    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [February 25, 1999]
    [Pages 302-307]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Interview With Janet Langhart Cohen of
    the Armed Forces Television Network
    February 25, 1999

    President's Impression of Personnel

        Mrs. Cohen. Mr. President, thanks very much for this interview. I
    want to talk about your impressions of our military. You get a chance to
    travel all over the world and see our men and women in uniform. What is
    your impression of them?
        The President. Well, first of all, I do have a unique opportunity to
    see them, in all kinds of settings--formal settings in my tour of Korea
    last December; going to the launching of the U.S.S. Harry Truman. But I
    have been, just in the last couple of years, in the last 2 years, on 30
    different occasions with our men and women in uniform, and I see them
    doing national security work overseas; I see them in training operations
    here and overseas; I see them dealing with disaster situations. I will
    see some of them in Central America in the next few weeks when I go down
    there, dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch. And the
    overwhelming impression that you get is that they're not only superb at
    what they do but that they're really good people and good citizens. That
    kind of teamwork that is required to pull off a military mission is
    something that they bring to all their work in life.
        I remember, I talked to a command sergeant major in Korea who can
    still run under a 6-minute mile; he's in his late forties. And he's been
    in the Army 29 years, and he's retiring. I said, ``What are you going to
    do when you get out?'' He said, ``I'm going home to Kentucky to teach
    school, because I think I can do some good for those young people.''
        So I see this. And I always try, when I am with our men and women in
    uniform, not only to get briefed in a formal way on what their mission
    is on a particular day but also to find out a little bit about their
    lives, how their families are doing, how many times that they've been
    deployed, how are they dealing with that. And whenever possible, I
    always try to take a meal with them, so that enables me to connect with
    a lot of them individually and get a real feel for what's going on.
        Mrs. Cohen. How do you feel they connect with you? What impression
    are you getting when they talk to you and answer your questions?
        The President. Well, I find them very confident, self-confident, and
    very forthcoming, very candid.
        Mrs. Cohen. Are they open with you?
        The President. Yes, I think they are. I think they are, I guess as
    open as you could ever be with someone who is in my position. I ask
    direct questions, and I always feel I'm getting direct answers.

    Rigors of Military Life

        Mrs. Cohen. What do you think the American citizen should know and
    understand about the

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    military? Because when you and I were coming up, there was always
    somebody in the family who was in the military, or somebody in the
    neighborhood. Nowadays, we don't see them on the street.
        The President. Well, I think most Americans do know and admire the
    fact that we have the best military in the world. They know that we have
    the most high-tech equipment. They know that our people are well-
    trained. I think most Americans know they're good people, fine men and
    women. What I don't think most Americans know is how hard they work all
    the time. I don't think Americans who aren't involved in the military
    have any idea how rigorous most of the training schedules are and what
    is involved. That's the first thing.
        The second thing is, I don't think most Americans know how diverse
    the operations are. And the third thing, maybe the most important thing
    in terms of this budget we're trying to push on Capitol Hill, I don't
    think most Americans know how tough it can be today on the families. I
    don't think they're aware of how--with a smaller military and fewer big
    engagements but a lot more small ones--how much deployment is involved.
    I don't think they understand how quickly these people have to come in
    from being overseas or come in from being on a ship or being in a
    foreign land and then turn around and go back again.
        Mrs. Cohen.  And the stress on their families.
        The President. Yes. I don't think--the family stress thing bothers
    me as much as anything right now, about where we are with the military.

