Bill Clinton travels the world with purpose

updated 1:38 p.m. ET Sept. 5, 2007

In December 2006, Condé Nast Traveler's Patricia Storace trailed former president Bill Clinton on his health and disaster-relief campaign in Asia. Later, in his New York City headquarters, the two sat down to discuss Clinton's philanthropic work, the United States' global reputation, and travel's potential to do good.

Condé Nast Traveler: You've said that you woke up one morning and discovered you were an NGO. What motivated you to embark on philanthropic work?

Bill Clinton: I knew what I was doing, but I hadn't ever thought about it in those terms. But it happened somehow, sometime in 2001, that I realized that was what I was.

Well, first of all, I wanted to continue to be active on those things that I cared about when I was president where I could still have an impact. Like HIV/AIDS; economic opportunity for poor people in America; and all around the world, promoting reconciliation where I could. I had a pretty clear idea of what I could still make a difference doing and what I couldn't. And I didn't just want to make speeches. Although I think actually that the speech work I do is fine. It's important, because I try to help people think about what's going on and organize their lives accordingly. But I wanted to have an impact. And secondly, I felt obligated to do it. I knew I had to work hard, because when I got out, I had a wife in the Senate, and we had to have a home in Washington and a home here, and I was in debt. But I thought it would have been wrong for me to spend the rest of my life just trying to amass personal wealth, because of the gift I had been given. First by the people of my state, to be able to be governor for a dozen years, and to be able to be president for eight years. I think when you get that kind of life that's a gift of the people, you owe whatever time you have when you're finished. To try to give it back. And so I wanted to do it, and I felt obligated to do it, and finally I thought it would be more interesting and more fun for me than anything else I could do. And it's turned out to be.

CNT: What in your background and experience best fitted you for the work you're doing now?

Clinton: I think two things. First of all, when I go into a situation I always think about—I always have, all my life—I think about, How could we make this better? What could we do differently that would be even better? And I'm pretty good at seeing like a lot of different things happening at once and putting them in a pattern and figuring out how you can rearrange it so it might have a better outcome. The second thing is that I think, because of my background, I never thought of political endeavors primarily in terms of power and prestige, and I never thought of economic endeavors primarily in terms of wealth and position. I always thought about how all this affected ordinary people. Because I came from fairly modest circumstances, and I saw the impact of political decisions and economic arrangements on ordinary people's lives. I knew it made a difference what decisions were made and how they were carried out. And I think that really that made this a comfortable transition for me. It didn't matter to me very much that I didn't have a political office any more. All I knew was that I still had the ability to affect other people's lives in a positive way based on my own experience before I ever got into politics.

CNT: Your friend, King Abdullah of Jordan, said in a recent interview with Condé Nast Traveler that it surprises him that Americans lack knowledge about the international world and that "one of the problems I've found with American politicians is the small numbers of senators who have traveled." How do you account for this incuriosity about the world?

Clinton: I don't know. Except that historically, except for wartime, we have felt relatively insulated. We have land borders only with Canada and Mexico. We have these two massive oceans that separate us from most of the rest of the world and, we often thought, from their problems. But I think that's changing quite a lot, partly because 9/11 reminded us that we can't escape from the troubles of the world. And also because of international economic competition, outsourcing, stagnant wages, all the economic challenges we face.

NBC News video Clinton maintains powerful presence Sept. 5: Bill Clinton talks about his new book, the power of reconciliation, Rwanda, and the 2008 election. Today show

And I think the other thing that's changed it is the increasing diversity of American society, which is no longer just the province of the East and West coasts and the big cities like Chicago and Detroit in the middle, which have always been diverse and have grown even more diverse. But you know in Arkansas, in my native state, in the northwest part of the state, which was overwhelmingly white Protestant, the fastest-growing group of citizens there are Hispanics, and many of the Catholic churches in northwest Ark now have two masses. They have a Spanish mass as well as an English mass. If you go to North Carolina, where there were always a lot of African-Americans, the others were basically Scots-Irish white people, and now they have a huge Hispanic population. If you go to Queens, in New York City, which used to be primarily an Irish-Italian borough, and then the African-Americans came in, now there's a massive infusion of Asians, both from East Asia and from South Asia. I went to an event for Hillary the other night. It was an Asian event, and everybody was from Queens. There's a whole culture center there. There are different Asian shops and a shopping center and a big restaurant and a big public-events room, and all that kind of stuff. You just see that now, all over America. So I'd say that 9/11, plus awareness of the international economy, plus the growing diversity of America, has really changed that.

I gave a speech in Kansas State the other day. Heartland of the country. Nine thousand five hundred kids came, and I got several questions about Darfur. So I think it's changing. I'm as likely to get a question about Darfur in Kansas or in Idaho as I am in Liberia, where I talk to university students. So I believe it's changing. But to go back to your specific question about politicians—for many years there were always a few people in the House and a few people in the Senate, in both parties, who were really interested in international affairs, and the rest of the members sort of delegated it over to them because they knew they would never be defeated at home for going one way or the other on most international issues, because they weren't the voting issues for their people. And I think that's changing too.

I gave the commencement speech at the University of Michigan this week and that's a big, sophisticated place. But just in Michigan, people would ask me, for the last ten years, only what they could do to keep from losing their manufacturing base in the auto industry. Now they still ask that, but they also want to know how we can restore America's standing in the world, how we can have more friends again, more allies again. So I do think it's changing. King Abdullah is right, but I think it's changing. I also believe that those of us who have had the benefit of lots of foreign travel, lots of foreign experience, have an obligation to try to share what we think we know with our fellow citizens. And that's basically one reason that I give as many speeches as I do. I always try to say to people, here's how I look at the world. And you need to have a way of looking at the world. You don't necessarily have to agree with me, but you have to have a theory of how the world works and how it should work in order to evaluate all these issues that are coming at us. But we're getting there. America is getting there. Our citizens are becoming more worldly, in a positive way.

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