Africa is a shambles, beset by ghastly levels of disease and destitution. In the December issue of GQ, George Saunders travels the continent with Bill Clinton, the man who's doing everything in his power to make it better. Read an exclusive Q&A with the former president, and see a slideshow of photos from the journey, here on GQ.com. And pick up the December 2007 GQ to read Saunders's complete story.
A GQ.COM INTERVIEW WITH BILL CLINTON
By George Saunders
Bill Clinton: How are you
George Saunders: Good, sir. Busy day
Not too bad. It's a pretty easy day, and so is tomorrow. But I've got to get sleep tonight so we can go to the crater. I always have trouble sleeping in Africa—mostly because I get excited, you know Just happy to be here, and get carried away.
Well, as you may have heard, I'm mainly a fiction writer. So I apologize in advance for my ineptitude. But to start: People like yourself and Ira Magaziner and Tom Hunter and Paul Farmer and so on—can you tell me, what's the difference between those people and other people who are just as gifted and accomplished but don't** choose to go in the direction of service**
Well, I think the people who do it, do it because they feel morally obligated to do it—because they can, because they have the capacity to make a contribution, because they believe it will make a difference. Maybe because someone asked them to do it. And because they find it more rewarding than the other things they could do with their time or money. It's pretty straightforward. I don't think most people who do it consider themselves any better than anyone else… If you think you can make a difference—if you know enough to know that there are things that you can do that empower other people, so that you actually give them the opportunity to change the way things work—then you should do it. I also think it makes people happier when they do it.
I've done a lot of interviews with novelists and so on, and one thing I always like to ask them is if there was a moment when they first kind of went, Ah, I'm processing experience differently than most people.** Was there a moment where you realized you had these abilities—not only of energy but of empathy **
On a personal level, it happened when I was… I don't know. I'm trying to remember how old I was. I think I was in the seventh grade. I was walking home from school, and this guy that was a year older than me, but not as big as I was, had been taunting me. He must have followed me home—I was walking home with two or three of my friends, about a three-mile walk—and for, I don't know, more than half the walk he taunted me and pushed me and finally he hit me. And I turned around and I drew back and hit him, and he turned to run away so fast I hit him in the back—not because I intentionally hit him in the back, but he was smaller and faster…and then I got to worrying about whether I'd hurt him or not, and when I got home I made my mother call his house and make sure he wasn't hurt. And she thought that was strange that I didn't… She was glad. But a couple years before that, I realized I was fascinated by politics, by the ability to use your powers to help other people.… Nobody in my family is particularly involved in politics. I'd had an uncle who served one term in the legislature in his life and then quit. And that was about it. I also was deeply committed to the integration of the schools in the '50s. Most people I knew weren't—in the South, you know. And I began to be aware that I had been raised by my grandparents and my mother in a way that was different, to see the world in a different way.
A few months ago, I did a story on the U.S.-Mexican border for GQ,** and I ended up spending some time with the Minutemen, and then some Mennonites, and it was so striking to see that if you put the Other in front of two different kinds of people, some say, "Get thee behind me," and some say, "What can we do to help" It struck me as almost neurological.**
Well, you know, it's very interesting. If you look at the history of human society… Robert Wright—who wrote a very interesting, and more famous, book called The Moral Animal, that a lot of people have read, which was not personally righteous but rather was about: How do we do learn to develop relationships with one another—wrote a less famous but I think ultimately more important book called Nonzero. That's a game-theory word, right A non-zero-sum game is one where everybody wins: In order for me to win, you have to win. As opposed to the soccer match or golf tournament or most sporting contests, which are zero-sum games: In order for me to win, you have to lose. And Wright basically says that you can view all human history as a result of people coming in contact with the Other and either changing their view of them—from "Us and Them" to "Us and Us," and thus widening the circle of interdependence—or fighting with them and using them in a way to solidify the existing group and struggle. And he says, basically, there were rational reasons for viewing people as the Other at various points throughout history where they wanted to destroy you or you were fighting over scarce resources or whatever, you know There were reasons. But that what has allowed humanity to survive is the constant widening of the circle of Us and the shrinking of the circle of Them as we come into contact with more and more different kinds of people. A really interesting idea.
