[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 49 (Monday, December 11, 2000)]
[Pages 2989-3001]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Interview With Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone Magazine

October 10, 2000

Situation in the Middle East

    Mr. Wenner. Last time I sat down with you here in the White House 
and had a long conversation, it was just right after Wye, and you were 
feeling real good and real happy and really accomplished and, today, 
considerably different. How are you feeling? You must be exhausted.
    The President. Well, one night about 3--when did I stay up all 
night?
    Press Secretary Jake Siewert. It was Friday night.
    The President. Yes, Friday night I was up all night talking to them. 
That's not quite true. I slept an hour, and then maybe I slept another 
30 or 40 minutes in different snippets. I'd just fall asleep. But I've 
been working this hard now.
    Today I feel pretty good because the violence has gone down 
considerably. Prime Minister Barak had a Cabinet meeting that lasted 
almost all night last night. It did last all night. It broke up about 5 
a.m. this morning. And in the middle of it, he came out and announced 
that the Israelis would suspend their ultimatum because they had some 
encouragement, and there was so much effort being made by the world 
diplomatic community.
    Mr. Wenner. What are you doing from here, in Washington, at your 
desk talking on the phone with these guys? I mean, how are you able to 
effect this, and what do you see your role as now?
    The President. Well, I've spent so much time with both of them, and 
I know quite

[[Page 2990]]

a bit about what makes them tick. And I think I understand the pressures 
they're both under, and I believe I understand what happened here, how 
they both came to see themselves and their people as victims in this. So 
I've tried to do what I could to help.
    I think that they both became concerned about 24 hours ago, maybe a 
little more, that this thing could really slide into a much deeper 
conflict. So at least today we've pulled back from the precipice. Kofi 
Annan is out there, and I think he's doing some good work there. And of 
course, there are any number of other people out there trying to make 
diplomatic efforts to kind of end the violence.
    So I feel good today, as compared with yesterday. And I'm sorry that 
the peace process has been temporarily derailed. Although, if we can end 
the violence and if we can get agreement between the two sides on some 
sort of factfinding commission to figure out how this happened and how 
to keep it from happening again--which was the thing that the U.N. 
resolution called for, that, in fact, Barak and Arafat had agreed to in 
Paris. Although they hadn't agreed to the composition of the commission, 
they had agreed that it ought to be done. If we can do that, the next 
big step is to begin the negotiations, the peace negotiations, as 
immediately as possible, because otherwise the sort of public pressures, 
both within the Middle East and beyond, will get worse.
    Mr. Wenner. Were you shocked by what happened? Were you surprised?
    The President. Yes, a little bit. I was surprised it spread as 
quickly as it did. I was surprised that the feelings on both sides could 
be stripped to the core as quickly as they did, because they've made so 
much progress and they got so close.
    But in a funny way, I think that from the Israeli point of view, 
Camp David made them feel even more vulnerable because Barak, at Camp 
David and since, went further by far than any Israeli Prime Minister had 
gone before. And I think the Palestinians, number one, really thought it 
wasn't enough to make a peace agreement but also have a different 
strategy since basically the physical concessions have to be made by 
Israel--except for what the Palestinians have to agree on security, in 
terms of joint security presence in what would become a Palestinian area 
in the West Bank. They have to make agreements on the West Bank 
territory, on the right-of-return language in the U.N. resolutions, who 
gets to come back, and if they don't come back, what is their 
compensation. They have to resolve Jerusalem, and they have to deal with 
security.
    Interestingly enough, because it was the most concrete with the 
fewest number of unpredictable consequences in the future, they made 
more progress at Camp David on security than anything else. They also 
had a habit of working together on security and getting along. But I 
think that the Israelis sort of felt aggrieved that they didn't get more 
done, because they offered so much. Then the Palestinians felt provoked 
by what happened on the Temple Mount with----
    Mr. Wenner. Sharon?
    The President. Yes.
    Mr. Wenner. Let's not get too far into this----
    The President. We don't have to get into the weeds, but the point is 
that then a whole series of events happened where each side began--with 
each successive event it seemed that each side misunderstood the other 
more.
    Mr. Wenner. Does any of it tend to piss you off about the 
relationships that you formed with--you formed a very strong 
relationship with Arafat and also Barak. Did it change your mind any, 
when you get into this--goddammit, Yasser--you have the same 
interpreter, right, that you used to share?
    The President. Yes.
    Mr. Wenner. So you've got a close relationship. Doesn't that----
    The President. Well, it's frustrating.
    Mr. Wenner. This will all be settled by the time this comes out, so 
just speak your mind. [Laughter]
    The President. It will all be settled, or it won't by the time this 
comes out.
    The whole thing is frustrating, but you've got to realize we're 
dealing with fundamental questions of identity. What Jack Lew was saying 
at Rosh Hashanah, though--the Jews go back and read the story of Abraham 
and Sarah giving birth to Isaac. I was thinking it's interesting how the 
circumstances under which the sons of Abraham were born and

[[Page 2991]]

became separated. And it sounds like sort of epic family tragedy, and 
they just sort of keep replaying it down through the years.
    That's the thing that bothers me. I just hope that somehow, you 
know, at this moment, however long it takes, we'll get beyond that. To 
the outsider who cares about them both, it seems so self-evident that 
the only acceptable answer is for them to find a way to live together in 
peace.

