[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[November 2, 2000]
[Pages 2632-2649]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Interview With Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone
Magazine
November 2, 2000
Mr. Wenner. Thank you for your time; I appreciate it. It takes time
to do something like this.
The President. Good.
2000 Presidential Election
Mr. Wenner. Why do you think the race is so tight, given the
economy, the issues, the incumbency? How could it get to be this close?
The President. Well, I think for one thing, things have been good
for a long time, and I think a lot of people may take it for granted and
may not have--they may not be as clear as they should be, which I hope
we can use the last week to do, on what specific policies contributed to
it and what could undermine it. I think that's one issue.
I also think that, you know, there's not as much general awareness
as there might be about the differences between the two parties on
health care, education, the environment, and crime, where I believe that
the things we've done over the last 8 years had a measurable impact on
all those things going in the right direction.
And a lot of--most Presidential races are fairly close, you know,
because a lot of Presidential voting is cultural.
Mr. Wenner. The way you were raised.
The President. Well, the way you were raised and sort of the
neighborhood you live in, your socioeconomic and ethnic background. I
mean, a lot of it's cultural. So I think there are a lot of reasons it's
close.
Also, keep in mind, in the history of our Republic, only two Vice
Presidents have ever been directly elected President. One of them--when
Martin Van Buren succeeded Andrew Jackson, we were effectively a one-
party country then. And the other, when George Bush defeated Michael
Dukakis, the country was not in as good a shape as it is now, but it was
in pretty good shape, and Bush basically destroyed Dukakis.
[[Page 2633]]
It was a hugely negative campaign with a lot of charges that were never
effectively rebutted.
So this has been a much more positive race. There have been
differences on the issues, but neither one of them has called each
other's patriotism into question or whether they're normal Americans.
Basically, the rap that was put on Dukakis was like reverse plastic
surgery. So I think that that explains it largely.
Demands of the Presidency
Mr. Wenner. At the end of the interview, I'm going to ask you to
make a bet with me.
What physical change in you says that you've served 8 years and it's
a job that really takes a toll?
The President. Well, I think I'm in better shape, better health than
I was 8 years ago, in a lot of ways. My hair is gray. I think that's
about it. I've got a few wrinkles I didn't have 8 years ago.
But I've held up pretty well. I've had a good time. I've enjoyed it.
I couldn't help my hair going gray. It would probably have gone gray if
I hadn't become President.
Oklahoma City and Columbine
Mr. Wenner. One of the most important jobs that you, as a President,
have is to talk to the country in the wake of national tragedies, frame
the issues for the American people. I'm going to ask you about two of
the things that happened during your two terms: the Oklahoma City
bombing and the Columbine shootings.
Where were you when you first heard about the Oklahoma City bombing,
and what was your first reaction, personally? And then how did you think
you should frame that to the American people, to help them understand
what's really a national trauma? And where were you when you heard it?
The President. I was in the White House. I believe I was in the
White House, because I remember making a statement at the beginning,
right in the Rose Garden, saying what you would expect me to say,
expressing the Nation's sympathy for the loss but also urging the
American people not to jump to conclusions about who had done it.
Remember in the beginning, there were a lot of people saying it was
obviously some sort of act of foreign terrorism. There was one man that
was brought back on an airplane. He was flying out of the country
through to London, and he was brought back, suspected of maybe being
involved, and he wasn't. And of course, subsequently, it was a domestic
terrorist act.
But then when I went to Oklahoma, at the memorial service, what I
tried to do was to elevate what the people who had been working in that
building were doing. They were all public servants, and it was at a time
when it was quite fashionable to bash the Government. And I told myself,
even, that I would never refer to people who worked for the Government--
even in agencies I thought weren't performing well--as bureaucrats
again, because this whole--we have gotten, for more than a dozen years,
a sort of demeaning rhetoric about the nature of Government and the
nature of public service. And I tried to point out that these people
were our friends and our neighbors and our relatives, and they were an
important part of America's family and that their service ought to be
honored in that way.
And also, obviously, I took a strong stand against terrorism. And I
was able--later I went to Michigan State and gave a commencement speech
and tried to amplify on that. But I really believe that was the turning
of the tide in the venom of anti-Government feeling.
Mr. Wenner. Did you see--was it a conscience thought to you that
this could be the turning of the tide, and if you focused it correctly,
if you said, ``You know, you can't love your country if you hate your
Government,'' that this would crystallize that feeling?
The President. I think I felt that after I had some time to think
about it. In the beginning I was just horrified about all those people
dying, all those little kids killed and hurt.
Mr. Wenner. What I'm trying to get at is, once beyond that obvious
first reaction----
The President. Yes. I mean, it occurred to me that, you know, the
American people are fundamentally decent, and they've got a lot of
sense. And I thought that this might break a fever that had been
gripping us for too long. And I think it did.
Mr. Wenner. And you thought, if I can take advantage of this
opportunity--I mean, to have this tragedy--in every tragedy comes an
opportunity, so is this an opportunity where I can make people rethink
that idea.
The President. I think in a way, at least at some--maybe not even at
a conscious level, the American people were rethinking it. And I think
[[Page 2634]]
maybe that's why what I said at the memorial service struck a responsive
chord in the country.
Mr. Wenner. What I'm trying to get at is, was that a deliberate
thought on your part? That I have an opportunity as President to----
The President. Well, I thought that--yes, I was conscious of what I
was saying.
Mr. Wenner. Did you connect it in some way to a kind of metaphorical
bomb-throwing of Newt Gingrich, of the real anti-Government stance that
he was taking at the time?
The President. I was careful not to do that. I wanted it to change
the American peoples' attitude toward public servants and their
Government. But to do it, you had to focus on what happened.
One of the things that I didn't like about
Newt--and he certainly wasn't responsible in any way for the Oklahoma
City bombing--because one of the things I didn't like about him is, he
was always blaming the 1960's or liberals for everything that went
wrong. When that woman, Susan Smith, drove her kids into the lake in
South Carolina, he blamed the 1960's, and it turned out that the poor
woman had been sexually abused by her father, her stepfather, who was on
the local board of the Christian Coalition or something.
And when that woman dropped her kid out of the window in Chicago, he
blamed the welfare culture. He was always blaming. So I didn't want to
get into where I was doing reverse blame. I just wanted to try to make
it clear to the American people that we shouldn't have a presumption
against Government in general or public servants in particular.
Mr. Wenner. What about Columbine? Where did you first hear the news
about that? And again, what was your reaction to that?
The President. I believe I was in the White House when I heard that,
but I'm not sure. But I know that I called the local officials and the
school officials from the Oval Office. You know, that was only the most
recent and the most grotesque of a whole series of highly visible school
shootings that we've had--a number of them in the South, one of them in
Jonesboro, Arkansas. That was in my home State, and I knew some of the
people who were involved, who run the school and in the county and in
the city.
There was one in Pearl, Mississippi, and there was----
Mr. Wenner. One in Oregon.
The President. The one in Springfield, Oregon. What I thought there
was that--I thought a lot of things. I thought, number one, how did
those kids get all those guns, and how could they have had that kind of
arsenal without their parents knowing? And I thought, after I read a
little about it, how did they get so lost without anybody finding them
before they went over the edge?
We had a spate of--before all these killings associated with that
kind of darkness on the net, network----
Mr. Wenner. What do you mean, darkness on the net?
The President. Well, those kids were apparently into some sort of
a--weren't they into some sort of satanic-like thing?
