'He is not just great: he is a good man' Clinton about Mandela

[Ming]

The Authorised Portrait is a series of essays about Mandela:This is a edited extract by Bill Clinton shareing his encounters with this great man:

I had followed South Africa for many years and I thought that Mandela was a seminal figure. And because of the spiritual transformation he had gone through in his imprisonment, he became bigger and bigger. I wanted (my daughter) Chelsea, who was then 10 years old and knew who he was and knew what he stood for, to watch his release.

I felt it would be one of the most important political events in her lifetime.

So, I sat her up on the kitchen counter and turned on the television. I still remember it like it was yesterday. I see him walking towards that gate; I see the car there waiting; I see Chelsea sitting on the kitchen counter. And it meant more to me that I was able to watch it with her.

Mandela made a grand, elegant, dignified exit from prison and it was very, very powerful for the world to see. I wondered whether he was thinking about the past 27 years, whether he was angry all over again. Later, many years later, I had a chance to ask him. I said: "Tell me the truth."

And he said: "Yes, I was angry. And I was a little afraid. After all I've not been free in so long. But when I felt that anger well up inside of me I realised that if I hated them after I got outside that gate then they would still have me." And he smiled and said: "I wanted to be free so I let it go."

It was an astonishing moment. It changed me.

The Republicans were quite surprised when I got elected and they basically decided to assault my legitimacy from the day I became president. It was tough … Mandela was especially helpful. I remember asking him one day to go over one more time the moment when he realised that he was letting go of his anger and hatred.

"Well, I hated them for 14 years," he said, "and I'm not sure, when I was young and strong, if I wasn't kept alive on my hatred.

"But one day when I was breaking rocks I realised they had taken so much from me … They'd taken everything from me except my mind and my heart. And I realised I would have to give those things to them - and I decided not to give them away."

Then he looked at me and smiled and said: "And neither should you."

Not long before the vote on the impeachment, I saw Thabo Mbeki in Washington and I asked how president Mandela was.

He said: "Oh, he's fine, but he did tell me to give you a message ... He said I should remind you 'not to give them away'." Right there, before the House voted! It was amazing.

The Republicans were worried because they wanted to impeach me and knew they had no constitutional, legal or historical basis to do so, but they knew that the US press had made such a big deal out of it that they could get it.

They were worried, however, about the fallout in the minority community and so they voted to give Mandela the Congressional Gold Medal.

Mandela called me and he starts off: "My President…" Whenever he said: "My President", I knew he was telling me something we were going to do and I was going to do it whether I wanted to or not! He said: "The Congress has voted to give me this gold medal. As the president of South Africa I cannot turn down such an award. I may be old, but I'm not foolish. I understand what is going on here so here's what we are going to do.

"I'm coming in a day early and we are going to have dinner at the White House and I will tell America what I think about what they are doing." So he comes and says how all these world leaders are dependent on me and how I've helped solve all these problems and how it's not for him to tell America what to do but they ought to leave me alone and let me go back to work. I got a standing ovation at the UN, which is unheard of for an American, but I don't think one network carried his speech on the evening news.


Mandela will never know how much he helped me get through that period.

The more I thought about him walking down that road, the more I realised how he had demanded that he be judged by who he was, and what he did and what he said, not by what others had done to him or said about him.

Our connection is a political affinity, but I don't think it is entirely that … there was just something about us that clicked.

Interestingly enough, we did actually have a dispute to do with various economic and security issues that were rooted in the apartheid years before his presidency.

He didn't always agree with everything I did on foreign policy either and our government bureaucracy was a little harder on him than I was. I got that: he was in prison for 27 years and he was determined to stick with any country that helped the ANC when he and the other leaders were in prison. Mandela prides himself on being a loyal friend and just as he was loyal to me so he was to Castro, the Libyans and others that America didn't always get along too well with.

He has so much to teach us about forgiveness. Mandela found that forgiveness was a strategy for survival. Because he found a forgiving heart under the most adverse circumstances, because he learnt to hate the apartheid cause without hating the white South Africans, he had space left inside to learn and grow and become great.

