I would like to thank the members of my administration and the members of my circle of friends for coming today, including people from around the world, and I want to thank especially Madeleine Albright and David Pryor for what they said. 

Secretary Albright did a great job for us, and not only at the State Department but also at the United Nations.  She was the first woman secretary of state in American history.  Apparently, we’re about to make it a habit, which is not a bad thing.  Because she was a native of the former Czechoslovakia, she understood that rapidly changing and deeply strained part of the world at a time when it was the responsibility of the United States to try to stop hundreds of thousands of innocents from being killed there and millions of people from being turned into refugees.  Whatever good we did, we couldn’t have done without you. So I thank you, Madeleine, I thank you for being here.

David Pryor only told you part of the story.  You know he was running for Congress forty years ago when I was a student and pleading for a job with Senator Fulbright.  I met him when he was out running, and I thought then, and I think now, that he’s a better politician than either Bill Fulbright or I was, as you can tell from his speech.   David and his wife, Barbara, who’s here in the front row, and their children, one of whom is now the United States senator from our home state, have been my friends for 40 years.   After he left the Senate, which was a sad day for me, he went up to the Kennedy School and wound up running that program up there.  Then he came down and became the first dean of the Clinton School of Public Service, which is associated with my library at the University of Arkansas.  Now, he’s just, I think, officially out of office for how long, two weeks, about three?  So he worked again for me.  But I didn’t have a better friend in the United States Senate.  I didn’t have a more helpful friend when I left office, and I never knew a kinder person in this rough business we were in.

I want to say just a couple of words about Senator Fulbright.  I wrote about him at length in my memoirs, and he did have a profound influence on my life, even long before I met him.  You  know, when we were growing up at home in the late 50s and early 60s, the whole image of my state was frozen in time by that awful encounter at Little Rock Central High School and the crisis it precipitated when the governor called out the National Guard to try and stop the court-ordered integration and then President Eisenhower had to nationalize the guard to ensure that it occurred.  Everything seemed to be defined in terms of that.  So having against that background someone as sophisticated, as broadminded, as progressive as Fulbright representing us was quite something for a schoolchild in Arkansas who hoped to have a different sort of life and believed that public service could be a noble endeavor. 

Long before I ever got to the substance of what it was he believed and whether his theory of how the world worked and how American foreign policy should proceed, I was just impressed that you could actually have a good education and not “redneck people to death” and divide them and still win an election every now and then.  I mean—and it turned out to be a rare quality even later on, even in the last few years.  But you can’t imagine what it was like.  Keep in mind, we’d just been through the McCarthyite scare of the nineteen-fifties.  We were having all these horrible racial conflicts and, you know, here was this guy who spoke in complete sentences and coherent paragraphs, who talked about history and believed that the people he represented were just as smart as anybody anywhere else and they just needed better opportunities and better education.  It was an amazing thing. 

Fulbright essentially thought that a country had to have a military, but that there were limits to what you could achieve militarily.  He believed that over the long run, the gains that we achieve through reasonable conversation and coming to a common understanding of our mutual interest through really coming in contact with each other are those that were most lasting. 

He wouldn’t be surprised, for example, to know a stunning factoid I will tell you.  There is one, and only one, Muslim country where the public opinion of the United States has soared since 2003 and stayed high in the aftermath of Iraq—even though it didn’t start for a year later.  Do you know what country it is?  Indonesia—the largest Muslim country in the world.  And why?  Because of the tsunami. 

When the President asked his father and me to coordinate a last part of the fund raising effort for tsunami relief, and then we went together to South Asia, we came back to make our report to the White House.  When I was on the way in to the meeting with the President, one of the career people from USAID who had worked with us and done a marvelous job handed me a poll completed just the day before.  In Indonesia, comparing attitudes on the United States and Osama Bin Laden on that day with a year previous, approval of the United States had gone from 36 to 60 percent and approval of Bin Laden had gone from 58 to 28 percent.  Mr. Bin Laden had done nothing to the Indonesians after the tsunami, but nothing for them, either. 

