[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 51 (Monday, December 27, 1999)]
[Pages 2656-2665]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Interview With Larry King of CNN's ``Larry King Live''

December 22, 1999

Cabinet Room

    Mr. King. Good evening. We're in the Cabinet Room at the White House 
in this Christmas season. It's a great pleasure to have as our special 
guest, as part of our millennium month, the President of the United 
States, Bill Clinton. Do you spend a lot of time--do you have a lot of 
Cabinet meetings?
    The President. I do. And I have a lot of other meetings in here, 
like with individual Cabinet members. I met this week with three or four 
different Cabinet members and extended staff here. So we have large 
meetings in here.
    Mr. King. This room is, like, right off the Oval Office?
    The President. That's right, right off the Oval Office.
    Mr. King. Did they plan it that way so the President could run right 
in and meet with--how often do you have Cabinet meetings?
    The President. I don't have too many full Cabinet meetings, because 
we have 23 members of the Cabinet plus Chief of Staff. So I have a few 
of those a year, when we have to do a review and get all geared into one 
issue or another. But I have a lot of meetings with various Cabinet 
officials in this room and with maybe more than one who are all working 
on a common project.

Year 2000 Problems

    Mr. King. We have a lot to talk about, and I want to get an overview 
as we look ahead to this millennium but cover some current things. I 
guess the thing everybody is talking about is, should we be frightened? 
That's the basis of the State Department yesterday--should we travel; 
should we stay home? We're told the Cabinet members have

[[Page 2657]]

been asked to stay home or stay in Washington. Is that true?
    The President. The Cabinet members are staying here, but it's really 
just as a precaution, because we feel a high level of confidence about 
where we are with the Y2K problems. We've been working on this for 
years. We've spent a lot of money on it; we've tried to get all the 
private sector involved. All the big systems in this country, I think--
airline travel, banking systems, electrical systems, Social Security 
checks--all those things I think are in good shape. We're here partly as 
a precaution and partly so, if any of our friends in other parts of the 
world have any trouble, we can all be there to give whatever help we 
can.

Year 2000 Terrorism

    Mr. King. And how about the terrorism threat, where people are asked 
to be careful, especially overseas, and we have these arrests occurring 
in Washington and Vermont?
    The President. Well, what I would say to the American people about 
that is that we know that at the millennium, a lot of people who may 
even be a little crazy by our standards or may have a political point to 
make, may try to take advantage of it. So we are on a heightened state 
of alert. We're working very hard on it. No one can guarantee that 
nothing will happen. But all I can say is we're working very hard.
    And my advice to the American people would be to go on about their 
business and do what they would intend to do at the holiday season but 
to be a little more aware of people and places where they find 
themselves. And if you see something suspicious, well, call us and let 
us know. Call the authorities. We're working very, very hard on this. 
And if it were me, I would not just refrain from activities. I'm going 
to go out and do my Christmas shopping. I'm going to do what I normally 
do.
    Mr. King. Are you saying if you have a hunch about something, go to 
the hunch?
    The President. If you have a hunch about something, if you see 
something that's suspicious, you should report it, just to make sure 
that we do everything we possibly can to maximize our protection. But I 
wouldn't just hunker down until it was all over.
    Mr. King. Colin Powell says that maybe by doing all this, you've 
scared them off. You know, if you make people fear the alert so much, 
that might cause terrorists to have a second thought.
    The President. Well, they should have a second thought, because 
we're working it hard.
    Mr. King.  In cooperation with other 
nations?
    The President. Absolutely.