To me he represents a great political leader. He had the discipline to stay the course for almost three decades, through enormous punishment, to achieve the political objective he sought. And he did it in a way that, in the end, had the support of people across the racial divide.

Most of us act as if we have no control over the way we react. I tried to convince Yasser Arafat not to start the intifada in 2000. Ariel Sharon, before he was prime minister, went up on the Temple Mount. He was the first Israeli politician to do so in 33 years and the Palestinians felt it was desecration. Arafat said: "We have to prevent it," but I said: "No, you don't. You have another option. You could have a little Palestinian girl go with flowers, give them to Sharon and welcome him and invite him to the Al Aqsa Mosque and say when Temple Mount is yours he can come back every day. You have a choice."

Mandela always understood that. That's the difference between a person who is just a politician and a person who is a great human being. I used Mandela's model of peacemaking over again.

In 2000, he hauled me all the way to the peace centre in Arusha in Tanzania. He called me and told me I was coming to help end the conflict in Burundi. He said: "We are going to do a good cop, bad cop routine and for once I'll be the bad cop and you be the good cop." He said: "They'll either have to do it for me or they'll have to do it for you."

What makes Mandela so special is that he's a real human being. He laughs, he cries, he gets mad, he fell in love with Graça Machel.

He's got a real life. And the fact that he is so flesh-and-blood real makes his greatness and his sacrifice and his wisdom and his courage in the face of all that has happened to him even more remarkable.

For me, he's also a personal friend with whom I have shared parts of my personal life. I don't know how conventionally religious he is, but Mandela is a very godly man because he's the living embodiment of the importance of second chances in life: giving them and getting them, and becoming bigger through adversity.

But he's not just great: he is a good man. Not because he is perfect - he still has his flashes of anger and regret - but in the big moment, in the big ways, there is nobody like him.

Pure pearls of wisdom.

The Authorised Portrait is a new book about Mandela, this a edited extract from the book in which the Irish musician Bono talks about Madiba:

One of the first times I met Madiba was when my friend Naomi Campbell put together a concert in Barcelona for one of his charities. It was called Frock and Roll, can you believe!

A lot of top names in fashion and a lot of people in music had agreed to do it but it was beset by problems and the event had gone sour in Barcelona's local press. There had been rumours the concert was off - then it was on again.

When we arrived the organisers explained that there hadn't really been that many tickets sold. And I said, "Like how many?" "A thousand." "A thousand! In a stadium for twenty thousand!" I said. "Don't worry. There'll be a big walk up. That happens in Spain."

So we went to the concert and Madiba was to walk on with me and Naomi at 7.30, but there were only one thousand people there. So we waited till 8.30: two thousand. At nine, there were about five thousand. So there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth backstage. Who was going to tell the great man? Nobody seemed to want to, so they turned the lights off and hoped he wouldn't notice!

So we walk out on the stage and I'm just staring at my shoes. So's Naomi. Madiba comes to the microphone and says, "It is a dangerous thing to have high expectations. And I want you people to know in Barcelona that I had high expectations of this event." I'm staring harder at my shoes!

"What can I tell you? You people have given me a reception I could never deserve. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for turning up and turning out for the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund."

And I look out. Same amount of people but I swear it looked full. It was one of those moments. It was a real lesson for me because it's the way he sees the world. It wasn't an act, he genuinely was thrilled that so many people had turned up. If you've spent all those years in prison, the glass doesn't look half empty. He turned the event completely around.

With your words you make things true sometimes. And I guess he's been doing that all his life: speaking the words, describing South Africa before it existed, bringing it into existence by speaking about it as if it was.

If rock and roll has anything at the core, it's surely about liberation. Whether it's sexual liberation or spiritual liberation, just getting free of yourself and your limitations seems to be part of the theme of rock and roll. So it's natural that people in that music would be in awe of him. And he's cooler than any rock star or any hip hop star you are ever going to meet.

Cool is not something I generally look up to, but he actually has it. And I think he finds these occasions very funny. There's playfulness and mischief. I think he likes to be around carnival a little bit. It lifts his spirits. He'll be there holding Naomi's hand and smiling and laughing and he's just living all the life he missed. I think that's it, he enjoys the carnival.

