day of life, another million in the first weeks), as well as the high death rate of mothers. Vaccines already avoid more than three million deaths a year but still don’t reach 20% of infants, babies, and adolescents. Over the next decade, CHAI will negotiate lower prices for effective rotovirus, pneumococcal, HPV, and other vaccines for mothers and children and deliver them, with a goal of saving another 500,000 lives a year. 

Diarrhea remains the second leading cause of children’s death—in 2015, 530,000 of them. More than 90% of all diarrhea-related deaths can be prevented by a simple inexpensive treatment of zinc combined with oral rehydration salts (ORS). CHAI started working on this in 2012, when only one percent of children in need were receiving the treatment. As a CHAI Board member, professor of public health, and mother of three young children, Chelsea is particularly passionate about children’s deaths from diarrhea. She went to Nigeria and Uganda to help kick off our programs there. Now, CHAI’s strategy calls for increasing zinc/ORS treatment in our partner countries to more than 70% of the target population. 

That brings us to the number one killer of children globally—pneumonia, claiming almost a million lives a year. CHAI believes it can reduce deaths by more than 50% in partner countries by properly screening and treating every child with respiratory illness. 

Finally, as CHAI first learned years ago in providing medicine for children with AIDS, in order for these goals to be met we have to do more to eliminate severe malnutrition and its consequences. In some sub-Saharan, South and Southeast Asian countries, more than 40% of children under five are so malnourished they suffer from stunting, which results in impaired learning capacity and a weakened immune system, leaving children less able to fight off infections, and to retain and process lifesaving treatments. Severely stunted children are five times more likely to die than well-nourished ones. 

CHAI is working with the government of Rwanda, the World Food Program, and the world’s leading provider of micronutrients, Royal DSM, to produce fortified food from local agricultural products for young children and pregnant and lactating women, which the government will buy at cost and provide free to its poorest citizens. The factory in Rwanda will also sell to the World Food Program and commercial buyers. If it succeeds, the model will be extended to other countries. 

A similar project is underway in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh to increase fortified food to young children, reduce high anemia rates of adolescents with iron-folic acid supplements, and supply purified water. The program will reach 4.5 million young children, 6.75 million adolescents, and 2 million pregnant and lactating mothers over the next three years. If it works, it will be expanded to other Indian states. 

Too Small to Fail 

 The National Diaper Bank Network, Penguin Young Readers, and Huggies are giving books to parents when they pick up their diapers. The National Head Start Association, the National Association for Family Child Care, and Harper Collins are giving books and materials to early educators to reach parents. Scholastic, Gerber, and the National Child Development Institute are distributing nutrition-themed books to promote conversations during family mealtime. Highlights for Children is providing animated videos and an activity book showing how parents can incorporate math learning into everyday activity. Bright Horizons Foundation for Children works with TSTF to provide Brightspaces for Learning in homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, and other places for children experiencing crises. 

 

In 2020, Chelsea unveiled the first Family Play Read and Learn space in a family court in Milwaukee, a TSTF partnership with the city’s Office of Early Childhood Initiatives and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, which hopes to expand the effort nationwide. 

 

Patti Miller, the CEO of TSTF from the beginning, kept the program going during the pandemic and developed a new bilingual “Indoor Activities Kit” to help parents keep their children learning and distributed it along with children’s books across the country. Our friends at José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen helped in the Covid hot zones of New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, and in Little Rock and the Navajo Nation. To offer activities that allow for social distancing, TSTF and the LaundryCares Foundation launched a partnership with Sidewalk Math of Lesley University. Sidewalk Math provides colorful designs for sidewalk games that help children learn numbers, shapes, and patterns while walking, hopping, skipping, and jumping. 