President's Future Plans

    Mr. Wenner. Changing the subject a little bit. When you're out of 
office, what are the three or four issues you think you're going to want 
to most focus on and be most concerned with?
    The President. Well, first of all, I haven't quite figured out what 
to do and how to do it, because I'm so into what I've been doing. I've 
laid the basic plans for my library and policy center. And I know I'm 
going to have an office in New York, because I'll be there, as well. And 
I've talked to a lot of people in general terms about it.
    But I decided that I would try to be effective in this job right up 
until the end. And in order to do it, I can't be spending vast amounts 
of time kind of planning out my next step. I also think I probably need 
a couple months to kind of just rest, relax, sleep--rest, get a little 
perspective.
    I've thought a lot about ex-Presidencies. There have been two really 
great ones in history, John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter, and they were 
very different. Quincy Adams went back to the House of Representatives 
and became the leading spokesman for abolition. * 
    * White House correction.
    You see the Washington Monument right behind us that actually, in 
his last term in Congress, was Abraham Lincoln's only term in the House, 
and they stood together on that mound when the Washington Monument was 
dedicated.
    But Jimmy Carter used the Carter Center to do very specific things. 
He works on human rights, election monitoring, getting rid of river 
blindness in Africa, agricultural self-sufficiency. From time to time, 
he's engaged in various peace issues, primarily in Africa. And he works 
here at home on Habitat for Humanity, which is now, by the way, the 
third-biggest home-builder in America--stunning thing--and also involved 
all over the world. I've been to Habitat sites in Africa, or one in 
Africa, but there are more than one. There are lots of them over there.
    So the challenge is to trade power and authority broadly spread for 
influence and impact tightly concentrated. That's basically the 
challenge. And I'm sure I'll be interested; I'll try to do a lot on the 
areas that I've always been involved in, this whole area of racial and 
religious reconciliation at home and around the world, economic 
empowerment of poor people, something I'm very interested in here and 
around the world.
    As we speak, I still don't know for sure whether the new markets 
initiative that the Speaker of the House and I have built such a broad 
bipartisan coalition for will pass. We've got 300-some votes for it in 
the House. It's really got a chance to be one of the signature 
achievements of this Congress, and it is something that Republicans 
ought to like, because it basically involves getting private capital 
into poor areas in America.
    And then I've got a big initiative to relieve the debt of the 
world's poorest countries that will put the money into education, health 
care, and development back home, if they get the debt relief. So that's 
something that I've always been very interested in. We make 2 million 
microcredit loans a year around the world, under AID in my 
administration. We set up----
    Mr. Wenner. The Grameen Bank model.
    The President. The what?
    Mr. Wenner. The model of the Grameen Bank.
    The President. Grameen Bank--Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and in 
America, the South Shore Bank. We set up a community development 
financial institution program here in America, and we fund those here in 
America, as well. So we've done a lot of work on that.
    And I'm very interested in this whole idea of the relationship of 
energy to economic growth and the challenge of global warming, which I 
believe is real. And I believe we can break the iron link between how 
nations get rich and how they deal with the environment.

[[Page 2992]]

I don't think--I think the energy realities of the world have changed 
drastically in the last 10 years, and they're about to really change 
with the development of fuel cell engines, alternative fuels. And 
there's also--we've funded a lot of research on biofuels--not just 
ethanol from corn, but you can make biofuels out of grass. You can cut 
the grass out here and make fuel out of it.
    But the conversion is not good. It takes about 7 gallons of gasoline 
to make about 8 gallons of biofuel. But they're working on research 
which would lead to one gallon of gasoline making 8 gallons. So I'm 
interested in all that.
    I'm interested in the breakdown of public health systems around the 
world. AIDS, TB, and malaria kill one in every four people that die 
every year now, those three diseases.
    Mr. Wenner. So you would set up something like--you're very mindful 
of the Carter Center.
    The President. I don't know. I don't know how I'm going to do it. 
I'm thinking about it. I've explored a lot of ideas, but I'm going to 
take some time when I get out to think about it. I also want to make 
sure that whatever I do, I give the next President time to be President, 
and whatever I do, I don't get in the way of the next President, because 
a country can only have one President at a time, and I want to be 
supportive of that.

Theodore Roosevelt

    Mr. Wenner. Well, you must have obviously thought a lot about Teddy 
Roosevelt. I mean, you are--or he--are the youngest--you're the youngest 
President since Teddy Roosevelt, to come out of a successful Presidency, 
and be in your midfifties, because of your powers, really, and energy. 
Do you compare yourself much to him? Have you thought much about him?
    The President. Well, I think the time in which I served was very 
much like the time in which he served. And I think the job I had to do 
was quite a lot like--there are some interesting historical parallels 
with the job he had to do, because he basically was--his job was to 
manage the transition of America from an agricultural to an industrial 
power, and from essentially an isolationist to an international nation. 
In my time, we were managing the transition from an industrial to an 
information age, and from a cold-war world to a multipolar, more 
interdependent world. And so I've always thought these periods had a lot 
in common.
    But when Teddy Roosevelt left, he served almost 8 full years, 
because McKinley was killed in 1901, shortly after he was inaugurated. 
But he thought he really should observe the two-term tradition that 
George Washington had established--that his cousin would later break in 
the war--before, the election was right before the war. But World War II 
was already going on when Franklin Roosevelt was--but anyway, Roosevelt, 
when he got out, then he felt Taft had betrayed his progressive legacy. 
So he spent a lot of the rest of his life--he built a whole third-party-
new-political movement and promoted what he called the New Nationalism 
around America. And he was a very important political force.
    But I think in some ways the impact he might have had was a little 
tempered by his evident disappointment at not being President anymore. 
And I think--that's not an option for me, because I can't run again, 
because now there's the 22d amendment. Roosevelt didn't have the 22d 
amendment. So it's not a real issue for me. So I've got to try to use 
whatever influence and networks and friendships and support I've built 
up around the world and here at home just to have a positive impact, to 
be an effective citizen. And I think I'll find a way to do it.

