[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 41 (Monday, October 16, 2000)]
[Pages 2410-2417]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Interview With Joe Klein of the New Yorker

August 15, 2000

2000 Democratic Convention

    Mr. Klein. I'll tell you what. I was nostalgic enough, and then you 
had to stop at McDonald's on top of it?
    The President. It was nice. We didn't get much sleep last night. It 
was a nice setting, though, today, and it was nice last night. That 
convention was nice. The stage seemed more in the audience than the 
previous ones we've had, didn't it?
    Mr. Klein. Yeah. And they were up for it, that crowd last night.
    The President. They were ready, weren't they?
    Mr. Klein. Yeah. If I remember correctly, in '92 there was still 
some skepticism in that audience, when you gave your acceptance speech. 
But you know, the difference between then and now is pretty----
    The President. A lot of these people have been with me for 8 years 
now, you know. They have--a lot of those delegates--I've run into 
several people that tell me they were at the previous conventions, one 
or the other of them, going in----
    Mr. Klein. How are you feeling right now?
    The President. I feel fine. I'm a little tired. You know, we just--
all I did in L.A. was run around and try to prepare for the speech. 
Except I did get to play golf one day, which was quite nice.
    Mr. Klein. You did? Where?
    The President. I played a public course there. What's it called? El 
Rancho? It's a public course right near Hillcrest that used to be the 
site of the L.A. Open. They were very proud of it. They mayor wanted to 
play on it. The bad thing about it was lots of folks out there. It took 
a good while to get around, but it was really nice.

AmeriCorps

    Mr. Klein. Steve said, when he called me, that you wanted to talk a 
little bit more about foreign policy and----
    The President. There were some things we didn't talk--and I made a 
few notes. I don't think we said anything last time about foreign 
policy. I just thought you might have some questions you wanted to ask. 
I also thought we didn't talk much about environmental policy. And I 
couldn't remember whether we talked about AmeriCorps.
    Mr. Klein. About AmeriCorps? Did we talk about AmeriCorps? No, we 
didn't. We don't have to.
    The President. You know how important that is to me.
    Mr. Klein. Yeah, I know how important that is.

[[Page 2411]]

    The President. Did you see what Bush said 2 days ago?
    Mr. Klein. What did he say?
    The President. He said he was going to get rid of the 100,000 cops 
program, and he was going to take another look at AmeriCorps.
    Mr. Klein. Really? But so many Republicans have turned around on 
that. I mean, I thought that the adjustment that you announced in 
Philadelphia at the volunteerism summit was just the icing on the cake 
for that program. That really----
    The President. I think the only reason he would get rid of it is 
just for personal----
    Mr. Klein. Did you ever hear the story about John Kasich going to 
Jeff Canada's program in Harlem?
    The President. Yeah.
    Mr. Klein. And Kasich saying, ``God, you know, this is the kind of 
thing that AmeriCorps should be.'' And Jeff said to him, ``Every one of 
those kids in there are AmeriCorps kids.''
    The President. And Kasich has turned around.