No Ceilings 

No Ceilings partnered with national and community leaders who were working to advance full participation of women and girls, including two female Presidents, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović of Croatia and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia; former Irish President Mary Robinson; two leaders of Vikalp Sansthan, an Indian NGO dedicated to ending child marriage and gender violence; a Haitian midwife; Shabana Basij-Rasikh, the President of SOLA, the School of Leadership of Afghanistan, and one of its students; Wanjira Mathai, following her mother Wangari’s example of environmental leadership in Kenya; American Latina leaders Nely Galan and America Ferrera; and other women leaders working all over the world. 

The Clinton Development Initiative’s work was overseen by Walker Morris, a remarkable North Carolinian who left a comfortable retirement to take on formidable challenges with energy, understanding, and an extraordinary ability to relate to the dreams, abilities, and unique qualities of the people he was trying to empower. He was both key to our success and clear-eyed when we needed to stop what wasn’t working. 

The Clinton Presidential Center 

All presidents since FDR have established presidential libraries to preserve records and artifacts that tell the story of their time in office and why it mattered. Similar institutions have been created in various forms for the presidents who served before the library trend began. The thirteen modern libraries work hand-in-hand with the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, which takes responsibility for the papers, photographs, films, gifts, and other physical objects. They are the property of the American people, and of priceless value to historians and citizens who want to know more about the administration. A President may keep gifts after leaving the White House but if they’re worth more than $250, you must pay fair market value for them. For example, I bought a large standing Jordanian jar given to me by King Hussein and a commemorative plate Yitzhak Rabin gave me shortly before he was killed to keep as mementos of our friendship and work for peace. 

When planning for my library began soon after my re-election, I already knew I wanted it both to be the repository for those important records, and to provide a clear picture to people in America and around the world of how my administration affected them. I wanted everyone who came—whether or not they voted for me—to see that what government does and doesn’t do has a real impact on their lives, and on lives far into the future. 

To carry that work forward, I had incorporated the Clinton Foundation in Little Rock in December of 1997. Although we would subsequently open Clinton Foundation offices in New York and in the Boston area, some of the core functions of the foundation would remain in Little Rock at the Clinton Center. I had visited several of my predecessors’ libraries and museums, including those of FDR, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and President George H.W. Bush at its opening ceremony at Texas A&M in College Station in 1997. They showed me different possibilities for combining a historical archive, explaining the big events in the president’s service, and more recently, the ongoing philanthropic work of an ex-President. 

I first had to decide where to build the library. My Georgetown classmates had pledged to seed the library with $30 million if I affiliated it with my alma mater and built it in Anacostia, a poor neighborhood in Washington. They knew I loved Georgetown and cared about the capital city. On several occasions I had supported improvements in the quality of life for its permanent residents and tried to protect its government from excessive Congressional interference. 

I was moved by the offer, but I knew I had to put the library and Presidential Center in Arkansas and wanted to put it in Little Rock, where our family had lived from 1977, when I became Attorney General, until I became President sixteen years later. I owed the chance to become President to the people of Arkansas, and I wanted my library and Presidential Center to be in Little Rock, closely linked to the community and a boon to the local economy. Also, the capital city has a good-sized airport and is on an interstate highway in the middle of the country, well within driving distance for the working people who had given me so much support and were too often overlooked in Washington. The city of Little Rock provided a 28-acre parcel of land on the Arkansas River, next to an old downtown area that was already being revived and close to the Governor’s mansion where Chelsea had lived most of her young life. 

After studying the work of several gifted architects, I selected Jim Polshek and his partner Rick Olcott, who had designed some wonderful buildings, including both the Rose Center planetarium at the Natural History Museum and an innovative remodeling of Carnegie Hall in New York, and a beautiful art museum on the Stanford campus. And I asked Ralph Applebaum to design the exhibits because of his powerful work on the Holocaust Museum in Washington. 

