His Side of The Story

On writing the book

I've always been given to remembrance and remembering--more when I was younger even than when I was President. When I was a young man, I thought about my childhood all the time. It's a Southern thing; we're all obsessed with the past. I was very blessed that both my mother and I saved virtually everything from my childhood. I was always a pack rat.

I never had writer's block once I started. But I did have periods when I had to just get up and drop it--it was just too hot. I have that pretty gripping scene in the early part of the book where my stepfather was drunk and he had the gun in his hand and he shot it off, and my mother and I were standing in the hall and the bullet goes in the wall between us. I felt it all over again. It was frightening.

I learned some things or at least learned how to describe some things from my life. For example, this whole idea about having a life that required me to be a secret-keeper and how if you have a whole part of your life you can't talk about, then you wind up living parallel lives.

On keeping secrets

The problem with having one part of your life walled off from the other is trying to decide what belongs behind the wall. It gets bizarre. How bizarre was it when I was a kid that I didn't want my daddy to know that I was giving part of my allowance to Billy Graham? How weird is that? I did a good job dealing with all this Starr stuff, I think, and going through all my work. By the way, the flip side of having lived parallel lives is that I was good at it. People have a hard time believing that I could go to work and concentrate on my job, but I'd been doing it ever since I was a little boy. So in a funny way, my childhood prepared me for dealing with this sort of crazy, bifurcated life I had to pursue during that whole impeachment thing.

On his revelation in the book that during much of his time in office he was "seething inside" at Ken Starr

I hid it pretty good, didn't I? You didn't know. I mean, he bankrupted us. He ruined us financially.

Let me tell you what I did. I knew that if all of you guys were more interested in Whitewater than anything else, you might not print or air a shot across Starr's bow unless it came from me. However, one of the things I've learned is, the difference between being Governor of a small state and being President is, if I had had this kind of thing as Governor, I could have been on it every day like a wet blanket, and been on television every night talking about education, economic development, the environment, whatever I was doing. If you're President, you maybe get 20 seconds on television four nights a week. And I had come to realize that for me, on a scale of 1 to 10, a 10 answer on Whitewater was not nearly as good as a 7 answer on education or welfare reform or trade or something that related to the American people. Because if [Whitewater] was the only message they got, they would conclude that that's all I was doing. I don't blame you [in the media]; what's hot's hot.

I also realized that I could not afford to manifest any anger. Keep in mind, I was always mad at myself because I asked for the special counsel and it was a horrible mistake. I really thought it was an up-and-up deal. The thing that really angered me was I felt helpless because I felt like I had set in motion a chain of events in a good-faith effort to reassure mostly the press more than the American people--the people didn't care--that I hadn't done anything wrong in Whitewater and neither had Hillary. And now Hillary, Susan McDougal, all these people in Arkansas, they were being crushed because of these events, and I couldn't help them. Look, I figured I'm big enough to take care of myself, I made the mistake of asking for this, I thought it was a legit deal, and I'll just keep performing as President, and if I survive and stay healthy, when I leave the White House then I'll make enough money to pay my bills and go on. I didn't worry nearly as much about that as I did about everybody else, and I felt so helpless. I thought, I'm in the one position on earth, the presidency of the United States. It's supposed to be the most powerful job on earth. And on this one thing, it's the most powerless job. I cannot do anything to help these people.

On his contention that Starr was an "instrument in a grand design"

Starr knew what he was supposed to do. And I think he did it. You look at who all of his major clients were, all of his major political alliances, you look at the effort he made to get into the Paula Jones case from the beginning. He was part of the New Right that runs the Washington Republican Party. As opposed to the Republicans out in America, mainline Republicans. This was not about evidence. This was about a struggle for power. I think that they really saw us as usurpers. They thought the only reason they lost the election to Jimmy Carter was Watergate. They thought they had found a formula to describe us in a way that would basically move us out of consideration with the American people, rooted in the receding memory of the '60s. You know, weak on crime, fiscally irresponsible, never met a tax we didn't like, never met a program we didn't like, couldn't defend the country.

If you believe that you're entitled to rule and that the most important thing is that the right people be in power, then it makes you vulnerable to the abuse of power. They honestly believe that the most important thing is that people that espouse conservative values and antigovernment policies and their economic philosophy be in power. So of course there should be a different set of rules for them than everybody else because the most important thing is to kick everybody else out.