Foreign Policy

    Mr. Klein. Yeah, Kasich has turned around. Santorum has turned 
around. Let me ask about--let's go to foreign policy for a minute. In 
going through this thing, I've now written a mere 31,000 words. Every 
time you have to make a decision about global economic security during 
the last 8 years, you make it like that. Mexico, Asia, time and time 
again, you seem to have a really good sense of what global economic 
security is about. But international security decisions seem to be 
tougher.
    The President. Well, if you look at it, for one thing, if it's a 
decision that involves the use of force, almost without exception--Haiti 
being the exception, I guess--we have--particularly in the Balkans, we 
thought we had to have first a consensus within NATO and then, if 
possible, some sanction from the United Nations. It took us a long time 
to put together that consensus in Bosnia. It took a couple of years.
    Mr. Klein. You were saying last time that first, especially Somalia, 
you hadn't--that you didn't have the procedures in place that you later 
would.
    The President. I think Somalia was a special case. I don't feel that 
way about Bosnia. Bosnia was literally--Christopher went to Europe early 
on. We tried to build a consensus. We failed. We didn't think we should 
go in there unilaterally. We finally got the country to, I think, 
eventually--we're proud of what NATO did in Bosnia and proud of the 
peace process.
    And ironically, we didn't have the kind of delay in Kosovo that I 
was afraid we'd have. You know, it actually worked out pretty well.
    So I think you're going to see this from time to time where, if 
there's a question on the use of force, whenever possible, the American 
people will want the United States to act with others. And whenever 
possible, it would be a good thing if we do and if it's sanctioned by 
the U.N. or at least if there's a darn good argument that it's covered 
by a U.N. resolution.
    But Somalia was a special case. And I hope that Somalia will never 
be used as an excuse for the United States not to be involved in United 
Nations missions. We're training those soldiers in West Africa now that 
are going to go into Sierra Leone, which I think is a very good thing. 
And we have been working, ironically, for several years on the Africa 
crisis response initiative, trying to generally train soldiers in Africa 
to be ready to deal with the problems.
    But what happened in Somalia, as I say, was a special case because 
you had--the Americans were there under U.N. command. And I think we 
learned a lot from Somalia, but I think that we shouldn't overlearn it. 
That is we shouldn't refuse to go into another situation with soldiers 
from other countries. It's just that I think, if it happened again, we 
would have a much clearer notion of the rules of combat. And before we 
would have an engagement that could literally have led to several 
hundred casualties on their side and 18 deaths on our side, we would 
have much greater involvement in the details of it.
    Mr. Klein. I talked to McCain about your foreign policy and other 
things. He was actually very supportive in a lot of other areas, 
especially high-tech areas. But the argument

[[Page 2412]]

that he made on foreign policy is one that you hear from the foreign 
policy priesthood all the time about your foreign policy. They use words 
like ``ad hoc'' and ``untidy'' and that you move from issue to issue and 
there isn't the kind of sustained interest in it.
    He uses an example--they use the example of you calling China our 
strategic partner, and he says Japan's our strategic partner. What do 
you say to the critics who say that you haven't had a sustained and 
coherent foreign policy?
    The President. Well, I know they say it, but I disagree. A lot of 
those people didn't want us to be involved in the Balkans. They didn't 
think it was worth it. A lot of those people didn't think we should have 
gone into Haiti. They didn't think it was worth it.
    I think we have had a consistent policy toward China. We've had to 
do different things in response to developments there. I think we've had 
a consistent policy toward Russia and I think that we've had--basically, 
if you go back to some of the foreign policy speeches we gave, I think 
it's obvious that we've tried to meet the new security threats of the 
21st century. We have tried very hard to support a united Europe. We've 
tried very hard to support the development of democracy in Russia and 
the reduction of the nuclear threat and removal of nuclear weapons from 
the other states of the former Soviet Union.
    We have tried to engage with China. We have tried to contain or 
reverse the North Korean nuclear threat, and we have supported a dialog 
between the North and the South. And I think the things that we did and 
the things that we refused to do in North Korea have some bearing on the 
ultimate decision of Kim Chong-il to engage Kim Dae-jung.
    We had an unusual and systematic outreach to our neighbors south of 
our border. And I regret that one of the few defeats of my 
administration--legislative defeats that I really regret was the fast-
track defeat which sort of slowed up our initiative in building a free-
trade area in the Americas, because I think it's important. And the 
United States has actually paid a price for that as a lot of the South 
American nations have actually started doing much more business with 
Europe rather than the United States.
    But I just frankly don't agree with him. I think that--what I 
think--that if they're looking for some simple explanation of the world, 
a lot of them didn't agree with my outreach to Africa. A lot of them 
didn't agree with our designation of the global AIDS crisis as a 
national security threat.
    But I think that--I don't know if you were--I gave a few remarks 
kind of ad hoc to the NDI luncheon yesterday. I think that we should see 
our foreign policy and national security in terms of the traditional 
alliances and challenges that we have that haven't changed, even though 
the cold war is over, in terms of the new possibilities opened up either 
by the end of the cold war or the emergence of this sort of global 
information society and then the new security threats. And I think a lot 
of the security threats of the 21st century will come not from other 
nation-states but from the enemies of the nation-states.
    I think that you will see a convergence of terrorists, 
narcotraffickers, weapons merchants, and kind of religious and racial 
nationalists. I think you will see a lot of that. And then I think you 
will see a convergence of information technology in weaponry which will 
lead to the miniaturization of seriously dangerous weapons, both 
conventional and biological and chemical weapons. And I think the 
likelihood is that sometime in the next 10 years, people will come to 
think that there will be kind of cross-national threats which will 
threaten our security as much as one particular other nation.
    I understand why they're all saying that. But the truth is, a lot of 
them didn't think I was right in Bosnia and Kosovo.
    Mr. Klein. They never disagree on the big picture stuff. I talked to 
Tony Lake, and I read the book that he has coming out in October. And 
one of the things he posits as a kind of a central principle of your 
years that was something different was the fact that we were more 
threatened by the weaknesses of other countries than their strengths. Is 
that something you agree with?
    The President. Absolutely. I think the United States can be 
threatened more by another nation's weakness than by its strength. And I 
used to tell--I don't know how many times I've said to our crowd over 
the last

