It’s not our God-given right to be happy. So, if a man can laugh out loud once or twice a day, that would be happiness.

The entire family being healthy, being on the set of Barry, and a rainbow trout on my line.

Floating on my back in the ocean.

Getting hired. With the possible exception of my daughters’ births and my wedding day, the happiest moments of my life were when someone offered me a job.

Well, it wasn’t a game to me. We were taught, interestingly enough, given the current state of political affairs, that you should try not to hate anyone, that hatred was a sickness and a weakness, and that there were very few people who were completely evil, so you should go out of your way to figure out what makes them tick and see if you can find some way to communicate with them. I learned that more with my family — even before I was old enough to know what I was doing —when I was eating meals, my grandmother’s brother and his family had — they had four kids, and they always fed a lot of people, and we ate there a lot, and they would talk about whatever had happened that week. And the kids could talk, but they had to prove they could listen first, so before I could tell a story I had to recount what I had just heard, because if you weren’t listening, nobody wanted to listen to you. And it was like a primer in human nature, and I was fortunate in having people all along the way who tried to help explain other people to me, and I developed an obsessive interest in doing it.

Oh, yeah. I spent a lot of time in the public library. When we moved I was seven years old, and I got a library card, and I used to go to the library all the time, and I loved all the, you know, standard children’s novels. I love those Biblical epics, but my favorite books when I was a child were books about Native Americans: tribal leaders; Osceola, who brought the alphabet to the Seminoles; Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce; and the standard ones that were heroes in all the Western movies. But I was fascinated. The Cherokee had moved across my state on the Trail of Tears when they were expelled from the East and then moved over to the reservation lands. I became fascinated with what happened to the Native Americans and the struggle that many were undertaking then — and they still try to preserve their traditions and their way of life, their ties to the land, and still provide education and participate in the life of the country. I was interested in it then. I’m interested in it now. The Native Americans in our country who don’t have casinos on their tribal lands still have the lowest per capita income of any ethnic group in America. It’s a disgrace, and when I became president I was the first president since James Monroe in the 1820s to invite all the tribal leaders to the White House, and it was fascinating. Some of the ones who came from lands that had casinos flew in on their private jets. A lot of the others had to pass the hat in the reservation to raise enough money to pay for a plane ticket, and they all came, and we began to meet, and I learned a lot from them.

And because Fulbright was the chairman of the committee he had an automated — some sort of automated device that allowed the Pentagon to send him, every day, a list of the people who’d been killed in Vietnam from Arkansas. So I would go check it every day. Four of my high school classmates were killed, including, as I said, the son of my guy who was my Sunday school teacher for nine years. And I also knew, because I had to carry the stuff around, that not everything the government was claiming about the progress on the battlefield was true, and it’s kind of a crazy burden for a kid my age. I felt guilty I wasn’t there, and it felt futile to go. It was an awful feeling.

My job was basically to be a delivery boy for all kinds of things, but they also — because I was at Georgetown and studying international affairs, I was assigned to read six newspapers a day and clip the most relevant articles. This is the technology we used. You couldn’t scan articles. There was no “online.” There was nothing, right? So I would read the newspapers, clip the articles I thought they ought to read, put them on a routing slip, which had on it the names of the senior staff of the committee and all the senators who were committee members. And I would send it to the senior staff, and they would decide whether to send any of them on, but I don’t think I’d have won a Rhodes Scholarship if I hadn’t been a clerk on the Foreign Relations Committee. Nobody else I was competing with read six newspapers a day, and they actually paid me good money to read The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Washington Star, which existed then, The Baltimore Sun , The St. Louis Post Dispatch , and then we alternated — and — oh, and The Wall Street Journal . We read them every day. Those were the six papers we read. I did, and then that’s what the senators got.

Now that’s what happens when people go crazy, where the only thing that matters is whose camp are you in, whose side are you on, what tribe do you belong to — where facts and discussions become irrelevant. And it made me wonder whether the way I was raised and all the listening and storytelling skills I learned as a boy would even be relevant today. They’d be good if you’re in. They’re still really important to getting anything done, but if you live in an environment where everything is a litmus test and everything is a-hundred-to-nothing, and the only thing that matters is feeding your resentment, and anger blinds you to answers, and being very sanctimonious somehow proves your sincerity and authenticity, it’s really hard to get anything done. It’s a whole new challenge now, and that’s why — and the Russians knew that. You know, that’s when they get in here and start fooling with all these politics. They realize you just sort of load it up because once people take sides based on what tribe they’re in then there’s no difference in facts and fiction. There’s no difference in truth and lies. It’s just, does this confirm what side you’re on? And you can’t run a democracy that way. It is utterly impossible to preserve democracy.

I do think my mother had a lot to do with that. I mean, after all, you know her — it was not near as bad as having your husband die in a car wreck after — he survives World War II. They had a great life planned, and he gets killed in a car wreck, not because of a concussion, but because in a fluke, the tire blows out on his car. He’s thrown out of the car. He lands in a ditch in a field, and the ditch is full of water, and he can’t get out of the ditch before he drowns. There’s — it made it look a little whiny for me to be all bent out of shape about losing an election, and I realized that it was a weird deal. It was 1980. It was Reagan’s election. It was a period not unlike now, widespread resentment over the stagnant economy, the Iran hostage crisis, and I bet I had a hundred people coming to — I’m not exaggerating — coming to me and saying, “God, Bill, I didn’t know you were going to lose. I just voted against you to because I didn’t like some of the things you’d done.” And I remember once — one of the funniest things that ever happened to me. I was driving over to see my mother. I lived in Little Rock, and she lived in Hot Springs 50 miles away, and in the middle of the trip was a little country store owned by a guy who ran the elections in that area and was real smart, so I went in to get a Coke, and started talking to him. And this little boy came up to me in overalls, and he said, “You’re Bill Clinton, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I helped to beat you. I cost you 11 votes, and it was no accident.” I said, “You did?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “It was me, my wife, our two boys and their wives, and five of my friends. We just decked you.” I said, “Why’d you do it?” He said, “I had to because you raised my car tax. The car license.” And so we’re standing on the interstate. I said, “Look over there. You remember when I was governor? That highway broke wide open, and even big trucks were off in the ditch, and I had to send the National Guard down here to clean it up, and we had to fix it.” He said, “Yeah, I remember. I don’t care. I still didn’t want to pay it.” So I was laughing at the guy, and I said, “Let me ask you something.” I said, “If I ever ran again, would you vote for me?” He said, “Absolutely.” I said, “You would?” He said, “Sure. We’re even now.” And I went — and there were no cell phones, so I had a dime. I went and put it in the payphone, and I called Hillary, and I said, “You know, I’m not dead yet. We might have to run again.