The receiving line, hope it is not too chaotic, not everybody can make it through because there is a period of time to do this and he will not sign anything. If you will line up over there to the left, you have to line up against the wall to my left, thank you for coming this morning. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] every saturday night we feature author programs from our archives and tonight our focus is on former president s to have written books. Of next is president bill clinton who served in office from 1993 to 2001. His memoir my life was written in 2004 and sold over 1 million copies in its first week. He has since written four the books including thrillers with james patterson. From june of 2000 for president clinton talked about his over 900 page memoir, book expo which is the publishing industrys convention, here is president bill clinton. [inaudible conversations] good evening, everyone. My name is Greg Cappelli in, Vice President and show manager book expo america. On honor to welcome you to this this very special occasion. We would not be here this evening if it werent for the support and loyalty of the bookselling and Publishing Community brings each and every year and for that i thank you. [applause] the fabric of our convention lies in the connections we all make with the authors that appear here. It has been over 100 years of memorable moment since the First Convention played host to a guest of honor, mark twain in 1901. Since then the book industry has continued to come together to host authors that provided us with thoughtprovoking discussions to say nothing of stimulating entertainment. Through it all i can safely say that nothing has approached the magnitude of this evenings event. It is with sincere gratitude i have the further introducing the president and editor in chief of tough publishing. [applause] thank you, greg. It is good to be here back among friends. On behalf of all my colleagues at the Publishing Group i thank you for the work that you do bookselling is a noble endeavor, you make readers of the world and you do so without quitting or failing heroes to us all. I am as excited as you are about our guest this evening. Among his notable achievements. [applause] he presided over the longest economic expansion in the history of the United States. [cheers and applause] he was responsible for moving the nation from record deficits to a record surplus. He provided crucial investments in education, tax relief for working families and helped millions of americans move from welfare to work. [applause] he has been an unflinching advocate for civil rights. [applause] he has promoted peace. [applause] and spread democracy throughout the world. He was elected president of the United States in 1992 and again in 1996. The first democratic president to be awarded a second term in six decades. [applause] i dont think there is any doubt that the law was different and he were able to run again. [cheers and applause] he would win with a landslide. His name is bill clinton. And his book is called my life. My life is an extraordinary story. Both a riveting personal drama as well is a fascinating look at the american political arena over the past 40 years. President clinton talks with candor about his successes as well as his setbacks, his career and Public Service and his life. It is the fullest and most nuanced accountable presidency ever written. In the prologue to my life the president mentions golfing in his youth. Have good friends was one. Make a successful political life was another, that he achieved both is no surprise. He also mentions wanting to write a great book. Happily for everyone in this room he has succeeded on that front as well. Im not alone in my assessment. Bob gottlieb who we kept sequesters in our chappaqua safe house during the editing of this book calls it, i quote him, authentic, engaging and revelatory. Clark will publish my life on june 20 second. Our first printing will be one and a half million copies and i suspect that wont be nearly enough. You are going to have the time of your life selling this book. We work enthusiastically to secure its success. In turn i have assured him when it comes to selling books there are no sure hands than the ones in this room. Tonight and in the weeks to come im counting on your support to sell not just a great book but an important historical document. A rare opportunity in any publisher of booksellers life. My my life is a book that deserves the widest possible readership. I want to thank you in advance for helping us spread the word. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming president William Jefferson clinton. [applause] [cheers and applause] thank you very much, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Wow. You have to be careful, you will have me thinking i am president again. Thank you for the invitation to appear and i want to thank you for that wonderful introduction and for believing in this project and agreeing to publish my life. I found quite an honor to get to know sonny and all the people, although he wasnt always as upbeat as he was today. Back when all the gossip writers in new york were saying clinton is going to 20 countries and 30 next and will he ever do this book, from time to time when i was working like crazy on this book i would see sunny and he would give me that look. One time about a year ago, a little less i went to have lunch in new york with one of my College Roommates and a friend of his who became a divine who repayment became the republican governor of arizona, we were sitting there and sunny saw me and i got that look and the look was why did i pay you all this money if you are going to take time and have lunch and how dare you take the time to drive from chappaqua to new york city to have lunch. But eventually got it done and it was a wonderful experience. I want to thank the team, kathy hourigan, andy hughes, who have been so thankful to prepare the launch of this book