My life

Within an hour, the peaceful transfer of power that has kept our country free for more than two hundred years had taken place again. My family said good-bye to the new First Family and drove to Andrews Air Force Base for our last flight on the presidential plane that was no longer Air Force One for me. After eight years as President, and half a lifetime in politics, I was a private citizen again, but a very grateful one, still pulling for my country, still thinking about tomorrow.

EPILOGUE

I wrote this book to tell my story, and to tell the story of America in the last half of the twentieth century; to describe as fairly as I could the forces competing for the country’s heart and mind; to explain the challenges of the new world in which we live and how I believe our government and our citizens should respond to them; and to give people who have never been involved in public life a sense of what it is like to hold office, and especially what it is like to be President. While writing, I found myself falling back in time, reliving events as I recounted them, feeling as I did then and writing as I felt. During my second term, as the partisan battles I tried to defuse continued unabated, I also tried to understand how my time in office fit into the stream of American history. That history is largely the story of our efforts to honor our founders’ charge to form a “more perfect union.” In calmer times, our country has been well served by our two-party system, with progressives and conservatives debating what to change and what to preserve. But when change is forced upon us by events, we are all tested, and thrown back to our fundamental mission to widen the circle of opportunity, deepen the meaning of freedom, and strengthen the bonds of our community. To me, that is what it means to make our union more perfect.

At every turning point, we have chosen union over division: in the early days of the Republic, by building a national economic and legal system; during the Civil War, by preserving the Union and ending slavery; in the early twentieth century, as we moved from an agricultural to an industrial society, by making our government stronger to preserve competition, promote basic safeguards for labor, provide for the poor, the elderly, and the infirm, and protect our natural resources from plunder; and in the sixties and seventies, by advancing civil rights and women’s rights. In each instance, while we were engaged in the struggle to define, defend, and expand our union, powerful conservative forces resisted, and as long as the outcome was in doubt, the political and personal conflicts were intense. In 1993, when I took office, we were facing another historic challenge to the Union, as we moved from the industrial age into the global information age. The American people were faced with big changes in the way they lived and worked, and with big questions to be answered: Would we choose global economic engagement or economic nationalism? Would we use our unrivaled military, political, and economic power to spread the benefits and confront the emerging threats of the interdependent world or become Fortress America? Would we abandon our industrial-age government, with its commitments to equal opportunity and social justice, or reform it so as to retain its achievements while giving people the tools to succeed in the new era? Would our increasing racial and religious diversity fracture or strengthen our national community?

As President, I tried to answer these questions in a way that kept moving us toward a more perfect union, lifting people’s vision, and bringing them together to build a new vital center for American politics in the twenty-first century. Two-thirds of our citizens supported my general approach, but on the controversial cultural questions and on the always appealing tax cuts, the electorate was more closely divided. With the outcome in doubt, bitter partisan and personal attacks raged, bearing a striking resemblance to those of the early Republic.