[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.