11月18日，美国第12个总统图书馆——克林顿图书馆正式向公众开放，克林顿政府要员、前总统老布什和现任总统小布什、演艺明星等人前往捧场，出席总人数估计达到了3万人。 该图书馆名为威廉·杰斐逊·克林顿总统中心，座落在美国前总统克林顿的家乡美国中南部阿肯色州的小石城。
按照美国政府的传统，军乐团奏起《向总统致敬》，克林顿在老布什、小布什和前总统卡特的陪同下走上台。早些时候他们的夫人已经上台。由于下着大雨，每人都撑着一把伞。

November 18, 2004  

PRESIDENT Clinton:

　　(Applause) Well, ladies and gentlemen, if my beloved mother were here, she would remind me that rain is liquid sunshine and that I shouldn"t complain about this because the ground probably needs it and somebody is benefiting from it.

　　Mr. President and Mrs. Bush, President and Mrs. Carter, President and Mrs. Bush, members of the Eisenhower, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy and Carter families; to the vast number of members of Congress and former members of Congress here -- I don"t know where they are because you"re all in ponchos -- (cheers) -- but there they are; there"s a huge group from Congress, and the president sent four planes down and I thank him for that; to all the guests from other countries; and my fellow Americans -- welcome to my rainy library dedication.

(Laughter)

　　Thank you Skip Rutherford and all those on my staff and the volunteers from Arkansas and across America who work so hard to make this event just perfect -- ( he laughs) -- and except for one thing, it is.

　　I thank the previous speakers and those who have sung and entertained.

Mr. President, I can"t thank you enough for your generous words and for coming to the opening at all. I mean, after all, you just delayed your own library opening by four years. (Laughter.) I congratulate you on your election, and I wish you Godspeed, especially in a new and more hopeful time for peace in the Middle East.

　　I remember the first time I ever heard George W. Bush give a speech in Iowa, and I called a friend of mine and I said: "My God, that guy can beat us. He is a good politician." He has been very kind and generous to my family, and I thank him for that.

　　Today we"re all red, white and blue.

　　I thank former President Bush and Mrs. Bush for coming and for their service to our nation. President Bush, I loved all that stuff you said. But I want to thank you for something seriously. In 1989, after I had been governor for a long time, you were the president who finally called us together and asked us to develop national education goals for America so that all our children could get a good education. It was the beginning of a serious reform effort, which I tried to carry through and which I know President Bush has tried to push. So thank you for doing that and for giving me the opportunity to work with you.

　　Thank you President and Mrs. Carter for all you did in the White House and all you"ve done in the years since to make the world more just and peaceful. John Quincy Adams once said, "There is nothing in life so pathetic as a former president." Well, he turned out to be wrong because of his own service, and President Carter has proved that nothing could be further from the truth.

(Applause)

　　He just told you we met 30 years ago when he was trying to help me. He didn"t tell you that, less than a year later and less than a mile from here, Jimmy Carter asked Hillary and me to join in his campaign for the presidency. We did, and as you can see from this day, it was the beginning of quite a ride.

　　I recently spoke with President Ford, who, at 91, is unable to come and -- with his extraordinary wife, Betty. But they still are strong. Yesterday I received a wonderful letter from Nancy Reagan, who remains in our thoughts and prayers. I thank the Fords and Nancy and the late President Reagan for their service to our country.

　　I want to thank all the vast numbers of Congress and former members who are here who served with me. I couldn"t have done most of the good things we did without "em, and they"re not responsible for any of the mistakes I made.

　　I can"t see through all the umbrellas and all the ponchos or whatever you call those plastic things that make you all look so beautiful -- (laughter) -- but I"m pretty sure Senator Kerry"s out there. And if he is, I want to thank him and I"m glad he"s back on the job.

(Applause)

　　I want to thank the people of my beloved home state for your support, for your love, your friendship, the trust, the sacrifices you so willingly made when we worked together here and when you carried me to the White House.