    Military Budget Proposal

        Mrs. Cohen.  What are some of the things that you took into account,
    the factors, the decisions you made on pay raise, retirement----
        The President. Well, they were sending us a signal. We've got a lot
    of people retiring, and we're having trouble meeting some of our
    recruitment quotas. Now, part of that is a high-class problem; it's a
    result of the success of the American economy. And with the unemployment
    rate under 4.5 percent, wages rising at twice the rate of inflation now
    for the last couple of years, there are so many compelling opportunities
    for young people outside the military that it's harder to recruit and
    retain. We see it in Air Force pilots, but we also see it in enlistees
    in the Navy and the Army. We see it across the board. So it's obvious to
    me that we need to raise pay, and we needed to fix that so-called
    retirement redux problem, you know, that I believe the Congress will go
    along with fixing this year.
        Mrs. Cohen.  Sir, with all due respect, you offered the highest
    budget proposal in a long time--ever. But is it enough when you talk
    about the things we're asking of them to do? They're at the tip of the
    sword. I don't know how much money anybody could pay me to get me, at a
    moment's notice, to go to Bosnia and stay there and leave my family.
        The President. Well, I think the real question is--this is what
    we're working out with the Congress now--there is sentiment in the
    Congress to have an entire pay increase, and I think that, from the
    Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs to the White House, we would all
    support that. But we have to operate within a given budget ceiling, so
    we have to measure what we need to do for our troops and their families
    off against the absolute imperative of being able to pay for training,
    which is more and more expensive--the more sophisticated the equipment
    is, the more expensive it is to train on it, which is why we developed
    so many computer simulations and programs--and the need to continue to
    modernize the equipment. You don't want a bunch of equipment out there
    that you can't run because you don't have spare parts, you haven't kept
    upgraded to high safety conditions.
        So in the best of all worlds, is it enough? No, I don't think so.
    I'd like to do more. But if we're going to do more, then we need to work
    it out with Congress so we're not robbing Peter to pay Paul. I mean,
    most of our men and women in uniform would like it if we invested more
    in them, in their families, in their quality of life, but they wouldn't
    like it if, in so doing, we made it impossible for them to fulfill the
    mission they joined the military to perform in the first place. So
    that's the real conflict.

    Postsecondary Education

        Mrs. Cohen.  Sir, what I was thinking is the mid-life, the mid-
    career recruits that we have--they're thinking: Well, I've been in half
    my adult life; I have children; I may have to educate them in college.
    On their pay, they can't afford to educate their children. Can there be
    a GI bill for----
        The President. One of the things we helped a little at--I should
    point that out, I haven't

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    mentioned it--the Defense Department is also working on changing the pay
    scales, so that the rewards will ramp up more for people who stay in
    longer as they reach different levels of achievement and service.
        And keep in mind now, the children of military personnel are
    eligible for all the financial benefits that we put out there for middle
    class families generally. I mean, now, for example, in the first 2 years
    of college, virtually all American families can get a $1,500 tax
    credit--and if you're in the 28 percent tax bracket, that's like $6,000
    worth of tuition--plus a dramatic increase in the scholarships, and a
    lowering of the cost of the student loans, and tax credits for all other
    higher education.
        So I think that we need to make sure our military families know
    about all these benefits and make sure they can take advantage of them,
    but I think on that score they'll be all right. I'm more worried about
    just whether the pay itself and the retirement are sufficient to allow
    good people to feel they can stay in, take care of their children, and
    know they'll be all right when they get out.

    Recruitment

        Mrs. Cohen. Do you think it's enough for recruitment? While it may
    be enough for retention because they're already invested, can we do more
    on recruitment?
        The President. I don't know; we'll see. You and I were talking
    before we started the interview about this new innovative program the
    Navy is doing, and I hope that the higher pay, plus the better
    retirement benefits, will make a difference in recruitment this year.
    We'll just have to see. But I think that we all have to be honest: On
    the recruitment side, the biggest problem is the rest of the economy is
    doing so well, and the young people we've been getting in the military--
    we've got fairly high standards for who can get in in the first place.

    Military Career Benefits

        Mrs. Cohen. If you were to do a pitch right now for those we already
    have, what would you say as to why they should stay? Because they're
    certainly not in it for the money.
        The President. I would say, first of all, if you stay until you've
    got enough time in to retire, you'll still be young; you'll still have a
    whole other career you can work. We're going to do our best to get our
    budget on a plane where we'll be paying you better. We're going to
    accelerate the maintenance of quality of life, improvement of those
    benefits. We're going to improve the retirement system for those for
    whom it was a problem. And the work you're doing is profoundly important
    to the country. We need good people to do it. And the skills you acquire
    in doing it will make you even more marketable when you leave.
        I see people all the time getting out of the service. Maybe it's
    just my perspective since I'm not young anymore, but you can do--a lot
    of these people doing 25, 26, 27 years, and they're still not 50 years
    old yet. So they've got another 20 years or more to do something else
    with their lives. So I would hope that if we can make the quality of
    their life situation better for them, that more will choose to stay.

