My life полностью

Two of the featured health-care speakers were people with AIDS: Bob Hattoy and Elizabeth Glaser. I wanted them to bring the reality of a problem too long ignored by politicians into America’s living rooms. Bob was a gay man who worked for me. He said, “I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to live in an America where the President sees me as the enemy. I can face dying because of a disease, but not because of politics.” Elizabeth Glaser was a beautiful, intelligent woman, the wife of Paul Michael Glaser, who had starred in the successful TV series Starsky and Hutch. She had been infected when she hemorrhaged during the birth of her first child and received a transfusion contaminated with the virus. She passed it on to her daughter through her breast milk and to her next child, a son, in utero. By the time she spoke to the convention, Elizabeth had founded the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, lobbied hard for more money for research and care, and lost her daughter, Ariel, to AIDS. She wanted a President who would do more about it. Not long after I was elected, Elizabeth, too, lost her fight with AIDS. It was heartbreaking to Hillary, me, and countless others who loved her and followed her lead. I am thankful that her son, Jake, survives, and that his father and Elizabeth’s friends have carried on her work. By the third day of the convention, a national poll showed me in first place, with a double-digit lead over President Bush. I started the morning with a jog in Central Park. Then Hillary, Chelsea, and I had a real treat when Nelson Mandela came to our suite for a visit. He was the convention guest of Mayor David Dinkins. Properly, he said he wasn’t taking sides in the election, but he expressed appreciation for the Democrats’ long opposition to apartheid. Mandela wanted the United Nations to send a special envoy to investigate an outbreak of violence in South Africa, and I said I would support his request. His visit was the beginning of a great friendship for all of us. Mandela plainly liked Hillary, and I was really struck by the attention he paid to Chelsea. In the eight years I was in the White House, he never talked to me without asking about her. Once, during a phone conversation, he asked to speak to her, too. I’ve seen him show the same sensitivity to children, black and white, who crossed his path in South Africa. It speaks to his fundamental greatness.

Wednesday was a big night at the convention, with rousing speeches by Bob Kerrey and Ted Kennedy. There was a moving film tribute to Robert Kennedy, introduced by his son, Congressman Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts. Then Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas spoke. Jerry bashed President Bush. So did Paul Tsongas, but he spoke up for Al Gore and me, too. After all he’d been through, it was a brave and classy thing to do.

Then came the big moment: Mario Cuomo’s nominating speech. He was still our party’s best orator, and he didn’t disappoint. With lofty rhetoric, stinging rebukes, and well-reasoned arguments, Cuomo made the case that it was time for “someone smart enough to know; strong enough to do; sure enough to lead: the Comeback Kid, a new voice for a new America.” After Congresswoman Maxine Waters and Congressman Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, my other nominators, spoke, the roll was called. Alabama passed to Arkansas so that my home state could cast the first votes. Our Democratic chair, George Jernigan, who had run against me for attorney general sixteen years earlier, gave the honor to another Clinton delegate. Then my mother simply said, “Arkansas proudly casts our forty-eight votes for our favorite son and my son, Bill Clinton.” I wondered what Mother was thinking and feeling, beyond her bursting pride; whether her mind wandered back forty-six years, to the twenty-three-year-old widow who gave me life, or back over all the troubles she had borne with a bright smile to give me and my brother as normal a life as possible. I loved watching her and was grateful that someone had thought to let her start the tide rolling.

As the roll call continued, Hillary, Chelsea, and I were making our way to Madison Square Garden from our hotel and stopped inside Macy’s department store, where we gathered to watch the voting on television. When Ohio cast 144 votes for me, I crossed the majority threshold of 2,145 and was finally the official Democratic nominee. During the demonstration that followed, the three of us walked onto the stage. I was the first candidate to come to the convention before the night of my acceptance speech since John Kennedy did it in 1960. In brief remarks, I said, “Thirty-two years ago another young candidate who wanted to get the country moving again came to the convention to say a simple thank you.” I wanted to identify with the spirit of John Kennedy’s campaign, to thank my nominators and the delegates, and “to tell you that tomorrow night I will be the Comeback Kid.”