访谈录 Interview 2007-09-09&09-10, 克林顿：权利依旧（上）

Matt?

Alright, Andrea Mitchell in Washington for us this morning, thanks very much. President Clinton's new book is "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World". President Clinton, good to have you back in our studio. Good morning!

Thanks, Matt.

I want to go through a political potpourri 1 in a second, but let's start with your book. And I think that when people see the title, they are going to say "Well, Giving.” I mean, we can all write a check, we can change the world. But I am struck by how much of this book you spend talking not about giving financially, but giving of your time or your talents.

Yep, I, what I tried to do in this book was to say whatever your age, whatever your income group, and whatever your time availability, or whatever you know, whatever talents you have, everybody can do something, and there is an explosion of giving around the world that has the capacity really to change things in a way that private citizens have never done before.

And on a one-on-one basis, there is a section in the book and there are some examples of this, when you talk about giving the gift of reconciliation 2 and new beginnings, in other word to mend the fence. You know, settle a dispute with someone you've been fighting with, do you have personal experience with that? What inspired you to write that aspect of the book?

Well, I think my long friendship with Nelson Mandela, started me thinking about what a unique gift it is. I mean that he gave a gift to a country, he showed the country how he could get over 27 years in prison, invite not only his jailers to his inauguration 3, but his persecutors into his government, and basically, that's what we're all gonna have to do to get through this new and unprecedented 4 time, so politically, it's a good thing. But I was also profoundly moved, because of my continuing involvement with Rwanda, with the things I've seen there. I will never get over meeting a woman who lost her husband and six children. They were literally 5 killed right in front of her. They, the people who attacked them thought she was dead. She woke up and instead of living a life in vengeance 6; she started adopting orphans 7 without regard to whether they have been part of the tribe that she was a member of or part of the group that killed them. And I see things like that in Rwanda all the time where people are reaching across the divides. I saw two neighbors holding hands: two women, one of them lost her husband and brother in the genocide; the other's husband was in jail awaiting war crimes trial, war crimes trial for doing it, you just see this over and over again.