9/11, Global Initiatives, and Affordable Healthcare

0:00 Speaker 1 With us today is President William J. Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States. And this is 9-11 weekend, a weekend, 25th anniversary, a weekend that none of us will ever forget. Mr. President, that weekend, we will never forget, none of us. And it’s his 25th anniversary. Tell me how you feel about it and tell me your thoughts

0:23 about it.

0:24 Speaker 2 Well, I’ve done what I do every year at this time.

0:27 Speaker 3 I relive it. And at the time, I was in Australia. Hillary was in Washington. But our daughter was in lower Manhattan, and we were worried to death about her. And she was one of the thousands of people who were told to just walk north. And so we couldn’t get in touch with her. And at the same time, I did

0:49 get Hillary. And I was watching television in Australia when the second plane hit. And I immediately said.

1:01 Speaker 2 That bin Laden did this. And they all looked at me and said, how do you know this? And I said, well, because the only adversaries we have with the capacity to do this.

1:11 Speaker 3 Are Iran and bin Laden.

1:15 Speaker 2 And the Iranians wouldn’t do it because we could wipe them off the face of the earth immediately. And bin Laden is holed up in a cave in Afghanistan. I just knew it had to be him.

1:28 Speaker 3 And I also knew that he’d been planning to do what he could to hit us for a long time, and I had authorized the CIA to try.

1:42 Speaker 1 To take him out.

1:42 Speaker 3 I said, it would be good if we could get him alive, but the most important thing is to stop him from doing this.

1:49 Speaker 1 And so I was.

1:53 Speaker 2 Sure he did it and sure we were going to have an enormous responsibility to eventually get him and bring him to justice.

2:06 Speaker 1 How long did it take you to come back from Australia? Well, President Bush.

2:13 Speaker 2 Wanted all the former presidents and vice presidents back in Washington, or at least in the United States. So I caught a plane early in the morning, a military plane, and flew back. They took me first into one of our islands in the Pacific, and then I got on another plane and flew home.

2:44 Speaker 1 And I.

2:46 Speaker 3 Remember when I got there, Al Gore had flown in to Canada and drove.

2:55 Speaker 2 Into the United States, so he stopped and basically spent the night with me. I’ll never forget it. It was horrible.

3:07 Speaker 1 And I had been.

3:10 Speaker 2 Fixing our house, and the refrigerator was on the front porch. So when Gore drove up, he said, I know you were trying to get your Ozark lifestyle to work out with New York, but this is taking it a little far.

3:27 Speaker 1 Oh, my God. I remember Al Gore called me. Al Gore called me from Toronto, and I let you know. I think I remember I called you and let you know that he was stuck in Toronto, and I didn’t know what happened after that. Yeah, well, we got him.

3:45 Speaker 3 I said, you know what? Let him drive down to New York, and I’ll put him up, and then we’ll work it out. And that’s what happened. You know, the most important thing was that we needed to be united behind President Bush and see what.

4:05 Speaker 2 We could do to make sure nothing worse happened. And the people in Shanksville.

4:15 Speaker 3 Pennsylvania deserve a lot of credit for bringing that plane down and they came pretty close to surviving it in the plane flipped over at the last minute and they were all killed. But they did a great thing by stopping that plane. It was clearly meant to hit the Capitol.

4:37 Or it would have been a lot worse.

4:41 Speaker 1 It would have been a lot worse. You’re absolutely right. I mean, were you scared for our country? Well, I was scared and I was mad.

4:56 Speaker 2 You know, because we tried to get him before.

5:00 Speaker 3 And the CIA at the last minute.

5:07 Speaker 2 Killed the plans that I think might well have succeeded, but they were afraid that if they missed, they’d kill a lot of innocent civilians, and they didn’t want to run the risk. And I didn’t second-guess them, but I think in the end, you know, the guy was determined to do what he did, and he had lots of

5:36 money and lots of capacity, and I wish we’d done even more to get him. I always thought he was our biggest threat.

5:49 Speaker 1 Now, have you ever figured out why... They wanted to do that? Yeah, he.

6:02 Speaker 3 You know, we had been allied.

6:05 Speaker 2 With him at one time. Well, that’s a little too strong, but we had been working with him when he wanted to get the Russians out of Afghanistan.

6:20 Speaker 3 And he believed....

6:26 Speaker 2 That he had to get all the infidels wherever they were from out of the, you know, what he hoped was his sphere of influence.

6:40 Speaker 3 And they were willing to kill a lot of people to do it. And I. Always thought that. So I wanted to get him, and I did what I could to do that.

