We understand you made a foreign policy related call shortly-- Yes, I just talked to President Kim about the No Gun Ri incident and personally expressed my regret to him. And I thanked him for the work that we had done together in developing our mutual statement. We also set up this scholarship fund and did some other things that we hope will be a genuine gesture of our regret. It was a very-you know, I had a good talk with him. Any particular reason why you used the word regret instead of apology in your statement? I think the findings were- I think he knows that regret and apology both mean the same thing, in terms of being profoundly sorry for what happened. But I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the Government had participated in something that was terrible. So I do not think there is any difference in the two words, on a human level, because we are profoundly sorry that it happened and sorry that any Americans were involved in it. But I think that in terms of the kind of responsibility the institution of the military that the facts were sufficiently unclear after all this time that the people who were reviewing it thought it was the appropriate language. And we worked it out with the Koreans and obviously shared whatever we could find with them. These people have been our friends for 50 years. We did not have-I told our guys to play it straight, that we did not have an interest in trying to cover anything up or sugar-coat anything; we needed to try to get to the bottom of this. I think that we have done about the best we can do. And I hope that the people of Korea will accept our statement as genuine, and I hope it will bring some solace to the family members and the few people that still survived who were involved in it, who will never get over it. Let me ask you another topical question. California is on the verge of blackouts. Is there anything you can do in your remaining time in office? Well, I am working at it. We have done some things. Secretary Richardson has worked very hard to make sure that the wholesalers kept selling the power to the utilities.

William J. Clinton Interview With Steve Holland and Debbie Charles of Reuters


But essentially, what happened was before-without any involvement from the Federal Government and before the previous administration in California, the deregulation was done in a way that made them vulnerable not to- in essence, to very high prices, maybe prices that are not justified by market conditions on occasion. They need to get all they can get from out-of-State generators and in-State generators, because they have grown so much. And they still have a regulation of prices to the ultimate consumer. So we have got a situation here which it seems to me might have been predictable at the time the deregulation legislation was done. But I, frankly, until this happened, I did not know what the nature of the California deregulation law was. So we are dealing with the situation the best we can. But I also think we need to talk to some of the producers, see whether more power can be brought on line at economical rates more quickly. I actually talked to one of them myself just in the last 2 or 3 days. So I am trying to get all of our options out there, and if there is anything else I can do, I will. I saw Governor Davis about a week ago, and I told him that. But I do believe that the Governor and the people of California know that, through the Energy Department, we have done everything we can so far. Let me turn you to the election very quickly. You seemed to surprise everybody when you said that the Republicans only-that when they stopped the counting, that is the only way that George W. won. What point were you trying to make there? I was actually just having fun with Bill Daley in Chicago. We were home and his brother-he had introduced his brother. I think Bill did a very fine job running the Vice President's campaign. I was just having a good time, trying to put them all in a good humor. I was not trying to be sarcastic or hateful or even make any kind of deliberate point. I was basically having fun with what I think are the undisputed facts. I do not think there is much dispute about the facts. They did not finish the vote count. Do you have any hard feelings about the election outcome and the way the Court, the conservative majority stepped in to stop the counting? Well, I do not have much to add to what I said. I think the Vice President said it all for us. We accept the principle of judicial review.


It has been since John Marshall wrote the opinion in Marbury v. Madison in the early 19th century. And it has helped us to have some finality in our law. But yes, I disagree with the decision, and I think most constitutional scholars do. I saw a quote in the paper the other day from a man who was a law professor in the Middle West- I am sorry, I do not remember his name-but he identified himself as a conservative, pro-life Republican. But he said, I am a constitutional law professor, and I disagree with this decision. But the country has had, periodically-thankfully not often, but periodically-there is a handful of Supreme Court decisions that I think were unfortunate. But we nearly always straighten it out with time. And in the meanwhile, the election was very close. It was fought nearly to a draw, and the political forces in Florida, the legislature might have done the same thing, and it might have been upheld. I just hated to see the Court involved in this way when there was, you know, 6 days less to count the votes. But I did not mean to make any big point. I did not say anything that I and the Vice President and other Democrats had said tons of times. I was just having fun, trying to say something nice, to make people laugh about Bill Daley. It is pretty tough on him, you know, because he really did do a good job. I think they were about 10 points behind or something, and Bill took over, and he really did, I think, a very good job. Can I switch to the Middle East? Today they had some talks-- Let me just say one other- you should not read anything about-that has nothing to do with-we have tried to be very supportive of the President-elect and his team and the transition. I have not tried to politicize this. I was strictly having fun with my friends in Chicago and bucking up Bill Daley. What are your thoughts about the next 8 days? It depends on what the agreement is and then how the Israeli electorate responds to it. General Sharon has, I think, never liked the Oslo agreement and has been very honest about it. But he did come to Wye River; he participated fully. Then Prime Minister Netanyahu had been very critical of Oslo. But they negotiated that agreement at Wye River, and previously to that, I think he was in when they finalized the Hebron agreement.


The reason we went-let me just back up and say, the reason we went to Camp David in the first place is that it was obvious to everybody that just as the Hebron and then especially the Wye River agreement was absolutely essential to keep the peace process alive, because the previous understandings had come to the end of their rope and they had to stay on the process, it was obvious to me that we had come to the end of our capacity to stay in the peace process with just the Wye River agreement. It worked very well for a couple of years, but there had to be some continued movement. Because what happens is, when you reach a stall, then the people that really do not want this to happen, particularly rejectionist elements within the Palestinian community, they can have incidents; then they provoke reactions; then the borders get closed; then the incomes of the Palestinians drop again, and you get in a downward spiral. So I was trying to head off just what we have been through these last 3 months. So I think that they will have to reach some sort of accommodation, unless they really want the thing to spin out of control. And I really do not believe either side wants that, so we will just have to see. But you know, whatever happens will be the responsibility of the next administration and the winner of the Israeli election, whoever that may be. Do you think it is important for you to set out a list of, maybe, points that have been agreed to so far, so that they do not start from scratch again, that you do not lose what you have already gotten? Well, I think it was quite significant, actually, even though it came 6 days later than I wanted it to, that the Palestinians have now agreed in principle with the parameters. So at least that Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have agreed-this Israeli government, excuse me-and the Palestinian Authority have agreed to the parameters. Both sides have some concerns and some questions which are, frankly, quite well known to either side. So I think we have narrowed the debate and moved it forward. Now obviously, unless there is an agreement, the United States Government is not bound by the position I took.


For example, when I felt that I had to continue a number of President Bush's policies-I did not particularly disagree with them, either, by the way, in Somalia and one or two other places-but I did not really believe it was an option to reverse them, because our Government was committed. And I think it is very important that we-except in the most extreme circumstances-maintain some continuity in foreign policy and in our commitments to other countries. But President-elect Bush is in no way, shape, or form bound by the positions I have taken on this Middle East agreement, unless there is some agreement. In all my 8 years of service as ENTITY, I have never seen a situation quite like this, where the circumstances, including my short time in office, seemed unfavorable, but the determination of the main players seems strong, in fact, maybe even intensified. I am trying to keep myself free of expectation one way or the other, and to do whatever I can to try to help end the violence-and we had a good day today-and just create the conditions in which, if they are willing, they can do as much as they can do. I do not think we can predict it. Do you think the incoming Bush people will be as interested in pursuing this as you have been? Well, I think they will be very interested in stability and peace in the Middle East. Their orientation has been a little more toward, you know, the Gulf, the oil-producing states, honoring our historic commitments to Israel to maintain their qualitative military capacity. But to be fair, the previous Bush administration took a pretty strong line on expanded settlements after the Madrid talks started in the hope that they could help to create the conditions in which the Palestinians and the Israelis could move toward peace. So I think that there may be differences in approach and priorities that the President and the Vice President and Secretary Powell will have to work through. But my guess is that their general direction will be the same, because in the end, what happens is-let us assume-and I am not saying this, because I do not believe this-but listen, even if you had an administration that did not really care about the Palestinian problem on its own merits and said, Well, our real interests are in the geopolitics of the oilproducing states and the problems created by the lack of an agreement with Syria.


