[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
[March 7, 1997]
[Pages 251-262]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



The President's News Conference
March 7, 1997

    The President. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Today we 
learned some very good news about the American economy. Our Nation has 
created almost 600,000 new jobs in the first 2 months of 1997, almost 12 
million since January of 1992. At the same time, the deficit has been 
reduced by 63 percent; investment in our people has increased; inflation 
remains low. Our economy is on the right track. But to stay on that 
right track, we have to balance the budget while we go forward with the 
work that leads to continued growth and low inflation. That's what our 
balanced budget will do, eliminating the deficit in 5 years and 
strengthening critical investments for the future of all of our people.
    Last week the Congressional Budget Office certified that even under 
its assumptions, because of the protections we built into the budget, it 
would be balanced by 2002. So I am hopeful, and I want to say again that 
the talks we have been continually having with congressional leaders in 
both parties will produce a balanced budget agreement this year and in 
the not too distant future.
    I also want to talk a moment about our commitments to our Gulf war 
veterans. And I thank Secretary Brown and the other veterans leaders who 
are here, including Elaine Larson from the Presidential Advisory 
Committee on Gulf War Illnesses, the leadership of the Veterans of 
Foreign Wars and other veterans organizations, and the Persian Gulf 
veterans who join with us here today.
    Two months ago, when I accepted the final report of the Presidential 
Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illnesses, I pledged to the Committee and 
to all America's veterans that we would match their efforts with action. 
Today I am announcing three important steps to meet that pledge and our 
debt to our veterans.
    First, I have approved Secretary Brown's recommendation for the new 
regulations to extend the eligibility period for compensation for 
Persian Gulf veterans with undiagnosed illnesses. We aim to raise 
significantly the window for Gulf veterans to claim the compensation 
they have earned. Under current regulations, veterans with undiagnosed 
illnesses must prove their disabilities emerged within 2 years of their 
return from the Gulf in order to be eligible for benefits. Experience 
has shown that many disabled veterans have had their claims denied 
because they fall outside that 2-year timeframe. The proposed new 
regulations would extend the timeframe through the year 2001. That is 10 
years after the cessation of hostilities in the Gulf war. Gulf war 
veterans who became ill as a result of their service should receive the 
compensation they deserve even if science cannot yet pinpoint the cause 
of their illnesses.
    Second, I have accepted from the Secretaries of Defense, Health and 
Human Services, and Veterans Affairs a comprehensive action plan to 
implement the recommendations of the Presidential Advisory Committee's 
final report. I asked for this plan within 60 days, and they delivered. 
The plan addresses outreach, medical and clinical issues, research, 
coordination, investigations, and chemical and biological weapons. It 
will help us to do an even better job of

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caring for Gulf war veterans and finding out why they're sick.
    Third and finally, as the Committee recommended, I have initiated a 
Presidential review directive process to make sure that in any future 
troop deployments, we act on lessons learned in the Gulf to better 
protect the health of our service men and women and their families. We 
need to focus on better communication, better data, and better service.
    The Committee's work and a massive, intensive, ongoing review of 
millions of pages of documents by the Department of Defense and the CIA 
continues to bring new information to light, including recently released 
documents about possible exposure of our troops to chemical agents. The 
scope of the efforts is substantial, and if there is additional 
information, it will be found and released. We will be asking two very 
important questions about any such new information. First, should it 
change the research or health care programs we have in place to care for 
our veterans? And second, how will it help us to make the policy changes 
we need to better protect our forces in future deployments?
    What is most important is that we remain relentless in our search 
for the facts and that as we do get new information, we share it with 
our veterans, with Congress, and with the American people, and that we 
act on any information we uncover. That is what we have done and what we 
must continue to do. I will not stop until we've done everything we can 
to provide the care and to find the answers for Gulf war veterans that 
they need and deserve.
    And again let me say, I thank all of you for your work and for being 
with us here today.
    Now I'll be glad to take your questions, and I think, Terry [Terence 
Hunt, Associated Press], you're the first.