22d Amendment

    Mr. Wenner. If there wasn't the 22d amendment, would you run again?
    The President. Oh, I probably would have run again.
    Mr. Wenner. Do you think you would have won?
    The President. Yes. I do.
    Press Secretary Siewert. That was an ``if.'' [Laughter]
    The President. But it's hard to say because it's entirely academic. 
It's such a----
    Mr. Wenner. On the other hand, you've got the advantages of the 
incumbency; you've got the highest popularity rating of any President; 
the economy is doing good. It looks like you would have won in a walk. 
Do you

[[Page 2993]]

think the 22d amendment is such a good idea? Is it really consistent 
with democracy, to have this kind of term limit on a President?
    The President. I think the arguments for executive term limits are 
better than the arguments for----
    Mr. Wenner. Congressional?
    The President. ----all legislative term limits. I've never supported 
legislative term limits. I don't think they're good ideas. But I think 
the arguments for executive term limits, on balance, are pretty 
compelling. I mean, I have an extra amount of energy, and I love this 
job, and I love the nature of this work. But maybe it's better to leave 
when you're in pretty good shape, too. Better to leave when you're in 
good shape.
    I think maybe they should--maybe they should put ``consecutive'' 
there. Maybe they should limit it to two consecutive terms. Because now 
what's going to happen is--see, Teddy Roosevelt was young but not so 
young for his time. He was the youngest person to have been President, 
but he died at 61. Now, anybody that lives to be 65 has a life 
expectancy of 82. So you're going to see people who--most people mature, 
politically--and it's like all different activities have--gymnasts are 
tops at 14 or 15, basketball players at 25 or 28.
    Mr. Wenner. Presidents?
    The President. Presidents normally about 50, 51. Roosevelt was 51 
when he was elected. Lincoln was 51 when he was elected. In their early 
fifties, most Presidents do their best.
    Mr. Wenner. Retirement is functionally the early fifties.
    The President. Yes. And now you're going to have more and more 
people, particularly that come after me, living much longer lives. So we 
might decide----
    Mr. Wenner. Is that enough time to repeal the 22d amendment, get 
that through?
    The President. No. This is not really about me, because my time is 
up. But I think that if--you can't predict all the challenges the 
country will face in the future and whether someone uniquely suited to a 
given moment will be there. So maybe they should--but I'm just saying, 
you may have people operating at a very high level of efficiency, in 
politics, from age 50 to age 80 in the future, because of the changes in 
the human life cycle that are going to come about as a result of the 
human genome and pharmaceutical developments and all kind of other 
things we're learning. We may be able to reverse Parkinson's. We may be 
able to reverse Alzheimer's. So there's going to be a lot of things that 
are different about aging in the future. We're going to have to totally 
rethink it in ways we can't imagine.
    And if it seems appropriate, then I think some future Congress may 
give the States a chance to at least limit the President to two 
consecutive terms, and then if the people need a person, a man or a 
woman, to come back in the future, they can bring them back. That might 
happen. It may take decades, but it wouldn't surprise me if it happened 
simply because of the lifestyle, the length of life we're looking at.
    Mr. Wenner. Not to drag this out--people say that you love 
campaigning. I mean, that you don't stop campaigning in all aspects. I 
mean, how are you going to sort of withdraw from that in the next couple 
of years? How do you stop campaigning?
    The President. I don't know. I do like politics. But I like 
governance, too. I like policy. I liked it all. That's one of the 
reasons why I've been so fortunate in my life; I got to do something 
that was basically about politics and policy and governing, and in 
executive positions, being a Governor for a dozen years and President 
for 8. I got to deal with politics, policy, and governing, the three 
things that I really loved. And I think I got better at it all as I went 
along.
    I'm very interested--I think I'll spend a lot of time helping other 
people. I'm thrilled about Hillary running as we do this interview. I 
believe she will win. I hope she will, and I believe she will. I have 
worked very hard with Tony Blair to try to build this network around the 
world of kind of likeminded political leaders, and if I can be helpful 
to them, I want to be. So I'm sure that, from time to time, I'll get a 
chance to do a little politics after I leave here.
    But I'm also looking forward to a different chapter in my life. I 
mean, this is an interesting challenge. I'm still young enough to learn 
how to do new and different things. And it's exciting to me. There's 
never been

[[Page 2994]]

a period in my life that I didn't enjoy and find challenging and 
rewarding. And so I just need a little time to get my bearings and hope 
I'm not too old to change.

