[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.