Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [34]
I got to the White House around 8 p.m. The president wouldn’t arrive back until about 11 p.m. So, I received the full tour from a lady there: the whole White House, all except for the president’s bedroom, which I can understand. That was off-limits in my governor’s residence, too. But I got to see parts of the White House that ordinarily nobody did. The public tours never include the private quarters on the second or third floor.
Eventually I was put way upstairs in a TV room. I was sitting in there with two of the president’s relatives, cousins or something, when we heard the “helo” land on the pad outside. I had butterflies in my stomach. You feel overwhelmed, is the best way to say it. Especially in my case, when I look at myself and where I come from. The product of a street laborer and a nurse, growing up in a little house in south Minneapolis where both of my parents worked, a latchkey kid. You pinch yourself and say, I’m really here?
When President Clinton walked into the room, he tore off his suit jacket, threw it onto a chair, loosened up his tie, looked at me and said, “Governor, can I get you a beer, water, anything?” I said, “No sir, I’m fine.” He got a beer for himself, came over, plopped into a chair, and gave a big exhale. It shows you that, at the end of a long day, presidents are human, too.
Earlier that day, I had given a keynote speech at Georgetown University, which is where Clinton went to college. I knew C-SPAN had been there with the cameras. So here I am sitting with the president, when he flips the channel to C-SPAN—and it’s my speech! I’m thinking to myself, “Oh my God, I hope I didn’t say something derogatory about the president or Hillary today.” Because my speeches were always ad-lib. Whatever struck me, I was going to talk about it, and I never knew where I’d end up. So this was kind of a strange situation, sitting there having the president watch me giving a speech, almost as a critic. Well, he made a few comments now and then but, when it was over, I hadn’t said anything bad. What a relief!
Then the fun part came. The relatives went to bed, and it ended up just the president and me. I had always wanted to smoke a cigar with him, on the balcony of the White House. But the White House is a smoke-free building. And the Secret Service won’t allow the president to go out on the balcony and have a cigar, because anybody from a nearby building with a high-powered rifle would have a pretty clear shot at him. And if you had an infrared scope, you could do it at night. So I never did have a cigar with him, but we ended up sitting together and talking in his library.
This was toward the end of President Clinton’s second term, and he was working overtime to try to get a peace accord between the Palestinians and the Israelis. This was really the legacy he wanted to leave behind. He started talking about this and he said, “You know, governor, it’s so frustrating. Because it all comes down to one mound of dirt.”
I said, “A mound of dirt?”
He said, “Yeah, there’s a hill over there,”—or maybe he said “mountain,” I can’t remember the name of it—“and all the Israelis believe that their sacred religious artifacts are buried there. All the Palestinians and Muslims also believe their sacred relics are buried there.” The president explained to me that both sides have agreed no one will ever touch the spot. No excavations or anything like that. But neither religion will allow the other one to be in control of it.
I sat there thinking: There’s the rub. Until the religions change their positions, they’re going to be fighting forever. We all know what it takes to get religions to take a different viewpoint. Good luck! You might have to wait for a thousand years or more.
So, after hearing the problem, I sat back in the chair and I said, “Mr. President, I have a solution.”
His eyes flashed. He looked over at me and said, earnestly, “What would you do?”
I said,