Throughout the lengthy design process I took an intense interest in the plans, which went through several iterations. Jim Polshek once said, only half in jest, that I was the worst client he ever had, because if he came to see me after a six-month hiatus and had made even a small change in the drawings, I would immediately ask him why he had done it. I did have strong feelings about the overall look and feel of the facility—it had to be open and filled with light with as much glass as possible—and I wanted it to serve not only as a traditional library but also as a living, breathing space that would tell the story of my eight years, welcome traveling exhibits, cultural events, school activities, and other programs and uses that hadn’t been developed yet. Two good examples of the latter are the Clinton School of Public Service, the first ever program in which students can earn a Masters in Public Service rather than in public policy, and the Presidential Leadership Scholars Program which we run with President George W. Bush’s library, bringing together mid-career professionals to study leadership and decision-making at our libraries and those of his father and of LBJ. 

We unveiled the final design of what was to be formally called the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in December, 2000, just a month before my second term ended. At the groundbreaking ceremony in Little Rock a year later, I told those gathered that “the spirit behind the whole project is not only to help people understand what was going on in America over the eight years I served as President, but mostly to help them understand what kind of country we are becoming, what our opportunities and responsibilities at home and abroad are, and what kinds of choices we should make.” 

In the years between the incorporation of the foundation and the opening of the Center in 2004, we worked hard to raise the $165 million we estimated it would take to finish the project and the legally required endowment of 7% of construction costs, much of it from small donations. There were a few delays due to the condemnation of the existing structures on the site and the related acquisition of the land by the city of Little Rock, which would then lease the land to the library in perpetuity. It had been an area of neglected warehouses and other older buildings, one of which, the old Choctaw Railroad Station, built in 1899 and on the National Register of Historic Places, was to be refurbished and incorporated into the overall design. Needless to say, there were plenty of obstacles, both expected and unanticipated along the way, including one eminent domain issue that had to be decided by the Arkansas Supreme Court, which ruled in our favor. But I had a good team in Arkansas that solved each problem as it arose, especially Dr. Dean Kumpuris, the driving force on the City Board, Skip Rutherford, who was overseeing the project for us in Little Rock and later became dean of the Clinton School, and Stephanie Streett, who has served as the Center’s director since the very beginning after working all eight years in the White House. We held a topping off ceremony in May of 2003 and now, just a little more than a year after that, the William J. Clinton Presidential Center was finished and ready to be unveiled. 

It was beautiful, and faithful to the design I had fretted over, a tribute to the many thousands of people who directly or indirectly brought it into being, including the more than 1600 workers who had labored to build it, most of them employees of my long-time friend Bill Clark, who brought the project in on time and under budget. The final design of the main building, after some alterations, including a 90-degree turn so that the structure, rather than stretching alongside the Arkansas River, soared above and toward it. It now resembled an elongated glass-enclosed bridge—an appropriate design for “A Bridge to the 21st Century,” which had been my campaign slogan in 1996 and now was the Center’s theme. After it opened, a wag from a British newspaper compared it to a double-wide trailer, a comparison which tickled rather than irritated me. I liked the implication that such a magnificent structure could also evoke a more down-to-earth reaction, if for no other reason than to make more people feel welcome. I especially loved the exhibition space, inspired by the grand classical features of the Trinity College library in Dublin, which I first saw as a young man studying abroad. It was bathed in light from special protective glass. I was also impressed with the archive space, which housed, well-protected and underground in a connected building, the two million photographs and 80 million pages of documents, the largest collection to date. 

Following two days of preliminary activities, including the launch of City Year Little Rock, a speech to the local Chamber of Commerce, and several receptions, the dedication ceremony was an interesting, unforgettable occasion. We were delighted to host the many friends and dignitaries, including current and former heads of state were able to attend, as well as more than 30,000 citizens. Presidents Carter, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush graciously attended and spoke, and the audience included the families of other presidents, including Susan Eisenhower, Caroline Kennedy, Tricia Nixon Cox, Lynda Johnson Robb, Luci Johnson and Chip Carter. President Ford, who was then 91 and ailing, sent his regards but was unable to come. Al Gore and Tipper attended, as did John Kerry, who got a warm welcome from the crowd. Foreign dignitaries included President Shimon Peres of Israel, Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, and Prime Minister Jean Chretien of Canada. 

