The first time I saw him up close and personal, American President Bill Clinton was still new in office at the White House in Washington in September 1993. I was covering the state visit of then President Fidel V. Ramos in the United States. At 46 years old, Mr. Clinton became the third youngest to become President of the US.
The presidential entourage in the White House meeting of Ramos included then Senator Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who happened to be Mr. Clinton’s classmate. It was a reunion of sorts for the two classmates at Georgetown University in Washington. Several years later, when Mr. Clinton stepped down after his second and last term at the White House in January 2001, it was the turn of his classmate Gloria to rise to power. She was vice president then when she took over from deposed President Joseph Estrada at the end of the EDSA-2 People Power Revolution.
I had the opportunity to see again up close and personal the former US President when I was invited to cover the first Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in Asia held in Hongkong in December 2008. Mr. Clinton organized the CGI in 2005 as a non-partisan organization that convenes annually with global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.
The two classmates met again last Monday when the founding chairman of the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation came to Manila as the venue of his latest international series of lecture forums. The Congresswoman met with Mr. Clinton before the latter’s “Embracing Our Common Humanity” talk at the 1,800-seating capacity Tent City of the Manila Hotel last Monday. Mr. Clinton just came back from his courtesy call to President Aquino at the Palace.
Age and failing health have obviously fast caught up with Mr. Clinton who just turned 64 years old last August. Much leaner now, Mr. Clinton no longer has the puffy, red cheeks that I most remembered about him the first time I saw him. In September 2004, Mr. Clinton underwent a successful quadruple heart bypass surgery. He had another surgery for partial collapsed lungs last March 2005. Only last February, he was rushed to hospital after he complained of chest pains and had two coronary stents inserted in his heart.
Fast forward. It was sheer luck that for the third time I met up close and personal the charismatic US leader last Wednesday at the Manila Hotel. I was one of those who got a ticket from our boss Miguel Belmonte because The STAR was one of the media partners of the Clinton event.
In his opening spiel, Mr. Clinton noted it was also his third visit to the Philippines. In the three times he came here, he said, they were all during the month of November. He first came in Manila for a reciprocal state visit in 1994 during the Ramos presidency. The second time he was here was during the 1996 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders’ Summit also during Ramos’ term.
While he was here for the APEC summit, there was some sort of issue when Ramos’ critics carped about the construction of multi-million peso worth of APEC villas in Subic Bay Freeport for the 21 attending world leaders. The Clintons did not stay overnight at the APEC villa assigned to the US First Couple. Ramos’ critics claimed Mr. Clinton merely used the villa’s five-star bathroom/toilet to pee.
Among the harshest Ramos’ critics was opposition stalwart, former Senate president Ernesto “Manong” Maceda who joined us in the Clinton event at the Tent City. The senator was among the so-called “Magnificent 12” who voted in 1991 for the abrogation of the RP-US Military Bases Agreement (MBA). But history has a funny way of turning things around when several years later, Maceda became our Philippine ambassador to the US from 1999 to 2001 during the shortened Estrada administration.
We’re reminiscing those days Maceda assumed his post in Washington after the Philippine Senate ratified in 1999 the RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA). We we’re listening intently though to Mr. Clinton’s talk when the former US President mentioned about the VFA as one of the most important bilateral pacts entered with the Philippines during his watch at the White House.
He spoke for 35 minutes or so about world developments in general and how they influence and affect countries like the Philippines in particular. He cited the contributions of Filipino migrant workers all around the world, including those in the US, who have contributed to the economic growth and development in the countries where they work and live.
The ex-US President underscored the need to bring back to the Philippines many of these millions of overseas Filipino workers to help move forward the country to the direction the people aspire for.
He pointed out that the supposed over-population problem of the Philippines is being seen negatively rather than its positive impact to the country. He cited rapidly growing economies like China, India, Singapore, and Vietnam all benefited from a reverse brain drain, when educated expatriates returned to their respective homelands that finally reaped from their expertise.
Mr. Clinton suggested the policymakers of the Philippines need to reorient instead the mindset of the Filipino people through greater access to education and employment to keep the population from migrating to other places in search of better paying jobs. “But I think you need to try to get more people to come home,” he stressed.
Filipinos should not worry about why the Philippines has not yet reached its potential, he said in reply to moderator Maria Ressa, former vice president for news and current affairs of ABS-CBN during the brief question-and-answer that followed his talk. Citing the “Chaos theory” mentioned in Clinton’s speech, Ressa asked why the Philippines seemed to have not moved forward after EDSA-1 and 2 when Filipinos got united with one purpose.
Mr. Clinton was obviously trying to couch his reply. He initially tried to trace the problem to the Philippines’ being once a colony of Spain and the US for so many years one after the other. But to get to the point, he drew parallels with how Rwanda and South Africa moved on after their countries similarly were divided by ethnic strife and internal conflict.
He was almost talking in parable when he cited the case of two women from the warring Hutus and Tutsie tribes in Rwanda. Mr. Clinton told the story of the two African women. One of them, he said, offered to work as a slave to the other as a form of payment for the murder of her child during the height of the genocide in 1994 in their tiny Central African country. But the other woman told her she has already forgiven her family for the murder and that she should just work and earn her keep.
He also cited the case of former South African President Nelson Mandela who was imprisoned for so many years fighting the apartheid policy or racial discrimination of native black Africans by the white colonizers of his country.
Mr. Clinton said Mandela pursued Truth and Reconciliation that allowed those who committed crimes and abuses to admit and repent for their sins. After doing so, he said, these people got back together in their common goal of nation building and forget about the hurts of the past.
“They did it relentlessly and focused on the future…It is their capacity to let go,” Mr. Clinton pointed out. If the Rwandans can do that, there’s no doubt in my mind that we Filipinos can also get our potentials to work for us, to sound like hope-selling Mr. Clinton.
Unless we get out of this vicious cycle of vindictiveness, our country would never move an inch from where we were before.