1996 Campaign Financing

    Q. Yes, sir, Mr. President. We learned this week that the Vice 
President solicited campaign contributions in the White House and that 
the First Lady's Chief of Staff accepted a $50,000 campaign contribution 
in the White House. This comes on the heels of news about White House 
sleepovers and White House coffees for big-money donors. You, sir, 
promised to have the most ethical administration in history. How does 
all of this square with that?
    The President. Well, first of all, let's take them one by one. I 
don't believe that they undermine the case. But let me begin by saying 
there were problems in the fundraising in 1996 which have been well-
identified. And the Democratic Party commissioned its own audit, did a 
review, made the results public, and took appropriate action. I think 
that is very important, and I'm proud of that.
    The second thing I want to say is, I thought the Vice President did 
a good job of explaining what he did and why, and explaining exactly 
what he intended to do in the future.
    With regard to Maggie Williams, I'd like to make a comment about 
that. She is an honorable person. She was put in a rather unusual 
circumstance, and as a courtesy, she agreed to do what the relevant 
regulation plainly provides for, which is to forward the check on to the 
Democratic National Committee. Now, in retrospect, with all of the 
publicity that's attended the whole contribution issue, would it have 
been better if Maggie Williams had said, ``Look, I can do this under the 
regulations, but I decided I shouldn't do it. And I want you to go mail 
it in yourself or take it over there yourself''--that would have been a 
better thing to do. And in the future, I expect that the White House 
will follow that course should such an occasion ever arise again.
    But finally, I want to make the point I have been trying to make to 
the American people. We had to work hard within the law to raise a lot 
of money, to be competitive. We did work hard, and I'm glad we did, 
because the stakes were high and the divisions between us in Washington 
at that time were very great. We still fell over $200 million short of 
the money raised by the committees of the Republican Party.
    The real problem and the reason you have some of the questions you 
have, I think--unless you just believe that all transactions between 
contributors and politicians are inherently suspect, which I don't 
believe and I think is wrong for either party--the real problem is these 
campaigns cost too much money, they take too much time, and they will 
continue to do so until we pass campaign finance reform. If we pass 
campaign finance reform, as I've asked, by July 4th, then the situation 
will get better. If we don't, we will still be raising too much money, 
and it will take too much time and effort

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on the part of everyone involved. So I'm hopeful that we can.
    But I believe that both the Vice President and Maggie Williams are 
highly ethical people, and I do not believe that either one would 
knowingly do anything wrong.
    This business of raising money takes a lot of time, and if you have 
to do too much of it, it will take too much time and raise too many 
questions. But I do not agree with the inherent premise that some have 
advanced that there is somehow something intrinsically wrong with a 
person that wants to give money to a person running for office and that 
if you accept it, that something bad has happened. I don't agree with 
that. I don't think there is something intrinsically bad. But the system 
is out of whack, and I think we all know it and we all know it's not 
going to get better until and unless we pass a reasonable campaign 
finance reform law.
    Helen [Helen Thomas, United Press International].
    Q. Mr. President, Governor Romer said that Maggie Williams was wrong 
to accept the check, and you obviously seem to agree in retrospect. 
But----
    The President. No, no, I'm not going to say Maggie Williams did 
anything wrong. And I don't want to be--you all will have to deal with 
this as best you can, but I want to be clear. She is an honorable 
person. There is a regulation that deals with this which explicitly says 
that when something--if you receive a contribution and all you do is 
just pass it on and you've been involved in no way in any solicitation 
on public property and you're just passing it through, that that is what 
the regulation provides for. It is explicit and clear.
    What I said was, I think that she would say in retrospect and I 
would say, given the extreme sensitivity now everyone has to all these 
contribution issues, that she should have said to the gentleman in 
question, ``Look, I can do this legally, but I don't want to do it 
because I think we should remove all question, all doubt. I think you 
ought to go mail it yourself. Go take it down there yourself.'' And 
that's what I think the White House should do in the future if someone 
physically is present in the White House and attempts to do that.
    Q. Mr. President, in your zeal for funds during the last campaign, 
didn't you put the Vice President and Maggie and all the others in your 
administration topside in a very vulnerable position?
    The President. I disagree with that. How are we vulnerable, 
because--only vulnerable if you think it is inherently bad to raise 
funds and you believe that these transactions are between people who are 
almost craven. I mean, that's how--I don't agree with that. Maggie 
Williams, in this case, was completely passive. She didn't ask someone 
to come in and give her a check. And she had no reason to believe there 
was anything wrong with it, with the check involved. She just simply did 
what the regulation explicitly provides for, which is to pass it on.
    Now, in the case of the Vice President, he can speak for himself, 
but I have to tell you, we knew what we were facing. We knew no matter 
what happened, we would be badly outspent. We believed in what we stood 
for. From time to time, we were surprised we had as many folks who were 
willing to stick with us as there were. But we are proud of the fact 
that, within the limits of the law, we worked hard to raise money so 
that we could get our message out there and we would not be buried, 
literally buried, by the amount of money that the other side had at 
their disposal.
    There were the problems that we identified, which we've been very 
forthright about. We got an external auditor to come into the Democratic 
Party. They have taken the steps to correct them. But it was--we had 
never faced anything like that before in American politics, and we did 
the very best we could with it. And I don't think we were compromised by 
fighting for what we believed in within the limits of the law.
    I do believe that this system is not good now. It is so expensive. 
It requires too much time, too much energy. And the more effort you put 
into it, the more opportunity you have for some sort of--something going 
wrong. So what I think has to be done is we have to reform the law. But 
until we get some energy behind an effort to reform the law, you know, 
if it's just me and Senator McCain and Senator Feingold and a few others 
who support us for it, we can't pass it, and you will be left with the 
same system next time and the time after that and the time after that. 
And because of the exponential rise in the cost of buying air time and 
other means of communication, we'll have all these questions all over 
again, time and time and time again.

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    Go ahead--Rita [Rita Braver, CBS News] first, and then Wolf [Wolf 
Blitzer, Cable News Network]. I'll just do it that way.

