Bill Clinton's Bucket List: Seeing Grandkids and Climbing Kilimanjaro

By: Brian Montopoli
Topics: Democrats

(Credit: CBS)

Former President Bill Clinton has a few things he wants to do before he dies.

"I'd like to climb Kilimanjaro before the snows melt, I'd like to run a marathon before I give out, there's lots of things I'd like to do," Mr. Clinton said Monday in Vienna, where he was speaking at the 18th International AIDS Conference, as AFP reports.

The former president said he is a big fan of the 2007 Morgan Freeman/Jack Nicholson movie "The Bucket List," in which two dying men come up with a list of the things they do before they die and then do them.

Clinton's own bucket list isn't only limited by his mortality: Studies suggest the snow will melt on Tanzania's Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain, in the next two decades as a result of climate change.

The 63-year-old former president, as AFP reports, said climbing the mountain and running a marathon are on his "B" bucket list - that is, things that "would be fun to do but doesn't amount to a hill of beans whether I get to do it or not."

His more important "A" list, he said, includes living to see his own grandchildren (his daughter Chelsea is about to get married) and living "to know that all the grandchildren of the world will have the chance in the not too distant future to live their own dreams and not die before their time."

Mr. Clinton said at the conference that one of the benefits of post-presidential life is that he can "say whatever I want."

Added the former president: "Of course, nobody cares what I say anymore, but I can say it!"