[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 15 (Monday, April 18, 1994)]
[Pages 794-804]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session With the American Society of 
Newspaper Editors

April 13, 1994

    The President. Thank you very much, Bill, for the introduction. And 
thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for the invitation to come by again.
    I can't help noting some satisfaction that the president of this 
organization is not only the editor of the Oregonian, which endorsed my 
candidacy in 1992, the first time it ever endorsed a Democrat for 
President--I hope they haven't had second thoughts--[laughter]--he also 
spent the first 8 years of his

[[Page 795]]

life in Arkansas, which didn't seem to do him too much harm.
    I am delighted to be here. I want to make a few remarks and then 
open the floor to questions. We probably have some things in common. 
Both of us battle from time to time with reporters. [Laughter] And I 
recently did some light editing on my mother's autobiography, so I 
appreciate the difficulty of editing things. It was a little easier for 
me; my mother, when she got very ill, I said, ``What are we going to do 
if you don't finish your book?'' She said, ``You finish it, don't touch 
anything I said about you.'' [Laughter] ``Check the facts. Don't let me 
be too hard on the living.'' So it was easier for me than it was for 
you.
    But let me say I've been thinking about it a lot lately because it 
gave me a chance to relive a period in American history that spanned my 
mother's life as well as my own, starting in the Depression. In many 
ways, like everybody's family, her life was unique. But it was in many 
ways like that of so many people who grew up in the Depression and World 
War II and exemplified and made possible the rise of the American middle 
class. Most of those people were obsessed with working hard and taking 
care of their families and building a better future for their children, 
and they never doubted they could do it. There's a reason, I think, we 
ought to think about that today, and that is that there are a lot of 
people who doubt that we can continue to do it. Our mission at this 
moment in history, I believe, is to ensure the American dream for the 
next generation, to bring the American people together, to move our 
country forward, to make sure the middle class grows and survives well 
into the 21st century.
    My mother's generation knew what we are learning, and that is that 
the preservation of these kinds of dreams is not as simple as just 
talking about it. She had to leave home after she was widowed to further 
her education so she could make a good living. And my earliest memory as 
a child is of my grandmother taking me to see my mother in New Orleans 
when she was in school and then seeing her cry when I left the train 
station as a little child.
    But our generation is full of parental stories about the sacrifices 
that were made for us so that we could do better. And all of us in this 
room have been exceedingly fortunate in that regard. The generation that 
our parents were a part of built the houses, the schools, educated the 
children that built the explosion of American energy and industry after 
the Second World War.
    Underneath the magnificent material mileposts, which left us with 
only 6 percent of the world's population then and 40 percent of the 
world's economic output, was a set of values. They believed we had to 
work hard, that we had a duty to do right by our community and our 
neighbors, that we were obliged to take responsibility for ourselves and 
our families. Without those values, the successes would not have 
occurred, and nothing else passed on to us would amount to much for we 
would quickly squander whatever material benefits we had.
    Most of my mother's generation, at least that I knew, would never 
have put it this way, but they lived by a creed that I was taught by a 
professor of Western civilization at Georgetown, who told me that the 
great secret of Western civilization in general and the United States of 
America specifically was that always, at every moment in time, a 
majority of us had believed that the future could be better than the 
present and that each of us had a personal, moral responsibility to make 
it so. In pursuit of that dream, the Americans in this century have made 
a solemn bargain with their Government: Government should work to help 
those who help themselves.
    Forty-nine years ago today, Harry Truman spent his first full day as 
President of the United States. No one ever did more to honor that 
solemn bargain. After World War II, our country chose the course of 
confidence, not cynicism, building a stable world economy in which we 
could flourish with the Marshall Plan and the General Agreement on 
Tariffs and Trade, which we have just concluded of the Uruguay round.
    We lifted a majority of our people into the middle class not by 
giving them something for nothing but by giving them the opportunity to 
work hard and succeed. In just 2 months, we'll celebrate the 50th 
anniversary of the G.I. bill of rights, which helped more than 20 
million American veterans to get an

