50th Anniversary Truman Presidential Museum and Library

July 5, 2007
Independence, Missouri

I sometimes think the most important lesson for any former President to learn is never to forget that he isn’t there anymore. You almost dislodged the lesson from my mind with that wonderful welcome. Thank you very much.

I am delighted and profoundly honored to be here. I thank my great friend Ike Skelton for that introduction. He came through the line today with his son, Lt. Col. Jim Skelton, who has served our country for 20 years. I thanked them both for what they have done for the national security.

One of the best things about being President is that I knew I could always get the right answer about what we should do for the American military if I just asked Ike. He is a national treasure of whom Missouri should be very proud. I also want to say, as he indicated, that Hillary and I loved his wife, Susie, very much, and the only thing that’s keeping this whole thing from being absolutely perfect for me is that she is not here, although I suspect she is, and it may be that telepathically Ike and I will both get corrections on our remarks after this event. She certainly was never shy about correcting either one of us when I was President.

I want to thank Congressman Emanuel Cleaver for being here with his family and for his long friendship. He supported me so strongly when I ran for President, he was even willing to jog in a charity run with me. I don’t know if he remembers that, but we both somehow managed to make it.

Dr. Devine, thank you for your work at the Library, and Alex Burden, thank you. Governor Sebelius, thanks for coming over from Kansas and for answering the question “What’s the matter with Kansas?” Nothing anymore, thanks to you.

Mayor Reimal, Mayor Funkhouser, former Mayor Kay Barnes, former Congresswoman Karen McCarthy, thank you for your friendship to me and Hillary and for your support for what I did as President. Bill Nelson, the members of the Library board, and the members of the Missouri legislature and other public officials who are here, I thank you so much for coming.

Harry Truman was a hero to me from the time I was old enough to know about politics. I knew him first by word of mouth, because my family didn’t have a television until I was almost ten, which meant that the first time I had a chance to watch politics was the 1956 conventions where I watched President Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson re-nominated and John Kennedy try to become the nominee for Vice President. His loss was the best thing that ever happened to him, as we all know.

What I knew about Truman, I knew from the stories of my family. My family loved Roosevelt and Harry Truman. They identified with Harry Truman because he came from such modest circumstances and because he was for civil rights, something that was relatively rare among white Southerners of modest means and limited education in the ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60s. They liked Harry Truman because he wasn’t embarrassed to be bookish. I was the first person in my family to ever go to college, and my grandparents on my mother’s side went to a tiny little school in a town called Bodcaw that still exists and has the same 50 people now it had about 60 years ago. But they prided themselves on believing that thinking was important and that what you knew mattered, and so they admired Harry Truman, and they got me to admire him.

In 1984, I was profoundly honored as a young governor to be asked to speak at the Democratic National Convention, simply to give a tribute to Harry Truman. I did it, and I couldn’t help thinking if we had learned a little more about his politics, we would have been running better than my party did in the 1980s.

In 1992, when I was running for President, we kicked off the general election campaign on Labor Day right here in Independence because I wanted people to believe that if elected, I would try to honor the values, the policy, the direction, and the attitude of President Truman.

Clifton, after I was elected, your mother was uncommonly kind to my wife and my daughter, with whom she identified, as you might imagine. One night early in my first term Hillary, invited your parents to dinner at the White House. She fretted about it the whole day. She wanted the food to be right and the setting to be right. She was just brimming with gratitude and anxiety. The White House now has a beautiful dining room on the second floor where the Lincoln Bedroom, the Queen’s Bedroom, the Presidential living quarters, and the children’s living quarters are. It was established by Jackie Kennedy with this incredibly beautiful wallpaper going back to the early 19th century depicting various American scenes, including some military ones. It was all the rage when it was revealed, when Mrs. Kennedy did that famous television tour of the White House. So we set up the dinner there. Hillary and I and Chelsea never had dinner there unless somebody came. We ate in the kitchen at night; it felt more like home. But we wanted to put on the dog for Margaret and Clifton.

Now, before Jackie Kennedy and President Kennedy came to the White House, the First Family went downstairs to dinner every night to a private dining room right off the State Dining Room, where the First Family ate from the time the White House was opened in 1800, for 150 years plus, until the Kennedys moved to the White House. So this was going to be the first time Margaret and her husband had ever had dinner in this room. We had the best time. Margaret talked and told stories. It was just a perfect evening, until I ran into the famous Truman candor. After we had talked about everything under the sun, I said, “Well, Margaret, how do you like this Kennedy dining room?”

