We both did. Most people in my part of the country really liked him because he was from Tupelo, Miss., right across the river. He was the cultural rage of my childhood-before the Beatles.
I could do worse. Then all the Elvis fans could say, Well, Elvis is alive. It’s just another thing I could do for the country.
I don’t know that I’ve planned for this for 20 years. But the truth is most politicians are not candid with people. They try to act like they hate polities-and, oh, this is a burden, I just had to do it. When the truth is most of them love it and wouldn’t do anything else on a dime if they could avoid it. I’m just more candid than that. I decided when I was a young man that my best use in life would be in public life, that I had some gifts at it and I wanted to make a difference. To me politics is the only area of human life where it’s bad form to be ambitious. Nobody criticizes Michael Jordan for the hundreds of free throws he may have shot when he was a kid in North Carolina.
I didn’t quite say that. I said that I was always warned that-or I always wondered if I’d want to be 16 when I was 40 because I never felt like I got to complete my childhood. Hillary and I have talked about that-how I’ve always been such a workaholic and that most of the major mistakes I’ve made in my life-bursts of anger, other things-I’ve made when I was absolutely just too exhausted to move.
I think there’s always been a part of me that said, “Wait a minute, I’m just killing myself.” I’m always working. A big part of growing up in life is figuring out how to reconcile all the things you want and make the choices you have to make and give up the things you have to give up-and still have a lot of fun. I am not by nature a dour person. I love to crack jokes; I love to laugh; I don’t mind making fun of myself.
First of all, even in the toughest times, we really loved each other. We really, really loved each other. It was like the first time I met her. I had just broken up with another woman. I knew from the minute I saw her that if I got involved with her I would fall in love with her. And I saw her across the hall [at Yale Law School]. And I’d been trying to work up the guts to talk to her. And she threw a book down at the end of the library-it’s a long, skinny room-and she walked the length of that room and she said, listen, if you’re going to keep staring at me and I’m going to keep staring back, we should at least know each other’s names. My name’s Hillary Rodham. What’s yours? At that moment, I could not remember my name.
That was one thing. Secondly, we thought that our lives were richer together, that for different reasons it was difficult for both of us to accommodate to other people-like it is for a lot of strong-willed people. And we love parenthood, and we’re nuts about our kid in a wonderful way.
Never been boring. I told her one time when she was chewing me out about something: don’t ever leave me unless you really think you would enjoy spending more time with somebody else. I can honestly tell you there has never been a time when that happened. We just never wanted to give up on each other, and we still don’t.
If you’re going to go back in someone’s past, then you must view their actions in the light that they were meant then, not what they look like 22 years later when I’m 45 and running for president. And also keep in mind that at that point in time we didn’t think of people who ran for office as bad people necessarily. Those of us who came of age when Eisenhower was our father figure and then the torch was passed to Kennedy, who grew up believing in the legacy of World War II, with Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, politics was an honorable, not a dishonorable profession.
It’s a profoundly religious country. People believe in God. They believe in life after death. They believe in good and evil. They believe that each individual life is a struggle with cosmic dimensions. They also believe in redemption. That’s why religious people are more likely to be both forgiving of and accepting of the comments I made on “60 Minutes,” because they understand that life is a process of growth and renewal. My religious background, I don’t talk about it much because I was as a boy very moved by the story of the Pharisee standing on the street corner. I saw a lot of people that I thought were hypocrites in the very religious atmosphere that I grew up in, saying one thing and doing another. But it’s a very important part of my life. I think I feel somewhat more comfortable speaking in the rhythms of my faith in my speeches when I’m home in the South than I do in other places.
One of my wise former cabinet members said to me once in the aftermath of the Hart business in ‘87 that he’d had reservations about Hart for other reasons and he thought the whole thing was sad, but inevitable. On the other hand, he said, “I don’t want to vote for a president who’s never done anything wrong.” He said, “I want somebody who knows what it’s like to feel pain and loss and defeat and disappointment in yourself, and to overcome that.” I think those of us who come out of a religious tradition are far more comfortable talking about that than maybe others are.
The hardest licks I thought would come later. I didn’t think they’d come this early. And I never thought I’d live to see the day where the presumption would be against me on two stories where I’ve been telling the same story all along and other people change their stories. That has surprised me. It seems that in national politics the presumption always runs against the candidate even if everybody else is changing their story and the candidate is telling the same story he’s told all along. That’s been a little tough to deal with. If [people] can get a fix on me again, I can do fine. If they don’t, I’ll try to put my anchor in somewhere else.
title: “Political Ambitions Personal Choices” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-01” author: “Don Johnson”
We both did. Most people in my part of the country really liked him because he was from Tupelo, Miss., right across the river. He was the cultural rage of my childhood-before the Beatles.