The day was marked by one of Arkansas’ more spectacular rainstorms. It had begun raining the day before, but the forecast had called for it to end in the morning before the ceremony began. It was not to be. The downpour intensified and never let up. Thank goodness we had provided rain gear for the crowd, and nearly everyone there persevered through two hours of what my mother had always referred to as “liquid sunshine,” braving the elements without drowning thanks to the umbrellas and ponchos. Most people maintained their patience and sense of humor, and as far as I know, no one came down with pneumonia. 

There was wonderful music from a local church choir; African drummers; my favorite children’s group from Colombia, Los Niños del Vallenato, which was still a sensation in Latin American singing for peace in the endless war over politics and drugs; and finally, my friends Bono and the Edge from U2. Besides the Presidents, six Americans who had been affected by my work spoke, including a young AmeriCorps volunteer, a mother who had been on welfare and was now working, and a man who, because of the Family and Medical Leave Act, had been able to spend time with his terminally ill daughter. Their voices rang out through the falling rain, reminding us all of the positive effect public service can have on peoples’ lives. 

When it came time for the other Presidents to speak, none of them disappointed. President Carter reminded me of when we first met and teased that he had at first mistaken me for a messenger. He also acknowledged, for the first time, that the Cuban refugees he sent to Arkansas in 1980 might have had something to do with my defeat in my first re-election campaign as governor. That it did. The first group of Cubans rioted and the federal troops said they couldn’t keep them on the base. When I forced them back and secured the area, we got a new security agreement and a White House pledge that no more refugees would be sent to Arkansas. Then the pledge was broken when the Cubans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were relocated to Arkansas. Breaking the pledge cost President Carter Arkansas’ electoral votes and 6% of the voters said they voted against me because of it. I lost 52-48%. Still, Carter’s humorous understatement got a laugh and appreciative applause from the audience, especially the Arkansans. 

President George W. Bush, whose father I had defeated and who, just two weeks before, I had been campaigning against, was kind, funny, and erudite in his remarks, a harbinger of the friendship we were building. And President George H.W. Bush was characteristically self-deprecating in reliving our hard-fought election battle, saying at one point that I was a natural politician and how he “hated me for it” which got a big laugh. 

Hillary was last, and introduced me with a lovely speech that included her memories of the first time I took her to Arkansas, driving her from Little Rock seventy miles west to Russellville, so that I could take her home to Hot Springs through a beautiful stretch of the Ouachita Mountains and stop at places I’d come to know when I ran for Congress in 1974. Then she said of the library, “This building is like my husband; it’s open, it’s expansive, it’s welcoming, it’s filled with light,” and it represents “America’s unique capacity to bridge divides and bring people together.” 

I concluded the wet ceremony by thanking those who had come to share the day and the many others who had made both our symbolic and our actual bridge to the 21st century a reality, and by reminding the assembled crowd of the principal challenges still facing us: 

I believe our mission in this new century is clear. For good or ill, we live in an interdependent world. We can't escape each other. And while we have to fight our enemies, we can't possibly kill, jail or occupy all of them. Therefore, we have to spend our lives building a global community and an American community of shared responsibilities, shared values, and shared benefits. 

Today this may sound naïve. The right wing’s skill in driving white and a good number of Latino and Asian-American voters away from our common interests into our identity corners, coupled with their structural advantage in the electoral college and their constitutional advantage in the Supreme Court, threatens our capacity to bridge divides rooted in separatist identities. They fan the flames with each new issue, most recently with new voting fallacies and new attacks on transgender people. They need a “them” for “us” to fight. But I remain hopeful. I’m still betting on America. 

