[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[December 6, 2000]
[Pages 2671-2678]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Interview With Forrest Sawyer for the 
Discovery Channel
December 6, 2000

    Mr. Sawyer. Good evening, Mr. President.
    The President. Good evening.
    Mr. Sawyer. Thank you for talking to us.
    The President. Glad to do it.

Mars Exploration

    Mr. Sawyer. Let us talk about Mars. It is much in the news right 
now, some new discoveries on Mars that suggest there is at least a real 
possibility that this was once, some good long time ago, a land of 
lakes. That puts it on the radar screen.
    The President. Yes. All along, our people have thought there was 
some chance, based on other research that had been done, that there 
might have been some kind of life on Mars, at least for the last couple 
of years we've had some evidence of it.
    Now, these new pictures that we've seen indicate that there might 
have been water there, quite near the surface, and much more recently 
than had previously been thought. So I think it's important that we 
continue our exploration, that we continue to take photographs, and that 
we keep working until we can set a vehicle down and get some things off 
the surface of Mars and bring it back home so we can take a look at it.
    We had a couple of difficult missions there, but we learned some 
things from them. NASA was very forthright, and they came up with a new 
plan, and I think we should keep going at it.
    Mr. Sawyer. The question is how you should keep going at it. As you 
mentioned, there had been a couple of losses, and that's been a hard 
public relations blow to get by. This new information at least raises 
what's going on in Mars, to the public's attention, a little higher. Do 
you continue more aggressively than you had before?
    The President. Well, I think the NASA people will be the best judge 
of that, but they are and they should be committed to Mars exploration. 
They should continue to do more, I think, with the photographs. We 
should get as much information as we can from observation, in the 
greatest detail we can. And I think they should keep working on trying 
to get a vehicle to land on Mars that will be able to not only give us 
more immediate photographs but actually, physically get materials off 
the surface of Mars that we could then return to Earth. I think they 
should keep working on it.

Priorities for the Space Program

    Mr. Sawyer. Look out a little further with me. You recall President 
Kennedy saying there should be a concerted effort to put a man on the 
Moon. Should there be a concerted effort to go that much greater 
distance and put humans--men and/or women--on Mars?
    The President. I think it's just a question of when, not if. I think 
that now that we are committed to space exploration in a continuing way, 
now that we've got the space station up and the people there are 
working, and they're there 3 years ahead of the original schedule--I'm 
very proud of them--I think that what we should do from now on is to 
figure out how much money we can devote to this and what our most 
immediate priorities are.
    The space station, I think, is going to prove to be an immense 
benefit to the American people and, indeed, to all the people of the 
world, because of the research that will go on there and what we'll find 
out. And so I think it's just a question of kind of sorting out the 
priorities, and the people who will come here after me in the White 
House and the space people and, of course, the interested Members of 
Congress will have to make those judgments.

Possibility of Life in Space

    Mr. Sawyer. Do you think there is life out there?
    The President. I don't know. But I think the--what we know from Mars 
is that the conditions of life may well have--for some sort of 
biological life--may well have obtained on Mars at some point in the 
past.

[[Page 2672]]

    Now, we know also that our solar system is just a very tiny part of 
this universe, and that there are literally billions of other bodies out 
there. And we're only now really learning about how many they are, where 
they are, how far away they are. And we can't know for sure what the 
conditions are on those bodies. We just can't know yet, but I think that 
we will continue to learn. And I hope we will continue to learn.