So much of what I've heard you say, if you just changed a couple words, is basically Buddhist epistemology. Is this something you've thought about
A lot. I've thought about it a lot. I'm reading a fascinating book, the Dalai Lama's most recent book, about his encounters with science. He's been fascinated with science since he was a boy, and I knew this from reading his autobiography, but this is literally his attempt to explain the intersection of how he practices his Buddhist faith with why he takes science seriously and why he believes in the scientific method. It's an attempt to integrate science and his faith. It's quite interesting, because most people who respect both science and religion simply say they're two different spheres with two different objectives. Like Stephen Jay Gould, not long before he died, wrote a great book called Rocks of Ages, in which he basically argued that the religious enterprise—which he said he didn't embrace but did deeply respect—and people of faith might be right, but since science could never prove them wrong (or right), it was about different things. It was about the tangible as opposed to the spiritual world, and therefore we should have a separation of church and state but we should also—as a matter of governance, but in our dealings with others—we should recognize that these are two different areas of life that don't intersect. The Dalai Lama claims they do intersect, and that because in Buddhism practice is important and that in the end, practice is… He said if your experimentation, for example, with concentrated meditation finally contradicts some doctrine you're being given, even by a fellow religious teacher, that your search for truth has to, in the end, go with your honest experience. So he said because of that, that has enabled him to construct this whole theory about why science is wonderful and his faith is wonderful, and they both require practice. And therefore when you're practicing both, you'd have to practice science with a certain reverence for humanity and the possibility that there's a larger meaning to all of this, and you have to practice faith with a respect for the scientific method, and you should want to learn about the facts of the earth. It was really interesting because… This is, you know… I'm about a third of the way through the book, but I think that all of the disciplines are tending towards what Einstein hoped to find, which was a unified theory of time, space, matter, and beyond. It's about, you know, who we are and how we are and what we're made up of…but that's all highly consistent with the politics of interdependence, practiced by not only people in government but by private citizens who seek to do public good.
In your spiritual life, is there something akin to meditation
I wouldn't say akin to meditation. but there are a lot of—an enormous number of—admonitions in the Christian New Testament where Jesus says, and the apostles say, we should pay attention to the plight of the poor, the ill, the imprisoned, those with physical handicaps; that we should not judge, but extend a helping hand to, people who have done things that society considers wrong, whether they're abusive tax collectors or prostitutes; that, you know, we should not look upon any person as less human than we are.
Steven Mitchell, as you may know, has written a lot of serious books about Buddhism and also about Christianity and other faiths, at Harvard. He did a very interesting little book on the teachings of Jesus, in which he attempted to present them, as best scholars can determine, in chronological order rather than the way they are organized in the current version of the Bible. And he says the very last encounter Jesus had with his religious adversaries was when they brought him the woman who was caught in the act of adultery, and it's in the eighth chapter of the book of John, and they were attempting to catch him in some religious error, some doctrinal error, and he was into practice—he had already been attacked for performing miracles on the Sabbath, for saving lives on the Sabbath—and his answer was that the Sabbath was a day to keep holy and he didn't sanctify it by refusing to do his father's work to help the needy. So in this case, they bring in this woman who's weeping and crying and throw her on the ground, and they say, "Master, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Mosaic law says we should stone her. What say you" And in the Scripture, it says that he kneels down and draws on the ground—doesn't say what he was drawing—and he stands up and looks at them and says, "Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone at her." And he kneels down again and doesn't even look up. And it says, "And they, being convicted by their own conscience, went away, beginning with the eldest, to the youngest." And then he stands up and says, "Woman, where are those who condemned you There's no one here to condemn you" She says, "No, Lord." And then, in the King James version, he says, "Then neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more."
So it's this thought that… The whole Scripture is full of… The book of James, which is very much debated in Christian circles—particularly among conservative fundamentalists, who have a tough time with it—says faith without works is dead. "Show me your works and I will know your faith," you know... For 500 years now, we've been struggling—the Protestants of the world at least have—over the relationship of faith to works. But there is no doubt that while there is no explicit reference to, let's say, homosexuality in the New Testament, no explicit reference to abortion, there are hundreds and hundreds of references to the imperative of acting to help people who are in genuine need, who are less fortunate than you, whom you can help, and you're supposed to do it without regard to your own economic or social standing. The only test is whether you can make a difference in someone else's life without disadvantaging or really hurting someone in your circle of primary responsibility—you know, your family. It's fascinating.