6:54 Speaker 1 Understood. Now, the other thing I had asked, I was talking during the 9-11 days a couple days ago, I was talking to like a Charlie Gasparino, and there was rumors that there were some people that shorted the market just before 9-11 actually hit. Have you ever heard anything like that?

7:19 Speaker 2 No, I have no information on that. I talked to the 9-11 commission. for a long time and I told them that I was not interested in covering my backside or anybody else’s and if they found anything we should have done, we didn’t. They should tell the American people and we should get it on record and be very

7:42 open about making this our top security priority.

7:47 Speaker 1 Do you feel that all the things that are going on in the world right now, that New York is still a target for future attacks?

7:56 Speaker 2 I think it’s entirely possible, and I think we have.

7:59 Speaker 3 To stay on guard about that, and we have to make sure we’re getting all.

8:04 Speaker 2 The intelligence we can on the issue, because I think there is a chance that that will happen. I think we’re much better prepared than we were. We’re much more likely to pick up on it than we were, but we still.

8:27 You only have to miss once, and then you’re screwed. So I think it’s just something that has to be a continuing part of our national security plan.

8:42 Speaker 1 I agree. Mr. President, you’re spending a lot of time every September. You have the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation doing all kinds of good things in September, meetings, and you put meetings together. Can you give us an update on what’s going on with the Clinton Foundation and all the good stuff that you guys have been doing? Well,

9:08 very briefly.

9:12 Speaker 2 I’ve been occupied with two things.

9:14 Speaker 3 First of all, we haven’t done anything physical with our library.

9:23 Speaker 2 Until recently, since I opened it in 2004. And Hillary’s got the biggest collection of public documents of any non-president in history. So we had to move it down there to secure the documents, and we were making some changes in the way our building works, and we bought the building next door, which belonged to a great foundation called

9:55 the Heffer Foundation, which at the.

9:58 Speaker 3 End of World War II tried to help first starving Europeans and then people elsewhere by giving livestock to poor villages. And they had a great idea that if your village got let’s say if they gave your village a milk cow, that you had to give the first offspring to someone else.

10:27 And if you think about it, that model was replicated millions of times for cows, for goats, for sheep, all the way down to earthworms. And you just have to, whoever got what, had to give the first offspring to someone else. So over the years, since the end of World War II, they’ve done an amazing amount of good.

10:55 And I wanted to do what I could to help them. They decided for.

10:59 Speaker 2 Economic reasons they needed to go home, but they wanted to rent a couple of floors from their old building. So we bought it, retrofitted it, and moved our school of public service into the buildings that they had. And it’s very exciting because Donna Shalala, who was my Secretary of Health and Human Services, and let her serve in Congress,

11:30 and is, I think, maybe the ablest public administrator I ever worked with. She’s under her 80s now and still bright as can be. She’s one smart lady. I had lunch or dinner with her about a year ago, and she’s one smart lady.

11:52 Speaker 1 She is.

11:54 Speaker 2 And so she worked with us, and she said, this is crazy. We’ve got this great school here, and nobody knows about it because we haven’t... You know, the school is a part of the University of Arkansas, and the only school... than answers directly to the president of the system.

12:15 That’s the good news.

12:16 Speaker 3 The bad news is the legislature didn’t want.

12:21 Speaker 2 To fund any higher education. So we were stuck for a few years. So we just kept working and finding ways to, you know, bring people in.

12:32 Speaker 3 But last year, Donna brought all these ratings.

12:36 Speaker 2 Agencies in to see us. And one guy said, well, this program is better than the one we have at the Kennedy School.

12:45 Speaker 1 And I said, well, it’s good.

12:48 Speaker 3 And we don’t want a lot more students, but we need 20 or 30 more. And we want some people from around the world to come back because.

12:58 Speaker 2 We had a lot of people come in the beginning when President Bush, the first President Bush and I were involved in trying to help after 9-11 and then after the tsunami in South Asia.

13:16 Speaker 3 And so now that we went up 79 places on the rating system and we didn’t do anything.

13:26 Speaker 2 We just kept doing what we were doing. So now we’ve got these plans to expand the school. And it’s the only place where you have to do as well as. Study. That is half the time people spend in the field figuring out how to do what they talk about. And I think that’s very important. I think that, you know,

13:55 all these years I was in politics and today I see it with the rise of the Democratic left and the far right on the Republican side. Everybody can say something that sounds good, but how you turn your good intentions into real changes in other people’s lives is what matters.

14:15 So we focus on answering the how question, and it’s been very rewarding, and we’re still doing it, and with good results. So I feel good about that.