I look to Madiba for inspiration in many ways. When I go to meet him it's quite clear who is the rock star - and yet he's consistently trying to shrink himself. "Why would you come to see an old man like me?" He's always turning everything on its head. He's so very playful. I've always thought that laughter is the evidence of freedom and there's comedy in those eyes. They're evidence of life and liberty and I'm sure they were when they were behind bars.

I heard recently he had an operation on his eyes to fix his tear ducts. The sun bouncing off the quarry had damaged his eyes and apparently the salt had got into his tear ducts and he had not been able to cry properly and I just thought: there it is, right there. I thought about all those years Madiba wasn't able to cry. There's such poetry in that physical condition. When did he weep? And on what occasions did he weep for his country? I would be surprised if he hadn't.

For sure Mandela has a lot of bravery - but also strategy! I knew someone who actively opposed the anti-apartheid movement and I would try to avoid him.


Then one day I was in a restaurant in New York and bumped into a very good friend of mine, an African American, sitting with this person. He introduced me and I sat down and we talked.

Afterwards I pulled my friend aside and said, "What's going on here? You of all people must know what this person has been up to!" And my friend said, "Come on! Madiba was only out of prison six weeks before he called this guy. Now he's one of the biggest contributors to the ANC."

I felt like one of those Japanese soldiers who came out of the jungle in 1957 still fighting the Second World War.

Mandela is extraordinary, to use the force that was coming at you to defend yourself. You could call it judo. He told me himself that when Margaret Thatcher, who had not supported the anti-apartheid movement, came to visit him, he asked for money, as he always does. With a big smile.

No sooner was Mrs Thatcher in the door when he asked her for some cash and to her credit she wrote there and then a cheque for £100 000. That's an enormous amount of money if you have spent your life in politics. And he was very moved she should do that. Anyway, he took the cheque and somebody said, 'How can you take this, Madiba, from this woman who fought against our movement?"

He said, "If we sit and we break bread with de Klerk who squashed our people like flies, I can take the money from Margaret Thatcher."

That's strategy, making unexpected alliances. I've tried to follow in those footsteps, always reaching out for people who you least expect to be your friend. Don't look in the obvious places. Always believe that people can surprise you and themselves with a change of heart. I don't know if he has faith in God but he certainly has more faith in mankind than anyone else.

Madiba has the kind of nobility that just cannot be denied. The only way one race or people can keep another down is if deep down we believe the other race is not equal to us, not as capable as us. With Mandela it was very clear that he wasn't equal: he was way above everyone else. He completely turned it around again, like judo, using the language of the colonising force better than they could, taking the words out of their mouths and arranging them in such a way that it was inconceivable that black and white should be kept apart, that it was always a ridiculous notion.

Frantz Fanon talks about the crushing of the human spirit which comes with colonisation. One of the things he describes is emasculation, how some countries have found it very hard to find their own identity and how myth becomes really important to people coming out from under the jackboot of colonisation.

Think of the way Ireland's writers, poets and playwrights created a mythology for the Irish. The Irish came out believing that we were noble, that we had this rich past with mythic figures in it.

Nobility is usually the first thing that you lose in oppression, and men particularly will then exaggerate their masculinity to make up for it. You get a lot of brutality to women, for instance. You see it in African American culture - guns and very male things.

That's what is so bewildering about Mandela: he hung on to that nobility even seeing degradation all around. He's a gentleman and the white South Africans - of British and Dutch origin - could just not deny his gentility.

The power of words and the way Madiba puts them together cannot be underestimated and as it turned out, language was the ANC's most lethal weapon. The world discovered the potential of South Africa through the poetry of Madiba's speeches and his communiqués.

His speech at the Rivonia Trial in which he said "I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination" even then implied a future. He'd already jumped ahead in his own mind and was saying "in the new nation we will do things differently." It's imagination: it's not seen to be believed, it's believe it to be seen.

Leaders from all over the world could learn from this great man.