She said, “Oh, it’s all right, Mr. President, but really, I don’t think people should eat on the same floor they sleep.” So I said, “You know, that’s what I loved about your dad. Thanks for the answer.”

After I left the White House and Hillary went to the Senate, we had occasion once to go down to Key West. We had some friends who lived there and they wanted to do a little event for her. I actually asked to go to somebody else’s political event, which is a form of insanity, I think, once you get free of it, so we could see Truman’s Little White House in Key West. We stayed in that wonderful place, and I got to look at the books President Truman read, to frequent the rooms that he haunted, and to walk around in the military area where he took his morning walks when he was down there. It was fascinating. If any of you haven’t been there, and you ever get a chance to go, you’ll never regret it. As Ike said, I also had two other occasions to honor the President when I was in the White House.

I identified with Harry Truman for many reasons, one of which is the pundits always told him during his first term that he was finished. I heard that a lot. Another is that he nearly wrecked his Presidency by his attempt to provide universal health care to all Americans. When they were pillorying me about it, I went back and read what was said about Truman, and it was almost like somebody put a memory chip in the heads of my critics from that generation. Actually, I think we are finally going to get it; old Harry and I will have the last laugh sometime in the next couple of years.

I admired him because he stood up for civil rights and human rights, and I admired the way he was both partisan and bipartisan. He never put any fancy varnish on what he believed, and he could be brutally tough when he was in a fight with the Republicans, and he needed to be, because they were trying to get him every day.

On the other hand, he could be refreshingly bipartisan whenever there was an opportunity for common ground: in organizing America to deal with the Cold War; in protecting the national security of the country and advancing our interests around the world; and in his respectful treatment of his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, which I thought showed an extraordinary amount of class and also good sense, realizing that every former President has something to contribute. You forget now, but Herbert Hoover was the same age I was when he left the White House, and he lived 34 more years. Before he became President, he was one of the world’s most acclaimed humanitarians. It would have been terrible to waste his mental abilities and his great experience. President Truman was big enough to get that, even though the surefire applause line for every Democrat for 50 years was to say something bad about Hoover. So I liked him.

But what I want to say today, on this 50th anniversary of the Library, is that the enduring legacy of Harry Truman is highly relevant to 21st century America. Oh, we’ve changed a lot. We have changed the bipolar world of the Cold War to a globalized world of states that compete and cooperate, threatened by stateless terror and the prospect that terrorists could get hold of weapons of mass destruction. We all share common threats from diseases like avian influenza, the threat of climate change, and the destruction of vital resources necessary to sustain life everywhere. The world is losing trees and topsoil and drinkable water. Plant and animal species are disappearing from the world at the most rapid rate in human history, and increasing numbers of petroleum geologists, including some who are conservative Republicans, believe we only have 35 to 50 years of recoverable oil left. Optimists say, “No, we have 100 years.” The oldest city in civilization by carbon dating is Jericho in the Holy Land. It’s 10,000 years old. That would mean we have one percent of civilization to figure out how to get along without oil. We use 70 percent of our oil in America to get around. We don’t need oil to get around at all except for jet planes. We haven’t figured out how to build the biofuel that will lift a heavy plane in the air and fly it long distances. But the other 30 percent of our oil goes to fabrics, plastics, chemicals, and lots of other things for which at the present moment, even though a lot of agricultural companies are doing research, we don’t have viable substitutes. So it’s a different world with different sets of challenges.

The United States in Harry Truman’s time was still, by and large, except for south Texas and pockets of California, a biracial country, and race was a black-white problem. Today, while we still have that, we are very much a multiracial, multireligious, multiethnic, multicultural country trying to hang on to the idea with which we started, that America was the only country founded with a purpose, based on an idea. The idea was that we are all created equal, and the purpose was that we had to form a more perfect union, without which we could never become all that we ought to be.

