Interview with Marjorie Clapprood of WRKO Radio, Boston, Massachusetts

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 24, 1994

But I'm feeling good about it. You know, last year we devoted ourselves intensely to two things: getting our relationship straight with the Russians and reducing the nuclear threat in that part of the world, and toward getting an international economic order set up. We worked on NAFTA, the Asian Pacific countries, the GATT world trade agreement. And then this year, we had some good success, as you have pointed out, in Haiti and the Middle East and elsewhere. So I'm very hopeful. And I'm very excited, as I know a lot of people in Massachusetts are, about the moves toward peace in Northern Ireland. And we're working hard on that as well.

Ms. Clapprood. You don't even have time to go bowling anymore.

The President. No. I miss bowling. I like to bowl, actually.

President's Golf Game

Ms. Clapprood. By the way. I know I heard on your birthday one of your wishes was to break 80. Did you ever do that?

The President. I never have.

Ms. Clapprood. You never have.

The President. But the last 10 games of golf I've played I had 80 once, 81 twice, 82 three times, so I'm playing--

Ms. Clapprood. Oh, man.

The President. I'm playing pretty well, for me. That's about as good as I can play. And if I lowered my handicap when I was President, the American people would never believe that I'm working as hard as I am. [Laughter] So I probably should not want to break 80. But still, I do.

The Presidency

Ms. Clapprood. I know. It makes you very charming and endearing, because the rest of us can all relate to that.

Let me ask you just a couple wacky questions. The thing that I remember most about you from the first time that I heard about the Governor from Arkansas that wanted to be President was a picture I saw of you with then-President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a personal hero of mine but also someone here from Massachusetts. And I grew up in his hometown of Brookline. And I saw that picture recently on sort of a retrospective of your tenure over this last year and half as President. And I wondered, from that idealistic young man that you were, to now sitting in the Oval Office and dealing with questions like sending the 82d Airborne down to Haiti while Sam Nunn and Jimmy Carter and Colin Powell sat there, making decisions on war and peace, is it everything that you thought it was going to be? And what are your biggest surprises now that you're actually sitting where you worked so hard to get?

The President. Oh, yes, it is that much and more. I mean, if anything, I am more hopeful, more optimistic about the future of this country than I was before I got here.

Ms. Clapprood. You never want to say, "Quit your bitching. Quit your whining. Why is everybody being so unreasonable?"

The President. Yes. Well, I do want to say that some. I mean, sometimes I think that Americans in this time are a little too prone to see the glass as half empty instead of half full. Our optimism, our unfailing faith in our ability to make the future better has been one of the great secrets to our successes over the last 200 years. And so I do feel that. I regret that at this moment in our history there is a lot of accumulated cynicism and frustration and that it is, in some ways, more difficult for the President to communicate directly to the American people than it has been in the past, because of all the indirect filters between me and the American people. The Presidency is more isolated than I wish it were, partly because of the security concerns that exist in this day and age.