    Importance of the Mission

        Mrs. Cohen. What would you say, sir, to the men and women serving in
    our hotspots, from Bosnia to the Persian Gulf to Korea, even those who
    are down in Central America helping with relief--what would you say to
    them, why their missions are important, why it is important to those of
    us here at home?
        The President. Well, first I would say that they're really the first
    generation of American troops to serve a United States that is both the
    dominant military power in the world and without a dominant military
    opponent, like the Soviet Union; that for 10 years now, we've been
    trying to work out how we can fairly fulfill our responsibilities to
    promote peace and freedom and prosperity, consistent with our ability to
    afford it and the need for our allies to assume their fair share of
    responsibility.
        And our military people have been on the cutting edge of this sea
    change. In the whole history of America, there has never been a period
    like this, ever. We've either gone into isolationism as soon as a war
    was over, or we got thrown into the cold war for the last 50 years,
    before the end of the cold war. And I would hope that they would be very
    proud of that, the idea that other nations would trust the United
    States, for example, to come into Bosnia, to deal with this crisis in
    Kosovo, to stand guard on the border with the U.N. troops in Macedonia,
    to stay in Korea decades after the end of the Korean war, because they
    know we have no territorial ambitions, because they know we don't seek
    to impose our will on other countries.

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    They really know we're there for peace and security.
        And it's sometimes dangerous, sometimes boring, sometimes disruptive
    because of the rapid number of deployments that we have. But all of them
    should understand that they're part of a profound historic
    transformation in the world. And if we do this right, when we get
    through, the United States will share responsibilities for security with
    other democracies in a balanced and fair way and will be doing it in a
    way that is quite effective.
        I mean, one of the things that our people ought to be proud of is
    how effective they are in Bosnia, for example; how effective they are in
    the aftermath of the hurricane in Central America.
        Mrs. Cohen.  Give me some examples, human stories, in Bosnia and
    then Central America.
        The President. Oh, I got lots of letters from Bosnia, people who--I
    got wonderful letters from service people in Bosnia, men and women who
    went over there having questions about why they were going, was it worth
    it, was it going to be dangerous. Then they got involved with people in
    the communities nearby, with children. They understood--they saw the
    incredible tragedy of the carnage that existed before we went there. And
    these soldiers who write me these letters, or when I go over there--the
    second time I went over there, telling me how they--how proud they were;
    it was the right thing to do.
        I never will forget one prominent officer who went to Haiti, who
    told me--he said, ``You know, when you sent us down there, I just didn't
    know about that, but I'm glad we gave those people a chance to save
    their country.''
        I think that of all ranks and all walks of life, our military
    people, they get caught up in actually seeing what they can do. The
    military is the most well-organized operation in our society, so you can
    only imagine the contrast between going into a war zone or a society
    that is totally dissolved over racial or ethnic or religious hatreds. To
    a little child who is used to living in chaos, seeing the United States
    as a symbol of both order and goodness, both things, is astonishing. And
    what I mostly hear back from the members of the Armed Services is when
    they see that and they see the human reaction it evokes and they see
    what it does for the image of the United States in those areas, most of
    them are very proud to have done what they have done.

