BILL CLINTON: GHOSTS FROM THE PAST

For eight years, he was the world’s most powerful man, but wielding that power – at times – carried great personal costs. Now 64 years old, former US President Bill Clinton visibly aged since we last met – his face more lined and gaunt, his voice thinner. We were in front of an audience of leaders, which represented Philippine history – former presidents Fidel Ramos and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, former first lady Imelda Marcos and her son Bongbong Marcos, numerous politicians and top business executives.

“How did that much power affect you personally,” I asked.

“I think having that much power made me a lot more humble,” he responded. “You realize that you’re not quite as smart as you thought you were.” The audience laughed.

“I think people should use their power vigorously but humbly. Anybody who exercises power vigorously risks his or her own soul,” he added. “You might make a mistake. In fact, if you make a lot of decisions, you will make a mistake.”

I’ve interviewed Clinton several times: charming, expansive, he exudes power and confidence. What’s even more striking is that nearly each time, he admitted something he could’ve done better. In our 2001 interview at the birth of a new nation, he said he could’ve done more for East Timor – that the US could have gotten involved earlier to help prevent some of the 2,000 deaths from the Indonesian military’s scorched earth policy.

That came a few years after two mistakes he admitted: Rwanda, which he called his “worst failure,” and Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern who sparked a scandal that led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1998.

During the November 10 forum in Manila, Clinton repeatedly mentioned Rwanda, where 800,000 people were methodically slaughtered in “about 90 days” of ethnic cleansing in 1994. His administration was accused of ignoring what many called the most horrific violence of the 20 th century. 16 years later, the man who could have stemmed the genocide seems to still be atoning for his government’s inaction.

He said, “I’ve been doing a lot of work in Rwanda. We helped them develop their health care system, and I’ve worked with farmers there. We’ve helped them double, in some cases, triple their incomes.”

He used Rwanda as an example for how the Philippines can move forward: “Their per capita income four years after the genocide was only $268/year, less than a dollar a day. They quadrupled their income in a decade. No other country in the world did it, and they did it with this relentless focus on the future. They developed this amazing capacity to abandon the grievance.”

In 2007 when he was campaigning for his wife, Hillary, he explained she wanted him to intervene in Rwanda. “I believe if I had moved, we might have saved at least a third of those lives,” he said.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have long campaigned for and defended each other. When allegations of the Lewinsky affair first erupted in 1998, Hillary defended her husband against what she called “a vast, right-wing conspiracy” – the latest, she added, in a long collaborative series of charges by his political enemies.

In his memoir published in 2004, Mr. Clinton said they had endured “lies and abuse … intensely personal attacks” during their very public lives, but he admitted that he lied to his wife and daughter about Monica Lewinsky. “I was ashamed of what I had done,” he wrote, “and that I had kept everything to myself in an effort to avoid hurting my family and undermining the presidency.”

The day after he told his wife and daughter the truth, their family went to their annual vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. He wrote: “I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging for forgiveness and planning the strikes on al Qaeda.”

That ability to handle intense personal pain and the pressure of the presidency intrigued me. Leadership has its costs: in our world today, it often means stripping away any notions of privacy. Anything can and will be used against you. No one knows this better than Bill and Hillary Clinton.

As we exited the stage of the forum, I asked him how he dealt with the personal attacks and his own uncertainty. How did he manage to lead and stay focused?

“I wish you had asked me that in front of the audience. You have to set up a system, and you have to work relentlessly on your own state of mind,” he answered animatedly. “I worked out a system, and I tried to train myself to take the criticism seriously but not personally.”

His eyes were sparkling, and I could see people on the side trying to catch his attention. The stage manager signaled for me to return onstage to close the forum. I asked him if he would go out again to answer the question, but he declined.

“People are already leaving,” he said. So I ran to the podium and thanked everyone for coming. When I returned backstage, I was surprised to see Clinton waiting for me. He picked up where we left off.

“Most great contests, even athletic contests, given a reasonable distribution of talent and resources, are head games,” he said. “I didn’t run for this job to sit around and worry about me and what people were saying about me, and every minute I spend doing that is a minute I am robbing from the American people. I am stealing from them and handing my adversaries a victory.”

“How did you do it,” I asked. “How did you not let it affect you?”

We moved away from the stage as he answered: “I set up a system. I told my staff, I said look, if someone’s just taking a personal cut out of me, I don’t want to read all this stuff. Don’t bother. If somebody’s disagreeing with our policy, I want to read it all because I will take it seriously and ask myself if I’m wrong.”

His hands gestured emphatically when he said his next words: “But don’t let me get into any of this disgusting self-pity where I’m basically paralyzed as President and robbing the American people of the service that I wanted to give. And it required RELENTLESS effort.” He jabbed the air for emphasis.

His words came from grueling experience: for more than a year, aides said Mr. Clinton was all but “paralyzed” after he parsed the truth about the intern half his age. The political firestorm nearly brought down his presidency.

“The Truth is whatever the Truth is. But whatever the Truth is or was, you can still do some good every day of your life, but not if you’re in a knot. You have to displace that, and the best formulation I ever heard of it was learn to take criticism seriously but not personally because if you take it personally, you’re almost unable to take it seriously.”

“You can’t,” I interjected. He emphasized his point.

“Once you take it personally, you can’t take it seriously. And some of your critics are right. You remember what Benjamin Franklin said? ‘Our critics are our friends; they show us our faults.’”

Twelve years after the Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton has left the past behind and remains engaged globally. He told Filipinos “it wasn’t a big advantage to have been colonized by Spain and the United States” because it did not develop “the mindset that exists in Rwanda” with its “relentless focus on the future.” He urged Filipinos overseas to come home and help create a climate that has the “big mental and emotional factors that build a nation’s greatness.”

He seems at ease with the mistakes he made, speaking about the lessons he learned and admitting he may no longer have much influence over the US government.

“When you are a former president, you can say what you want, but people don’t care what you say – unless you are the husband of the US Secretary of State!”