On his relationship with Monica Lewinsky

You know the Greek adage "those whom the gods would destroy they first make angry"? It's not good for a person to be as mad underneath as I was. I think if people have unresolved anger it makes them do nonrational, destructive things. People ask me all the time, they say, "What you did during the government shutdown with Monica Lewinsky didn't make any sense, so explain. How could you do this? You knew Ken Starr was looking over your shoulder."

We always look at reality backward, but we live it forward. And I say over and over in the book, once people reach the age of accountability, no matter what people do to them, that is not an excuse for any mistakes they make. On the other hand, only a fool does not seek to understand why he or she makes the mistakes they make.

I think a lot of it was I had been for a period of years back to living my parallel lives with a vengeance, dealing with the Ken Starr thing. Then I lost the Congress in '94 because I tried to jam too much change down the system at one time, and Gingrich was a better politician than I was in '94. His major contribution to American political history was the proof that you could consistently nationalize midterm elections. And it's a lesson that any Democrat or Republican now ignores at their peril.

But I got beat. So we'd fixed the economy, we'd done NAFTA, we'd done the crime bill, and instead of me paying for it, all of these brave members of Congress that voted to do something about the deficit and to take on the N.R.A. and who tried to do something about health care, they paid. I just felt terrible about that. And here we were at the beginning of this government shutdown. It worked out just fine in the end politically for me and for America because I stopped it, but no one knew in the beginning how the fight would come out.

So I was involved in two great struggles at the same time: a great public struggle over the future of America with the Republican Congress and a private struggle with my old demons. I won the public one and lost the private one. I don't think it's much more complicated than that. That's not an excuse. But it is an explanation, and that's the best I can do.

On telling Dan Rather on 60 Minutes that he had an affair with Lewinsky "just because I could"

What I meant by that is a lot of times you're angry, and you don't do these things because the opportunity is not there. Being a moral person [means] the one thing you don't do is do things just because you can. But if you think about most of the mistakes that we all make in our lives--all kinds of mistakes--well, there was temptation and opportunity.

On family counseling

First thing you learn is that any relationship that was once good, that is grounded in love but is in trouble, then one big reason is because you let it get on automatic. People begin to take each other for granted, their relationship begins to fall into routines. And if you're like us, you're workaholics, and if you know each other as well as we know each other, you get to where you don't even have to talk anymore half the time. You've been married a certain amount of time, your partner doesn't even have to open her mouth. So you have to fix that.

The other thing that I learned about was the impact of my whole life on my marriage. You bring the person you are to the altar, not just the person you want to be. Hillary made me a heck of a lot better a fellow than I would have been otherwise. But I was still the person I was as a child. We dealt with all that, and I talked to my daughter about all that. It was really a good thing. I believe in this. I believe that even marriages that end in divorce, maybe even especially marriages that end in divorce, should have the benefit of this because then both parties will know in good conscience that they gave it their best shot.

On 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.

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. I knew there was nothing to Whitewater, I knew there was nothing to the Paula Jones case--Ken Starr could have as many FBI agents as he wanted doing whatever they wanted to do.

On the challenges of the presidency

I'm trying to show [in the book] how everything happens at once. You come to office. If you're fortunate, you have a theory of the case. You know where America is, where America ought to go, and what you think you ought to do to take it there. And so you pursue that agenda. And then almost without exception, there are other things you have to deal with. First, unanticipated events. When I ran for President, I didn't dream that within a year I'd be dealing with what happened in Somalia. George Bush certainly didn't believe he'd be dealing with 9/11.

Then there's always an opposing party. And sometimes they see their job as to stop you from doing yours. So you have to find a way to work with them and, hopefully, to reach an honorable compromise without looking like you sold out. You have to make judgments about when to hold, when to fold. And I think that the whole American system was set up to force people to compromise. So I don't think it's a bad thing. But there are some things that aren't acceptable. That's why I try to go through in some detail in the welfare-reform section why I vetoed the two bills I vetoed, why I signed the bill I signed.