And by the way, I am fairly optimistic that there will be an agreement between Israel and Syria sometime in the not-too-distant future, and I do not think there would be much difference in the policy positions taken by Likud or a Labor government on Syria, or by my administration or the incoming administration. We worked this hard, I mean, for years. And I think if the late President Asad had not kind of felt he was not in the best of health and was not- that they wanted to freeze things in place, and if he can secure his son's accession, we might well have been able to do a peace agreement when I met with him in Switzerland shortly before his death. So even if it is not a priority for you because it looks like a morass that cannot be solved in a small place with people that do not have a state, do not have nuclear arms, do not have an air force, do not have an army, inevitably what we always get back to is that the absence of an agreement with the Palestinians and the absence of a stable situation between Israel and the Palestinians infects the other countries and their capacity to relate to us over the long run. And particularly as these other countries have more and more young people who are more and more drawn to the sympathetic-drawn with a sympathetic ear to the claims of the Palestinians, and they have more demonstrations in these other countries and more unrest in these other countries, I think that our concern for stability in our relations with the Saudis, with the Kuwaitis, with not letting Saddam Hussein develop weapons of mass destruction again, the whole range of concerns that any American administration would have to have leads you back down to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and trying to get to the end of the road there. I think that that is why I made the speech I did to the Israeli Policy Forum the other night. I waited until the very end, and until, essentially, I had put these parameters out before saying that, because I do not believe an American ENTITY should try to impose or create a peace between these two parties. The questions go too much to the heart of their respective sense of national identities, their cultural identity, their whole set of religious convictions.


So all I said in these parameters and all I meant to say in the Israel Policy Forum speech is, Look, I have been listening to these people for 8 years, and I have studied these issues as closely, I believe, as any American President ever has, down to the maps, the settlement locations, the maps of the city of Jerusalem, the whole thing. My best judgment is if there ever is going to be a comprehensive agreement, it will have to look something like this. In other words, they could do what they did at Wye River. They could say, Okay, here is the next chapter, and this is what we are going to do. But the real problem with the sort of sequencing of interim steps is that, at least so far, because of all the other very complex forces going on there, these steps have not brought sufficient stability to the relationship and to the climate within the Palestinian areas or within Israel that there can be a long-term sort of set of nonpolitical measures that lead to progress-which is exactly the reverse of the Irish situation. And you may have heard me say this before, but the difference is, in Ireland-I may have said this in the Israel Policy Forum speech, I cannot remember-but my physical analogy is, some unsolved problems are like scabs on a wound. If you leave them alone, they will heal. Some are like an abscessed tooth. If you leave it alone, it will get lots worse. In Ireland, because the underlying economic circumstances are dramatically improved and because there has been a dramatic increase in interpersonal contact which is positive, and because while there is a small terrorist group that is still trying to upset the Irish thing, it is much more contained, the absence of final resolution of the thorny political issues is unlikely to crater the situation. In the Middle East, the per capita income of most Palestinians is the same or lower than it was when we signed the agreement on the White House Lawn, because there are so many different groups that can paralyze the process with acts of terror or violence that close the borders, that stop everything, that wreck the economy, and that kind of burn the bridges of trust that get built up when things are going okay for a year or so. I think it is more like an abscessed tooth. So that is why I decided to make the speech I gave at the Israel Policy Forum. But they do not have to do that. They could reach another accommodation.


They could say, Okay, we cannot do this whole thing, but we cannot just rest on Oslo plus Wye River, so we have to do this, whatever this is. And they could do that. But I think any Israeli leader would have to see that, and I think in the end, any American government will come back to a concern for it, if for no other reason than a desire to have stability in the region. Let me turn you quickly to the economy. The Republicans are talking about a retroactive tax cut. You have got an economic statement tomorrow. Are the factors there, is the evidence there strong enough that there is a downturn going on and we need this retroactive tax cut? Well, first of all, the blue chip forecast, I think, is for 2.6 percent growth, which is enough growth to keep the unemployment rate at about 4 percent. And that really does not surprise me. When I saw the initial estimates, which were about 3.4 percent, I thought they were a tad high because we have been growing for a couple of years at nearly 5 percent, which is, for an advanced economy of our size, it is just virtually unprecedented. You simply could not sustain it at that rate. On the other hand, there is been a fairly sharp drop in stock values, and that takes a lot of wealth out of the economy, and eventually, that backs down into lower consumption and orders and things like that. So you see, for example, real problems in the steel industry today at a time when steel imports are also dropping. So it is not like the '97 crisis where-the crisis in Asia and Russia led people to try to flood the market in America with bargain basement prices. Here, you have got an overall problem. So I think I have always believed that a tax cut should be part of the next budget. I thought it should have been part of the last budget. It can be a little bigger than the one that I proposed, because the surplus has been written up some-the estimated surplus. Although I think it is very important that they go back and subtract from the estimated surplus the 10-year costs of the budget we just adopted, because it is the best education budget, for example, that we have had in my 8 years.


But you have to prorate that out, and President-elect Bush has said he is very interested in continuing to support education, even though he wants to kind of rearrange the deck chairs on how we allocated it- which is, you know, that is up to him and the Congress. They will have to work that out. So I think the question is not so much whether one is warranted but what kind of tax cut should it be, and how big should it be? My concern-what I have believed in-I said this back during the campaign period so I can reiterate it-my view is that it should not be so large as to preclude our continued ability to pay down the debt and to stay more or less on the track we are on to get the debt down over the next 10 years, because if the markets perceive that we are going back into deficits, that would lead to an increase in interest rates, which would wipe out the impact of a tax cut for most Americans-even wealthy Americans, because it could have a depressing impact on the market, and it certainly would increase the cost of business borrowing and tend to slow down the growth of the economy. So the trick is-that also, by the way, would foreclose-this is what happened to me when I got in. I did not have the option to do what Americans would normally-the Government would normally do in a recession, which is to have a substantial tax cut and pump the thing back up, because the deficit was so big, it would just have caused interest rates to skyrocket. So the trick for the incoming administration- they have lots of options here. They can spend money; they can cut taxes; they can do more of one or less of the other-and less of the other. But the real-what I would be thinking about if I were in that position is, what is the aggregate amount we are going to commit here, particularly on the tax cut side, because it is not like-you do not have to repeat spending in years 2, 3, and 4. You can cut spending if times are tough. We have proved that. But once the tax money-once you cut the taxes, that is normally gone. It is hard to raise taxes when times are tough.


So what I hope is, I think they ought to have a tax cut of some magnitude, but I think they ought to save back enough to keep on the track of paying down the debt, which also gives you the protection down the road. Someday, surely, the expansion will come to an end, but I do not think it has to come any time soon. And when it does, the more we pay the debt down, the more free we will be then to have a substantial tax cut to help the country in a recession-when that happens sometime in the future-without having an adverse impact on interest rates. So I do not think there is any question that they can have a tax cut. But I just think you do not want it so big that it takes you off the path of getting us out of debt, because the mental knowledge that that is the path we are on keeps interest rates low. The average American family now is saving $2,000 a year on a home mortgage, as compared to where we were back in '93. Long-term interest rates are 2 percent lower than when I took office, even though we have had an 8-year expansion, which is unheard of. You normally would not have that. And paying down the debt has a huge impact on that, because it frees up more and more money every year to borrow in the private sector, and interest rates are lower than they would be if the Government were competing. And let me also say there is something else that we should keep in mind. The more you pay down the debt, the lower your interest bill is. I think this year we have got interest payments on the debt down under 12 cents on the dollar. But they were at 13 or something, headed north, when I took office. Let us say we went-I am making this up, of course-let us say we went 4 or 5 more years on the same tack, and we got interest on the debt down to 6 cents on the dollar. That is a huge amount of money that is freed up every year for either investment in our future or for tax cuts. And you have more and more and more flexibility. Anyway, that is kind of a long-winded answer, but it is a very, very important subject, and I have thought about it a lot.


On NMD, which has become topical now with the Bush administration and Rumsfeld's hearings today, do you regret at all making it a commitment of the United States, since some diplomacy efforts, like with Korea, are working out? And is it just going to create more problems with China, Russia in the future? Well, I think I made the right decision not to deploy. And I think that I made the right decision to continue the research program. And I hope that is what they will do. It is not clear to me exactly how they are going to operationalize their commitment. That is, because in the campaign, the President-elect said that he would do this if it could be developed, whether anybody else liked it or not, which bothered some people. But he also-the it that he was trying to develop was a system that was, in effect, more comprehensive than the more limited one that could have been deployed in the timeframes we were talking about during my tenure. So it may be that what he will decide to do is to intensify research. Look, if we actually knew we had the technology to take missiles out of the sky, even assuming that we get this agreement with North Korea-which I think we will get, on freezing the missile production, not selling missiles. That is teed up, and I believe the Bush administration will see it as a great opportunity. And I think it will be one seized within the first few months of the incoming administration. I think it will be one of their first achievements, because it is set, and I think it will happen. But even if that happens, with the proliferation of technology around the world, we cannot possibly know who might have missiles in the future. So I think we are almost morally obligated to continue to try to develop this kind of system. However, if we deploy the system in a way that leads to more proliferation and more insecurity, that is very problematic. And it is one of the things that I had to consider, that if we just set it up, even if we were worried about North Korea and the Middle East, if the Chinese interpreted it as a move to try to contain them, even though there is no way we could- even if they have just 50 missiles, that is more than-or two dozen, whatever they have got-two dozen I guess, more or less-they might decide that now they need 300.


