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 Support The DrudgeReport; Visit Our Advertisers  TIME Interview's President Clinton Sat Jun 19 2004 19:33:46 ET New York - "I was involved in two great struggles - a great public struggle ... with the Republican Congress and a private struggle with my old demons. I won the public one and lost the private one," former President Bill Clinton tells TIME in an interview prior to the publication of his book, 'My Life,' by Knopf on Tuesday. TIME's Joe Klein and Michael Duffy spent almost 2 hours with President Clinton at his home in Chappaqua, New York on Thursday, where the former president talked about everything from the war in Iraq, Louis Freeh, Monica Lewinsky, Ken Starr and the planning of state funerals. The 12-page package includes exclusive photos by longtime TIME White House photographer Diana Walker and renowned photographer Gregory Heisler. The issue contains a series of vignettes from the book. TIME columnist Joe Klein gives his analysis of Clinton and the book, writing, "Clinton's theory is that he has always lived "parallel" lives. As a child, he hid the deep anger he felt over his stepfather's drunken violence behind a relentlessly sunny fa�ade. He is brutal about his childhood failings. He describes himself as "fat, uncool and hardly popular with the girls." He writes that he "tended to make enemies effortlessly" and that he was so clumsy, he outgrew his fear of riding a bike without training wheels only as a college student at Oxford, Klein writes. The presidency, he says, was an unconscious return to the self-destructive patterns of his childhood-private anger over the Starr investigation, public optimism about the work of state. (The notion of nursing shameful secrets is also an inferential acknowledgment of his amorous reputation, although he offers no new information about any of the famous "bimbo eruptions.") The case he builds against Starr in My Life is a lawyer's case, careful and powerful. In retrospect, it is clear that there was no substance to the Whitewater allegations or the other White House scandalettes-the travel-office firings, the fbi files, the death of Vince Foster-except, of course, Lewinsky. It seems clear that Starr conducted an unseemly and irresponsible investigation filled with "abuses of power," as Clinton contends, illegal leaks to the press and barely legal coercive tactics against prospective witnesses. And it also seems clear that the press was way too credulous about Starr's allegations and didn't pay nearly enough attention to his methods, TIME reports. Highlights from the TIME interview include: On whether the Iraq war was justified: "You know, I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over. I don't believe he went in there for oil. We didn't go in there for imperialist or financial reasons. We went in there because he bought the Wolfowitz-Cheney analysis that the Iraqis would be better off, we could shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, and our leverage to make peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would be increased," Clinton tells TIME. "After 9/11, let's be fair here, if you had been President, you'd think, Well, this fellow bin Laden just turned these three airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, right? Arguably they were super-powerful chemical weapons. Think about it that way. So, you're sitting there as President, you're reeling in the aftermath of this, so, yeah, you want to go get bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that. But you also have to say, Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I've got to do that," he tells TIME. "That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So I thought the President had an absolute responsibility to go the U.N. and say, 'Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process.' You couldn't responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he'd [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he'd sell this stuff or give it away. Same thing I've always been worried about North Korea's nuclear and missile capacity. I don't expect North Korea to bomb South Korea, because they know it would be the end of their country. But if you can't feed yourself, the temptation to sell this stuff is overwhelming. So that's why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you're the President, and you're country just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for," he tells TIME. On the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: "I was surprised when I saw the extent of it. I was not surprised that there were some abuses. And I was afraid that they might become more likely because we had to rely so much on Guard people. It's tense for anybody in Iraq. But if you're a special forces person, you're more psychologically prepared than [if] one day you're cleaning teeth, or working in a car garage, or selling stuff at the Wal-Mart, and a week later you're riding in a personnel vehicle down a street in Baghdad waiting for a bomb to go off and take your life away. Now, that's like my problems-an explanation is not a justification. There is no justification for that," he tells TIME. "The more we learn about it, the more it seems that some people fairly high up, at least, thought that this was the way it ought to be done, and they may have justified it by thinking that that's the way things are done in this region and we want to find out where terrorists and killers are. [For those who wanted us to invade Iraq], it has to be because people choose freedom over repression, and because they believe that we are different from what they don't like. And that means, No. 1, we can't pull stunts like that, and No. 2, when we do, whoever is responsible has to pay. The Arabs will not be impressed if we, like in their culture, decapitate all the little guys and exonerate anybody above a certain level who was responsible," Clinton tells TIME. Why He Never Fired FBI Director Louis Freeh: "If I had known that when we tripled the counterterrorism funds none of it was put into improving the data processing and interconnecting with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, if I had known that the Executive Order I signed fairly early in my Administration ordering the CIA and the FBI to exchange high-level people and cooperate more hadn't been done, I might have done so," Clinton says. "But since the FBI chief gets a presumptive 10-year term, I didn't feel what I thought was outrageous treatment of us, particularly by him personally, was worth replacing him, because all of you [in the media] would have said, Well, he's doing it because he's got something to hide, and I didn't have anything to hide," he tells TIME. Developing... |
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