Former President Bill Clinton delivered a touching eulogy for Sir Evelyn de Rothschild at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue

TRIBUTE TO SIR EVELYN DE ROTHSCHILD 

November 21^st, 2022 

William Jefferson Clinton, 

The 42^nd President of the United States 

Lynn, thank you for inviting me to say a few words today. Thank you for the gift of bringing  Evelyn into our family’s lives, for making his last 22 years such a happy chapter. Jessica,  Anthony, David, Ben and Jake – the entire family, I thank you for the opportunity to be part  of this day and try to make some sensible meaning of what we have all felt and went  through these last few days. 

I have been thinking a lot about Evelyn and the ambiguous privilege of bearing a famous  name, inheriting physical resources and having to make decisions about what you will do  with both the identity you have inherited, the resources, the advantages and the  complications that go along with them. All this, I tried to understand through being a  witness to the last chapter of a man I came to truly love. For all of you who come here with  unresolved doubts and labouring resentments, I ask that they be forgiven. For all of you  who come with a deep sense of loss, I ask that you look at his life as a source of renewal. 

I have asked myself a lot these last few days, "What was it about Evelyn that I liked so much? Why was I nuts about the guy?" I just loved him. He had obvious assets, he had a winning  way about him and he certainly had an interesting life that he could re-tell as at least as  interesting as it was when it unfolded in the first place. And he had his fare share of good  fortune, I mean as a young navy man in the Mediterranean, he was picked by Mountbatten  for a Polo team after he failed the audition by falling off the horse by holding the mallet in  the wrong way! He still got picked. 

What was it about him that made people want to pick him whether he was scoring at the  moment or not? What was it that made his career and service to Crown and country and  philanthropy and love of family, all of his passions, I got to see them, they never went  away. He loved history, horses and chocolate and not necessarily in that order. 

He made quite a lot of his time on earth and he made those of us who were around him feel  richer and fuller and thirst for more time. I think it is worth pointing out just for the history  books that he as a banker who grew his inner pride dramatically and did not agree with the short plan in the modern era, short term profits and financial mechanisms and he still  thought that if things sounded too good to be true, they probably were and time proved  him right. He thought the Rothschilds had rightly earned their fame by financing actual  projects that created actual results. 

He also understood the strength of the family unit. I appreciate that he brought the British  and French arms of the family back together and he is not here today because of COVID, but I  particularly appreciated the fact that he and Jacob were reconciled, thanks in no small  measure to Lynn, because Hillary, and Chelsea and Marc and I came to care very much for  him too, in a totally unrelated, accidental way. 

I appreciated the fact that he supported Lynn’s Inclusive Capital initiative because it was the  apotheosis of his own life. When I asked Prime Minister Blair yesterday, "What do you think  of publicly when you think of Evelyn?" He immediately said without a moment’s hesitation  that he was out there on Interfaith reconciliation, at the request of Prince Philip before it  was fashionable to do. He was out there saying we had to do more on the environment to  save the planet before it was fashionable to do and he always cared about giving back to  things that would make a difference whether they were in the headlines or not. Hillary and  Chelsea loved that he wanted to save the Elephants, which is a big cause of theirs when  Hillary was Secretary of State and our Foundation.

I think he would be celebrating the long-neglected, but finally coming to fruition, concentration on whether we are about to destroy  or save our planet. 

I was very touched when he grilled me. Evelyn could have been quite a griller. He might  have been a good Prosecutor. He was grilling me on what I was spending my time doing. I  told him about the big stuff but I have this little project that I really believe it and I know I  will never be able to raise enough money to make a difference but I hope to be able to  convince other people to do it. He said, "What is it?" The average African farmer farms an acre  of land a year. All the contemporary people say that what we need to do is sell them off the  land, modernize it, mechanize it. I said that is going to be a disaster; they will go to the  cities, it will be terrible. He said, "What do you propose?" I think we can make them just as  productive as big farmers, we just need to organize it, the seeds, fertilizers, marketing that is  legitimate. “That is what I want to help you do” – something no-one else would do.

There  was not a single headline about it – he just thought it made sense. 

