[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 51 (Monday, December 25, 2000)]
[Pages 3146-3153]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Interview With Ellis Rubinstein of Science Magazine

December 6, 2000

Government and Science

    Mr. Rubinstein. Our thinking is, you're finishing your second term 
at the millennium. We're in a new millennium, so you have a lot to look 
back on that would be interesting. We know you're a visionary, so we're 
interested in what you think about the future. I thought that we would 
start with a couple of philosophical things before getting into the 
practical things, because I think it would be interesting for our folks 
to hear you address the following issue.
    Some of us would make the case that science is becoming such a core 
part of our individual human lives that something is actually 
transformed from the way it was some decades ago. That is to say, you 
almost can't turn around without needing to have information about 
science. I don't know if that's something that you feel, but I was 
hoping that you would address the notion about whether you feel that the 
impact that science can have now on society, individuals, or government 
is substantially greater in your mind than it was when you were younger 
and if that, in effect, has some sort of question----
    The President. Well, first, let me say I think, at a minimum, we are 
much more aware of the impact of science on our daily lives than we were 
when I was young. I'll just give you just one example. You just take the 
space program, for example, where we--if you go back and look at the 
rhetoric of President Kennedy and the space program, we had to get out 
there, and we worried about--we didn't want the Russians to beat us into 
space, and could they do something negative back here?
    And then you look at the rhetoric around what we're saying about the 
space station. We've got 16 nations working together. And we want it 
because it will give us some sense, looking back at Earth, about what's 
happening to the environment on Earth, how to handle climate change, 
what else should we do about global warming. It will help us in our 
studies in a gravity-free environment of all kinds of biological issues, 
how proteins form, what happens to tissues, all these kinds of things. 
It will help us in our efforts to resolve remaining questions in the 
material science area, which have been so pivotal to our growth of 
productivity and economic strength. So if you think about the range of 
subjects that are part of kind of the basic language of space research, 
as compared to where it was 35, 40 years ago, it's just one example of 
that.
    And of course, most people didn't know there was any such thing as a 
human genome; most people still don't know what nanotechnology is. But 
if you combine the sequencing of the human gene and the capacity to 
identify genetic variations that lead to various kinds of cancers with 
the potential of nanotechnology, you get to the point where, in the 
imagination, you're identifying cancers when--assuming you have the 
screening technologies right--there are only a few cells coagulated 
together in this mutinous way, so that you raise the prospect of 
literally having 100 percent cure and prevention rate for every kind of 
cancer, which is something that would have been just unimaginable 
before.
    Those are just two examples, and I could give you lots of others. 
And I think this whole--the inevitable increasing preoccupation of the 
world with climate change--yesterday I set aside 70 percent of the reefs 
that the United States has for protection in the northern Hawaiian 
Islands--I think that will lead inevitably--when people start thinking 
about the prospect that the sugarcane fields in Louisiana or the Florida 
Everglades could flood or agriculture could move north, people will get 
a lot more of the science.
    And the other thing I would say is, I think that the globalization 
of society has made us all more vulnerable to each other's epidemics and 
viruses.
    Mr. Rubinstein. More bioterrorism?
    The President. Yes. And that's the final point I was going to make, 
that I think that

[[Page 3147]]