Then there's another thing that happens, which is you make mistakes. [For instance,] at the end of the '96 campaign, when it was obvious that the Democratic National Committee, even though I knew nothing about it, didn't have an appropriate vetting operation for some of the contributions. So all we could do was give up the money, codify it all, give it all to the Justice Department and try to fix it. You run a big ole bureaucracy, things are going to happen. And then, you know, those of us with kids, your kid graduates from high school, things happen. I wanted to try to give people a sense of what it is like to be in the middle of this.

On mistakes he made as President

I should have done welfare reform before health care. As soon as I realized [Senate majority leader] Bob Dole wasn't going to do anything on health care, I should have told the American people the truth, abandoned it, and said we're going to do this after the '94 election, we've got to have a bipartisan solution. I hope that in my account here I have persuaded people that the blame for those two big decisions rests entirely with me, because I always thought Hillary and Ira Magaziner got a totally bum rap on this. Those were big, big calls I made and they were wrong. I made a lot of big calls right, but those two I made wrong.

On exhaustion

Almost all the mistakes I've made in my life, personal and public, happened to me when I was so tired I could hardly lift my arms above my shoulders. It's not fashionable to say, but it's true. And I'll bet it's true in the George Bush White House. I bet it's true in every White House that's ever existed. You've got to work like crazy, you have a limited amount of time, you want to do all these things, but you have to be very sensitive to the risk of error.

On succeeding in politics

I think the great trick to a successful run in politics is to have both what you've called the wussy-mommy qualities and the macho-tough qualities. If you're only one or the other, you're going to get into trouble. A party without compassion and without intellect and without appreciation for ambiguity is going to get in trouble in an environment where there are many moving parts, not all of which are under your control. On the other hand, if all you have is empathy and ambiguity and you don't know when to stand and fight and when to say no, then in the end all the sand will run out of the hourglass before you really can prevail.

I think the Republicans are better at understanding how to get and keep power. They've shown that since 1968. The Democrats tend to be more responsible in the exercise of power but sometimes don't understand how to get it or how to keep it. We have to understand, we Democrats, that not all politics is rational and you have to deal with people's fear, their need for security. We have to understand that when the Republicans come at us and paint cartoon-like images of us, even if, like [former Georgia Senator] Max Cleland, we left half our body in Vietnam, they do it for one simple reason--because it's worked so much. And they will keep on doing it until it doesn't work, because they're in business to beat us. We've got to beat them.

On John Kerry

Our voters decided they wanted to win. So they said, We need to pick the person we think has got the best chance to win, and this guy looks like a President, talks like a President, he's got a good military record, good security and economic background. He's the one. So John Kerry wins, and by the way, I don't think the voters are wrong. My own experience with him is, just from the psychological factors, I think he would be a successful President.

On Democrats' concerns that his book will draw attention away from Kerry

I must say that's insulting to the voters. That's like saying the voters can't walk and chew gum at the same time. They can't read about the past and draw any conclusions about the presidential elections until they digest my book. I mean, come on. I don't buy that.

On terrorism

We're in a new era where nobody seriously thinks humankind is going to be destroyed, but in a funny way we all feel more vulnerable because the porousness of freedom and openness makes everybody everywhere subject to terror. And everything has been miniaturized in the digital age, including chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. You get a Girl Scout cookie's worth of fissile material, you put it in Timothy McVeigh's bomb, and you take out 25% of Washington.

So we are in fact, as a race, in far less danger than we were in the early days of the cold war, when both sides had nuclear weapons and before the red telephones and before we really understood each other. But as individuals we are at least, in theory, more vulnerable, because none of us can hide. And that's frightening.

On whether Bush's foreign policy is rooted in missionary zeal

Well, first of all, I think we needed a little missionary zeal after 9/11. But the exercise of power in the grip of any obsession is always a risk. There's a difference between having convictions and obsessions. And by the way, I had to fight this; I was almost obsessed with bin Laden for a long time and the record will reflect that.

You've got a real intellectual debate today in the post-9/11 world--more than a missionary zeal. I take the general approach of the current Administration to be, we should do whatever we can on our own and cooperate when we need to. Whereas our approach was, we should cooperate whenever we can and act on our own when we need to. Very often it led us to the same place. I went out there in Bosnia, Kosovo and Haiti. I didn't join the land-mine treaty because I thought they were being unfair to our soldiers. I waited until 2000 to join the [international] criminal court because I had to get those amendments to make sure that our soldiers wouldn't be used as political pawns.