    Kosovo

        Mrs. Cohen.  You talked about Kosovo. It's very timely right now.
    What are we going to do? Are we going in on the ground? Are we going to
    be just that 10 percent of NATO, or are we going to be the dominant
    force? Who is going to command people who go in on the ground?
        The President. Well, first of all, unless there is an agreement
    between both parties, we will not go in on the ground, because we didn't
    go in on the ground in Bosnia until we had an agreement--everybody had
    to agree--because we were a peacekeeping force, not a war force designed
    to win a victory and then enforce the peace.
        Mrs. Cohen.  But we will defend ourselves.
        The President. Absolutely. We'll have vigorous rules of engagement
    if necessary to defend ourselves, just as we've had in Bosnia. And the
    more vigorous our right to defend ourselves, the less likely it is we'll
    ever have to do it.
        But anyway, to go back to the first question, the difference in this
    and Bosnia is that this movement reflects the continued development
    within Europe of security capacity and the idea that the Europeans have
    that they should take the lead for their own security. So this time, all
    we have been asked to do within NATO is to put up 14 percent of the
    troops. But it's a critical 14 percent because it bolsters the
    confidence in our NATO allies that there really is a European alliance,
    number one; and number two, the Kosovar Albanians want us there, which
    is interesting. Most Americans didn't know a thing about Kosovo or
    Albania until this whole thing started. But those folks knew about
    America. They knew about the American military, and they trust them to
    keep their word and do what they say they're going to do. So that's an
    enormous thing.
        So we'll go in there if, in fact, it happens--and I hope it does--
    with only 14 percent of the force in the NATO command, working with
    perhaps other countries as well, like we work alongside Russians in
    Bosnia. That's one of the reasons that the mission has been a success.
    But this one reflects the continuing maturity and strength of the
    European capacity for self-defense. And I think it's going about the way
    we want. We think that they should do more

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    for themselves, but we also want to maintain our tie to the Europeans.

    Accomplishments Past and Present

        Mrs. Cohen. Sir, this is my last question. Everyone lately has been
    talking about ``The Greatest Generation,'' from Tom Brokaw on down to
    ``Saving Private Ryan.'' I think this is one of the greatest
    generations, the men and women serving now. What would you say to them?
    Because I remember the day that we went to Normandy in 1994, and that
    had to be--time for you. What would you say to the people serving now,
    if we look back 50 years from now, as to their contribution?
        The President. Well, I would say that obviously what they're doing
    may not be as dramatic as landing on Omaha Beach, and I certainly hope
    it won't be as dangerous, ever. But what we know about World War II,
    looking back, is that even though after World War II there was this long
    twilight struggle of the cold war, it may be that World War II was the
    last war of mass slaughter of nation-states, certainly in Europe,
    because we stood up against the totalitarian dictatorships of Nazi
    Germany and their allies.
        So it was of historic significance because, in the aftermath of
    World War I, we hope at least that it nailed the coffin, at least in the
    West and other more well-developed countries, on mass warfare by
    nations. And huge--millions and millions and millions of people died.
        Then the cold war, we hope, brought an end to the world being
    divided between communism and freedom. But what these people are doing,
    and what 50 years from now their children and their grandchildren will
    be able to look back and see, is that they are erecting a defense for
    the 21st century. They are dealing with a hundred little problems, each
    of which could become a big problem and could swallow the world up. They
    are making the world safe for genuine self-determination, for freedom,
    for free commerce, for free exchange of ideas, in a way that no
    generation has ever tried to do or had to do before, because the world
    is so interconnected and one of these little problems can become a
    forest fire and spread around.
        So they really--I think 50 years from now, when they look back, they
    will see that they didn't bring an end to an era of slaughter the way
    the World War II generation did, with heroism and great sacrifice, but
    they did put America's military might to work in building a new world,
    which is something that I think their children and grandchildren will be
    very, very proud of. And there is no doubt that the United States could
    not have done it by economic power alone. Without our military
    alliances, without the expansion of NATO, without the deployment in
    Bosnia, without our ability to continue to try to stop bad things from
    happening and weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, without
    our willingness to stay on the Korean Peninsula to try to stabilize
    situations there and work through the other tensions in Asia, we would
    not have been able to do this.
        And if people in my position, the decisionmakers, if we don't mess
    it up, then the military will know that they were part of literally
    building the world different from any in all previous history. And
    that's--I think that's a legacy to be proud of.
        Mrs. Cohen. It's one you should be proud of, too. Thank you very
    much for this interview. Thank you, sir.