If they did that, the Indians would decide that they needed more, under the present state of play between the two countries. If they did that, the Pakistanis would certainly build more. And circumstances that exist on the Indian Subcontinent are not as stable as those which existed between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war, or that exists today between the United States and Russia. And by the way, I expect that there will be a further reduction in nuclear warheads by both countries. That is one thing I think the Bush administration will be in a position to do, because of the development of our relationships, I will be-I expect that President Putin and then-President Bush will be successful in continuing to reduce the nuclear arsenals. But you do not want to have all this sort of uncontrolled instability in some other part of the world. But there is a way to continue to work the missile defense issue, and then there would be a way to put it at the service of all countries, the technology, which is what President Reagan used to talk about when he was talking about the Star Wars in the sky and all of that. Philosophically, he had an idea of making it available to all countries so that no one would be any more at risk, including from us. We are talking about technology to stop the accidental launch or a terrorist or a country with two or three missiles that could lob them at you. Two or three missiles could do a world of damage on the United States or someone else. So I just think-I think that I left it with a maximum number of options for the next administration. I have tried to leave the economy with maximum number of options in good shape, and I think this program gives them the maximum number of options. And I think-again, you know, we all say things in campaigns, and then you get to be ENTITY and it looks a little different. Presidents pretty much do what they promise to do in campaigns, but sometimes when you turn an idea into an operation, when you operationalize your views, the world looks different when you are sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office than it did when you were running for the job. And that is no criticism of him. They are the same things that looked different to me when I got there. And so I just-it is a big issue, but it will be closely covered and widely debated, and I hope it will be resolved in an appropriate way.


How are you going to feel on January 21st? But I will say this, right now, I just feel very at peace and very grateful. And I am going to start thinking about the rest of my life. Every stage of my life has been rewarding and good. I am just going to try to imagine how I can make the most of it. I am kind of looking forward to it. I do not expect that I will have sort of prolonged periods of semi-depression because I am not ENTITY anymore. I was only halfway kidding when I told the church the other day that I expected to be disoriented when I go into big rooms and nobody plays a song anymore. I mean, I am sure there will be somehow some kind of things that will be tough, and I will have to learn how to be a real citizen all over again, but that is good. The Presidency is what was so well taken care of, and a lot of the cares of normal daily life that I never had to think about when I was in office. It is probably healthy for a person not to have that kind of support for too many years in life. So I am kind of looking forward to it. What is going to happen to Socks? You know, I made more progress in the Middle East than I did between Socks and Buddy. And I do not know that I have got enough space and enough help when I am gone to keep them both away from one another and keep them both happy. But I still have not quite resolved what to do. I love that old cat. You know, we picked him up as sort of a half stray in Arkansas, and I hate to give him up. But Betty loves him. Half the White House loves the cat, and the other half loves the dog. You cannot break them up into that many pieces. I am sure going to take-I know I will take Buddy, because I slept with him for 16 months all during the Senate campaign. He was with me all the time. I cannot live without him. But I really-I have even talked to some of the guys, a couple of the guys at the White House are quite good at training pets, and we have all kind of tried to work at this. None of us have been able to figure out how to actually get them in peaceful coexistence. I feel, of all the skills I learned as ENTITY in bringing these people together, I did not do very well with that.


The Summit of Madrid marks the first expansion of the NATO to the Eastern European countries. ENTITY, it is perceived by the public opinion in Europe that the United States limits this expansion. It is perhaps a misperception from Europe? First of all, let me say that the expansion itself is historic, and we should not minimize it. Of course, Spain was the last new member of NATO, and that was an historic thing as well. But to expand NATO in a way that enables us to move closer to our goal of a united, democratic Europe for the first time in history is very important. I do not want to limit NATO expansion; I want to leave the door open to all democracies that would like to be a part of it. But keep in mind, NATO is not simply a political alliance. It is primarily a military alliance, and we have done a lot of work to try to adapt NATO to the security challenges of the 21st century, to the Bosnias, if you will, rather than to the cold war. So it seems to us, after having consulted with all of our allies and after having looked at the capacity of those that would like to become members, that the three members from Central Europe, Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic, are clearly ready to assume the responsibilities of NATO membership and ready to integrate militarily with NATO. That does not mean that the door should not remain wide open to others and that we should not make every effort over the next couple of years to do what it takes to help others qualify for NATO membership. I do not want to exclude anyone, but I think it quite important on principle that we not admit anyone until we are absolutely sure that their democracy is stable and that they are militarily capable. And this is just a difference of opinion. Some of the NATO members agree with us; some would prefer four; some would prefer five. But, ENTITY, does that mean that when you go to Madrid, in effect your mind is made up, and those who disagree in the alliance will have to join your view? NATO has always made decisions by consensus. For example, suppose we were for five and the British were for three- alone. In order to achieve a consensus, since that is the only way we can proceed, three would still prevail. In other words, it is not because it is America; it is because we have to reach a consensus. But we have spent a lot of time with this.

Interview With European Television Journalists


I have personally visited with President Chirac about it. I have personally talked with Chancellor Kohl about it. I have personally talked with President Aznar and with Tony Blair about it and many other European leaders. I had a long talk with Prime Minister Prodi about it. Then Madeleine Albright went to Sintra in Portugal and talked to all of the people about it before we announced a public position, and I have spent a long time with our military leaders talking about it. And others had announced their position before ours, so I do not foresee any circumstances under which I would change my position that today we ought to have three. But keep in mind, my position also is-and some of the members do not agree with this- that we should leave the door open, that we should have a review, we should take another look at it in 1999, and even at 1999 we should keep the door open. That is, I see NATO as a way of continuing the process of European integration, which I have supported. I have supported the European Union; I have supported the independent security unit, the ESDI within NATO, which is something that is been important to France and others. So I am looking forward to other meetings like Madrid. I do not think this will be the last one by a long shot. ENTITY, NATO is a bone of contention between you, President Chirac, and his Socialist Prime Minister Jospin. Concretely, why do you refuse the French, but any other European countries, to have the command of the South NATO flank? And I would like to add, is the communist presence inside the French Government a problem in the NATO context? First of all, I hope that France will become integrated into the military structure of NATO, and I hope that Spain will be as well, and I think we are quite close with Spain. Secondly, I believe that more command positions should be open to Europeans, and I have supported that. That is-so, in the adaptation of NATO internally, the United States has favored the integration of France and Spain into the military command structure, has favored an independent European security defense initiative within NATO, and has favored more command positions going to French and to European officers. The particular command, the AFSOUTH Command, is-the real problem there for us right now is that right now, the AFSOUTH Command is essentially command of the 6th Fleet of the United States Navy.


And except for, and maybe even including-I'd have to check the numbers-our presence in South Korea, it is the biggest single deployment of United States military assets anywhere. So if we were to divide the AFSOUTH Command, it would not , from our point of view, be a sensible thing to do militarily because that is essentially the central asset of AFSOUTH. We have offered to revisit this-even that position with the French in a few years, because it may be that we decide to change the composition of what makes up AFSOUTH. But in terms of the command structure, we believe the Europeans should have more command positions. And we hope that we can resume these discussions and work this out. Look, France is a democracy, and they elected a new leadership for the Parliament, and that is up to the government. As long as the Government of France is a great democracy, standing for freedom and participating, I do not have a problem. The French people should make their own decisions over that; the United States should not make a judgment about that. ENTITY, one could say that the main beneficiary of the new security structure in Europe is Germany. Our country is not a front line state anymore; the Bundeswehr, which has been trained and equipped to fight a war on its own territory, defining the Eastern flank of NATO, will not have to do that anymore. So when the new, the next Gulf crisis, Somalia crisis, Bosnia crisis come about, what would America expect from Germany to take over in terms of burden from the Americans? I do not know that I would expect them to take over anything from the Americans, but I would make two points. One and most importantly is that the Germans are in a position to be partners with us now because of decisions which have been made by your supreme judicial body, and because of the vision of Chancellor Kohl-we are in a position to be partners in Bosnia, for example-that the Germans can participate and are not only trusted but relied upon to participate in cooperative security challenges beyond the German borders. The second thing I would say is that the Germans have supported the French and others in being for a European security defense capacity where Europe can act alone without the United States and Canada in appropriate circumstances within NATO as part of our adaptation. So that is what I would expect, if you will.


