So I want to make sure that when we put this document out, it is in the form of a book which can be useful and have something to say and move the conversation and the efforts beyond where we were in the Presidential initiative on race. So you should not draw any conclusions other than that I want to be personally involved in it and I simply have not had the time to give it the effort that it deserves. Is it based on the panel's hearings and so forth? It is based on the panel's hearings; it is based on very long conversations I had with the people that worked on the draft for me, with Mr. Edley and Terry Edmonds and others. We had some long, long sessions. I went through everything I wanted in the book. I went through some things I wanted to emphasize more than were emphasized in the year that the panel was publicly meeting we were having the race dialogs. But I think it is very important, but it is got to be, first of all, mine. It is got to reflect what I believe and where I think we need to go. And secondly, it needs to move the ball forward a little bit. Those of you who covered the speech this morning at Georgetown will remember that the young woman from Alabama who introduced me talked about how the initiative on race got her involved in something in her local community. Another one of the Presidential scholars, when she walked by me this morning, said, I want to know how I can get involved. I am still interested in this. So I think there is still a great deal of interest in this in the country and maybe especially among our younger people. So you should not yes, there are some differences of opinion among the people who had input in it, but that is not what is caused us not to put it out. What is caused us not to put it out is that I have not had the time to give to it, to be very careful and relaxed and thoughtful about how I say what it is I want to say to the country about this. ENTITY, this morning and again just now, you made references to a summer of progress, and you were calling for bipartisanship to try to accomplish things in the next few months. I am just wondering, with the 2000 campaign obviously heating up and growing in intensity, do you feel there is more of an urgency to act right away, within the coming months?

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Well, for one thing, I think it would be to everyone's advantage to continue to make progress. As I always tell the Republicans and Democrats, no matter how much we do, there will still be plenty of things on which there is honest disagreement, over which the next election can be fought. That is just in the nature of things. That is healthy; that is good; that is a two-party system in America. But we are all hired by the American people to work here day-in and day-out, week-in and week-out, and we make a grave mistake and it is almost never good politics to do the wrong thing, that is, to take a pass on making progress when you can do it. This is a very unusual moment where we have sustained prosperity, the longest peacetime expansion in our history. We have gone from having the biggest deficits in history to having the biggest surpluses in history. And yet, we have these looming demographic challenges of Social Security and Medicare. And we have these big issues that are right before us now, the ones I mentioned on which there is basically broad agreement. So I think that it would be good for America and, therefore, good for everyone involved if we go ahead and do this. I think, obviously, the closer you get to the election, perhaps the more difficult it will be. But I expect I will make you a prediction here I expect that we will get some good things done in the year 2000, before the Congress recesses finally for the election then. I expect to keep working right up to the very end, and I think that we will continue to make progress. But the most important thing is the attitude of the main players in Congress, insofar as Congress has to play a role in this. ENTITY, in the wake of California Congressman Christopher Cox's study of spying in the U.S. and, specifically, Chinese attempts to spy, you asked your Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to look into this, and it came back with a central recommendation that you separate the Nation's nuclear labs from the Energy Department. Your Energy Secretary seems to be resisting that. Do you still maintain that you were not told anything about these Chinese efforts to spy at the Nation's nuclear labs during your administration, sir? Let us go back to the first question there are two separate questions. I read Senator Rudman's report.

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I thought it was quite interesting and had a lot of very helpful analyses of how this problem developed. either that the labs could be put under an independent board, or that the labs should be taken out of the present hierarchy of organization because of the culture the committee the Rud-man group talked a lot about the culture of the labs and its resistance to oversight. He said another alternative might be to take it out from under the present organizational structure and make it directly answerable the labs directly answerable to the Secretary's Office. And he posed those things in the alternative. I have asked our people to look at it. I have talked to Secretary Richardson about it. I think everyone recognizes that he has worked very hard to deal with the underlying security issues, which are the most important things. And I think we all just ought to try to get together and work out what the best organizational structure is, and I expect that we will be I expect to have a chance to talk to him about that and to work on it. But I think the Rudman report was a service to the country, and I think that Bill Richardson is doing a good job on trying to implement the security measures that are necessary. Now, on the second question, I went back I have been interested in this question, and I went back and looked at exactly what I said. And what I said was that I did not suspect that any actual breaches of security had occurred during my tenure. Since then, we have learned of the offloading of the computer by Mr. Lee, from the secured computers into his personal computers. That is something we know now that I did not know then. But I think my choice of wording was poor. What I should have said was I did not know of any specific instance of espionage, because I think that we have been suspicious all along. And I have to acknowledge, I think, I used a poor word there. We did not have any specific instance, as we now do, of the offloading of the computer. But I also want to emphasize that I took no particular comfort in that, because what we have here is what I learned in 1997 was that there was a general problem of very long standing with the security at the labs, and I issued the Executive order in early '98 to clean it up. And Secretary Richardson has been working on it since then. And I think we have made a lot of progress since then.