The benefits of the new world are evident. Most of us have benefited from education and from information technology. And look how much more diverse this crowd is today than it was 50 years ago when the Library was dedicated. But the world has three huge problems. It is growing increasingly unequal; it is unstable because of terror and the prospect of global disease threats and weapons of mass destruction; and it is unsustainable because of the threat of climate change and resource depletion. If we would like there to be a 100th anniversary celebration of Harry Truman’s Library, we have to apply the lessons of Harry Truman’s legacy to the current day.

What is that legacy, and how do we apply it? Well, first, we need a goal. In a globalized world, it’s not just America that needs a more perfect union. The world needs it. We can’t just sit by with an interdependence that is unequal, unstable, and unsustainable. We need communities that are more equal in terms of giving people opportunity, communities in which everyone feels a responsibility for the success of the enterprise, and communities in which there is a genuine sense of belonging.

Think about the latest terrible terror story coming out of the United Kingdom. Three cars full of explosives and nails designed to kill people, apparently all loaded by a cabal of medical doctors from different countries who came to the United Kingdom to find a home. They were not invaders, and as far as anyone knows, they were not terrorists when they showed up there, but they felt no sense of belonging. Their identity was so different from that of the country they inhabited that they were willing to contradict the very reason of their professional life to advance some other identity.

So what’s all that got to do with Truman? Well, I believe that we can only build a world with more communities locally, nationally, and globally if we do the following four things.

First, we do have to have a security policy that recognizes that we must have a strong military, but no matter how strong it is, it will never be possible to kill, jail, or occupy everybody who’s against us, because we live in an interdependent world. Now, if that’s true, it means, both in military and non-military ways, our policy should be to cooperate with others whenever we can and act alone only when there is absolutely no other alternative.

That was Truman’s policy at the end of World War II. The United Nations was the dream of Franklin Roosevelt, but Harry Truman oversaw its beginning and supported it completely. NATO was a cooperative alliance designed to counter the threat of communism. The Truman Doctrine held that we would support anyone with military assistance if they would stand against communism. It didn’t matter if they were some little country on the far reaches of the Cold War’s long divide. We knew we had to do it together. I think if Harry Truman were here today, he would remind us of these things. Even the Korean War, let me remind you, was fought with the United Nations’ mandate, partly because the Soviets were dumb enough to walk out before the vote was taken, but he had it nonetheless.

If Truman were alive today, what would he say? I think he would say, no matter how painful it is, we have to stay the course in Afghanistan. We have to win there, and the world wants to win. We have to roll back the Taliban. We can’t let al Qaeda have more running room. We have to stand there. On Iraq, I think he would say that we jumped the gun, should have let the inspectors finish, but we are where we are. I hope we can protect the Kurds and at least give them a chance to hold together, but it’s fundamentally a civil war, and they are going to have to resolve it. But our military, as I say everywhere, by incurring more casualties from Americans, has dramatically reduced the number of deaths that would have occurred in the last three years among the Iraqis. I don’t support the policy, I don’t think he would have, but how to get from here to where we need to be will not be easy.

I think he would support President Bush in finally adopting a diplomatic approach to North Korea and in talking to the Iranians and to the Syrians about what to do in Iraq. We talked to the Soviets throughout the Cold War, and they were threatening to blow us off the face of the earth and erase us from human history. It’s not weak to talk to people who are against you.

I believe Harry Truman would have supported the international agreements on climate change, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the International Criminal Court for war criminals once our soldiers were protected by the agreements that we made because we were in countries where the UN asked us to go. In other words, I think the legacy of Harry Truman and the UN and NATO and the Truman Doctrine would say we have to have a military-plus strategy. We have to cooperate whenever we can and act alone only if we are forced to, because there are so few things we can accomplish alone in an interdependent world.

The second thing I think Truman would say is that in any environment where you can’t kill, jail, or occupy everyone who is or might be against you, you have to try to make a world with more partners and fewer enemies. Don’t forget, that’s what he did with the Marshall Plan, and it was the best money America ever spent.