Meanwhile, in the years following that rainy day up to the present, the Clinton Presidential Center has more than lived up to its promise. Already a Silver LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) designee by the U.S. Green Building Council when it opened due to its incorporation of sustainable and energy-efficient elements, and the first Presidential library to have that distinction, the Center was able to achieve the top LEED certification for Existing Buildings, Platinum, in November of 2007—the first federally maintained facility to do so. In April of 2014 the Center’s old Choctaw building received a LEED Gold for Existing Buildings certification—becoming one of the nation’s oldest LEED-certified buildings. 

In 2011 two park projects opened just adjacent to the Presidential Center. One was the Clinton Presidential Park Bridge, an old Rock Island Railroad drawbridge that had been converted to a pedestrian bridge across the Arkansas River and marked the completion of the 15-mile Arkansas River Trail, which runs along both banks of the river. The other was the William E. "Bill" Clark Presidential Park Wetlands, 13 acres of restored wetlands, elevated walkways, and trails that showed off the beauty of the area, with displays explaining the significance of the wetlands to the river’s unique ecosystem. It was a fitting memorial to my good friend and outdoorsman who died in 2007, after a rough bout with cancer. The family asked that any memorial gifts be devoted to the wetlands. A few years later the bridge—and two others nearby—got a beautiful LED lighting upgrade through funds donated by Entergy and others. 

The Center has hosted millions of visitors, a tribute not only to the institution itself but also to the ongoing commitment of the staff to make each guest’s experience the best it can be. The lion’s share of this personal attention is provided by the legendary corps of volunteers who, since opening day, have embraced the Center and its mission. On June 6, 2021, the 77th anniversary of D-Day, I gave a Twitter shoutout to our oldest volunteer, World War II Navy veteran LeMoyne Jones, who was an active up until his death in 2023 at age 97. The Little Rock Convention and Visitor’s bureau has been a key to the Center’s success as well. 

Some of the exhibitions and events hosted at the Center since its opening include a rare showing of the Emancipation Proclamation, coinciding with the 50th Anniversary of the Central High desegregation crisis in September 2007 and attended by each of the Little Rock Nine. On World AIDS Day in 2008, the Center hosted a symposium with special guest Stephen Lewis, the former U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, and displayed the single largest traveling section of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. And in October 2013, the Center, in partnership with the National Archives and the CIA, hosted a symposium on intelligence and policymaking during the Bosnian War, including a discussion of the imminent declassification of intelligence records from the period.

The Clinton School of Public Service, which is housed at the Center and is part of the University of Arkansas system, continues to produce graduates who have spent two years in real-world-based study in public service fields like social and economic justice, healthcare, the law, corporate responsibility, environmental sustainability, and education policy. At the time of this writing, XXX degrees have been awarded and alumni are pursuing lifechanging work in Arkansas and across the U.S. and the world. 

One important recurring event hosted by the Center and the Clinton School is the Frank and Kula Kumpuris lectures series, established by the Kumpuris family in honor of their parents who played a major role in Little Rock’s civic life and were huge supporters of mine beginning in the early 80s, to bring distinguished speakers from all over the world to Little Rock for free public events. Since the program launched in 2006, there have been more than 30 programs, featuring Nobel Prize winners, former world leaders and cabinet secretaries, biographers, singers, and more. I’ve had the opportunity to speak a few times, including once with Hillary, and I always enjoy the hometown crowd, never more than on September 3rd, 2019, when I took the stage to introduce Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she sat for an interview with Nina Totenberg. It’s a tribute to how much Justice Ginsberg was beloved, respected, and admired that the event had to be moved to Little Rock’s Verizon Arena because advance interest in the event had become so intense, it was described by the Arkansas Times as “a fervor.” The crowd filled the arena and there were thousands more who wanted to come but couldn’t get in. 