International Space Station

    Mr. Sawyer. The International Space Station is not without 
controversy, and you have pushed hard for it. It is expensive. It is 
challenging. It is, in good measure, risky. Why do this project in this 
way?
    The President. Well, first of all, it is expensive. It will cost us 
about $40 billion over about 10 years. That includes the cost to put it 
up, our part of the cost, and then to maintain our part of it over 10 or 
15 years. But I think it's important for several reasons.
    First of all, it is a global consortium. There are 16 nations 
involved in it, each of them making some special contributions. The 
Russians, for example have--because they had the Mir station and we 
conducted some joint missions to Mir, I think nine of them over the last 
2 years and 3 months--have made it possible for us to expand the size of 
the station and the number of people we can have there.
    I think that it's important, because we can do a lot of basic 
research there in biology. We can see without the pull of gravity what 
happens with tissues, with protein growth. We've got a whole lot of 
things that we might be able to find out there that will help us in the 
biological sciences.
    Secondly, I think we'll learn a lot about material science without 
gravity, how can you put different kinds of metals together and things 
like that. And the revolution in material science here on Earth is a 
very important part of America's productivity growth. It's just like our 
revolutions in energy that are going on now, our revolution in 
information technology. Advances we've made in material sciences are 
very important to our long-term productivity and our ability to live in 
harmony with the environment here.
    Then there are a lot of basic physics things we're going to find out 
there. So I think the whole range of scientific experiments that we'll 
discover will be enormous.
    Now, there are a lot of corollary benefits, too. When countries are 
working together, they're less likely to be fighting. And we've been 
able to keep literally hundreds of Russian scientists and engineers 
occupied who otherwise would have been targets of rogue states to help 
them produce nuclear or biological or chemical weapons or missiles or do 
some other mischief-making thing. So I think that's been a positive side 
effect.
    But I believe in the potential of the space station, and I think 
that over the years we will come almost to take for granted a 
breathtaking array of discoveries, what they'll be beaming back to us.
    Mr. Sawyer. The critics are saying, Mr. President, we've been doing 
work in weightless conditions for 20 years. This is not new. And when 
you take 16 nations, each one of them contributing a piece, this is 
enormously complicated; it makes it much more expensive; and frankly, 
for the astronauts, it can make it more risky.
    The President. First of all, we're ahead of schedule. We're doing 
well up there, and we have never been able to keep people up, 
essentially, continuously. There were limits to our previous manned 
missions in outer space and the period of time in which weightlessness 
was available to them.
    You're going to have now, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, 52 weeks a 
year, for more than a decade, to see this work done and develop. And I 
believe in its potential. The scientists who believe in it sold me a 
long time ago, and I've never wavered in my belief that it's a good 
investment, and it'll pay back many times over what we're doing.
    Mr. Sawyer. I think you said $40 billion for the United States part.
    The President. But over 15 years, total.
    Mr. Sawyer. Correct. And what the critics say, not the right 
calculations. In fact, all you have to do is look at the Russians right 
now, and they're not contributing what they were expected to contribute 
at all. And that could happen with the other nations, as well.
    The President. It could, but I don't expect it will. What I think 
about the Russians is that as their economy comes back--and it's 
important to realize they went through a terrible, terrible economic 
crisis at the same time oil was less than half, almost a third of the 
price it is now--so I think as their economy comes back

[[Page 2673]]

and they become more financially stable, I don't have any doubt that 
they'll pay their part.
    Mr. Sawyer. Do you have any question in your mind about sharing 
technology with a nation that is certainly more politically unstable 
than we would like--and that includes sharing missile technology?
    The President. Well, we try to have some restraints on that. But I 
think, on balance, the technology we're sharing up there, the benefits 
of it, the benefits of cooperation, the sense of the--what we get by 
working together and how much greater it is than what we get from being 
in competition with one another, I think makes it a good gamble. It's a 
good risk.

Future of the Space Program

    Mr. Sawyer. Look down the road. What do you see the space program 
transforming to?
    The President. Well, I think we will focus--I think we've already 
talked about it. I think there will be more and more focus on how we can 
do specific things with enormous potential in the space station. And I 
think there will be a lot of interest in Mars, in terms of exploration. 
And then with our powerful telescopes, I think there will be more and 
more emphasis on what's out there beyond the solar system.
    Mr. Sawyer. And to those who say, AIDS, famine, the countless 
problems that array themselves before us right here on Earth, those 
billions of dollars are so precious to those problems--you say?
    The President. I say, first, we should address those things. But the 
United States has tripled the money we're putting into international 
AIDS program. We pioneered for the last 2 years the largest 
international debt relief initiative in history. It's one of the finest 
achievements of this Congress that they embraced in a bipartisan fashion 
the legislation that I presented them on debt relief. We should continue 
to move ahead with those things.
    But you all must take some of your wealth to invest toward tomorrow, 
the long-term tomorrow. And that's what our investment in space is. It's 
the investment in the long term. We have to know more about the 
universe, and we have to know more about what space conditions, 
particularly the space station, can do to help us with our environment 
here at home, to help us deal with diseases here at home, to help us 
grow our economy here at home.
    I believe this is an investment that has a return. And I feel the 
same way about other scientific investments. We've increased investment 
in basic science. You can argue that, well, it has a long-term payout; 
maybe we should spend something else on that. I just don't agree with 
that. I think you have to--societies have to take some of their treasure 
and invest it toward the long run. And that's how I view this.