All I'm saying is I did things unilaterally too. But my view is that in an interdependent world most problems do not lend themselves to unilateral solutions, and that if you live in an environment where you don't control the playing field, then sooner or later you have to make a deal. That's what politics is about. You have to try and create a world in which there are more partners and fewer terrorists.

On America's place in the world

I believe that instead of acting on our own whenever we can to solve whatever problems we can, we should be trying to build alliances and acting with others whenever we can and acting alone only when we have to. Because I think the most important thing is not to solve all the problems in the world. We can't do that. The most important thing is to create a world we would like to live in when we are no longer the world's only superpower.

For example, if in 30 years, the E.U. continues to grow together, economically and politically, China continues to grow, and India has the boom it might--then, if we're the only military superpower, it will be their choice, not ours. As soon as they're as rich as we are, it is their choice, not ours. So I think we should be trying to create a world we would like to live in even if we're not the only big dog on the block.

On whether Bush was right to invade Iraq

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.

At the moment the U.N. inspectors were kicked out in '98, this is the proper language: there were substantial quantities of botulinum and aflatoxin, as I recall, some bioagents, I believe there were those, and VX and ricin, chemical agents, unaccounted for. Keep in mind, that's all we ever had to work on. We also thought there were a few missiles, some warheads, and maybe a very limited amount of nuclear laboratory capacity.

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.

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 to 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 your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for.

On whether the Iraq war was worth the costs

It's a judgment that no one can make definitively yet. I would not have done it until after Hans Blix finished his job. Having said that, over 600 of our people have died since the conflict was over. We've got a big stake now in making it work. I want it to have been worth it, even though I didn't agree with the timing of the attack. I think if you have a pluralistic, secure, stable Iraq, the people of Iraq will be better off, and it might help the process of internal reform in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. I think right now, getting rid of Saddam's tyranny, ironically, has made Iraq more vulnerable to terrorism coming in from the outside. But any open society is going to be more vulnerable than any tyranny to that.

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.

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.

On whether he'd want a state funeral like Reagan's

I haven't thought about it, and I've been chided for not, so I've got my little book now and Hillary and I have to fill it out. They give you a book to plan your funeral. The government does. It's big. I mean, it's down to the last who gets to sneeze for you.

On whether he's forgiven himself for his mistakes

On most days I have. I'm in a good place now. I've had a wonderful life since I left the White House. Contrary to a lot of the commentators, I haven't been sitting around sulking that I wasn't basking in the spotlight. I hope people will read the book. I worked hard on it. But I am more at peace with who I am in my life than I have ever been. I'm thrilled with how Hillary's doing. And we're still laughing, having a good time together. And my daughter is making her own life, and it's exhilarating. Much to my surprise, she still wants to spend time with her parents sometimes. I love this work I'm doing on AIDS, I love my foundation work. I don't sit around. I don't beat myself up a lot. And I believe, on balance, my life had a lot more good than bad. On balance, my presidency had far more good than bad.

I hope it will free other people to talk more openly about their mistakes and their problems and their fears. I'm trying to liberate people. I think we're so afraid--guys like me and women too, people in public life--we're all afraid that if we admit error or admit fear, we'll be viewed as weak or wanting. That's why when President Bush and I did the portrait unveiling a couple of days ago, I said one of my favorite portraits in the White House was Philip Laszlo's portrait of Theodore Roosevelt in the Cabinet Room. You can see the strength, but you can see the fear. The only thing I can compare Laszlo's portrait of Theodore Roosevelt to is the way Gary Cooper played Will Kane in High Noon. They're both scared, and they do the right thing anyway. To me that's more heroic. The real world has always been more interesting than the mythical world to me. And so I'm hoping that by writing this book, I'll make other people feel free to let go of their anger and resentment and not be afraid to admit what they've done wrong.

PICT-

B/W PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS FOR TIME BY DIANA WALKER Clinton speaks with TIME in his study in the renovated barn adjacent to his home in Chappaqua, N.Y.

FIVE B/W PHOTOS: PHOTOGRAPHS FOR TIME BY DIANA WALKER