White House Access

    Q. I'm going to ask your forbearance, because this question is a 
little bit long. But this is about Johnny Chung, the person who gave the 
check to Maggie Williams. In April of '95, about a month after he gave 
that check, he came in here to the White House; he brought in five 
Chinese officials. Someone on your staff sent a memo to the National 
Security Council saying that you were not certain you'd want photos of 
you with these people floating around. I wanted to ask you why you were 
worried about that, and also why, after a highly knowledgeable NSC 
official wrote back that he was a hustler who will continue to make 
efforts to bring in his friends into contact with the President and 
First Lady and whose clients might not always be in favor of business 
ventures the President would support--why did he keep getting back in 
here? What was your relationship to him? And he now says that it was at 
least implicit, if not explicit, that he would get this access for the 
money he gave.
    The President. Well, first of all, you asked me two questions 
really.
    Q. Four. [Laughter]
    The President. Why did I--well, I'll answer the two I can remember, 
then if I don't suit you, you can ask again. [Laughter]
    I just had--as I have said before on this question of White House 
access, we did not have an adequate system here. I assumed, wrongly as 
it turned out, that there were kind of established procedures which were 
sort of handed on from administration to administration that had nothing 
to do with whoever happened to be here about--that controlled and 
developed access. And I was wrong about that. So that's what I assumed 
generally was in place until we became aware that they weren't.
    But on this particular day, I just had an instinct that maybe 
whatever the rules were, that we didn't maybe know enough about these 
folks to know whether there should be a picture there. I didn't assume 
anything negative about them; I just thought that we just didn't know.
    Now, with regard to the memo about Mr. Chung, I can't answer that 
question because I never saw it, and no one ever told me it had been 
written, and I don't know who did see it. So I really can't answer that 
whole cluster of questions because the first I ever knew such a memo had 
been written was when it was discussed in the public domain. I did not 
know that. I had no reason to believe that there was any problem there.
    Q. And what was your relationship with Mr. Chung? How did you come 
to know him? How did he get into your office and write you letters that 
you replied to? There is lots of record of that.
    The President. Well, I like to think we're pretty good about 
replying to our letters, and I don't think there is anything wrong with 
that. I don't remember how I met him, but I think I met him at some 
Democratic Party event. I'm sure that's where I met him. I didn't have a 
relationship with him prior to my becoming President, to the best of my 
knowledge.
    Wolf.

Decision on an Independent Counsel

    Q. Mr. President, early in your administration, when you were faced 
with a similar round of pressure for a special prosecutor to investigate 
Whitewater, you made it easy on Janet Reno by preempting her and saying, 
``Yes, it's time for a special prosecutor''--Robert Fiske, in that 
particular case--``to go forward.'' And ever since--you know, the 
history of Whitewater. Why not make it easy for Janet Reno this time and 
similarly preempt her and say, ``Yes, there's enough of a threshold, 
enough of the law has been met to go forward and get to the bottom of 
this''?
    The President. For one thing, there was no law at the time. And I 
might point out that if there had been a law, either the previous law or 
this law, there would have been no special prosecutor because the 
threshold of the law was not met. And you know, the American people will 
have to make a judgment about whether all of this has been worth it when 
the facts come out. But the threshold of the law was not met, and I 
doubt very seriously if one ever would have been called if any law had 
been in place.
    Now there is a law in place. It is a legal question. I do not think 
it should become a political question. And I have been very rigorous in 
dealing with this and saying it in just that way, and I'm going to stick 
with my position.
    Peter [Peter Maer, NBC Mutual Radio].

