The David Rubenstein ShowFormer President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton discuss Ukraine, Taiwan and the state of politics in the US with Bloomberg's David Rubenstein as part of a series of talks at The 92nd Street Y. This interview was recorded May 4th in New York.
Two of the best known individuals in the United States over the last forty years have been Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bill served as President of the United States for eight years. Hillary Clinton served as First Lady for eight years, but also as a United States Senator and Secretary of State. I had a rare chance to interview both of them together at the ninety second Street Why and I think their insights are quite interesting for current affairs, not only about what they've done before, but what they're working on now. So, President Clinton, let's talk about some current affairs for a moment. What do you think is the likely outcome of Ukraine? Do you see any resolution of that in the near term? And obviously, Secretary Clinton, what your views are as well.
I don't expect it to be resolved in the near term unless Putin had some sort of change of heart, or unless the United States and others walk away from Ukraine and they can't get enough arms nomination to continue. I mean, they've been amazing, you know, they fought and fought and fought. They haven't asked any Americans to come and fight with them. But I think we I think they have a chance to win. I think they will win if we stay with them.
What do you think is there any way out of this that a face saving way out of this that you can think of, or what is your view on how this might be resolved?
Well, David, first, I think it's imperative that we continue, and I would even argue increase our support for Ukraine because, as Bill just said, the Russians are back to indiscriminate bombing in cities, aiming at apartment buildings, hospitals, other civilian sites. They have committed war crimes, they are in the midst of committing genocide, particularly with respect of how they're kidnapping children and forcing Ukrainians into Russia. So the bottom line for me is the only potential possible end to the hostilities is either a victory by Ukraine, including them being able to take back the property the territory seized in twenty fourteen, or pushing Russia out of what they have seized since February of last year, and so that could give give us a breathing space to perhaps have some kind of opportunity to protect Ukraine's legitimate borders with the exception of what they didn't get back from twenty fourteen, and to move them forward in reconstruction and rebuilding in the face of such devastation.
Are you surprised that the US China relationship now is as bad as it's been since Tieneman Square, it seems, And what do you think could be done about that to improve it?
I think it's difficult, and.
I think it'll get harder if we walk away from Ukraine, because I think it will increase the willingness of Russia of China to attack Taiwan. It's a real dilemma for me because I worked hard with China and I tried to build a relationship, and 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 she or Smith, your number one priority has got to be crushing all the scent, eliminating any source of alternative power in your country, and then keeping people lathered up by being angry.
At somebody somewhere else.
And so I believe the best thing to do is to keep talking to them, even while we have to disagree with them publicly.
Secretary Clinton, are you worried about a possible invasion by China Taiwan?
When she saw that Putin's invasion number one didn't work as fast and smoothly as Putin apparently thought it would, and that the world literally united, with a few exceptions to impose sanctions that are taking a toll on the Russian economy, not as fast as I would like, because I think that could change the power dynamic inside. But she saw that, and I think 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.
So since you've left Washington, there's been an increase in what i'll call the divisiveness in Washington. I'm sure you've noticed. And what do you think accounts for this? It's much worse than it was even when you were there, and it wasn't great then, but now the Democrats Republicans don't even want to talk to each other, let alone think about bipartisan legislation. What do you think causes this and you see any solution in the near term.
Well, if I say it.
You'll say I'm being a partisan Democrat, but I'm going to say it anyway. It's because the Republicans have been rewarded for being divisive, and it's it, and it's it's great for them because they're great branders, they're really good at they're better at than we are, and they convince people that are most left wing members about ten percent of our caucus represent one hundred percent of us, and cause people that get scared in the middle who are swing voters, to forget that their most right wing members represent over ninety percent of them in the House and about sixty percent in the Senate. I have a lot of Republican friends still who just pretend it's not going on, or who don't like it and don't support it. But you can't blame people in politics who covert power for doing what works, and it's been working for them.
So, President Clinton today, if you were to say we should change the way the presidents are elected, obviously you were elected twice, you probably are reasonably happy with the method. But do you think direct election of the president popular vote would be preferable to the electoral college method?
I do. I think.
First of all, we adopted the electoral college when we were thirteen states, and we had a couple of.
Really big states and.