Vice President Al Gore's Offer To Debate

    Mr. King. All right. Let's discuss some things political--one of 
your main--you know that. Do you agree with Al Gore's request to have 
debates? ``Forget all the advertising. Let's debate.''
    The President. Well, I think it's an interesting idea. I don't want 
to get into handicapping the campaign. I think that the more debates 
they have, the better. I'm very proud to be a member of my party when I 
see those two debate. They're smart. They have their ideas. You know I 
favor the Vice President and not just because I feel personally loyal to 
him. I think he's been by light-years the best Vice President this 
country has ever had, by a long, long way. But I think the fact that he 
and Bill Bradley are out there talking about education; they're talking 
about health care; they're talking about biomedical research; and they 
know what they're talking about; and they've thought about these 
things--I think it's a very substantive, good thing. And that's what I 
think elections ought to be about, so I'm proud of that.
    Mr. King. Were you surprised at the idea, though, to say, let's 
forget--you know, Goldwater and Kennedy were going to do that.
    The President. I was surprised. And I must say I find it quite 
interesting. I was intrigued by it. If someone had offered me that in 
1992, I probably would have done it.
    Mr. King. Would have taken it?
    The President. Yes, probably, because I think we need to find out 
whether we can have elections without the kind of money that they cost 
today, and we can't have them without that kind of money unless people 
can have access, the candidates can have access to the voters. That is, 
what costs all the money is access to the voters.

[[Page 2658]]

    Mr. King. Barry Goldwater had told me that he and John Kennedy had 
arranged that if Goldwater would be the nominee in '64, had Kennedy 
lived, they were going to travel around together.
    The President. I think it would have been wonderful. I still think 
it would be great. And I'd like to see it happen in a general election. 
I don't think it's necessary for the voters to be for one person but 
think that the other person is a bad person. And I think it's very bad 
development in our politics. I think it's one reason that the voting 
percentage goes down; people think, ugh. So if there could be a way to 
be more and more debates, not only now but in the general election, I 
think it would be a good thing for American democracy. I did three last 
time and three the time before, but I would have done six or seven or 
however many. I believe in this.

Candidate Bill Bradley

    Mr. King. You say, of course, you're supporting your Vice President. 
What do you think of Bill Bradley, though?
    The President. Oh, I've known him for many years. I like him. He's a 
very smart man. He's had a very interesting life, and he's got an 
interesting take on things.
    Mr. King. Do you ever think they might run together?
    The President. They'd be a good ticket. [Laughter] It would be a 
good ticket.

Challenges of a Vice Presidential Campaign

    Mr. King. Kennedy could run with
Johnson. You picked a man from a neighboring State to run with you. Do 
you understand the difficulty of a Vice President running?
    The President. Yes.
    Mr. King. That's not easy, is it?
    The President. No. But it gets easier as time goes on, and people 
focus on it. And it's easier now than it was 100 years ago, I think. But 
I think that, as I said--when Harry Truman became President, he didn't 
even know about the atomic bomb.
    Mr. King. Did not.
    The President. And we had already lost five or six Presidents in 
office by the time he became President. Since then, there has been an 
increasing level of seriousness given to the job. Lyndon Johnson was a 
major figure, and Richard Nixon was a major figure. Both of them had 
responsibility in office. Then President Carter upped the ante more; 
Vice President Mondale had far more responsibility than anybody had 
before. President Reagan, to his credit, gave President Bush a lot of 
responsibility. But no Vice President has ever had the range of 
responsibility and the level of achievement, accordingly, that Al Gore 
has had, whether it was in our technology policy, our environmental 
policy, our foreign policy, the economic empowerment of poor areas. I 
could just go on and on.
    Mr. King. So there is nothing he isn't abreast of?
    The President. No.
    Mr. King. If something happened to you, there's not surprise we have 
to tell him?
    The President. No. There would be nothing--if something were to 
happen to me tonight, he could become President, and there would be 
nothing he wouldn't know, no person he hadn't met, no issue he hadn't 
dealt with.
    Mr. King. We'll be right back with the President of the United 
States, Bill Clinton, at this Christmas season. Don't go away.

[At this point, CNN took a commercial break.]

Trade Debate and the Seattle Round

    Mr. King.  Speaking of debates, it was Vice President Gore's idea, 
we just reminded each other, to debate Perot. And I understand you were 
the only one here that agreed with that.
    The President. In the beginning.
    Mr. King. There was a lot of disagreement.
    The President. They all thought there was a lot of downside to it. 
But I wish we had more debates in recent years on trade policy, because 
it's such a controversial thing. Everybody is for selling more of our 
exports. Everybody has the feeling, because we have a big trade deficit, 
that people take advantage of us. People are worried about losing their 
jobs, even though the unemployment rate is at a 30-year low. And I think 
we need to continue to debate this. I wish we had more