Mr. Wenner. No, they had their websites and----
The President. Their websites, yes. There were, earlier, a number of
kids who killed themselves who were into talking to each other about
destruction, but they weren't killing other people. And I just kept--I
worry that--I worried then; I worry now about the people in our society,
particularly children, that just drift off, and no one knows, or people
feel helpless to do anything about it.
You know, I couldn't help thinking, wondering whether those kids
could have been saved if somebody got to them, and then whether all
those other children would still be alive.
Gun Safety Legislation
Mr. Wenner. It seemed shocking to me and a lot of other people that
after that there was no--we didn't get any new gun control legislation
after an event like that.
The President. It's going to be interesting to see what the voters
in Colorado do. They have a provision on the ballot now in Colorado to
close the gun show loophole. And it's a heavily Republican State, and I
think it's going to pass.
Mr. Wenner. Right.
The President. I think what happened is that--well, first of all,
you can't say nothing came out of it, because there was an organization
of young people in Colorado that then organized kids all over the
country for commonsense gun legislation. They got about 10,000 kids
involved. Now we have the Million Mom March, and they're very active.
But the truth is that when legislation time comes that a lot of the
people in Congress are
[[Page 2635]]
still frightened of the NRA, because even though there is broad public
support for these measures, they are still not primary voting issues for
a lot of the people who are for them. Whereas, the NRA can muster an
enormous percentage of the vote--maybe 15 percent, maybe even 20
sometimes--for whom that's a primary voting issue.
So if you've got an issue where you're ahead 60-30 but in your 60
it's a primary voting issue for 10 percent of the people, and in their
30 it's a primary voting issue for 20 percent of the people, the truth
is, you're a net loser by 10 percent. That's the way--that's what
happens in Congress and State legislatures. They're genuinely afraid.
Mr. Wenner. They know they could lose their seats.
The President. You see the tirade that Charlton Heston has carried on against Al Gore and me, before--
saying that I was glad some of these people were killed because it gave
me an excuse to take people's guns away. We never proposed anything that
would take anybody's guns away.
I saw a special--you may have seen it on television the other night
on ABC. Peter Jennings actually went out and
went to some of these gun shows. And he was talking to all these people
who were absolutely convinced that we wanted to take their guns away.
The NRA is great at raising money and building their organizational
power by terrifying people with inflammatory rhetoric. I guess that's
why, since LBJ passed the first law after Bobby Kennedy was killed, I
was the first President to take him on.
Mr. Wenner. You got Brady and assault through, but why didn't you
take the opportunity with this post-Columbine atmosphere? I mean, you
called the White House Conference on Violence immediately----
The President. Well, I did. I tried----
Mr. Wenner. But it focused on, like, violence in the media----
The President. Yes, but we also did lots and lots and lots of
events----
Mr. Wenner. ----and then you thought you could reason with the NRA.
The President. No, I didn't think I could reason with the NRA. I
thought Congress would be so shocked and the public was so galvanized
that we had a window of opportunity.
Mr. Wenner. Right. And what happened to that, is my question.
The President. The Republican leadership just delayed until the
fever went down. That's what happened. They knew that they couldn't
afford to have their Members voting wrong on closing the gun show
loophole or banning the importation of large capacity ammunition clips,
which allows people to get around the assault weapons ban.
Mr. Wenner. Were you powerless to do something about that?
The President. No, we had tons of events. And we got a vote--if
you'll remember, we finally got a vote in the Senate, where you can
bring things up, where we got a majority vote for it. Al Gore broke the tie--another reason he ought to be
President, he broke the tie. But we couldn't get a bill out of a
conference committee, that had it in there. If we could ever have gotten
a clean vote----
Mr. Wenner. You would have won that vote.
The President. Oh, absolutely.
Mr. Wenner. And beat that----
The President. Absolutely. We could win the vote today if you could
get a vote. But the leadership of the Republican Party, as long as
they're in the majority in both Houses, they can control things,
especially in the House. You can write the rules so that you can just
keep stuff from coming up.
Mr. Wenner. So despite your power, despite that event----
The President. Yes. And we had lots and lots and lots of events at
the White House, not just one. We had a ton of events. We brought people
in. We talked about it. We pushed and pushed. We finally got the vote in
the Senate. We got 50 votes. Then Al broke the tie. We got 51. And
there's no question that we could pass it.
But I'll remind you that one of reasons that Democrats are in the
minority today in the House is because of the Brady law and the assault
weapons ban. And interestingly enough, we didn't--there is--not a single
hunter has missed an hour; not a single sport shooter has missed an
event--an hour hunting--I should have finished the sentence--or a single
sport shooter has missed an event. But they acted like the end of the
world, but a half million felons, fugitives, and stalkers haven't gotten
handguns because of the Brady law.
The ironic thing is, there's no reason here--when we tried to pass
the Brady law they said,
[[Page 2636]]
``Well, this won't do any good because all these criminals get their
guns either one-on-one or at gun shows or urban flea markets.''
Mr. Wenner. Let me change the subject. This is absolutely amazing--
--
The President. I feel passionately about this, and I'm glad I took
them on. I'm just sorry I couldn't win more. There are a lot of good
people out there in America who work hard; their only recreation is
hunting and fishing; they don't follow politics all that closely; they
get these NRA mailings. They're good people, but they think they can
believe these folks. And they know that if they can stir them up, they
can raise more money and increase their membership. And they do it by
basically terrifying Congress.
Race Relations
Mr. Wenner. How would you characterize race relations today, as
compared to when you took office?
The President. I think they're considerably better.
Mr. Wenner. In what ways?
The President. Well, I think, first of all, the country is changing.
It's growing ever more diverse and, therefore, more and more people are
having more contacts across racial, ethnic, and religious lines. And I
think that, ultimately, the more people relate to each other, the more
they come to not just tolerate--I don't like the word ``tolerance'' in
this context because it implies that one group is superior, putting up
with an inferior group and tolerating them.
I think the more they come to genuinely appreciate each other's
heritage, find it interesting, and find a fundamental common humanity--I
think a lot of it is just systematic human contact. And beyond the human
contact, I think that the race initiative we started led to hundreds of
efforts all over the country to have honest conversations. You know,
sometimes people work around each other for years and they don't know
the first thing about one another. Forget about race. I mean, there are
people who probably work in the White House who see each other every day
that don't know the first thing about one another.
So I think that the one thing we did was to spark all these
conversations and also to highlight systematic efforts that were working
in local communities and try to get them replicated around the country
in communities, in workplaces, in schools. I think that there was a
genuine effort to deal with that.
I think the third thing is that we may have had some impact on it, I
and my administration, because we were so much more diverse than any
other administration in history. And I think people felt, who had never
felt that way before, that the White House was their house, too; the
Government was their Government, too. So I think the climate in the
country was positive for that.
Mr. Wenner. And you sense that change in climate from those factors
in----
The President. Absolutely. Look at the difference----
Mr. Wenner. Because this is one of your main priorities?
The President. Yes. And look at the difference in the rhetoric in
the Presidential campaign this year. All the rhetoric is about racial
inclusion. Now you know, we could argue about the policies. I think that
the Republican policies are still divisive, but the rhetoric is about
inclusion. And even they--a number of their members have taken a
different tack on immigration.
Advice for Youth
Mr. Wenner. Do you have any special message to young people, any
sort of valedictorian thoughts to the kids in school right now, as you
leave office?
The President. Yes, I do. First of all, I think that they should
realize that they're very fortunate to be living in this country at this
time, fortunate because of our economic prosperity, fortunate because of
our enormous diversity, and fortunate because of the permeation of
technology in our society, all of which enables us to relate to the rest
of the world and to one another in different and better ways.