you've got--that science has become essential, indispensable to dealing 
with national security--bioterrorism, chemical warfare, cyberterrorism.
    So for each of those reasons, I think the whole--the language of 
science and the necessity of understanding at least the basic concepts 
will make science a much more pervasive part of the average citizen's 
life in the next 20 to 30 years than it ever has been.
    Mr. Rubinstein. So following on that--I thought you might feel that 
way--one of the things that one observes is that most international 
leaders are trained as lawyers, or they come up in the governments. We 
tend to have science not in the key place in the ministries, often. And 
so I thought maybe you could give our folks a sense of you, yourself--I 
think perhaps--or at least some people thought that in the first term 
you weren't that familiar with scientific issues, maybe uncomfortable 
with them, not sure that you understood them as well. But certainly 
since I've seen you, for example, at the millennium dinner that your 
wife did on informatics meets genomics, you were so obviously 
enthusiastically involved in the questioning and aware of the stuff. And 
you'd also given a very good talk at the AAAS on the genetic rights of 
Federal employees and so forth.
    So I'd like to hear both on a personal level--has there been a 
rather marked change in yourself, in your own relationship to what you 
feel you need to know about science? And then in a general sense, what 
do you think that--do you think that governments have to be structured 
in a different way to deal with this world that you've just described?
    The President. Well, let me answer the first question first. First, 
I've always been interested in science issues, but the nature of my life 
was such that I didn't have a lot of time to be consumed with them, 
except the one or two areas where my universities were doing important 
research in Arkansas when I was Governor. And one of the reasons that I 
asked Al Gore to be my Vice President is that he's devoted so much more 
of his life to studying scientific issues and understanding them. And 
one of the reasons I thought and still think he would be a good 
President is that he does understand those things, and he cares about 
them.
    But what happened is, after I got here I began to try to imagine, 
just go through the categories you talked about: What are our 
responsibilities in basic research; how can I make a stronger case? Are 
we going to save the space program or not; if so, what are the arguments 
for it, and what are the real implications of what we'll be doing there? 
What are the national security issues of the 21st century, and how much 
will science play a role in that? And I think we were all shocked at 
that sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, just for example.
    And then, of course, I had to deal with these global--the sweep of 
the age problems: the fact that one-quarter of all the people who die in 
the world today die from AIDS, TB, and malaria; what are the 
implications of the breakdown of public health systems all over the 
world--all of these things. So the more I learned, the more I saw these 
things related one to the other, and the more I began to study and read 
and try to learn so I could get myself comfortable with what I thought 
my responsibilities were at this moment in time.
    Mr. Rubinstein. And do you think, from that experience, that you're 
confident that other countries have structures that are going to allow 
them to be able to react to these kinds of issues?
    The President. I don't know that. But even in this country, what I 
did here was to establish this National Science and Technology Council, 
to get the Cabinet involved, to let my Science Adviser--first Jack 
Gibbons, then Dr. Neal Lane--kind of drive it for me.
    Mr. Rubinstein. I think you only went to one PCAST meeting, though.
    The President. I think, over 8 years, I think I met with them three 
times. I think I did.
    Mr. Rubinstein. Does that say anything about your----
    The President. But I thought about what they did a lot, and 
especially when--some of the members I knew quite well, and I also had 
talks with them. And then some of the specific scientific issues, 
particularly those relating to the national security--and one thing

[[Page 3148]]

we didn't mention, which was the safety of nuclear weapons in the former 
Soviet Union, I spent quite a bit of time on it. And of course, I spent 
an enormous amount of time on the climate change issue.
    But what I would like to see--I would hope the next President would 
think of ways to even further elevate and institutionalize scientific 
concerns. Because I don't think you can sort of separate out science, 
except to say we've got to have a strong basic research budget. And I 
don't see that this is troubling for science. The stock values of dot-
com companies or biotech companies go up and down. That's totally 
predictable and absolutely inevitable. But what it should remind us of 
is that venture capital cannot be expected or even the research budgets 
of big, established corporations cannot be expected to carry the whole 
research and development load for America. So, should we have a 
permanent R&D tax credit? Of course, we should. Will it ever be a 
substitute for basic research? Never--never, at least, in the timeframe 
I can imagine.