The reason I cared so much about him was that I thought he was a profoundly interesting,  decent, good human being and I think his success was not just because of the name he was  born with or the resources that accompanied it but because he was profoundly curious and  always paying attention. The problem all of us have at various critical points in our lives is  that we become more obsessed with ourselves than with others. Evelyn could make  himself other directly in a way that I think we should remember. 

He also knew how to enjoy life. I will never forget when Evelyn and Lynn were getting  married in this Synagogue, Hillary invited them to spend the night on their honeymoon in  the White House, which they did, and stayed in the Lincoln bedroom, which is full of rumor  and mystical gossip. We all stayed up and laughed and the next day, we went to a dinner in  the new couple’s honor in the US Senate dining room, where the Senator from New York,  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who Hillary succeeded in the Senate, and who was himself quite a  historian, stood up and told Hillary and me that we were very brave to invite a Rothschild to stay in the White House as they had financed the burning of it in 1814. Where upon I  reminded them that in all of the reconstruction since then we had always left a couple of big  stones with the burn marks on them so we would never forget. 

He seemed to know everybody, seemed to have been everywhere, seemed to have been  involved in anything that happened over the years he was alive. I was kidding him one time  and I reminded him that you have a remarkable combination of both Woody Allen figure  Zelig who just met everybody in the movies and the Swedish novelist, Jonas Jonasson, who  wrote a book, The Hundred Year Old Man who Jumped out the Window and Ran Away and  the whole book is about what he does on his journey and he relives the entire 20^th century  and how he knew everybody, he met everybody, every good and bad character and also the  great medieval knight era, Percival, the good man, slowly wise, and that’s what he was. I  asked him a thousand questions and he patiently answered them all and I have vivid  memories of three things:

When he was 88 years old, he came up to the little town where Hillary and I lived and we  were going to go to the airport and fly down to Washington to go to one of Lynn’s Inclusive  Capitalism meetings and a huge winter storm came up. All the flights were cancelled, all  the roads were icy and Evelyn was stuck and obviously we asked him to spend the night and  he said, "No, I want to go home and sleep in my own bed." The only safe way was to go on the rails, our local trains were still working, and he was determined to go and I said, "Can we  send someone with you? Will you let us take you?" "No, I will go alone. It will be a grand  adventure. I will go alone. I want to be standing alone in the train station in the city when I  get out. At my age, it won’t hurt if something happens to me. I want to do this."

The guy  was 88 years old and a terrible storm, and he wanted to go alone. So, I drove him to the train  station, we were looking at the pictures yesterday, we were standing there these 2 old  white-haired guys alone in the train station in the town next to us as the train station in our  town would have required him to climb steep stairs and then back down. He would never  have made it, no one would have made it with all the ice. So, he was in this town of  Pleasantville. He said, this town is well-named, it is quite Pleasant. I watched him like a 

child at Christmas, or at first carnival or first sporting event, jump on that train for one more  adventure.

When he was 90, he was still asking me for reading lists. I would call and he would say,  "What are you reading now?" I need to read new things. It was stunning. The most fun I  ever had with him was when Hillary and I were visiting Lynn and Evelyn on Martha’s  Vineyard. He said, "I know there is a book store here you don’t know anything about." It  wasn’t one of the nice community book stores, it was an old house, full of old books. They  sold no new books. Maybe three or four of them were expensive. The rest were just old  books, thousands of them. They had totally emptied out 2 stores of old books. We spent 2  hours in it; these 2 old guys in grubby clothes showing each other books, acting like  children. Everything was an adventure for him all the way to the end. 

So, what was the secret of his life? He paid attention and he was directed. Whether it  was business, philanthropy, politics, you name it. Lynn got a wonderful letter from King  Charles, elegant language, but it basically said, "Wow, I liked this guy. He did a lot of good  things. We should remember that."

Just a few days before he passed, I called and Lynn gave him the phone and he sort of sat up  and I said what I could as best I could and he said, in his proper way, "It is an honor, Sir." The last thing I heard him say.

Well, Evelyn, whether you can hear me or not, the honor is  ours, and we thank God for your life and wish you Godspeed.