[[Page 2659]]

of them. I hope there will be some trade debates in this election.
    Mr. King. Did Seattle throw you, Mr. President? I ask that because 
Governor Bush was with us last week, and he agrees completely with you 
on the trade issue, but he said he thought--I'm paraphrasing--that you 
kind of copped out, that you didn't forcefully attack those people who 
were demonstrating, you sort of rode the middle.
    The President. Well, first of all, I attacked those who were violent 
in no uncertain terms. And I said to those who were demonstrating for a 
cleaner environment or for decent labor standards that I thought their 
concerns were legitimate but their opposition to the trade agreement was 
wrong. And that's what I believe. And I think that we're a little 
different on that. I mean, I strongly agree, and most Republicans that 
apparently agree with me that we ought to have expanded trade.
    We benefit, not just from the exports; we also benefit from the 
influence. You've got an--time, so do I. We benefit in that an open 
market enables us to grow and still have to compete, and that keeps 
inflation down. One of the reasons--in February we're going to have the 
longest economic expansion in the history of the country, and we did it 
with three things. We did it with getting rid of the debt--deficit; we 
did it with investing in technology and people; and we did it with 
opening our borders in trading and continuing to compete, because 
usually, when you have this kind of economic growth, inflation takes 
over and kills the recovery. That hasn't happened. So I think this is 
very important.
    But the difference between me and most Republicans is that I believe 
that globalization is inevitable. But people are scared of all this 
change, and what we have to do is to convince them that change can be 
their friend. And the way to do it is to say, ``Okay, we're going to 
compete, and we're going to win over the long run, and we're going to 
win in the short run, but we should grow the economy in a way that 
improves the environment, and we should do it in a way that respects 
core labor standards: no forced labor, no child labor, no abusive 
working conditions.''
    Mr. King. Did Seattle surprise you?
    The President. No. I think--I knew there would be a lot of people 
there. I was surprised the first night at the level of violence. I 
didn't know that there would be so many, basically, creeps there who 
would try to----
    Mr. King. Who instigated it, you mean?
    The President. Yes, throw rocks--there was just a very small 
percentage of those thousands of people who were doing this. There were 
probably a couple of hundred people who were prepared to throw rocks at 
stores and take other violent action.
    Most of them were there to express their opposition to some aspect 
or another of this process of globalization, but they cannot turn the 
clock back. The world is better off than it would have been if we hadn't 
had 50 years of increasing economic integration, and America has won big 
these last 7 years by being involved. And we are making a huge mistake, 
in my judgment, if we don't continue to both expand trade and work for 
better core labor standards in a better environment.
    Mr. King. Do the unions then not understand this? They're the 
biggest supporters your party has--the trade unions in America have 
been.
    The President. They're divided. If you look at Seattle, for example, 
there are 170,000 union members in and around Seattle. And most of them 
have jobs in part because their companies are so tied to trade. I went 
to York, Pennsylvania, the other day to the Harley Davidson motorcycle 
factory, something most--at least most guys and an increasing number of 
women can identify with. They've got a year's backlog, and 25 percent of 
the Harleys are sold overseas, and the biggest foreign market is now 
Japan, which makes the only competitors to Harley and motorcycles. So I 
think it just depends.
    Some unions feel that their jobs might be undercut by the 
importation of textile or clothing goods or shoes or whatever, but on 
balance, we have won big as a country by opening our markets, showing 
we're not afraid to compete, and asking others to open their markets, 
too, to be fair, whether it's farmers or manufacturers or people in 
entertainment or people in the information technology business.

[[Page 2660]]

Final Year of the President's Term

    Mr. King. Is it tough going into a last year? I ask that because we 
sat together here quite a few times. I remember once we were looking 
out, and you said to me, ``You know, my bad days are good days.''
    The President. Absolutely. I love this job.
    Mr. King. You love this job.
    The President. I do.
    Mr. King. You----
    The President. And I'll miss it. People ask me all the time, ``What 
will you miss most? Will it be living in the White House, going to Camp 
David, getting on Air Force One?'' The job is what I'll miss most, the 
work. There is no place in the world where you can come in contact with 
so many different kinds of people and so many different kinds of issues 
and have so much opportunity to do good or stop bad things from 
happening.
    But the hard thing about it now is you want to do everything, and 
you have to be disciplined. You have to figure out what can I do, what 
can I put out there that the country ought to do that maybe can't be 
done while I'm here. I never want to sleep. I realize the days are going 
by, and I just want to keep working. I just want to do everything I can.
    Mr. King. We'll be back with the working President right after this.