I think that there will be continuing partnership, and now we will be able to worry not about the eastern border of Germany but about the stability of all of Europe, and we will be able to do that together now. But it will also mean an increased military role, probably. It could, but it may not require an increased military budget. That is, all of our militaries are doing different things. On the budget, let me say-this is one other point I should make-there are costs for Europeans and costs for Americans in expanding NATO, and it is important, therefore, to make a good military decision because you have to justify the costs to the public. That is why it cannot simply be about politics, because we have to-we are all obliged to do certain things to keep the military able to work with one another; the term of art is interoperability. ENTITY, I think it would be interesting to know how you did convince President Yeltsin three instead of five. Is it the price that you paid to get yes from Mr. Yeltsin? I would not say that, but I think that it is important to note that we made an agreement with President Yeltsin to have an agreement between NATO and Russia that would make it crystal clear that NATO is no longer an organization designed to contain Russia; NATO is an organization designed to work with all free countries to respect the territorial integrity of its members, to protect the security of its members, and to work with its members and their allies, Russia, soon to be Ukraine, and those in the Partnership For Peace, on common security problems like the problem in Bosnia. I think the great contribution Boris Yeltsin has made to the integration of Europe is his willingness to say, Russia is not going to define its greatness in terms of territorial domination, Russia will define its greatness in terms of the achievements of its people and its partnerships with other countries. That was the contribution, that is what he did, and he deserves a lot of credit for that. Now, should we expand NATO in a way that is at least aware of the nationalist elements in Russia, the people that do not feel the same way? Should we be sensitive to that? But I think as NATO and Russia continue to work in partnership as we have in Bosnia, the continued expansion of NATO will not be seen as a threat to the Russian people but will be seen as something that reinforces our partnership and therefore makes the Russian people more secure.


You decided for a slow start? The main reason I decided this is I really believe that these three countries are the only three countries right now that can start tomorrow and within a reasonable time meet the same standard of membership militarily that the other NATO countries met. We have to remember, this alliance is the most successful alliance in history because it is had military as well as political integrity. But these other nations, I believe, that are either developing their economies and their military capacity, are stabilizing their democracies, should all be considered for future NATO membership. And the irony of this is, right now a lot of the European countries say five, and I say three, but over the long run we may find the United States in favor of considering more countries than a majority of Europeans would be. ENTITY, the government of Madrid wants to remain in the chain of command of NATO. Is Spain's petition to maintain under its control of the Canary Island territory acceptable for the United States? I think the Spanish position is certainly understandable, and it is my understanding that Spain is at least close to being satisfied with the discussions that have been held. The position the United States has taken on this is that the military experts should resolve this, that only Spain can decide whether its concerns about sovereignty and leadership have been satisfied. But for all of the rest of the countries, what we should do is to make this a military decision and see if we can resolve the issue with Spain in a way that is consistent with the way NATO should operate. And they are working very hard on it, and I hope and believe they will resolve it soon. On another security matter, ENTITY, you have nurtured the peace process in Northern Ireland personally, but things are looking very ominous, coming up to this weekend with the scheduled Loyalist march in Drumcree. No, I am not pessimistic, but frankly, the ball is in the IRA's court right now in terms of declaring a cease-fire, and then there is also a ball in the court of the Protestant Loyalists and whether they will continue to exercise restraint. But let me say, to me the most hopeful thing is that we have got this meeting, I believe, today between Prime Minister Blair and Mr. Ahern, the new Irish Prime Minister. There has been sort of a reaffirmation of the position of the British and Irish Governments about how decommissioning should operate in a fashion parallel with the peace talks.


And so I think that the British and Irish Governments are right on track and doing what should be done, and the Irish people should be heartened by the new leadership in both countries, reaffirming the peace process and trying to invigorate it. But the truth is that in order to get all the parties involved and do it without bloodshed, the IRA will have to renounce violence and reinstitute the cease-fire. We have tried to involve Sinn Fein; we have tried to reach out, as you know. But two young men were brutally murdered in what is clearly an assassination recently in Ireland. That is unacceptable, you know; we cannot do that. The Irish people want the peace process, the British and the Irish Governments want the peace process, and the IRA ought to give it a chance to work. But would you favor the Loyalists calling off their march, postponing things? I think that is a matter best left to the people of Northern Ireland and to the British and Irish Governments. I have tried to be very disciplined in the role the United States has played in this, and I just do not think that is a matter on which I should express a view at this moment. Let us see what Prime Minister Blair and Prime Minister Ahern say after their meeting today. What I would favor is that they do nothing to try to provoke violence. If it happens, there are marches and there are marches; we all know that. So I hope that we can-whatever happens, it will not be an occasion for further violence. ENTITY, going back to the French, President Chirac and the Socialist government are often quoted, and it is true-as criticizing the-what they call, I quote, the arrogance of the U.S. superpower which wants to rule the world politically and economically, and they add that they criticize the United States for wanting to oust France of Africa. What do you answer to this double accusation from the French authorities when they talk to the French press or that got quoted in the American media, too? The one on Africa is a new one on me, but the other two-I have heard people say things like that. I have read it in the press with regard to economic issues and with regard to NATO. First of all, let me restate what I said. I do not know whether we would be where we are in Bosnia today if it had not been for the leadership of President Chirac and the French.


The United States and the French- there have been words in the press for decades now, but the truth is that when the chips are down, we are almost always allies. Jacques Chirac supported NATO expansion when some European leaders did not . He was instrumental in getting the agreement with Russia. He was instrumental in forging our common position in Bosnia. All I can say is, I do not want America to dictate to Europe; I want-I have supported European integration. When other Americans were afraid of it, I said-because Europe would be bigger than the United States then-I said, No, we want a democratic, free, strong, united Europe, and the next 100 years will be different than the last 100. On economics, we have been very fortunate in the United States in being able to discipline our spending, invest in our people, and create a lot of jobs. But we have problems here, too. We have-a lot higher percentage of our children are poor than in France or Germany and other countries. We do not have the kind of health care and child care supports that you provide to your working families. How are we going to create jobs, raise incomes, and hold the social compact together in a global economy? We just happen to be in different places in meeting the challenges. In Africa, let me say I am very grateful for what the French and we have done together to help each other's citizens get out of harm's way in African countries in trouble. We have offered an initiative on Africa because we have been repeatedly challenged to do more, and we think there should be aid, and I do not think we have given enough aid to Africa. But we think we can do more to expand trade as well. So I hope we will be working with France on that. I do not want to push France out of Africa. I want to lift Africa up. And if we would lift Africa up, the fact that the French were there, caring about Africa all along, will only redound to France's benefit. ENTITY, in line with what the French colleague just said, there is-especially I feel it after Denver-a growing feeling in Europe that America leans toward something like grandstanding or patronizing toward Europe.


And then when it comes time to make sacrifices, like in firm commitments to reduce greenhouse gases or to make compromises like in extending NATO and not risking a rift within NATO over the question of these two countries who will join in addition to the three who are not, America says, this is what our interest is and pushes through. Do you feel that there is a little imbalance in the transatlantic relationship? First of all-let us deal with the two things separately. I do not think that is a fair characterization of what happened when we had the Summit of the Eight in Denver. Before the other leaders arrived, I gave one speech in Colorado in which I said, 7 years ago when the other countries met in the United States, Europe criticized America, 7 years ago, for dragging down economic growth in the world because our budget deficit was so high, for taking money away from worthy investments in Europe and in other places in the world by having high interest rates in America to finance our deficit. And we have changed that. So now we cannot be criticized by our friends in the Summit of the Eight, because we have changed that and we are better off than we were then. But I said in the same speech, we still have a lot of problems at home and we have no cause for arrogance, and I outlined what those problems were. When I met with the other leaders, I said clearly we have been fortunate; we have created a lot of new jobs. The British also have now created a lot of new jobs. But what happens in this global economy is, as you create more new jobs, the more open the economies are, you have more difficulty in avoiding greater inequality among your people. So the trick is how to preserve the social compact and create jobs. This is a problem we share together; that is what I said. And anybody who was there in those private meetings will say that. Now, in NATO, let me say again-I want to say two things. Though quietly-- --that there are five, but quietly they say, We know that you are right, that this is the right thing to do. Not all of them-I do not want to be-the Italians and the French and others clearly want five. Some would favor four; I think Chancellor Kohl is genuinely open to that. But there is more difference of opinion within Europe than you might think.


