By M&C News Aug 16, 2006, 4:09 GMT
Bill Clinton, the boy from Hope, Arkansas who became a Rhodes Scholar living the American dream, born into real poverty and never knowing his real father, made it to all the way to the White House as the 42nd president of the United States, has an impending birthday.
president Bill Clinton wishes he could turn back time... so do we, Bill! EPA/W Toda
Bill Clinton may hate the idea of it, but he will be sixty on Saturday, and unlike years past, he is often the oldest man in the room now.
The baby-boomer ex-president admitted at a world AIDS conference when delegates serenaded him with "Happy Birthday" that his approaching sixtieth birthday filled him with apprehension.
"In just a few days, I will be 60 years old. I hate it, but it's true," the president who some called “Slick Willy” said.
"For most of my working life, I was the youngest person doing what I was doing. Then one day I woke up and I was the oldest person in every room," said Clinton, who was a only forty four years old when he was first elected president in 1992.
"Now that I have more days behind me than ahead of me, I try to wake up with a discipline of gratitude every day," said Clinton, who left office in 2001 and has since devoted himself to his charitable foundation with George Herbert Walker Bush.
"I realize that I came from, by American standards, very humble circumstances when I was born in my home state at the end of World War II," said Clinton.
"Our per-capita income was barely half the national average. And I had a totally improbable life. But I know I was not born in a log cabin that I built myself," Clinton said, turning his own life story into a parable for those worse off including the many developing-world AIDS victims stifled by poverty.
"I had teachers, a coherent community, a decent health care system. I knew that there would be some connection between the efforts I made in life and the results that I achieved," he said.
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