[[Page 796]]

education and millions more to build businesses and homes.
    These great achievements did not belong to any particular party. 
They were American decisions. They were not the reflection of a country 
pulled to the right or to the left but a country always pushing forward. 
They reflected the vision and the values of leaders of both parties. 
After Truman, Eisenhower continued the tradition by building the 
Interstate Highway System and by investing in the space program and 
science and technology and in education. The tradition continued in the 
next administrations, all working toward greater prosperity but rooted 
in certain values that enabled us to go forward.
    But the seeds of our new difficulties, that we face in such stark 
reality today, were sown beginning three decades ago in changes in our 
social fabric and two decades ago in changes in our general economic 
condition. We have seen the weakening slowly of the institutions and the 
values which built the middle class and the economic underpinnings which 
made it possible, in theory at least, for all Americans to achieve it.
    Three decades ago, in 1960, births outside of marriage were 5.3 
percent of total children born. In 1980, the rate had risen to 18.4 
percent; in 1990, to 28 percent. There are many of those who say, 
``Well, Mr. President, you're overstating the case because the birth 
rate among married couples has dropped so much.'' It may be. All I know 
is that those kids are our future, and the trends are inescapable and 
disturbing. And the rates for teen mothers in poverty and for all 
mothers without a high school education of out-of-wedlock birth rates 
are far, far higher than the 28 percent that I just said.
    The fear of violent crime has made neighbors seem like strangers. 
And as Senator Pat Moynihan of New York has said, Americans have begun 
to ``define deviancy down.'' We're simply getting used to things that we 
never would have considered acceptable just a few years ago.
    In the post-war economy, a high school diploma meant security. By 
the time of the 1990 census, it was clear that a high school diploma 
meant you'd probably be in a job where your income would not even keep 
up with inflation. Most middle class families have to work longer hours 
to stay even. The average working family in 1992 was spending more hours 
on the job than it did in 1969. And in too many neighborhoods, the 
vacuum that has been created by the absence of work and community and 
family has been filled by crime and violence and drugs.
    In the 1980's, the world continued to change dramatically 
economically. And I would argue that, in general, our collective 
response to it was wrong, even though many of our best companies made 
dramatic productivity gains which are benefiting us today. We reduced 
taxes for some Americans, mostly the wealthy Americans, and we increased 
the deficit. But increases in Social Security taxes and State and local 
taxes put further strains on middle class incomes. From 1981 to 1993, 
our Nation's debt quadrupled, while job creation and the general living 
standard of the wage-earning middle class stagnated or declined.
    So we have these problems that, let's face it, brought me to the 
Presidency in 1992, the abjective conditions that Americans were groping 
to come to grips with. You can be proud that so many newspapers have 
done so much to not only call attention to these problems to make them 
really real in the lives of people and to cry out for new thinking.
    In its remarkable series, ``America: What Went Wrong?'', the 
Philadelphia Inquirer showed how the National Government's policies had 
undermined the middle class already under stress by a global economy. Of 
all the facts cited by Donald Bartlett and James Steele, one stood out 
to me. In 1952 it took the average worker a day of work to pay the 
closing costs on a home in the Philadelphia suburbs. In the 1990's, it 
took 18 weeks.
    The Chicago Tribune on its front page underscored the epidemic of 
violence killing so many of our children and robbing so many others of 
their childhood. The Los Angeles Times explored the loss of a sense of 
community that prompted the riots there 2 years ago. Recently when I was 
in Detroit for the jobs conference, the papers there talked about the 
changing job market and the State that was the automobile capital of the 
world, the good and the bad dislocations that have occurred and what was 
working.

[[Page 797]]