President's Accomplishments in Science

    Mr. Rubinstein. So, going down that road, I think we would like to 
ask you what you feel are your big accomplishments. I assume that one of 
the areas that you feel proud of is the amount of funding in basic 
research, but maybe you could give a little more flesh to that idea, of 
what it is that you think it was important to have done, and also after 
that, what frustrations you might have had about it.
    The President. Well, I think, first, I think we did do a great deal 
of good with basic research. There was enormous support in the Congress, 
and among the Republicans as well as the Democrats, for more funding for 
the National Institutes of Health and all related health research. And I 
think it was most--there were some politics in that, because it's easier 
to sell that to voters back home because we all want to live forever. 
But I think a lot of it was genuine. I think men like John Porter, a 
retiring Republican Congressman from Illinois, I think he--his 
commitment was deep and genuine. So I think there was that.
    But we've kept fighting for overall increases. We got the biggest 
increase for the National Science Foundation in history this year. So I 
think we got research back on the national agenda, and big. And you 
know--and we had some unlikely allies. Newt Gingrich, even after he left 
the Congress, continued to speak out for it. So I think that was quite 
important.
    And then, specifically, I think that research and the funding for 
the climate-change-related areas and the development of alternative 
energy sources and energy conservation technologies is profoundly 
important. In the end, that has got to be the answer. We have to be able 
to create wealth with smaller and smaller amounts of greenhouse gas 
emissions. We have to. And you're either going to have alternative 
energy or greater conservation. If India and China have to grow wealthy 
the same way we did, since they will not give up the right to become 
wealthy, we're not going to whip this climate change problem. So I think 
that's important.
    The other new area that I think--I'm glad we continue to support the 
sequencing of the genome and all of the genome research. And we 
identified a couple of the genetic variants that lead to breast cancer 
and other conditions that I think are important. And I think the work 
we've done in nanotechnology in 10, 20 years from now will look very 
big, indeed. I just think that the potential of this is just 
breathtaking, and it will change even the way we think about things like 
calculation or what we're supposed to know how to do. It will--it's 
going to really, I think, have a huge and still underappreciated impact 
on our understanding of human processes and our capacity to do things.

Science Infrastructure

    Mr. Rubinstein. I had heard you talk a little bit off-line with 
somebody at a meeting about how you had come to feel that it was one 
thing to support the disease-related research and the NIH and so forth, 
but it was crucial to support what I guess you call the infrastructure, 
if I remember correctly--I'm not sure--the computing, the physics that 
is now being used in bioinformatics, and so on. I'd rather you would 
tell it.

[[Page 3149]]

    The President. You remember, we had that millennium meeting here----
    Mr. Rubinstein. That's what I was thinking.
    The President. ----where we had Eric Lander here, sort of talking 
about genomics research, and you had Vint Cerf, who sent the first E-
mail to his then profoundly deaf wife 18 years ago, and how they both 
agreed that the sequencing of the genome would have been impossible 
without advances in information technology. And we now know, to make the 
point in even a more personal way, Vint Cerf's wife can now hear because 
she has a deeply embedded hearing device that would have been completely 
inconceivable without information technology, without the ability to 
have a computer chip with greater power on a smaller device.
    So the thing that I kept arguing with the Congress on is that, 
``Look, it's fine. You can't give health research too much money to suit 
me. It's perfectly all right, but you've got to do this other, too.'' 
And this year, I think we've reached a happy accord.
    Mr. Rubinstein. So, related to that, some people give you credit for 
pushing the NSF agenda. Some people wonder why it is, however, that DOD 
research has been cut by--the figure I've seen is 40 percent from the--
which used to support a lot of infrastructure, math and Internet issues 
and so forth.
    The President. First of all, I think a lot of the research is going 
to have dual benefits running back the other way. For many years, it was 
all this defense research which had a lot of nondefense implications. I 
think a lot of the civilian research is going to have a lot of defense 
implications now, because if you think about the kinds of restructuring 
that the Defense Department is going to have to do, an enormous amount 
of it will have to do with information technology and weapon systems and 
troop deployments and intelligence gathering. And I also think that a 
lot of what they will have to do in the fields of chemical and 
biological warfare will be driven in no small measure by nondefense 
research.
    Now, I think the Defense Department, frankly, they had to make some 
very tough calls. In this last election, the Vice President said that he 
would put some more money back into the defense budget. And we began to 
turn the defense budget around a couple of years ago because we thought 
we basically reached the limits of the post-cold-war peace dividend.
    So I think that's something that the next administration will have 
to look at, because we had limited dollars and we tried to put it into 
quality of life, into training, into the basic things that would make 
the force available to meet the challenges of the moment. And maybe, you 
know, maybe it does need some more money.