Secondly, I think they should understand that our future success is
not guaranteed and depends upon their interest in public affairs, as
well as their private lives and their participation. One of the things
that's really concerned me about this election is all these articles
that say that young people think there is not much in it for them. I
think maybe that's because there has been a lot of debate about Social
Security and Medicare in the debate. They think that's an old folks'
issue.
But it's actually not just an old folks' issue, because when all of
us baby boomers retire--and I'm the oldest of the baby boomers; the
[[Page 2637]]
baby boomers are people that are between the ages now of 54 and 36. So
when we retire, unless everybody starts having babies at a much more
rapid rate, or we have hugely greater immigration, there will only be
two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. Now,
more of us are going to have to work into our later years. And more of
us have a choice now because--one of the good things that Congress did
unanimously was to lift the earnings limit on Social Security.
But anyway, even the Social Security issue is a youth issue. Why?
Because the baby boomers, most of them, I know, are obsessed with our
retirement not imposing an undue burden on our children and our
grandchildren. But there are all these other issues.
We have to build a clean energy future to avoid global warming. Two
stunning studies have come out in the last month, and because of the
Presidential campaign, they've not been much noticed. One analysis of a
polar icecap says that the 1990's were the warmest decade in a thousand
years. The other projecting study estimates that if we don't change our
greenhouse gas emissions, the climate could warm between 2.4 and 10
degrees over the next century; 2.4 is too much. Ten degrees would
literally flood a lot of Louisiana and Florida. This is a very serious
thing.
Then you've got this incredible scientific and technological
revolution that will lead to, among other things--if you just take the
human genome alone, a lot of the young people in America today, when
they have their children, they'll get a little gene card to take home
with them from the hospital, and their children will be born with a life
expectancy of 90 years, because they'll be able to avoid so many of the
illnesses and problems that they have a biological propensity to.
So this is a fascinating time to be alive, but it's not free of
challenges. So I would say to the young people, you ought to be grateful
you're alive at this time. You'll probably live in the most prosperous,
interesting time in human history, but there are a lot of big challenges
out there, and you have to be public citizens as well as private people.
Drugs and the Legal System
Mr. Wenner. Do you think that people should go to jail for
possessing or using or even selling small amounts of marijuana?
The President. I think, first of all----
Mr. Wenner. This is after--we're not publishing until after the
election.
The President. I think that most small amounts of marijuana have
been decriminalized in most places and should be. I think that what we
really need--one of the things that I ran out of time before I could do
is a reexamination of our entire policy on imprisonment.
Some people deliberately hurt other people. And if they get out of
prison--if they get in prison and they get out, they'll hurt them again.
And they ought to be in jail because they can't be trusted to be on the
streets. Some people do things that are so serious, they have to be put
in jail to discourage other people from doing similar things. But a lot
of people are in prison today because they, themselves, have drug
problems or alcohol problems. And too many of them are getting out--
particularly out of the State systems--without treatment, without
education, without skills, without serious effort at job placement.
Mr. Wenner. You're talking about any offender?
The President. Yes. But there are tons of people in prison who are
nonviolent offenders, who have drug-related charges that are directly
related to their own drug problems.
Mr. Wenner. Don't you think those people--should we be putting
nonviolent drug offenders in jail at all, or should we put them in
treatment programs that are more fitting and not----
The President. I think it depends on what they did. You know, I have
some experience with this. Let me just say----
Mr. Wenner. Well, I remember your experience is based on your
brother's----
The President. Well, let me just say about my brother--whom I love
and am immensely proud of, because he kicked a big cocaine habit--I
mean, his habit got up to 4 grams a day. He had a serious, serious
habit. He was lucky to live through that. But if he hadn't had the
constitution of an ox, he might not have.
I think if he hadn't gone to prison, actually been put away forcibly
somewhere, I think his problem was so serious, it is doubtful that he
would have come to grips with it. I mean, he was still denying that he
was addicted right up until the time that he was sentenced. So I'm not
so sure that incarceration is all bad, even for drug offenders,
depending on the facts. I think there are some----
[[Page 2638]]
Mr. Wenner. I meant----
The President. Let me finish. I think the sentences in many cases
are too long for non-violent offenders. I think the sentences are too
long, and the facilities are not structured to maximize success when the
people get out. Keep in mind, 90 percent of the people that are in the
penitentiary are going to get out. So society's real interest is seeing
that we maximize the chance that when they get out, that they can go
back to being productive citizens, that they'll get jobs, they'll pay
taxes, they'll be good fathers and mothers, that they'll do good things.
I think this whole thing needs to be re-examined. Even in the
Federal system, these sentencing guidelines----
Mr. Wenner. You've got mandatory minimums. Would you do away with
those?
The President. Well, most judges think we should. I certainly think
they should be reexamined--and the disparities are unconscionable
between crack and powdered cocaine. I tried to change the disparities,
and the Republican Congress was willing to narrow, but not eliminate,
them on the theory that people who use crack are more violent than
people who use cocaine. Well, what they really meant was that people who
use crack are more likely to be poor and, coincidentally, black or brown
and, therefore, not have money. Whereas, people who use cocaine were
more likely to be rich, pay for it, and therefore be peaceable.
But my own view is, if you do something violent, it's appropriate to
have an incarceration. But I think we need a serious re-examination in
the view toward what would make us a more peaceful, more productive
society. I think some of this, our imprisonment policies, are
counterproductive. And now, you know, you have in a lot of places where,
before the economy picked up, prison-building was a main source of
economic activity, and prison employment was one of the big areas of job
growth.
Mr. Wenner. Do you think people should lose access to college loans
because they've been convicted of smoking pot--which is now law?
The President. No. I think that, first of all----
Mr. Wenner. I mean, those are people that seem to need a loan the
most.
The President. First of all, I don't believe, by and large, in
permanent lifetime penalties. There is a bill in Congress today that has
bipartisan support that I was hoping would pass before I left office,
but I feel confident it will in the next year or 2--which would restore
voting rights to people after their full sentences have been discharged,
and they wouldn't have to apply for a Federal pardon to get it.
I changed the law in Arkansas. When I was attorney general I changed
the voting rights law in 1977, to restore voting rights to people when
they had discharged their sentence. And my State is one of the
relatively few States in the country where you do not have to get a
pardon from the Governor to register to vote again--or from the Federal
Government, for that matter.
Look, it depends on what your theory is. But I don't believe in
making people wear a chain for life. If they get a sentence from a jury,
if they serve it under the law, if they discharge their sentence, the
rest of us have an interest in a safe society, in a successful society,
and seeing that these folks go back to productive lives. You know,
keeping them with a scarlet letter on their forehead for the rest of
their lives and a chain around their neck is not very productive.
Mr. Wenner. Just to wrap this up, do you think that we need a major
rethink of what these drug sentencing laws are?
The President. Not just drugs. I think we need to look at who's in
prison, what are the facts----
Mr. Wenner. Well, they're filled with drug prisoners, these jails.
The President. ----most of them are related to drug or alcohol
abuse, but there are some non-violent offenders unrelated to drug or
alcohol abuse, which is not to say that I don't think white-collar
criminals should ever go to jail. But I think we need to examine--the
natural tendency of the American people, because most of us are law-
abiding, is to think when somebody does something bad, we ought to put
them in jail and throw the key away.
