As ex-President Bill Clinton embarked on a media blitz designed to sell millions of copies of his highly anticipated autobiography, "My Life," “Today” host Katie Couric talked to the former chief executive about his eight years in office and the scandal that almost cost him his job. Here is the first installment of their conversation:
Katie Couric: “You well know, President Clinton, that a lot of people are going to turn to the index, and look up under “L” for Lewinsky. Does that bother you that that's the first thing they're going to be interested in, many people?”
Bill Clinton: “Because it's … because I want them to see what I had to say, and then I think they'll go onto the rest. And I think the important thing to me is that there are millions of people who are interested in other things as well, as I have people just coming to me on the street now and tell me that.
“It's a part of my story. I've lived a long life. I was president for eight years. It's part of it. I deal with it. I try to deal with it as candidly as I can. But it's not the whole story. And all I think is that the more time goes on, the more people will weigh it in the balanced scale with everything else in my personal life and in my public life. And that's really important.”
Couric: “Do you feel sorry for Monica Lewinsky? She was a young woman, what, 22-years-old?”
Clinton: “I do.”
Couric: “And I feel like in many ways, her life has been irreparably damaged.”
Clinton: “Well, what I feel….”
Couric: “And she's a real victim.”
Clinton: “I feel sorry because, as she said herself, she was betrayed by her friend, and then she got caught up in this big media and Starr imbroglio. And none of it would have happened if I hadn't done anything wrong. So, I feel terrible about it. You take someone like Susan McDougal, who I feel much more sorry for, who suffered far more. It made her stronger. She became a magnificent human being in the face of almost insurmountable abuse. And what I hope for Monica Lewinsky is, I have said repeatedly, is she is a really intelligent person and a fundamentally good person. And what I hope is that she will not be sort of trapped in what Andy Warhol referred to as everyone's 15 minutes of fame.”
Couric: “Do you think she will be, though?”
Clinton: “I don't know. I'm pulling for her. It's just a choice she'll have to make.”
‘The vast right-wing conspiracy’
Couric: “Many people have remarked how open and candid you've been in the book. And I'm sure it was quite painful to relive that episode in your life. And of course the other person in this whole thing was your wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton. And I guess many people don't understand, Mr. President, how you allowed her to go on national television, how you sort of hung her out to dry while she defended you that January morning on the ‘Today’ show.”
Clinton: “Yeah, I was ashamed because she didn't know the facts.”
Sen. Hillary Clinton on “Today” January 27, 1998:
Clinton: “What she said was true.”
Couric: “I know you've said that. On the other hand, she was defending you. Come on.”
Clinton: “That's right, and I explain that. But what you have to come to grips with, and all the people in the media have to come to grips with, is that both things are true. I did a bad thing. I felt I couldn't tell anybody about it at the time because of the circumstances. It wasn't like when Grover Cleveland had to admit he had to have a child out of wedlock. There was no Kenneth Starr to put people in jail. Keep in mind, Mr. Starr even violated the Justice Department guidelines and made Monica Lewinsky's mother testify. It was a crazy time and people can make their judgments about that. But what you have to come to grips with is [that] both things are true. It is true that I did a bad thing, and I did a bad thing in misleading everybody about it. And it's true that Starr was wrong and the people who covered up what he did were wrong.”
Couric: “Let me ask you a question, though. If you hadn't done A, do you think there would be B?”
Clinton: “Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. It wouldn't have gone on — played out in quite the way it did. But it would still have been a terrible blight on the American people in American history. I think both things were bad. But, you know, if I hadn't done A, would there have been an impeachment? Probably not. Would there have been all this other stuff? Probably not. But one of the things I tried to do in this book is to say, I've tried to understand why I made the mistakes I did without making excuses for it. And in doing that, it's made me free to say that I can't — whatever was done to me, and I hope nobody ever has to do this, not just the president. I hope nobody ever has to live day in and day out with a man who's got unlimited power trying to put you and your wife in jail, knowing that the charges were false. It's not easy to live with. It's not an excuse for anything I did. However, what I did therefore is not an excuse for what other people did who reach the age of accountability. No one thought, no serious constitutional scholar, lawyer, historian, believed that anything that happened was a grounds for the impeachment to proceed, nor did the American people by 70 percent.”
Ken Starr’s ‘cheap and sleazy’ tactics
Couric: “You said before you wrote this book that this wasn't about settling scores. But you are pretty angry at Ken Starr. You call his tactics, ‘cheap and sleazy.’”
Clinton: “Absolutely. In the context of calling Hillary before the grand jury, it was a cheap, sleazy [and a] publicity stunt. If you go back and look, it's one of the few times I apply adjectives to him. Most of the time I just said, ‘these are the facts.’ So, when he called Hillary down at the grand jury, that was a sorry thing to do, especially since her billing records, which is why he hauled her down there, proved that she told the truth. They proved that she told the truth and she had no motive to hide them. She found them. She turned them over the next day. And he treated her like a common criminal. That was the wrong thing to do.”
Couric: “He, in response to your book and some of the things – I guess he's heard about it – he said he hasn't read it yet, but will. He said, ‘I understand the depth of his feelings. People tend to not like prosecutors.’”
Clinton: “That's not true. I like Robert Fisk just fine. People don't like prosecutors who prosecute people instead of crimes.”