    Opportunities for Women and Minorities

        Mrs. Cohen. The recent mission that we had was Desert Fox. And we
    were fortunate at Christmas to be on the ``Big E,'' on the U.S.S.
    Enterprise, and we met a lot of the Navy pilots, and some of them were
    women. Could you talk about that?
        The President. Yes. You know, we've had now, for a few years, women
    in combat pilot roles, and they've performed very well. And I think, to
    me, the most important thing is that this was done in Desert Fox without
    a lot of fanfare. The military did it without a lot of fanfare, and the
    women pilots themselves did it without a lot of fanfare. They worked for
    a long time; they trained for a long time; they waited for a long time.
    And when their chance came to do their job, they did their job without
    making a big deal of it, and they did it very, very well.
        So I like the fact that it was done and the way it was done. I think
    since I've been President we've opened something like 250,000 duty
    positions to women that were not open previously. And it's making a big
    difference. And there all these disputed areas of training, deployment
    areas, but I think that the disputes should not be allowed to obscure
    the underlying reality

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    that the military has dealt with the gender difference in the same way
    it dealt over time with racial differences, to open up a maximum number
    of roles and give people the maximum opportunity to live up to their own
    ability.
        We were talking before about the pardon I gave posthumously to Henry
    Flipper, who was the first African-American graduate of West Point,
    remarkable engineer, good soldier, unfairly discharged. He was cleared
    of his dishonorable discharge over 20 years ago but never given a
    pardon, I think because we had never given a posthumous pardon before.
    But the Defense Department and I very much wanted to do it.
        We gave the fourth star to Benjamin O. Davis not very long ago in
    tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen. I think that looking backward is really
    a way of--in this context--is a way of ensuring you'll continue to go
    forward. It's a way of reminding us how far we've come and what we
    missed when we deny any group of people who wanted to contribute to our
    military the chance to do so. And I hope that this forward movement will
    continue.
        I mean, there will always be controversies around the edges, rules
    to be worked out, difficulties to be dealt with, but when you give
    patriotic Americans who want to serve and who can serve well, the chance
    to do it, you win.
        Mrs. Cohen. Sir, if I may ask you a personal question, you have been
    a champion of diversity, you have always defended and stood up for the
    underdog, whether it's gender, whether it's race, whether it's age,
    whether even it's orientation. Where does that come from?
        The President. I think two things in my long-ago past. First of all,
    with regard to women, my mother was widowed when I was born, and she was
    off studying to be a nurse. My grandparents raised me until I was 4. My
    grandmother worked, as well as my grandfather; my grandmother was a
    nurse. So I had always been around women who had to work to make a
    contribution to their family's welfare. And so I think from early
    childhood I always was particularly sensitive to any kind of
    discrimination against women or just denial of opportunity. And I was
    always sort of rooting for them because of my mother and my grandmother.
        And on the race thing, I think it was because of my grandfather and
    the fact that when I was a child he had a little grocery store in a
    predominantly black area of this little town we lived in. Most of the
    customers were black. And most of what I learned about people and human
    nature and treating everybody the same and also discrimination, I
    learned as a little boy just listening and watching and observing and
    being taught.
        So, in a funny way, most southerners were at a--most white
    southerners were at a disadvantage in dealing with the civil rights
    revolution because they were raised with more explicit racial prejudice.
    But some of us were actually at an advantage because we had more human
    contact with African-Americans before others did, and if we were lucky
    enough to have parents or grandparents that taught us differently, I
    think it made a difference.
        So I think those two things, you know, and just in my family--we
    always had sympathy for the underdog, too. We never believed it was
    right to keep anybody down. And we were all raised, all of us, never to
    build ourselves up because there was somebody else we could look down
    on.
        And I think that's--if you think about it, if you generalize that,
    really that psychological problem is at the bottom of a lot of this
    racial and ethnic hatred around the world. A lot of these groups
    themselves are deprived of opportunity. They've had economic adversity,
    had all kinds of diversity, and a lot of them, frankly, are taught as
    groups that what gives meaning to their lives is that they're not a
    member of this other group; at least they've got somebody to look down
    on. And I just thank the Lord nearly every day that I was--it didn't
    have anything to do with me--I was lucky enough to have grandparents and
    a mother, a family situation where I was taught differently.
        Mrs. Cohen. Well, we're lucky that we have a President who feels
    that way.
        The President. Thank you. Thank you, Janet.

    Note: The interview began at 11:10 a.m. on February 25 aboard Air Force
    One en route to Tucson, AZ. The transcript was released by the Office of
    the Press Secretary on March 4. A tape was not available for
    verification of the content of this interview.