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Sir, I'd like to ask you about Medicare and your plans that you are going to be announcing next week. This is a program that tens of millions of Americans depend on, and yet in 15 years it will be effectively bankrupt. And you are about to propose what could be a very costly additional benefit in the prescription benefit. Why are you going to do that, sir? For one thing let me remind you that we have taken a lot of very tough positions to reform Medicare since 1993. When I took office, Medicare was supposed to go broke this year. So we have taken a lot of important positions already. And as a matter of fact, as I am sure you are all aware, a lot of the health care providers, particularly rural hospitals, nursing homes, home health providers, a disproportionate share of hospitals for the folks listening to us, that is basically inner-city hospitals and teaching hospitals that have a whole lot of poor folks they take care of who are not reimbursed a lot of those people believe that our savings are too great. But we have taken some very tough actions to try to lengthen the life of the Medicare Trust Fund. When I make my proposals on Tuesday, there will be more to lengthen the life further, to make sure that we get through the first quarter century and maybe more of the new century with Medicare alive and well. But if you look at the long run, I think it is important that we propose a prescription drug benefit because life expectancy is going up. Drugs are being constantly developed which help to improve the quality as well as the length of life, and if they are properly taken, they can actually reduce long-term hospitalization and other medical costs. Now, it is absolutely true that if we design this wrong, it could wind up being a lot more expensive than rosy scenario suggests. But if you look at my record here over the last 6 1/2 years, I have tried to be quite conservative in my budget projections and quite responsible in handling the budget of the country. And you will see that, I think, reflected in the way I make this proposal, including the prescription drugs. You have got 15 million Americans, seniors, out there without any kind of coverage for their medicine. You have got millions and millions of others with inadequate or highly expensive coverage. And I just I really believe that this is the most significant health care need that senior citizens have today.

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And I believe that over the long run, the proper availability, properly priced, of prescription medicine will actually not only lengthen lives and improve the quality of life of our seniors and improve their security, their state of mind, but it will also, long, long-term, save medical costs because it will keep people out of hospitals and out of more expensive treatments. What is your strategy now, ENTITY, for a comprehensive campaign finance reform, to really make it pass? Well, I think the best strategy is to get a clear majority of the House of Representatives to demand that it come up and then try to put enough pressure on to get the Senate leaders to let it come up. Basically, the Republican leadership in the Senate has said that they are just not going to permit it to come up, because they do not want their people who would vote against it to have a recorded vote on it and they do not want to run the risk that they have got enough for their folks that would vote with all of ours. See, all of our people are for it. We have got 100 percent of the Democrats in the Senate for it. And so, what I think we have to do is to keep it on the front burner enough so that the discomfort level rises high enough that an actual vote is allowed. If we'd just get a vote on the bill, I will be very well satisfied, and I think it will come out just fine. Can I ask a political question? When Vice President Gore announced officially for President, he chose a date when you were going to be out of the country. And according to Mrs. Clinton's supporters, if she announces her exploratory committee in the next couple of weeks, it would be at a time when you have got a commitment to go out to South Dakota. Do you think your personal behavior has made you something of a liability to those who are running? And did you take it personally when Vice President Gore made his announcement and seemed to set himself so clearly separate from you when it came to issues of family? Well, first of all, I thought, as I have said repeatedly, I thought the Vice President had a great announcement. And what he really said in his announcement I actually heard it, so I do not have to have it characterized for me.