    Recently, in the Pulitzer Prizes, which were awarded yesterday, I 
noted that Bill Raspberry got a well-deserved Pulitzer for his 
commentaries on social and political subjects. And Isabel Wilkerson's 
report on children growing up in the inner city in New York--the New 
York Times won.
    Our administration owes a special debt to Eileen Welsome's series in 
the Albuquerque Tribune exposing secret governmental radiation 
experiments conducted decades ago which have consequences today. And I'm 
proud of the openness that the Secretary of Energy, Hazel O'Leary, has 
brought to the Energy Department in dealing with this.
    There are lots of other things I could mention: The Akron Beacon 
Journal's examination of race relations there; the Minneapolis Star 
Tribune's editorial board hosted me the other day, and I had one of the 
most searching and rewarding discussions of the health care conditions 
in our country that I have had in a long time.
    Every day, you are challenging us to think and to care through your 
newspapers. My job is to act. As I travel the country, I see that that 
is basically what people want us to do. Oh, they want us to be careful. 
They know we live in a cynical age, and they're skeptical that the 
Government would even mess up a one-car parade. But they want us to act.
    The future of our American leadership depends upon what we do at 
home, but also what we do abroad. Last year among the most important 
developments were the trade agreements, the NAFTA agreement, the GATT 
agreement, the historic meeting we had with the leaders of the Asian-
Pacific communities. But we have a lot of problems, too. By attempting 
to come to grips with them in a world increasingly disorderly, we hope 
to preserve an environment in which America can grow and Americans can 
flourish, whether it is in addressing North Korea's nuclear program, 
which protects not only our troops on the Peninsula but ultimately the 
interests of all Americans, or supporting reforms in the Soviet Union, 
which helps to destroy missiles once aimed at us and to create new 
market opportunities for the future, or by harnessing NATO's power and 
the service of diplomacy in troubled Bosnia, which will help to prevent 
a wider war and contain a flood of refugees. Our efforts to stop the 
shelling of Sarajevo and the attacks on Gorazde, to bring the Serbs back 
to the negotiating table, to build on the agreement made by the Croats 
and the Bosnian Muslims, enhanced both Europe's security and our own.
    Here at home, for the past 15 months, we have focused on starting 
the engines of upward mobility to try to make sure we can remember the 
values of the so-called forgotten middle class with an economic plan 
that is fair, with cuts that are real, investments that are smart, a 
declining deficit, and growing jobs.
    Last year, our budget cut 340 programs, including most major 
entitlements. This year, the budget calls for cutting 379 programs, 
including the outright elimination of a hundred of them. As we cut 
unneeded programs, we're investing more in education, in medical 
research, in the technologies of tomorrow that create jobs now, whether 
in defense conversion or in environmental sciences. We're fighting for a 
revitalized Clean Water Act, a safe drinking water act, a reformed 
Superfund program. All of them will clean the environment, but they will 
also create the jobs of tomorrow, everybody from engineers to 
pipefitters.
    As April 15th approaches, people will see that I did tell the truth 
last year about our economic program: 1.2 percent of Americans will pay 
more in income taxes, including me and some others in this room. All 
that money will go to reduce the deficit. One-sixth of America's workers 
will get an income tax cut this year because they are working hard and 
raising children but hovering around the poverty line. And we are 
attempting to reward work over welfare and to prove that people even in 
this tough, competitive environment can be successful workers and 
successful parents. That's why the earned-income tax credit was expanded 
so much. I believe it was the right thing to do.
    The economic plan creates new opportunities to send people to 
college by lowering the interest rates and broadening the eligibility 
for college loans and then changing the terms of repayment so that young 
people can pay them back as a percentage of their earnings regardless of 
how much they borrow.

[[Page 798]]

