An Email From Bill Clinton

Chappaqua, New York
November 12, 2004

Dear Friend,

Next Thursday, November 18, the Clinton Presidential Center will open in Little Rock, Arkansas. Newsweek calls it “stunning,” and for people living today and generations to come, my hope is that it will be a vibrant place of history and learning.
The Center includes my library, the archives of the Clinton-Gore Administration and the Clinton School of Public Service. It will also be a home for the Clinton Foundation and its mission of good works here in America and around the world.

I created the Clinton Foundation not only to build the Clinton Presidential Center but also to help build a more integrated global community, one in which we recognize that, while our differences make life interesting, our common humanity matters more.

And so the Clinton Foundation is at work in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx helping small businesses survive and grow. It is promoting racial, religious and ethnic reconciliation in places like Northern Ireland and the Middle East. The Foundation supports citizen service programs in America and South Africa, and perhaps most significantly, the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative is helping countries in the developing world obtain and distribute life-saving medicine to people suffering from AIDS.

This coming week will be an exciting one not only for me and my family, but for the people of Little Rock and Arkansas, as well as thousands of people I was lucky enough to have by my side during my campaigns and my time in office. I look forward to the opening of the Center, with its thousands of artifacts and millions of documents, and I hope its high-tech exhibits will prove to be both engaging and enlightening to people who stop and visit through the years.

I am especially proud that, by locating the Clinton Presidential Center where we did, we have helped encourage more than $700 million in economic investment and development in Little Rock. It’s the least I can do for a community and a state that meant so much to me throughout my life. And for the country that put its faith in me for eight years, I am proud to be able to turn over the keys to the Clinton Presidential Center on the day it opens. I am grateful, too, to the many thousands of people whose charitable donations made it happen.

If you aren’t able to be with us next week for the grand opening events, I hope you will visit the Clinton Presidential Center sometime soon. And in the meantime, please check out our website at www.clintonfoundation.org. It contains a wealth of information about my Administration, the Center and the work of the Clinton Foundation around the world.

Thank you for your support. God bless you and may God bless America.

With best regards,


Bill Clinton