Bill Clinton: The Rolling Stone Interview
This is the third full-length Rolling Stone interview with Bill Clinton. We first met in 1992 at Doe’s Eat Place, a steak joint in Little Rock, Arkansas, when he was fresh from winning his party’s presidential nomination. A year and a half later, we sat around a table in a private dining room off the Oval Office while the energetic young president discoursed at length on the challenges of occupying the most powerful office in the world.
This final interview — the longest of the three — began in the family quarters in the White House on a beautiful fall day in October and concluded just four days before Election Day, aboard Air Force One, en route to a last-minute campaign appearance in California. We had been promised a quick third session for a postelection wrap-up, but with the Florida vote still up in the air, the president chose not to comment. As we went to press, we still did not know who would succeed him, but we preserved his predictions in this interview, for the record.
The president we encountered this time seemed more humble but also more confident and expansive. No longer just the brightest and most energetic guy in the room, Bill Clinton gracefully exudes the dignity and command of the presidency. On the first day we met, we were sandwiched into his typically furious schedule. In the morning, he had received the leader of the North Korean army — the first presidential contact with an official from that country in fifty years; later, the president would preside over a bipartisan ceremony on the South Lawn to sign the bill normalizing trade relations with China. The president has also been spending late nights dealing with the violence that has broken out in the Middle East in the wake of the collapsed Camp David talks.
Journalists rarely enter the family quarters of the White House. We were invited to conduct the first part of the interview in the solarium, the glassed-in oval room on the third floor that has traditionally been the president’s family room, with its inspiring view of the Washington Monument. On one table sits a large collection of Russian dolls painted as Hillary, Bill or Chelsea. A Peter Max lithograph hangs on one wall, as does a beautiful painting of a leopard, a gift from South African President Nelson Mandela. There is also a collection of Beanie Babies for the Clintons’ nephews. A passageway leading into the room has been decorated with photographs depicting the Clintons’ 30 years in public life. Just down the hall, the president has set up a small music room, where he keeps his saxophones. Naturally, there is a portrait of Elvis on the wall.
When the president enters, he sits down at the small glass-topped dining table, picks up a cigar and cuts off the end but does not light it.
How are you feeling? You must be exhausted.
I was up all night talking to [Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak]. I slept an hour, and then another thirty or forty minutes in different snippets — I’d just fall asleep. Today I feel pretty good, because the violence has gone down considerably.
What are you doing from here?
I’ve spent so much time with both of them, so I know quite a bit about what makes them tick. I understand the pressures they’re both under and how they both came to see themselves and their people as victims in this.
Were you shocked by what happened?
I was surprised it spread as quickly as it did, that the feelings on both sides could be stripped to the core so quickly, because they’ve made so much progress and gotten so close. But in a funny way, Camp David made the Israelis feel even more vulnerable. Barak went further, by far, than any Israeli prime minister had gone before.
They made more progress at Camp David on the security issues than anything else — because it was the most concrete, with the fewest number of unpredictable consequences in the future. They also had a habit of working together on security and getting along. But I think that the Israelis felt aggrieved that they didn’t get more done, because they offered so much. Then the Palestinians felt provoked by what happened on the Temple Mount with Ariel Sharon.
Let’s not get too far into this —
We don’t have to get into the weeds, but the point is that a whole series of events happened and, with each successive event, it seemed that each side misunderstood the other more.
Does any of this tend to piss you off? You formed strong personal relationships with Arafat and Barak. Do you ever just want to say, “Goddamnit, Yasser.”
Well, it’s frustrating.
This will all be settled by the time this interview is published, so just speak your mind.
It will all be settled, or it won’t, by the time this comes out.
The whole thing is frustrating, but you’ve got to realize we’re dealing with fundamental questions of identity. At Rosh Hashana, the Jews go back and read the story of Abraham and Sarah giving birth to Isaac. It’s interesting, the circumstances under which the sons of Isaac were born and became separated. And it sounds like sort of an epic family tragedy, and they just sort of kept replaying it, down through the years. That’s the thing that bothers me. I just hope that somehow we’ll get beyond that. To the outsider who cares about them both, it seems so self-evident that the only acceptable answer is for them to find a way to live together in peace.
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{Leaving the Presidency and Starting a New Life}
You’re only in your mid-fifties, at the peak of your powers, with the most astonishing experience and contacts a man can have. When you’re out of office, what are you going to do?
I’ve laid the basic plans for my library and policy center. And I know I’m going to have an office in New York, because I’ll be there as well. I’ve talked to a lot of people in general terms about it, but I decided that I would try to be effective in this job right up until the end. And in order to do it, I can’t be spending vast amounts of time planning out my next step. I probably need a couple of months to just rest, relax, sleep, get a little perspective.
I’ve thought a lot about ex-presidencies. There have been two really great ones in history: John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter. Adams went back to the House of Representatives and became the leading spokesman for abolition. You see the Washington Monument right behind us? Adams and Abraham Linclon stood together on that mound when the Washington Monument [cornerstone was laid].
Jimmy Carter has used the Carter Center to work on human rights, election monitoring, getting rid of river blindness in Africa, agricultural self-sufficiency. From time, to time, he’s engaged in various peace issues, primarily in Africa. And he works here at home on Habitat for Humanity.
The challenge is to trade power and authority, broadly spread, for influence and impact, tightly concentrated. I’m sure I’ll be involved in this whole area of racial and religious reconciliation at home and around the world, and economic empowerment of poor people, here and around the world.
I’m very interested in this whole idea of the relationship of energy to economic growth and the challenge of global warming, which I believe is real. I believe we can break the iron link between how nations get rich and how they deal with the environment. I think the energy realities of the world have changed drastically in the last ten years, and they’re about to really change with the development of fuel-cell engines, alternative fuels and research on biofuels. You can cut the grass out there on the South Lawn and make fuel out of it. I’m interested in all that.
I’m interested in the breakdown of public-health systems around the world. Three diseases — AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria — kill one in every four people who die every year now.
I’ve explored a lot of ideas, but I’m going to take some time when I get out to think about it. I want to make sure that, whatever I do, I give the next president time to be president, and I don’t get in his way.
What physical change in you says that you’ve served eight years and that this is a job that really takes a toll?
I’m in better shape and better health than I was eight years ago, but my hair’s gray. I think that’s about it. I’ve got a few wrinkles I didn’t have eight years ago. I’ve held up pretty well. I’ve had a good time. I’ve enjoyed it. I couldn’t help my hair going gray. It would have probably gone gray if I hadn’t become president.
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{The Twenty-Second Amendment}
You’re the youngest retiring president since Teddy Roosevelt. Do you compare yourself much to Roosevelt?
Well, I think the time in which I served was very much like the time in which he served. His job was to manage the transition of America from an agricultural to an industrial power and from, essentially, an isolationist to an international nation. In my time, we were managing the transition from an industrial to an information age and from a Cold War world to a multipolar, more interdependent world.
Then, when Roosevelt got out, he felt Taft had betrayed his progressive legacy. So he spent a lot of the rest of his life in political affairs. He built a third-party political movement and was a very important force. But I think the impact he might have had was tempered by his evident disappointment at not being president anymore. That’s not an option for me. I can’t run again, because now there’s the Twenty-second Amendment.
Bill Clinton: The Rolling Stone Interview, Page 1 of 9