Justice Ginsberg, whom we would lose a year later, was as sharp, funny, and wise as ever, and captivated the crowd. I’ll be forever grateful that the event gave me a chance to spend time with her, one more opportunity to witness her unique combination of humanity, brilliance and common sense. At a small dinner afterward, we were joined by Carlotta Walls Lanier, the youngest member of the Little Rock Nine, the brave children who integrated Little Rock Central High. Carlotta grew up to become an impressive, accomplished woman, a model of the opportunities for women and minorities Justice Ginsburg had fought for all her life. 

There have been many other memorable events held at the Center, including a speech I gave in 2013 supporting President Obama’s rollout of the Affordable Care Act, and more recently, a conference Hillary and I hosted in 2019 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Community Development Financial Institutions, or CDFI, Fund, and other inclusive economic strategies my administration had put in place or strengthened, like Rural Empowerment Zones and the New Markets Tax Credit. Rather than a look backward, the conference stressed the importance of addressing our current income and wealth disparities and how we can better support underserved communities, small businesses, and entrepreneurs. We didn’t know at the time how, only a few months later, Covid-19 would make these problems so much worse, and how we would soon be devoting even more of the Clinton Foundation’s efforts towards helping build a more inclusive economy. 

 

Friends, Philanthropists, and Supporters 

Nima and Joe 

Joe Kiani came to Southern California from Iran at age 9. He spoke no English at first, but graduated from high school at 15 and went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from San Diego State University. In 1989, at age 25, he started Masimo, a medical technology company whose ground-breaking pulse oximeter technology is widely used by hospitals and physicians to improve patient treatment and outcomes and, as I can attest, also comes in an easy-to-use small home version that allows people to monitor their own bodies. 

But what drew me to Joe was his international Patient Safety movement, dedicated to reducing to zero the number of avoidable hospital deaths. About 200,000 people were dying in hospitals every year when Joe started his movement almost a decade ago. Influenced by the Clinton Global Initiative, he began bringing together people from all over the world with a stake in hospital patient safety to identify and implement the necessary procedures to eliminate avoidable deaths. The Patient Safety movement has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. 

Joe also accepted the challenge to help with the opioid crisis. On May 5, 2022, I went back to Arkansas to visit Masimo’s facility in Little Rock, a modern warehouse distribution operation with a modern research and development center. On this day, Joe showcased two new products that if widely deployed, could make a big impact in reversing the opioid crisis. The first, Bridge, is an FDA-approved, small-nerve simulator that looks like a long hearing aid that fits on the outside of the ear attached to small wires with pads on the end that stimulate the cranial nerves. Just 15 or 20 minutes of nerve stimulation has been found to reduce opioid withdrawal symptoms by as much as 80%.  If we can get this into every community, along with the necessary training for healthcare professionals, it could revolutionize the recovery rates for opioid addiction. 

The second device, the Masimo SafetyNet, is an oxygen monitoring and alert system that monitors breathing even during sleep. This could buy precious minutes to save the lives of people who have mixed opioids and alcohol and fallen asleep. The Little Rock people who are involved in harm reduction, including faith leaders and people who do night patrols armed with NARCAN were especially excited about this. FDA approval is pending, but it has already been approved in Canada and Europe. 

The second star I know is Nima Taghavi, who had immigrated from Iran to Southern California at age 9. He began selling video games in his early teens at the local Swap Meet to support his family. He built a video game company with a few hundred million dollars in sales when I was president, sold it in 2005, then co-founded Solutions 2 Go, which became the largest video game distribution company in North America in 2009. In 2018 he joined the Clinton Foundation Board, after years of bringing in new donors to support our economic empowerment and health efforts. 

Joe and Nima are powerful arguments for a generous, sensible immigration policy that rewards hard work, good ideas, and an inclusive community. 

Bono 

Our friendship had begun by accident during the 1992 presidential primary campaign, when U2 and I were staying in the same hotel in Chicago and got together for a talk. Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr. had already been at it for a decade, producing powerful music filled with timeless, often spiritual themes. Over the next three decades they would gift us a huge library of songs, many getting to the raw truth of contemporary matters. When I went to Belfast, Derry, and Dublin in 1995 to push the peace process, U2 was in the Bank of Ireland building in Dublin where I waited for the chance to speak to a large crowd waving American and Irish flags. U2 waited with me, and Bono gave me a 1938 signed book of Yeat’s plays, in which he wrote, “Bill, Hillary, Chelsea—This guy wrote a few good lyrics.” The Irish can do understatement, when there’s a wink involved. 