I could do worse. Then all the Elvis fans could say, Well, Elvis is alive. It’s just another thing I could do for the country.
I don’t know that I’ve planned for this for 20 years. But the truth is most politicians are not candid with people. They try to act like they hate polities-and, oh, this is a burden, I just had to do it. When the truth is most of them love it and wouldn’t do anything else on a dime if they could avoid it. I’m just more candid than that. I decided when I was a young man that my best use in life would be in public life, that I had some gifts at it and I wanted to make a difference. To me politics is the only area of human life where it’s bad form to be ambitious. Nobody criticizes Michael Jordan for the hundreds of free throws he may have shot when he was a kid in North Carolina.
I didn’t quite say that. I said that I was always warned that-or I always wondered if I’d want to be 16 when I was 40 because I never felt like I got to complete my childhood. Hillary and I have talked about that-how I’ve always been such a workaholic and that most of the major mistakes I’ve made in my life-bursts of anger, other things-I’ve made when I was absolutely just too exhausted to move.
I think there’s always been a part of me that said, “Wait a minute, I’m just killing myself.” I’m always working. A big part of growing up in life is figuring out how to reconcile all the things you want and make the choices you have to make and give up the things you have to give up-and still have a lot of fun. I am not by nature a dour person. I love to crack jokes; I love to laugh; I don’t mind making fun of myself.
First of all, even in the toughest times, we really loved each other. We really, really loved each other. It was like the first time I met her. I had just broken up with another woman. I knew from the minute I saw her that if I got involved with her I would fall in love with her. And I saw her across the hall [at Yale Law School]. And I’d been trying to work up the guts to talk to her. And she threw a book down at the end of the library-it’s a long, skinny room-and she walked the length of that room and she said, listen, if you’re going to keep staring at me and I’m going to keep staring back, we should at least know each other’s names. My name’s Hillary Rodham. What’s yours? At that moment, I could not remember my name.
That was one thing. Secondly, we thought that our lives were richer together, that for different reasons it was difficult for both of us to accommodate to other people-like it is for a lot of strong-willed people. And we love parenthood, and we’re nuts about our kid in a wonderful way.
Never been boring. I told her one time when she was chewing me out about something: don’t ever leave me unless you really think you would enjoy spending more time with somebody else. I can honestly tell you there has never been a time when that happened. We just never wanted to give up on each other, and we still don’t.
If you’re going to go back in someone’s past, then you must view their actions in the light that they were meant then, not what they look like 22 years later when I’m 45 and running for president. And also keep in mind that at that point in time we didn’t think of people who ran for office as bad people necessarily. Those of us who came of age when Eisenhower was our father figure and then the torch was passed to Kennedy, who grew up believing in the legacy of World War II, with Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, politics was an honorable, not a dishonorable profession.
It’s a profoundly religious country. People believe in God. They believe in life after death. They believe in good and evil. They believe that each individual life is a struggle with cosmic dimensions. They also believe in redemption. That’s why religious people are more likely to be both forgiving of and accepting of the comments I made on “60 Minutes,” because they understand that life is a process of growth and renewal. My religious background, I don’t talk about it much because I was as a boy very moved by the story of the Pharisee standing on the street corner. I saw a lot of people that I thought were hypocrites in the very religious atmosphere that I grew up in, saying one thing and doing another. But it’s a very important part of my life. I think I feel somewhat more comfortable speaking in the rhythms of my faith in my speeches when I’m home in the South than I do in other places.
One of my wise former cabinet members said to me once in the aftermath of the Hart business in ‘87 that he’d had reservations about Hart for other reasons and he thought the whole thing was sad, but inevitable. On the other hand, he said, “I don’t want to vote for a president who’s never done anything wrong.” He said, “I want somebody who knows what it’s like to feel pain and loss and defeat and disappointment in yourself, and to overcome that.” I think those of us who come out of a religious tradition are far more comfortable talking about that than maybe others are.
The hardest licks I thought would come later. I didn’t think they’d come this early. And I never thought I’d live to see the day where the presumption would be against me on two stories where I’ve been telling the same story all along and other people change their stories. That has surprised me. It seems that in national politics the presumption always runs against the candidate even if everybody else is changing their story and the candidate is telling the same story he’s told all along. That’s been a little tough to deal with. If [people] can get a fix on me again, I can do fine. If they don’t, I’ll try to put my anchor in somewhere else.