Some really really small states that had distinct differences. But it also helped to load up the electoral votes of the southern states that had slaves. And now we know that the effect of the electoral college is to give about thirty six extra votes to the most culturally conservative and furthest right American states. And I have no objection to them voting. I want them all to vote. I would not unlike some of them. I'd never try to make it harder for him to vote. I'd make it easier for him to vote. I want the votes counted, and I want them all to count. But I just don't think you can justify that today. Now, if you did it, the first question you got to ask yourself is would we have more or a three party or fourth 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, forty percent of the vote, forty five percent of the vote. Lincoln got elected with like thirty nine percent. A lot of countries have this, by the way, they have you know, you have to get a majority, or you have to get something over a minimal amount to be president. If you're not going to go to a parliamentary system which has a lot of coalition governments, you have to have I think at least some sort of threshold.
I assume you prefer direct election as well.
Well.
I definitely prefer direct election.
So let me ask you. There's a famous passage in your life where you are at Yale Law School library and you're seeing Bill Clinton looking at you, and you're looking at him, and finally you go over to him and say, well, stop looking at me, let's have a conversation or something like that. So, had you not been in the same yet law school class or there at the same time, how do you think your life would be different? You think you would have been president of United States sooner? Or would you have gone in the public service, or how do you think your life would be different if the two of you had not married?
Wow, I think it would have been more boring.
When you told your parents you're moving to Arkansas, what did they say, Well.
You know my father, You know, when I was growing up, my father was a very big supporter of Republicans, He loved Dwight Eisenhower.
You know, he was you know, World War two vet. He really loved that.
And so when I brought Bill home the first time, it wasn't so much that he was from Arkansas, was that he was a Democrat.
So Hillary came from the town Park Ridge, Illinois where Goldwater beat Johnson eighty to twenty and the other twenty percent Goldwater to Liberal. But I loved her father and her mother, who was a liberal Democrat. She was more liberal and iller than I were. And it was interesting how they're listened to their marriage unfold in terms of raising their children and advice and everything was different. But he was a really good guy and smart, and he wound up, you know, working as a volunteer in my campaign for Congress in nineteen seventy four.
I ruined him.
President Clinton, when you were president three times, we had a budget surplus. A surplus is when you have more money than you spend. And at one point it was thought that maybe we would run out of having any federal treasury bills because we weren't going to have any debt. Any ideas about how we can get back to that kind of situation.
Well, first of all, I did have a big argument with Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan was to my left.
He said, we're not going to be able to have interest we can 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. We get to it.
But let me say I also supported.
President obama stimulus program, and I supported the build President Trump passed, and I supported the bill President Obama path. When you have zero to negative interest rates, you can't run a balance budget and you can't start cutting spending without making the economy worse. But when you do have interest rates, then you have to deal with your debt issue, or otherwise you spend more and more of your money pay an interest on the debt, and you don't have anything left for education and health and all the science research. So I think, first, here's what I think. First of all, I think it's nuts to make a big issue of this debt limit thing. And because that's simply it's a stupid rule we have in America that that Congress has to approve twice paying for something they've already voted to spend on. I mean a lot of these people who were opposing raising the debt ceiling.
Voted for most of the debt that is embedded there.
So bottom line, we should bring the depth sit 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 loan it to you, not if you want to be a great country.
So you ran for the presidential nomination. Barack Obama became the nominee, and to your surprise, he offered you the position of secretaries and you turned that down initially. Why did you turn it down?
She turns everything down. She turned me down three times when I asked her to marry it.
Hard. The false answer is no.
Well there is some truth to that, but eventually, you know, I do say yes to these charming men like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
For Parry Clinton, there's a very famous photo of you sitting in the situation room looking at the Osama bin laden effort to capture him. What were you all looking at? And everybody's mouth is open. What were you afraid it wasn't going to work? And when did you realize it actually did work?
Well?
Yeah, we were all afraid something would go wrong. You know, I was part of the small group that studied all of the intelligence that had been gathered to make recommendations to the president about whether to do something and if so, what And it was a It was the most intense public deliberation, public service deliberation I've ever been part of.
And it was also you know, it was secret.
I couldn't tell Bill, I couldn't talk to anybody because how closely held it was. But we were in that small situation room off the big one, 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 into land and one of the helicopters, its tail clipped the wire on the wall surrounding a little area where animals were kept. And so once the helicopter tail hit we knew it was disabled. And that was the moment I think that the picture was taken because we all had flashbacks to what happened when you know, President Carter tried to rescue the hostages in Iran. It also meant that we'd have to send in another helicopter that was in waiting in hiding to get it in there quickly enough.
We had to do all of this literally.
You know, within twenty thirty minutes, because when people were starting to wake up, I mean, we had helicopters landing. You know, there was obviously noise. People were living in homes around the compound. It was a hot night, people were sleeping out on their roofs, and we were you aware that people were waking up and starting.
To wonder what the heck was going on.