Gays in the Military

    Mr. Wenner. Going back to the beginning, one of the first things you 
did in your earlier term was trying to overthrow the military ban on gay 
people. Why did this backfire, and what did you learn from that?
    The President. Well, I think it backfired partly because the people 
that were against it were clever enough to force it, force the pace of 
it. I tried to slow it down, but the first week I was President, Senator 
Dole, who saw it as, I think, an opportunity, pushed a vote in the 
Senate disapproving of it. And I tried to put it off for 6 months, and 
the Joint Chiefs came down and raised hell about it. And I wanted to do 
it the way Harry Truman--Harry Truman issued an order saying, 
``Integrate the military. Come back in 3 years or 2 years, whatever, and 
tell me how you're going to do it.'' And a lot of the gay groups wanted 
it done right away and had no earthly idea of what kind of--I think they 
were shocked by the amount of congressional opposition.
    So a lot of people think I just sort of compromised with the 
military because they asked me to. That's not what happened. A lot of 
people have forgotten that. We knew that there were--at least 75 percent 
of the House would vote against my policy. So if I were going to sustain 
a different policy and have it withstand congressional action, I had to 
have a veto-proof minority in one House or another. But what happened 
was, the Senate voted 68-32 against my policy, which meant that I could 
not sustain my policy in either House, which meant they were going to 
enact it over my--they were going to, in a sense, ratify the status quo 
in law.
    And it was only at that time that I worked out with Colin Powell 
this ``don't ask, don't tell'' thing, went to the War College, and 
explained what the policy was going to be based on, what we had agreed--
the agreement we had reached together. And then they wrote that into 
law. And then we had several years of problems where it was not being 
implemented in any way consistent with my speech at the War College, 
which General Powell agreed with every word of, which we'd worked out.
    So Bill Cohen has now changed the training and a lot of the other 
elements that contributed to the fact that this policy continued to have 
a lot of abuse in it, and I think it's better now. But I still don't 
think it's the right policy. I think the policy I implemented 
originally, that I wanted to implement was the right policy.
    Mr. Wenner. Would you do it any differently? Do you wish you could 
have done it differently?
    The President. I don't know. I think that what I would like to do, 
what I wish I had been able to do, is to get an agreement on the part of 
everybody involved to take this out of politics and look at it.
    But the Republicans decided that they didn't want me to have a 
honeymoon, that they wanted to make me the first President without one, 
that we were living in a 24-hour news cycle and that the press would 
happily go along with my not getting a honeymoon and that they would 
make this the opening salvo.
    And they understood--and I didn't understand exactly what I know now 
about how what we do here plays out in the country. Because they've 
added up, first--but because it was one of my campaign commitments and I 
refused to back off of it, the message out in the country was, ``We 
elected this guy to turn the economy around, and his top priority is 
gays in the military.'' That's not true. It was Bob Dole's top priority.
    Bob Dole's top priority was making this the controversy that would 
consume the early days of my Presidency, and it was a brilliant 
political move by him, because at the time I was not experienced enough 
in the ways of Washington to know how to explain to the American people 
what was going on. If it happened to me again, I would say, ``Why is 
this the Republicans' top priority? I don't want to deal with this now. 
This is their top priority. We can deal with this in 6 months when the 
study is done; let's take care of the American people now.''
    And if it happened now, all the gay groups, who are now much more 
sophisticated about dealing in Washington than they were then,

[[Page 2995]]

would come in and say, ``That's absolutely right. Why is he doing this? 
We don't want this dealt with now. We want to deal with''--and we would 
put it back on them. They would be in the hot box, and we could win it.
    But the country has come a long way on gay rights issues since '93. 
Because keep in mind, we did drop the ban on gays in security positions, 
national security positions. We had done a whole lot of other things to 
advance a lot of the causes that the gay rights community wanted. So we 
have made a lot of progress there--plus all the people I've appointed.
    And I think the country has moved on that issue. The country is 
overwhelmingly for hate crimes legislation. The country supports 
employment nondiscrimination legislation. The only reason that we can't 
get those through the Congress is that the leadership of the Republican 
Party is way to the right of the country.
    Mr. Wenner. You know, historically, politicians have never, ever 
done much for gay rights. But gay issues are in the mainstream--
certainly, for instance, Reagan, who was very funny with gay people and 
had lots of experience in Hollywood. Why did you take it upon yourself, 
particularly in light of the political heat, to advance the causes of 
gay people?
    The President. I believed in it. It's not very complicated. I just 
said, from the time I was a kid, I had known people who were gay, and I 
believed that their lives were hard enough without having to be hassled 
about it. I saw it as a civil rights issue.
    I also didn't buy the kind of conservative attack on them, that this 
was sort of a conscious choice to have a depraved lifestyle. I had had 
enough gay friends since I was a young man to know that--to believe, at 
least, that that's not the case. So I saw it as a civil rights issue. I 
believed in it.
    I also thought that as a white southern Protestant, who could 
obviously talk to a lot of the so-called Reagan Democrats, the people we 
had lost that came back, that I was in a unique position to do it. And 
Al Gore, I must say, reinforced that, because he felt it at least as 
strongly as I did, and he wanted to do something about it. And we 
thought that we could do that for the same reason we thought we ought to 
take on the NRA. You know, that if we couldn't do it, coming from where 
we came from with our backgrounds and kind of out of the culture we came 
from, and understanding that opposing elements, who could do it? When 
would it ever get done? And so we did.
    Mr. Wenner. Congratulations. The climate is 1,000 percent different 
than it was.
    The President. You know, if that whole gays in the military thing 
came up today, I don't think it would be handled in the same way. It 
might not be that we could win it today, but today we would get a 
civilized response, and we'd have a long study. There would be hearings. 
People would handle this straight. It wouldn't just be a--it would be 
handled in a whole different way today. The climate has changed, I 
think, rather dramatically.