International Collaboration in Science

    Mr. Rubinstein. I'm going to jump a little bit to international 
issues, because again, I was thinking about you--direction to some 
degree with things that you've done. And I noticed an interesting event, 
that you would never have known about, at Davos when you were there last 
year. I happened to be running some panels there. And before you ever 
got on stage, there was sort of a revolt in the audience of the 
Europeans and the Asians who didn't want to leave, because they had 
gotten seats 3 hours early because they were so excited to see you. And 
when folks wanted to sweep the room, they were afraid they were going to 
lose their seats, you know. And the thing about that was, they refused 
to move. And eventually your guys said okay and relented, and they 
stayed. But what I actually noticed about that was that for hours 
thereafter, people going, ``Yes, finally America had to listen to us.''
    And I think that increasingly I've heard this sort of discussion as 
a sort of subtext, that we're such--we are the only superpower left. And 
if you talk to Europeans and Asians, some of them worry about this sort 
of power that we have and whether we are using it wisely all the time. 
They feel we moralize to them. I think this is not going to be news to 
you.
    So what I thought would be interesting for you to talk about a 
little bit in the science context is, we've actually dropped some 
collaborations with Europeans and Asians on a number of their projects. 
It was hard for the Japanese to get us in their human frontiers program; 
I don't know if you recall that particular thing. We haven't supported 
some of

[[Page 3150]]

the big European initiatives. So in relation to this, what would you 
say, maybe either about your own experience or feelings or what you 
would advise your successor about how science might be used 
internationally for an effort to try to deal with the kinds of feelings 
that our European allies and Asian allies might----
    The President. I think I would advise my successor to do as much to 
fund as much international collaboration as possible. If I could just 
take two examples where it has worked very well, the work that we did 
through the NIH with the human genome project involved several other 
countries. And when we announced the sequencing, we not only had Craig 
Venter here from TIGR from the private effort, we did it jointly with 
Tony Blair and with the Ambassadors of the other countries that were 
involved in the project with us. I don't think there is any question 
that even though there are all kinds of unresolved issues there, that 
the fact that we're doing this together has been a plus.
    To give you another example which I think is profoundly important 
and somewhat controversial, the 16-nation collaboration with the 
international space station I think has been very, very important. I've 
spent a lot of time, as you know, on this space station, and to see what 
the Canadians have done, to see what the Japanese contribution is.
    And the Russians got criticized for not being able to come up with 
the money, but the price of oil collapsed, and they were killed by this 
horrible financial crisis. It gripped Asia and also affected them. I 
think they're getting back on their feet, and I think they'll pay their 
way. But the contributions that they made, based on the Mir and based on 
the fact that they had certain capacities we didn't have, and what we 
learned by working together with them and the nine trips to the Mir we 
took together with them, and the fact that the corollary benefit of 
keeping--I don't know--hundreds and hundreds of their scientists and 
engineers working on a positive international project, instead of being 
picked off by rogue states to help them develop weapons and missile 
technology and things of that kind, I think, were enormous. So I think 
the more that we can make this an instrument of constructive 
interdependence, the better off we're going to do.
    Also, there are a lot of smart folks out there. And I think we have 
to recognize that--when I took office, there weren't all that many 
people that resented us, because they thought our economy was a basket 
case and they were worried about us being too weak. Then, when we had a 
great deal of success, even though we bent over backwards not to lord it 
over anybody, and we did have--we had some inevitable conflicts--our 
desire to end the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, things of that 
kind--that we were criticized when we did it, and then when we didn't go 
in quickly enough in Rwanda, we were criticized. Part of this is 
inevitable. But I think we do have to try to wear our power lightly and 
also with some humility, because there's always a chance we could be 
wrong, number one, and number two, nothing lasts forever.
    Mr. Rubinstein. Are you aware, as President, of the brain drain 
that--the tremendous power we have to get the best young scientists 
coming over here and how few of our young people go over to work now----
    The President. There might be a way for my successor to 
institutionalize a little offset there. For example, you know, I worry 
about that--if you just take in the information technology area, and you 
get out of it--you just forget about the labs, there are 700 companies 
today, in Silicon Valley alone, headed by Indians--700--and just in 
Silicon Valley. It was just stunning, you know? Now a lot of them are 
also active back home.
    But I think there needs to be a way for us to try to share both the 
scientific and the economic benefits of our enormous infrastructure 
here. I'd like to see America used, in that sense, as sort of a global 
lab, but with the ability to send our folks back out, send their people 
who come here back out, finance educational and research exchanges, and 
even, as I said, even operational exchanges. I think that we need to--
this is not a resource we should husband so much as share.
    Mr. Rubinstein. Jiang Zemin--you remind me of Jiang Zemin, because 
he is very proud of his trip to Silicon Valley, where he noticed the 
incredible percentage of the folks