The most important thing is, if we were for five and France was for three, if that were the case, then the French position would prevail because three is a smaller number than five, and we have to do that. This is not an American win; this has nothing to do with me. I am trying to keep NATO's integrity intact from the military point of view, and that is what I want to do. Do I believe that we should consider expanding to the south when next we meet in '99? Do I think that we should exclude the Baltics? Might Bulgaria be ready in the future? So I think that-this is not-this does not have to be done in a day. Keep in mind, 3 1/2 years ago when I proposed this, it was a revolutionary idea. Now we are talking about how many and when. So I am not trying to impose this. I am just trying to do what I think is best for the military alliance, and it just happened that we strongly believe that if you look at the conditions of membership, that these three clearly meet those conditions, and no one else does now. But I am for-I am very sympathetic with the French and the Italian position that we have to consider moving to the south, and I am sympathetic and interested in the new interest in Bulgaria and in Austria, and the Baltics are moving very-forward. We should not tell anyone they cannot be part of it. But if you look at it, everyone agrees that at least three should be in, and that is what we ought to do. We always go to what everybody agrees on. May I ask about the Baltic States because you mentioned them three times? Nobody is as desperate to get in psychologically as the Baltics, and nowhere are the Russians as adamant as in the Baltics not to let them in. Will they come away from Madrid with something more than a vague promise, We will consider you in the future ? Keep in mind, the Baltics are in the Partnership For Peace. Let us not overlook that. That has been-I think one reason we have so many people wanting to be in NATO now is that the Partnership For Peace has been so successful. The Euro-Atlantic alliance that we have with these Partnership For Peace countries will continue to be strengthened.


And I think what we plan to do is to offer to work with the other European countries to try to-to set the stage for what we will do 2 years from now, and also to keep going into the future, to keep integrating these Partnership For Peace countries more and more and more into the military and other operations of NATO. So I think the Baltics should feel reassured by that. I worked very hard, you know, to work with President Yeltsin to get the Russian troops out of the Baltics, to keep them on the path of reform and democracy, and they have done very well. So I think they should be considered in the future like everyone else, and we should make that clear. ENTITY, you said that the Italians definitely want five. Well, they certainly want Slovenia. I think they would favor five; they would take four. Romania-is not the reason of this, is not that the real threats are there coming from the south, no more from the east? Well, we certainly hope that, yes. And, sir, do not you think that Romania and Slovenia will guarantee more stability in the crucial area of the Balkans? Yes, I do think that. My problem with Romania and Slovenia is I believe, compared to the other three countries, we cannot say that they are clearly ready now to assume NATO membership. Let us take Romania. There is a terrific case you can make for Romania-it is the second biggest country in Central Europe. I mean it has-it is very large, and it has a lot of people, strategically located, and the people want to be in NATO. But they have been on this path now for a little less than a year. The countries that are getting in have already been through ups and downs in their economy, in their political systems. They have had elections. They have really been through all the tensions that happen when you move from communism to freedom. The Romanians have done an amazing job in a few months. They have resolved their differences with Hungary on the border. They have got two Hungarians in the Cabinet. But it has still been less than a year. So my position is, give them a couple of years to stabilize their democracy, to develop their economy, and then let us take a look at it. Would it be better if, going into the 21st century, we had a NATO that had more membership in the southern flank to deal with those problem areas that are just beyond our borders?


You are having a lot of fun there for this early in the morning. And you are having a lot of fun, too, are not you? Now that Chelsea is gone, you all are having some fun, are not you, ENTITY? That is what Hillary says. I told you. He can say that. You cannot say that about him. And what was going through your mind when you saw all this that was happening here in Little Rock? But as I said yesterday, most of the white kids did not think about it one way or the other until it actually happened. Until the Little Rock Nine were turned away, I think most people did not think about it one way or the other. Children are basically self-absorbed in their own lives. It is part of the privilege of childhood. But then, all of a sudden, kids that had never thought about it before, it is all they talked about for weeks. And everybody then had to decide really how they felt about it. It seemed obvious to me that sooner or later this was going to have to be done; it might as well be done sooner. But I also I was always amazed at how there was an element in the South and probably in the rest of the country, too, of people that were they always just needed somebody to hate, needed somebody to look down on. But it is no way to run a country and no way to run a life. Sooner or later, to me, it was obvious it had to change. ENTITY, there seems to be so much symbolism to the fact that you were opening the door yesterday for the members of the Little Rock Nine coming through, as well as this year that you have stepped before the Nation, before the world, and telling them that you are taking this step into the 21st century and making a difference in terms of race relations. This is a year in which you are just really making us aware and bringing these things out to us. And I commend you for that. I think part of the symbolism yesterday was that thank you very much. I think yesterday part of the importance of the symbolism was that political leaders closed the doors and stood in the doors in the fifties and the sixties and kept people out of the doors. And apparently, that idea to open the door came from the students at Central High themselves. It was a great, wonderful idea, and I was glad to be a part of it.

Interview With Tom Joyner, Tavis Smiley, and Sybil Wilkes on the Tom Joyner Morning Show in Little Rock


First of all, to the affiliates of 93 stations around the country on the ENTITY Morning Show, as you can tell, we are running long. We are going to go right through the break. We want you to hang with us. you said that what happened 40 years ago really developed your idea of what race relations in this country should be about. At 11 years old, you were thinking race relations? Well, it was discussed in my home because my grandparents were interested in it. That is what I said yesterday. So I had a chance to think about it earlier just because my grandfather expressed himself very strongly about it. He had once been a grocer and had a lot of black customers, and he knew a lot about black people as human beings and about the troubles they were facing and the problems in their lives and the potential they had. My grandmother was a nurse and she had a lot more contact with black people in the fifties than most white people did, and she thought it was wrong. And they just had a big impact on me, and they talked about it a lot. And even though my grandfather died in 1957, and everybody was talking about this happening in the 2 years coming up to that, I still remember as a little boy, 9, 10 years old, sitting around the table, having him walk through this with me and telling me that this was something that had to be done. ENTITY , ENTITY asked you a moment ago about the symbolism of yesterday this is ENTITY and I want to ask you about the substance, if I can. As you know, the two issues that are facing this country, certainly facing black America, with regard to education as we talk about this incident 40 years ago are the issue of school vouchers and this whole issue of resegregation of schools. You know, the NAACP was even considering earlier this summer reassessing their position on school integration. What are your thoughts specifically on how the issue of school vouchers and the issue of school integration are impacting the African-American community? Where do you come down on that debate on those issues? Well, let me say, first of all, school vouchers that is, giving people money that used to go to the school district that they can then use and spend in the school district or they can use it to defray the cost of tuition to private schools school vouchers are the most extreme version of more school choice for parents and students.


I have supported for years and years giving students and parents more choice for the public schools their kids attend, and also the national charter school movement which allows groups of teachers and parents to organize schools on their own and be more loosely affiliated with public school districts and to meet the special needs of the community, and then they can have a lot of freedom from the rules and regulations of the school districts and the State as long as they meet high standards. I support the school uniform movement which a lot of private schools have and which have made a big difference in a lot of school districts. The reason I have opposed school vouchers is that I think if you look at the facts, it is a relatively small financial contribution to give somebody, for example, what the Federal Government gives to a school district, but if you take it away, you can have a big adverse impact on the school districts without helping any individual children very much. I believe that sooner or later there will be a lot of people who will try it, going beyond Milwaukee and, I think, Cleveland, unless we can prove that the public schools can work for children again. But I think from my point of view, particularly with the Federal dollars, I simply do not believe that we should be diverting resources when our schools have been relatively underfunded on the whole. The parents ought to have some say, which is why I think they ought to have more choice over the schools their kids attend, and they ought to have the right to participate in new schools that are outside a lot of the bureaucratic rules that burden school districts. On the resegregation, I think that my own view is that we ought to continue to try to have integrated schools. We ought to recognize that segregated neighborhoods and different patterns in who has children of school age in various places have led to a resegregation of a lot of our schools. We still ought to try to integrate these neighborhoods and mix them not only racially but economically. We still ought to have, where reasonable, transportation plans that work and are not too burdensome for the kids. But we should not use the fact that a school is not especially integrated at this moment as an excuse not to give those kids an excellent education and do the very best we can. Ten years ago, ENTITY, there was a 30-year celebration for the Little Rock Nine that you helped organize when you were Governor here in the State of Arkansas. It was a lot smaller celebration than the one we have had this week, huh?


Do you essentially agree with my sense that you had that the big issue has been moving from the industrial age to the information age, and that I mean, the toughest thing The short answer to that is yes. to explain to people is, you take something like how can being in favor of affirmative action and being in favor of welfare reform be part of the same vision? There are people on the right or the left who would say, You cannot do that. And yet, I think that they are part of the same vision. But my first question is, how would you describe that vision? I think my view I saw my Presidency as a transformational period, and basically, America has gone through two before. Maybe it could start if we did it in historical times. There were basically I look at American history in the following we had the creation how we got started and sort of filling out the elements of the National Government and defining what it meant. And that basically went from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, Washington's Presidency, and the appointment of John Marshall as Chief Justice which is a very important thing and then, ironically, through Jefferson's Presidency, with the purchase of Louisiana and the Lewis and Clark expedition, and then the next big challenge was, how would we adapt that to our growing industrialization? And how did we get rid of slavery, which was inconsistent with our principles? So obviously, that is what Lincoln and the Civil War and the constitutional amendments and everything that happened on civil rights after that was about slavery. But there was no single President that managed the process, if you will, or laid out a framework from the agricultural society to an industrial society. But that is part of what the railroads, the canals was all about, and it is part of what and Lincoln was a part of that with the Morrill Land Grant Act, with the colleges.  But it happened over a long period of time. Then, there was the transformation from the you know, it happened over a long period of time as we slowly became a balanced society. But then, when we burst onto the world scene as a major national industrial power, that process was basically defined by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. And I sort of saw this period in parallel with that.