[[Page 2413]]

8 years, when we're dealing with a country that has interests that are 
in conflict with ours, I would rather have a strong leader of that 
country than a weak leader, because a strong leader can make an 
agreement and keep it and is capable of kind of distancing himself from 
the more destructive elements in the relationship and within their 
societies. So I believe that.
    I also believe--let me be more specific. We want to preserve 
democracy in South America. But you still need to be strong to keep 
Colombia from collapsing, for example. There needs to be--you have to 
have to have a certain amount of discipline and strength to do what 
Museveni did in Uganda and reverse the AIDS rate--the infection rate of 
AIDS. There has to be a certain amount of strength in the state to 
rebuild the public health systems which are breaking down all over the 
world.
    Laurie Garrett, who wrote ``The Coming Plague''--do you remember 
that book? She's got a new book coming out--I've just seen it in 
galleys--about the breakdown of public health systems all over the 
world, in the states of the former Soviet Union, in developing 
countries, and speculating what it might mean for us. You've got to have 
a strong state with some fair measure of strength to deal with the 
challenges of climate change, for example, a lot of these big questions. 
So I absolutely agree with that.
    I think that, to take a more traditional national security problem: 
the continuing agony between India and Pakistan and the centrality of 
Kashmir to that conflict and that relationship, it would take a pretty 
strong Government in both countries to really come to grips with the 
compromises that would be required to make an agreement that would have 
any shot at all of putting an end to that problem and also putting an 
end to it as a potential trigger of nuclear exchanges.
    Mr. Klein. So, is the story of Camp David II the fact that one 
country was stronger than the other, and they weren't able to make 
compromise? You don't have to answer it if it's undiplomatic.
    The President. Well, I think we're using--no, because--I understand 
what you mean, but I don't mean it in the same sense you do.
    There, Israel has land and army coherence; the Palestinian state has 
existed in the minds of its adherents and implicit in these U.N. 
resolutions. So in that sense, that's a different kind of strong and 
weak. That is, if you don't have land, an army, and everything, maybe 
you have to adhere to words and ideas more, and compromise is more 
difficult.
    I don't mean it like that. I meant actually--but both Arafat and 
Barak are strong, even though Barak didn't have a big margin in the 
Knesset.
    Mr. Klein. No, I was meaning it in the way that you were meaning it. 
I was wondering whether Arafat's coalition--I mean, I've been over 
there, and I've seen all the various--I know how good a politician he's 
had to be to, you know, to survive.
    The President. My gut is that if the other--three or four of those 
other people who will take whatever--if we can affect a compromise on 
Jerusalem that other Arab leaders will take, he can make whatever other 
arrangements he wants to make.
    But that's different from whether the Colombians can physically 
recover 30 percent of their land now in the hands of narcotraffickers 
and terrorists or whether the Russians can actually rebuild their health 
care system.
    Mr. Klein. Whether the Chinese can collect taxes from Guangdong 
Province?
    The President. Yes, that's right. Your fellow journalist Friedman, 
Tom Friedman has written a lot of very interesting essays on this whole 
subject of the weakness of government as opposed to the strength of 
government threatening freedom and progress. You know. You've written a 
lot of very interesting pieces on it. I just come in contact with it 
over and over and over again. So it's something that I'm concerned 
about.