Boy Scouts

    Mr. Wenner. What about what's going on with the Boy Scouts? Were you 
disappointed with the Supreme Court decision, and what do you think you, 
as President, can do about that?
    The President. Well, I can't do anything as President about the 
Supreme Court decision.
    Mr. Wenner. Were you disappointed with it--not about the decision 
but about the Boy Scouts?
    The President. I think the Boy Scouts were wrong. I think what the 
Boy Scouts were reacting to was one of these stereotypes for which there 
is no evidence whatever, which is that adult--gay adults are more likely 
to abuse children than straight adults, sexually. I think that's what 
was going on. It's a stereotype. It's not true. There is no evidence to 
support it. But I think that--I think that's what was behind that. The 
Scouts were scared. Now, apparently, the Girl Scouts have no such 
prohibitions and have had no known problems.
    Mr. Wenner. Well, there are less gay girls than there are gay guys--
Girl Scouts.
    The President. I'm not sure about that.
    Mr. Wenner. I don't know. I'm just bullshitting. [Laughter]
    The President. I doubt that. [Laughter]

[[Page 2996]]

    Mr. Wenner. You're smart. You are smart, Mr. President. [Laughter]
    Is there something--doesn't the President have an official capacity 
with the Boy Scouts as, like, an honorary chairperson or something like 
that?
    The President. Oh, yes. And the gay groups asked me--not the gay 
groups, the press asked me if I would--whether I should resign from 
that. The President is always the honorary chairman of the Boy Scouts. 
And it's going to be interesting when we have our first woman President, 
if they make her the honorary chair of the Girl Scouts, or she gets to 
be the honorary chair of the Boy Scouts. [Laughter] That will be a kick. 
[Laughter]
    Anyway, and I decided I shouldn't, and I think that's right. Because 
I think that--first, I think the Scouts do a world of good, and in our 
time they have begun to be more active in the cities, which I think is 
really important, to go into a lot of these places where the kids don't 
have a lot of family or community support. And I think that it's near 
the end of my term, so it would just be like a symbolic thing that 
would, in my view, probably cause more harm than good.
    And I think it's better for me to say I disagree with the position 
they took and try to persuade them to change their position, which I 
hope they will do, because I think----
    Mr. Wenner. It seems like there are so many States and communities 
that are moving to pressure them.
    The President. To change?
    Mr. Wenner. Yes.
    The President. Yes, I think there should be a lot of grassroots 
pressure on them to change. But that's where they will change.
    Mr. Wenner. That's a surprise.
    The President. That's where they'll change. They'll change at the 
grassroots level. But what's happening is--look, the overwhelming thing 
which changes people's attitudes on these issues is personal contact, 
personal experience.
    I'll tell you a little story. When we did the gays in the military 
thing, I got--not my pollster, another guy that I knew sent me a poll he 
had done saying this is a political disaster for you, and here's why--
but that's not the reason, the point I'm telling you. The polls showed 
by 48 to 45, people agreed with my position in 1993.
    But when asked, do you strongly--so I won it, 48-45. But among those 
who felt intensely, I lost it 36-18 or 15--36-15.
    Mr. Wenner. Not a single-cause vote at all.
    The President. No, but for the antis, it was a single-issue vote. 
For the pros, it was, ``You know, I'm broadminded; I've got a lot of 
other things on my mind.''
    Press Secretary Siewert. They're still mad at Cheney for what he 
said the other day.
    The President. Yes. What did Cheney say?
    Press Secretary Siewert. He wasn't hard over against--he wasn't hard 
enough over against gay marriage or civil unions.
    The President. Let me make the larger point. But in this poll, 
interestingly enough--now, again, this was '93--there was not a huge 
gender gap; there was not even a huge regional gap, as you might expect 
with the South being way bigger than anyplace else. There were only two 
big gaps. People who identified themselves as evangelical Christians 
were 72-22 against my position. People who said yes to the question, 
``Have you personally known a gay person?'' were 66-33 for my position.
    So this is a matter of personal experience, and the country will 
come to this. They will come to the right place on this. Most gay people 
kept their sexual preference secret for a long time. A lot of venerable 
institutions in society that worry about their respectability and 
impact--and the Boy Scouts is such a venerable institution--what they're 
really dealing with is people coming out much more than affirmative 
prejudice.
    It's like, ``Hey, let's go back to the way it used to be where 
people didn't say and I didn't have to deal with this.'' That's what I 
believe, anyway. Because I remember--I grew up in a southern town. One 
of my teachers was gay. There was a gay doctor in my hometown that some 
people knew and didn't talk about.
    So we're dealing with a huge kind of--and this goes to the core of 
how people think about themselves and how you work through

[[Page 2997]]

all this. We'll get there. We'll get there. But it's a matter of 
personal contact.