I was raised Catholic, and my wife was born-again Christian. So when we had our kids, of course we went running back to the church. But the thing that I found was that, okay, say I took the injunction to be kinder: Somehow I would reach the limit of my own kindness and not know what to do. But with meditation, I have found that somehow it actually does** change your capacity for kindness. **
I think, you know, the Buddhists teach that service to others is essential for developing a heart free of jealousy and bitterness. The ability to look at other people without wishing you had what they had, resenting that they have had the life they've had, or resenting that you don't have something you don't have…and that the spirit of giving to other people is actually a great gift to you, because it helps to lift your own sense of self to a much higher level so you don't have petty jealousies…that the act of relating to others less fortunate than you purges you of resentments with whom you have been in competition or who may have been more successful than you financially or whatever else. It basically just puts you in a more anchored place in life.
There are actually practices where you imagine yourself as face-to-face with an enemy and try to imagine them, understand their viewpoint.… One thing I notice about you is that if somebody has criticized or done you wrong, you seem to just sort of—at least from this distance—to try to walk away from it.
I've struggled with it all my life, but I have never been a long-term grudge bearer. I must say that I was tested as never before when I started running for president, just because it seemed so crazy. But, um, it's something you have to practice and think about and work on, even if you're inclined—inclined —to forgiveness or inclined to rise above attacks. You have to realize, if you're in public life especially, that not everyone who criticizes you will be wrong. I mean, you can't live under that much pressure and make that many decisions for that long without making mistakes—certainly public mistakes, and often private ones, too. You just can't do it. You can't. Nobody can live at that sustained level of activity, under that much pressure, and never make a mistake. So you first have to realize that, in the words that Hillary used to give me, it's important to learn to take criticism seriously but not personally, because if you start taking it personally, then you're incapable of taking it seriously and you can't sort through what's accurate and not. That requires an enormous amount of discipline. And then when you get out of it and you get back in it, it's like having to learn it all over again. I see that now. When Hillary started running for president, I found that I would get much more upset if someone said something about her that I thought was unfair than I ever was when they said something about me. It's a little different when you've got a guy like, you know, Ken Starr, with an unlimited budget, who's trying to wreck the lives of everybody who ever knew you, you know I mean there seems to be a presumption among a certain element of the political press that anybody who was from my native state was by definition subhuman and deserved whatever punishment they got, no matter how innocent they were…that they were necessary fodder for a larger war or something. I was horrified by that. And I just, I just—if I think about it in the wrong way for too long, I get mad all over again. So I work on it all the time. But I do believe that this whole deal about forgiveness is absolutely essential for a healthy life. It's nice for the people you forgive, but it's lifeblood for you.
When I was president, I got every book I could about this, I listened to what Mandela said, I fought through this, and I realized how just harboring constant anger, no matter how well justified it is—almost the more justified it is, the more toxic it is to you. The fact that you've got a legitimate right to be angry at other people doesn't mean it still doesn't hurt you after a certain point. It's okay to be angry in the moment and try to rectify an imbalance, but just to carry it around, it just eats you alive. Mandela would be dead now if he carried all his justified anger around and allowed it to poison him. He wouldn't be celebrating his eighty-ninth birthday.…
Maybe it's just getting older—and I think maybe surviving this heart scare had something to do with it—but I am more likely than I used to be not to get mad at somebody because they don't weigh things on the same scales as I do. Their whole world view about what really matters to them is different. I realize all I can control is what really matters to me. If I want other people to care about what really matters to me, then I have to both talk about it and model it.