Couric: “But you thought he [Fisk] was doing the right thing. How could this [Starr] be false?”
Clinton: “He absolutely did. Because he [Starr] believed that it violated the natural order for me to be elected president. That's what he believes. After 1968, they thought there would never be a Democratic president. They thought the only reason Jimmy Carter was elected is because of Watergate. And they really believed when I won, it interrupted the natural order of things. But I don't quarrel with that, and I don't think that Starr believes he's a bad man. I think he believes he's a good God-fearing Christian and that he was driving an infidel from the temple. But his goal was to drive me from office whether I committed a crime or not. And the American people need to know that.”
Growing upIn his autobiography, President Clinton writes that growing up he was quote "a fat band boy." When we sat down to talk, he told me that he struggled with his self image as a child.
Clinton: "That's what I was. I was an overweight band boy."
Couric: "But a kid that didn't have a lot of self-confidence, wasn't particularly popular or liked by the girls. You write a heartbreaking story about not getting an Easter egg 'cause you were too heavy to kind of (laughter) chase after it."
Clinton: "I saw all the eggs and I never got to them in time."
Couric: "But how did all these things, I mean, feeling sort of different and frankly, unattractive affect your view of yourself. And do you ever still feel like that fat band boy?"
Clinton: "Sometimes. But keep in mind, I also had, as I say in the book, I also had a lot of people who loved me in my family, particularly my grandparents and my mother, you know, just unconditional sort of love. And I had a world of friends. And I, you know, always had a world of friends."
Couric: "You always felt very loved, even though…"
Clinton: "Absolutely."
Couric: "…you didn't feel very attractive."
Clinton: "Yeah. I didn't feel like I was one of the "in" crowd. And I think that was good for me, 'cause it made me more sympathetic to other people when I became a politician. I always was interested in what happened to the people that felt left out and left behind. I was sensitive to it, 'cause I knew what they felt like. But I never got over, I don't think, quite the fact that I never was, you know, the…"
Couric: "The jock, yeah."
Clinton: "…or the captain of the football team and the most popular person in school. But that was good. It was good for me. It always made me more sensitive than I would've been otherwise."
Accomplishments and disappointmentsCouric: "Let's fast forward a few years to the Presidency. When asked about your greatest accomplishent, you said the conventional wisdom would be the economy. But I'm not as interested in the conventional wisdom as I am in your own perspective."
Clinton: "My own view is different. I think. Keep in mind, when I took office at the end of '92, America's self-confidence was pretty far down. We had a divided society. We'd had the Los Angeles riots as well as a bad economy. We'd been told for 12 years that the government would mess up a two-car parade. What I tried to do, and I think my greatest accomplishment, was trying to prove to the American people that we could solve any problems, we could seize any of our opportunities, that we can move into the new century in good shape."
Couric: "That sounds like what people said about Ronald Reagan a couple weeks ago."
Clinton: "But I think he did give us a lot of self-confidence. But his argument was different from mine. His argument was, the American people was great and we're great, but the government was bad. My argument was that the American government was the American people and that in the post-Cold War, post-industrial age, this new global information society, the government had a positive but different role to play."
Couric: "What was your biggest disappointment?"
Clinton: "At home, health care — with a close second, the fact that in my second term, we weren't able to make some modest changes to social security which would've taken it beyond the life of the baby boom generation."
Couric: "One of your biggest disappointments, I understand, Mr. President, is the fact that you did not kill or capture Osama bin Laden."
Clinton: "Abroad, that's what I was gonna say. My biggest disappointment abroad was that we didn't get bin Laden and Mr. Al-Zawahiri, in the top leadership of al-Qaida. Because I always thought they were qualitatively a bigger threat than any other terrorist operation in the world."
Couric: "Did you sense during the course of your administration that Osama bin Laden would change the world in a very bad way?"
Clinton: "I thought he was a big player from fairly early on. In the beginning, we thought bin Laden was. We knew quite a bit about him starting in my first term. But we thought in the beginning, he was essentially a financier of other people, terrorist operations. Then, we came to understand that he had his own independent network. And they were connected with a lot of others. And as it turns out, a lot of the things that we prevented, he or some of his associates were behind even before we knew that. And but I knew that. I think, so, my biggest disappointment of all was that and not making peace in the Middle East. And the two things are actually two sides of the same coin. Because the continuing problems between the Palestinians and the Israelis at least serve as a pretext to a lot of these terrorist recruitment tactics and what they later do."
Couric: "Do you wish you had responded more aggressively to the attack on the USS Cole in which 17 sailors were killed? Some people feel that the inaction by your administration and the Bush administration somehow emboldened al-Qaida."
Clinton: "Well, first of all, we did respond aggressively after the African Embassy bombing. And I authorized every single operation the CIA or the military asked me to do, and signed several documents which gave them the power to kill or capture him and senior aides. And after the Cole, was prepared to do much more. The problem I had was very different. The CIA and the FBI did not agree and actually issue a finding that bin Laden was responsible until after I left office. So, I felt that my hands were tied because I couldn't get a clear, unambiguous agreement from the FBI and the CIA, 'Yes, he did it.' If they had done it, I would've taken some of the military actions immediately, even if it had come after the election and if I were a lame duck, I would've done it. And because I thought it was really important. I always thought he was the biggest problem we had."