[At this point, CNN took a commercial break.]

Gays in the Military

    Mr. King. We are reevaluating, are we, ``don't ask, don't tell''?
    The President. Well, I think the candidates are. A lot of them are 
saying it should be changed.
    Mr. King. What do you think?
    The President. I tried to have a different policy. I tried to say 
gays should be able to serve in the military----
    Mr. King. Period?
    The President. Without lying about it. But if the military code of 
justice says that homosexual acts are illegal, if they keep it, then 
they'd have to observe that. But when we went to ``don't ask, don't 
tell,'' it was all we could get through the Congress. The Congress had a 
veto-proof majority to reverse the policy I recommended.
    Now a new administration and new Members of Congress, they're free 
to do something different. What we're doing now--in August, we issued 
some new guidelines to try to correct some of the abuses, because the 
policy, as it was articulated in '93, has been often abused, and that's 
what's led to some of these expulsions, some of this harassment.
    The Secretary of Defense is absolutely committed to faithfully 
implementing the policy. It's really ``don't ask, don't tell,'' don't 
pursue, under those circumstances.
    Mr. King. So it's not the policy that's wrong?
    The President. No, I didn't say that. I recommended a different 
policy, but the policy is better than the results. That is, if the 
policy were faithfully applied, we would not have many of the problems 
that we've had these last few years, and I think the Secretary of 
Defense and the leadership of the Pentagon is now--with these new 
guidelines and with the work they're doing to try to make sure people 
are trained and they understand they're not supposed to go in and harass 
people and what can and cannot trigger an inquiry, I think we can make 
it better now.

Gay and Lesbian Rights

    Mr. King. How much--we know about your interest and the gains we've 
made in the racial area and still a long way to go. How are we doing in 
that area, in the homosexual area in this country, with regards to 
acceptance, do you think?
    The President. I think we've come a long way. We're a long way from 
where we were just in '92 and '93. I think vast majorities of the 
American people support hate crimes legislation that protects gays as 
well as people with different racial and religious backgrounds. I think 
most Americans strongly support nondiscrimination in the workplace and 
would vote for the ``Employment Non-Discrimination Act'' if they were in 
Congress. I hope that the Congress will vote for it this year, this next 
year.
    I think that--the real problem, I still believe, is the absence of 
open, personal contact. I think----
    Mr. King. We don't know it----

[[Page 2661]]

    The President. I think there are too many people who don't know gay 
men and lesbian women in the ordinary course of their lives, and they 
don't see that there are people who--their friends, their sisters, their 
brothers, their sons, their daughters, their co-workers, and that it 
is--my judgment is, it's not a lifestyle people choose. It is the way 
people are. It's too hard--it's too hard a life for people to just up 
and----
    Mr. King. Why choose it?
    The President. ----up and choose it. I think that--and I think that 
my view is that every American that works hard, obeys the law, plays by 
the rules ought to be treated with dignity and respect and have a part 
in our American family. That's what I believe.
    Mr. King. Do you agree with the Vermont judiciary that while 
marriage may be wrong, they are entitled, couples who live together who 
are gay, to equal benefits?
    The President. I do. I think that's a good thing. That's always been 
my position, that--you've got gay couples that, for example, have been 
together for years now. One of them--and I'm beginning to think about 
this, because I'm moving into this age bracket now--one of them has a 
heart attack; one of them gets sick; one of them is in the intensive 
care unit in the hospital; and only family members can come in; and 
sometimes they're not allowed in--that kind of thing.
    You know, I think that--in terms of health care coverage at work or 
in terms of property and willing of property to your closest family 
member, that sort of thing, I think they ought to be able to do that.
    Mr. King. But not marry?
    The President. Well, marriage in our culture and to me has a certain 
connotation, meaning for me, that has not gotten me to where I could 
accept that, because I think it's basically a union for the purpose of, 
among other things, having children and--so that's why I've never 
supported the term of marriage, although there are a lot of increasing 
numbers of people, even in the clergy, who believe that they should be 
able to do that.
    Mr. King. We'll be back with more of President Clinton. We've got an 
overview here on the millennium and some other things after this.