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1996 Campaign Financing

    Q.  Mr. President, you again today, Vice President Gore the other 
day, and your staffs have repeatedly told us that no laws were broken in 
the Lincoln Bedroom issue, in the phone calls for donations, in Maggie 
Williams accepting and then passing along the donation to the DNC. But 
cumulatively, Mr. President, what are your thoughts on the propriety and 
the appearance of all of these various actions?
    The President. Well, let's take them one at a time. The Vice 
President has said that he believes he should--if he makes further 
fundraising calls as opposed to attending fundraising events, he should 
not make them from his office even if it is paid for with a political 
credit card.
    I have said that I believe Maggie Williams thinks, in view of the 
environment in which we now are, that even though there is an explicit 
regulation on this--right on point on this--that what she probably 
wishes she had said and what I expect future employees to say is, 
``Look, I can take this; it is legal. But we're not going to do it this 
way. You have to mail it in, or you have to take it in yourself.''
    On the third thing, I just have a different view of this than you 
do. We have--I have done something no President has ever done. I mean, I 
gave you a list of the people that spent the night in the White House. 
And it shows that a relatively small percentage of them, about one in 
nine, were people that I met in the course of running for President, who 
supported me for President, who either gave me contributions or also 
helped to raise money for me.
    The people that did that, I'm grateful to them for doing that. I 
appreciate the fact that they helped me in the campaign in '92. And the 
document which was released, which most of you reported on, which showed 
the note I had sent back to Nancy Hernreich, makes it clear that I 
wanted to get back in touch with those people. I appreciated what they 
had done. I didn't want them to feel estranged from me. And I don't 
think there is anything wrong with a President--me or anyone else--
reaching out to his supporters.
    And some of them, including--let me just give you--I mean, I can 
give you lots of examples, but there have been a lot of different kinds 
of people who spent the night here. But one of the newspapers made an 
issue of B. Rapoport from Texas. Well, he was my friend 25 years ago. 
When I was a defeated candidate for Congress with a campaign debt that 
was almost twice my annual salary, he was my friend. When I was the 
youngest former Governor in the history of the Republic and nobody felt 
I had any political future, he was my personal friend. I don't think 
there is anything wrong with having people like that spend the night 
with you.
    So you can make your own judgments about this. But I have tried to 
be very forthright with you about this. I've given you all of this 
information, and you can make your own judgments. But I just simply 
disagree that it is wrong for a President to ask his friends and 
supporters to spend time with him.
    And let me remind you of one problem. A lot of you who have to 
travel around with me are acutely aware of this. This job, even when 
you're traveling, can be a very isolating job. Usually when you travel 
someplace, you go someplace; you stay a little while; you turn around 
and leave. If you go to these fundraisers--on the coffees, for example, 
I'm the one that's most responsible--or for the dinners out, the 
fundraising dinners--I get frustrated going to meetings and goings where 
all you do is shake hands with somebody or you take a picture, no words 
ever change. You never know what somebody's got on their mind, or they 
never get a chance to talk to you. You never have any real human 
contact. I look for ways to have genuine conversations with people. I 
learn things when I listen to people.
    But I can tell you this: I don't believe you can find any evidence 
of the fact that I have changed Government policy solely because of a 
contribution. It's just that I don't think I should refuse to listen to 
people who supported me or refuse to be around them or tell people, 
``Well, you contributed to the campaign. Therefore, even though I'd love 
to have you come see me at the White House, I can't do it anymore.'' And 
you will just have to sort through that and evaluate whether you agree 
with that or not. But that's how I feel.
    Q. Are those who question the propriety off base? Is that what 
you're saying?
    The President. Well, no, I'm saying that I do not believe that 
inviting people to spend the night with me at the White House, the 
overwhelming majority of whom were personal friends of mine of long 
standing, family members, friends of family members, friends of my 
daughter's, dignitaries, public officials, former

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public officials--some of whose connection with me really did begin in 
1991 when I started running for President and that involved their 
willingness to give me money or to raise money for me--I don't think 
that that is a bad thing.
    What I think is a bad thing is to say--and again, this may not be 
illegal either, and you know the documents also show that I stopped 
this--I don't think a political party should say, ``If you give this 
amount of money, we'll guarantee you this specific access. If you give 
that amount of money, we'll guarantee you that specific access.'' I 
don't think that a political party should say or a President should say, 
``If you want access to us, you have to contribute. And if you want 
access to us, you not only have to contribute to us, you can't 
contribute to them.'' I never did any of that.
    As I have said before, one of the most important meetings I had 
about China policy was one organized by Republicans; as far as I know, 
none of them had ever done anything in my behalf before. But it was 
important.
    I just don't think you should eliminate contacts with your 
supporters. And I don't think that anyone else--if you really think 
about it, I don't think you will think that, either.
    John [John Donvan, ABC News].
    Q. Mr. President, in listening to many of your supporters and aides 
respond to these questions over the last several weeks, one note that I 
think I hear is one of frustration, a sense that these questions are 
unfair and the focus on the Democrats is unfair. But I also find 
something unsatisfactory in that response, and my question to you as 
somebody who has enormous power to lead by example, is it good enough to 
say that everybody else does it?
    The President. No, no, and I'm not trying to say that. I'm going to 
try to get through this whole press conference and never talk about the 
practices of the Republicans. [Laughter] I'm going to do my best to get 
all the way--I don't think that's a good example.
    And I also don't think it's good enough to say it is legal. I think 
we should be held to a higher standard than just, ``It is legal.'' But 
what I do want you to know is, when it is obvious that we have a 
disagreement--when I read reports or see them on television and I 
think--you see this in a certain way, and I just honestly see it in a 
different way--I think it's helpful to the American people and to you 
and to me for me to tell you how I see it, that's all.
    But I think there are things that when we see them in the light of 
day, even if we've been given guidance about what the limits of what the 
law are, it seems that it's not a prudent thing to do. I thought the 
Vice President gave a very upfront and forthright statement about that 
the other day. So I don't believe it's enough to say everybody does it.
    On the other hand, I don't believe either that we can afford to run 
the risk of having one party just kind of disappear from the scene 
because they don't do what--they're unwilling to do what is necessary to 
be competitive in raising funds in the system that exists, which is why 
I say to you, in the end, we should set a high standard. But if I 
honestly disagree with you about what's right and wrong, I should be 
free to say that. But in the end, the answer to this is to pass a 
reasonable campaign finance reform bill this year. That's what I really 
believe.
    Yes, go ahead.
    Q. Mr. President, you have--you and your officials have given us a 
number of explanations over the past several months about what you 
thought was legal. You said you got clear legal advice and gave us the 
impression that the dividing line on solicitations for contributions--
that the dividing line between right and wrong was whether or not that 
solicitation took place at the White House. But when we learned that the 
Vice President did just that, then we were told that that wasn't the 
standard after all. Which is right?
    The President. Well, let me just say on the--I think that's one the 
Vice President--first of all, I think they're both right, and let me 
explain why. Because it's clear that what the law is on this, going back 
a long time, is that it's as if he'd written a letter to somebody from 
the White House. Did the solicitation occur when he wrote the letter or 
when the letter is received? And the law is clearly that the 
solicitation is consummated, if you will, when the person is solicited 
and where the person is solicited.
    And the Vice President thought that as long as he was not using 
taxpayer money to make the call, that it was legal. I think he was right 
about that. He also thought about it and said, ``If I ever do this 
again''--in terms of calls--``I'm not going to do it in my office 
because it doesn't look right. We ought to have a higher