Public Figures and the Public

    Mr. Klein. One thing my boss was really interested in. He's spent a 
lot of time in Russia--David Remnick. But this had nothing to do with 
that.
    It was something that you said in the very end when we were talking 
last time, when we started talking about the loss of mystery and the 
fact that the distance between the

[[Page 2414]]

leader and the public has evaporated during your time as President. And 
you were saying that you thought that was a good thing. And I understand 
the point that you made. Do you remember that? Do you remember? You 
said----
    The President. Yeah, but let me say this: I would like to make two 
points. Number one, I think that it's a good thing if the American 
people, through television or through journalistic writings, have a 
better, deeper sense of what a person--the Presidency, for example--not 
only what we're doing but why we're doing it and how it fits into the 
larger scheme of things and how it fits into the pattern of our lives.
    And you can get enough--I think what you get out of the greater 
exposure and a more consistent pattern of exposure is worth as what you 
give up in majesty.
    Mr. Klein. What you give up in majesty?
    The President. Mystery or majesty. So I approve of that.
    I do not believe that the kind of invasion into public figures' 
private lives for the stated purpose of exploring their character but 
for the real purpose of destroying them for some political end is a very 
good thing. But I think it is unlikely to occur to the extent to which 
you've seen it in the last 8 years again for a long time.
    Mr. Klein. You don't think the Presidency has just changed forever 
because of that?
    The President. No. For one thing, the Democrats don't have anything 
like the infrastructure or the stomach or the desire to do that,, that 
the Republicans do. So there will have to be an actual abuse of power in 
office in some way that affects the public interest.
    We don't--the guys that make money--we've got a lot of rich people 
to support us. They wouldn't do what Sciafe did. They wouldn't waste $7 
million going on 15 wild goose chases to try to run somebody down. We're 
just not that kind of people. We're actually interested in government, 
and we care more about what we do with power than power.
    So I think that's part of it. And I think shutting the Independent 
Counsel law down was part of it. Finally, when it finally was hijacked 
as basically the private property of the party not in the executive 
branch, I think its legitimacy was destroyed. So I think, if there ever 
comes a time again when we really need one, we'll get it, the same way 
we got it back in the seventies. The press and the public will say the 
only appropriate response is for the Attorney General to name someone or 
to ask the court to name someone that's clearly independent.
    Mr. Klein. Even short of those kind of spectacular, disgraceful, 
disgusting, awful kind of investigations, the Presidency after you--the 
Presidency exists in people's kitchens. You've been living in our 
kitchens for the last 8 years.
    The President. Part of that's television and part of that's my 
predisposition to work hard in an open fashion. So I don't--as I said, I 
believe the ability to share with the public at large what you're trying 
to do and why and to take everybody along on the journey is worth the 
extra exposure in terms of the price you give up. Whatever the value of 
the mystery is, I think it's worth it. And I think most future 
Presidents will attempt to establish a more--I don't know; ``intimate'' 
may be the wrong word, but you know what I'm trying to say--a more sort 
of closer bond with the American people not just on an emotional level 
but actually in terms of having them understand what you're trying to do 
and why.
    And if you do lots of interviews, if you're real accessful, if you 
work crowds, if you do townhall meetings, all these things that I did, 
you run the risk of making mistakes and paying some price and also sort 
of being demystified. But I think the benefit you get from it, in terms 
of keeping the energy flowing through a democratic system, is quite 
great.
    If you think about it, after the Republicans won the Congress, a lot 
of people thought we'd never get anything done again. But we got a big 
bipartisan balanced budget. We got a big bipartisan welfare reform. We 
got a lot of bipartisan education reforms. We've even gotten some 
environmental work done. We got the Safe Drinking Water Act, we got----

Conservation and Environment

    Mr. Klein. An awful lot of public land. I mean, I've been through 
these budgets line by line over the last 3 or 4 months.

