with Israel and had given me helpful advice over the years. Many others simply supported my work for peace. Regard-less of what happened, I thought I owed it to them to explain my proposal.
The next day, after presenting the Citizens Medal to twenty-eight deserving Americans, including Muhammad Ali, I went over to the Democratic Party headquarters to thank the chairmen, Mayor Ed Rendell of Philadelphia and Joe Andrew, and to give a plug to Terry McAuliffe, who had done so much for Al Gore and for me, and who now was campaigning to be the new party chair. After all the work he’d done, I couldn’t believe Terry wanted the job, but if he did, I was for him. I told the people who’d slaved away at the party work without glory or recognition how much I appreciated them. On the ninth, I began a farewell tour to places that had been especially good to me, Michigan and Illinois, where victories in the primaries on St. Patrick’s Day 1992 had virtually assured me of the nomination. Two days later, I went to Massachusetts, which gave me the highest percentage of any state in ’96, and to New Hampshire, where they had made me the Comeback Kid in early 1992. In between, I dedicated a statue of Franklin Roosevelt in his wheelchair at the FDR Memorial on the Mall. The disability community had lobbied hard for it, and most of the Roosevelt family had supported it. Of the more than 10,000 photos of FDR in his archives, only four depict him in his wheelchair. Disabled Americans had come a long way since then.
I said farewell to New Hampshire in Dover, where almost nine years earlier I had promised to be with them “’til the last dog dies.” Many of my old supporters were in the audience. I called several by name, thanked them all, then gave them a full account of the record their hard work in that long-ago winter had made possible. And I asked them never to forget that, “even though I won’t be President, I’ll always be with you until the last dog dies.”
On the eleventh through the fourteenth, I had parties for the cabinet, the White House staff, and friends at Camp David. On the night of the fourteenth, Don Henley gave us a wonderful solo concert after dinner in the Camp David Chapel. The next morning was our family’s last Sunday in the beautiful chapel, where we had shared many services with the fine young sailors and marines who staffed the camp and their families. They had even let me sing with the choir, always leaving the sheet music in Aspen, our family cabin, on Friday or Saturday so that I could review it in advance. On Monday, I spoke at the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday celebration at the University of the District of Columbia. Usually I marked the day by doing some community service work, but I wanted to take this opportunity to thank the District of Columbia for being my home for eight years. The D.C. representative in Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Mayor Tony Williams were good friends of mine, as were several city council members. I had worked to help them get needed legislation through Congress and to prevent unduly meddlesome laws from being enacted. The District still had a lot of problems, but it was in much better condition than it had been eight years earlier when I took my preinaugural walk down Georgia Avenue. I also sent my last message to Congress: “The Unfinished Work of Building One America.” It was based in large part on the final report of the Commission on Race and included a wide array of recommendations: further steps to close the racial divide in education, health care, employment, and the criminal justice system; special efforts to help low-income absent fathers succeed at parenting; new investments for Native American communities; improved immigration policies; passage of the hate crimes bill; reform of the voting laws; and the continuation of AmeriCorps and the White House Office on One America. We had made a lot of headway in eight years, but America was growing more diverse, and there was still much to be done.
On the seventeenth, I held my last ceremony in the East Room, as Bruce Babbitt and I announced eight more national monuments, two of them along the trail Lewis and Clark blazed in 1803 with their Indian guide Sacagawea and a slave named York. We had now protected more land in the lower forty-eight states than any administration since that of Theodore Roosevelt.
After the announcement, I left the White House on the last trip of my presidency, going home to Little Rock to address the Arkansas legislature. Some of my old pals were still in the state House or Sen-ate, as were people who had gotten their start in politics working with me and a few who began by working against me. More than twenty Arkansans who were then serving or had served with me in Wash-ington joined me that day, as did three of my high school class-mates who lived in the Washington area, and several Arkansans who had served as my liaisons to the legislature when I was governor. Chelsea came with me, too. We passed two of her schools on the way in from the airport, and I thought of how much she had grown up since Hillary and I had attended her school programs at Booker Arts Magnet School. I tried to thank all the Arkansans who had helped me reach this day, beginning with two men who were no longer living, Judge Frank Holt and Senator Fulbright. I urged the legislators to keep pushing the federal government to support the states on education, economic development, health care, and welfare reform. Finally, I told my old friends that I would leave office in three days grateful that “somehow the mystery of this great democracy gave me the chance to go from a little boy on South Hervey Street in Hope, Arkansas, to the White House…. I may be the only person ever elected President who owed his election purely to his personal friends, without whom I could never have won.” I left my friends and flew home to finish the job.