I think if you look at the diplomatic successes of the United States in the last six years, arguably the most successful military operation we have conducted in a Muslim country, except for what was done in Afghanistan after 9/11, was the humanitarian relief in Indonesia, the world’s biggest Muslim country, after the tsunami. Approval of the United States went from 30 to 60 percent because our helicopters dropped food and medicine and our government workers were there helping put people’s lives back together and our religious and non-religious, non-governmental groups were there helping people to put their lives back together. I worked there for more than two years, first with former President Bush in helping to raise funds to solve problems and then as a UN coordinator, and I saw this. Indonesia is a country of over 200 million people, 98 percent of them Muslim, who were completely against us because of our policy in Iraq. They saw our better selves. And interestingly enough, after the tsunami, approval of Osama bin Laden a year later had dropped from 58 down to 28 percent; not because he did anything to them, but because he didn’t do anything for them. And when you are flat on your back and your kids are dead or your parents are gone or you have to start your business over again, all of a sudden the ability of some crackpot to blow up one more bomb in Bali doesn’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the willingness of an American soldier to put your kid back in school.

Think about the Marshall Plan. Harry Truman said, “Look, this is an investment, like the investments we make in the American community.” When I was born in Arkansas at the end of World War II, our per capita income was about half the national average. We had a lot of people who had no sewer systems and drank water out of a well, and didn’t even have electricity. The REA hadn’t reached everybody, and our last remote village didn’t get telephone service until 1966. No self-respecting politician of either party could have run for office in Arkansas saying a water and sewer program or a telephone extension initiative or the REA was somehow foreign aid to poor people who lived in rural America. Why? Because we recognized we were part of the same community, and investing in us helped all of America grow stronger. That was the argument Truman made about the Marshall Plan. Investing in Europe and in Japan, helping them grow stronger, built us the best allies we had in the Cold War and enabled us and them to build the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. That is the argument we need to make today when we think about how cheap it would be to follow the proposals made in Congress, including one my wife made, to put the 130 million kids in the world who never go to school in school.

At the end of my Presidency, Bob Dole and George McGovern, who jointly sponsored the Food Stamp Program in the late ‘60s, came to see me with an idea to give money to poor countries to feed their kids who were hungry once a day, but only if the kids came to school to get the meal. So I scrounged up $300 million through the Agriculture Department budget, and we did it. Listen to this: school enrollments in the countries where we put this money increased by 6 million. It cost 50 bucks a kid to put these kids in school for a year. And we made a lot more friends and fewer adversaries.

We know what it would cost to build health systems in the world to deal with AIDS, TB, malaria, and infections related to dirty water. Believe it or not, those four things claim one in four of all the lives of people who will die this year, of all the heart attacks, strokes, wars, accidents, terrorist incidents, natural disasters, one in four people will die of those things, but nearly no Americans will. So in the places where the Bush Administration has put AIDS money either through the Global Fund on AIDS, TB, and Malaria or through America’s own AIDS program, people think better of us because we are helping our kids to live.

We know what it costs to help people who are poor, work their way out of poverty in the same ways that a lot of our families did. Last year, Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh won the Nobel Peace Prize for running the Grameen Bank for 32 years and making about 8 million loans, 97 percent of them to village women, with an almost 99 percent repayment rate. Here is the most important thing: when he started, the per capita income of that country was less than a dollar a day. Today it’s about $500. Last year, the economy grew six percent despite a cataclysmic political crisis. Why? In part because 58 percent of the people who borrowed that money used it to lift themselves above the international poverty line, and so many people got loans that they lifted the whole country. It’s an investment, and we ought to think about it just like the programs that worked in America when we had 25 percent unemployment in the Great Depression. And it’s always cheaper than going to war.

I have already told you that I strongly support what we have done in Afghanistan. We have spent over $100 million there. We have spent $500 billion, probably more now, in Iraq. There are about 25 million people there. If we agreed that only the rich countries in the world will finance the health, education, and development initiatives necessary to achieve the so-called Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, it would cost our country about $40 billion, maybe a little less because of all the money we are already spending. It sounds like a lot of money, but the government budget this year is something like $2.8 trillion. In other words, we could help 2 billion people for approximately five months of the Iraq budget. Whether you support or oppose the policy, it’s still expensive. And Harry Truman, I believe, would say, “Look, you have got to spend some money, like I did with the Marshall Plan, to make a world with more partners and fewer enemies. It’s always cheaper than going to war.”