and every one who has been involved and the folks in new york who helped us a lot. My lawyer, bob arnett who introduced me to cannot and helped me negotiate with foreign publishers who will publish the book. So far only one of them has asked for pictures only a country. I want to thank all the people at book expo america for inviting me here and i would also like to acknowledge three people who were essential to the completion of the book who came with me today, justin cooper, essentially made it possible for me to do this book when i did. I wrote it in longhand in 20 some notebooks and he put it in the computer, printed out and we chiseled on 5 or 6 other times. Each section, he did the basic research and make tomlinson did all the fact checking. If there are still factual errors in it is not their fault, they certainly tried. It is impossible not to make a mistake somewhere. I want to thank the booksellers of america for agreeing to have this book my life in your lives for the next few months and for all you did to promote reading. I am a great book lover. You cant navigate my house for all the books everywhere and i cant build any more bookshelves i dont think. When i left the white house we sent 4000 books home to arkansas to the library and took 1000 or so to washington where my senator lives during the week and where i get to visit on occasion and we bought a couple thousand home and another thousand since then. People are good enough to send me their books and they come out, between the ones i buy and the ones that are given to me i can hardly walk around without stumbling over them but ive had a lifelong love affair with reading since my grandmother gave me dick and jane readers when i was literally 2 or 3 years old and i used to hang out at the local Public Library one i was in grade school and read about the indian chiefs i most admired. I still remember, a paper i did an Elementary School and native americans. Referencing these books i had read about sitting bull and crazy horse and the other great florida chief who developed the first alphabet for his people. I have always loved reading and books have had a big impact on my life and you will see in the book i mentioned a lot of the books that meant a lot to me in the course of my life and my teachers. Most of them survived the editorial cut although Robert Gottlieb, my editor, a joy to work with, one of the most interesting experiences of my life, worked with Katharine Graham and katharine hepburn, he knew something about everything but not so much about politics. He didnt think he wanted to know much about it so i sent him the first 150 pages. First thing we had this meeting i told him what i was going to do, we may do it that way but you are working for me now and i havent worked for him in a long time so it was interesting. I sent him 150 pages triple spaced, he said this is a really good story but are you running for anything . I said no, i am not. He said good. You cannot put the name of every person you ever met in this book. He said i do not care what happened to their children and grandchildren and it bothers me my president had enough room left in his head to remember his children and grandchildren and every person here met. They come from arkansas, that is what we do. I cant help it, that is who we are. Got some book readers from home out their too. So another hundred pages or so on the American South in the late 40s and 50s, he called and said i really like this but got any questions . Just one. Do you know any sane people as a child . I said no, but neither did anybody else, i just paid more attention than most people. So then i sent him 155 pages on my introduction to arkansas politics and my exposure to different people in the 70s and 80s and he said this is really good. How much of it did you make up . He said this is a story come you cant make stuff up. So help me god all these things happened. So he said when people read this they will all wants to go to arkansas because it is more like a novel by Gabriel Garcia marquez. I had very interesting run through and when gottlieb tried to give me to cut things we began to play games with him, i sent him one draft which said out of the blue in the middle paragraph, not only that but Robert Gottlieb is the greatest editor in human history. And he cut it. But he put that he did it reluctantly. But i found out, if i tried to say too much about movies or football or the rock n roll culture in which i grew up that stuff was all, i wanted to write a whole page on high noon, my Favorite Movie and why it is an important movie and it really is an important movie in American History and somehow i will give you what gottlieb cut. We started, i started playing games with his new york sensibility and i quoted yates three times before he finally cut one. I wanted to talk about how i made a trip to limerick on one of my last stop in islands, there were 50,000 people in the street and i was afraid he thought i had too much ireland in the book so i told him when i was in limerick that Frank Mccourt was a friend of mine and i love angelas ashes but i like to deal one better than the old one, survived the cut. Once i figured out the cultural taste of my editor i just kept ballooning the book and it was really interesting. This was, i had never done anything like this before. I am sure many of you have. I want to make a couple comments about it. First of all most of you in this audience are younger than me, most everybody is now. I really think anybody fortunate enough to be live to be said 50 years old should take some time, a couple weekends, sit down and write the story of your life even if it is only 20 pages and even if it is only for your children and grandchildren and closest friends. Young people today have access to more information than any group of people in history, they learned how to use the internet for good or ill at early ages, 60, 70, more challenges on television than they have satellite but they still