And in a stunning moment—when they saw the military dropping food instead of bombs, when they saw the American civilian aid workers working, when they saw all the nongovernmental workers, both from religious and nonreligious groups, show up, when they saw all these American businesspeople spontaneously come over and set up water purification equipment, people that didn’t belong to any group who just sort of showed up and found a place where clean water was needed.  In a stunning moment, they saw us as people because we saw them as people.  Across all the religious and geographic and political divides, in that terrible moment of tragedy, we were united in our common humanity.  A year later, according to a survey released just in the last week or so, those gains have endured. 

This would not surprise Bill Fulbright at all.  He would say, “Now if you see this, this is a big argument for why we should be spending more money in this age to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists.  And if you see this, it’s a big argument for why doing things in a cooperative way works better than doing things in a unilateral way, because you can’t solve all the problems all the time.”

We still have people, I’m sad to say, in my job for the Secretary-General, who are still in tents in Indonesia, even though I said I’d get them out by two weeks ago.  But as long as people think you’re on their side and that you’re walking down the same road together and that you’re prepared to share the future together, you can deal with the factual setbacks and the momentary disappointments.  It’s whether people feel like you’re pulling for them, and you have some regard for them, and you wish to share the future with them. 

This doesn’t mean we don’t need a military, this doesn’t mean we should never be prepared to act on our own, but it means our preference should be, as Madeleine says, you can have—you can run—two kinds of foreign policy.  I will just steal her phrase.  You can cooperate whenever you can and act alone when you must or you can act alone whenever you can and cooperate when there’s no other alternative.  We believe the former is a far better policy.  So that was Fulbright’s idea, and he was right about that.

The answer he would give is yes, because—go back to the Indonesia situation—people in the world need to know we’re pulling for them.  We need to be trying to build the world we’d like to live in, where we are no longer the only economic or political or military superpower. 

If he were still alive today and at this podium, he would be giving you a speech using much more elegant and high-flown language than I do, telling you that that’s what we should be doing.  I learned that from him.  I read all his books, and I had the chance as a young man to watch the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Vietnam, on America’s role in the world against Communism and what their objectives were in Asia beyond Vietnam. 

I watched the then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk come in in the morning, at 7:00 a.m. sometimes, and drink coffee with Senator Fulbright.  I watched what it was like for people to have a civil, genuine, human relationship and a bitter public disagreement, and I saw that you did not have to demonize your opponent in order to disagree with him.  I learned a lot of stuff from Bill Fulbright. 

The main point I wish to make today is that the enduring part of his legacy is more important now at the end of the Cold War, more important now that he has left us, even than it was when he was alive.  He made these arguments partly to keep the United States and the Soviet Union from blowing each other off the map until we could figure out what the ultimate resolution to the Cold War was.  Now, in a much more sort of complex, messier world, I think what he had to say to us about the importance of education, about the importance of mutual understanding, about the importance of cooperation, is even more significant. 

Madeleine will remember, we used to have meetings in the White House sometimes, when we thought we might have to have military action on occasion.  We did.  We bombed Kosovo for 77 days in 1998.  The United Kingdom and the United States bombed what we though were Saddam Hussein’s storage sites for chemical and biological materials when he kicked our inspectors out.  But sometimes we would have these debates where people would say, if I didn’t take some military action this very day, people would look down their nose at America and think we were weak.  And I always thought of Senator Fulbright and the terrible quagmire of Vietnam and how many times we sent more soldiers and we found ourselves in a hole and kept digging because we didn’t want to look like we were weak.  So anytime somebody said in my presence, “Hey, if you don’t do this, people will think you’re weak,” I always asked the same question for eight years, Can we kill ’em tomorrow?  I don’t think we can bring ’em back tomorrow, but can we kill ’em tomorrow?  If we can kill them tomorrow, then we’re not weak, and we might be wise to try to find an alternative way.

I learned that as a 20-year-old kid watching Bill Fulbright.  Listening.  Seeing all those senators on the Foreign Relations Committee at a time when they thought being a United States senator was an august responsibility and a grave one.  That every time they went to a hearing, they had a profound obligation to be prepared and—my God, we had a lot of bright people on the Foreign Relations Committee, including people who didn’t agree with Fulbright, who were really smart—and they didn’t have to have their staff give them all the questions.  They actually knew what they wanted to ask.  They knew about the history of Southeast Asia.  It was a fascinating time to be working there, to be young.  Everybody would watch them on television.  It was like high drama.