Interview With Joe Klein of the New Yorker in New York City


The rest of the 20th century was mostly about dealing with the rise of first, the Great Depression; then the war and the need to defeat totalitarian systems, which was part of the war and the cold war; and dealing with the specific challenges at home, principally civil rights, the women's movement, and the growth of environmental movement in America. So here, we are moving into, basically, from an industrial society an industrial economy to an information economy, and at the same time moving into an ever more globalized economy, which also is more and more of a global society in that we share common challenges and common interests that go beyond economics. And the globalization of the media has accelerated that. So I saw my challenges trying to, first of all, maximize America's presence in the information economy; second, to try to maximize our influence in the welfare of our country and likeminded people around the world in a globalized society. And then, the other and I will get to your questions and then the third big thing for me was trying to make people have a broader and deeper vision of the American community and how to handle diversity and how we would finally get a chance to see, in ways we never had before, what it meant to make one out of many, what our national motto meant. And I think the and you ask me, well, how can you reconcile those things? It seems to me that the two operational strategies we had to pursue those three great goals were, one, the Third Way political and social philosophy. If you believe in opportunity and responsibility and community, then it is perfectly clear why you would be for affirmative action and a global trading system, you know, why you would be for health care for everybody and whatever else you said what was the other thing? No, I said that. Welfare reform, because first of all, work is the best social program. Secondly, it is imperative to have a basic work ethic if you believe in individual responsibility and you believe it gives meaning and direction to life, and I do. But if you do, you also recognize that there is no society no society has succeeded in providing access to health care to everybody without some governmental action. But there have been people all along, as you know I mean, you and I had this same conversation in 1991. It was never just an electoral strategy to me.


And the question I guess my question is, do you feel that you were ever able to really communicate the depth and breadth of this to the public? Yes, but only probably only at the State of the Union Addresses, because it is probably the only time I ever got to say it unfiltered. If I made an error in those, even though they always received very high public approval ratings, they said it always took me so much time to explain my specific ideas in education or whatever, I am not sure I ever took full advantage of the opportunity to lay the coherent philosophy out because I do think at those points, that people got it. But what I was going to tell you, if I could go back I think we had the transformation from the industrial economy to the information economy, from the idea of a national society to an idea of a more global society in which nation-states matter. I think the nation-state will matter more in some ways in the 21st century. We can talk about that some. And thirdly, the whole idea of defining America where our diversity was something to be cherished and celebrated because because our common humanity and common values were more important. And then, operationally, I think, the two things I think that mattered, I made some the whole Third Way political and social philosophy, one; and second is sort of a relentless focus on the future, making people always trying to force people to always think about not only what we are doing, how does it affect today, but what is it going to be like 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? And I think that is often that has not often been the business of the Government. But if you go back to Roosevelt's focus on conservation or Wilson's struggle of failed attempt at the League of Nations, I think what made them both great Presidents for the transformational period America was in is that they were not only successful in the moment, by and large, but they had this focus on the future; they kept trying to spark the public imagination with the future. And that is I hope very much that the announcement of this genome project, although I think it fills people with foreboding as well as hope, will tend to spark future orientation on the part of the voters, so the issues that are plainly before us, but will not be felt for a few years will have more effect on the debate and also on people's voting rights.


Charlene Barshefsky said to me that there are times that you have really been concerned, that the expression you used was that you had not found your voice on trade, which is the equivalent of Well, one of the things she, of course, has to deal with it. But the two things in trade that have frustrated me most, although I think we have got a great record and you can go from NAFTA to the WTO, to the Africa/ CBI, to launching the free trade of the Americas to China. The reason I raised it was because what you just said about the genome reminded me I just read your remarks about NAFTA in October '93, and it was very similar, too. And then, of course, China, and then in between we had 270-odd agreements, and we had the Mexican financial crisis and the Asian financial crisis. One, I have so far not created a consensus within my own party, at least among the elected officials, for the view of trade which I hold. I think it is how people view the world the second thing, and closely related to that, is that I went to Geneva twice, and I went to Davos once, and then I went out to Seattle to try to make the case that you cannot have a global trading system apart from a global social conscience, anyway, where there is a legitimate place for the voices of those who care about the rights of workers, the condition of children in the workplace, the impact of economic development on the environment, both nationally and globally. I have not yet, at least, been able to convince people that there is a synthesizing vision here that has to drive not only a global trading system but these other initiatives as well. And one of the great things that always struck me is, if you look at the people who were demonstrating in Seattle, while I think they were all sincere that is, they believed in what they were demonstrating against their sense of solidarity was truly ironic, because they had completely conflicting positions.


I mean, for example, a lot of the labor union people that demonstrated believe that even though for example, they think that even though this China deal is a shortterm benefit to American industry because China drops their barriers, that they are so big that there will be so much investment there that they will develop a great deal of industrial capacity and that wage levels will be so low that it will cost the developed world, and particularly America because our markets are more open than the Europeans, a lot of our industrial base within a fairly short term. And that is what they really believe. I do not believe that, but that is what they believe. And then you have the people that are demonstrating on behalf of the Third World, and they believe our concern for labor and the environment is a protectionist ruse to protect American high-wage jobs. But they are all out there in the streets in Seattle demonstrating together, because they are genuinely frustrated about the way the world is going and they kind of do not like this whole globalization thing. They think it is going to lead to further loss of control by ordinary people over the basic circumstances of their lives, and that bothers them. I think that this is to kind of put a cap on the first question I mean, that is so much at the heart of what you have been trying to overcome. I was talked to Zoe Baird, who said that she always remembers the statistics that you used, I think in around '95, that more jobs had been created by companies owned by women than had been lost by Fortune 500 companies. You always tried to make the future less frightened for folks. And yet, I am not sure you are convinced that you made the case. Well, I think I made the case to the people that were open to it, but I believe that I think that it is hard. Everybody's for change in general, but normally against it in particular. You know, what is that Dick Riley used to say? That is his sort of formulation of it. But I still believe, first of all, I think that what I said to the American people is true and right. Secondly, I do not think there is any alternative to change. So I think the real question is, how do you bring your, basically, values that do not change how do you translate them into specific approaches and policies that have the greatest chance of enhancing those values in the world you are going to live in? That is the way I look at this.


And I think that for the United States to have essentially turned away from this world, I think, would have been a terrible mistake. And in fact, I think the only mistake we have made in this whole thing is not accelerating the integration of the free trade area of the Americas more more rapid. Let me ask you some specific questions. Let us take a walk; start in '93. The First Lady said to me the other day that she believed that deficit reduction was a predicate for doing all the rest of the stuff. She compared it to education in Arkansas when you were reelected. The '93 economic plan made all the rest of this possible. There were a fair number of people on your staff that were saying, you know, it would throw the economy into recession. And you were dealing it was a theory at that point that if you lowered the deficit, interest rates would come down, and you would achieve the kind of growth that you have achieved.  First of all, let me back up a little bit. The people on the staff who favored somewhat there was nobody on my staff that was against vigorous deficit reduction. There were some who were afraid that to make the decisions we would have to make to get the $500 billion, which is what Lloyd Bentsen and Bob Rubin felt was sort of the magic psychological threshold we had to cross to get the bond markets and the stock market to respond in an appropriate way, they were afraid that if we did that, we would have to shelve too much of our progressive commitments in the campaign. Now, what finally happened was, we came up with a plan that raised income taxes only on the top 1.2 percent of the people, which I had, after all, promised to do in the '92 campaign. It was not like I did not tell upper income people who supported me I would not try to raise their taxes. But we had to raise them at the very end. Bentsen came in with a plan that essentially lifted the income cap off the Medicare taxes, which closed the gap. And we stuck with the gas tax, which Charlie Stenholm and some of our conservatives who were big deficit hawks were worried about, because they were afraid it would make our guys vulnerable, and I think it did. It was the only thing that average people had to pay, except that there were, I think, 13 percent of the Social Security recipients paid more because we began to tax Social Security income more like regular pension income.