And what I think is, we need a discriminating view. There are some
people who should be put in jail and throw the key away, because they
can't help hurting other people. And I believe that one of the reasons
for the declining crime rate is that we have a higher percentage of the
people in jail who commit a lot of the crimes; a very small percentage
of the people are multiple, habitual criminals. And if you could get a
significant percentage of them in jail, the crime rate goes way down.
[[Page 2639]]
Now, on the other hand, there are a whole lot of other people in
jail who will never commit another crime, particularly if they have--if
they get free of drugs or free of their alcohol abuse and if they get
education and training and if somebody will give them a job and give
them another chance.
And what I think we need is a serious re-examination of what we've
done, because we've done a lot of good in identifying people who are
habitual criminals and keeping them in prison longer, and that's one of
the reasons that the crime rate has gone down, along with community
policing and improving the economy. But we also have just captured a
whole lot of people who are in jail, I think, longer than they need to
be in prison and then get out without adequate drug treatment, job
training, or job placement.
But the society is moving on this. I notice now back in Washington,
there is a really good program where--maybe two, that I know--where they
try to keep people who go to prison in touch with their children, and
they use the Internet so they can E-mail back and forth. They try to, in
other words, not cut people off so completely that they lose all hope
and all incentive of returning to normal life, and they try not to
damage these kids so badly, to reduce the chances that the kids will
follow in their parents' footsteps.
Mr. Wenner. Let me change the subject.
The President. I think we need a whole new look at that. The
sentencing guidelines, the disparities, are only a part of it. We have
to look at how long should certain people go to prison from the point of
view of what's good for society. We need to completely rethink it,
because criminal laws and sentencing tend to be passed sort of seriatim
in response to social problems at the moment.
Mr. Wenner. You, in general, restored judicial discretion and
replace the kind of panic legislation that was passed about crack or----
The President. The reasons for the sentencing guidelines in the
first place was to try to reduce the arbitrary harshness. It wasn't
because they wanted to make sure everybody went to jail for a while; it
was because the citizen guidelines tended to be abusive on the other end
of the spectrum.
I think we may need some sentencing guidelines, but I think the
impact, the practical impact of the ones we have has led to some people
going to prison for longer than they should and longer than they would
have under the old system. So there should be some more flexibility than
there is.
Military Action in the Balkans
Mr. Wenner. I'm going to change the subject. The Balkans was your
only major military engagement. What was it like to run a war night
after night? I mean, was it your mentality in feeling that as all of
that was going on as you go to sleep every night?
The President. Well, I went to sleep every night praying that it
would end that night and that Milosevic
would give in, praying that no other----
Mr. Wenner. You were literally praying?
The President. Yes. Praying that nobody would die, no American would
die, and hoping that no innocent civilians would die but knowing that
they would.
You know, it's easy for people to talk about war when it's
appropriate to use military force, but you have to know that once human
beings start using big, powerful weapons, there will be unintended
consequences. We wound up bombing the Chinese Embassy. Innocent people
died. We hit a schoolbus. And we have the most skilled Air Force and the
most sophisticated weapons in all human history.
In the Gulf war, which is normally thought of as a 100-hour war and
a model of sort of technical proficiency, we had 4\1/2\ months to settle
in and prepare there, and still a lot of the American casualties were
from friendly fire. The same thing happened even in the small engagement
in Grenada--and President Reagan. These things happen. There are--once
you start killing people, there will be unintended consequences.
Mr. Wenner. How do you get yourself personally comfortable--I mean,
how do you get yourself, as a person and as a politician, ready to make
that decision with a level of comfort you're now going to go ahead and
do this?
The President. You have to be convinced that the consequences of
inaction would be more damaging to more people and to your country. And
in the case of Kosovo, I didn't think it was a close case. They had
already killed several thousand Kosovars, and they were running a
million of them out of their homes, 800,000. It was a clean case of
ethnic cleansing.
And I thought the United States and our European Allies had to stand
up against it. We
[[Page 2640]]
couldn't let it happen in the heart of Europe. If we did that, we would
lose the ability to stop it anywhere else.
Mr. Wenner. And wouldn't it be on your conscience in some way, for
having failed to stop it?
The President. Absolutely. Look, it took us--one of the things that
just tore at me--and in the end it didn't require much military
engagement, although it required some--was how long it took me to build
a consensus. It took me 2 years to build a consensus among our Allies
for military action in Bosnia. And you know, what happened there was,
after the slaughter at Srebrenica we finally got--you know, everybody
said, ``Okay, let's go''--we did a few air strikes, and all of a sudden
we were at Dayton and the peace talks. And for all the raggedness of it,
the Bosnian peace has held, and it's better now because we turned back
the tide of ethnic cleansing.
But over 200,000 people died there. And I just knew, you know, there
is no point in letting it happen again in Kosovo.
Rwanda
Mr. Wenner. How do you feel, then, about Rwanda? I mean, clearly
it's a difference. You didn't have the allies; you didn't have
intelligence, all kinds of things. Is there anything that we could have
done to prevent it? And whether there was or not, it happened while you
were President. Do you feel any responsibility in that, personally?
The President. I feel terrible about it. One of the reasons that I
went to Tanzania to be with Mandela and try
to talk to the Burundians into the peace agreement--because before my
time, over 200,000 people were killed in Burundi. Same deal--the Hutus
and the Tutsis, same tribes, fighting the same battles.
In Rwanda--the thing that was shocking about Rwanda was that it
happened so fast, and it happened with almost no guns. The idea that
700,000 people could be killed in 100 days, mostly with machetes, is
hard to believe. It was an alien territory; we weren't familiar. After
that, we began working very earnestly in Africa to train troops to be
able to go in and prevent such things. We worked very hard with
something called the Africa Crisis Response Initiative.
And when I was in Senegal, I actually went out of Dakar to another
city to watch a training exercise--at least a parade exercise--and talk
to the troops from Senegal that our American soldiers were working with.
We are now working with the Ghanaian forces and Nigerian forces to give
them the training and the capacity to prevent the resumption of the
slaughter of Sierra Leone.
So I think that--I hope the United States will be much, much more
involved in Africa from now on, and everywhere. In economic development,
we passed the Africa trade bill this year; in fighting AIDS, TB, malaria
in Africa; in debt relief, we passed a big debt relief legislation this
year; and in helping them to develop the mechanisms to do this.
The African countries have leaders who are willing to go in and take
their responsibility in these areas if we'll give them the logistical
and other support necessary to do it, if they're trained to do it.
That's what happened in East Timor, where we didn't have to put troops
on the ground, but we sent 500 people over there and provided vital
airlift and logistical and other support, so that the Australians and
New Zealanders and the other troops that came in could bring an end to
the slaughter there.
So I think that there is--there is sort of a sliding scale here. In
Europe it had to be done by NATO, and the scale of it and the power of
the Serbian Government was such that if we hadn't been directly involved
with our NATO Allies, we never could have turned it back and
Milosevic never would have fallen. If we
hadn't stopped him in Bosnia and Kosovo and kept the sanctions on, the
people would never have had the chance to vote him out.
So I feel good about that. I wish we had been--Rwanda, if we had
done all the things we've done since Rwanda and Africa--training the
troops, supporting them, working with them--what I think would have
happened is, the African troops would have moved in; they would have
stopped it; and we could have given them the logistical support they
needed to stop it.
Now, there are other problems that may develop----
Mr. Wenner. Another reason to vote for Gore.
The President. Another huge reason to vote for Gore, because, you know, Governor Bush has said that he doesn't think that's the business of the
American military. We're only supposed to fight and win wars and let
everybody else do this. He kept talking about Kosovo, I noticed, in a
way as if we were the only forces in Kosovo.
