I’m now in the second year of a process of trying to totally rebuild my life from a terrible mistake I made. And I now see–I don’t think anybody can say, hey, the state of my spiritual life is great, it’s constant and it’s never going to change. I think I’ve learned enough now to know that’s not true; that it’s always a work in progress and you just have to hope you’re getting better every day. But if you’re not getting better, chances are you’re getting worse. That this has to be a dynamic, ongoing effort. But, you know, I had to come to terms with a lot of things about the fundamental importance of character and integrity. Integrity, to me, means–is a literal term. It means the integration of one’s spirit, mind and body, being in the same place at the same time with everything, doing what you believe is right and you believe is consistent with the will of God.
It’s been an amazing encounter; you know, trying to rebuild my family life, which is the most important thing of all. And it took a lot of effort that I’ve never talked about, and probably never will, because I don’t really think it’s anybody else’s concern. And then to rebuild the support of the people I work with to try to be worthy of the fact that two-thirds of the American people stuck with me. That’s an incredible thing.
So I wake up every day, no matter what anybody says or what goes wrong or whatever, with this overwhelming sense of gratitude. Because it may be that if I hadn’t been knocked down in the way I was and forced to come to grips with what I’d done and the consequences of it, in such an awful way, I might not ever have had to really deal with it a hundred percent.
This kind of thing happens to–not, maybe, this kind of thing–but all kinds of problems come up in people’s lives all the time and usually they’re not played out with several billion dollars of publicity on the neon lights before people. But they still have to be dealt with. And in a funny way, when you realize there is nothing left to hide, then it sort of frees you up to do what you ought to be doing anyway. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but to me, I feel this overwhelming sense of gratitude. I also learned a lot about forgiveness. I’ve always thought I was sort of a forgiving, generous person, you know, non-judgmental in a negative sense–not that I don’t have opinions. But I realized once you’ve actually had to stand up and ask for forgiveness before the whole wide world, it makes it a little harder to be as hard as I think I once was on other people. And that’s meant something to me, too. I think I’ve learned something about that. (Applause.)
A lot of people, when they learned that I was going to interview you, and a lot of people who know that we’ve been meeting, have said to me, the guy never really apologized, the guy never really owned it and came clean about his mistakes, tried to hide it, said it didn’t happen. He never came clean. Now, that’s a little surprising to me because we sent a staff member, one of our senior staff members, to the White House the day in September of ‘98, when you gave one of the most clear confessional statements that I have ever heard. I’m not going to ask for a hand raise or anything, but there’s a whole bunch of people here who think you never really said it. I think I gave a clear, unambiguous, brutally frank, and frankly personally painful statement to me because I had to do it. I mean, I finally realized that I was–it would never be all right unless I stood up there and said what I did and said it was wrong and apologized for it. But I think what happened was, I think anybody who was there thought so; I think anybody who read it thought so. I don’t know what was covered by television, really, because I don’t watch the TV news much, or what was written in the newspaper or who heard it. But I think that anyone who saw that and who observed what happened afterward would not doubt that there had been a full and adequate apology.
You sent me the text of it right then, and I read it and it was–I mean, I’m an elder at this church, as well as the pastor, and we’ve had many times where people have had to make confessions, and this was as clean. You said, not only am I–you said, there’s no fancy way–there’s not a fancy way to say it, I have sinned. And you went on and quoted from Psalm 51 and talked about the need for a broken and contrite heart, and you confessed that. And you went on to say that it’s not enough to say I’m sorry, there has to be the fruits of repentance and the gathering together of people who hold you accountable for walking a new way. You announced that day publicly you were putting an accountability group together that would meet with you and help you stay on a new path. And you ended the speech by saying, let the words in my mouth, the meditation in my heart, and the work of my hands be pleasing to my God. It was about as clean as I have ever read something like that. And it must have been terribly frustrating for you to live on in the future with the sense that there’s a whole bunch of people who just continue to believe you never came clean. Oh, it was for a little bit. But I think one of the things you learn is that even a President–all you can do is be responsible for what you do. And what other people say about it or whether it gets out there–you have to work hard to get it out there, but–I suppose there was a time when I was upset about it. But then I realized that that was another form of defensiveness, that if I really thought about that, that was just another excuse not to be doing what I should be doing, which is to work on my life, work on my marriage, work on my parenthood, work on my work with the White House and the administration, and work on serving the American people. So, believe it or not, I haven’t thought about it in a long, long time now. I thought about it a little bit now because you asked me to do this and I said, yes, and here we are in the soup together. (Laughter.) But I don’t think about it now, because I realize that anytime you’re supposed to be doing something with your life and you get off thinking about what somebody else is saying or doing about it or to you or whatever, it’s just a crutch for not dealing with what you’re supposed to be dealing with. So I finally just let it go. And I hope people can see that it’s different. You just have to hope that and go on.