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standard.'' And I was proud of him for saying that.
    But I think that's what--that goes back to the question that John 
said. There is a difference between--sometimes there is a difference 
between what is legal and what ought to be done, and this is a place 
where I think there is a difference, and I think we've made that clear. 
And I was proud of the statement that he made.
    Q. Mr. President, your Press Secretary this week left open the 
possibility that you, too, had made calls like the Vice President did. 
Did you ever make those calls?
    The President. I told him to leave that possibility open because I'm 
not sure, frankly. I don't like to raise funds in that way. I never have 
liked it very much. I prefer to meet with people face to face, talk to 
them, deal with them in that way. And I also, frankly, was very busy 
most of the times that it's been raised with me. But I can't say, over 
all the hundreds and hundreds and maybe thousands of phone calls I've 
made in the last 4 years, that I never said to anybody while I was 
talking to them, ``Well, we need your help,'' or ``I hope you'll help 
us.''
    So I told him not to flat out say that I'd never done it because I 
simply can't say that I've never done it. But it's not what I like to 
do, and it wasn't a practice of mine. And once I remember in particular, 
I was asked to do it, and I just never got around to doing it.
    But I don't believe the Vice President did anything wrong in making 
the calls. I know some people have advanced the proposition that the 
Vice President should not ever ask anybody for funds, at least unless 
he's looking at them face to face as opposed to on the telephone. I just 
disagree with that. I do think he made the right decision about not 
doing it in the office.
    So I asked that that be--that Mike McCurry do it in that way, not to 
mislead you or to be cute but just simply because I don't want to flat 
out say I never did something that I might, in fact, have done, just 
because I don't remember it.
    Susan [Susan Feeney, Dallas Morning News].
    Q. You said that you've operated within the parameter of the laws, 
but in retrospect, do you have any regret about the quantity of campaign 
activity that happened in the White House?
    The President. You mean--I do not regret the friends that I have 
asked to come and stay with me here. And in terms of the coffees, based 
on what I knew the facts to be and what I still believe they were, that 
no one was going to be solicited at the meeting and that there was no 
specific price tag on coming to the coffees, which is what my 
understanding was, I don't regret doing that.
    As I said--again, this is a matter of perception. I really was--I 
mean, I think I was more upset maybe than some of you were when I found 
out that my party was not checking the checks that were coming in. I was 
livid and stunned that in 1996, after all we'd been through in the last 
20 years, that could have happened. It took my breath away. I was upset 
when I saw a proposed brochure that says, ``This is the access you get 
to the President in the White House if you have this amount of money. If 
you give that amount of money you get guaranteed a certain amount of 
other access.'' I thought that was wrong.
    But on the other hand, I have a different take on some of this than 
you do. I am, as I said--I want to take personal responsibility for 
this. If you find the coffees offensive--I can't say if somebody did 
something around the coffees they shouldn't have done, but if you find 
the fact of the President having coffee at the White House with people 
who either have supported him in the past or who he hopes will support 
him in the future--I am personally responsible for that, and I take full 
responsibility for it, because I enjoyed them enormously. I found them 
interesting. I found them valuable. I found that all these people, many 
of whom had been active in elections for years and they'd done all kinds 
of different things with their lives, were given the first chance they'd 
ever had to just sort of say, ``Here's my idea, and I hope you'll 
consider it,'' or ``Here's what I think you should do,'' or ``Here's 
where I think you're wrong.'' And I genuinely enjoyed them, and I did 
not believe they were improper.
    And I still believe as long as there was no specific price tag put 
on those coffees, just the fact that they would later be asked to help 
the President or the party does not render them improper. That's what I 
believe.
    Mara [Mara Liasson, National Public Radio].
    Q. My question really was, if you had it to do all over again, would 
you have moved these