The third thing I think we should remember about Truman’s legacy is that in the midst of all these problems in the world, which required this guy, who was a county judge in Missouri and then became a senator, whose major foreign policy experience, except for fighting in World War I bravely and well, was looking into waste and defense expenditures as a senator, then less than three months after he became Vice President, he became the President of the United States. What he really had was a lifetime of reading, steeping himself in history, paying attention to what was going on in the world, and looking at the world around him. He had to deal with all these questions. He could have been forgiven if he abandoned any domestic issues except how to convert from a war to a peacetime economy without having it collapse. But he didn’t forget; he kept pushing civil rights. He not only ended discrimination in the military, he ended it in federal employment generally, which was quite significant at the time and more likely to show up in the lives of Americans and communities all over the country. And he did try to do health care, because he realized that it was both socially unjust and in the end would be economically stupid. And he sure was right about both.

So I would say to all of us, no matter how much we worry about terror and all these other things, we have to continually engage in home improvement. The American people will never support doing these things around the world unless they believe we are making the American dream more real here at home.

Now, I love talking about this, because I never had a nickel to my name until after I got out of the White House. I read that some historian said my net worth was even lower than Harry Truman’s when I went in, in real dollars. But I made a lot of money, and then I became very important to the current government. This is serious. We are in the sixth year of an economic recovery, and these trends that I am going to mention are being mirrored throughout the world. In this recovery, we have a 40-year high in corporate profits, an all-time high in the stock market, and every year our worker productivity has improved, so the working people have done their job, but median wages— not average, because that’s skewed by the really rich people— median wages, the ones in the middle, are flat, and there has been an increase in the percentage of people working full-time falling below the poverty line and an increase in the percentage of people working full-time who have lost, along with their families, health insurance coverage. Over half of all the bankruptcies in America today are caused by health emergencies. Health insurance premiums have risen by 90 percent, 6.5 times the increase in average wages, when median wages haven’t increased at all. So it is obvious that home improvement requires us to do something to restore middle class growth. That’s the only way poor people can work their way into the middle class.

This is something that I would say to members of my party: you can’t help poor people if you don’t have an expanded middle class. The definition of not being poor anymore is being in the middle class. The last time we had five years in a row of rising median wages was the last five years of my term, when we had lots of good new jobs.

I would like to tell you it was because Bob Rubin and I were economic geniuses, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. We have been having this wage problem for over 30 years now. We had flat wages from 1972 through 1994 or ‘95, and then we had five years of rising median wages and declining inequality. Why? Because we had both good support policies and America created a vast raft of new high-paying jobs. Do you remember what they were? It was when information technology jobs moved out of Silicon Valley into every aspect of American life. Running a bank in Independence is not like what it used to be because of information technology. Running a doctor’s office is not what it used to be because of information technology.

There is no aspect of American life that has not been affected by this. The explosion occurred in the last half of the ‘90s. It constituted eight percent of our total employment, 28 percent of our job growth, and over 33 percent of our wage growth. Therefore, the whole structure of America’s living was lifted, and we had no increase in inequality. Now it’s resumed again.

So we have to deal with inequality and we have to deal with health care, because it’s about to bankrupt the economy and because it’s unjust. We are the only rich country in the world that doesn’t cover everybody. Sixteen percent of our people have no health insurance. We spend 16 percent of our income on health care. Canada, the next most expensive country, spends 11 percent. Switzerland spends a tad more, but they have 17.5 percent of their population over 65, and people are more expensive as they get older. America is at 12 percent over 65, more than the global average. The difference in 11 and 16 is $700 billion a year. So we are spending $700 billion a year more than anybody else would under any other system, and we can’t figure out how to give health care coverage to everybody, which feeds another problem.

We are great at treating sickness. I am Exhibit A, right? If we weren’t great at treating sickness, somebody else would be here giving this speech, and when you visit my Library you could also visit my gravesite, because my life was saved by the best of American medicine with my heart bypass surgery. But we are lousy at keeping people well, and we know how to do it. Safeway last year started paying for all preventative and primary health services for their employees; no co-pay, no nothing. Do you know how much their health insurance premiums went up this year? Zero. So we have to find a way to cover everybody, bring costs in line with our competitors, and treat wellness to help people stay well, as well as treating them when they are sick. It’s a big deal to me now because I work with the American Heart Association to try to combat the rising tide of childhood obesity and the attending explosion in diabetes, which leads to more heart attacks, strokes, blindness, amputations, and horrible things.

