The Highest Calling, page 38
Go talk to a Pole, go talk to an Estonian or a Lithuanian or a Latvian. Talk to a Finn. Talk to people who have dealt with historic Russian aggression, who have dealt with Putin.
The only potential possible end to the hostilities is either a victory by Ukraine, including being able to take back the territory seized in 2014, or pushing Russia out of what they have seized since February 2022. That could give us breathing room to perhaps have an opportunity to protect Ukraine’s legitimate borders, with the exception of what they lost in 2014, and to move them forward with reconstruction in the face of such devastation. But it’s ultimately up to them. They have to decide. They’ve been the ones sacrificing. They’ve seen the terrible consequences of this barbaric aggression.
I would stand with them and support them as long as it takes for them to feel like they’d get to a stopping point where they have an advantage, because they need leverage over Putin. I wouldn’t trust him at a negotiating table under any circumstances, unless the Ukrainians, backed by us, have enough leverage.
DR: Let’s talk about China for a moment. President Clinton, when you were president, China became a member of the WTO because of your support. Are you surprised that the U.S.-China relationship now is as bad as it’s been since Tiananmen Square? What do you think could be done to improve it?
BC: It’s difficult. And it’ll get harder if we walk away from Ukraine, because I think it will increase the willingness of China to attack Taiwan. Putin at least has been intellectually honest. He said he thought the loss of the Soviet Union was a tragedy for civilization. He believes there should be authoritarian dictatorships that are ideologically homogeneous running big swaths of the world.
And now President Xi has clearly decided to stay for life, or at least for an indefinite amount of time. He said that he can’t pass Taiwan on to his successor, he went back on his commitment to Hong Kong that there would be one country and two systems, he has a million Uyghurs in camps in northwest China, and a litany of other things.
It’s a real dilemma for me because I worked hard with China, and I tried to build a relationship. We desperately need a cooperative relationship with them to deal with things like COVID, climate change, North Korea. There’s a whole lot of things that we ought to be doing together, but they make it virtually impossible because, again, if you decide to stay for life, whether your name is Putin or Xi or Smith, your number one priority has got to be crushing all dissent, eliminating any source of alternative power in your country, and then keeping people lathered up by being angry at somebody somewhere else.
I believe the best thing to do is to keep talking to them, even while we have to disagree with them publicly, and just keep looking for things we can do together that don’t make us hypocritical in our defense of human rights in China and throughout the world.
DR: Secretary Clinton, are you worried about a possible invasion by China of Taiwan? And what would you recommend that the president do to improve the relationship?
HRC: I agree with Bill’s analysis of Xi’s decision, after there had been an agreement among prior Chinese leaders to peacefully transfer power, to decide that he was not transferring power. He was going to stay. Humiliating his predecessor, Hu Jintao, at the Chinese Communist Party meeting sent a real signal that this is someone who has consolidated power and is going to be a dangerous leader, unless he’s convinced that the costs of risk taking and aggression are too much, and therefore backs off.
Xi saw that Putin’s invasion didn’t work as fast and smoothly as Putin apparently thought it would, and that the world united, with a few exceptions, to impose sanctions that are taking a toll on the Russian economy. Before the Russian invasion, there was a good chance he would have moved on Taiwan within two to three years. I think that timetable has been pushed back.
President Biden doesn’t get the credit he deserves for what the U.S. is now building in Asia. Trump had no policy; he had tariffs. That was it. What Biden has done is to create an ongoing relationship in defense of the other nations, in defense of the Pacific and the freedom of navigation, by giving Australia nuclear-powered submarines, a big, big deal; working with Japan to, for the first time, increase their defense budget; working with South Korea to shore them up; convincing the Philippines to allow American military bases there again; working with Australia, Japan, and India so that India, which fights border skirmishes with China on a weekly/monthly basis, is now much more attuned to what needs to be done to stand up to Chinese aggression. Those were long overdue and smart moves.
But having said that, we’re in a real ongoing competition with China for influence, for determining who will have the most power within some of the other parts of the world, like Africa and Latin America. It needs a lot of attention, and it needs some strategic patience.
DR: Secretary Clinton, there’s a famous photo of you sitting in the Situation Room looking at the effort to capture Osama bin Laden. What were you all looking at? Everybody’s mouth was open. Were you were afraid it wasn’t going to work? When did you realize it actually did work?
HRC: We were all afraid that something would go wrong. I was part of the small group that studied the intelligence to make recommendations to the president about whether to do something and, if so, what. It was the most intense public service deliberation I’ve ever been part of, and it was secret. I couldn’t tell Bill. I couldn’t talk to anybody.
So we all made our recommendations to the president, and he decided to go with a raid, which meant bringing helicopters across the border from Afghanistan through Pakistan airspace into a town called Abbottabad, which happened to house the West Point of Pakistan, about a mile away from the compound where we believed that bin Laden was living. There were a million things that could go wrong.