    There is in this economic plan a new business capital gains tax, 
rewarding investments for the long term. People who make new investments 
for 5 years or more will get a 50-percent tax cut in the tax rate and a 
70-percent increase in the small business expensing provision--something 
that's been almost entirely overlooked--which makes 90 percent of the 
small businesses in the United States of America, those with taxable 
incomes of under $100,000, eligible for an income tax cut.
    The economy has generated a 20-percent increase in auto sales and 
2.5 million new jobs; 90 percent of these new jobs are in the private 
sector. That's a far higher percentage than the new jobs of the 
eighties.
    The combination of declining deficits, which will amount to 3 years 
in a row--if this budget is adopted, we'll have 3 years of declining 
deficits in a row for the first time since Harry Truman was the 
President of the United States. And it has produced steady growth and 
low inflation, leading many of our most respected economists, from the 
Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, to Allen Sinai, to say that our economy 
and its fundamentals has the best prospects it's had in two to three 
decades. Inflation is projected to be lower this year than last year.
    We've come a long way, but there's a long way to go. There's still 
too many people out of work, too many people working for low wages, too 
many people who know that they can work harder and harder and harder and 
they still won't have the opportunity of doing better. And there are too 
many people who are left out altogether, living in environments that 
are, at worst, downright dangerous.
    Our country is more than an economy; it is a community of shared 
values, values which have to be strengthened. This year, we are working 
on things that will both strengthen the economy and strengthen our 
community. We're working on a welfare system which will continue to 
reward work and family and encourage people and, in some cases, require 
people to move from welfare to work through welfare reform.
    We are working on lobbying and campaign reforms which, if the 
Congress will pass them, and I believe they will, will help us to change 
the culture of Washington in a very positive way. The national service 
program this year will have 20,000 young people earning money for their 
college educations by solving the problems of this country in a 
grassroots fashion in their communities or in others all across America. 
And the year after next we'll have 100,000 young people doing that.
    The Vice President's reinventing Government program has been a 
dramatic example of giving us a Government that will work better for 
less by slashing paperwork and regulations and again, if this budget is 
adopted--thanks to the work already done by the Congress--will lead us 
in a 5-year period to a reduction of the Federal Government by 252,000 
workers, in a 6-year period by 272,000 workers; so that in the end of 5 
years, we will have the smallest Federal Government since the 1960's, 
the early sixties. I'll tell you what we're going to do with the money 
in a minute.
    But we are moving in the right direction. The health care reform 
debate is a big part of that. I know there's a lot of good in our health 
care system. We don't want to mess with it. We want to fix what's wrong. 
But nobody who has seriously analyzed it can doubt that we have the 
worst and the most inefficient system of financing health care of any of 
the advanced countries. No other country spends more than 10 percent of 
its economy on health care. We spend 14.5 percent of our income. Part of 
that's because we're more violent; part of it's because we have high 
rates of AIDS; part of it's for good reasons: We spend more on medical 
research and technology, and we wish to continue to do that. No one 
would give up that premium. It's an important part of our world 
leadership and our global economy. Indeed, we need to find ways to do 
more in some of these areas, in biotechnology, for example.
    But a part of it stems from the fact that we have a system which is 
plainly inefficient and which, in paperwork burdens alone, may cost as 
much as a dime on the dollar more than any other system in the world. We 
are also the only advanced country in the world that has not figured out 
how to provide health care to all its citizens. Everybody else has 
figured out how to do it. The result of that is that almost all of you 
work for compa- 

[[Page 799]]

nies that pay too much for your health care, because when people who 
don't have health insurance get real sick, they tend to get health care 
when it's too late, too expensive, at the emergency room, and they pass 
the cost on to the rest of you in higher premiums. If you live in rural 
areas where the costs can't be passed along, the cost is passed along in 
another way, in lower quality of health care when the hospital closes or 
the clinic closes or the last doctor moves away.
    Eighty-one million Americans live in families with someone with a 
preexisting condition, who's been sick before, so that they pay too much 
for insurance, can't get it, or can never change jobs. This is an 
important part of rebuilding a faith in the middle class. It's no 
accident that the First Lady and I have received a million letters that 
people--telling us their personal stories. They aren't pikers. They're 
people who have paid their dues, who work hard, who want to make 
something of themselves in this country. And because of the way we 
finance health care, they haven't been able to do it.
    The education initiatives of our administration are important in 
this regard. The Goals 2000 bill I just signed for the first time in 
American history sets national standards of world class excellence in 
education and encourages schools to use grass roots reforms to achieve 
them. The student loan reforms will open college education to more young 
people than ever before.
    And finally this year we're going to try to change the unemployment 
system into a reemployment system. All of you as employers pay 
unemployment taxes into a system that is fundamentally broken. The 
average person when laid off was called back after a period to his or 
her old job when the unemployment system was created. And the 
unemployment system was just sort of a fair way for the employer to 
contribute to the maintenance of that person at a lower wage level while 
on unemployment. But today, most people don't get called back to their 
old jobs. Instead they have to find new ones. And we should no longer 
ask people to pay for a system that leaves people idle for a period of 
months after which they're out of work with no training, no skill, and 
not a good prospect for the future. So we believe from the day a person 
is unemployed, he or she should be involved in a retraining and a new 
job placement program immediately. It will cut the period of 
unemployment. It will increase the national income, and it will 
certainly honor the values of the American middle class if we change 
this system.
    For all of this, there are still a lot of things, maybe the most 
important things about America, that Government can't do. Nothing has 
reminded me more of that than the headlines in today's Washington Post. 
I'm sure you saw the story. Two 10-year-old boys were taken into custody 
yesterday in an elementary school not far from here, just across the 
line in Maryland. They were charged with planning to sell crack cocaine 
found in one of their school bags. Even in this jaded age most 
everybody, including the school officials at the school, were shocked .
    We can do a lot of things to put this country back where it belongs. 
We can and must pass the crime bill to deal with a lot of these 
problems. It's a good crime bill: 100,000 more police officers; a ban on 
28 kinds of assault weapons; the most innovative prevention programs we 
have ever supported at the national level to try to keep young kids out 
of trouble and give them something to say yes to as well as things to 
say no to; tougher punishment in what I think are sensible ways. And how 
are we going to pay for it, $22 billion over 5 years? With a 250,000 
reduction in the Federal work force, not with a tax increase.
    But even if you do that, we cannot live the lives of children for 
them. So every one of us, every parent, every teacher, every person, has 
to somehow find a way to reach these kids before it's too late. Somehow 
the young people who make it know that they're important. They 
understand that their lives matter. They understand that there can be a 
future. They think about the future in terms of what happens 5 or 10 
years or 20 years from now instead of what happens 5 or 10 minutes from 
now. They understand that they have to fight to find ways other than 
violence to solve their problems or deal with their frustrations. They 
have to come to understand that children having children is just wrong 
and can't lead to anything good for them, that drugs will ruin their 
lives. We've