Wilderness and Wildlife Preservation

    Mr. Sawyer. Let's come back down to home, then. Earlier this week 
you set aside thousands of square miles of coral reefs off Hawaii, to be 
protected in perpetuity. And your administration is not yet over. Now, 
if my calculations are right, since 1996, you have 13 times established 
national wildlife protection areas. And you're considering some more?
    The President. Yes, we have set aside more land, through 
legislation--we've established three national parks in California, the 
Mojave Desert Park. We saved Yellowstone from gold mining and saved a 
lot of the old-growth forests, the redwood forest in California, and 
we're recovering the Florida Everglades over a multi-year period. We've 
basically protected more land in this administration in the United 
States than any administration since Theodore Roosevelt, about a hundred 
years ago.
    So I think that's important. And the coral reefs are important 
because what's happening to the oceans as a result of global warming and 
local environmental degradation is deeply troubling, long-term, for 
everybody in the United States and everybody on the planet. Twenty-five 
percent of the coral reefs have been lost--are now dead. Over the next 
several decades, we'll lose another 25 percent of them within 20 to 25 
years unless we do something about it. So that's why we moved there.
    We did not end all fishing. We did not end all recreation. Indeed, 
we're preserving for the natives, the Hawaiian natives who live in that 
area and for those who come as tourists--leave live, vibrant coral 
reefs. But we had to protect them. And others will have to do the same 
thing.
    We've got big challenges to the Great Barrier Reefs in Australia, 
big challenges to the magnificent reefs off the coast of Belize, and 
these are very important sources of biodiversity. So I'm glad we did it.

[[Page 2674]]

    I'm looking at--I've asked the Secretary of the Interior, Bruce 
Babbitt, to follow the same process we 
followed the whole time we've been here, to look at other potential 
areas for protection, make some recommendations to me, and we'll take 
one more look before I go to see if there's anything else I should do.
    Mr. Sawyer. One of those areas he has just visited is a wide swath 
of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona----
    The President. Yes.
    Mr. Sawyer. ----which happens to be near a military bombing range.
    The President. Yes.
    Mr. Sawyer. Will you set that aside for protection?
    The President. Well, I'm looking for a recommendation from 
Bruce on that, but I think there is a lot of 
support out there for that, across the board, members of both political 
parties and all the different cultures that make up Arizona. And we're 
trying to work through that, and there are some very compelling 
environmental arguments there. And when he gives me his recommendation, 
I'll make a decision. But we're both very interested in that, and of 
course, he's from Arizona, so he knows a lot about it.
    Mr. Sawyer. The military wants its flying rights to continue, and 
you would approve that?
    The President. We're working on that. I haven't made a decision yet. 
We've got to work through all that.
    Mr. Sawyer. You know that a lot of folks are talking about the 
Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.
    The President. Yes.
    Mr. Sawyer. Some suggest that you could, by executive fiat, 
establish it as a protected site from oil drilling. Can that be done?
    The President. It is. As a national wildlife refuge right now, oil 
drilling is not legal there. There are some people who believe if I were 
to make it a national monument, as I have created national monuments, 
for example, and a million acres around the Grand Canyon to protect the 
watershed area there, that it would have extra protection.
    Now, as a legal matter, I don't believe that's right. That is, there 
is nothing to prevent Congress from specifically authorizing drilling 
either in a national wildlife refuge or in an arctic national monument. 
That is, I don't think--sometimes I don't think people understand that 
in order to have drilling there, I believe legislation is required, 
regardless.
    So there may be some other reason to establish some part of the 
National Wildlife Refuge as a national monument, because it would have 
other beneficial impacts during the time a monument existed. And of 
course, it depends in part on what happens in the ultimate resolution of 
this election, because one of the candidates, Vice President Gore, is against drilling; the other, Governor 
Bush, is for drilling. But he would still have to get some legislative acquiescence or 
approval of drilling even if it's a national wildlife refuge, just like 
it is now.
    Mr. Sawyer. Will you consider making the Alaskan National Wildlife 
Refuge a national monument?
    The President. I have not made a decision on that, but I will just 
say I do not believe that the drilling issue should be the determinative 
factor, based on the research I've seen so far. I don't think it has--in 
other words, I don't think that it would make it any harder to pass an 
act of Congress. And I think that as the land is now, it would still 
require an act of Congress.
    So I'm not sure that that should be the determinative factor. There 
may be other reasons to do it, and as I said, I'm going to talk to 
Secretary Babbitt, and we'll look at what the 
arguments are.
    Mr. Sawyer. May I ask how many other areas you are considering?
    The President. I think there are three or four or five that we've 
been asked to consider by people around America or things that we've 
been interested in. We always like to get out and talk to the local 
people in the communities and see what the arguments are, pro and con.
    Mr. Sawyer. Which one stands highest on your radar screen?
    The President. I don't want to talk about it until I can give the 
recommendation. No point in stirring everybody up unless we're going to 
do it.