Obviously, this had been practiced, and every angle that we could think about had been reviewed. We were in that small Situation Room, and we were watching a screen because we had video from a drone above. We had video of what was happening as the helicopters came in to land. One of the helicopters, its tail clipped the wire on the wall surrounding a little area where animals were kept. Once the helicopter tail hit, we knew it was disabled. And that was the moment, I think, that the picture was taken. We all had flashbacks to what happened when President Carter tried to rescue the hostages in Iran. It also meant that we’d have to send in another helicopter that was in hiding, to get it in there quickly enough.
We had to do all of this literally within 20–30 minutes, because people were starting to wake up and we had helicopters landing. There was obviously noise. People were living in homes around the compound. It was a hot night. People were sleeping out on their roofs. We were aware that people were waking up and starting to wonder what the heck was going on.
When the helicopters landed and the Navy SEAL Team Six got out to go into the compound, we couldn’t see. We were all holding our breaths. We had to wait till we got news from inside the compound.
There was a firefight. The guards and one of bin Laden’s adult sons were shooting. Eventually bin Laden was shot and then his body had to be taken out of the compound, loaded onto one of the helicopters, because we had to be sure about identification to have credibility with the world. And we had to blow up the helicopter, because it was an advanced helicopter with a lot of advanced electronics that we didn’t want the Pakistanis to get. We thought the Pakistanis might very well give it to either the Russians or most likely the Chinese.
It was just so intense. Thankfully, President Obama made the right decision, and it worked.
DR: When something like that’s happening, and you know about it, you can’t say to your husband, “Bill, I have a secret, I just can’t tell you”?
BC: If there was ever even a millimeter of doubt in Barack Obama’s mind that he could trust Hillary, because of the tough fight they’d been in, I think this blew it away, because he called me as soon as it was over, and he said, “Bill, we got him.” And I said, “Who?” He knew how hard I tried to get bin Laden when I was president, and nearly did once. So he said, “Bin Laden. Hillary didn’t tell you?” I said, “Now, Mr. President, didn’t you tell her not to tell anybody?” He said, “Sure.” I said, “She didn’t tell anybody.”
DR: President Clinton, when you were growing up, you were a musician, and you thought briefly of being a professional musician. Any regrets about not pursuing that?
BC: When I was young, I don’t think I did anything that made me happier, once I got fairly proficient on the saxophone. I looked older than I was, and I’d go in these places, and if there was a group playing, they’d give me a horn and let me play. I had a great time, but I decided when I was 16 that I could never be as great as John Coltrane.
I know, it’s laughable today, but you have no idea what sacrifices were required to be a professional jazz musician in the’50s and’60s. In other words, you couldn’t make enough money selling records. If you wanted to be a great jazz player, you had to do the clubs, which means you had to stay up all night, sleep half the day. And your chances of becoming addicted to some narcotic were two or three times greater than your chances of having a successful family.
And it was very important to me, having lost my own father before I was born, to try to build a family. I wanted to be a father, and I knew over the long run that people are normally happy doing what they’re best at. I was absolutely sure I could be a better musician than I was, and that I could be good enough to make a decent living and maybe even achieve some fame. I had nine college scholarship offers in music. But I knew, I just felt somehow, that I belonged in politics somehow.
DR: President Clinton, you went to Georgetown University. I read that you only applied to one college?
BC: Georgetown. That’s the only place I applied.
DR: If you didn’t get in, were you worried about what you were going to do?
BC: Thank God, the University of Arkansas had an open admissions program for natives, so I could have just showed up. But I decided that I wanted to go to Washington, where a lot of action was. That’s where all the civil rights action was taking place, all the Vietnam action was taking place.
Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, at the time, was the most highly regarded undergraduate program academically. I loved what I knew about the Jesuits and the fact that they organized the whole curriculum as a modern version of their ancient Russian city, Orem. You didn’t get an elective till the second semester of your junior year. The first two years, you had to take 18 or 19 credits every semester. You had to take six classes. It was like a boot camp, and I actually lost a student election defending it.
But I wanted to go to Georgetown because it was hard. They didn’t let me in until May or June. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but they let me in. Then I showed up and the priest in charge of the freshman orientation said, “What is a Southern Baptist from a landlocked state doing coming to the School of Foreign Service?” I said, “Father, let’s just wait a year or two and we’ll both figure it out.”
It was the greatest decision I ever made. It changed my life. I loved it and I still love it.
DR: President Clinton, when you were president, we had a budget surplus three times. At one point, it was thought that maybe we would run out of having any new federal Treasury bills to sell because we weren’t going to have any debt, and there would thus be no benchmark around which corporate or other government debt could be priced. Any ideas about how we can get back to that?
BC: First, I did have a big argument with Alan Greenspan. He was to my left. He said, “We’re not going to be able to set interest rates. We can’t. How do we set interest rates on federal securities if we have no debt?” I said, “Alan, that’s a high-class problem. Let’s deal with that when we get to it.”