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in one of the companies that he visited who were Chinese born and so 
forth. I know that--I was told by one of the vice presidents at Merc 
that 20 percent of their hires are born in China. But thinking about 
Jiang Zemin, he made the remark that, on a personal level, one of the 
things he was proud of was that he thought he brought some engineering 
expertise and discussions on the highest level. And I was wondering, is 
it really the case that when you guys get together at big events, that 
science is even discussed amongst Presidents?
    The President. Oh, yes.
    Mr. Rubinstein. Yes?
    The President. Of course. I've worked with Jiang Zemin for 8 years 
now, and I have a very high regard for him. He's a highly intelligent 
man, and he also--he speaks Romanian, Russian, English. He lived in 
Romania for a while. I think he speaks a little German.
    Mr. Rubinstein. He said very nice things about Hillary.
    The President. He did?
    Mr. Rubinstein. Yes, because he said he was sitting next to her----
    The President. Yes, he likes her.
    Mr. Rubinstein. He thinks she's great.
    The President. He is quite proud of his training. And he tries to 
bring that perspective to a lot of what he does. So we've had a lot of 
discussions about it. We've also had some arguments about it. I've had 
some--I even had the Chinese Environmental Minister thank me, on my trip 
to China, for doing a climate change event because, he said, ``We've got 
to convince people that you're not trying to slow our economic growth.'' 
This really is a whole different way of looking at the world.
    Mr. Rubinstein. So with Blair and Chirac and so forth, occasionally 
science issues are actually discussed?
    The President. Yes. I talk to Tony Blair about them a lot. And of 
course, we're dealing with them in more contentious areas, too. Within 
Europe, what do they do about mad cow disease, vis-a-vis the United 
States? What do they do about genetically modified organisms? How do you 
balance political pressures with scientific reality? How do you define 
scientific reality? Do they need a European Union-wide equivalent of the 
FDA?
    Mr. Rubinstein. Genetically modified foods and whatnot?
    The President. Yes, because all these things are really--these are 
hot issues now. I didn't even mention that earlier when we started, 
about all the things that will require a higher level of scientific 
knowledge, but that's another example. I mean, all this controversy over 
how we produce food and all that, that's going to be--that's not going 
away any time soon.

Science and Math Education

    Mr. Rubinstein. Well, you sort of have gotten to some of the 
questions I was going to ask you about the future. I thought maybe I'd 
just ask you a couple of quick ones, and I don't know, I don't want to 
take too much of your time. But I would really like--I know you and Mrs. 
Clinton have been very interested in education. I don't know to what 
degree you're familiar with the state of science education, and I don't 
know if you have some feelings about--we just had the latest report come 
out about young kids in math and science being--I think we were 18th or 
something. I don't remember myself what the number is now. So I was 
wondering if you have some strong feelings about the situation. I know 
you do about education in general, but in science in particular?
    The President. Well, I think there are basically two issues. One is, 
in a country as big and diverse as ours, how do you get more kids to 
take math and science courses at more advanced levels? And secondly, if 
you could do that, how would you have enough qualified teachers to do 
it? I think--the one thing I would say is that some States--I noticed 
California passed a really sweeping initiative this last year to try to 
give bonuses to people who will enroll--I think that what you're going 
to see inevitably in the future is that you will have to have more 
alternative certification mechanisms, and you'll have to pay people 
more.
    I also think at the advanced levels of science and math, you may 
even see a lot of high school systems operating the way colleges do now 
and bringing people in to teach one course or something like that. I 
think that you're going to--since we are going to have a critical mass 
of people out there in

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America who know the things that all of our kids now need to know, but 
virtually 100 percent of them are making a lot more money than they can 
make teaching school, you're either going to have to get people who make 
a lot of money and then can retire--I have a friend who's got a daughter 
who made, I don't know, $30, 40 million in her early thirties or late 
twenties in a software enterprise, who's now just cashed out and spends 
all of her time teaching inner-city schools.
    But you're either going to have to find tons of people like that; or 
you're going to have to find ways to finance the education of young 
people to do this work for 4 or 5 years and just recognize you're only 
going to have them for 4 or 5 years; or you're going to have to have, 
like in junior and senior year at least, have people who have this 
knowledge come in and teach a course just like a--someone would come 
into a college and teach one course.
    In other words, we're going to have to be, I think, flexible if we 
want to lift the level of performance in America above where it is now, 
because we have a lot of poor kids, a lot of poor school districts, very 
diverse student body, and a huge number of kids. I mean, most of these 
places that are doing very well have a much more--either a more 
homogenous or smaller, or both, student body and a system that's much 
more nationalized and much easier to control.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