Technology in the Future

    Mr. Sawyer. High tech underpins all of this. And we've been going 
through a bit of a resettling period here. It's been a tough, tough 
time.
    The President. Yes.
    Mr. Sawyer. Look out. How do you see that happening?

[[Page 2675]]

    The President. Well, I think the future is still quite bright. I 
know that a lot of the dot-com companies have been up and down, just 
like biotech companies go up and down. But that shouldn't be surprising, 
because a lot of these companies don't make money in themselves, that 
they really have value, inherent value for what they can do and how they 
might someday add to some other enterprise. So that shouldn't surprise 
people.
    But I think that the continued explosion in information technology 
and in biotechnology is inevitable. I do believe that the vagaries in 
the market should strengthen the resolve of Members in Congress of both 
parties who care about science and technology to keep up the basic 
research budget.
    For example, one of the things I have fought very hard for is a lot 
of investment into nanotechnology, or super, super microtechnology, 
because, among other things, it will enable us to have computer capacity 
the size of a supercomputer some day on something the size of a 
teardrop.
    I have a piece of nanotechnology in my office. It's a little outline 
of me playing the saxophone that has almost 300,000 elements in it, and 
it's very tiny. So I think that--what does this mean to real people? It 
means that if you take nanotechnology and you merge within it the 
sequencing of the human genome and the ability to identify defective or 
troubled genes, what you're going to have before long, I think, is the 
ability to identify cancers when they're just several cells in the 
making, which--and if you could do that and you develop the right kind 
of preventive screening, you can make virtually 100 percent of cancers 
100 percent curable.
    Mr. Sawyer. For any of these things to be accomplished, Government 
has to function and function well.
    The President. Yes.

Resolution of the 2000 Presidential Election

    Mr. Sawyer. And we are living in an extraordinary time. As you look 
forward, whoever becomes President, is that President running the risk 
of not being considered legitimately the President of the United States?
    The President. Well, I think--first of all, it's a difficult 
question to answer, because it depends on how this plays out. If the 
Vice President is elected, there will 
always be some Republicans who don't believe he should have been. If 
Governor Bush is elected, there will always 
be some Democrats who believe that Al Gore not only won the popular vote 
in the country but also had more people in Florida who wanted to vote 
for him, and perhaps more who did, which is--one good argument for 
counting all the so-called undercounted ballots and all the punchcard 
counties is trying to help resolve that.
    But once we actually get a determinative decision, that if it is in 
accord with our Constitution--and the Constitution, you know, our 
Founders foresaw close elections and tough fights, and they have 
prescribed all kinds of ways to deal with it. Back in 1800, we had 36 
ballots in the House of Representatives before we resolved it. And it 
produced Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Jefferson turned out to be 
successful because he was mindful of how divided the country was. He 
served two terms. He retired in honor. A member of his party succeeded 
him, served two terms; a member of his party succeeded him and served 
two more terms.
    So then, in 1876--nobody ever really quite felt good about it--the 
President who won didn't run for reelection, and then everything was 
sort of up in the air for a while. So I think that you cannot predict 
how this is going to come out. I think it depends a lot on whether the 
constitutional system is followed, the will of the people is determined, 
and then it depends on how people behave once they get in office.

Prospects for the 107th Congress

    Mr. Sawyer. I think what a lot of people are worrying is that it's 
very difficult to determine what the will of the people is when the 
country appears to be divided right down the middle and, in fact, 
Congress is divided right down the middle.
    The President. That's right.
    Mr. Sawyer. And we have the Democrats on one side saying, ``What we 
really want when we have a 50-50 split in a Senate is cochairmen, and we 
want an equal split of everything.'' And the Republicans are saying, 
``Not on your life.'' Now, that looks to me to be a recipe for gridlock.
    The President. Well, it depends. You know, I'm leaving the budget in 
pretty good shape, and they're going to ride up the surplus a little 
bit, although they should be cautious about that,