It’s different now from when Harry Truman tried it, and it’s different now from when I tried it, because people have figured this out. The other day, one of those interminable press conferences occurred in Washington where people stand up and say, “I am for this, that, or the other thing.” But this one was highly unusual, because these were the participants: AT&T; its union, the Communication Workers; Intel, the high-tech company; Kelly Services, the provider of part-time employees; Wal-Mart, the biggest nonunion company in America; and the Service Employees International Union, the most liberal public employee union in the United States. They all stood together and said, “We want universal health care, and these are the principles we all agree on.” Harry Truman didn’t have that, and neither did I.

I just think if you want an automobile industry in America, we have to take care of this. I think I am pretty good at running things. I don’t think that I could take over General Motors under current circumstances, which means you have to spot Toyota $1,400 a car in health care costs, and beat Toyota in the marketplace. So if Harry Truman were here, he would say, “I tried to do it and failed. So did Jimmy Carter, so did Richard Nixon, and so did Bill Clinton. He at least got a bill out of committee. Nobody else ever did that. But we all failed. Now is the time. Franklin Roosevelt did things that Teddy Roosevelt first proposed. Democracy takes a long time to get it right sometimes, but home improvement is our constant mission.”

On income inequality, the best way to reduce it is to find a source of new jobs, and the best way to do that is to make a serious commitment to a clean, independent energy future, which helps our national security and fights climate change.

Harry Truman was always reading, always learning. If he were here, he would tell you, “I have been reading up on this, and it’s not true that you have to put more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere to get rich, stay rich, or grow richer. It was true in the industrial era. It is not true now.” The great French writer Victor Hugo once said, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” Martin Luther King used to quote him all over America in advocating for civil rights. We ought to adopt the flipside. There is nothing more destructive than an idea whose time has come and gone and nobody will recognize it.

You don’t have to take my word for this. One of our NATO allies, one of our strongest allies in Europe, is Denmark. In the last few years, Denmark has grown its economy by 50 percent. How much more energy do you think they had to use to grow their economy by 50 percent? Answer: Zero. Not one watt of electricity more. Meanwhile, their greenhouse gases were reduced, because now they produce 22 percent of electricity from wind. As a result, they have rising wages and declining inequality.

The United Kingdom, our closest ally in Europe, with the economy most like ours, has only one huge difference. Their unemployment rate is about what ours is, but unlike America in this decade, their median wages are going up, and they have had no increase in inequality, and there is only one plausible explanation. When I negotiated, with Al Gore and Stu Eizenstat, the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty, I thought it was pretty weak, but it was the best we could do. You would have thought that I had called for an end to civilization as we know it. Even before President Bush rejected it, the Senate voted against it 95 to nothing. It’s the only bill I ever lost before I actually sent it to Congress. Usually at least they would wait for me to send it up before they batted it down. Oh, and all the things that were said were horrible. You know, “Bill Clinton is crazy” and “he drank Al Gore’s Kool-Aid.” I heard it all. Now, what did our friends in Britain say? They said, “We kind of like this Kyoto Treaty, but it’s really too weak, so we think we will beat the targets by 25 to 50 percent.” And they are going to. Last year, the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who was then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the equivalent of our treasury secretary, put out a report on why Britain had rising wages and no increase in inequality. It’s because they were going to beat their Kyoto targets by 25 to 50 percent, and it created massive numbers of new jobs in clean fuels and energy efficiency and new technologies, and he documented by category how many had been created.

It would be the same thing here. We can get around with hybrid cars or with biofuels for everything but jet airplanes. There is a bill in the Congress today that simply says that in 10 years you can’t use incandescent light bulbs anymore. If it passes, do you know what will happen? Listen to this. If this passes, it means that America will lose the need for 80 coal-fired power plants. Just that one deal: 80.

I am working with a bunch of cities around the world, 40 of them on five continents, to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. My mission is to create jobs, not cost jobs; to grow incomes, not shrink them. So we are starting with fixing the buildings’ lights and glass; promoting automatic temperature and lighting controls; where it’s feasible, better insulation; and everywhere we can, greening roofs to cut the heat on the roof in the summertime.

