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THE WHITE HOUSE
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Office of the Press Secretary
Internal Transcript
April 28, 1993.
INTERVIEW OF THE FIRST LADY
BY MARTHA SHERRILL OF THE WASHINGTON POST
The West Wing
Q
The purpose of the interview is to try to get a
sense of what you believe in, if that helps you while you answer
questions.
MRS. CLINTON:
Okay.
Q
I realized on my way over here that I have too many
questions for a 3D-minute interview.
So if we get to one, just wave
it off if you don't want to answer it.
MRS. CLINTON:
Okay.
Q
How do you think being raised a Methodist
influenced you in particular?
MRS. CLINTON: Oh, I think it influenced me a lot.
I
think that it influenced me because my father was such a strong
believer in Methodism and had such a history with the Methodist
Church which he traced back through his parents and his grandparents
and back to England and Wales and all of the early Methodist
preaching and reaching out to people in the coal mines and
everything.
So it was like a part of my personal history ..
And then the church itself really appealed to me because
they were very -- the church I grew up in was very child-oriented,
very supportive of kids in their early years as they tried to find
,their way through faith, not in a dogmatic way but in a real open way
in which anything could be discussed, no question was out of bounds.
And I think that gave me a grounding in my faith that has sustained
me.
The whole discipline of ttie Methodist Church appeals to
me with the emphasis on scripture and- ~eason and tradition and
experience.
So for both family and-~ersonal reasons it just made a
real fit for me.
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Did Don Jones have a lot to do with that later on?
MRS. CLINTON:
Yes.
Q
Or did you get a lot from the church before he
entered the scene?
MRS. CLINTON:
I got a lot from the church and a lot
from my parents -- really, the whole side of my father's family
because we all were christened in his little church in Scranton and
we all would be kind of -- every year we went back to Scranton,
sometimes twice a year, once in the summer and once in the winter,
and spent long times there. So there was a sense in which the church
and their experience was like part of the present. You know, it was
a real motivating force in our lives.
And then growing up in the church that I, grew up in was
very supportive. But Don Jones had a particularly important effect
because he came into my life at the time when kids start wondering
what all this is about and whether they want to be part of it and
whether they believe it or just because their parents make them go to
church. And he gave a sense of social mission and personal
commitment to faith that I found very unifying.
He was a lot of fun
when we did it. We just had a great time.
Q
It s,eems as though, and I don' t want ,to presume to
know, that he brought a lot of the outside world to Park Ridge.
MRS. CLINTON:
Yes.
Q
He described Park Ridge at the time he was there as
a place where maybe no black person had ever worshipped in the .church
that you were going to.
MRS. CLINTON: Unless there might have been some
visiting dignitary from some African country, I think that's probably
right.
Q
And the sense of a social revolution taking place
seemed very remote.
MRS. CLINTON: That's absolutely right.
He opened it
not only in an experiential way. You know, we did a lot of exchanges
with black and Hispanic kids in Chicago. We went out and worked with
Mexican migrants and their families.
When I say worked with I mean
we went out and baby-sat the children while the parents would be able
to go do something else.
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Because when I was growing up -- I mean, this is hard to
imagine now if you fly in and out of O'Hare and that's what you know
about suburban Chicago -- when I was growing up there was just
farmland everywhere. In my elementary school years we went to school
part of the year with the children of Mexican migrants who would be
ju~t camped half a mile from the school because we had all of this
agricultural land. O'Hare airport wasn't even really built as a big
commercial airport.
It was on a military reserve basis.
It really
came to flowering in the late '50s.
So the whole environment in which I was raised changed
from being fairly rural and pastoral even though it was suburban to
being very suburban. And he made it possible for us to reach beyond
that. And he also did it intellectually, because some of my fondest
memories were, you know, we'd be at MYF on Sunday night and we'd be
reading e.e. cummings or T.S. Eliot or looking at Picasso prints and
talking about what they meant to us. Nobody had heard about anything
like that before in my experience. So it was just a wonderful
opportunity.
Q
Do you remember any reading in particular
I know
there were a lot of theologians that I'm sure he introduced to you -
but anything that stayed with you in particular?
MRS. CLINTON: e.e. cummings and T.S. Eliot and Auden
and Bunhaufer and -- let's see -- he would give us like little
excerpts of things to read.
I mean, we weren't sitting around
reading long tomes -- I don't want you to get that impression. That
is not what we were doing. But, you know, for 30 minutes before we
had our social hour to hand us like an e.e. cummings poem, which I'll
never forget which goes something like "dying is fine, but death, oh,
baby, I wouldn't like death if death were good."
You know, and you're 15 years old when you're asked what
does that mean to you. That was just mind blowing for me.
I just
felt like there was this whole other world out there that was
exciting and challenging that he linked to our faith.
I mean, it was
part of our religious experience.
It wasn't just an intellectual
enterprise.
It was what does this mean to you as a Christian; what
does this mean to you as a person. How do you link what you feel
about this with people you may never know in some faraway land or in
the inner city of chicago.
It was just great for me. And then, of course, he took
some of us down to hear Martin Luther King preach one night downtown
in Chicago. Real radical thing to do.