[[Page 800]]

got a lot of kids now who are beginning to creep back into drug use just 
because they think it's hopeless out there. We have to change that, and 
we have to help them change that. And a Government program, alone, 
cannot do it. We have to do it with the kinds of things you do with 
these special reportings in your newspaper and galvanizing and 
organizing people all over this country, community by community.
    Finally, let me just say this. A couple of nights ago, we marked the 
end of the year honoring the 250th birthday of Thomas Jefferson. For you 
as journalists, of course, his commitment to freedom of expression was 
his greatest gift to us. I don't know how many journalists I've had 
quote Jefferson's famous line that if he had to choose a government 
without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, he would 
unhesitatingly choose the latter. My response is always, he said that 
before he became President. [Laughter]
    But there's a line, or a lesson, that we often overlook. Jefferson 
was also a slaveholder, even though he wrote three or four times in 
various places attempts to limit slavery or do away with it. If you go 
to the Jefferson Memorial, you find that wonderful quote when he says, 
``I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just and his 
justice cannot sleep forever.'' He knew it was wrong, but he couldn't 
change it.
    But Jefferson's great legacy, in some ways, was the advocacy of 
relentless change. He said that we'd have to change our whole way of 
doing things once every generation or so. He said the Earth belongs to 
the living. In other words, the great power of the idea that change and 
progress is possible if rooted in fixed principles is really the idea we 
need to bring to American life today.
    We all share the responsibility in achieving that kind of change and 
progress. I think we have got to get together. We've got to go on with 
the work before us. We cannot afford to be diverted or divided in this 
town. We cannot afford to ignore the urgent tasks at hand. And we cannot 
afford to ignore the possibility that we can really make a difference, 
that we can ensure for the next generation of children the values and 
the life that were given to us by the generation which preceded us. And 
that, I submit to you, is the job of the President and the job of the 
American people in 1994.
    Thank you very much.

[At this point, the emcee announced that the President would take 
questions. The first participant asked if delinquency and crime among 
children were not symptoms of the disease of adult delinquency.]

    The President. Well, in some ways I think it is a symptom. I think 
it is the outgrowth--if you think about what makes all societies work, 
basically what makes societies work, what makes them function, what 
guarantees a healthy environment, it is basically a devotion to the 
family unit, a devotion to the idea that everybody ought to have some 
useful work to perform, and an understanding that while the rights of 
individuals are important, the interests of the community at large are 
important, too, and that all of us find most personal fulfillment when 
we live in a community that itself is succeeding. So we have obligations 
to a larger community. If you go to the places that are in the worst 
trouble in America today, all three of those things are in deep 
distress, not very much sense of community, not very much work, and 
families in ruins.
    And what I'm trying to do, sir, is to try to create an environment 
in which we support family, work, and community, both with incentives 
for people to do the right thing, like giving a tax break to working 
people so they won't feel that they'd be better off on welfare--they're 
hovering at the poverty line--to dealing with the kinds of things that 
Secretary Cisneros dealt with when he spent the night in the Robert 
Taylor Homes Project of Chicago the other night, trying to find ways for 
the people who live in public housing to be secure, to build their own 
communities, take control of their own destiny, and to be safe from 
that.
    But I agree with you, I think a lot of these problems we identify 
are the consequences of the fundamental stress on those three things: 
work, family, and community.