[[Page 2676]]

because, again, these surplus numbers are 10-year numbers, and I always 
believe in taking them with a grain of salt.
    Our success here these last 8 years has been based in no small 
measure on being conservative on economic forecasts and trying to make 
sure we had the numbers right. And I personally believe that America is 
best served by continuing to pay the debt down. I know it's not as 
appealing as having a bigger tax cut now or having the money go to--all 
to some spending program or whatever. But I think that if you keep 
paying that debt down, you're going to keep interest rates lower than 
they otherwise would be, and that's money in everybody's pocket--
business loans, car loans, home mortgages, college loans, credit card 
payments--and it keeps the economy stronger.
    But still, even if they do that, they'll still have money for a tax 
cut; they'll have money to invest in education; they'll have 
circumstances that will argue for cooperation rather than conflict after 
the election.
    Mr. Sawyer. Your worst critics admire your political acumen. When 
you look at what's happening in Congress right now and the pushing and 
shoving that's going on, where is the resolution? How do you resolve the 
Democrats saying, ``I want cochairmen'' and the Republicans saying, 
``It's not going to happen''?
    The President. Well, of course, if all the Republicans vote 
together, they can stop it, because they'll have--if the Vice President is elected President, then Senator 
Lieberman leaves the Senate and his 
Republican Governor appoints a Republican Senator, and they have a 51-49 
lead. And then it will be a more normal circumstance. If Governor 
Bush is elected, and then all the Republicans 
vote with him, with Vice President Cheney, they 
could vote 51-50 for whatever system they wanted.
    But since in the Senate it only takes 41 votes to stop anything 
except the budget, that's a difficult sell. Now, Senator McCain said today that he thought there ought to be sharing. 
And I think--all I can tell you is, I think the country would like it. 
The country would like to see that one House of the Congress shared the 
resources, even-Steven, and shared the responsibilities. Somebody could 
chair a hearing today; somebody else could chair it tomorrow, because as 
a practical matter, to pass any of these bills, they're going to have to 
have broad bipartisan cooperation anyway.
    And I think that it--we know that there is kind of a dynamic center 
in America that has the support of two-thirds of the American people, 
and if they could reach out for that in the Senate, it might be quite 
exciting.
    Now, it's also going to be interesting in the House. The House is 
more closely divided. Now, there will only be, depending on--I think 
there are one or two recounts still going on in the House, so there will 
be, in effect, a three- or four-vote difference in the House--margin. 
And they need to decide whether that's going to change their rules any, 
because individual House Members or even our whole caucus in the 
minority, no matter how narrow the minority, very often cannot affect a 
rule. So in the House, debate tends to be cut off much more. So they're 
going to have to think, should they change the procedures in the House 
as well, at least--not necessarily to have cochairmen, because they do 
have a narrow majority in the Republican Party, but at least to have the 
opportunity for more options to be considered.
    It's going to be quite challenging. But I wouldn't assume it's going 
to be bad, because they do have more money. They have a strong economy, 
and if they keep paying the debt down, it will keep going for some time 
to come, I think.

Election Reform

    Mr. Sawyer. Let's look at what we've learned from this extraordinary 
period. Should we now consider voting reform, looking at these machines, 
looking at the vote count?
    The President. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. For one thing, even--I 
was impressed--I didn't know very much--I'm probably like most 
Americans; I didn't know very much about some of this beforehand. When I 
voted absentee, most of the time I was here in the White House, from 
Arkansas, instead of a punchcard system, we had a system with an arrow 
by every choice, and you had to take a pencil and fill in the arrow. 
There was a gap in the arrow, and you had to fill it in. So it was much 
less subject to misinterpretation. I didn't know what a butterfly ballot 
was until this happened.
    And I think--the question I think is, can we find a way to both 
simplify the ballot but also feel good about the return? For example, in 
northern California this year, in a county there was an experimental 
computerized voting system, where you punched on a screen the person

[[Page 2677]]

