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Clinton: 60 and hating it
16/08/2006 07:11 - (SA)
Toronto - Bill Clinton hates it, but it is true: He will be 60 on Saturday, and he is often the oldest man in the room.
The former baby-boomer-in-chief and 42nd US president admitted at a world Aids conference here - at which delegates serenaded him with "Happy Birthday" - that his approaching milestone filled him with trepidation.
"In just a few days, I will be 60 years old. I hate it, but it's true," the snowy-haired veteran of two tumultuous White House terms said.
"For most of my working life, I was the youngest person doing what I was doing. Then one day I woke up and I was the oldest person in every room," said Clinton, who was a youthful 44 when he was first elected president, in 1992.
"Now that I have more days behind me than ahead of me, I try to wake up with a discipline of gratitude every day," said Clinton, who left office in 2001 and has since devoted himself to his charitable foundation.
The man from Hope, Arkansas then reprised the tale of his own American dream, having been born into poverty and never knowing his father, who died before he was born, but then having a remarkable odyssey to the White House.
"I realise that I came from, by American standards, very humble circumstances when I was born in my home state at the end of World War II," said Clinton, an inveterate political campaigner.
"Our per-capita income was barely half the national average. And I had a totally improbable life.
"But I know I was not born in a log cabin that I built myself," Clinton said, turning his own life story into a parable for those worse off - including the many developing-world Aids victims stifled by poverty.
"I had teachers, a coherent community, a decent health care system. I knew that there would be some connection between the efforts I made in life and the results that I achieved," he said.
Clinton was the youngest US president to leave office, although he was not the youngest to enter the White House. That distinction belongs to his hero, John F Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963.
- AFP
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South Africa