[A participant cited the watchdog role of the press and asked what could 
be done to open up Government to the people, make Government more 
accessible to the press in terms

[[Page 801]]

of technology and access to electronic information via the Freedom of 
Information Act, grant greater access to Presidential materials, and 
effect changes in Pentagon policy in instances when the press covers 
military action overseas.]

    The President. Well, first of all, I think I mentioned one example 
in my opening remarks. And that is, I think that the Energy Department 
is doing quite a good job in dealing with the whole radiation issue. We 
also have under the review all the sort of, the secrecy rules of 
Government, and we expect to change them and make available a lot more 
records than have been available in the past.
    You made a specific comment about technology, and whether technology 
can be used to facilitate this. And we do have a couple of people at the 
White House--and unfortunately, I'm not one of them--who know a whole 
lot about this. And we've tried to use things like E-mail more and 
things like that. But that's one of the things that I've asked our 
people to study, is how we can use this so-called information 
superhighway to hook the news media of the country into the Government 
more for things that are plainly available anyway and whether that could 
be facilitated. Just the technological transfers, I think, would make a 
big difference.
    On the fourth question, I can't give you a satisfactory answer 
because I haven't made up my own mind yet, and I don't think I know 
enough to make a decision, and that is, the relationship of the press to 
our military operations in time of combat. I'm not rebuffing you, I'm 
just telling you I have not thought it through, and I don't know what my 
options are.
    But on the other three things, I think we're in accord, and I will 
try to do a little more work on the whole issue of technology transfer 
and interconnection. And I think we are moving forward to open more 
records.

[A participant indicated that the President had advocated Presidential 
intervention in the strike involving Caterpillar, Inc., and asked if he 
still believed such action was still appropriate.]

    The President. Well, we have worked hard through the executive 
branch to resolve other labor disputes, as you know, including the one 
involving the airlines recently. So I am not averse to that. But if 
you'll remember, at the time I said that there was an actual strike in 
place that was of significant duration for a company, Caterpillar, that 
is very important to this whole country. A lot of you may not know this: 
Caterpillar has as much as 80 percent of the Japanese market for some of 
its products. It's a very, very important company.
    And so, I guess what I have to tell you is if the strike occurs and 
if it is of significant duration and if there is something that I think 
we can do about it, I would be glad to look into that. But what I have 
tried to do on all labor disputes is not to prematurely intervene--there 
is no strike at this moment--not to prematurely intervene and to take it 
on a case by case basis depending on what the national interest is and 
whether or not there is a positive role we could play. In the case of 
the airlines, there was; and one or two other cases--a railroad issue, 
and several others--there has been something we could do. And if it 
happens, you can be sure that I will look into very closely.

[A participant asked the President to grade the performance of 
columnists and editorial writers in covering his administration and 
Whitewater.]

    The President. Well, let me first of all say, the grade that they 
gave me is not as important to me as the grade, sort of objective 
criteria, that many of the journals here went through: just how much did 
we get done last year as compared with previous first-year Presidencies. 
And all the objective analysis concluded that we had the best first year 
in a generation, in 30 years or more, just in terms of the volume and 
significance and the difficulty of legislative achievements and 
advances. So I felt quite good about that, and that's how I measured my 
own.
    Secondly, if I could grade the press, I wouldn't, especially not 
now. [Laughter] But let me just say--let me make three points very 
quickly about it, either in general or on Whitewater. If you have any 
doubts about it, then that's good because you ought to be having doubts 
about things like this. But I want to make three points. One is, you 
can't

[[Page 802]]