Let’s switch subject matters and go over to leadership. I mean, you know a lot about leadership. And you’ve been the leader of the most powerful country in the world for almost eight years now. So, okay, leadership questions, are we all right on that, or is there anything more you wanted to say on other stuff? I thought you’d never change the subject. (Laughter and applause.)
All right. So you started realizing you had leadership skills or talents in you. But then at some point you said, I’m going to direct this leadership toward the political arena. I mean, you could have been a leader in business, you could have been a leader in academia, you could have been a leader in ministry, probably. (Laughter.) You will find this funny, in light of all that’s happened. When I was about 11, I gave my grandmother a big speech about civil rights. I was just going on and on, waving my arms and everything. My grandmother looked at me and she said, you know, Billy, I think you could be a preacher if you were just a little better boy. (Laughter and applause.) True story.
I’m not going to follow up on that one. I’m letting that one go. Thank you.
I mean, that was a free shot for me and I took a pass. (Laughter.)
All right. Characterize your leadership style. Would you say like you’re a visionary leader, a strategic leader, team-building leader? Well, you probably ought to ask the people who came with me today–they would probably say, an exhausting one. (Laughter.) Let me try–first of all, I think the vision is the most important thing. I mean, to me, what you have to have, if you want to really lead in any endeavor you’ve got to say, okay, what is my objective, what are the facts here, what are the facts on the ground. Here’s my vision. Then you need a strategy for how you’re going to achieve your vision. Then you have to have all these tactics that explain it. Then you have to put together a team that can do what you can’t do. And so what I have tried to do is to focus on the vision thing, as some politicians say. I mean, it’s not for nothing that the Scripture says, where there is no vision the people perish. I mean it is the most important thing. Otherwise you get–remember that great old Yogi Berra line, “I may not know where I’m going, but I’m making good time.” (Laughter.) I mean, that happens to everybody in life, and part of it is when you lose your vision. But I also–I think that team-building is very important because a lot of the things that I get credit for, the good things that have happened have been done by somebody else that I empowered to act, consistent with an agreed upon plan that we started with. I mean, one of the things that frustrates me–it’s no different from everybody else that’s had this position, but Vice President Gore doesn’t get near enough credit for a lot of the things that I’ve done that he was the main executor on.
One of the last times we were together, we were just taking a little stroll around the White House grounds, and you said, man, I’m going to miss this job. What are you going to miss about it? People ask me all the time, what are you going to miss the most? Will it be living in the White House, which is the best public housing in America–(laughter)–or going to Camp David, which is a pretty good vacation home, or getting on Air Force One, which relieves me of all the kind of screaming tedium that tests your faith every time you walk in an airport. (Laughter.) But the truth is–or having the Marine Band play “Hail To The Chief” every time you walk in a room. (Laughter.) I’ve had a couple of my predecessors tell me you feel lost when you walk in a room the first four or five months and nobody plays the song anymore. (Laughter.) But what I will miss more than anything else is the job. I loved the job. I love it every day. My biggest problem now is I hate to go to sleep at night. I go to bed and I sit there and I read for hours, I just keep working. I’m trying to get everything done I can do before I leave. I have loved the work.
The last thing I want to say is–I used to say this about Al Gore all the time–I used to say, when I was being criticized, he doesn’t get enough credit for what we did together that is good, and surely, no fair-minded person would blame him for any mistake that I made. I hope you’ll feel that way about Hybels. I’ve got to make up for these two cuts I took him. (Laughter.) He didn’t fail in his ministry because I did. And what he did was good for America, because I needed somebody to talk to–to brace me up and make me think about things in another way. It was a gift. It’s something I’ll treasure all my life. And for those of you who have whatever political or personal differences you have, I hope you will still believe that he did the right thing. Because he did.
