    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [May 31, 1995]
    [Pages 774-777]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Interview With Jim Gransbery of the Billings Gazette in Billings,
    Montana
    May 31, 1995

    [The interview is joined in progress.]

    Farm Bill

        Mr. Gransbery. ----envision sharp reductions in both mandatory and
    discretionary spending for farm programs and research. To what extent
    are you willing to go, a veto or whatever, to get a farm bill that
    adequately meets your funding requirements to protect farmers' income
    and future research?
        The President. I'm willing to go quite a long way. You know, I went
    to Ames, Iowa, a couple of weeks ago to hold a rural conference to give
    agricultural interests from around the Middle West a chance to come in
    and testify on a strictly nonpartisan basis just to say what they
    thought ought to be done in the farm bill. And I pointed out that we had
    already put in our budget certain reductions in agricultural supports
    that were consistent with the GATT agreement we made with Europe and the
    others, other countries, to try to get everybody to reduce their
    agricultural supports.
        Now, the--and I think the numbers that are in the marks, in the
    Republican marks, are excessive. You know, we might be able to cut some
    more, but there's a limit to how much we can cut and still be
    competitive. Up here, you know, you've got special problems. I worked
    for a very long time to get this agreement last year with the Canadians
    on wheat to limit imports and then to set up this commission to try to
    resolve that problem.
        But I think that it's a great mistake to look at these farm
    subsidies just as sort of special Government spending programs instead
    of looking at them in the context of how we do in international markets.
    If everybody did away with their protectionism, we wouldn't have to
    spend a plug nickel on agriculture in America. Our people would do just
    fine.

    [[Page 775]]

        And so, I think the proper way to do this is through negotiations
    with our competitors and to keep driving the subsidies down in a way
    that opens up markets to our farmers and tries to keep--therefore, have
    some reasonable relationship of the competitiveness of American
    agriculture to the incomes people can earn.
        If we cut excessively, one or two things, or both, will happen: You
    will either have substantial losses of American markets--markets for
    American farmers, or you'll have a lot of individual farmers go under
    and corporate farms take them over, or both.
        So I think it's very important--and Secretary Glickman, the new
    Agriculture Secretary, as I'm sure you know, was a Congressman from
    Kansas for 18 years, knows a lot about agriculture. He's out and around
    the country now talking to farmers, trying to continue to get more ideas
    about what we can do to put some more flexibility in the farm program
    that the farmers have asked us for, what we can do to help make more
    farm income from within the United States by diversifying products and
    building on the base farm production to develop new products and a lot
    of that.
        But we are still going to have to be very careful, not only about
    how much farm prices--farm programs are cut but how they're cut. It's
    not just important to the dollar, but it's also important what form they
    take if your goal is to preserve productive, competitive family farms.
    And that's my goal. That's what I think our interest should be. We can't
    be in the business of propping up somebody that can't do it, but
    everybody knows that's generally not the problem with American
    agriculture.
        So, that's where we are. And I intend to make a hard fight out of
    it. And we have some allies in the Congress among the Republicans and
    the Democrats. I know that the urban Democrats and the suburban
    Republicans are the majority, but there are some that are sensitive to
    these issues. And of course, we have some--in the agriculture committees
    themselves, we've got some folks in both parties that understand these
    issues. And so I think we'll be able to make some progress there.

    Militia Groups

        Mr. Gransbery. Sir, are you here in Montana to take on the ideology
    of the so-called militia and similar anti-Government groups? How serious
    a threat do you think they really are?
        The President. Well, the first answer to your question is no, I'm
    not here in Montana to do that, although if--that presumably will be a
    part of my townhall meeting because you've got a strong militia presence
    here. I'm here because I think it's important that the President
    explicitly acknowledge and listen to all the concerns that the Mountain
    West has about--have about the Federal Government. All these concerns
    have to be listened to.
        Now, on the militia movement, I think that the answer is--how much
    of a threat? It just depends on who you're talking about, what the group
    is and what they've said and what they're prepared to do. I had a lot of
    experience with the militia movement 10, 11 years ago in a different
    incarnation when I was Governor, groups that were--they were then
    calling themselves survivalists. And we had a tax protester from North
    Dakota or South Dakota, Gordon Kahl, killed in Arkansas.
        Mr. Gransbery. I remember that, yes.
        The President. We had another guy, Snell, just executed in Arkansas,
    who killed a pawn shop owner he thought was Jewish and then killed a
    black State policeman who was a good friend of mine, shot him down in
    cold blood.
        And we had a group called the Covenant of the Sword and the Arm of
    the Lord that had 200 people in an armed encampment in north Arkansas
    that we were able to seal off and persuade them to voluntarily evacuate
    and give up a major, major arsenal. And then those that were wanted--
    there were two who were wanted on murder warrants there--they were
    arrested. And everybody else that wasn't one was let go, and they didn't
    come back. So I went through that, through the difficult times of the
    early eighties.
        I do not--my view is that all these groups and individuals have to
    be viewed based on the facts, you know. What are they doing and what are
    they saying? But I don't believe that anybody has a right to violate the
    law or take the law into their own hands against Federal officials who
    are just doing their job. I don't believe that.

    Bosnia

        Mr. Gransbery. If U.S. combat ground troops are sent to Bosnia, what
    are the rules of engagement? Will they be there to secure the safety of
    the U.N. peacekeepers, or will they be asked to neutralize the Bosnian
    Serbs as well?