[At this point, CNN took a commercial break.]

Reimbursement of Legal Fees

    Mr. King. We're in the Cabinet Room at the White House with 
President Clinton. Touch some other bases. The Washington Post said that 
you're applying to the Government to reimburse for legal fees. True?
    The President. That's not true.
    Mr. King. Not true?
    The President. Not true. I've never--I've never considered doing 
that.
    Mr. King. So where did that story come from?
    The President. I think it was leaked from the Independent Counsel's 
Office. That's the way the story read to me. But----
    Mr. King. You don't want----
    The President. I think that they've cost the taxpayers enough money 
already.
    Mr. King. So even if you were entitled legally----
    The President. I may be entitled to it, but my instinct is not to do 
it. But I've really never had a discussion about it. My instinct is not 
to do it. I've been very fortunate. I've had this legal defense fund; 
people have helped me pay for my legal fees. The travesty in this thing 
is the way the law is written. You can only get your legal fees if 
you're a target of an investigation but you're not charged. So if you're 
charged and acquitted, you can't get them, and if you never were a 
target, you can't get them.
    So the thing that I think is just tragic is you have no idea how 
many completely innocent people that were harassed repeatedly and called 
into hearings and called into this, that, and the other thing--everybody 
knew they never did anything wrong, but I mean, not just one interview 
which you could understand but over and over and over again, so that 
they have these massive legal bills, and they're not eligible for any 
reimbursement at all.
    So I've been trying to figure out how to help them pay their legal 
bills. That's what I wish I could apply for. I wish there was some fund 
where I could get some money for them to pay their bills, because a lot 
of these people--they're not President; they're

[[Page 2662]]

not like me; they can't have a legal defense fund that would pay their 
bills off.

Independent Counsel's Investigation

    Mr. King. How did you emotionally hold up through all that?
    The President. I'm here. [Laughter]
    Mr. King. I know. What is it? Some sort of inner thing in you, get 
up off the floor, the comeback kid approach? Is that part of your 
structure? Where does that come from?
    The President. I think there are two things, really. One is what you 
said. All my life, I was raised to believe that you should never give in 
and never give up. If somebody hits you and knocks you down, you were 
supposed to get up, not give up. And I also deeply believed--one thing I 
knew, the Whitewater thing was a total fraud, and I thought the people 
who were pursuing it knew it was a fraud at some point. They had to, 
especially 4-something years ago, when the Government report came out, 
the RTC report saying that neither my wife or I had done anything wrong 
and had detailed millions of dollars in explanations showing that.
    The other thing was that I'm--in the last couple of years, I had to 
come to terms with a lot of things. I prayed a lot; I thought a lot; I 
sought a lot of advice; I had a lot of help from really good people, 
here and around the world. A lot of the people I served with, world 
leaders, called and talked to me.
    Mr. King. Are you surprised at that?
    The President. I was touched by it beyond belief. Some of the 
conversations I had with people like Nelson Mandela, I've carried with 
me all my life. It's just unbelievable.
    Mr. King. They were there for you?
    The President. Yes.
    Mr. King. And that was part of the----
    The President. But here--but also, letters I got from, you know, 
kids around America. You wouldn't believe the letters I got from----
    Mr. King. Really?
    The President. Yes, unbelievable letters. And letters I got from 
religious leaders and people that taught philosophy and thought about 
these things. It was just--and I also had a lot of counseling, a lot of 
help from these ministers who came in and met with me, and my wife and 
daughter had a lot to do with it. Hillary and Chelsea had a lot to do 
with it.