The next night, after a day working on last-minute business, I gave a brief farewell address to the nation from the Oval Office. After thanking the American people for giving me the chance to serve and briefly summarizing my philosophy and record, I offered three observations about the future, saying that we should stay on the path to fiscal responsibility; that our security and prosperity required us to lead in the fight for prosperity and freedom and against terrorism, organized crime, narco-trafficking, the spread of deadly weapons, environmental degradation, disease, and global poverty; and finally, that we must continue to “weave the threads of our coat of many colors into the fabric of one America.”
I wished President-elect Bush and his family well and said I would “leave the presidency more idealistic, more full of hope than the day I arrived, and more confident than ever that America’s best days lie ahead.”
On the nineteenth, my last full day as President, I issued a statement on land mines, saying that since 1993 the United States had destroyed more than 3.3 million of our own land mines, spent $500 million to remove land mines in thirty-five countries, and was making a vigorous effort to find a sensible alternative to mines that would protect our troops as well. I asked the new administration to continue our global demining effort for ten more years.
When I got back to the residence it was late and we still weren’t completely packed. There were boxes everywhere, and I still had to decide which clothes were going where—to New York, Washington, or Arkansas. Hillary and I didn’t want to sleep; we just wanted to keep strolling from room to room. We felt as honored to be living in the White House on our last night as we had when we came home after our first inaugural balls. I never ceased to be thrilled by it all. It seemed almost unbelievable that it had been our home for eight years; now it was almost over.
I went back into the Lincoln Bedroom, read Lincoln’s handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address one last time, and stared at the lithograph of him signing the Emancipation Proclamation, on the very spot where I was standing. I went into the Queen’s Room and thought of Winston Churchill spending three weeks there in the difficult days of World War II. I sat behind the Treaty Table in my office looking at the empty bookshelves and bare walls, thinking of all the meetings and calls I’d had in that room on Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Russia, Korea, and domestic struggles. And it was in this room where I read my Bible and books and letters, and prayed for strength and guidance all through 1998. Earlier in the day I had pre-recorded my final radio address, to be aired not long before I was to leave the White House for the inaugural ceremony. In it I thanked the White House staff, the residence staff, the Secret Service, the cabinet, and Al Gore for all they had done to make my service possible. And I kept my promise to work until the last hour of the last day, releasing another $100 million to fund more police officers; those new police had helped give America the lowest crime rate in a quarter century. Well past midnight, I went back to the Oval Office again to clean up, pack, and answer a few letters. As I sat alone at the desk, I thought about all that had happened during the last eight years, and how quickly it would be over. Soon I would observe the transfer of power and take my leave. Hillary, Chelsea, and I would board Air Force One for a last flight with the fine crew that had taken us to the far corners of the world; our closest staff members; my new Secret Service detail; some of the career military staff such as Glen Maes, the navy steward who baked all my specially decorated birthday cakes, and Glenn Powell, the air force sergeant who made sure our luggage never got lost; and a few of the folks who “brought me to the dance”—the Jordans, the McAuliffes, the McLartys, and Harry Thomason. Several members of the press corps were also scheduled to make the last trip. One of them, Mark Knoller of CBS Radio, had covered me all eight years and had conducted one of the many wrap-up interviews I had done in the past several weeks. Mark had asked me if I was afraid that “the best part of your life is over.” I said I had enjoyed every part of my life and that in each stage I had been “absorbed, interested, and found something useful to do.”
I was looking forward to my new life, to building my library, doing public service work through my foundation, supporting Hillary, and having more time for reading, golf, music, and unhurried travel. I knew I would enjoy myself