Then in 1999, Bono became the chief proponent for a great cause—celebrating the new millennium by rich nations forgiving the debts of poor nations. It was an easy yes for me if all the savings had to go to education, health, and development. Bono played a big part in convincing members of my own administration who had technical arguments for less than 100%, and members of Congress, including Republicans, who listened to his calm arguments filled with facts and emotion. There was no music in forgiving 75 or even 95 percent. He later helped the Bush administration to keep it going with the Millennium Development Challenge. 

Over the years, our family friendship has endured. On future trips I spent the night at his house or at the Clarence, a hotel he co-owns in Dublin, where I always tried to host a dinner for foundation friends and supporters, including Seamus and Marie Heaney, Denis O’Brien, John McDonald and many others. 

In 2022, Bono released his memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. It was illustrated by his drawings and paints a vivid portrayal of how he has been shaped by his father, his wife, and his U2 family and the music they’ve made, and his country. He turned it into an ingenious one-man show. I saw it when it came to New York in November, with a set that lets him move through time and have two-way conversations, especially with his late father, who loomed large after his mother died when he was nine. 

He also brings people important to him and his causes to life through large drawings. Late in the show, he talked about women he admired, sitting next to two large sketches of Nancy Pelosi and Hillary. Bono is cleverly bipartisan when he’s lobbying Congress or the White House. But he never abandoned his friends or values. They’re beyond politics. That’s the best of his Irish heritage a rebuke to the old slur about Irish Alzheimer’s: they only remember the grudges. Not Bono. 

John Wallach 

Seeds of Peace is a group founded in 1993 by American journalist John Wallach to bring Israeli, Egyptian, and Palestinian teenagers, mostly Jewish and Muslim, together for three weeks at a camp in Maine, to live, play, work, and talk together. Wallach believed most young people in the region wanted to find their way to a peaceful future and that they could actually help bring it about. In September 1993, several of them were present on the South Lawn of the White House for the signing of the Oslo Accords. Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yasser Arafat, and I took a photograph with them, each of us holding Seeds of Peace t-shirts, with their trademark olive branch. Since 1993, more than 6000 young people from conflict areas in the Middle East, the Balkans, South Asia, Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus have participated in the summer camp and other Seeds programs. When the Second Intifada broke out in 2000, a 17-year-old Palestinian Seeds of Peace graduate was killed. He was buried in his olive branch t-shirt. 

John Wallach died in 2002 but Seeds of Peace is still going and is still important. In May of 2021, when the clash between Israel and Hamas in Gaza grabbed the headlines, the young Seeds living there spoke out forcefully against the lawsuit to compel the eviction of Palestinians from homes in East Jerusalem in mostly Palestinian neighborhoods that would have been part of a Palestinian state for two decades had Arafat accepted my last proposal in late 2000 as he had told me and others he would. 

CDI All this work was overseen by Walker Morris, a remarkable North Carolinian who left a comfortable retirement to take on formidable challenges with energy, understanding, and an extraordinary ability to relate to the dreams, abilities, and unique qualities of the people he was trying to empower. He was both key to our success and clear-eyed when we needed to stop what wasn’t working. 

 
There are so many other friends and supporters I know I’m forgetting, but the following are a few who come to mind as I sit and write this: Don and Ellen Walker, Lily Winter, Margaux Loyer, Clare Twitchell-Heyne, Sadek Wahba, Darnell Strom, Michael O’Connor, Ben Schwerin, Mike Taylor, David Kendall, Minyon Moore, Leah Daugherty, Emily Young, Caroline Lewis.