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Tuesday, June 29, 2004.
Life is a constant struggle to let good outweigh
the bad -Clinton
For eight years, Bill Clinton was the most
powerful man on earth. As President of the United States, he led his
country beyond the Cold War and into the 21st century. Clinton spent his time at
the White House trying to reconcile what he calls parallel lives: affairs
of state at odds with a turbulent private life. Despite his foreign and
domestic achievements, his time in office was also marred by scandal.
Whitewater - a property deal gone wrong that Clinton and his wife Hillary were involved in - led to
an inquiry by independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who had unlimited
powers of investigation.
Although the Clintons were found innocent, Starr controversially
broadened his inquiry to examine the President’s private life and
allegations of sexual harassment -he also investigated many of Clinton’s
friends and colleagues, some of whom were jailed.
In 1998, it was revealed Clinton had had an affair with a young
woman at the White House.
But for eight months, Bill Clinton lied about this infidelity to
his wife and to the country. “I did not have sexual relations with that
woman, Miss Lewinsky”, he insisted.
Clinton became the first US president in over a century to be
impeached - and for a time both his presidency and marriage were at
risk. In the first part of
this interview, he speaks frankly about his time in office and his affair
with Lewinsky. And he displays his anger at those who pursued him. He
fielded questions from David Dimbleby on the BBC television programme
“Panorama” last Saturday. Excerpts:
Mr President, it’s interesting that
you describe yourself as leading two parallel lives. What do you mean by
that?
Well, in my book, I talked
about my childhood, which was marked by living in an alcoholic home where
there was sporadic, arbitrary and sometimes quite frightening violence
and how I saw from my mother’s example, you know we not only didn’t go
around talking about it, we went on with our lives and we found something
to enjoy about every day. So it occurred to me as I thought about it that
we lived for years with a kind of an outer life outside our home that we
loved, that we loved living it, we lived it well, I did, my mother did,
then we had this other life that was often a source of pain, and agony.
But many people have a sort of private side of their
life that they keep private, but you actually describe it as two
different lives and I wonder whether it’s possible to lead two different
lives and …
No it’s not
And whether you end up not living either?
Well, I don’t think it’s
possible to lead two different lives, I think eventually they intersect,
and sometimes they clash and crash, and on occasion that happened to me
and I describe that with some candour in the book.
You also talk of anger, of a kind of anger. You say at one point you had a
constant anger, which you kept locked away. You don’t seem to be an angry man; what made you angry?
Well, by nature I’m not an
angry person. I wasn’t as a
child. And I’m in a
different place in my life now.
I’ve worked through a lot of this. But I was angry because I was living in the face
of arbitrary abusive power, and I always hated it.
From your stepfather?
Yeah.
You also said in a slightly different context, again about
anger that there were moments when you were so angry that it did you
harm. What harm were you done by your anger?
The Greeks said those whom
the gods would destroy they first make angry. If you go round mad you can’t, you don’t think very
well, and you wind up doing things that you shouldn’t do. And I think there are numerous
points in my life, where I really was angry and it bothered me. I also
think a lot of anger is quite healthy and I’ve bent over backwards
because I tried to be a peace maker in my home; I bent over backwards not
to be angry, and never to show anger and I think there’s a price for that
as well.
But what was the harm that it did you? Where did you
harm yourself or harm others by it?
Well, I don’t think there’s
any question that a lot of the personal mistakes I made in my life, I
made when I was angry.
You scourge yourself, don’t you really in this
book? You talk also about
selfishness. In this essay, you mention when you were a child, you
detested selfishness, but you saw it every day in the mirror. Has
selfishness been a constant part of your career, which obviously demands
ambition and …
My life has been both selfish
and selfless. I mean if you live the kind of life I live, I’ve lived,
you’re running for office - it’s almost impossible, as I say in this
book, I may be the only person who got elected President ever, because of
the loyalty, support and determination of his personal friends, who just
wouldn’t let my campaign die.
It’s seemed to me often that from the beginning, I was always
taking more from people than I could give back. I mean I learned very early in life, that we’re
all a mixture of selflessness and selfishness. That we’re all a mixture
of love and anger. That we all have these elements in us, and life is a
constant struggle to let the good outweigh the bad.
When you decided to run for the Presidency, you were told by your Republican opponents
that they would in effect stop at nothing to destroy you. And it’s interesting that you
knew that, you were forewarned that they were going to try and destroy
you, and yet you accepted the challenge.
When I was threatened, it
proved to me all the more that it was time to make a change. Because I don’t think the purpose
of politics is simply to get power and hold on to it.
But it’s a rough game in Washington.