　　I thank the friends of a lifetime who also made indispensable contributions. I"ve said a lot of times I may be the only guy that ever got elected president because of his personal friends.

　　I thank my pastor, Rex Horne, and all the other ministers here who have taught me, prayed with me, and counseled me over the years.

　　I thank God for my family and Hillary"s family. A lot of them are here today, and I thank you for making this whole long trip.

　　Like I said, I do wish my mother were here. She would have enjoyed seeing all of you, even in the rain, and I promise you -- (he laughs) -- you would have enjoyed seeing her.

　　Most of all, I want to thank Hillary and Chelsea. Now Hillary"s a senator and she has all the power in our family, but she"s proving what I always said. She has the best combination of mind and heart, conviction and compassion I"ve ever encountered, though I must say Chelsea is giving her mother a good run. Chelsea, your life and our love for you gave meaning to our public service. They made the presidency the second-most important job I ever had.

　　I love you both so much. Thank you.

　　And let me lastly thank the people who have contributed to and built this library: the School of Public Service and the foundation, my staff, my former staff, the board, the architects, the exhibit designers, the landscapers, the contractors, the 1,500 people who put this building up, the city and state officials who supported it. I thank especially the architects, Jim Polshek and Richard Olcott; Ralph Applebaum for the wonderful exhibits; and my longtime friend, Bill Clark, whose company built this building.

　　I also want to say that I thank those of you who are continuing to help in the work of the library and the foundation.

　　This library tells the story of America at the end of the 20th century, of a dramatically different time in the way we worked and lived. We moved out of the Cold War into an age of interdependence with new possibilities and new dangers. We moved out of an information -- I mean, an industrial economy into an information-age economy. We moved out of a period when we were obsessed with overcoming the legacy of slavery and discrimination against African- Americans to a point where we were challenged to deal with an explosion of diversity, of people from all races and ethnic groups and religions from around the world, and we had to change the role of government to deal with that.

　　That whole story is here, in 80 million documents, 21 million e-mails -- two of them mine -- (laughter) -- 2 million photographs, and 80,000 artifacts. In the interests of openness and public access, we are asking more than 100,000 of these documents to be opened early before the law requires.

　　I thank those who are working on the Clinton School of Public Service, because I want more young people to go into public service.

　　I thank those who are working in Harlem and here on my foundation or who visit us on the Internet, as Hillary said, at clintonfoundation.org, who help us to promote religious and racial reconciliation, to advance citizen service, to promote economic empowerment for poor people in poor communities, and to continue the fight against AIDS. In three years in Africa, the Caribbean, India and China, we have succeeded in cutting the price of the testing equipment and generic drugs by 70 percent, and we hope by 2006, and expect, to serve over 2 million people with medicine who were not getting it on the day I left office.

　　Now this library, of course, is primarily about my presidency. I want to say a special word of thanks to Al Gore and to Tipper for the indispensable contribution that they made. And I told Al today that this library won an international environmental award, even though it"s got a lot of glass. Because of solar panels and a lot of other improvements, we cut the energy usage here by 34 percent. So Al, thanks for the inspiration, and I"m still trying to measure up to the challenge you set for me so long ago.

　　I believe the job of a president is to understand and explain the time in which he serves, to set forth a vision of where we need to go and a strategy of how to get there, and then to pursue it with all his mind and heart -- bending only in the face of error or new circumstances and the crises which are unforeseen, a problem that affects all of us.

　　When I became president the world was a new and very different place, as I said. And I thought about how we ought to confront it. America has two great dominant strands of political thought; we"re represented up here on this stage: conservatism, which at its very best draws lines that should not be crossed; and progressivism, which at its very best breaks down barriers that are no longer needed or should never have been erected in the first place.

　　It seemed to me that in 1992 we needed to do both to prepare America for the 21st century -- to be more conservative in things like erasing the deficit and paying down the debt, and preventing crime and punishing criminals, and protecting and supporting families, and enforcing things like child support laws, and reforming the military to meet the new challenges of the 21st century. And we needed to be more progressive in creating good jobs, reducing poverty, increasing the quality of public education, opening the doors of college to all, increasing access to health care, investing more in science and technology, and building new alliances with our former adversaries, and working for peace across the world and peace in America, across all the lines that divide us.

