My life

Whether my historical analysis is right or not, I judge my presidency primarily in terms of its impact on people’s lives. That is how I kept score: all the millions of people with new jobs, new homes, and college aid; the kids with health insurance and after-school programs; the people who left welfare for work; the families helped by the family leave law; the people living in safer neighborhoods—all those people have stories, and they’re better ones now. Life got better for all Americans because the air and water were cleaner and more of our natural heritage was preserved. And we brought more hope for peace, freedom, security, and prosperity to people all over the world. They have their stories, too. When I became President, America was sailing into uncharted waters, into a world full of apparently disconnected positive and negative forces. Because I had spent a lifetime trying to bring together my own parallel lives and had been raised to value all people, and, as governor, had seen both the bright and dark sides of globalization, I felt I understood where my country was and how we needed to move into the new century. I knew how to put things together, and how hard it would be to do. On September 11, things seemed to fall apart again as al Qaeda used the forces of interdependence—

open borders, easy immigration and travel, easy access to information and technology—to murder close to 3,000 people, from more than seventy nations, in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. The world rallied around our loss and the American people in our determination to fight terrorism. In the years since, the battle has intensified, with understandable and honestly held differences at home and around the world about how best to pursue the war on terror.

The interdependent world we live in is inherently unstable, full of both opportunity and forces of destruction. It will remain so until we find our way from interdependence to a more integrated global community of shared responsibilities, shared benefits, and shared values. Building that kind of world, and defeating terror, cannot be done quickly; it will be the great challenge of the first half of the twentyfirst century. I believe there are five things the United States should be doing to lead the way: fight terror and the spread of weapons of mass destruction and improve our defenses against them; make more friends and fewer terrorists by helping the 50 percent of the world not reaping the benefits of globalization to overcome poverty, ignorance, disease, and bad government; strengthen the institutions of global cooperation and work through them to promote security and prosperity and combat our shared problems, from terror to AIDS to global warming; continue to make America a better model of how we want the world to work; and work to end the age-old compulsion to believe that our differences are more important than our common humanity.

I believe the world will continue its forward march from isolation to interdependence to cooperation because there is no other choice. We have come a long way since our ancestors first stood up on the African savannah more than a hundred thousand years ago. In just the fifteen years since the end of the Cold War, the West has been largely reconciled to its old adversaries, Russia and China; more than half of the world’s people are living under governments of their own choosing for the first time in history; there has been an unprecedented degree of global cooperation against terror and a recognition that we must do more to fight poverty, disease, and global warming and to get all the world’s children in school; and America and many other free societies have shown that people of all races and religions can live together in mutual respect and harmony.

Our nation will not be undone by terror. We will defeat it, but we must take care that in so doing we do not compromise the character of our country or the future of our children. Our mission to form a more perfect union is now a global one.