Clinton on Rwandan Genocide: “We Didn’t Even Discuss It”

Commencement season came early to Georgetown this year.   At most colleges the public speakers descend on campus in May to distribute speech-shaped graduation platitudes; but at Georgetown, the calendar for this week alone features Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, and Óscar Ándres Rodiguez Maradiaga of Honduras, one of Pope Francis’ eight cardinal advisors, all speaking on matters of substance.      

After his speech – April 21 in Gaston Hall – President Clinton took questions from students, posed by Otto Hentz, S.J., who taught a theology course Clinton took while at Georgetown.

“The first one is a softball,” Fr. Hentz said, and asked Clinton what his Georgetown education meant to him.  Clinton replied:

“When I wrote my autobiography my editor made me take out twenty pages about Georgetown.  He said, `You couldn’t possibly remember all this stuff – all these teachers and everything.’  But I do.”

Then came hardball: What was the hardest decision of Clinton’s presidency, and which decision from his presidency does he most regret?

“Some of the decisions that I regret most were not hard, but were wrong. For instance, we did not even talk seriously about whether we should send troops to Rwanda, because  the public was exhausted with what happened at Black Hawk Down and Somalia, and because we were involved in Bosnia, and that was much more in the news, and frankly we didn’t have any idea that they could kill ten percent of the country in ninety days with machetes, essentially.  So sometimes the things you regret most were not hard at the time.  They should have been a little harder.

“I’ll always regret we didn’t have a long, drawn-out debate on it.  We didn’t even discuss it.”    

That’s worth keeping in mind as problems such as Europe’s migrant crisis appear to be at once too large and complex for governments to solve and too small and regional to warrant the attention of the U.S. government.  

The full video is here.  President Clinton, now approaching threescore and ten, resembles another colorful, silver-haired, silver-tongued Southerner: Tom Wolfe.

• 22 April 2015
• 1