**When I read your autobiography, I was struck by how literary your high school and college years were. There are parts where you mentioned you'd memorized poems…and to me, it felt like there were was a link between your current philanthropic activities and that early literary development. **
Absolutely. I think…most of that is rooted in the time I spent in my early years with my grandparents and, you know, just, in my own childhood, growing up. But I don't think there's any question that the reading I did… I'll never forget, I went to summer school one summer and took an English course. I don't even remember why I did it now. I was 15 years old. And I remember my teacher—he was a high school teacher and superficially not erudite at all; he affected to be just a good old boy, you know—but he started talking about Julius Caesar—we read Julius Caesar—and what you could learn from it, and about human nature, and what made somebody a tragic as opposed to a happy figure. And so I learned to think about Shakespeare in terms of the people that I knew. I learned to see [in them] the qualities of tragedy and greatness that he wrote about in general terms.… And I read, you know, James Baldwin and other contemporary writers. I liked reading Dickens. I thought it was a hoot. I didn't read it all; I still haven't read it all. Most of the fiction I read now is just cheap thrills. [laughter]
You've said that the measure of political activity is "Are we better off than when we started" But when you look at, you know, the last seven years, the reversals—
Well, I'm disappointed they cut back on—I'll just give you some examples—after-school programs for poor kids. Because I think it will, in the end, undermine academic performance and increase social problems. And I think it will make it harder for kids in difficult circumstances to make the most of their lives.… I mean, I get why they'd like to see the private sector perform things instead of the government, but why they believe the private sector ought to be subsidized to compete with the government—that's, that's not my idea of having an efficient private sector. But anyway, that's the kind of ideology. It bothers me because I think it hurts other people. But it doesn't bother me from a philosophical point of view, in the sense that I think all you can control in politics is the here and now. And if you believe in democracy and freedom, then people have a right to take a different course. I do not believe that they had any clue in 2000 when they elected President Bush. I think they heard the "compassionate conservative" instead of the specific things he said in his campaign. He actually was not misleading except in tone and rhetoric, that phrase, in what he said. If you really paid attention to his specifics, he told us pretty much exactly what he was going to do, how he was going to run the government, and that there'd be a much heavier emphasis on the "conservative" than the "compassion." And that it would be an ideological sort of conservatism and not a traditional philosophical conservatism, a more radical conservatism. He was very forthright about it, if you paid attention to what he said. But in the ebb and flow of politics, no achievements are permanent. The only thing that is important is that while you're there, that you keep moving America in the right direction, both in terms of its timeless principles and in terms of the time in which you govern. Democracy is always going to be uneven and jagged and sometimes downright ugly. It stumbles in the right direction; it doesn't sprint.
**You know, the other day when we were in the Dominican Republic and you walked into the restaurant, a group of guys stood up behind us—do you remember that They yelled, "Holy shit! Bill! Bill!" I went over and talked to them afterwards. They were four auto-workers from Detroit whose jobs were being cut. All four of them said they had voted for you twice. I asked how many of them had voted for Al Gore. None. I've noticed this in my own sphere—a lot of working-class people who were lifetime Democrats, and in the last X number of years they've gone right. Do you have a sense of why **
Well, but I think… There's a new book out. There's a guy named Thomas Frank who wrote a little book called What's the Matter with Kansas—with which I only partly agree. It basically says that the Democrats lost because they weren't populist enough on economics. And he's not right about that. Right now, there's nothing the matter with Kansas. Kansas has become a Democratic state since he wrote his book—at the state level. They elected a woman governor; she was overwhelmingly reelected. And the chairman of the Republican Party, in 2000 until 2003, was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor this year, because the Republican Party had gone so far to the right. The attorney general this year, the Democrat, was a Republican prosecutor until early in this decade. So the Democrats have brought in their tent and taken over the state of Kansas, and they're going forward. So I don't agree with Frank. But a new book has just come out called The Political Brain, by Drew Westen, which I highly recommend to you. Because he is a psychiatrist and a student of brain science, of how the brain developed. And he explains why all of us are values voters—you and I are, too. I mean, I certainly am. If I were a narrow-self-interest voter, I'd be for Bush, because he gave me five tax cuts. I think it's horrible. We never had a time in the history of the country when rich people got tax cuts in wartime. In wartime, in every previous example, the people who were the most fortunate were asked to step up and do more, when we had to make financial sacrifice. That is, whether you agree or disagree with our policies in Iraq or Afghanistan—and I agree with one, disagree with the other—those are our kids, and they're out there, and instead of doing this, we're borrowing money from the Chinese, even the Mexicans. We're having this fight over illegal immigration, and we think it's good policy to borrow money from Mexico, a country with a per capita income of $1,500, to give Bill Clinton a tax cut and finance our soldiers And we act like we're doing them a big favor. To me, that's a values issue. And I think, as a philosophical matter, that in an interdependent world there is not a clear difference between enlightened selfishness and selflessness, because our fates are too bound together. So a truly smart selfish person in my income group would not want these tax cuts. A smart selfish person would want more educated children, all kids to have health care, a responsible fiscal policy, and less mortgaging our future to people whose interests do not entirely converge with ours, or may not in the future, and wouldn't want this loaded on our kids.