[[Page 2641]]
We were only 15 percent of the soldiers in Kosovo.
Presidential Politics
Mr. Wenner. Let me change the subject, back to Washington. Why do
you think you were such a lightning rod for partisanship and bitterness
and so much hatred during your term now?
The President. I think there were a lot of reasons. I think mostly
it's just because I won. The Republicans really didn't--they believe the
only reason they lost in '76 to Jimmy Carter was because of Watergate.
They believe that, from the time Mr. Nixon won in '68, they had found a
fool-proof formula to hold the White House forever, until some third
party came on. That's what they believe.
Mr. Wenner. Did you ever hear anybody articulate that, the
Republicans----
The President. Well, in so many words. I had a very candid
relationship with a lot of those guys. They would tell me what was going
on. I think they really believed that America saw Republicans as the
guarantor of the country's security and values and prudence in financial
matters, and that they could always turn Democrats into cardboard
cutouts of what they really were; they could sort of caricature them as
almost un-American; and that basically the Congress might be Democratic
most of the time because the Congress would give things to the American
people. But the Republicans embodied the values, the strength, the
heritage of the country, and they could always sort of do, as I said
about Dukakis, reverse-plastic-surgery any Democrat.
So I came along, and I had ideas on crime and welfare and economic
management and foreign policy that were difficult for them to
characterize in that way. And we won. And they were really mad. I think
I was the first President in a long time that never got a day's
honeymoon. I mean, they started on me the next day. I think that was one
thing.
I think, secondly, I was the first baby boomer President, not a
perfect person, never planned to be--I mean, never claimed to be--and
had opposed the Vietnam war. So I think that made them doubly angry
because they thought I was a cultural alien, and I made it anyway.
Mr. Wenner. Do you think that the cultural----
The President. ----Southern Baptist, because the dominant culture of
the Republican Party--President Reagan put a nicer image on it. But the
dominant culture were basically white southern Protestant men who led
the surge of the new Republican Party, first under President Nixon and
the silent majority and, you know, blue-collar people, and then it came
to an apotheosis under President Reagan.
So I think that, you know, they didn't like losing the White House,
and they didn't like me, and they didn't like what they thought I
represented. And that all happened at the time you had this huge growth
in conservative talk shows and these--you know, sort of associated think
tanks and groups and networks that grew up in Washington from the time
of Nixon through the time of Bush.
And I think they had sort of a permanent alternative Government set
up by that time. And they went to war the first day of my Presidency.
Mr. Wenner. Because you were the most threatening politically, and
they despised what you represented culturally, age-wise and----
The President. ----think they honestly disagreed with me on a lot of
the issues as well, but a lot of it was, they were mad they weren't in,
which is one of the reasons they're working so hard now. And one of the
big challenges that we face in the closing days of this election is to
motivate the people that agree with us to the level that they're
motivated. Just because they've been out a long time, they want back in
really badly.
Early Democratic Policy Differences
Mr. Wenner. Were you surprised about the difficulties you had in
your own party with Sam Nunn on the gays thing and Moynihan on health
care and Kerrey on the economic plan?
The President. Not particularly, because--I'll come back to the gays
in the military.
Mr. Wenner. Don't, because we've run through that. But just insofar
as Nunn?
The President. No. And the answer to that is, no, because a lot of
the Democrats who were culturally conservative and pro-military thought
that gays in the military coming up so early was inconsistent with the
whole New Democratic approach we were taking. Plus which, they thought I
was wrong. But as I explained to you, I think when we talked last, I
didn't bring it up first. Bob Dole did.
Now, on the other issues, the fundamental problems there was that
there were no easy
[[Page 2642]]
answers. I mean, Bob Kerrey comes from
Nebraska. He and Jim Exon were Democrats, but
Nebraska is one of the most Republican States in the country, and I
think, you know, he thought we should have maybe cut spending a little
more or raised taxes a little less, or cut taxes a little less on lower
income working people so we wouldn't have to raise it as much, you know.
And I think--and we'd been through that tough Presidential campaign.
Mr. Wenner. These guys were like, you know, the party elders.
The President. Well, Moynihan
believed----
Mr. Wenner. Generally, they should like say, ``Well, he's our new
President.'' That's----
The President. But I didn't take offense to that. Moynihan believed, first of all, with some
justification, that he knew more about most areas of social policy than
anybody else did. I think he thought we were making a political mistake
not to do welfare reform first, which turned out to be right. We did
make a political mistake not to do welfare reform first.
And secondly, I think he felt
that the system in Washington could not absorb in a 2-year period the
economic plan which he strongly supported. He was terrific. The NAFTA
trade agreement, which he strongly supported, which was controversial
within our party, and then this major health care thing. He really
didn't believe and he's told me that, you know, he said, you know, ``We
just don't have time to do these.'' He said, ``The system cannot absorb
this much change in this short a time.''
And you know, that was a mistake I made. Hillary gets a bum rap for that. That was basically my fault,
because I knew that basically there's only two ways to get to universal
coverage. You either have to have a taxpayer subsidy, which is what
we've done now with the Children's Health Insurance Program, because now
we've got the number of uninsured people going down in America for the
first time in a dozen years, primarily because in the Balanced Budget
Act, we insisted--the Democrats did--on getting the Children's Health
Insurance Program, which is the biggest expansion of Government-financed
health care since Medicaid. You either have to do it that way or you
have to have an employer mandate where the employers have to provide the
health insurance, and then you exempt smaller businesses and subsidize
that somewhat.
Mr. Wenner. You----
The President. I didn't take offense at it. You know, they thought I
was being bullheaded, and I think, in retrospect, they were probably
right.
Newt Gingrich
Mr. Wenner. What was your relationship with Newt like?
The President. I had an unusual relationship with him. First of
all----
Mr. Wenner. Was it----
The President. It depended on which Newt showed up. But I thought
the good Newt, I found engaging, intelligent, and that we were
surprisingly in agreement in the way we viewed the world.
Mr. Wenner. ----similar----
The President. Partly. But you know, Newt supported me in virtually
all of my foreign policy initiatives. And after he got his Congress, he
realized that a hundred of them had never had a passport.
I remember him calling me once, wanting me to get them to go on
foreign missions. He said, ``If you ask them, then they can't be
attacked back home for boondoggle trips.'' So we actually had a very
cordial relationship.
He was also very candid with me about his political objectives. And
he, in turn, from time to time, would get in trouble with the rightwing
of his own caucus because they said I could talk him into too much. We
had a pretty good relationship.
You know, on the other hand, as I told you, when he did things like
blaming every bad thing that happened in America on Democrats in the
1960's and all that, I thought it was highly destructive.
Mr. Wenner. How did he make you feel, personally?
The President. At some point, probably around 1996, I got to the
point where I no longer had personal feelings about those things. But
you know, things like the Whitewater investigation and the Travel Office
investigation--he was smart. He knew there was nothing in that stuff. It
was all politics to him. It was about power.
But he really did believe that the object of politics was to destroy
your opponent. And you know, he ran Jim Wright out of the Congress on
account of that. That's what he thought he was doing. And he had an
enormous amount of success in the beginning, and he won the
[[Page 2643]]
Congress basically by having that take-no-prisoners, be-against-
everything approach.
Mr. Wenner. Didn't he tell you once on the phone that he was
planning to lead a revolution against you?