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things outside of the White House or had stricter standards about what 
political things would be done in the White House?
    The President. Well, if I had it to do all over again, we would fix 
what we have now fixed. We would have stricter standards about admission 
to the White House. And the answer to your other question--I hesitate to 
give you a general answer because there may be some facts about a 
particular coffee or another that I don't know. All I'm saying is that 
based on what I thought the facts were, which is these were people that 
we hoped would help us, some of whom had helped us in the past, some of 
whom had never helped us, and they were going to be invited here, and I 
was going to have coffee with them, and we're going to talk about 
things, after which some or all of them--not all of them, as it turned 
out, but many of them would be solicited to help in the campaign--I do 
not believe that was wrong, and I feel comfortable about what I did 
there.
    I wish--I've said this a million times--I almost wish that one of 
you had been in all of these coffees, because they were, frankly, fairly 
pedestrian events in the sense that nothing very juicy was discussed, 
but people got to come out with their ideas, state their convictions. 
And maybe there ought to be some way of dealing with that. Maybe at 
least you ought to have some assurance that, if these sort of things 
were done like this on a regular basis, at least, that you ought to have 
some knowledge of what goes on in them, and that might make you feel 
better about it.
    Mr. Cannon [Carl Cannon, Baltimore Sun].

Access and Economic Issues

    Q. Mr. President, you said a moment ago that no decision or policy 
made here was solely because of a contributor. But should that be a 
factor at all in U.S. foreign policy and who gets Government contracts 
and who goes on trade missions? Should that even be considered at all?
    The President. Well, what I think should--let me just say this. This 
is the nub; this is the difficulty. Every public official--this is a 
problem or an issue that the President, Members of Congress, Governors, 
mayors all face. People who help you, people who try to help you put 
your program in, you try to stay in touch with them, so you're more 
likely to know if they want to do something than you are people who 
didn't help you and people who weren't involved in it. The instructions 
that I gave were, if someone who helped us wants to be considered for an 
appointment, they ought to be considered for the appointment, but they 
shouldn't get it unless they're qualified for it. They shouldn't be 
disqualified because they have been a supporter of ours.
    That's the way I felt about the trade missions. If someone wanted to 
go on a trade mission and was qualified and could make a contribution, 
then they ought to get to go. But if they would never get to go in a 
thousand years, that no one would think they should have any business on 
the trade mission and the only reason they were going to get to go was 
because they contributed to us, I didn't think they should go.
    But I think it's disingenuous for anybody in public life to say that 
it doesn't help you to be considered for these things if you help the 
person who happens to win an election, because you have to stay in touch 
with the people that helped you. And it is a good thing to do. That's 
the way the political system works. That's the way--I would expect that 
of a Republican or a Democrat or an independent who got elected to any 
office, that people that helped you and people that you know, people you 
have confidence in, you ought to listen to them. But you should never 
make a decision and do something solely because they have helped you 
before or solely in anticipation of something they might do for you in 
the future.
    And what we have to do is to have our decisions open enough and 
transparent enough that the American people can see that that is being 
done. And I can tell you, people come to you in all different kinds of 
ways. For example--let me just give you one example. It's not a trade 
mission, but I'll just give you one example. There was a huge amount of 
money at stake in the private sector in the legislation involving the 
telecommunications reform. It was the first time we had reformed 
telecommunications in 60 years. You all are in it. You know better than 
I do how much it's changing--all the competition issues, massive amounts 
of money.
    The Vice President has been interested in this issue forever. In our 
weekly lunches, we spent endless amounts of time talking about the 
telecommunications act, what it should look like, and we took a 
position. We then found we had all these people who came to us and 
supported

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us, many of whom had been Republicans their whole lives, who were 
independent long distance telephone operators. And they came to us 
because the majority party had decided to take a position favored by the 
larger telephone companies.
    We had a clear public position beforehand. Should we not have 
accepted their contribution? Should we not have accepted their support 
and help? I think we did the right thing. Now, flip it around. If they 
had been helping us all along, but we agreed with them, should we have 
weakened in our advocacy just because they were supporting us?
    In other words, I think the whole reason for the first round of 
campaign reform--let's go back to that--is that all these contributions 
should be made public and you should be free to evaluate them and you 
should be free to determine and to speculate and to probe about whether 
the money we received from such and such a group has affected a decision 
we made and does it undermine or support the public interest. You should 
be free to do that. That's why full disclosure is important. But I think 
that unless we're going to a completely publicly financed system, 
contributors will always have access to public officials, then other 
kinds of people will who helped them. That's the way it is.
    Mara, go ahead.
    Q. Mr. President, you say that there is no evidence that you've ever 
changed a policy because of someone you met with. But what does appear 
to have occurred is that certain people traded on their access. In other 
words, access to you became a valuable business commodity to get new 
clients or impress their current clients. Do you think that that meets 
the higher standard that you want the White House to adhere to?
    The President. Well, what I think about that is that we need to 
evaluate whether we did anything which would give the impression that we 
were trying to help someone get business. In other words, I can't say 
who, beyond the reach of our personal contacts, would be impressed with 
people who had their picture taken with me. After today, it may be that 
everybody will go broke unless they take the pictures off the wall. I 
don't know. But I can't say that.
    What I can say is that the White House should not knowingly permit 
the White House or the Presidency or the Vice Presidency to be used to 
advance some private economic interest. And that--you've put your finger 
on something that is troubling to me, and we have to evaluate that more. 
And it's one of the reasons that I wanted to make sure that we had a 
system in place on access and on all of these things that will meet that 
standard in the future, and I believe we've done that. But I think 
that's a legitimate problem.
    Jim [Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News].
    Q. Mr. President----
    The President. Just a minute, I'll come back to you.

