The Clinton Presidential Library

Little Rock, Arkansas

The Women's RV Forum Get Together at Petite Jean was a great success. I think that the ladies had an average of 2.4 dogs each. There was a skunk in a culvert next door and a number of Canadian Geese in the lake. The pot luck dinners each night were fun and the handful of males present sat outside the circle and discussed cigars, Fidel Castro, politics and taxes...it was all very civil despite a wide range of viewpoints.

For the next few days we'll be running a straight line East on I-40 though Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Asheville and Raleigh to see the grandchildren again before returning to Florida for the winter.

Speaking of cigars and politicians, Mrs. Phred and I broke away one day to visit the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock...We are collecting all 16 libraries and we are about half way there.The building itself is nicely designed, but we felt that on the inside there wasn't much "there" there...

There was the usual collection of odd gifts and Christmas Trees, but the Clinton Administration offered only unprecedented job growth, prosperity, poverty reduction, no wars, balanced budgets and dramatic economic growth...all hard stuff with which to create library drama...we greatly preferred the LBJ and Truman libraries...for the interesting times...

Clinton was the youngest person ever elected as a U.S. Governor. He was also the youngest to be defeated for a 2nd term, although he did come back and win four more terms as Governor of the Razorback Hog State.

The Oval Office and desk are reproductions. The original desk in the White House is made from the timbers of the H.M.S. Resolute, which was trapped in the Arctic ice about 1810. The Americans towed it back to England when the ice melted and the English took it apart and shipped some timbers back to Washington with the suggestion that they be made into a piece of furniture...

IMHO Clinton got a bad deal with an out of control Special Prosecutor by the name of Kenneth Starr. That whole impeachment thing for a minor peccadillo was totally inappropriate constitution-wise. The library had a little section on that waste of time and money. Clinton was a bright and likable boy who often said funny things:

"It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is." –Bill Clinton, during his 1998 grand jury testimony on the Monica Lewinsky affair

"What's a man got to do to get in the top fifty?" –Bill Clinton, reacting to a survey of journalists that ranked the Monica Lewinsky scandal as the 53rd most significant story of the century

"When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it. I didn't inhale and never tried it again." –Bill Clinton

"It was a real sort of Southern deal. I had AstroTurf in the back. You don't want to know why, but I did." –Bill Clinton, reminiscing about a pickup truck he once owned

"Being president is like running a cemetery: you've got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening." –Bill Clinton

"I asked him to do it because he was the only person that I could trust to read all 150,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations." –Bill Clinton, on asking Vice President Al Gore to tackle federal regulatory reform

"Sometimes I feel like the fire hydrant looking at a pack of dogs. For six years I had declined to tell those kinds of jokes, because I have been told it is not presidential. But I feel kind of outdoorsy today." –Bill Clinton, at a party honoring the 150th anniversary of the Interior Department.

"Look, half the time when I see the evening news, I wouldn't be for me, either." –Bill Clinton, in 1995, on a pre-campaign swing through Montana and Colorado.

"It wasn't my finest hour. It wasn't even my finest hour and a half." –Bill Clinton, after giving an endless nominating speech for Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic convention.

"You'd think he was running for First Lady." –Bill Clinton, on George H. W. Bush's criticism of Hillary Clinton