The President. Well, he thought he was leading a revolution, and I
was in the way. And I think he really believed, after '94----
Mr. Wenner. What did you think when he says this to you? ``I'm out
there to destroy--I'm going to take you on. You're through.''
The President. I thought he was a worthy adversary, and I thought I
would defeat him, because I thought the American people would stick with
me. But I thought he was a very worthy adversary.
I think he thought that he could create, for the rest of my
Presidency, a sort of an almost a parliamentary system where he would be
the prime minister and make the policy, and I'd be in charge of foreign
policy, and he'd help me.
Mr. Wenner. I mean, historically, the Newt versus Bill, I was just
trying to think back, there hasn't been as powerful--I mean, powerful
and as antagonistic a Speaker to the President, not in modern times. You
had an actual enemy. You had somebody actually out there daily fighting
you, not a--not a Lyndon, not a McCormack. Everybody went with Reagan
and gave him what he wanted.
The President. That's what they decided to do. And you know, now I
have a Speaker in Hastert I can really
work with. We've got a lot done. But he still has--the dominant power in
the caucus is Tom DeLay and Dick Armey. And if they had their druthers, you know, they'd
still follow that approach. But the balance of authority is so--power is
so close in the House that more often than not, we work things out.
But in the Senate, you've got the same thing with Lott. You know,
Lott I have a very cordial personal relationship
with. I have a lot in common with Lott in terms of our background and
childhood and, you know, that whole thing. His daddy was a laboring
person. He could have well been a Democrat.
Mr. Wenner. How did you develop your strategy in sort of dealing
with Newt and outflanking him? Just wait him out? Give him enough rope?
The President. Well, that's part of it. You know, I felt after they
won that when the people actually saw the fine print on their contract,
they would think that there was a contract on America instead of a
contract with America. And then I felt that I had to oppose them when I
thought they were wrong. But I couldn't let them push me back into the
old confrontation where they could say, ``Clinton's an old Democrat.
He's defending everything, even the indefensible, so you may think we're
going too far, but America has to change,'' because this is a country in
constant change. So that was--for example, instead of just fighting them
on the budget, I offered my own balanced budget.
Mr. Wenner. I mean, everybody--I think Democrats really wanted to
attack him back as quickly as possible, and you took a much more
conciliatory----
The President. That's because I felt they had to have a chance to
run their--and then when we got to the Government shutdown, I wasn't
just against what they were doing; I had an alternative. See, I
believe--and I think it's more important, I think it's easier for
Republicans to be against everything than Democrats because people view
us as the party of affirmative Government. And since I believed in
balancing the budget, I just didn't want to do it the way they wanted
to.
Mr. Wenner. What's your bottom line on Newt, historically? I mean,
what's your--if you were an historian, what would you say about
Gingrich?
The President. That he was immensely successful in, first of all,
consolidating the power of the Republican Party and its rightwing and
then in winning the Congress, winning the historic struggle for Congress
in '94 by opposing me right down the line. And in '94, the people--the
economy was getting better, but people didn't feel it yet. The budget we
passed did not impose great tax burdens on ordinary Americans, but they
didn't know it yet. And the crime bill we passed was going to help bring
the crime rate down without interfering with people's gun rights, but
they didn't know it yet.
So you had the best of all times to run through a gaping hole. And
then I had made the mistake of trying to do both, trying to do the
economic plan and NAFTA, which dispirited some of our base supporters.
And then I tried to do health care under circumstances that were
literally impossible. You could not get a universal coverage plan passed
through Congress.
So I made a lot of errors, and he ran through them, and he therefore
changed the Congress. Then I think people will say that we had one
[[Page 2644]]
of these historic battles that periodically happens in America about the
role of the National Government and, indeed, what the meaning of the
Nation is.
And I think he thought he could actually carry out the revolution
that President Reagan talked about, you know, drastically shrinking the
Federal Government, drastically limiting its ability to act in the
social sphere and moving it to the right.
And to me, we had a series of battles that were really the latest
incarnation of this age-old battle of what does it mean to be an
American, what is the idea of America, what is the purpose of a nation?
And there was a Government shutdown. There was an impeachment. There was
my veto of the Newt tax bill after Newt was gone. All these were ongoing
battles.
The battle over--the same thing is now happening, shaping up over
the courts. The most important issue in this election may well be what
happens to the courts. Because there is now already--we are one vote
away from having enough votes that would repeal Roe v.Wade.
But there is this other issue in the courts which I think is quite
profound, which is, there are five votes right now to restrict the
ability of Congress to require the States to participate in protecting
the American people in a lot of fundamental ways. So I think this is an
ongoing battle.
But it's the same battle that we had between George Washington and
John Adams and Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall on the one side and
Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Payne, and a lot of other people on the other
in the beginning; the same battle Abraham Lincoln had around the time of
the Civil War. Could the States secede? Did the Federal Government have
the power to enslave them? The same battle we had at the dawn of the
industrial revolution when Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson
asserted the authority of the Nation to proscribe basic conditions in
the workplace and protection. And it was the same battle that Franklin
Roosevelt fought. That was the fourth time it was fought. Now we're in
the fifth battle over how to define America. And in the first three
skirmishes, we won. But I see that as a big issue in this election, a
huge issue.
Impeachment
Mr. Wenner. Let's talk about impeachment a little. You're going to--
in the history books, it's going to say, of course, that you were the
second President ever to be impeached. How does that make you feel? Do
you feel that that will cloud your real accomplishments?
The President. Well, that's for the historians to determine. The
history books will also record, I think, that both impeachments were
wrong, and that's when they failed. And I'm just grateful that, unlike
Andrew Johnson, I was less embittered by it and I had more support from
the public and in the Congress, so I was able to resume my duties and
actually get a lot done for the American people in the aftermath.
Mr. Wenner. Was there ever a point where you wanted to give up or it
just became too hard?
The President. Never.
Mr. Wenner. Did you ever get so angry during it that you think it
clouded your judgment?
The President. I got angry, but I always was alone or with friends
who would deflate me, so I don't think it ever clouded my judgment on
any official thing I took.
You know, I realized that when it was all over, I would have the
responsibility to work with the Republicans, as well as the Democrats.
One of the things I had to learn--as I said, it took me almost my whole
first term to learn it--is that at some point Presidents are not
permitted to have personal feelings. When you manifest your anger in
public, it should be on behalf of the American people and the values
that they believe and the things they do.
You just can't--a lot of this stuff you can't take personally--and
especially when I realized that for the people that were directing it,
it was just politics. You know, it was about power and politics. So I
was largely able to purge myself of it. And I had very strong personal
feelings about it, but I tried never to talk about it. I tried to get up
every day and just do my job and let others defend me publicly and go on
with the work of the country, because----
Mr. Wenner. ----in private?
The President. Yes, because Presidents will always be under siege in
some way or another. And if you don't want the job and the attendant
heat, you shouldn't ask for it.
Mr. Wenner. Does it make you uncomfortable to talk about this
episode now?
The President. I just think the less I say about it right now, the
better. I think the more time passes, the more people will see what
happens,
[[Page 2645]]
and the more it will come out. There have been some pretty good books
written about it.
Mr. Wenner. What do you think of Ken Starr now?
The President. I think he did what he was
hired to do.
Mr. Wenner. You told me you never really met him and had no ill
feelings.
The President. I met him. You know, I met him
once when he interviewed me. He was hired to keep the impeachment
thing--I mean, to keep the inquiry going past the '96 election and to do
whatever damage he could. That's why he was put in, and he did what they
asked him to do.
