yes_justice | Flashback: Amy Goodman interviews then president Bill Clinton

Coming Up: A Democracy Now! Exclusive ... Amy Goodman Interviews Bill Clinton

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On Tuesday, former President Clinton’s memoirs will hit the bookstores. To mark the occasion Democracy Now! will re-broadcast an interview on Tuesday that Amy Goodman conducted on Election Day 2000 with the then-sitting president. They discussed many topics you won’t likely hear raised this week: Leonard Peltier, racial profiling, the Iraqi sanctions, Ralph Nader and the Israeli-Palestinian situation. At one point Clinton accused Amy of being “hostile and combative.” On the next day the president's aides threatened to ban Amy from the White House. Amy and her brother David Goodman wrote about the interview in their new book, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them (Hyperion, 2004). Below is an excerpt of the chapter titled "Not On Bended Knee."
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NOT ON BENDED KNEE

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be. - Alice Walker

On Election Day 2000, I was in the Democracy Now! office at WBAI on Wall Street when I received a call minutes before going on the air at 9:00 a.m. The caller said, "Hello, I am calling from White House Communications." Things get very frantic moments before broadcasting, and we get a fair number of unusual calls. White Horse? That's the famous tavern in Greenwich Village where poet Dylan Thomas was said to have drunk himself to death. Even the White Horse has a PR agent?

Then the caller said that the president would like to speak to me. I said, "The president of what?" We were on the air in less than a minute. "The president of the United States." Oh, please. "He'd like to call in to your radio program."

"Yeah, right," I said. "Whatever."

I ran into the studio as the theme music for Democracy Now! was playing. Our producers were Brad Simpson, a history grad student, and Maria Carrion. Maria had produced Democracy Now! for two years before moving home to Spain, and had flown back just to help out for the election. That was supposed to mean three days, but this was the election of 2000. She ended up staying five weeks-from the night before the election to the day after the final "selection" of George W. Bush. I could hardly tell Maria and Brad as they were frantically putting the finishing touches on the election show that the president was calling in, especially because I didn't believe it myself. But as the music swelled, I said, "By the way, that was the White House on the phone. They said the president might call in." "Yeah, right," Maria said. I left it at that.

When Democracy Now! finished, we were about to head out for coffee when someone began shouting from master control, "President Clinton is on the phone!" Maria ran in, took the call, and yelled for me to get into master control immediately. Gonzalo Aburto, the host of the Latino music show that followed Democracy Now! on Tuesdays, was at the control board.

I ran into the studio and heard, over the blasting Latino beat, the disembodied voice of President Clinton saying, "Hello, hello, is anyone there? Can you hear me?" The faders on our microphones were all the way down, and the music was all the way up. I practically dove over the master control board and pulled down the music, put up all of our mikes, and welcomed the president to WBAI.

"For Clinton it was supposed to be two minutes of get-out-the vote happy talk with a progressive radio show and then: Gotta go," The Washington Post later wrote of the encounter. The story continued, "In this insider media age when oh-so-serious reporters measure status by access to the powerful, Goodman is the journalist as uninvited guest," wrote Michael Powell. "You might think of the impolite question; she asks it. She torments Democrats no less than Republicans." There was no question this was President Clinton's voice, so we just launched in. Here's an excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: Mr. President, are you there?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I am. Can you hear me?

GOODMAN: Yes, we can. You are calling radio stations to tell people to get out and vote. What do you say to people who feel that the two parties are bought by corporations, and . . . at this point feel that their vote doesn't make a difference?

CLINTON: There's just not a shred of evidence to support that. That's what I would say. . . .The truth is there is an ideological struggle between those who believe that the best way to grow the economy is to give more money to the wealthy, and the Democrats, who believe that the wealthy will make more money if average people do better.

GOODMAN: President Clinton, what is your position on granting Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist, executive clemency?

CLINTON: I know it's very important to a lot of people, maybe on both sides of the issue. And I think I owe it to them to give it an honest look-see. . . . And I pledge to do that.

GOODMAN: And you will give an answer in his case?

CLINTON: Oh, yeah, I'll decide one way or the other.*

[*Clinton did not act on Peltier's application for clemency. The Native American activist, who is serving two life sentences for the shooting death of two FBI agents, has been imprisoned since 1977. Peltier continues to maintain his innocence. Amnesty International has appealed for his release.]

GOODMAN: Do you support a moratorium on the death penalty, given the studies that show the racist way it has been applied?

CLINTON: . . . The disturbing thing to me is that there is not only an apparent racial disparity on death row, but also way over half the cases come from a relatively small number of the U.S. attorneys' offices.

But again, let me just say this. If you are concerned about that, that's a good reason to vote for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, and Hillary for the Senate. . . . Because we know the Democrats care about these issues, and we know they're not very important to the Republicans. So that's another example of another reason you ought to vote for the Democrats.

GOODMAN: Gore supports the death penalty.

CLINTON: He does, but . . .

GOODMAN: And Lieberman.

CLINTON: Yes, they do. But there is a difference in supporting it and thinking that you would carry it out even if you thought the system was fundamentally unfair.

GOODMAN: But the studies show that . . .

CLINTON: But the studies are not complete. . . . And so I think that if you are interested in having somebody that at least has the capacity to look at the fairness of this, you only have one choice.

GOODMAN: Well, I guess many people were quite disturbed that when you first ran for president, you went back in the midst of your campaign to Arkansas and presided over the execution of a mentally impaired man.