1996 Campaign Financing and Partial Birth Abortion

    Q. Mr. President, when you vetoed the ban on partial birth abortion, 
you said you did so to protect the lives of the mothers and because they 
were fairly rare. Well, it's since been revealed that there are 
approximately 5,000 of these so-called partial birth abortions performed 
every year, 90 percent of them in the 5th and 6th month. Would you now 
support a ban if it included provisions to protect the mother but would 
ban the procedure also in the 5th and 6th month?
    And one second unrelated question, did the White House discover if 
there were any other checks or money passed besides the $50,000 to 
Maggie Williams? [Laughter]
    The President. That's fair. No, that's a fair question. As far as I 
know, that did not happen. As far as I know, any other checks that came 
in, we really didn't--were things that came in the mail and were just 
routinely referred. And I don't even know if there were any of those or 
how many there were. But as far as I know, there was no other instance 
like the one involving Maggie.
    Now, let me answer the other question as clearly as I can. The 
admission by the gentleman in question, that, you know, he thought he 
was misrepresenting the facts to the Congress in the last debate, has 
caused a lot of stir here. But I believe--and I tried to be clear about 
this at the time--I was under the impression that the facts are just as 
we all said they were, more or less what you've said. I don't know that 
we have exact numbers.
    What I said before was, and let me restate it, I sought to get a 
bill I could sign that would ban this procedure when it was 
inappropriate, because there would be other avenues available

[[Page 260]]

if an abortion was otherwise legal. What I was concerned about again--
and you said 500, I think, so let's just take your number. We don't 
really know.
    Q. Actually, I think it's 5,000.
    The President. Five thousand total, of whom a small proportion, 
maybe 10 percent or so, are like those five women that I had in the 
White House. I will say again, they are my concern. They are my only 
concern. And I would remind you that three of those five women 
identified themselves to me as pro-life voters. And they were told that 
unless they had a procedure which would be banned under the law that I 
vetoed, after it was over, the babies they would be carrying would be 
dead and their bodies would never be able to have another baby. That is 
my only concern. I have made that as clear as I can.
    So I can't answer the question that you asked me any clearer than 
that because I want to see the language of any proposed bill. I think 
you can make a very compelling case that for the small number of people 
I'm trying to protect, this is the biggest issue in their entire lives 
and that for them my position is the pro-life position. And I believe 
that it would be a mistake for us to pass this bill one more time 
without taking care of those folks. When--because, as you just pointed 
out, Mr. Miklaszewski, because anybody that's in the first two 
trimesters that has an elective procedure will still have access to 
another one in a different way after the bill passes.
    So, in a funny way, this might not work to reduce the overall number 
of abortions at all. But in the end, what it could do is every year to 
take a few hundred women and wreck their lives and wreck the possibility 
that they could have further children. That's why I was working on this. 
And if we can solve that problem, I will happily sign this bill. This 
thing is a real--it has hurt the American people, dealing with this. And 
I don't mean it's harmed physically; I mean, this has been a great 
emotional trauma for the American people trying to come to grips with 
this issue and deal with it. It's a deep thing out there around the 
country, and it goes way beyond the traditional pro-life/pro-choice 
fight or disagreement.
    I would like to see us bring some harmony to this and put it behind 
us. But every time anybody mentions this, I remember so vividly the 
faces of those five women and their life stories and what happened to 
them afterward. And a few hundred people a year, they don't have much 
votes or influence, but they're the people I'm concerned about, and 
they're the people I'm going to try to protect right down to the end.
    Let's take one from Sarah [Sarah McClendon, McClendon News Service]. 
And then I've got to take one from Jill Dougherty [Cable News Network] 
because she's about to go to Moscow, and she needs to have her parting 
shot. Go ahead.

American Sovereignty

    Q. Sir, this is on another subject. We have a very great problem in 
this country today, and I wonder if you would use your leadership to 
counteract the rumormongers that are abroad in the land who are 
spreading all these rumors that are scaring people to death; large 
segments of our citizens believe that the United Nations is taking over 
whole blocks of counties in Kentucky and Tennessee. [Laughter]
    The President. Yes.
    Q. And some of them, they believe that----
    The President. Now, you all are laughing, but----
    Q. ----you're going to put us in a concentration camp and you're 
going to give our Army to Russia and all that baloney. Could you do 
something about this, because it's hurting the unity of the United 
States.
    The President. I don't know, because the people who believe that 
think I'm the problem. [Laughter] We're all laughing about it, but there 
is not an insubstantial number of people who believe that there is a 
plan out there for world domination and I'm trying to give American 
sovereignty over to the U.N. There was a--I read in our local Arkansas 
newspaper, one of them the other day had a letter to the editor saying 
that there I go again, there's Clinton out there trying to give American 
sovereignty over to the United Nations.
    Let me just say this: For people that are worried about it, I would 
say, there is a serious issue here that every American has to come to 
grips with--including Americans that don't much think about foreign 
policy until some great problem occurs--and that is, how can we be an 
independent, sovereign nation leading the world in a world that is 
increasingly interdependent, that requires us to cooperate with other 
people and then to deal with very difficult