Mr. Wenner. What's your take on Henry Hyde, who was supposedly ``Mr.
Reasonable,'' and then he seemed to defy the will of the people after
the '98 elections, where he kind of got repudiated?
The President. Well, he did what he was
hired to do, too. I mean, the rightwing was in control of the Congress,
and they thought they had paid in '98, and they thought they would never
have to pay again. They thought it was a free shot to put a hit on me,
and so they did. I don't think it's complicated.
Mr. Wenner. Once the elections were done, I remember seeing you a
week before, and clearly Democrats were going to take the House in a way
they had never taken it before in an off election. And it was a
referendum on this issue, and then they went ahead--him and the
Republican leadership went ahead despite that. What does that tell you
about them?
The President. That they wanted to--they stayed with their
rightwing, and they thought they would pay no price in 2000, because
they thought, whatever happened, it would all be over by now. And they
thought they could put a black mark on me in history, and that was
really important to them. They were really angry. They got beat. They
were just angry, and they thought they had paid once, and they wouldn't
have to pay this time, because the American people would move on to
other things as they always do. And so they did it.
Mr. Wenner. It's not an issue now in this election, really.
The President. It is in three or four House seats, but not many.
Mr. Wenner. It's an issue to me.
The President. But it shouldn't be. I've tried--the only way it
should be an issue in the election is that it indicates how important it
is, if they should maintain their majority, they have somebody in the
White House that can restrain them. Because it's just an example of
other things they were doing to the environmental laws of the country,
to the education laws, to the health care system. That's the only way it
should be an issue. It's over. The American people shouldn't be expected
to dwell on it. They shouldn't have to deal with it.
Mr. Wenner. Who do you think really came through for you and got up
and defended you?
The President. Oh, tons of people. The House judiciary committee
Democrats were really good. There were 800 people, including a lot of
Republicans who didn't even like me, who filed testimony talking about
how inappropriate it was. Then there was that bipartisan panel of career
prosecutors who said that no one would bring any criminal charges on
this. So a lot of people who--came forward who had no particular reason
to do it but who cared about their country and were offended by what was
going on.
Mr. Wenner. Do you think in some way this is sort of a referendum on
sort of the nature of morality or the character of America in some way?
The President. Not really. No, I think people strongly disagree with
what I did. I did, too. I think the--I don't think the--I think that
they just were able to discriminate between a bad personal mistake and
the justification for a Constitutional crisis. I think--I don't think
that it--I think it said more about their ability to discriminate
between two different kinds of problems than any changed moral
standards.
Mr. Wenner. In the sixties we always talked--still they talk about
karma, you know, your karma? Did you ever look at it in terms of what's
in my karma that I got this shit-hammer dropped on me?
The President. No. Like I said--no, I don't. If I hadn't made a
personal mistake, they wouldn't have the pretext to do what they did,
even though what they did was wrong. So no, I don't.
Mr. Wenner. Do you think it benefited us, that process, that we
learned from all that, from the impeachment process?
The President. Well, the one thing it did was it pointed out all the
other excesses. You know that there was a bogus Whitewater
investigation. It was totally bogus and wasted money and----
[[Page 2646]]
Mr. Wenner. What was that?
The President. The Whitewater investigation. That civil lawsuit
against me was bogus. Even the judge, who was famous for disliking me
personally, threw it out as having no merit. So I think that what it did
was, at least for the time being, it took a lot of the venom out of our
public life. You know, even as hard as George Bush and Al Gore are hitting each
other now in this election, they are by and large hitting at each other
over the issues. I mean, Bush has got some ad up now questioning Gore's
integrity, which is amazing that Bush would question Gore's integrity,
but anyway. But he knows that there's a certain number of voters who
vote for Republicans because they're convinced that they're morally
superior to Democrats, not withstanding the fact that we're awash in
evidence now that they're not. And so he's doing that, but there has
been very little of that, even from him. They're basically--the level of
venom is lower than it was. And maybe I absorbed enough for several
years.
And if so, then that alone might make it worth doing. Because I
think it's just crazy for America with all these fabulous opportunities
and some pretty stiff challenges out there to waste our elections and
our public officials' time with things that we know are bogus or trivial
and cost the taxpayers a fortune, for no other purpose than for one side
to pursue political advantage over another. There will always be some of
that, but my instinct is that in the next 4 years, we'll have a lot less
of it.
Relations With the Media
Mr. Wenner. The press--as President, you have a relationship with
the press that is unique to anybody in the world. You, as an individual,
there's certainly more scrutiny or criticism or attention, more
everything. What's your take on the press in America?
The President. Well, I think that, first of all, it's very difficult
to generalize. I think that on the balance, it's a great advantage for
the President to have a bully pulpit that can reach everyone in America
and everyone in the world instantaneously. And any criticisms that a
President has about negative press or incessant carping or whatever--
you've got to temper that with the fact that they make it possible for
you to do your job in a communications age.
And they work--especially the working press, I have an enormous
amount of respect for them. I mean these people that are on this
airplane, because I've worked hard and I keep long hours, it's a hard
job for them, because they have to--they go around in the vans, not in
Air Force One or the helicopters. They have a lot of hard work to do,
and I think by and large, most of them do it as well as they can and as
honestly as they can. I have an enormous amount of respect for them.
Now, there's another part of the press that are kind of part of
almost a celebrity political press that are--that go all the way from
the columnists to the people that are on all these talk shows all the
time. And they have--in order for them to be successful, their comments
have to have edge. They tend to be more negative and more dogmatic in
their attempts to be--and sometimes there is more heat than light in a
lot of what's said in a lot of those forums--formats. But that's part of
the new age we're living in.
And also they're sort of on the cutting edge between the serious
press, the tabloid press, and pure political advocacy and entertainment.
You've got all these segments now that are kind of blurred together,
compounded by a 24-hour news cycle, and the fact that there are umpty-
dump channels people can watch, some of which are news channels that
know they have to go after narrowly segmented markets, and they're
targeting certain audiences.
So it's a very different press environment, and if you took it all
seriously, it would run you nuts. But you can't--once you realize kind
of what the environment is, you just learn to deal with it. I think the
important thing is to--for Presidents, especially--to try to hear the
criticism, because it's not always wrong. Sometimes it's right. I find
it easier, really, when it comes from thoughtful columnists who are
really trying to make a serious contribution to the national debate.
Even in some other forums it's important.
Mr. Wenner. Which columnists or reporters do you think have been
particularly good or particularly smart in their coverage of you in the
last 8 years?
The President. Well, I think just in terms of columnists, I think
Tom Friedman is the best foreign policy writer
we have today, by a long stretch. I think he understands the world we're
living in and the one toward which we're moving. Therefore, whether he's
criticizing me or analyzing an issue or whatever he's doing, he's
[[Page 2647]]
trying to do it from a completely honest point of view of trying to say,
here's where the world is; here's where we're going.
I think Ron Brownstein is one of the best
political columnists in America today, one of the two or three best.
He's truly extraordinary. And you know, he understands this whole New
Democrat movement that I have been a part of. He understood the ideas
that underlay the '92 campaign and the whole Democratic Leadership
Council effort, everything we're trying to do. And he made it his
business to study that. I think he's very good.
I think E.J. Dionne is good. I regret that
his other responsibilities at the Post don't give him time to write more
columns, because I think he's very good.
Mr. Wenner. [Inaudible]--towards the Times for their role in
Whitewater?
The President. No, I think that--it was sort of like this Wen Ho
Lee deal in a way. I mean, the same guy got a
story, and it was kind of overwritten, and dire things were predicted.