CLINTON: Yeah, but let me . . . let's go back to the facts here. He was not mentally impaired when he committed the crime.He became mentally impaired because he was wounded after he murdered somebody. And the law says that it is your mental state at the time you committed the crime . . .

GOODMAN: President Clinton, UN figures show that up to 5,000 children a month die in Iraq because of the sanctions against Iraq.

CLINTON: That's not true. That's not true. . . . If any child is without food or medicine or a roof over his or her head in Iraq, it's because [Saddam Hussein] is claiming the sanctions are doing it and sticking it to his own children.

GOODMAN: The past two UN heads of the program in Iraq have quit, calling the U.S./UN policy genocidal. What is your response to that?

CLINTON: They're wrong! . . . Saddam Hussein says, "I'm going to starve my kids unless you let me buy nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and biological weapons." . . . That's just not right! You know, the truth is, a lot of these people want to start doing business with Saddam Hussein again because they want his money.

GOODMAN: Amnesty International has described what the Israeli forces are now doing in the occupied territories as . . .

CLINTON: Listen, I can't do a whole press conference here. It's Election Day and I've got a lot of people and places to call.

GOODMAN: Well, I guess these are the questions that are very important to our listeners . . .

CLINTON: Well, I've answered them all.

GOODMAN: Right, and we appreciate that. And . . .

CLINTON: I have answered them all. Now let me just tell you, on the Israeli-Palestinian thing . . . which is something that I know more than a little bit about, the only answer to this over the long run is an agreement that covers all the issues that the Palestinians feel aggrieved by; guarantees the Israelis security and acceptance within the region; and is a just and lasting peace. That's the only answer to this in the long run.

GOODMAN: Why not support a UN force in the Middle East for the illegal occupation of the territories? And at this point I think there are around one hundred fifty people who have been killed in the occupied territories, overwhelmingly Palestinian.

CLINTON: You can support it if you want to, but the Israelis won't support it. And there was a war in which that happened. And if you want to make peace, then you have to do things that both sides can agree with. That's what a peace agreement is.

GOODMAN: Many people say that Ralph Nader has the high percentage points he has in the polls because you have been responsible for taking the Democratic party to the right. What do you say to that?

CLINTON: I'm glad you asked that, and that's the last question I've got time for. I'll be happy to . . . answer that. What is the measure of taking the Democratic party to the right? That we cut the welfare rolls in half? That poverty is at a twenty-year low? That child poverty has been cut by a third in our administration? That the incomes of average Americans have gone up 15 percent after inflation? . . . That the basic standard test scores among African-Americans and other minorities have gone up steadily?

GOODMAN: Can I say that some people . . .

CLINTON: Now, let me just finish.

GOODMAN: Let me just say . . .

CLINTON: Now let me . . . now, wait a minute. You started this, and every question you've asked has been hostile and combative. So you listen to my answer, will you do that?

GOODMAN: They've been critical questions . . .

CLINTON: Now, you just listen to me. You ask the questions, and I'm going to answer. You have asked questions in a hostile, combative, and even disrespectful tone, but I-and you have never been able to combat the facts I have given you. Now, you listen to this. The other thing Ralph Nader says is that, you know, he's pure as Caesar's wife on the environment. Under this administration, forty-three million more Americans are breathing cleaner air. We have safer drinking water, safer food, cleaner water. We have more land set aside than any administration in history since Theodore Roosevelt. . . . People can say whatever they want to. Those are the facts.

GOODMAN: What people say is that you pushed through NAFTA, that we have the highest population of prisoners in the industrialized world, over two million. That more people are on death row in this country than anywhere else.

CLINTON: Well, all right. Okay, that's fine. But two-thirds of the American people support that. I think there are too many people in prison, too. . . . Nobody ever said America was perfect. The real problem you've got are the . . . this country is in good shape. Now, I've talked to you a long time. It's Election Day. There are a lot of other people that . . .

GOODMAN: We appreciate that.

CLINTON: . . . I've got to go.

GOODMAN: One last question. What about granting an executive order ending racial profiling in this country?

CLINTON: I expect that we will end racial profiling. . . . I'm opposed to it. Al Gore is opposed to it. Here's the deal. Look, I had two people who work for me in the White House who were wrongly stopped, handcuffed, and hassled the other day. I have spoken out against racial profiling and Hillary has made it a big issue in New York.

GOODMAN: Thank you for spending the time, President Clinton.

CLINTON: Thank you.

We were amazed that President Clinton had stayed on the phone for so long. We quickly produced a transcript of the interview, alerted the press, then ran the interview during our regular broadcast the following day.

After the show, I got a call from the White House press office. A staffer let me know how furious they were at me for "breaking the ground rules for the interview."

"Ground rules?" I asked. "What ground rules? He called up to be interviewed, and I interviewed him."

"He called to discuss getting out the vote, and you strayed from the topic. You also kept him on much longer than the two to three minutes we agreed to," she huffed.

"President Clinton is the most powerful person in the world," I replied. "He can hang up when he wants to."

The Clinton administration threatened to ban me from the White House and suggested to a Newsday reporter that they might punish me for my attitude by denying me access-not that I had any to lose. White House spokesman Elliot Diringer said, "Any good reporter understands that if you violate the ground rules in an interview, that is going to be taken into account the next time you are seeking an interview."

First of all, we hadn't agreed to any ground rules. Clinton called us. Second, we wouldn't have agreed to any. The only ground rule for good reporting I know is that you don't trade your principles for access. We were treating the president not as royalty, but as a public servant accountable to the people.

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