I mean, it was a wonderful
time for me.
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By that time did you have a sense of commitment or
Q
conviction? A feeling that you wanted to devote yourself to public
service? I mean, when would be your earliest memory of thinking
about the world, that it wasn't a fair place and wanting to change
things?
MRS. CLINTON: Real early.
I remember a friend of mine
and I in my neighborhood when we were probably about 10 -- I don't
know w~ere we got this idea, but we read something about poor kids in
some place in Chicago. So we organized this fundraising effort which
consisted of what we called a neighborhood Olympics, you know. And
we had all these contests and kids had to pay like a nickle or a
quarter or something to participate.
And I hadn't thought about this for a long time, but
then an old friend of mine -- as you walked in I was signing a letter
to a ~oy that I had gone to school with all my life who lived three
blocks away who I haven't heard from since we graduated from high
school, sending me pictures and reminding me of stuff. And a few
months ago I got this picture where I'm standing there with my best
friends from our neighborhood and there's this distinguished looking
sort of Father Knows Best kind of character standing there and we're
handing him a paper bag filled with money, which probably was about
'$20, as our contribution to this charitable effort on behalf of these
kids.
And so, my mother was very concerned about injustice and
unfairness and kind of kept that on the forefront of our minds. So I
remember doing that when I guess I was about 10. And then I was in
seventh and eighth grade I became very interested in why people
weren't helped, why we didn't try to help more people. And I was
really impressed by my father.
You know, my father was a Republican
and he was not any kind of bleeding heart at all. He was a very
straightforward person and very much a man of his time, sort of
coming of age in World War II, the Depression, 1950s.
But I was always impressed by some of the things that he
did.
Like he had a man one time who he found drunk on the doorstep
of his small little plant where he did drapery fabrics.
And the man
wanted a handout and my father said, I'll give you a job. If you
will come in and work I'll give you a job. And, you know, my father
worked with that man -- I guess we met him, Mr. Atkins, like in the
early '50s maybe. My father not only gave him a job, but he helped
him invest his money, helped him buy property.
You know, if you were
to ask him, he wouldn't ,have any sort of high-blown theory about it,
he would just say, well, you know, the guy said he wanted help,so I
tried to help him. And so between my mother's more kind of general
feeling about the world not being a fair place and my father never
buying into any of that in a particular way, but in his own personal
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way trying to help people and connect with them, I just had this
sense from a very early time that you had to do both.
You had to try to be -- I mean, sometimes people do
either or. They are good to their own families, they are good to
people like them, they have -- and I think that is very important
because the alternative, which is to care about people very far away
and to mistreat those closest to you is not very good either.
So you
need t9 try to know those. You have to worry about those closest to
you; that's where your principle obligations are. And if you can
help one person who you find drunk on your doorstep to get his life
together and over time support him, that may be more important than
making a lot of speeches that you don't follow up on, and helping
somebody far away from you.
On the other hand, what you do in your personal life has
to be seen in the larger context of the community, the country, the
world and not to paralyze you, but to understand how it all fits
together. And I felt real lucky to have those two kinds of world
views, in a way, coming together in my life.
Q
Don Jones speculated that perhaps growing up, and
later when you were in college, that while you were comfortable with
being competitive, that maybe standing out and being a leader, which
you were naturally, was sort of embarrassing to you, and that to do
something for others instead of appearing to be being a leader and
out front just for self-serving purposes was sort of not ever you
goal.
It has always seemed to be about other people and organizing
other people and not to be about yourself. Was that part of how you
were raised? Or just something naturally about you that you -
MRS. CLINTON: Well, I think that's an interesting thing
for him to say.
I have repeatedly felt over my lifetime -- I really,
I don't have any personal desires to be in any particular position.
That has never been my goal.
I have a burning desire to do what I
can to try to make the world around me, kind of going out in
concentric circles maybe, better for everybody.
I would be so happy if tomorrow we could wave a magic
wand and I could walk down any street in Washington, D.C. without
being afraid of being mugged; if I could take my child to any park in
this city at any time of day or night with my friends and we could
sit around and have a conversation and watch children playing, and
you know, young teenagers holding hands, and you wouldn't be living
in fear.
I don't care who gets the credit for that.
But that's how I see my life.
I want to live in a place
that helps everybody be better than they are, and to achieve whatever
their potential is.
I don't care who's president, I don't care who's
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governor, I don't care who's the big muckity-muck that gets the
attention.
I just want the conditions to change. And that's always
the way that I have felt.
And it is -- you know, I don't talk about
it a lot because it sounds sort of silly, I suppose, to some people.
Because, you know, here I am, I have a lot of wonderful aspects of my
life; my husband is President and I'm very proud of him. And I think
he's going to be a great President because I think he care about the
right things.
But I told him all during the campaign, if there had
been anybody else who I thought could talk about the world the way we
see it, who could motivate people to understand they had to change
personally -- it wasn't just some top-down, programmatic approach to
our lives that we needed to changei it was who we were and what we
cared about, and the meaning in our own lives -- heck, I would have
been ecstatic about that.
