Bill Clinton: “Well, if I might just comment on that and say one thing--I thank you for saying that. And I thank you for being…”

“Well, if I might just comment on that and say one thing--I thank you for saying that. And I thank you for being positively inclined toward me. If you lived here, you would have an obligation to be more critical of me. [Laughter] I accept it. Let me tell you what I think about that. I think that both Mandela and de Klerk are remarkable stories, and together, they are a stern rebuke to the cynics of the world: de Klerk for the reason you said, because he was an Afrikaner and because of the image we all have of that and what it was and what it meant politically and racially and every way; Mandela because he spent the best years of his life in a prison cell, walked out by most standards an older man, still ready to be young and vigorous and able to free himself of the bitterness that would surely have destroyed most people who had to live for 27 years behind bars. That also is an astonishing story. If these two people are capable of that sort of internal growth and wisdom and understanding, there must be a way for the rest of us to impart some of that to the society at large in South Africa and the United States or wherever, so that they, in turn, can live together. But both stories are truly astonishing. I think also they owe a lot to others, too. We were talking before I came into this interview--I believe, in the history of the Nobel Prize, the conflict in South Africa between the races is the only thing that's produced four Nobel Prizes over the same issue: Albert Luthuli, then Bishop Tutu, and then Mandela and de Klerk. I mean, this is something that the world has been fixated on with you for a long time. But the internal changes of those two people, that's what you have to find a way--that goes back to where you started. You have to find a way to mirror that down here where people live and buy newspapers and go to work every day and find a way to live together. Thank you.”