[[Page 2415]]

    The President. I worked with--Pete Domenici and I worked together to 
do this Baca Ranch deal in New Mexico. It's a huge thing. And we may 
actually get this whole CARA legislation through where we're really 
trying to make the right kind of compromises with the Republicans that 
would, in effect, take the royalties we get from offshore drilling and 
put it only into environmental preservation, buying land--a small part 
of it for the Federal Government but a lot of it for States--and then 
restoration of coastlines and all that kind of stuff. If this thing 
passes, it's huge.
    What do you think the odds are we can pass this CARA legislation? 
It's a really big thing.
    Chief of Staff John Podesta. It's up against some tough rightwing 
filibusters.
    Mr. Klein. Is this last round of negotiations going to happen during 
the next 2 or 3 weeks?
    The President. On the environmental stuff?
    Mr. Klein. No, I mean the budget. Is that in the budget?
    The President. No, it's a separate--it's a stand-alone bill, because 
it takes a funding stream that's already there and directs it only to 
basically long-term land preservation and conservation work at the State 
and local level, primarily, and the Federal level.
    But the fact that some of these Republicans, including Don Young 
from Alaska, they're willing to work with us to institutionalize this 
sort of thing on a permanent basis is, I think, really encouraging.
    I still believe there's a lot to be said for showing up every day, 
and you just keep trying to push the rock up the hill.

Reaction to Scandal

    Mr. Klein. Can I say something that might piss you off? And you can 
even turn that off if you want.
    Deputy Press Secretary Jake Siewert. We're landing. You just don't 
have to answer it.
    Mr. Klein. When Lewinski happened, I was more pissed off at my 
colleagues and at the Republicans than I was at you. I'm sitting there, 
writing this piece, and I go through this whole section of the trench 
warfare, line-by-line battles that you've won against the Republicans 
during those 3 or 4 years. And all of a sudden, I get to Lewinski, and I 
got to say, I got pissed off at you. It doesn't change the bottom line 
of the piece----
    The President. I was pissed off at me.
    Mr. Klein. I was surprised. I was surprised by my own reaction to 
that moment because the stuff you had done you didn't get any credit 
for, you weren't going to get any credit for. Unless a lot of people 
read this piece and it changes other people's minds, you wouldn't get 
credit for it. But it was the stuff that you did for working people. 
You're probably the best President for the working people in the history 
of the country. And then----
    The President. Robert Pear actually wrote a good story the other day 
about what we had done for the working poor that nobody noticed over 8 
years. That's why we were able to get it done.
    But I think--well, you know, for us to talk about that would require 
a longer conversation than we have. But I think the interesting thing 
was I viewed the way they overreacted to it as sort of like the last--as 
the second step of the kind of purging our national life of the hard-
core, rightwing aspects of the Gingrich revolution, which was the 
Government shutdown.
    We rolled that back, and then we rolled this back, and then we had 
this unbelievable congressional election. And I think you see in the 
tone and tenor of the Republican campaign this year. Although I told you 
before I'm not sure their policies have changed very much, but at least 
in the tone and tenor of it, I think you can see basically a decision 
within their camp that, ``Okay,'' that, you know, ``we don't have to get 
beat a third time over this. We want to stay in.''
    Mr. Klein. I think we've changed, too. A little bit late for your 
benefit.
    The President. Yes, I think so.
    Mr. Klein. But I think that Bush is getting a little bit of the 
benefit of the fact----
    The President. Huge.
    Mr. Klein. ----that we've realized--that my colleagues realize that 
we went way overboard in '98. I mean, our poll ratings--yours----

[[Page 2416]]

    The President. But I think it was even before that. I don't think--
well, sometime we'll have more time to talk about it. But I hope that 
nobody will ever have to undergo what I did from 1991 through 1998 
again, or at least, I hope that if it happens, the media will know that 
it's happened, instead of being so willing to be basically suborned by 
it and kind of enlisted and all these other things that happened.
    In fact, if that is one result of it and it changes our politics and 
makes it a little less hostile and personally destructive, even if the 
changes last for 10 or 15 years, that would be a very good thing. I 
can't say that I think it would have been worth it, but it certainly 
would be a very good thing.