Richard Nixon

    Mr. Wenner. In your first year in office, you regularly talked with 
Richard Nixon. What did you two talk about, and what were your 
impressions?
    The President. He came up here. Do you remember that?
    Mr. Wenner. Vaguely.
    The President. He came to the White House. I had Nixon back at the 
White House. I've got a letter that I treasure that Nixon wrote me about 
Russia a month to the day before he died. And it was--how old was he 
then, 80, 81?
    Mr. Wenner. Yes.
    The President. It was really a lucid, eloquent letter. Have you ever 
seen that letter, Jake?
    Press Secretary Siewert. No.
    The President. You know, it was sort of his take on where Russia was 
and--the early part of my Presidency.
    Press Secretary Siewert. He went to Russia right before he died.
    The President. That's correct. He went there. He came back. He wrote 
me a letter about where he thought things were, and a month later he was 
gone.
    Well, I had him back here. I just thought that I ought to do it. He 
lived kind of in the--he had lived what I thought was a fundamentally 
constructive life in his years out of the White House. He had written 
all these books. He tried to--and he tried to be a constructive force in 
world affairs. And I thought that he had paid quite a high price for 
what he did, and I just thought it would be a good thing for the country 
to invite him back.
    Mr. Wenner. So when he came up, what was it like when he came here? 
Was that the first time you had met him, in a way that--spend any time?
    The President. Actually it's funny, because I had had two other 
chances in my life to meet him. We were somewhere in 1969--we were at a 
dinner. I was working here in the summer--1970--and there was a dinner 
where he was, and I didn't go shake hands with him, because I was young 
and mad about the Vietnam war.
    And then in the 1980's sometime, we were in the same hotel in Hong 
Kong. We were staying in the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. I was there 
on a trade mission, and I was supposed to meet him, and somehow or 
another it got messed up. I can't remember what happened.
    Mr. Wenner. But when he came here, what was that like? What was he 
like? He was kind of a stiff guy, right?
    The President. Yes. He met my daughter, who was then going to 
Sidwell, and his mother was a Quaker, and I think his children went 
there, or at least had some association with Quaker schools. So he had 
this long talk with Chelsea about--who was then 13--about Sidwell and 
Quaker schools. But it was rather touching, because he seemed still, 
after all this time, somewhat ill at ease in personal conversations with 
people he didn't know. But it was obvious to me that he had thought 
about what he would say when he met my daughter.
    Mr. Wenner. How was he like to you? I mean, did he treat you like 
the young man, or was he nervous?
    The President. He sort of identified--it's interesting, he told me 
he identified with me because he thought the press had been too hard on 
me in '92 and that I had refused to die, and he liked that. He said a 
lot of life was just hanging on. So we had a good talk about that. 
[Laughter]
    But I found it interesting--I always thought that he could have 
been--he did some good things, and I always thought he could have been a 
great President if he had been more, somehow, trusting of the American 
people, you know. I thought that somewhere way back there, his--
something happened in terms of his ability to just feel at home, at ease 
with the ebb and flow of human life and popular opinion.
    And I think also, some of his weaknesses were reinforced by the way 
he rose to national prominence, because he got elected to Congress by 
convincing people Jerry Voorhees was soft on communism, and he got 
elected to the Senate by convincing people that Helen Gahagan Douglas 
was soft on communism. Then he busted Alger Hiss and got to be Vice 
President when he was, I don't know, 38 years old--37. He was just a 
kid.

[[Page 2998]]

Because he was only--Kennedy was 43 and Nixon was 46, I think. Nixon was 
my age. Nixon would have been, had he won in '60, would have been as 
young as I was when he got elected.
    So I think all of a sudden, boom, one term in the Congress, a couple 
years as a Senator, boom, you're Vice President, 8 years as Vice 
President, and how did you do this? You did this by sort of whipping 
popular opinion up into this frenzy by demonizing your opponent as being 
a little pink.
    And I think that kind of reinforced some of his weaknesses. Whereas, 
if he had had to run like I did, in a little State, where you had to go 
to every country crossroads, people expect you to run the Governor's 
office like a country store, and you were used to brutal campaigns and 
used to trusting people to sort of see through them, if you fought them 
out hard enough, I think it might have rounded him in a different way. I 
think it might have prepared him a little.
    Mr. Wenner. By all accounts, he was a nicer guy before the Jerry 
Voorhees campaign--and that there is something in that. And it wasn't 
even an idea he liked.
    The President. Well, look, when he ran for President, he got 35 
percent of the black vote. If he had a good record on civil rights--and 
for a Republican, he had a good record in the House and the Senate. And 
you know, there is no--when he got to be President, he signed the EPA 
and OSHA and a lot of other stuff. The guy had some--and he had a very 
fertile policy mind. He could get out of his ideological box. Remember, 
it was Nixon that imposed wage and price controls in 1971.
    Mr. Wenner. And effectively.
    The President. He understood that. He understood that only a 
Republican could go to China.

Nation-Building Presidents

    Mr. Wenner. Which Presidents do you feel the most affinity for, in 
terms of the way--the problems they faced and the way they've handled 
them? We spoke a little bit about the similarity with Teddy Roosevelt. 
Are there any others that you feel a particular kinship to?
    The President. Well, I think Roosevelt and Wilson--except I didn't 
have a war, thank God. But Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had the same--
during that whole period, they were dealing with the kinds of challenges 
that I have dealt with, both at home and around the world. And so I 
identified with them a lot.
    There are a lot of others that I like, but I think Harry Truman, in 
a funny way--even though most of the ideas, like the U.N. and the 
international institutions, a lot of them were hatched and germinated 
when Roosevelt was still alive--Truman also had to create a new era, had 
to organize a world where our commitment to the world was not an option 
after the Second World War. But we had to create a set of international 
institutions where we could be leaders, but in which we were also 
interdependent. And that's what not only the U.N. but also NATO, the 
Marshall plan, and the Bretton Woods institutions that have been--that 
we've tried so hard to modify in my time.
    And Truman--I liked Truman a lot. I'm from Arkansas, and we border 
Missouri. I was raised on Harry Truman.
    Mr. Wenner. The McCulloch book made him look just great.
    The President. Yes, it did. David McCulloch did a great job on that 
book. But I think he was pretty great. If you read Merle Miller's 
``Plain Speaking''--it's a much earlier book--it also made him look 
pretty good, and he was an old man when he did a lot of that talking. 
But he was pretty great.
    Mr. Wenner. ----across the street from his house, in the Hay Adams 
Hotel, walk across the street and come to work.
    The President. Yes.
    Mr. Wenner. I mean, those are the--the modern Presidents. And you 
just gave a speech about sort of identifying a progressive tradition of 
which you feel that you are a part of and trying to sort of consciously 
come to terms with the idea of----
    The President. Have you read--Wilson and FDR, and it ends in 
Johnson--I can't remember if he put Truman or Kennedy in it or not--but 
this whole sort of tradition of progressivism, of using Government as an 
instrument of social justice and economic progress. And so they were--
Princeton,