So when the helicopters landed and the Navy Seals Seal Team six got out to go into the compound, we couldn't see that there was there was no video of that, so we were all holding our breasts. So then we had to wait till we got news from inside the compound. And there was a you know, there was a firefight. The guards and one of bin Laden's adult sons were you know, you know, shooting, and then 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 because we thought the Pakistanis might very well give it to either of the Russians, most likely the Chinese.
So all this was going on, and so.
Yeah, I think we were all holding our breath for you, like twenty minutes. It was just so intense, and thankfully, you know, President Obama made the right decision and it worked.
When something like that's happening, you can't and you know about this, you can't say to your husband, Bill, I have a secret. I just can't tell you. You can't do that.
So he called me as soon as it was over, and he said, Bill, we got him.
And I said who? Because he knew how hard I.
Tried to get him when I was president and nearly did once, so he's been lauden. Hillary didn't tell you, I said, now, mister President, didn't you tell her not to tell anybody?
He said sure, But I said she didn't tell anybody.
Final question for both of you were just about out of time. So Secretary Clinton, in your long distinguished career, what would you say you're most proud of having accomplished you.
Know, I'd been Senator from New York for you know, about eight months when nine to eleven happened, and it was the most devastating, horrible experience for our city and our country.
But it was also.
A absolute mandate to act to help people who'd been directly affected, to help victims' families, to help rebuild New York, and it was so bipartisan. David, you started with a question about that at the very beginning. You know, I just want to tell a little story here, because you know, Chuck Schumer and I literally were the only plane in the sky on September twelfth, because we were flown down to New York to meet with then Governor Pataki and Mayor Giuliani to survey what had happened. And it was just overwhelming to have seen it firsthand like that that television could not capture it. And we spent the day in meetings talking.
About what we were going to do.
And that night, around eight nine o'clock, Schumer and I were, you know, we're Chuck and I were in a meeting with everybody, all these state, local, federal officials, and we were each handed a note from our staffs who were with us, and the note said, the White House has just sent a budget request to deal with nine eleven for twenty billion dollars and there's not a penny for New York in it. So I took the last train out of Grand Central back to Washington.
Then that afternoon we go to the White House.
And so it's the two senators from Virginia, Senator Allen and Senator John Warner, and Chuck and I were in with the President, and you know, I could see on his face. I mean, this was you know, a devastating, obviously you know, crisis that had to be dealt with. And he says, he says to us, so, you know, I'm with you, what do you need? And I said, we need twenty billion dollars, mister President, and he said, you got it, and his staff nearly fell off their chairs. And so then we were going into the Cabinet room, which is next to the Oval Office, and we got up to leaving. John Warner, who was one of my favorite colleagues of all time. He stopped me and he goes, Hillary, have him make that commitment in public in this meeting.
I said, okay, John.
So we go in all the members of Congress from New York, canad Get New Jersey, a couple of them, but mostly New York and Virginia. And the President's talking about how, you know, we're going to you know, protect the country and we're going to do this and all that. So he finishes talking and then I say, and I just want to thank you, mister President, for committing twenty billion dollars to New York. And literally, by the time Chuck and I got back to the Senate, his staff was trying to undo that and telling, you know, the Republican leaders, you know, don't don't put it in the appropriations bill, don't do it. And so we just kept calling the White House and Bush that I gave my word and you know I'm going to follow through.
That was an amazing moment for me.
So wow. So President Clinton, you look back on your distinguished and long service to our country. What are you most proud of having achieved?
Well?
Can I just add one thing to earn what he said? One thing I like.
About George W. Bush.
We have fought, we had disagreed. He started out more conservative than his father. We do speeches together that are really funny now because we bad mouthed each other in a funny way.
But he will listen.
And if he will listen, and if he thinks you're right, he'll switch. And if he thinks you're wrong, he'll argue. That's all you can ever ask. And I think that's what you should remember. And that's when you asked me in the beginning, and I said that the polarization was partly because the right had been rewarded. It's also caused the left too easily gives.
Up on people.
We should We shouldn't talk down about people.
We shouldn't.
You know.
The one thing I loved about Elijah Cummings and John Lewis was they treated people respectfully and they just kept trying. They kept knocking on the door. There's some other people out there that you can knock on the door.
No regrets about not having going into the higher calling of private equity, right, neither of you don't regret that. So on, behalf of everybody at the ninety second Street.
Why oh, that's cause you take care of all the stuff that requires real money to do you.
He gives a lot of that money away. Don't don't let him play the rosko on.
Behalf of the ninety second Street why. I want to thank you for coming here again. You've been here before and you're always welcome back. And thank you for a great evening.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Gavin.
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