Bill Clinton: ‘The most valuable thing I had for perspective in politics at the White House was the moon rock’
President Bill Clinton has been wading back into politics in recent weeks, praising Republican frontrunner Donald Trump as a “master brander” who has a lot of “pizzazz and zip” but won’t be able to “insult his way to the White House” because he’s largely “fact-free.”
“There is a macho appeal to saying ‘I’m just sick of nothing happening. I’m going to make things happen. Vote for me,’” Clinton said in an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” last week.
Later this month, though, Clinton will appear on a different kind of late-night show — the Oct. 25 season premiere of the National Geographic Channel’s “StarTalk,” hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson — where he will discuss decidedly apolitical topics, including the cosmic perspective, the Human Genome Project and Albert Einstein.
The former president, though, couldn’t resist the opportunity to discuss the connection between space exploration and international politics with an astrophysicist.
“The most valuable thing I had for perspective in politics at the White House was the moon rock,” Clinton told Tyson in the interview, which was taped in July. “When we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the walk on the moon in 1999, Nancy [Reagan] came in with a vacuum-packed, glass-enclosed moon rock. It was taken off the moon in 1969. It’s since been carbon-dated at 3.6 billion years old. So I asked, because I supported the space program so strongly … I said, ‘May I just borrow that until I leave [office]? You can have it back when I go. I know it’s not mine.’”
Clinton said he used the moon rock as a political prop during contentious policy debates.
“When you see the television coverage of the president meeting with a foreign leader, and whatever, in the Oval Office, there’s two chairs, two couches, and there’s always a table between them. I put the moon rock on the table,” Clinton explained. “And for the next two years, whenever we’d have Republicans and Democrats, people on two sides of any issue, and they’d start getting really, really out of control, I’d say, ‘Wait! You see that moon rock? It’s 3.6 billion years old. And we’re all just passing through here. and we don’t have very much time. So let’s all calm down and figure out what the right thing to do is.’ And it worked every single time.”
The 69-year-old said such perspective could be used in today’s divisive political atmosphere.
“That’s what we’ve got to keep doing: We have to keep moseying around both out there and in here,” Clinton said, pointing to his silver hair. “You know, if you keep stumbling toward Jerusalem, good things happen.”
Clinton added: “I’d give anything to be 20 again — I’d give up having been president and gamble on my chances in the future. Just so I could live another 80 or 90 years and see what happens.”
Clinton and Tyson (National Geographic Studios/Katy Andres)