Former Advisers in the Media

    Mr. King. Are you hurt by the Dick Morrises, the Stephanopouloses 
who write books, who write columns, become part of the media sometimes, 
in Morris's case, often a very critical--a guy you were pretty close to? 
Does that hurt you?
    The President. Well, first of all, I am very grateful for the 
overwhelming loyalty that I've enjoyed from people who could have made a 
lot of money by dumping on me because that's what sells and the kind of 
media culture they were in. And I have enjoyed an extraordinary degree 
of it.
    I've also had a lot of stability. A lot of people have stayed with 
me the whole time. So let me start with my gratitude. When Dick first 
started going on television and saying those things, he used to call 
somebody here in the office and apologize in advance and just say, ``You 
know, I've got to do this. It's the only way I can get on television.''
    Mr. King. Really?
    The President. Oh, sure. I mean, it's a game. It's a game. I know 
that. And so it's hard for me to take it seriously. I think that a lot 
of the things that he has said, he knows downright aren't true, and I 
feel bad for him because I think you pay a terrible price when you do 
that over and over and over again.
    Mr. King. You feel bad for him?
    The President. Yes, I do. I feel really bad for him.
    Mr. King. He's attacked your wife a lot, too.
    The President. Yes. And he's said a lot of things that he just knows 
aren't so. And so I feel badly for him. But I don't--I can't be mad at 
him.
    With George, it's a different story. I think he's a brilliant man 
and basically a good person. But when George entered politics, he 
entered as a boy wonder. He came right in with Dick Gephardt, you know, 
and he assumed great responsibilities because he's a person of--he works 
like crazy, and he's smart, and he's basically good-hearted in a lot of 
ways. But he was, I think, always affected by being basically a 
Washington politician.

[[Page 2663]]

    I remember when I was attacked in the New Hampshire primary, and 
everybody said, ``He's dead, and he ought to get out,'' and all that, 
George was asking, ``Well, should we withdraw?'' And James Carville and 
I, who grew up in the country, you know, out there with the folks, we 
looked at him and said, ``George, if the people want me to withdraw, 
they will withdraw me at election time. That's what you've got elections 
for.''
    And I think that--I think he's probably more comfortable now being a 
part of the professional critics of the Washington establishment, the 
media establishment. I think that's where he's--I think he's comfortable 
there. That's where he started in politics, and I think that's just 
where he is.

Criticism of the President

    Mr. King. Do those pundits in general bother--do they get at you? 
Some guy--
Truman wrote that famous note when he got mad. Some people let it slide 
off----
    The President. I've got that note, you know.
    Mr. King. You have the actual note?
    The President. Yes. One of the great little stories of my Presidency 
is Steve Forbes gave me that letter that Truman wrote.
    Mr. King. Steve Forbes?
    The President. I've always been grateful to him.
    Mr. King. SOB he called that writer.
    The President. Yes, he said, ``You'll need a new nose, a lot of 
beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a''--[laughter]----
    Mr. King. Do you ever watch ``Larry King Live'' or ``Meet The 
Press'' or somebody--do you get mad?
    The President. No, the truth is I never watch them. I never watch 
the Sunday talk shows.
    Mr. King. You don't watch Sunday morning?
    The President. Never. And the only time I ever see any of these 
other programs is if I'm channel surfing late at night and I happen to 
run into them. I watch your program sometimes when you're interviewing 
somebody I want to hear from.
    Mr. King. But basically, you don't turn on ``Meet The Press'' or----
    The President. Never. Never. And if I did, what good would that do 
me? I mean----
    Mr. King. Except make you mad.
    The President. Yes. If someone--if I read a column, like an op-ed 
column, of someone who says, I think the Clinton administration policy 
is all wet on this for these reasons, I read that, because Benjamin 
Franklin said, ``Our critics are our friends. They show us our faults.'' 
But I cannot--you can't afford to be angry as President. If you're angry 
all the time over things people say about you--you can be angry about 
what happens to the American people. But if you're angry about what 
happens to you, then you're wasting a lot of time and emotional energy 
that belongs to the American people. And you're not going to make good 
decisions. So nothing really good can come with that.
    Mr. King. You really feel like an employee of the people?
    The President. Yes.
    Mr. King. We'll be back with some more moments with President 
Clinton from the Cabinet Room in the White House. Don't go away.

[At this point, CNN took a commercial break.]