    [[Page 776]]

        The President. Well, the answer is that, first of all, they have not
    been asked for, and no decision has been made to send them. But going
    back to a time before I became President, there was a general commitment
    made by the United States that if our NATO allies who were part of the
    U.N. force in Bosnia got in trouble and needed our help to evacuate
    them, that we would do that, because we have air and naval presence in
    the area and we can move manpower off of our naval presence into the
    area.
        As you know, our role in Bosnia has been to try to confine the
    conflict to Bosnia. Our troops are in the Former Yugoslav Republic of
    Macedonia. We have also supported certain efforts in Croatia to try to
    confine the conflict. And then we had played a major role in the
    airlift, which is now the longest humanitarian airlift in history.
        Now the question has arisen, if these people, if the U.N. forces
    want to stay in Bosnia but have to relocate so they can concentrate
    themselves in more secure areas, if they needed help from us, would we
    be willing to give it? My instinct is, as long as the mission was
    strictly limited for a very narrow purpose and it was something that we
    could do for them that they couldn't do for themselves, upon proper
    consultation with Congress, I would be inclined to do that. But they
    would not be going there to get involved in war or to be part of the
    U.N. mission.
        The United States--first of all, Europe wanted to take the lead
    here. It was the right thing to do. And we had no business involved in
    ground war in Bosnia.

    Natural Resources Policy

        Mr. Gransbery. Natural resource issues, grazing, mining, lumbering,
    wools, are all flash points in the West. Your administration appears to
    have antagonized just about every one on all sides of these issues. In
    view of the fact that you captured electoral votes in the West in 1992,
    what policies can you establish now to regain your political support,
    especially in the Rocky Mountain West?
        The President. Well, let's just take them one at a time. On the
    grazing issues, which I think gave the Republicans their little opening
    to claim we were waging war on the West, the administration--the
    Interior Department made a mistake. They just made a mistake. They
    proposed as a negotiating strategy raising the grazing fees too high in
    1993. It was wrong. But after strenuous objection by a number of people,
    led by Senator Baucus, we immediately dropped it, immediately. That
    should have been evidence that we weren't trying to wage war on anybody
    out here. Since then, what we've been trying to do is to develop a
    responsible way of managing the federally owned lands that permit people
    to continue to graze them in a responsible manner. And I've been trying
    to follow the model that was developed down in Colorado to use more
    local input.
        On the mining, I just simply believe that the mining law of 1872
    needs to be modernized. I don't think that it's served the public
    interest very well, but I don't think we should do it to the extent that
    we put people out of business.
        On the timber, the truth is that the timber people ought to be for
    me. The previous----
        Mr. Gransbery. I beg your pardon?
        The President. The timber people ought to support what I've done. If
    you look at where we were before, look at the fact that the old growth
    forests were tied up in court for years and years and there were no
    contracts let--that's mostly, you know, Washington, Oregon, Northern
    California. That's where the big controversy was on the timber. The
    previous administration, President Bush's White House, they complained
    about it, but they didn't get their Government in line. They had six
    Government agencies that had five different legal positions in the cases
    in court.
        So I got all of our people together. I said, we've got to come out
    with a position that will get this case out of court so we can do what
    we can to preserve the forest but so we can get people logging again.
    And that is what we did. We did something the previous administration
    couldn't do. And I have been--we are letting contracts there now. We are
    giving landowners, especially small landowners, more flexibility over
    their land. We have just released a contract, the U.S. Forest Service
    has, for a half a billion board feet of salvaged timber in Idaho,
    primarily in Idaho.
        The only difference now is whether we should have a law which
    basically says that no one can file a suit on any timber contract for 30
    months. You know, I think that goes too far. But I am trying to get it
    where these folks can log again. I have worked hard on that, and I think
    that, frankly, that's just a bum rap. That's what I believe.

    [[Page 777]]

        You know, I come from a State that has a lot of national forest land
    and that has a lot of logging. And I have really worked hard to make
    that one go. So one of the things that I hope to do when I get out of
    here is get a better sense of how people perceive what our
    administration is doing and how--you know, if there are problems between
    my office and the White House and what's actually happening out here on
    the ground, I want to get a sense of what they are and move through
    them.
        But you know, if I had been trying to wage war on the West, I don't
    think the West would have done as well as it has in the last 10\1/2\
    years. The economy out here is booming because I followed good economic
    policies. And I really have tried to be sensitive to all the incredibly
    conflicting interests. And you pointed it out--I may ask people on both
    sides--you know, most of the environmental groups don't think I've
    been--[inaudible]----
        Mr. Gransbery. That's true.
        The President. ----enough. I mean, I think it's a mistake to take an
    extremist position on one side or the other. If you look at Montana, for
    example, you have got a huge stake in preserving the environment and
    permitting people to grow wheat and raise cattle and do whatever else
    they're trying to do. And what we've got to do is to try to work it out.
        What I generally try to do is try to push as many of these decisions
    as I can down to representative local groups so that people don't feel
    that alienated bureaucrats in Washington are shoving them around. I
    don't want them to feel that way.

    Note: The interview began at approximately 6:45 p.m. in the President's
    limousine en route to Montana State University. The press release issued
    by the Office of the Press Secretary did not include the complete
    opening portion of the interview. A tape was not available for
    verification of the content of this interview.