Bill Clinton’s Goodbye to C.G.I.

There were many moving moments in Bill Clinton’s speech at what may have been the final meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, in New York, on Wednesday. He described helping millions of people get water-purification kits, and seeing a newborn boy in Indonesia, in a camp for displaced survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and being asked to choose a name for him. (He picked one that meant “dawn” in the local language.) There were some dizzying moments, too. One came when he began explaining the tagline for this year’s C.G.I. meeting, which was “Imagine All the People.” As with many people his age, Beatles moments “haunted” his birthdays, he said. For example, on his sixty-fourth birthday, he had just finished playing golf with Rolando Gonzalez-Bunster—he gestured toward the audience, where Gonzalez-Bunster, an international energy businessman who is on the foundation’s board, was sitting—when his phone rang. It was Paul McCartney, who sang him “When I’m 64,” a surprise that his wife had arranged. (“That was Hillary’s best present—I think the best one she ever gave me.”) And that reminded him of the time that Jon Bon Jovi sang “Help!” at a C.G.I. event and the other time, at one of his birthday parties, when Bon Jovi offered to sing “American Pie,” except that Bill told him that, while he loved that song, he’d rather hear “Here Comes the Sun.” That whirl of connections and associations brought him back to “Imagine” (which was also played during the event), and the time he’d heard a children’s choir sing that song at the eightieth birthday party of Shimon Peres, the former Labor Party Prime Minister of Israel, which was also attended by “his old adversary, Ariel Sharon.” As the audience was left to ponder that tableau, Clinton added, “Hard to imagine, in the world of bloodlust politics today.”

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