But it was the Republicans who believed that tax increases by definition were recessionary and that so they unanimously opposed the plan. You asked me what convinced me. What convinced me finally was that I believe fundamentally, unless we got interest rates down and investment flowing, that we would never be able to see a decline in unemployment and growth in new businesses, particularly in this high-tech sector which depended on vast flows of venture capital, confidence capital, if you will, that it seemed to me was just out there bursting, waiting to happen. I think and maybe it was my experience as a Governor that informed all this but I really did believe there was this huge, vast, pent-up potential in the American economy that had been artificially repressed ever since the deficit spending recovery at the end of President Reagan's first term. Basically, what happened at the end of the first Reagan term is, interest rates were not too high because we had such a terrible recession and so much inflation and such high interest rates at the end of President Carter's term, so when the interest rates came down, then inflation naturally inflation around the world came down. Those huge deficits brought us back a little bit. But the long-term potential of the American economy, I was convinced, could never be unleashed until we got rid of the deficit. So finally, I just decided that if I did not get the economy going, nothing else would matter in the end, and I believed that the pent-up potential of the American economy was so great, that if we did get the interest rates down and we did get investment up, everything else would fall into place. And I thought that I ought to listen to Bentsen and Rubin because they knew a lot more about it than I did. But you did not listen to Bentsen on the EITC. No, but we had promised that, and I believed in it. I thought and again, I am confident that not only what I saw in the campaign but my experience as Governor of a State that was always in the bottom two or three in per capita income had an impact on this. But I just believe that we had to use the tax system to dignify the work of low-wage workers and to make it possible for them to raise their children more successfully.


I did not think I could go out there and argue for a tough welfare reform bill and a tough deficit reduction package, and say I was going to have to slow down my increases in education spending and some other social spending, housing, and all these other things that I would otherwise like to do if we were not prepared to give lower income working people more income. I also thought it was good economics, because they were going to spend it. They needed to spend it. Did you ever think that was there any way that you could have gotten Republicans to go along with this? I do not know, and I will tell you why. In retrospect, maybe there were some things I could have done. What if you had invited Dole and Michel to that dinner in Little Rock? Yes, or invited them down even on their own it might have worked. The real problem I see with it in retrospect, the reason I say I do not know first of all I wish I had done that, because later on I started bending over backwards. I had Gingrich in and Armey in, and I met with them exhaustively, and I tried. Often it did not work, but we did get some things done from time to time. I think they had made a decision to oppose all tax increases because of the Gingrich position vis-a-vis President Bush. And he was pretty well in the ideological saddle, the political saddle in the House then. And I think because Senator Dole obviously hoped to run for President in '96, I think the Republicans in the Senate were going to be reluctant to break ranks once it was obvious that the House Republicans were going to oppose any kind of deficit reduction package that had any tax increases in it. And I did not believe if we had not gone for some upper income tax increases, then number one, we would have had to adopt cuts that the Democratic majority in the House would not have supported, even under me. And number two, we could not have kept our commitments on the earned-income tax credits on education, where we did have a substantial increase, or on the empowerment zones or a lot of the other things I did that I believed in. Did the atmosphere surprise you, the vitriol, the difficulty? Yes, it did, I think, basically, but I now know things I did not know then. What do you know now?


Well, they really believed first, I know now something I did not know, which is that some of the people on the Republican side actually, I did know this, but I did not believe it when I got a call from the White House early before I decided to run in the summer of 1990 from a guy I knew who worked there who was saying, You know, you should not run. Bush was at like 80 percent then or something. I could not believe so I had this serious talk with him about how President Bush had used his popularity to try to deal with the economy. And after about 5 minutes, the guy said, Now, let us just cut the crap. We have looked at this crowd, and we can beat them all. All the guys in Congress have votes. We can beat them all. You might beat us, and so if you run, we are going to take you out early. Then, after I got up here and started dealing with them, what I realized is that they had been in for 12 years, but they basically had been in since President Nixon won, except for the Carter interregnum, which they thought was purely a function of Watergate, and therefore they saw it as an historical accident that they had quickly corrected, and that is the way they saw it. I actually think Jimmy Carter and, before him, Bobby Kennedy were the precursors of the sort of New Democrat, Third Way stuff I have tried to do here. And I think, therefore, it is not fair, but that exactly, to diminish but that is the way they viewed it, anyway. I really think a lot of them thought they could hold the White House forever, until a third party came along to basically offer a competing vision. And so, they just never saw me as a legitimate person. They just thought I was, in President Bush's words, the Governor of a small southern State. And as I often crack on the trail, I was so naive that I actually thought that was a compliment. So anyway, it did surprise me. I mean, I knew it was there, and I'd seen the Democrats do things in my view, I guess I have got a warped view, but I never thought it was nearly as bad as what they did to me. But from time to time, the Democrats did things I did not approve of.


I did not like the nature of their arguments against John Tower or the fact that somebody checked out the movies that Bob Bork and I knew there was some of this up here. But I never thought I would see it in the kind of systematic way that I saw it unfold. But when I got to know Newt Gingrich and actually had a lot of candid conversations with him, I realized that that is just the way they thought politics worked. Yes, that is what they thought. That is what Newt called it. I had a fascinating conversation with one Republican Senator in the middle of the D'Amato hearings when they were impugning Hillary. And I asked this guy, who was pretty candid, I said, Do you really think that my wife or I did anything wrong in this Whitewater thing? He said, Any fool who has read the record would know you did not do anything wrong. He said, How could you do anything wrong? You did not borrow any money from the S&L which failed. And you lost $40,000 or whatever you lost on the real estate deal. He said, Of course, you did not do anything wrong. He said, That is not the point of this. The point of this is to make people think you did something wrong. Yes, I was surprised by their vitriol, and yes, I was surprised, and I must say I was surprised that they believed and they had an electoral and they turned out to be right, but I made a mistake or two that helped them. They believed that they could win the Congress if they could just say no to everything, and they did. And I think it rested on basically three things. One is, we did the economy, the budget plan, which we had to do, and we had to expect some loss of midterm seats. And some of those seats we had for a long, long time were naturally Republican seats, anyway. The second thing is but the people had not felt the benefits of it. Then the second thing we did that cost us some seats, but I am absolutely convinced is the right thing to do, was the Brady bill and the crime bill, which had the assault weapons ban. But there again, we got that done in 1994. Had it happened in '93, I think it would not have hurt us so bad.


But in '94 there was not enough time, between the time that bill passed and the time people voted to convince the world people that voted, against our Congressmen on the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban that there was not anything going to happen to them and their hunting and sport shooting and all that. By '96, the issue was working for us, because I could go to places like New Hampshire and say, I want everybody that missed a day in the deer woods to vote against me. But if you did not , they did not tell you the truth, and you ought to get even. That is what I said. And our winning margin in New Hampshire went from one point to 13 points or something. But in '94 my party's Members bore the brunt of that. Then the third problem we had, and this is where I think you were right, is I was trying so hard to keep all of my campaign commitments and the way I made them I should have done welfare reform before health care. You were right about that. I do not know that I took that position. I thought you were saying that.   I will tell you where I was wrong, is that when it came to doing welfare reform, I chickened out, and I wrote a column the week you signed it telling you not to sign it. I talked to Elwood last week, and he is turned around on it as well. But the reason is, I think, if you go back, there is one thing that nobody in the press has picked up and we ought to talk about this later is why I vetoed the first two bills and signed the third one. We will come back to that. But if I had not done welfare reform first, that would have given the Democrats a chance to appeal to more conservative and moderate voters. And the system one thing I have learned is, since I have been there, is actually the system is capable of great change, but it can only digest so much at once. So in '93, they did a big economic plan and NAFTA, and in '94 they did this big crime bill. And they might have been able to do welfare reform, but there is no way the system could digest the health care thing. Why did you say that? it was one of those decisions we made practicing for the State of the Union, and I just should not have done it.


I was trying to bring clarity to the debate, and I was afraid that they would try to run something bogus by. You are saying that you think there is no way you could have gotten a health insurance deal in '94? Let me tell you what happened. if you had gone and just dumped your bill and gone over to Chafee's press conference and said, I am with him ? He had universality. He had a tax increase to pay for it, and he had Bob Dole. Well, he sort of did, but let me tell you what happened. What happened was, I offered and Hillary offered not to submit a bill. We offered to do two different things. We offered to submit sort of a generic bill and let Congress fill in the blanks, and Rostenkowski asked us this is a little more detail, but then we offered not to submit our own bill at all but instead to submit a joint bill with Dole, which I thought was good politics for him, because then he could not lose anything What was the timeframe for this? Well, before we introduced a bill. Yes, before we introduced the bill. And Dole said to me I will never forget this, because we were at a leadership meeting in the Cabinet Room, and he said, No. He said, That is not the way we should do it. He said, You introduce a bill. We will introduce a bill. We will put them together. We will compromise and pass them. Then after that, Dole got the memo from Bill Kristol, I think, which said which basically took the Gingrich line. The way you guys are going to win in the Congress and weaken them is to have nothing happen. If anything happens, the Democrats will get credit for it, so you guys have to make sure nothing happens. After that, I do not think we really had a chance, because Mitchell killed himself to try to figure out a way to get to Chafee, do something and maybe if I had gone to Chafee's press conference, maybe that would have worked. You know, I had not thought of that, but all I can tell you is that I really believed, because Dole with that single exception, all my other dealings with Dole, whatever he said was the way we did it. In other words, not the way we did it, but I mean, if I made a deal with him, it always was honest.