[[Page 2999]]

where obviously--where Woodrow Wilson was president, did a seminar, or a 
2-day symposium, excuse me, on the Progressive Era, on the Presidencies 
of Roosevelt and Wilson. So they asked me to come and speak about that 
and about the relevance of that for the work I had done. So I talked 
about that. But I also said that they were part of a larger tradition 
that I also felt that this time was a part of, which was defining the 
Union, defining what America was.
    In the beginning of this country, there was a big debate. When we 
started the--after we ratified the Constitution, there was a huge debate 
early on between George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John 
Marshall on the one hand, and Thomas Jefferson and all his allies on the 
other, about whether we would have a strong nation and what did that 
mean. And you know, John Marshall subsequently became Chief Justice, and 
wrote all the great nation-building decisions of the first 20 years of 
the 19th century.
    But even before that--and Alexander Hamilton you remember, wanted to 
build a great, strong national financial system. George Washington 
supported him. That's what the Federalists were. They wanted a Federal 
Government that was strong. The Republicans wanted more than the 
Articles of Confederation, but not all that much more. Now, as I said, 
when Thomas Jefferson got elected President, he was glad the other side 
won, because he used that to buy Louisiana and send Lewis and Clark out, 
which are two of the most important things in the first half of the 19th 
century that were done.
    And Louisiana cost only $15 million, but that was one year's Federal 
budget at that time. Can you imagine what the Congress would say if I 
said, ``Hey, I've got a deal for you, and it just costs $1.9 trillion. 
Let's go do this''? So that was the first battle.
    The second battle was the battle to define the Union in terms of who 
was part of it. That's what Abraham Lincoln, you know, lived and died 
for. Gary Wills has argued brilliantly that he, in effect, rewrote the 
Constitution, the common meaning of the Constitution, for the Gettysburg 
Address, and brought it closer to the natural meaning of the words--the 
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. So that was the second 
time.
    Then the third time we had to redefine the Union was under Woodrow 
Wilson--Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, whom we had--one, we moved 
into an industrial era, and we had this huge wave of immigrants coming 
into our cities, into our factories. And we had to define, number one, 
what the role of the Nation was in incorporating all these people and 
defining the conditions of civilized life--child labor, minimum work 
week, all that stuff. And number two, what the role of the Government 
was in mediating between the industrial society and the civil society, 
which was the antitrust laws, in an economic sense, and in a larger 
sense, all that land Teddy Roosevelt set aside, when people first began 
to worry about pollution and using natural resources and all that. Teddy 
Roosevelt partly was able to be our first great conservation President, 
because people could see that growth in pollution could take away some 
of our natural resources.
    And then, of course, Wilson built on that with a social agenda and 
then defining our responsibilities in the world in terms of World War I 
and his argument for the League of Nations, which ultimately prevailed, 
even though he lost it. So that was the second great time.
    And then the third great time was Roosevelt in the Depression and in 
World War II, and afterward, Roosevelt and Truman had this--excuse me, 
the fourth time. You had the beginning, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and 
Woodrow Wilson. Then you had the fourth great period, was this period, 
because what they were doing is, they had first to essentially bring the 
Government into the heart of the management of the economy. That's 
what--the Federal Reserve and all that had been created, but we didn't 
really manage the economy until the Depression. Then there was this 
whole idea that the responsibility of the Government to help build and 
sustain a middle class society, everything from Social Security to the 
GI bill.
    Then, after the war, what they had to do was create the conditions 
of permanent involvement of America in the world, because Teddy 
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson got

[[Page 3000]]