Can I take you back to this trip to Africa for a minute What were the particular moments that stood out for you, if you're talking about gratification What were the moments that made all of this worthwhile
Well, when we were in Malawi, the project we're doing in Malawi is our attempt to use the lessons we learned fighting AIDS and apply them to the more complex area of development in which other people's behavior is more important. I mean, if you're just trying to save lives from AIDS by diagnosing, providing care and treatment, then what we did in lowering the cost of AIDS drugs and finding cost-effective ways to train people and develop paramedical personnel, you can replicate that. I mean, you still have to get other people to change in terms of stopping new infections, absent a vaccine or a cure. But it's straightforward. When you get into development, you're trying to deal with health care, education, and economic opportunity—in effect, creating a whole different social structure so people are empowered to lift their lives. It's a little more complex. I loved being out there in Malawi and seeing how all these things are working, because the Malawian government—and we always do what the local people want—they said, "Well, we want you to do this work with the farmers"…which we knew. You know, these guys were talking a little bit about what we'd done…but we'd done much more extensive work as of this day with farmers in Rwanda than Malawi…'cause these guys said, "Look, first, if you're going to go out there in this area, people have to be able to stay well...and we have no health care." And I realized how intimately related all these things are in our own society, and we don't see it. There were over 500 construction jobs created because we're building a hundred-bed hospital, and we had to build housing for people to come do that. But what I _loved _seeing—to me what was most rewarding—was hearing the farmers talk about what they were doing and how happy they were, you know, to be getting the help with fertilizer and things like that. And seeing all these women as well as men out there learning new skills. They were, all of them, making their own definition of progress. We were there helping them to live their dreams, not imposing some notion we had about how they ought to live. They bought into a certain vision of what they wanted. It was their deal, and you could tell. And I loved it. I think my favorite moment was hearing that farmer talk about his crops. That older guy, he was just so excited, remember that… I loved the pharmaceutical stop, the distribution stop that we did in Lusaka. Not only because it was extremely impressive and well done, but because it was a symbol of a much, much larger issue, which is that incapacity of people to change their fate in poor countries because of the absence of systems. If you really look at it, having good systems is almost more important—except in terms of keeping body and soul together—than any kind of aid you can give people. Because otherwise there's not a predictable consequence between the effort they ert and the result they get. I loved that distribution center. And I loved the crowd yesterday here, in Tanzania, because I had the feeling… I don't know if you noticed that they were quite quiet when I was talking; they are very well aware that a lot of them die from malaria, and they know that we helped them get medicine for AIDS. And I know that it was a Sunday afternoon, and they weren't working, and that they didn't, you know, have the option of staying inside and watching the British Open on TV. It's not like… I mean, it was like the only show in town, I got that. But I also believe a lot of them came because they hope that their families and their country can be liberated from this… I mean, I had the feeling it really was a mini-ercise in, you know, participatory government and democracy. They were… It was nice, they were enthusiastic and glad to see me, did all the greeting and everything, but to me the most moving thing was just how quiet and respectful they were. They were listening, in large numbers, and I had the feeling they really would do what I asked them to do and go out and talk to their neighbors and start talking about it. Those kinds of things make you think change is possible.
Thank you for your time.
Africa's pretty great, don't you think One of the other journalists asked me why I liked it here so much. And I said, you know, I love traveling the world, I love Latin America and the Caribbean, I have really deep feelings when I go to Cambodia and Vietnam, particularly because of my history with that. I've had some of the greatest days in my life, in mystical ways, in Japan and China. But I believe that on this continent, under the most adverse circumstances, in country after country, you find the highest percentage of the people that go through every day with a song in their heart. It reminds me of when I was a little boy, you know When I was born in Arkansas at the end of World War II, the per capita income was barely half the national average. So by conventional American standards it was quite a poor place. But the people I knew didn't consider themselves poor as long as they had clothes to wear and food to eat and they could feed somebody else if they showed up at the door. They didn't think about it. And they learned to enjoy the rhythms of daily life and their interactions with their neighbors and to live without a lot of resentments and anxieties. So the trick is to keep the song in their hearts and allow them to shed their shackles. They refuse to let their lives pass by just because they're poor. It's a beautiful thing to see.