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What he said in his announcement was that he had had more experience than anybody running, which is true; that he would put forward more specific ideas about what he would do if he were elected President than anyone has to date, by far, which is true; and that the choice before the American people was whether we would build on the progress that we have made for the last 6 years or turn around and go backwards, which is what I think the real choice will be before the American people. So I approved of that. And as far as his doing it when I was out of the country, I thought that was a good thing. Very often, you'd be amazed how many times over the last 6 1/2 years we have planned for certain announcements to be made by the Vice President when I was out of the country, because that way it gets I mean, far be it for us to try to maneuver the press but he gets better coverage, and I get better coverage I am out of the country, so he gets better coverage. And I think on the general point, what I have noticed over now more than 30 years, since I first began to volunteer as a young man in politics, all politics, all elections are about the future, and all candidates are judged on their own merits. But I think that the American people know that the country's in good shape and that not only our economic policies, our crime policies, and our welfare policies, but our family policies are good for their efforts to raise their children. And the best thing that I can do, it seems to me, is to do the right thing by my country, to just keep working at being a good ENTITY, and they will do fine. Not be with Mrs. Clinton when she campaigns? Well, first of all, she has not made a decision to announce to run for the Senate. And as a practical matter, logistically and legally as a practical matter, she has to have an exploratory committee to continue to talk to people in New York about this. She has not made a final decision to run yet. And I think that you should look at it in that context.

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ENTITY, considering what is going on in Kosovo now, and now that you have had a chance to meet with the refugees in Macedonia on Tuesday and you have heard the depth of the hatred that they feel for the Serbs and you have heard of the brutality to which they were subjected, is it not asking the impossible for the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians to live in peace in Kosovo? Well, I do not think they could do it without a lot of help in the short run. And I think I was asked this question earlier in a slightly different question I think that the first and most important thing is for us to get the whole KFOR force in there, all 50,000, as quickly as possible, properly deployed to maximize security. Then I think we have got to get people busy doing positive things, rebuilding their homes, reestablishing their property records, reestablishing their schools. We have got to give them something to think about on a daily basis that is positive. Then I strongly believe we need to give them the help they need to try to work through this emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, morally. I think a lot of these children are going to need mental health services, and I hope we can get them. I think that we need to bring people in who have been through similar things. I had a long talk with Elie Wiesel about this after he came back. He went over and toured the camps for me and talked to the people. I think that there are people who've been through the Holocaust who can help a lot. I think there are people who have been through South Africa and the peace and reconciliation commission and 300 years of what those people went through there who can help a lot. I think we need to be quite imaginative about once we get the building blocks of security and the building blocks of reconstruction in place and the building blocks of civil society in place, then I think we need to be quite imaginative about the human, spiritual dimension of this. And I will do my best to be supportive. I have talked to Reverend Jackson about this, about the importance of bringing in religious leaders from all the not only from the Muslim and the Orthodox faiths to come and work together and work people through this but perhaps others as well. So there are lots of things that we need to do. It is going to take a lot of courage, and it is going to take some time.

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ENTITY the future of this country, it seems to me that one of our big issues is parenting that causes divorces having children and breaking up the families. Is not there any way that we can design a national program to educate people ? On the to go to your point when Hillary and I decided that we ought to have this grassroots campaign to try to protect children against violence and we began to talk to Pam Eakes, who started the Mothers Against Violence movement in Washington State, and others, one of the things that we learned, obviously, is that a lot of young people wind up being especially really troubled young people can often be almost strangers in their own homes. And we assume that people ought to just know how to do the most important jobs in life, and they are very often reluctant to ask for help. But I think one of the things that we have to try to do is to develop the kind of supports parents need to do a better job. And it is a much harder job now than it used to be, especially since the average parent is away from his or her children for 22 hours a week more than was the case 30 years ago. So I do think that we need to do some more. Most parents, however, want to do a good job, really, really want to do a good job. And I think when you start with that, one of the things that I hope very much will come out of this whole movement against teen violence is more efforts in that regard. Of course, that is one of the reasons that Hillary wrote her book a few years ago she knows more about that than I do and, of course, one of the reasons the Vice President and Mrs. Gore had those family conferences every year, starting before he joined the ticket with me back in '92. The short answer to your question is, yes, we should do more to help parents do a good job. ENTITY, a lot of Medicare beneficiaries are enthusiastic about the idea of a new prescription drug benefit but perhaps less enthusiastic about paying higher premiums to pay for it. Should Medicare beneficiaries, themselves, be prepared to endure some pain to get some gain? Should they be prepared to pay higher premiums? And especially, should higher income Medicare beneficiaries pay means-tested premiums that are higher? Well, let me just if I give you all the details of my program Tuesday, you will not cover me Tuesday, and then I will be bereft.

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