us involved in the world in a leadership way, and then we just walked 
away from it and paid the consequences. So the cold war was on us after 
the war. So basically Roosevelt and Harry Truman built the structures 
within which America could lead and operate in an interdependent world.
    And I would argue that this period is the fifth great period of 
nation-defining. Because we have to define what the role of Government 
is in an information global society, both in terms of empowering people 
to make the most of their own lives, dealing with a far greater array of 
racial and religious and social diversity than we've ever had before, 
and dealing with a world that is very different than the world of the 
cold war, or the world before that that we used to move in and out of.
    So we had to have the permanence of involvement that we had in the 
cold war, with a greater degree of interdependence than we had in the 
cold war, because it's not a bipolar world. So we have a different set 
of challenges. And my election spawned a reaction in the Gingrich 
revolution, or the Gingrich counterrevolution, where if you go back and 
look at all their arguments for weakening the Federal Government, for 
toughening stands against immigrants, for turning away from the civil 
rights claims of gays, for refusing to strictly enforce the civil rights 
laws, and strengthen laws protecting women, the whole social and 
economic agenda they had--and Government is bad; the private sector is 
good--basically, they were trying to rewrite the Progressive Era that we 
built up over this time, and we, I think, essentially defeated them in 
three stages.
    One was when they shut the Government down, and we beat their budget 
back. Then we went on to get a bipartisan welfare reform and Balanced 
Budget Act and the biggest expansion in child health--under the Gingrich 
Congress, the biggest expansion in child health since Medicaid. Two was 
impeachment. And three was when, after Gingrich was gone, I vetoed their 
big tax cut last year, and the public stuck with me.
    Now, I don't know if you saw it, but earlier this week Al Hunt had a 
piece on Rick Santorum saying, where have all the conservatives gone, in 
pointing out that all these guys with these rightwing records were out 
there running away from what they did, running as the new moderates. And 
in a way, that's a form of flattery.
    But the point is, every forward progress in this country has always 
sparked a reaction. And they won some of their reactions. I didn't 
prevail on health care. I didn't prevail on gays in the military. I 
haven't won every fight I've been in. But the big things that would have 
taken us down and taken the country in a different direction--the budget 
and Government shutdown, impeachment, and the big tax cut--those three 
things were the seminal battles, and we prevailed.
    And if you look at it, if you look at the arguments that we're 
having, you can go all the way back to the beginning, and it's the same 
sort of thing that you saw in the fight that Washington and Marshall and 
Hamilton had with Jefferson and his crowd; that Lincoln had with the 
people that were against him, and you know, divided the country; that 
Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had with the people against them; 
that FDR and Truman had with the people against them.
    Interestingly enough, little piece of anecdotal evidence, there was 
a fabulous article in a paper the other day about all the people, 
Republicans all over America giving money to this Rick Lazio, running 
against Hillary. And there's a story about him going to--did I tell you 
this? In the New York Times, in the story about it, about how everybody 
that hates me or hates her or hates us both, this is their big deal, so 
they want to give money to Lazio.
    So he's at a fundraiser in Alabama--Alabama. And there's a guy that 
says, ``I just can't stand him.'' He says, ``She's a carpetbagger''--and 
he didn't mean to New York; he meant to Arkansas--``and he is a 
scalawag.'' Now, the scalawags were the Southerners who supported the 
Union in the Civil War. And after the Civil War, all the Southerners who 
fought for the Confederacy were disenfranchised. So the only people that 
could vote were the scalawags, the carpetbaggers, and the blacks.
    So that guy was actually exhibit A of my argument that I'm making. 
He was absolutely right. If I'd been there then, that's exactly what I 
would have been.

[[Page 3001]]

    And one of the reasons they dislike me so intensely, that crowd, is 
they think I betrayed--they worked very hard, under the cover of Reagan, 
being quite nice, to basically have the old, conservative, white 
southern male culture dominate the political life of America. And they 
see me as an apostate, which I welcome. I mean, we have this--so when I 
take on the NRA or do something for gay rights, to them it's worse if I 
do it. It's like a Catholic being pro-choice. That's sort of that deal.
    So when he said I was a scalawag, the guy knew exactly what he was 
saying, and he did--for anybody that read it, did a great service, 
because he was absolutely accurate. I have no quarrel with what he said. 
That's basically the great fault line we've been fighting through.
    Mr. Wenner. Like Roosevelt, you're a traitor to your class?
    The President. Yes.
    Mr. Wenner. Like FDR?
    The President. Yes. A traitor to my caste. [Laughter] But it's very 
interesting, when you see sometime--when an adversary of yours says 
something that you 100 percent agree with, the guy is absolutely right. 
That's why he's against me, and that's what I've tried to be in my whole 
life. I mean, I had a grandfather with a fourth grade education, fifth 
grade education, who was for integration of the schools. I mean, that's 
who we are.
    And we were still having the Lincoln fight in the South, when I was 
a boy in school.
    Mr. Wenner. They're trying to drag you out of here.
    The President. I know. We'll finish.
    Mr. Wenner. We've got two and a half pages done. [Laughter]
    The President. It's good, though. Just set up another time. I owe it 
to him. We'll do one more. I just love Rolling Stone. They've been so 
good to me.
    Mr. Wenner. I'd just like the long view and your philosophy about 
where we're going, what you've seen, and what you think about America. I 
want to ask you questions about, you know, what have you learned about 
the American people. You've had a unique exposure to them that nobody 
else has ever had.
    The President. I'll tell you this. When I leave office, on January 
20th, I will leave even more idealistic than I was the day I took the 
oath of office, 8 years earlier.
    Mr. Wenner. Why?
    The President. Because the American people almost--they are 
fundamentally good, and they almost always get it right if they have 
enough time and enough information. Now, they've got to have enough 
information. They've got to have enough time. They have to have a way to 
access it.
    But the biggest problem we have in public discourse today is, 
there's plenty of information out there, but you don't know what's true 
and what's not, and it's hard to access it. It's all kind of flying at 
you at once. It's hard to have time to digest it. But if people have the 
information, they have time to digest it, they nearly always get it 
right. And if that weren't the case, we wouldn't be around here after 
226 years.
    I'm glad to see you.

Note: The interview was taped at 3:10 p.m. in the Solarium at the White 
House, and the transcript was released by the Office of the Press 
Secretary on December 7. In his remarks, the President referred to Prime 
Minister Ehud Barak of Israel; United Nations Secretary-General Kofi 
Annan; Chairman Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority; Prime 
Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom; historian and author Gary 
Wills; and journalist Al Hunt. A tape was not available for verification 
of the content of this interview.