[[Page 261]]

circumstances in trying to determine how best to cooperate?
    That's the issue that you will all be reporting on for the next week 
in the Mexico certification issue. Did I do the right thing to certify 
Mexico? Are the Members of Congress who disagree with me right when they 
say we should have decertified Mexico and then given a national interest 
waiver so we could continue to cooperate economically and in others 
ways?
    I strongly believe I was right. But we don't--if you want to go into 
that, we can later, but the issue is, we live in an interdependent 
world. We have to cooperate with people. We're better off when we do. 
We're better off with NATO. We're better off with the United Nations. 
We're better off when these countries can work together. So I just think 
for folks that are worried about this out in the country, they need to 
be thinking about how--we're not going to give up our freedom, our 
independence, but we're not going to go it alone into the 21st century 
either. We're going to work together, and we have to.
    Jill?

Russia and NATO Expansion

    Q. Thank you very much, Mr. President. Speaking of Russia and NATO, 
yesterday we heard President Boris Yeltsin saying that the purpose of 
the motivation by the West for NATO expansion is to squeeze Russia out 
of Europe and politically marginalize it. And in a couple of weeks, 
you'll be sitting down with Mr. Yeltsin again. We've heard similar 
things from the Russians many times. Are you making any progress in 
changing the Russians' position on this?
    The President. Well, I hope so. Let me answer the--I'd like to make 
two points about it. First of all, this meeting that we're going to have 
in Helsinki, President Yeltsin and I, it will be very important. And yet 
it's important to recognize that it's part of a regular pattern of 
meetings over the last several years which have changed the nature of 
U.S.-Russian relations forever, I hope, so that it will be a meeting 
that will be extremely candid, extremely straightforward, and I hope it 
will deal with not only the question of Russia's relationship to Europe 
but also what we can do with the Russians to continue to reduce the 
nuclear threat and what we can do with the Russians to help them to 
build their economy, because I'm convinced that they have the capacity, 
if they can make certain changes, to enjoy a phenomenal amount of 
economic growth in a relatively short time, which I think would help a 
lot of things in their country.
    Now, on the merits, I have said since 1993 that one of my dreams for 
the 21st century world is a Europe that for the first time is united, 
democratic, and free. Since the dawn of nation-states, about the 
beginning of the last millennium in Europe, it has never been so. There 
has never been a single time when Europe was united, democratic, and 
free. The final capstone to that, I think, is working out a security 
relationship with NATO, a European Union that is expanding and still 
tied--a Europe still tied to the United States and to Canada, to North 
America, not only economically and politically but also in terms of our 
security alliance, but also has a special relationship with Russia and 
does not rule out even Russian membership in a common security alliance.
    The best answer I can give to President Yelstin is, what are we 
doing with NATO to-day and with whom are we doing it? What we are doing 
today is Bosnia. We together ended the bloodiest war in Europe since 
World War II, and we are doing it with Russia. And there are lots of 
other things we can do with Russia.
    The final point I want to make is, among the great questions--there 
are five or six great questions which will determine what the world will 
look like 30 or 40 years from now. One of those great questions is, how 
will Russia and China, the two great former Communist powers, define 
their greatness in the next century? Will they define their greatness as 
we try to do, in terms of the achievements of our people, our ability to 
protect ourselves, and our ability to relate to other people? Or will 
they define--and I think that's a more modern definition, if you will--
or will they define their greatness in terms of their ability to 
influence, if not outright dominate, the people that live around them as 
well as to control the political debate of people who live within their 
borders to a degree that I think is not helpful?
    If that debate is resolved in the proper way, the 21st century is 
going to be a very good time for the American people. And I think when 
you hear all this stuff about NATO, you have to understand that there's 
two things going on. The Russians want to know, are we aggressive in 
NATO expansion or defensive, and looking

[[Page 262]]

at other targets like Bosnia? Then they're having to define in 
themselves, ``Where do we want to be 25 or 30 years from now?''
    And when they say things that we find offensive, I would ask the 
American people to understand their sensitivities. We were never invaded 
by Napoleon or Hitler, and they were. So they're a little sensitive 
about the prospects of their borders. And we're trying to work together 
for a better, brighter world.
    I think that we're going to get there. I expect that the Helsinki 
meeting will be positive. But you should understand, this is a tough 
debate and that they have reasons in their own psyche and circumstances 
that make it a difficult one.
    Thank you.

Note: The President's 137th news conference began at 2:02 p.m. in the 
East Room at the White House. In his remarks, he referred to Nancy 
Hernreich, Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Oval Office 
Operations; Bernard Rapoport, member, Advisory Committee for Trade 
Policy and Negotiations; and Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director, 
National Coalition of Abortion Providers.