But let me say, I supported President Obama’s stimulus program, I supported the bill President Trump passed, and I supported the stimulus bill President Biden passed. When you have severe economic problems—like those caused by the Great Recession or COVID—you can’t run a balanced budget, and you can’t start cutting spending without making the economy worse.
On a related matter, I think it’s nuts to make a big issue of the debt limit. It’s a stupid rule we have in America that Congress has to approve twice paying for something; they’ve already voted to spend money on something, and the associated debt cannot be ignored by refusing to pass a debt limit bill. A lot of these people who are opposing raising the debt ceiling voted for most of the spending that is embedded there.
On the other hand, I think that President Biden has more than he can say grace over now, in a positive way, to implement the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS bill, the Inflation Reduction Act with all the climate change projects that are in it. All of it is job-creating stuff. All of it will create enormous numbers of income-tax payers and sales-tax payers. And we are now in what will be the second, maybe next year will be the third year, in a row where the deficit is going down. The aggregate debt will still go up a little bit.
But once we get to where the annual deficit is going down, then if we have appropriate growth, we should move back to a balanced budget and start paying some of the aggregate debt down, until at least this $30 trillion–plus of debt will reach a more modest percentage of our annual national income. I did dream that maybe I could get rid of it altogether for the first time since Andrew Jackson was president, but I could not do that; and then (after I left office) the Iraq War came along, and 9/11 came along, and we had to do what we did in Afghanistan.
And at one point the House leader, Tom DeLay, said, “In wartime, there is nothing more important than cutting taxes.” Not since George Washington, in all the conflicts we’ve been in, did we ever cut taxes in wartime, and no other country ever did. We did it for the first time during the Iraq War, and that reflected “tax cuts as theology” perspective. President Reagan had a similar theology, but he clawed back about 40 percent of his tax cuts. He tried to make it so we only tripled the debt when he was president. But the debt was then still small compared to now.
Bottom line, we should bring the deficit down as much as we can, but we ought to pay our debts. You can’t spend money, borrow it, and then refuse to pay the people that loaned it to you, not if you want to be a great country.
DR: Secretary Clinton, is there anything about the 2016 campaign you might have done differently?
HRC: I wrote a whole book about it called What Happened?, because I couldn’t figure out what happened. I think it was a perfect storm of a lot of unprecedented actions. I don’t want to plow old ground, because it’s obviously important to look to the future and move on, but I will say that it is important that we learned some lessons from 2016 that were applied in 2018, applied in 2020.
There is no doubt that there was interference in the 2016 election unlike we’d ever seen. There’s no doubt that Vladimir Putin really didn’t want me as president, and therefore ordered the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, to interfere. We had indictments that were made against the Russians that will never go to trial, because they’re all Russian military intelligence operatives, but there was a line intercepted from the Russians which said, “Just don’t do any damage to Trump or Bernie Sanders. We support them. Go do everything you can to destroy Hillary Clinton.”
Once that became known after the election, we did a much better job protecting our elections in 2018 and 2020. And we have to keep protecting our elections, from both those inside our own country who want to suppress the vote, and from foreign actors, largely the Russians. But we also had some evidence in 2020 of a little byplay by the Chinese and the Iranians. So, this is an ongoing challenge.
DR: Would you consider ever running for office again, even though you’re a bit young?
HRC: No, but I’ll come back here every week to be told I’m too young to do something.
DR: President Clinton, you were elected twice, so you probably are reasonably happy with the method, but do you think the popular vote would be preferable to the Electoral College method?
BC: I do. We adopted the Electoral College when we were 13 states. We had a couple of really big states and some really small states that had distinct differences, but it also helped to load up the electoral votes of the Southern states that had slaves. Now we know that the effect of the Electoral College is to give about 36 extra votes to the most culturally conservative and furthest right American states.
I have no objection to those states voting. I want every eligible person to vote. Unlike some of the Republicans, I’d never try to make it harder for people to vote. I’d make it easier for them to vote. I want the votes counted, and I want them all to count.
Now, if you did go to direct election, the first question you’ve got to ask yourself is whether would we have more three-party or four-party national elections? And if so, would we have to have a runoff? That is, should you at least require a president to have, I don’t know, 40 percent of the vote, 45 percent of the vote? Lincoln got elected in 1860 with 39 percent. Ross Perot got 19 percent in’92. I won the election by, I think, five and a half points, 5.8 points, something like that. But I only got 43.8 percent of the vote.
I think we should get rid of the Electoral College, but doing so might unleash even more parties. Should there be a minimum? A lot of countries have this, by the way. You have to get a majority or you have to get something over a minimal amount to be president.
DR: Secretary Clinton, I assume you prefer direct election as well?
HRC: I definitely prefer direct election.
DR: You met an enormous number of foreign leaders in your time as secretary of state. Are there one or two whom you really admire, whom you think have done a terrific job for their country?