President's Legacy

    Mr. King. We're back with President 
Clinton. I want to read something that was given to me today. The last 
time--not the last time, we've been together many times, but the night 
Vince Foster died, you were on television together, in this building. We 
were the last two to know about it.
    The President. Yes. We were going to go another half hour, and 
McLarty came on and said, ``You can't do it.''
    Mr. King. Mack McLarty came in and said, ``You've got to get off 
now.'' And you were mad. Why? Because you even said, ``Am I not doing 
well?'' But anyway, that aside, the last question to you that night was 
called in by someone asking you, even though you had only been a year, 
less than a year in office, what do you think your legacy will be. 
Here's what you said: ``I'll be happy to tell you. Number one, I'd like 
to get the economy moving again.'' This is 6 years ago. ``Number two, 
I'd like to provide health security for

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all Americans. Number three, I want my national service plan to pass to 
open doors of college education to millions of Americans. Number four, I 
strongly want to pass a welfare reform bill that will move people from 
welfare to work. And five, I want to reform the political system.''
    Reading this, how have you done?
    The President. We've done well.
    Mr. King. Three out of five.
    The President. Yes. And we've made--we've done some really good 
things in health care; we just haven't been able to have universal 
access. And I finally got--I'm very proud of this--we had 100 percent of 
my party vote for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. So we now 
have unified the Democratic Party for our campaign finance reform, and 
it's just a question of whether the other party will come along now. So 
I think that will happen.
    I feel very good about what's happened these last 6 years. We've 
done a lot of other things as well, and we've been able to advance the 
cause of peace in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the Balkans.

President's Disappointment

    Mr. King. Biggest disappointment?
    The President. I don't know what the biggest disappointment is. I'm 
sorry we were not able to have more progress in health care, but we may 
have some this year. The main thing is I feel this enormous gratitude 
because I think our country is ending this century on such a high note, 
and I really do think we built our bridge to the 21st century.

Hillary Clinton's Senate Campaign

    Mr. King. And are you going to campaign for Hillary?
    The President. If she wants me to, and if I can be helpful, I am. 
But I think that there's a time for that. I think in the beginning 
people want to know who she is, what she believes, what she will do as a 
Senator, and they'll want to see her. And I need to be as supportive of 
her as I can. There will come a time when I can perhaps help her in the 
campaign. The people of New York have been wonderful to me, and I'm very 
grateful for that. But they want to make an

independent judgment about her, so I have to be careful about when I do 
it and how I do it. But if and when I can help, I will do whatever I can 
to help, because first of all, for her, I want her to win. But secondly, 
she would be absolutely unbelievable if she were a Senator. I mean, it 
would be unbelievable. It would be such a gift for the people of New 
York and America. I've never known anybody, ever, who had her 
combination of intellect and passion and organizing ability and 
absolutely consuming devotion to public service.

    Mr. King. Our common friends in California tell me you were going to 
move to New York, you and Hillary, no matter what.

    The President. That's correct. She told me--when we got elected in 
'92, I said, ``Okay, ever since we've been married, we've lived where I 
wanted to live; we've done what I wanted to do. Now, when we get out of 
here, I've got to go home; I'm going to build my library and build my 
center, but that's my gift to my State. And I'm going to spend some time 
there, and we'll spend the rest of the time wherever you want to say.'' 
And she said, ``I want to go to New York.'' That's what she told me when 
we moved up here. I bet it was the first week or 2 we were here.

    Mr. King. Seven years ago.

    The President. Yes.

    Mr. King. Happy holidays.

    The President. Thank you.

Note: The interview was videotaped at 5:56 p.m. in the Cabinet Room at 
the White House for later broadcast. The transcript was released by the 
Office of the Press Secretary on December 23. In his remarks, the 
President referred to Gen. Colin Powell, USA (Ret.), chairman, America's 
Promise--The Alliance For Youth; former President Nelson Mandela of 
South Africa; the President's former political consultant Dick Morris; 
former Senior Adviser for Policy and Strategy George Stephanopoulos; and 
former Chief of Staff 
Thomas F. (Mack) McLarty. The President also referred to Vice President 
Al Gore's debate with Reform Party candidate Ross Perot on the North 
American Free Trade Initiative on November 9, 1993. A tape was not 
available for verification of the content of this interview.

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