He was as good as his word. And in this case, I just think, you know, he saw a chance to win the majority, saw a chance to get elected President. Bill Kristol told them do not do it; they did not do it. But this is the thing that people on the left point to, that would have been your big achievement, the big, New Deal kind of achievement. And when you look back on it, do you regret the substance of what you did? Do you think that going with an employer mandate was the wrong thing?  On the substance, I think basically it was a privately financed plan that relied on managed care but had a Patients' Bill of Rights in it. And I think the two things that made it unpalatable to Republicans were the employer mandate and the Patients' Bill of Rights. I think the thing that made it unpalatable to Democrats, a few of them, was the employer mandate. But if you are not going to have an employer mandate, then you have to have a subsidy where people buy into either Medicare or Medicaid. That is what you are going to have eventually. That is what you are going to have eventually. And if I could do it now, that is what I would offer. But the problem is, I could not do it in '94, with the deficits the way they were, without a tax increase. And I did not feel that I could ask the Congress to vote for another tax increase, even if it was a dedicated thing, after we had just had that big one in '93.  We were getting killed by the scoring. The scoring was all wrong, and we knew it was wrong, but I was stuck with the scoring. So if you look at it, the position I was in is, I was stuck with the scoring. I did not want to ask for another tax increase; I did not think that was right. So I had to try stay with the private insurance system. And I would have thought that the insurers would actually have liked that, because they were going to get a lot more customers. But basically, they did not like it because we could not just let them have all those mandated customers and have no Patients' Bill of Rights and no restrictions on managed care, so they then developed this whole argument that it is a Rube Goldberg machine, it is a Government takeover of health care, and all this stuff.


And that sort of stuck because they had all that money to put behind it. But the truth is, in defense of what we offered, if you go back and look at all the early soundings from all the experts when we first laid it out there, everybody said, This is a moderate plan. They have tried to keep their private insurance system. They have certainly left the private health care delivery system intact. Because nobody said it was some big Government takeover until all the people spent whatever they spent, $100 million, $200 million, whatever they spent in there later, to try to perform reverse plastic surgery on it. But I think that in the context you ask the questions, to go back, I think that the combined impact of the economic plan, with people not fully feeling the benefits in '94; the gun deal, where people had their fears fully allayed; and the health care thing, where the people that wanted it did not get it and the people that did not like it knew what they did not like about it. That tended to depress the Democratic voters. And the three things together produced plus the fact that the Republicans had this contract on America, and people did not really know what it was; they just knew they had a plan gave them the big win they got. Just to stay with health insurance for a minute, do you regret structurally the way you went about doing it? If you had to do it all over again, would you give it to the First Lady? I do not think it was a mistake to give it to her. I think the mistake I made was, I either should have insisted on having her say, Okay, here is all of our work. You guys draft the bill, or I would have insisted that we had a joint bill. If we were going to draft the bill, I would have made the Republicans draft it with me. Neither one of those things was her doing. She gets a total bum rap on this. The plan she came up with, which was she was told, We ain't going to have a tax increase, right, and therefore it is not going to be a total Government program, but you have to try to get 100 percent coverage, so there was no other way to do it except with an employer mandate. And she was also told that managed care is going to happen, and we favor it, which she did favor it, but we have got to have some protections in there for people.


I do not know how many doctors I have had come up to me since then, tell me that we were right and that basically it was a good plan. So in a way, I think she really got a bum rap on that deal, because she was operating within constraints that were, we now know, impossible. What I should have done is to let her do all the work, publish all the findings, say, Here are our principles. You guys write the bill. Or I should have said, If you want me to do a bill, I will only do it if we have a bipartisan agreement on the bill. That would have produced something less than 100 percent of coverage, but at least it would have produced something that would have passed and gotten us up to 90 or maybe above 90 percent. She, I think, has gotten a totally bum rap on this deal. All she did was what she was asked to do. I asked Ira about it, and he pointed to his E-commerce protocols, and he said, What I did was, I decided to do everything the exact opposite of what we did with health insurance, and it worked. But the interesting thing there was, it worked because number one, we did not have to pass a big bill because of the Telecommunications Act, which was a great success which we ought to talk about later was a big part of the economic program, was operating on a parallel track. And all we had to do there was to basically invite them to help us make Government policy that would maximize economic growth. There was absolutely no way to get to 100 percent of coverage, to have universal health coverage, unless you had an employer mandate or the Government filled in the difference. If we were doing it today, we could do it. And the next administration could do it, because now we have the money to do it. The CHIPS program, the parents, and you let people between 55 and 65 buy into Medicare. Then the only people that will not be able to get health insurance are young, single people who think they will live forever and just do not want to do it, or very wealthy people who just would rather go ahead and just pay their doctor. The reason why I was always for universal was because I thought those people had a moral responsibility to pay in to help the risk pools. I do not know if I can get this CHIPS thing, but if I can, it will make a huge difference.


I do not want to stick on the bad stuff in the first term too long, but things in retrospect, things seemed pretty much a mess in the White House for the first couple of years. And there were times several people have said to me that you came to them at various times and said, Look, I am in the wrong position. I am to the left of where I should be, or Things just do not feel right, or Things are out of control. How did that happen? I mean, how do you come out of the box doing gays in the military, for example, which I assume well, you believe in the policy it probably was not the best thing to come out of the box with. Why did you surround yourself with why were there so few At what point did you get a White House that you were really happy with the way it was working? Well, first of all, I think that in retrospect, I think if you compare the functioning of our White House, for example, with the Reagan White House in the first term, I think ours looks pretty good. And I think that the problems we had were fundamentally most of the mistakes we made were political, not substantive. So I do not think I do not think it is fair to say and Laura Tyson agreed with us. I do not think we had a bad I think we did have people who were, philosophically and substantively and on policy terms, consistent with our New Democrat philosophy. And I think that budget, from the empowerment zones to the charter schools we got in the beginning, to the Goals 2000 program, to what we did on the student loan program which was terrific; it saved $8 billion in student loan costs for kids to the overall economic plan, I think it was consistent.  You left out NAFTA and reinventing Government. Yes, we had NAFTA, and we did RIGO, and we did the WTO all that in the first 2 years. But what was wrong was that the political image was different from the reality. I have heard Bob Rubin defend the White House repeatedly and talk about how the things that worked well later, especially the sense of camaraderie and teamwork and joint decisionmaking, were all put in place in that first year and a half. But let us just go through the problems, and you will see.


Part of it was, I think, none of us were sensitive to the way sufficiently sensitive to the way Washington works and to the way little things would look big to other people. Now, let us just start with the gays in the military. It is not true that we brought it up first. Andrea Mitchell brought it up in a press conference on November 11th. Dole introduced legislation Dole deserves credit for this. The Republicans should give Dole credit for this. They should give Dole credit for this. And I give him credit for it. I have thought a lot of times about how I could have outmaneuvered him on it. But I had two things going and the Joint Chiefs obviously agreed with him, which helped. But what put this on the front burner early? Dole introduced a bill in Congress which was going to fly through there, because Nunn agreed with him, to keep the present policy. And then the Joint Chiefs demanded a meeting with me. The President cannot refuse to meet with the Joint Chiefs. So it was those two things that put this thing front and center.  The bill came in after you said after Andrea Mitchell asked the question and you responded the way you did. I always thought that was because she needed a vacation and had not taken it. No, no, it was because but he was going to put that in anyway. We knew what he was doing. So what happened was, between the Joint Chiefs and the Dole bill, we were forced to put it up. I was going what I intended to do was to get all the stuff, my basic stuff organized, lead with that, and figure out how to handle the gays in the military. And they basically forced me to deal with it from the beginning. And then the thing that then I got a lot of heat, obviously, from the gay community for what I did. But everybody ignores what precipitated do not ask, do not tell, which was a vote in the Senate, essentially on the Dole position, that passed 68-32, i.e. by a veto-proof margin. In retrospect, given the way Washington works, what I probably should have done is issued a clean Executive order, let them overturn it, and basically let them live with the consequences of it. And I might have actually gotten a better result in the end, more like the one I wanted.