But I think whatever I feel about that, it has to be tempered by the
fact that the Times has a serious conscience when it comes to the
national issues. I don't think the--I think they had a--they really have
tried consistently to think--on the public issues, I think they really
have done an excellent job of analysis and are trying to come out in the
right place in the right way. So whatever I feel about that is tempered
by that.
Mr. Wenner. Do you think institutionally it's working right, the
press as a whole, the major newspapers, the networks, and so forth?
The President. I think they're doing the best they can in a very new
and different environment. I have a lot of sympathy with them.
Mr. Wenner. So you don't have resentment towards them? Like, a lot
of Presidents just hated--once done, they just hated them.
The President. No. Absolutely not. You know, how can Presidents hate
the press? I mean, they give you--you can gripe all you want about all
the negative coverage you get on the evening news or on these talk shows
or being blasted in the newspaper or having to get on something where
they're dead wrong--like on Whitewater, whatever it is--dead wrong, but
still, every day they're right in all kinds of other things about all
the things that affect the American people and their lives. And anytime
you want a microphone to have your say, you've got it. So I think to be
obsessively negative is a mistake.
The White House
Mr. Wenner. What creature comforts are you going to miss the most
about leaving the White House, not living there?
The President. The movie theater, the swimming pool, Camp David.
Everybody says I'll miss Air Force One the most once I have to return to
commercial travel. But what I will miss the most is not the creature
comforts; it's the honor of living in the White House, which I have
loved. I've loved living there, because I love my country; I love the
history of my country. I know--I was a pretty good American historian
before I got there, and I know a lot more than I did then, and I've read
a lot about Presidents that most people don't know much about, including
me before I got there.
And even more than that, I'll miss the work. It's the job I'll miss
the most. I love the work. I actually have loved doing this job.
Mr. Wenner. Do you just get off every single day when you get up,
just--I am so lucky?
The President. Even the worst day. Even in the worst times--the
whole impeachment thing--I just thank God every day I can go to work. I
love the job. I've always loved it.
Mr. Wenner. Looking at the other side of the coin, what--is there
anything that seems attractive to you about not living there anymore?
The President. Well, I look forward to kind of having--being a
citizen again. It will be the first time in 20 years--you know, I've
been--I was Governor for 12 years, and 10 years, the last 10 years in a
row--so it will be the first time in 18 years that I've really had a
private home that was my primary residence, and where I'll get up every
day, feeling a responsibility to be of public service, but knowing that
I'm basically in control of my life again. And it will be an interesting
challenge for me. Eighteen years is a long time to be a chief executive,
living in public housing, with every day scripted out--you know, hours
and hours a day, particularly if you work like I do.
It's a challenge, and I'm going to be interested to see whether I
can meet it and what it means, you know, to go into this next chapter of
my life. I'm actually excited about it.
[[Page 2648]]
Advice for the Next President
Mr. Wenner. What's the one thing about being--what's the one thing
that would surprise either Bush or Gore about being President that they
just can't know now? What was the greatest surprise to you? What advice
would you give the next President?
The President. I think they will be surprised how many different
things happen at once. Now, Al won't be as
surprised by that, because he's been there 8 years. It's another good
argument for voting for him, because he's experienced and he makes good
decisions. He'll be a very good President if he wins. He'll be quite
good. He makes good decisions, and he's had experience. And the
environment, I think, will be less hostile for either one of them than
it was for me, and they will have more of an opportunity to craft
cooperative solutions, because almost under any conceivable scenario,
the Congress will be even more closely divided than it is now.
You know, the Democrats are going to pick up some seats in the
Senate. They might even be in control. But if they are, they will just
have a one-seat majority here, too, and I think the Democrats will win
the House. But if they do, they won't have any bigger majority than the
Republicans do now, maybe a little more, but not much. So you will have
a very closely divided Government which will require them to all work
together.
So I think they may have a less hostile environment than I did, and
I hope they do, but I think they'll still be surprised at how many
different things they'll have crash in on them at once.
Mr. Wenner. What would you tell them to do? You say, look, here's
what you've got to do as the next President. Here's what I would like
you to do.
The President. Well, first of all, I think after the election, they
ought to get more rest than I did. You know, I didn't really take a
vacation. I think they ought to clear their heads. I would advise them
to work as hard as they can to get a good Cabinet and a good staff, and
then really emphasize teamwork, and when you come to the tough
decisions, do what you think is right.
A lot of these decisions, you know, that were unpopular that I
made--Bosnia, Haiti, debt relief in Mexico, taking on the NRA, doing the
debt thing--reducing the deficit, I mean, right now, it's like smooth
sailing. But it's just not in the nature of human existence to be free
of difficulty. And I think when you come down to those tough decisions,
you just have to do what you think is right, tell the American people
why you did it, and hope they'll go along with you.
2000 Presidential Election
Mr. Wenner. So this comes out after the election. So do you want
to--give me a prediction.
The President. I've always believed Gore will win, and I still do.
And I think if he doesn't, the only reason that I think that he might
not win is if they vote--a higher percentage of the people that want
Bush to be President vote than the percentage
of people that want Gore to be President.
But I believe if we get an even turnout, I think in the closing days of
this election, people will begin to think about whether they really want
to risk this prosperity by adopting an economic plan that has a huge tax
cut, a huge Social Security privatization program, and a bunch of
spending that will put us back into deficit.
I think that people have to think about whether they want to risk
having nobody to restrain a Republican Congress if they should stay in
the majority, and I think they will think about what will happen to the
courts.
And so I think that those things will be enough to put Al Gore over, and I think he'll be elected.
Mr. Wenner. What do you think the margin is going to be--the popular
vote?
The President. I have no idea. I think it will be--it will
definitely be close in the popular vote. Whether it's close in the
electoral vote depends on what happens--there's a dozen States it could
go either way. So either one of--there could be a sizable electoral
victory; it could be----
Mr. Wenner. Predict Florida for me. Predict Missouri, Pennsylvania,
Michigan.
The President. I think Gore will win
Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. I've always thought Gore would win
Florida. We've worked like crazy there for 8 years, and we've done a lot
for Florida and a lot with Florida, and Joe Lieberman has helped a lot in Florida. So I think Gore will win
Florida. I think he will win Pennsylvania. I think he will win Michigan,
and I think he will win Missouri if Mrs.
[[Page 2649]]
Carnahan is the choice of the Missouri people
for Senator.
Mr. Wenner. And Washington State?
The President. I think we'll win in Washington.
Mr. Wenner. I don't want to take any of your money on that. Did you
see the cover on Al that--the Rolling Stone that's gotten so much talk?
The President. Yes.
Mr. Wenner. It took hours to do that interview. I just used--eat up
hours of his time. I appreciate your time very much.
The President. Thanks.
Note: The interview was taped at 2:45 p.m. aboard Air Force One en route
to Los Angeles, CA, and the transcript was released by the Office of the
Press Secretary on December 7. In his remarks, the President referred to
actor Charlton Heston, president, National Rifle Association; ABC News
anchor Peter Jennings; former President Slobodan Milosevic of the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro); former President
Nelson Mandela of South Africa; Republican Presidential candidate Gov.
George W. Bush; former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr; Thomas L.
Friedman, columnists, New York Times; Ron Brownstein, columnist, Los
Angeles Times; E.J. Dionne, columnist, Washington Post; former Los
Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee; and Jean Carnahan,
widow of the late Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri. A tape was not
available for verification of the content of this interview.