　　Now when I proposed to do both, we said that all of them were consistent with the great American values of opportunity, responsibility and community. We labeled the approach "New Democrat." It then became known as "the Third Way." It was -- as it was embraced by progressive parties across the world. But I like the slogan we had way back in 1992, "putting people first," because in the end, I always kept score by a simple measure: Were ordinary people better off when I stopped than when I started?

　　I grew up in the pre-television age, in a family of uneducated but smart, hard-working, caring storytellers. They taught me that everyone has a story. And that made politics intensely personal to me. It was about giving people better stories. That"s why I asked those six people to talk here today. When I think of the Family Leave Law, I think of that good man who brought his dying daughter to see me in the White House on a Sunday morning, and who grabbed me as I walked away and said, "The time I got to take off from work was the most important time in my life."

　　I think of people like that fine woman who worked herself out of welfare and now runs her own business. I remember the first woman I ever talked to who went from welfare to work. I said, "What"s the best thing about it?" She said, "When my boy goes to school and they say, "What does your mama do for a living," he can give an answer." Those are the things that make politics real to me, at home and around the world.

　　The record is all in there -- what we did at home, what we did abroad. I thank Bono for singing about Northern Ireland and President Bush for mentioning the Balkans. There were many other places we tried to help.

　　But the record is there. Even where we fell short, we pushed forward. And what I want to say is, if you think of the biggest disappointment around the world to me, I tried so hard for peace in the Middle East. I thank Shimon Peres and the children of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak for being here today, and the current foreign minister of Israel for being here today. I did all I could.

　　But when we had seven years of progress toward peace, there was one whole year when, for the first time in the history of the state of Israel, not one person died of a terrorist attack, when the Palestinians began to believe they could have a shared future. And so, Mr. President, again, I say: I hope you get to cross over into the promised land of Middle East peace. We have a good opportunity, and we are all praying for you.

(Applause)

　　Finally, let me say this. Quite apart from all the details, the thing I want most is for people who come to this library, whether they"re Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, to see that public service is noble and important, that the choices and decisions leaders make affect the lives of millions of Americans and people all across the world.

　　I want young people to want to see not only what I did with my life, but to see what they could do with their lives. Because this is mostly the story of what we, the people, can do when we work together.

　　Yes, this library is the symbol of a bridge, a bridge to the 21st century. It"s been called one of the great achievements of the new age, and a British magazine said it looked like a glorified house trailer. And I thought, well, that"s about me, you know? I"m a little red and a little blue.

(Laughter)

　　What it is to me is the symbol of not only what I tried to do but what I want to do with the rest of my life -- building bridges from yesterday to tomorrow, building bridges across racial and religious and ethnic and income and political divides.

　　Building bridges.

　　I believe our mission in this new century is clear. For good or ill, we live in an interdependent world. We can"t escape each other. And while we have to fight our enemies, we can"t possibly kill, jail or occupy all of them. Therefore, we have to spend our lives building a global community and an American community of shared responsibilities, shared values, shared benefits.

　　What are those values? And I want to say this. This is important. I don"t want to be too political here, but it bothers me when America gets as divided as it was. I once said to a friend of mine, about three days before the election -- I heard all these terrible things -- I said, "You know, am I the only person in the entire United States of America who likes both George W. Bush and John Kerry, who believes they"re both good people, who believes they both love our country and they just see the world differently?"

　　What should our shared values be? Everybody counts. Everybody deserves a chance. Everybody"s got a responsibility to fulfill. We all do better when we work together. Our differences do matter, but our common humanity matters more.

　　So I tell you we can continue building our bridge to tomorrow. It will require some red American line-drawing and some blue American barrier-breaking, but we can do it together.

　　Thank you and God bless you. (Applause) (实习编辑：夏根建)