President's Best Memories

    Mr. Klein. Let's end on an up. I don't want to end on that note. 
What's your favorite moment when you look back? What was your biggest 
high?
    The President. Well, it's very difficult to say because we did so 
many things, and one of the things that--that I'm sitting here with you 
now. We just left the handoff deal, and I'm thinking what--I mean, it 
seems like I just got inaugurated the first time. I can't believe that 8 
years are gone. But I knew, when we won the economic plan, that it would 
turn the country around economically. I felt that, when we passed 
AmeriCorps, we had a chance to create a new citizen ethic in the 
country, which I thought was important.
    I loved going to Ireland when we made the peace there. I loved--a 
lot of the things we did in the Middle East meant a lot to me. You know, 
when we--just a lot of things.
    I feel very strongly that we did the right thing with welfare 
reform. I think I told you, when I was at the trial lawyers' meeting the 
other day and I was just shaking hands, I met two women. One had a 
master's degree, and one had a law degree. They told me they were on 
welfare when I became President.
    I went home--I say I went home--I went back to my political home in 
New Hampshire earlier this year on the eighth anniversary of my victory 
in the New Hampshire primary. And I met a woman in the crowd who was a 
nurse who had gotten some appointment from our administration and was on 
welfare when I got elected President.
    I suppose, in a funny way, those personal encounters are the biggest 
highs I get. There was a guy--I don't know if you were out there when I 
spoke today and introduced Al and I started talking about the HOPE 
scholarship? There was a guy over to my left that said, ``Yeah, I got 
one of those here.'' He screamed out in the audience. Because I said it 
would pay for the community college there. He said, ``Yeah, I know. I'm 
there. I got one.''
    You know, I run into people all the time that have taken the family 
leave law. I met a woman the other day who told me that her sister had 
taken the family leave law to take care of their mother, and then she 
had gotten cancer and taken it and now had a clean bill of health.
    And I think that in some ways, even bigger than all the 100,000 
people in the street in Dublin and all of the huge emotional crowd 
events, when you actually look at somebody who says, here is something 
you did, and my life is better because of it, that's probably the most 
rewarding thing of all.
    Mr. Klein. Well, it was 9 years ago just about now that it was just 
you and me and a State trooper in Maine. And it does feel like----
    The President. Maine?
    Mr. Klein. The State trooper was a source for the American----
    The President. We also got beat in Maine. Jerry Brown won in Maine. 
Remember that?
    Mr. Klein. I was thinking about that out there today. I was just 
thinking about the first time I went out with you in Maine. And I 
remember we were stuck on the tarmac in Boston. You had to catch a plane 
to Chicago. And I looked at you, and I said, ``Do you realize a year 
from today you could be giving your acceptance speech, and you'll have a 
fleet of cars and Secret Service and planes to take you anywhere you 
want to go?'' And you looked at me as if to say, you're out of your 
mind, boy.
    The President. And now it's all over--or just beginning. A new 
chapter is beginning. I've got to figure out--after you write this, you 
ought to talk to me about what you think I ought to do next.

[[Page 2417]]

Post-Presidential Plans

    Mr. Klein. I have a couple of ideas. I know a guy, the guy who runs 
the Ford Foundation in Asia is really interested in funding ways to move 
new technology and biotechnology to Third World areas. He would give you 
a bunch of money for your collaborating on that.
    The President. Well, I'm going to spend a lot of time working on 
that.
    Mr. Klein. My guess is that, just from hearing you talk, that's the 
kind of stuff that floats your boat these days.
    The President. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I want to do stuff that keeps my 
juices running.
    Mr. Klein. I don't think you're going to have any problem with that.
    The President. No. I'm going to have a good time. But I've got to--
if my wife wins the Senate seat and my daughter stays in school, I have 
to make a sizeable income. [Laughter]
    Mr. Klein. One or two speeches a month. But we've still got to play 
golf next year.
    The President. You've got a deal. We can also play this year, if you 
want to come.
    Mr. Klein. By the way, I broke 90 for the first time between last 
interview and this.
    The President. That's great.
    Mr. Klein. Two birdies.
    The President. Two?
    Mr. Klein. That meant I screwed up some other holes.
    The President. That's great. If you want to come to Washington and 
play, I'd like that.

Note: The interview began at 5:55 p.m. aboard Air Force One en route 
from Monroe, MI, to Andrews Air Force Base, MD, and was released by the 
Office of the Press Secretary on October 10. A tape was not available 
for verification of the content of this interview.