In Independence, Missouri, on a 90-degree day, if you have an old-fashioned building with a flat roof that has tar, after the sun has been shining for two hours, the temperature will reach 150 degrees to the touch. If you seal the roof so it won’t leak and put sod down and then maybe a few other things, depending on what it will hold, you can cut the roof temperature to 80 degrees. That’s lower than the outside air. It dramatically reduces the air-conditioning demand, dramatically reduces the utility bills of everybody in the building, and this is a job that cannot be outsourced. Somebody has got to be standing on the roof when you put the sod down.

New York City has 950,000 buildings. Do you have any idea how many jobs we can create for people who don’t have college degrees just in retrofitting these buildings? We could create more jobs in more American states in more different kinds of communities than we have created since we fully mobilized for World War II if we took this seriously, and we could get rid of this inequality problem for at least a decade, by which time some new opportunity will have presented itself.

Mr. Truman, a book reader, would know this, the same way he knew those other things at the end of World War II, taking a job for which rationally he could not possibly have been prepared. But he was. So we need security, partners, and home improvement.

This last point, I think, is the most important of all. Harry Truman was a guy who was helping to run a family farm until he was 32 years old. He was 50 when he was elected to the Senate, but he understood something that you would have expected only from someone who had traveled the world, lived in many different cultures, and led a much more sophisticated life. If he wanted to present himself as an everyman, which he did adroitly in politics, he had to respect every man and woman. I mean, why did he take all the heat to integrate the military and the federal employment service? He didn’t have to do it to get elected. He did it because he thought it was right. I get why he wanted to do the Marshall Plan. We needed Europe as a counterweight to communism, but the Truman Doctrine helped all these little countries that a more narrow-minded person would not have seen as critical to our security, but he thought those people were entitled to freedom.

The central challenges of the world today are all related to what I said about community. More critical than opportunity and responsibility to the success of the community is whether you belong or not. What is your sense of identity? How can you be faithful to your religion, to your politics, to your culture, to your race, to your history, and be part of larger and larger units? Only if you believe your differences are important and aid the search for truth, but our common humanity matters more. Harry Truman knew that in the fiber of his bones.

If you look at every place in the world today where there is a problem, people think their differences are more important than their common humanity. What’s the biggest story out of the Middle East today except for Iraq? The brutal fight going on between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestinian territory. It’s a big story, 90 people killed, and Hamas won this magnificent military victory and seized the Fatah security headquarters. The Fatah security headquarters is about one-sixth the size of this room. It isn’t that big a deal. And I don’t say that to trivialize it. I mean, they don’t even have time to fight the Israelis anymore. They are too busy trying to devour each other. Meanwhile, the people get poorer and poorer. If these people would get together with the Israelis, within 10 years the economic center of power in the Middle East would move away from the oil countries to the Israeli-Palestinian partnership. But they are fighting over a building that would fit within this room, and everybody else could still be here. I don’t know if you have ever been to Gaza, but Gaza, by far poorer than the West Bank, has 46 kilometers of straight, flat, broad, breathtakingly beautiful beach on the Mediterranean, better than the south of France.

Think about this. Why did those other British citizens set off those bombs on the bus and in the subways? Because they felt they did not belong. They had a prior sense of identity, which made them dehumanize their fellow citizens. It was psychologically almost rougher for the British than it was for America on 9/11. I mean, at least we were invaded. But I read all those heartbreaking articles in Britain saying, “I don’t get this. Our kids played together, we went to sporting events together, we ate on the weekends together, and we worked together for years. I never had any idea they hated us this much.”

All of our brains are hardwired to make distinctions. Otherwise, we couldn’t survive. Thinking would be impossible if you couldn’t make distinctions. You have to put reality in little boxes. You know the difference between a man and a woman and tall and short and wide and thin and liberal and conservative and scientist and doctor. All of us think in distinctions. But when we get to the point where we believe life is only about those distinctions, we cannot live in a globally interdependent environment. Truman knew somehow in the fiber of his bones that you couldn’t be everyman unless you cared about every man.

So I believe one of the most important things we can do as Americans, while we are always prepared to defend, while we fight when we have to, while we are building more partners and fewer terrorists and improving things at home, we have to be working on the way people think and feel. It’s not just thinking, it’s feeling. We are all hardwired through millennia of development to recognize our differences. We have to learn to appreciate our common humanity.

