Bill Clinton: “Well, if it were for the millennium, it might be someone different. Well, this century produced a lot of great men and…”

“Well, if it were for the millennium, it might be someone different. Well, this century produced a lot of great men and women. But as an American, I would have to choose Franklin Roosevelt, because in this century our greatest peril was in the Depression and World War II and because he led us not only through those things and laid the building blocks for a better society with things like Social Security and unemployment insurance, which was, interestingly enough, first recommended by his cousin Theodore Roosevelt when he was President, but he also looked to the future, endorsing the United Nations and a lot of the other international institutions which were subsequently created under President Truman. Finally, I think Roosevelt was an example to Americans of the importance of not giving up and of the dignity inherent in every person. And when Franklin Roosevelt was first elected, Oliver Wendell Holmes was still in the Supreme Court; he was 92 years old. And President Roosevelt was taken to see Oliver Wendell Holmes who was still reading Plato in his nineties and all that. Holmes was a pretty acerbic fellow when he said, after meeting Roosevelt, that he thought he might not have had a first-class mind, but he certainly had a first-class temperament. And he did. He understood that reality is more than the facts before you; it's also how you feel about them, how you react to them, what your attitude is. That was the advice that--``only thing we have to fear was fear itself '' was much more than just a slogan to him. He had lived it before he asked the American people to live it. So for all those reasons, if I had to pick one person, I would pick him. Yes, sir. Colombia and Venezuela”