generalize about the press today. You probably never could generalize 
about the press. But believe me, it is far harder to generalize about it 
than ever before. There is no way you can do that.
    Secondly, I think it is--the press, at least in this town, is very 
different from most of the press outside this town in terms of how they 
work and what's important and all of that. But they are under more 
competitive and other pressures today than ever before. I said last 
night at the radio and TV correspondents dinner that the Founding 
Fathers had two points of untrammeled freedom in our set-up. One was 
given to the Supreme Court and the lower Federal courts; that is, they 
had lifetime jobs. And they got that because somebody had to make a 
final decision. They have limited power but ultimate freedom. So they 
have to be careful not to abuse their freedom. The other was the press, 
because nobody could think of any practical way to limit the press. And 
in fact, the limits have become less, not more, with the weakening of 
the libel laws over time.
    And I just think that always, any kind of unrestricted freedom 
imposes great responsibility on people. And what happens here is, when 
you've got, for example, you've got all these different new outlets; 
you've got all these channels; you've got all this time to fill; you 
have all this competition now from the tabloids; you have the highly 
politically motivated outlets posing as news media, but not really, 
trying to affect what the news media do. It is more difficult to be 
responsible now than ever before. It is a bigger challenge than ever 
before.
    The third thing I would say is, while I am in no position to comment 
on this, you ought to read what Garrison Keillor said last night at the 
radio and television correspondents dinner. It was a stunning speech. I 
have never heard anyone speak that way to a group of media people. He 
obviously was from the heart, and he said some very thoughtful things. 
And if you really care about the issue, I would urge you to read what he 
said. I could not add anything to what he said last night.
    Q. That's an A-plus answer.
    The President. Thanks.

[A participant asked the President to respond to a veteran who had 
stated that the way the Veterans Administration runs its hospitals is an 
example of why the Government should not run the health care system.]

    The President. That's why we don't recommend a Government run the 
health care system. I have two responses to that. First of all, our plan 
does not provide for Government-run health care. In fact, that's very 
rare in the world. The British system is the only one where the 
government actually delivers the health care, just about. There are some 
other systems, like the Canadian system, where the government finances 
it all. We have Government-financed health care through the Medicare 
program. Most people think it's pretty good who are on it. But it's 
all--you know, if you are on Medicare, you get to choose your own 
doctor; it's all private care, all private.
    The veterans hospital system worked quite well, sir, for a while, 
but it doesn't work now because the Government can't run it without its 
being able to compete. I mean, what basically happened is, there are 
fewer and fewer veterans who choose to use the veterans hospital 
network. They have other options for pay--they're eligible for Medicare; 
they have private insurance or whatever. The veterans hospital can't 
take that kind of pay, so it becomes more underfunded while the 
population it's treating goes down; and those difficulties feed on 
itself.
    I think we've got a--basically, we have proposed to give the 
veterans hospital network the chance to compete and do well, but when 
those veterans hospitals are in trouble, that's why they're in trouble. 
What I proposed to do instead is to have guaranteed private insurance, 
and all I want the Government to do is to require guaranteed private 
insurance for the employed uninsured, give organized approval to give 
discounts to small businesses so they won't go broke providing the 
insurance, and then organized buyers co-ops, so small business, farmers, 
and self-employed people can buy insurance on the same terms that big 
business employees and Government employees can. And I don't want the 
Federal Government to do that, I just want it set up so that can be done 
at the State level.

[[Page 803]]

    But I certainly don't think we ought to have a Government-run health 
care system. I think the Government could create an environment in which 
everybody can get health insurance; we can bring cost in line with 
inflation--the right economic incentives for managed care are there--and 
the little folks have the same chance as the big folks to get affordable 
care. That's all I want to do.

[A participant asked how he should respond to his daughter's statement, 
``He sounds just like me when I'm trying to explain why I don't have my 
homework,'' after she heard the President's explanation of events that 
happened 15 years ago.]