It’s a rough game but the
other side had been in for twelve years; we had tried it their way. And first I was shocked that they
made me think I might have a chance to win because I was told that they
were confident that they could beat everybody but me and I didn’t think
that you know, at the time, no one else thought I could win so if they
thought I could win, maybe it meant I had a chance.
But you can’t have had any grounds for complaint when
the press did go at you when you became President.
No.
Because you knew it was going to happen, you brought
it on yourself in a sense by running for it.
Yeah, but I don’t like that
because that exonerates everybody else of responsibility for the
decisions that they make.
The New Right that controlled the Republican Party in Washington
and the political press had the same interests. They thought it was all
about power, I thought it was about how power was used. I was interested,
to me, the way I kept score in my Presidency was; did more people have
jobs or not? Did more people
move out of poverty or not?
Did the crime rate go down or not? Were more kids breathing clean
air and fewer getting asthma?
What was our record in the world? Did we advance peace and prosperity and security or
not? That’s how I kept
score.
Others kept score in a totally different way. You know, are we hurting the
other side or not? Have we
got a good story today that is about personal destruction?
So, yes I knew that, and yes I did it and
no, I don’t complain but I don’t have to agree with it. I still think American politics
works better when the fight is over who’s right and who’s wrong, rather
than who’s good and who’s bad.
Who’s good and who’s bad may be a good
little flashy story for today, but it doesn’t have much to do with how
the American people are going to live, ten, twenty, thirty years from
now, and how the world will work.
But if you knew you had enemies like that, you
offered them a gift with the Monica Lewinsky affair, didn’t you?
Of course I did, and was it
rational? No.
So I do my very best to explain why I think it happened. But you know when people
ask me this question, well how could you do something so stupid, when you
knew they were after you.
Well of course, if I’d been thinking straight, I wouldn’t have
done it. If - but I hope
that you and everyone else who asks me this question, never have to know
what it’s like to have somebody who despises you be given unaccountable
legal power, to indict the innocent, because they will not lie and to
exonerate the guilty because they will, and then to be treated as a
totally legitimate person in the press, as if obviously you must have
done something wrong or why are they doing all this? And you know, it’s hard to think
straight when that’s going on.
And nothing I say by way of explanation in
my account of my life should be taken as an excuse. I don’t make any excuses for
myself, you’ve already said I’m pretty tough on myself and I try to be. I don’t believe anyone who
reaches the age of accountability can take an explanation for his
mistakes as an excuse; so there’s a big difference.
But I frankly think Washington went a
little haywire you know just, ever since Watergate there was this idea
that you know, we treat all our politicians as if they were basically
crooks, and we just keep looking till we find something. And that’s the way the press kept
score, and that’s the way the Republican Right kept score; that, thank
God, is not the way the American people kept score. Let me remind you in all of this,
we always had the support of two thirds of the
American people staying with us, so I was
gratified that more people saw the world the way I did, and believed
politics actually mattered. I think these decisions affect people’s lives.
But given that you, as you say, hated the inquiry
into Whitewater and all this.
Well it was not legitimate. I
hated it (overlaps), I asked
for it.
You say, then along came the Lewinsky affair and you offered
it to them on a plate in effect. How did you come to do that?
Well, I tried to explain
that. It happened under circumstances in which people who had lived
parallel lives become quite vulnerable. It happened at a time when I was angry, I was under
stress, I was afraid I was going to lose my fight with the
Republican Congress. As I said, I was in this titanic
fight for the future of the country and an inevitable fight with my old
demons, so I won the public fight and lost the private one. And then, Starr turned the
private one into a legal, constitutional and public one.
You think he was wrong to do that?
Of course.
Did you think it was dangerous at the time?
What they were doing?
What you were doing. Did you think it was risky?
I don’t know that I, I don’t
- I can’t answer that. I don’t know what I thought about it. It didn’t last very long and …
and the accounts are not entirely accurate of what did happen; so I don’t
want to talk about that.
I’ve said, all I have to say about that in the book. I’m not
saying any more about that.
There is a curious aspect of it that you said to
Starr; you implied that you expected it to become public knowledge. You
said you expected it to come out at some point.
I didn’t in the beginning but
subsequent things happened which made me think that.
You’ve explained the background to it and how you
felt that this was really a private matter and was wrongly exposed
publicly, but one thing people were puzzled by, which was when you said
you hadn’t had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, did you seriously,
when you said that, not consider oral sex to be a sexual relationship.
First of all, I never
discussed what did or didn’t happen; so you only have one side of what
happened. I don’t believe in
discussing it and won’t.
Secondly, did you read the instructions I was given?