    Mr. Rubinstein. Could you just tell me a couple things about--how do 
you feel about, right now, about why NASA, which you're very enthused 
about, continues to get a sort of flat budget? Is this a wise thing at 
this point?
    The President. Well, first of all, I think that NASA, when I took 
office, needed to show that it knew how to economize and could be 
managed better. I think Dan Goldin has done that. I think they have 
proved that they can do more with less. I mean, they got the space 
station up 3 years ahead of time.
    Mr. Rubinstein. But they've also had some disasters, which some 
people----
    The President. They've also had some disasters, but look--I mean, 
they're out there fooling around with Mars. You're going to have some 
disasters. You know, if you want something with 100 percent success 
rate, you've got to be involved in something besides space exploration. 
You're never going to have that. I think the important thing is that, 
from our point of view, NASA responded in an honest, up-front way to 
their difficulties with the two Mars probes that didn't work so well, 
the lander mission and the other one. And they're going forward.
    And I would like to see their budget increase now, because I think 
that they have proved, after years and years of flat budgets, that they 
have squeezed a lot of blood out of this turnip. They have really 
restructured themselves. They have gotten rid of a lot of their 
relatively inefficient costs. And I believe that now is the time at 
least to let them start growing with inflation again, if they're going 
to be able to handle their missions.
    And I think that what we'll have to see over the next few years is 
where we go with Mars, because you've just got these new pictures, and 
it looks like there was water there closer to the surface more recently 
in time than we thought. So we need to keep taking pictures. We need to 
keep trying to--not withstanding what happened to the lander module, we 
need to find some way to put a vehicle down there that can actually 
physically get some stuff off the surface and bring it back to us.
    We need to keep--and then I think the rest of the space budget may 
be in some measure determined by exactly what is going on at the space 
station, how much progress we'll be making in the whole--you know, 
there's seven, eight, nine areas of basic research that I think are 
likely to have enormous advances as a result of what's going on there. 
And I think that in these two things, more than anything else, will 
dictate how much money NASA needs and what they need it for.

President's Future Plans

    Mr. Rubinstein. So, now that you've released your inner nerd, my 
last question is, do you think you'll do anything related to science in 
your next years?
    The President. When I leave here?
    Mr. Rubinstein. Yes.

[[Page 3153]]

    The President. Oh, I certainly hope so. I'm very interested in 
continuing to work in the climate change area in particular and doing 
what I can to convince the political systems of countries that have to 
participate in this that there are economically beneficial ways to do 
the right thing for the global environment. And in order to do that, we 
have to continue the basic research into alternative fuels and 
alternative technologies. There is no way to solve this over the long 
run unless you can get more growth out of fewer greenhouse gases. There 
is no way to do it. And so, on that alone, I will continue to be very 
interested.
    The other thing that I'm particularly personally interested in is 
the breakdown of public health systems in so many countries, and how it 
disables them from dealing with things like the AIDS epidemic and other 
problems, and what we can do to sort of put that back together again. So 
I expect those are two areas that I'll be involved in for a long time to 
come, if I have the opportunity to be.
    Mr. Rubinstein. Thanks very much. I hope that we can ask you some 
questions about it later, when you're doing those things.
    The President. Thanks.

Note: The interview was taped at 4:20 p.m. in the Oval Office at the 
White House for later broadcast, and the transcript was released by the 
Office of the Press Secretary on December 21. In his remarks, the 
President referred to Eric Lander, director, Whitehead/MIT Center for 
Genome Research; Vinton G. Cerf, senior vice president of Internet 
architecture and technology, MCI WorldCom, and his wife, Sigrid; J. 
Craig Venter, founder, The Institute for Genome Research, and president 
and chief scientific officer, Celera Genomics Corp.; Prime Minister Tony 
Blair of the United Kingdom; President Jiang Zemin of China; and 
President Jacques Chirac of France. A tape was not available for 
verification of the content of this interview.