For a man who was in some ways very proper and very distant—not exactly your standard back-slapping politician—Fulbright had an uncanny understanding that the purpose of politics was to create a framework in which people could live their personal lives according to their dreams.  That almost all aberrational behavior—whether it’s impressing children into tribal wars in Africa or selling drugs or setting off bombs in marketplaces in Israel or Iraq or anywhere else, or in those hotels in Jordan—almost all aberrational behavior like that is basically the product of people who, for whatever reason, have decided to put their power lust ahead of letting children live their dreams.  He got that, and I tried never to forget it. 

I thank you for this award, even though, in general, I think former presidents and presidents should never get awards.  I was delighted when Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize because I thought he earned it, and I thought it was great because he got it as much for what he did after office as when he was in office.  In general, I think that the fact that we got to be president is quite honor enough.  But because I admired and came to love Senator Fulbright, because he helped me when I was young and in need of it, and because I believe the wisdom that you will find throughout his books and speeches applies with particular relevance to the present day, I am honored to receive this.  I just ask you not to forget that, for all his intellectualism, he really understood that politics had a limited purpose.  It was supposed to stop abuses of power and create opportunities and conditions so that people could have their own lives and live their own dreams. 

I do not wish to embarrass one person in this audience, but the new ambassador to the United States from Colombia, Andrés Pastrana, was the president of Colombia when I was in office.  He lost a member of his family in the violence there, and he still went alone into the rainforest in an attempt, a last, vain attempt, to make peace with the guerilla groups who have basically become terrorist henchmen for the narco-traffickers.  When they repulsed him, I agreed that with the Speaker of the House, Mr. Hastert, to support something called “Plan Colombia” to increase the military and judicial capacity of the Colombians to fight the narco-traffickers and to offer alternative ways of making a living, and we went to work there.  America did this on a bipartisan basis, and I’m proud to say that President Bush has continued that policy, and President Pastrana’s successor did as well, Mr. Uribe. 

When I went with my group in Colombia in 2000 to see Andrés before he left office and before I did, to see what we were doing with Plan Colombia, I met a bunch of kids—the Children of Vallenato—who were singing and dancing for peace on the streets in Cartageña.  Chelsea went with me.  They pulled us out, and we danced with them in the streets.  I have a great picture of the President of Colombia and me and my daughter dancing with these kids in their native costumes.  I was so impressed that I invited them to come to the White House in 2000 to sing at Christmas time.  I’d never done that, ever, for a non-American group.  They also sang, by the way, at the opening of my library.  But in the middle of that, on June 27, 2002, at the invitation of President Pastrana and his successor, I went to Colombia to speak.  I asked the business community not to leave, not to think America had given up on them so soon after 9/11.  Thirty-five percent of the country was in the hands of the narco-traffickers and their guerilla supporters.  You think how we’d feel in America if we had 35 percent of any state [in that situation]. 

Today, 13,000 guerillas have laid down their arms.  Opium production—poppy—is down 70 percent, coca production down 25 percent. The government of the country is one, and the former president is now our ambassador.  And those little kids sang at my library dedication.  Because they want peace.  It’s important to remember that.  All authority and force in the end can only work if it’s somehow brought into alignment with people’s dreams.  When you run the risk of killing somebody, it’s okay if you have to do it to save more lives, to stop abuses, but we should remember, Fulbright was always humble about power.  He always understood it had a very limited purpose:  to create the conditions and give people the tools and stop the abuses so that there would be a space for people to live their dreams. 

If you don’t remember anything else I say today, remember that.  I accept this award because what he recommended is more, not less, relevant today.  It’s got a fancy new name called “soft power,” but it basically reflects Sam Rayburn’s famous admonition that we should never tell anyone to go to hell unless we could make him go.  In this life there are relatively few people we could make go to hell, so we should make as many common causes as we can.  You’ve done me a great honor today.  I hope we can do the memory of Senator Fulbright honor by making America not only the strongest country in the world, but the world’s best partner in the fight for our common dreams.  Thank you.