Which instructions?
Well, keep in mind we were, I testified very
differently to the Grand Jury, than I did in the civil deposition. I was given the most bizarre
definition of sexual relations, which the Republican lawyers that were
going after me, said they did to spare me embarrassment. Then, my lawyer, and then I
personally, asked those lawyers if they wanted to ask me a specific
question and they said ‘No’.
And then, they claimed that I had lied in the deposition, because
I had answered no to this contorted definition they gave me, which to
this day, I still believe is the right answer.
So you’ve never said
you had oral sex, or she did oral sex on you. That’s what …
I’ve never answered that one way or the other.
Right.
I answered questions in the grand jury
about what I thought the definition meant. But you know, I wasn’t, keep in mind, at the time I
went through that deposition, I wasn’t in the business of helping them,
and I wasn’t supposed to help them, because they knew the law suit - that
gave them the power to ask me these questions - was a total fraud. They
knew it. And the judge threw it out. They knew that the theory on which they were asking me
these questions was a total fraud. They knew there had never been any
sexual harassment, and they knew something I didn’t know, which is that
they had gotten Kenneth Starr involved in the case, for total political
reasons.
Now, maybe you know, given the import of
your question, maybe you think all this is perfectly legitimate and every
person in the world should be treated this way; I don’t, I think it was
wrong. I think it was done by people who craved power, who wanted to
concentrate wealth and power in my country. Who wanted to radically
revise my country’s future, and move it to the right, and who resented
the fact that two thirds of the American people supported what I was
doing. Now does that excuse what I did? No. But
what they did was a threat to the Constitution and the fabric of life in
America and the future of the country. And I think when they get in power
they do things that I don’t agree with. So, I fought them, and I’m glad I did.
You say we’re not
to know what you did and that’s obviously your affair, but your wife, in
her book clearly sets out that you did lie to her.
I did do that and…
You lied to her about your relationship with …
And I said I did, and I acknowledge that
in my book.
So, it is true that
you lied.
Is it true that I didn’t tell her the truth? I didn’t
tell anybody the truth. When
it broke publicly, and it was obvious to me that I’d been set up and when
I asked … specifically to ask me these questions, they declined to do so.
And that they had manoeuvred, that Starr had manoeuvred himself into the
case, I decided that the most important thing that I should do is not to
compound my personal error by letting these people win and that in the
meantime I shouldn’t expose anybody until the thing calmed down a little
bit because we had a mad prosecutor on the loose who was dying to indict
anybody.
Let me remind you, in violation of the
Justice Department guidelines, he compelled Monica Lewinsky’s mother to
testify. You know, if this
had been a normal thing where I had been found to have done wrong
personally, and I’d been asked about it, I would have simply dealt with
it in an appropriate way, with my family and everybody else.
You were fighting for your presidency and you were fighting as you
saw it against political enemies.
Absolutely.
Right through
...and that was what it was about?
Wasn’t as I saw it sir, we had several
years of evidence. Kenneth Starr would not be allowed to be prosecutor
against me as a defendant in any decent court in the land.
You obviously …
And, let me just say this. One of the
reasons he got away with it is because people like you only ask people
like me the questions. You
gave him a complete free ride. Any abuse they wanted to do, they indicted
all these little people from Arkansas, what did you care about them,
they’re not famous, who cares that their lives were trampled? Who cares that their children are
humiliated. Who cares if
Starr sends FBI agents to their school, and rip them out of their school
to humiliate them, and try to force their parents to lie about me? Who cares if he sends a woman
like Susan McDougal in to Hannibal Lector like cell and makes her wear a
uniform worn only by murderers and child molesters. Nobody in your line of work cared
a rip about that at the time. Why, because he was helping their story.
And that’s the difference in me and the
people that were after me. I
actually cared about what happened to those people, and I wanted to be
President to help those people.
And that’s what the fight was about. Now that doesn’t justify any
mistake I made, but look how much time you spent asking me these
questions, and this time you’ve had … that’s because what you care about, because
that’s what you think helps you and helps this interview. I care about
what happened to the people that I fought for.
And that’s why people like you always help
the Far Right because you like to hurt people, and you like to talk about
how bad people are and all their personal failings, and (David
interjects) and that’s why you.
Look, just - you made a decision to allocate your time in a
certain way. You should take responsibility for that. You should say yes,
I care much more about this than whether the
Bosnian people were saved, and whether he
bought a million people home from Kosovo, than whether twenty seven
million people had jobs at the end, and whether we moved a hundred times
as many people out of poverty as Reagan and Bush. This is what I care
about.
•To be continued tomorrow
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