hunger to know about their roots. They dont want to be full of facts and information and uprooted from their past. One of the most amazing experiences for me in writing this book was seeing it through my daughters eyes. I have been talking to her about this stuff her whole life but she still learned some things about her family and people she didnt know. Shes also helpful to me, one of my best readers, she said this thing you said about the 50s you said in shorthand. I know what you mean, but youve got to unpack it. People my age wont know what you are talking about. But i highly recommend it to all of you because you cant imagine what it would mean to your children. Second thing, observation i would have is its very therapeutic because i found myself thinking about this book, writing about these three or four years now and then and when i would get into any particular part of my life after about an hour i was there again. And i know your memory plays tricks on you over the years but i really felt, i believe, as i did when i was 5 years old and my stepfather in a drunken rage shotgun and the bullet landed in a wall between where my mother and i were standing and i can almost feel it again. It happened to me again when i was president of the things i thought i wasnt mad at anymore i got mad about all over again. One day i was writing about what can started to Susan Mcdougall and got so mad i couldnt work for four hours. I never had any Writers Block but i did have these emotional waves coming over me and a lot of happiness too. If this book is no good it is all my fault. If it is good that people whose names i mentioned deserve a lot of credit. I just try to tell a story. I feel that i was very fortunate in my political career and having grown up in the last television age. I was almost 10 years old when Television First came out and all my people were working people from arkansas and at the end of world war ii the per capita income of my state was only 56 the national average, only mississippi at 48 was for. But nobody had any money to speak of, no one felt poor as long as they had close on their back and they were clean and had a place to sleep at night and had enough food to feed whoever walked in the front door. Most of our entertainment when i was a child centered around meals and storytelling. Before you could tell what you had to listen to one. You had to learn to listen and learn to appreciate the unique characteristics of superficially ordinary people. I feel profoundly indebted to all my family. My grandmother who was a nurse and her sister who was a nurse and my great uncle buddy who was probably the most important member of my extended family who was a farmer and fireman it had one of his lungs taken out in 1974, lived to be 91, they were great storytellers and they were really smart and back then this is one thing poor white people, black people in the south shared in common, pumping gas at the local filling station might be as smart as going to a hospital because there was no such thing as universal educational opportunity, it was largely by accident of birth and circumstance. They were all preg. I. Bill folks. It made for an amazing childhood. Made the ordinary extraordinary. My uncle never got over telling stories. In his late 80s, i was talking to him and he was bragging on the fact that his wife had been dead for several years and he was bragging on the fact that even though he had one lung he was still alert enough to drive his car and he took two ladies out for a ride every week, one was 91 and the other was 93 so i said you like these older women . He looked at me, didnt miss a beat, it seems like they are a little more settled. So i had an inordinate advantage when i went into politics because i liked people and i learned to listen to their stories. I also had a great advantage because i lived with my grandparents until i was 4. At 6 i spent massive amounts of time with them and they were unusual characters for a small southern town. They were uneducated relatively, white folks of modest means who didnt have a racist bone in their body and i learned a lot. From my grandfather, about looking up to folks and he is one of the people i dedicated my book to, but a lot of the good things that happens to me in life i dont deserve any credit for, i was very very young, nothing to do with anything good about me. I just learned from what i saw. And the power of their example was considerable. What i try to do in this book, i tried to accomplish two things as you can almost look at it as two separate books. From my birth through the election of 1992 i tried to tell a story, tried to tell the story of my life and the story of america and how my small life interwoven with American Life beginning with the south at the end of world war ii and through the 50s and my trips to Georgetown College and the oxford study and back through my political career. I tried to explain what happened in america, with particular care what happened in the 1960s and how america broke up and publicly and all the turmoil of 1968. With the death of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther king and controversy over the vietnam war, the rise of the Womens Movement and all the things that happened in the beginning of the polarization of politics politics part which occurred at the Democratic Convention and how republicans begin republicans and democrats became democrats and there was a lot of shifting chairs, the why the white southerners who had been conservative democrats became republicans and basically i reached the conclusion a long time ago which i say in the book that if you look back on the 60s on balance you think this would morgan harm you think your democrat if you think more harm than good you are probably a republican. There was a there were doubtless excesses and selfindulgence is in the 60s, all that stuff people say that is critical of me and my generation theres some truth in all of it but it was also profoundly