Interview With Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone Magazine - part 2 - President Bill Clinton - Interview

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Dec 11, 2000

And you know, that was a mistake I made. Hillary gets a bum rap for that. That was basically my fault, because I knew that basically there's only two ways to get to universal coverage. You either have to have a taxpayer subsidy, which is what we've done now with the Children's Health Insurance Program, because now we've got the number of uninsured people going down in America for the first time in a dozen years. primarily because in the Balanced Budget Act, we insisted--the Democrats did--on getting the Children's Health Insurance Program, which is the biggest expansion of Government-financed health care since Medicaid. You either have to do it that way or you have to have an employer mandate where the employers have to provide the health insurance, and then you exempt smaller businesses and subsidize that somewhat.

Mr. Wenner. You---

The President. I didn't take offense at it. You know, they thought I was being bull-headed, and I think, in retrospect, they were probably right.

Newt Gingrich

Mr. Wenner. What was your relationship with Newt like?

The President. I had an unusual relationship with him. First of all---

Mr. Wenner. Was it---

The President. It depended on which Newt showed up. But I thought the good Newt, I found engaging, intelligent, and that we were surprisingly in agreement in the way we viewed the world.

Mr. Wenner.---similar---

The President. Partly. But you know, Newt supported me in virtually all of my foreign policy initiatives. And after he got his Congress, he realized that a hundred of them had never had a passport.

I remember him calling me once, wanting me to get them to go on foreign missions. He said, "If you ask them, then they can't be attacked back home for boondoggle trips." So we actually had a very cordial relationship.

He was also very candid with me about his political objectives. And he, in turn, from time to time, would get in trouble with the rightwing of his own caucus because they said I could talk him into too much. We had a pretty good relationship.

You know, on the other hand, as I told you, when he did things like blaming every bad thing that happened in America on Democrats in the 1960's and all that, I thought it was highly destructive.

Mr. Wenner. How did he make you feel, personally?

The President. At some point, probably around 1996, I got to the point where I no longer had personal feelings about those things. But you know, things like the Whitewater investigation and the Travel Office investigation--he was smart. He knew there was nothing in that stuff. It was all politics to him. It was about power.

But he really did believe that the object of politics was to destroy your opponent. And you know, he ran Jim Wright out of the Congress on account of that. That's what he thought he was doing. And he had an enormous amount of success in the beginning, and he won the Congress basically by having that take-no-prisoners, be-against-everything approach.

Mr. Wenner. Didn't he tell you once on. the phone that he was planning to lead a revolution against you?