14:33 Speaker 1 So you’re going to create the new school and at the same time bring all of Hillary’s product that she has from being Secretary of State and other government jobs to put it together so it’s all in one place.

14:50 Speaker 2 Yeah, and what she’s doing is running our policy institute and they operate on the same principles. it’s fine to care about these things, but what do you actually propose to do that would make it better?

15:10 Speaker 3 And so I’ve been. Excited.

15:13 Speaker 2 For example, we believe that vaccines are a good thing, not a bad thing. And we sued the government to keep going. And all the spade work, if you will, was done by our policy institute. That’s the kind of thing that we like to do. And meanwhile, we’ve got a plan through my health program, the Clinton Health Access Initiative,

15:54 which has been able to raise money even when all these things have been cut by the Trump administration. We keep raising more money because we’re good at what we do.

16:05 Speaker 3 And we’ve had some really important successes. And we believe that.

16:16 Speaker 2 This new drug, Lenacopovir, which we negotiated the price for down to, it was $ 14, 000.

16:26 Speaker 3 When it came out, and we’ve got it down to now $ 40 a. Wow.

16:35 Speaker 2 Which is a pretty big cut.

16:40 Speaker 3 And if you go to these.

16:41 Speaker 2 Areas where there’s a lot of AIDS and you can identify who’s at highest risk and you give them this shot twice a year, once every six.

16:52 Speaker 3 Months, and so far no one who’s gotten.

16:56 Speaker 2 The shot has tested positive for AIDS.

17:02 Speaker 1 I would say that’s just about a cure.

17:05 Speaker 2 Yeah, so we think that we got a chance if we can get up to 9 million people a year getting these shots, we think within a decade we can make AIDS history. That is wonderful news. So we got a lot of good things going on. We also have had great success in reducing deaths of children from other

17:38 childhood problems. Malaria is way down. We’re about to eliminate malaria in several countries. And one.

17:46 Speaker 1 Of the biggest.

17:47 Speaker 2 Problems we’ve had is kids becoming infected when the sanitation is not good. We’ve had a lot of work, a lot of success in treating kids for childhood diarrhea so they don’t die from it. And an enormous number of kids were dying for it, and that’s going way down.

18:17 So one of the big successes all day every day we have.

18:25 Speaker 3 Is in healthcare around the world.

18:31 Speaker 2 You know, because it’s not a disaster, it doesn’t get a lot of publicity if you’re having success. But that’s been one of the most rewarding events of efforts of my life since I left the White House. So we’ve got this, we’re doing a lot in healthcare and we’re also trying to figure out how to cut down on

19:04 big costs. Our utility bills are going to go down enormously because we were the last, I think, almost place in America to qualify for what’s called energy districts.

19:21 Speaker 3 And if you’re in.

19:26 Speaker 2 An energy district, then what you have to do is. Essentially, you say you’re going to find the cheapest energy you can to serve the people there. So the local utility is building a 50-acre solar field that will provide us cheaper energy forever.

19:52 Speaker 3 And where my library and school.

20:00 Speaker 2 Are, and we have some other things.

20:04 Speaker 3 That Jeff Bezos was Amazon had a big storage facility in Little Rock, and when they decided that the mails were efficient enough, they didn’t need the storage facility. They said that on the way out, they gave the city $ 30 million or so to have a big park that’s connected to my library, but it’s We’re just there, but

20:37 it’s all along the Arkansas River. And it’s a great thing for the community. And, you know, we try to do everything together down there.

20:51 Speaker 2 We’re too small to everybody going out on their own. So we’re working this thing with the city, and I think it’s going to be just great.

21:01 Speaker 1 So I’ve got to. Yes. Go ahead. We’re almost out of time, but I’d like to continue this discussion because we are having a great discussion. And, you know, you’re one of my heroes. We worked together a lot in the old days. And I look forward to having this discussion, continuing this discussion in the future.

21:26 Speaker 3 Me too.

21:28 Speaker 2 And I’m glad that people are thinking about 9-11 again and how we still have to be alive to these risks and we have to be trying to, you can’t do everything, so you gotta pick the things that you think are most, if you’re running the country, you wanna make big good things happen and stop big bad things

21:52 from happening. You can’t be perfect all the time, but that’s where I think we are as a country and where I think we can maybe find unity again.

22:03 Speaker 1 But that’s what I’m praying for is unity between all Americans and common sense among all Americans. And Mr. President, this conversation will definitely be continued. And thank you so much for coming on this Sunday morning. And God bless you and God bless America. Thank you, John.