you were for, and it would say, ``You have voted for Ralph Nader. If 
that's correct and that's what you meant to do, punch 1,'' and you 
punched 1, so it had a guarantee. None of these 3,400 predominantly 
Jewish voters that now think they voted for Buchanan--or did vote for 
Buchanan, who apparently meant to vote for Vice President Gore--you couldn't have that happen there.
    The only question I would have with that is, every computer from 
time to time goes down, so you wouldn't have any error in the voting 
there like you did with the 19,500 double-punched ballots in Palm Beach 
County or the 10,000 African-Americans who apparently were told they had 
to vote on two pages, and then they wind up voting for some of these 
minor Presidential party candidates they never even heard of and didn't 
know what they were doing, so that's 10,000 more votes out the window 
that were lost. You could probably fix that with electronic voting.
    Then the question would be, what are your assurances that the count 
won't be lost if the computer goes down? In other words, there may not 
be any perfect system, but it seems to me that--I think particularly 
troubling to people is the evidence that's come out that these punchcard 
systems where there was most of the trouble had a plastic coating 
underneath, rather than the original sort of spongelike design which 
would have made it much easier to pierce all the way through--that they 
tended to be in the counties that had lower per capita income voters, 
and therefore, the people that maybe needed to vote the most, that we've 
always tried to bring into the political system, lost their votes 
because of a flaw in the system. That's tragic, and we can't let it 
happen again.
    It's interesting. But the only thing that bothers me about the 
northern California system is--I think you can probably design it, but 
to have the confidence in the voters--because every system has to be 
subject to a recount at some point if it's a close enough election. Even 
a computerized system has got to be very hard--like in Canada. Of 
course, they only have 30 million people in Canada, but in Canada, 
interestingly enough, they all still vote with paper ballots, and they 
have like 100,000 counters, so they count all the ballots within an hour 
of the polling close, even though they're all paper ballots.
    Chretien was just here. He played golf 
with me over the weekend. And I said, ``Don't you all vote with paper 
ballots?'' He said, ``Yes.'' And I said, ``How did you count them all?'' 
He said, ``We have 100,000 counters.'' He says, ``Every community has 
equal--all the parties are represented, and then there's sort of a 
judicial overseer type. And we all sit there and look; everybody can 
watch everybody else; and you just count the ballots right away.'' It's 
interesting.
    Mr. Sawyer. You are an advocate of high-tech. You are an advocate of 
applying science to technology and applying that to our lives. Should 
that not also be applied to the way that we choose our representatives?
    The President. Yes, I think anything that increases the likelihood 
that a legal voter will have his or her vote counted in the appropriate 
way should be done. Anything that increases the likelihood that every 
legal voter will actually fully understand the ballot and not make the 
wrong choice by accident should be done. And as I said, this new system 
that we see, that was used in northern California, which is rather like 
the systems that some companies have--if you order things over the 
Internet now, some of them have not one but two different checks, where 
you have to say not once, but twice: Yes, this is what I ordered; this 
is what it cost; this is what I know. If you can simplify the voting 
that way, that would be good.
    The only question I have is, what do you do if the computer goes 
down, and how do you know for sure that no votes are lost, so that there 
has to be a recount, you know that the tabulation is accurate, because 
that's also very important? You're never going to have a time in America 
where we're never evenly divided over something. So anyone who runs for 
office ought to have access to some sort of legitimate recount if it's 
very tight or if it's a dead-even vote. But I think that, surely, a lot 
can be done to make sure that no one ever goes into the polling place in 
a national election with ballots as confusing and as subject to error as 
we've seen here. I think that the system has got to be cleaned up.
    You just think how you'd feel if you were one of the people who had 
lost his or her vote. We have a lot of friends with kinfolks down in 
Florida who think they may be some of the people whose votes were 
wrongly cast. And they

[[Page 2678]]

are sick--sick, sick. So you don't want that to ever happen again.

Science and Technology Accomplishments

    Mr. Sawyer. Mr. President, we're talking about science and 
technology. And your administration is coming to a close. In years to 
come, looking back, how would you like the administration to be 
remembered in this area?
    The President. First, I would like to be remembered for a serious 
commitment to pushing America forward and keeping us on the forefront of 
science and technology in two or three areas. We reorganized and 
revitalized the space program, kept it alive, and kept it moving. We had 
a very serious attempt to deal with the climate change in the 
development of alternative energy sources and conservation. We finished 
the sequencing of the human genome and began to work on its practical 
implications. We worked on--that's what the whole nanotechnology issue 
and all that. And fourthly, that we worked on information technology and 
tried to make sure it was democratic--small ``d''--with the 
Telecommunications Act, the E-rate, hooking the schools up to the 
Internet, so that--and finally, that we dealt with the scientific and 
technological implications of national security--biological warfare, 
chemical warfare, cyberterrorism--that we prepared America for those 
things.
    I think that will be our legacy in this area.
    Mr. Sawyer. Mr. President, thank you for talking to us.
    The President. Thank you.

Note: The interview was taped at 3:30 p.m. in the Cabinet Room at the 
White House for later broadcast, and the transcript was released by the 
Office of the Press Secretary on December 11. In his remarks, the 
President referred to Prime Minister Jean Chretien of Canada; and 
Republican Presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush and Vice 
Presidential candidate Dick Cheney. A tape was not available for 
verification of the content of this interview.