    The President. Well, let me tell you, let me give you an example. 
I'll just say one thing. Garrison Keillor said last night, he said, 
``You know, all I know about Whitewater is what I read in the papers, so 
I don't understand it.'' [Laughter] He made two statements; I'm just 
repeating what he said. He said, ``I really wasn't going to talk about 
Whitewater tonight, but I was afraid if I didn't say anything, you'd 
think I know something about it.'' [Laughter] Then he said, ``I suppose 
I ought to tell you that I've never been to Arkansas.'' But, he said, 
``I'm reluctant to tell you that, because then you will attack me for 
not telling you that 30 days ago.'' [Laughter]
    All I can tell you, sir, is I have done my best to answer the 
questions asked of me. Maybe you have total and complete recollection of 
every question that might be--not is--might be asked of you at any 
moment of things that happened to you 12, 13, 14 years ago. Maybe you 
could give your tax records up for 17 years and, at the moment, answer 
any question. Or maybe, instead, you want to go back to the homework 
question: You think I should have shut the whole Federal Government down 
and done nothing but study these things for the last 2 months?
    I would remind you that I was asked early on by the press and the 
Republicans to have a special counsel look into this on the grounds that 
then everyone could forget about it, and let the special counsel do his 
job, and I could go on and be President. I could give all the records 
up, and then when he had a question in his document search, he could ask 
me, we could work it out, and the issue could be resolved. So I said, 
``Sure,'' even though the criteria for appointing a special counsel 
weren't met. No one had accused me of any wrongdoing, certainly nothing 
connected with my Presidency or my campaign for the Presidency. I said, 
``Let's do it so I can go back to work.'' And that is what I have tried 
to do.
    Since then, the same people who asked for the special counsel so 
that these issues could be resolved in an appropriate and disciplined 
way and I could go back to work, have decided they were kidding. And 
they wanted to continue for us to deal with this. Well, I'm sorry, I'm 
doing the best I can while I do the job I was hired by the American 
people to do.
    I have been as candid and as forthright as possible. Sam Dash, the 
Watergate special prosecutor, said, ``This is a very different 
administration than previous ones. These people have resisted no 
subpoenas. They have claimed no executive privilege. They have 
cooperated. They have turned all the documents over.'' I have done 
everything I know to do.
    But can I answer every question that anybody might ever ask me about 
something that happened 10, 15, 17 years ago on the spur of the moment 
and have total recall of all of that while trying to be President? No, 
sir, I cannot. But the special counsel has a process for dealing with 
that which would permit us to focus on the truly relevant questions and 
deal with it. And I have cooperated very well. I will continue to do 
that.
    I will also do my best to give information to the press. But I would 
just like to point out that the people who asked for the special counsel 
asked for it and said, the President ought to do this so we can clear 
the air and he can go on and be President. Now the suggestion is, the 
implication of your remark, sir, is that instead of that, I should stop 
being President and do my homework on this issue.
    Q. All I was asking is what I should tell my daughter for her 
response, and I think the response was wonderful. And I thank you very 
much for it.
    The President.  Thank you.
    Q. We have time for one more question right here.

[[Page 804]]

    Q. Mr. President, I'm Tom Dearmore, retired from the San Francisco 
Examiner and a native of your home State----
    The President. Mountain Home, Arkansas.
    Q. ----who used to long ago stir up lots of trouble in Arkansas.
    The President. You're still legendary down there, Mr. Dearmore. 
[Laughter]
    Q. My father helped run your campaign for Congress 20 years ago----
    The President. He sure did. And I'm grateful to him.

[The participant then asked if the President favored the unrestricted 
use of U.S. money that goes abroad for population control or if he 
favored any limitation at all on the use of American taxpayers' money 
for abortion.]

    The President. Yes, I do. I do, and let me say first of all, I have 
asked--I did about 2 days ago--I saw a story on this, and I received a 
couple of letters about it. And I have asked to see the language that we 
are advocating and the language that is in the present draft so that I 
can personally review it.
    My position on this, I think, is pretty clear. I think at a minimum 
that we should not fund abortions when the child is capable of living 
outside the mother's womb. That's what we permit to be criminalized in 
America today under Roe against Wade. And secondly, we should not, in 
any way, shape, or form fund abortions if they are enforced on citizens 
by the government, if they're against people's will.
    There may be other restrictions I would favor, but I can just tell 
you that on the front end, I think that those are the two places where I 
would not support our funding going in. And so I think that we ought to 
be very careful in how we do this.
    On the other hand, I don't necessarily think that we ought to write 
the Hyde Amendment into international law, because there are a lot of 
countries who have a very different view of this and whose religious 
traditions threat it differently.
    So I think that there is some room between the original draft and 
where--it appears, from the news reports, some folks in the State 
Department may be going to write a policy that most Americans could 
support. But I'm glad you brought it up.
    I, myself, did not know about this until just a few days ago. And I 
have asked for a report, and I've asked to see the documents myself so I 
can get involved in it and at least try to have some influence on what 
happens. Of course, it's an international conference. We don't know 
exactly how it will come out in the end, and there will be countries and 
cultures that have widely clashing views on this.
    But, anyway, I've answered you what I think.
    Q. Thank you.
    Q. Mr. President, thank you very much. We're looking forward to a 
more informal gathering with you Friday night.
    The President. I'm looking forward to it, too. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 12:31 p.m. at the J.W. Marriott Hotel.