In one of the countries I work in Africa with my AIDS program, they have the most amazing greeting. People meet each other walking along mountain passes, and they’ll say, “Hello, how are you? Good morning,” but the response is not, “I am fine, how are you?” or “Hello.” Their response, in English, is, “I see you.” Think about that. It automatically confers dignity. It automatically establishes common humanity. Think about all the people we never see. Somebody is going to have to come in here and clean up after us when we leave today. Five will get you ten, a bunch of the people who do this work think nobody ever sees them.

When the human genome was sequenced in 2000, opening up the prospect that we could find cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, and all these other problems, as a lay person, the most interesting thing to me was when the scientists who came and briefed me said, “This is amazing. There are 3 billion genomes in every human body, and we are all genetically 99.9 percent the same.”

Look around this room. Every difference you can see in skin color, gender, hair color, body type, you name it, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our difference. In a way, it’s great. The thing that has given us all the creativity and the progress in human life is the application of the brain to that one-tenth of one percent. But how arrogant we are when almost all of us spend 90 percent of our time or more thinking about that one-tenth of one percent. Don’t we? I do. I wish I weren’t 60, but at least I’m not 61 yet. And I wish my hair weren’t so white, but at least I’ve still got some. We all do this, don’t we, every day? So how can we be surprised that a certain small percentage of people who share this earth with us would be so wigged out they would think that’s all there was to life, that one-tenth of one percent? Why do we have to have something terrible happen before we see that?

When I was doing the tsunami work, I went to Indonesia several times. On one visit, we still had 40,000 people living in tent cities. It is much hotter and much muggier than here, and I had to go to these tent cities and see people who were just miserable. It made me sick I couldn’t get them out. It’s just like anytime you have a disaster, getting the housing back is the hardest thing to do. So I went to this tent city, and the elected leader was there with his wife and son to meet me, along with my interpreter, a lovely young Indonesian woman who had been a television personality and fell in love with the tsunami work and became an interpreter.

So I met the man and his wife. They were smiling, and they introduced me to their son. I looked down at this child, and I literally gasped, he was so beautiful. I said to the interpreter, “I don’t know if I have ever seen a more beautiful child.” The young woman said, “Yes, he is very, very beautiful, and before the tsunami he had nine brothers and sisters, and they are all gone.”

The woman and the boy took their leave, and the father, who had lost nine of his children, took me around through this camp with a smile on his face. He never said a word about it, talking to me only about what those people needed and what he wanted me to fix, and I was overwhelmed with admiration for him.

We went through the tour, and the last stop was the health clinic. It was really impressive. Then all of a sudden I looked up, and there was his wife, who had lost nine of her children, holding this two-day-old baby. I am almost hesitant to say this to an American crowd, but in Indonesian culture, when a woman has a baby, she gets to go to bed for 40 days and be waited on hand and foot, and on the 41st day she gets up and they name the child.

So anyway, this baby was a couple days old, and this mother, who had lost nine of her own children, was holding him with a smile on her face, saying, “This is our newest child, and in honor of your visit, we want you to name him.” So I said, “Is there a word in your language for new beginnings?” And they talked, the lady and the interpreter, and then the interpreter looked at me and said, “Lucky for you, in our language the word ‘Dawn’ is a boy’s name, not a girl’s.’ The mother said, ‘We will name this boy Dawn, and he will symbolize our new beginning.’”

Why do we have to see someone who lost nine of her ten kids cherish the one left and have the courage to hold another woman’s baby and call him “Dawn” to realize that whatever differences we have with these people— 100 percent of whom are Muslim, by the way— are as nothing compared to what we have in common?

We get it when something bad happens, just like the world got it for Harry Truman because they had the communist threat hanging out there. In a humorous way, the world got it in that movie “Independence Day.” We all got together because we were finally threatened by aliens from outer space.

We have to learn to live without that. We don’t have the one thing Harry Truman had going for him when he put all this together. Everybody had fresh memories of World War II and the Cold War was staring them in the face, so they got it. We still have to do it the way Harry Truman did. We have to think and feel and imagine, and we have to learn to rewire ourselves; not to give up our differences, not to stop appreciating them, not to stop realizing that we have to air them to make any progress at all, but to know we have to allocate more of our time and our life and our energy to our common humanity.

Mr. Truman left us quite a legacy. What we owe him is to follow his legacy to make sure our grandchildren can be here celebrating the 100th anniversary of his Library and his service.

Thank you very much.