I just want this country to realize what it's real
future could be and to corne to terms with a lot of the problems that
it's had and to work them out. And that's what I care about -- you
know, in a political and a day-to-day sense about how we live
together, and how we support each other, and how we take care of each
other. I don't care who gets the credit. That's irrelevant to me.
Q
I'm going to, later on, get back to the politics of
meaning and your speech in Austin. Let me skim through some
chronological stuff. Alan Sheckter said that you were never
inflammatory or radical in any way in college. And I was wondering
whether you gave a lot of thought to how much of an activist you
wanted to be at that time, or whether i t was just your nature to be
more cautious maybe.
MRS. CLINTON:
I don't know if cautious is the right
word.
I like to see that what is being advocated actually can bring
about results. Because there are very few sweeping events that you
see historically, whether you're talking about a college or a
community or a country or anything else. Most change is done
incrementally and over time. And I've always felt that way. That
even if you had very strong feelings about something, you had to
think about how best to communicate those feelings so that people
could understand what you were trying to say.
And I learned a lot about that in college because it was
a very tough emotional time to be going to college and to care about
issues. And, you know, a lot of my, friends were deeply involved in
various movements and emotionally committed to them. And I've
supported their feelings, but I was always looking for ways that
would get to where they wanted to go that would be effective.
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So maybe some of it was my own nature, but some of it
was real thoughtful in trying to work out how to help the people who
I thought were really more in tune with what was going on, who
understood the pain and the anguish of assassinations and wars and
all that was happening, but whose emotion was not always tied to
being effective. And the emotion is a necessary engine, because you
got to have a track you're going down once you get it fired up.
So that's kind of how I tried to understand what we
needed to accomplish.
I have very strong feelings about a whole
range of issues and believe deeply in a lot of personal and social
matters. But I also want to go back to what I said earlier which is
that what I'm interested in is creating an environment in which more
people have an opportunity to make good decisions for themselves and
the emotional catharsis that comes with just saying it, which gets
you the momentary applause and the great screams and yells of
approbation, are usually not enough to sustain the energy that's
needed to bring about the changes that will actually created the
conditions that I'd like to see.
Q
Your politics changed a lot when you were in
college, I think the way they do for a lot of people.
But did
was
this something that happened that was more emotional or intuitive or
gradually -- a more rational sort of process or -
MRS. CLINTON:
I don't know. Kind of both. I'd always
been a Republican because my parents were Republican and I lived in a
very Republican community, and because a lot of the issues that I
cared about I could view in terms of what I used to think of as the
Republican Party. I mean, individual responsibility, conservatism
that really does try to conserve, that is not driven by the buzz
words of the modern ideological battles we've had.
And probably I began to change about my thinking in my
senior year in high school because I had a very smart Social Studies
teacher who in 1964 wanted to have a debate between Johnson and
Goldwater. And I was a Goldwater proponent, a Goldwater girl.
I
used to dress up with all these other friends of mine and we'd go do
things for Goldwater. And so my Social Studies teacher took a good
friend of mine who was a leading Democrat, assigned her the task of
representing Goldwater, assigned me the task of representing Johnson.
We both bitterly complained and she held her ground.
So I had to go
and really look at things from the other side.
I had to do a lot of
research.
I had to understand all this -- you know, Great Society
stuff, all this civil rights stuff that Johnson was promoting. And
it was a real eye-opener for me.
But when I got to Wellesley I was elected President of
the college Republicans. And I remember going to a big meeting of
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Massachusetts Republicans.
It was like their convention or
something. And I remember walking around, talking to a lot of
people, and I began to see more clearly what a lot of the movement
toward a more radical version of Republicanism actually meant.
So I
got back to college and I -- you know, it was more emotional and
intuitive.
I went to see one of my good friends who was like the
vice presiderit of the college Republicans, and I said, I don't know
what I am right now, but I know I can't be the president of the
college Republicans.
Q
What year was that, do you remember?
MRS. CLINTON:
It was the first year when I was at
Wellesley, 1965-66. I worked very hard to elect Senator Brook. We
worked in his campaign. And I really believed in that, but I didn't
believe in a lot of the other stuff that I saw happening in the
Republican Party after the Goldwater defeat.
And so I went to my friend and I said, I'm going to
resign and so you're going to become the president and, you know,
I'll do anything I can to help you, but I just can't do this.
I just
don't believe it anymore.
I just can't be part of it.
So I didn't identify with any particular party after
that for a while because I was mostly interested in issues and
reading a lot and trying to understand what I did believe.
I had a
wonderful course in international relations at Wellesley my sophomore
year, one of the best college courses I've ever had. And the
professor, a woman named Barbara Green, was so intellectually acute
I mean, she really raised for us every possible theory about
America's role in the world. And it was so apt because we were
getting more deeply involved in Vietnam and she had -- I mean, I must
have spent -- I did not only all the reading I was supposed to, but I
did mUCh, much morelreading.
I remember sitting in the reserve room
of the Wellesley library hour upon hour reading everything I could
find about what was happening in the world.
And I remember also -- it was my freshman or sophomore
year -- Henry Kissinger came up to Wellesley to speak. And we all
crowded in to hear him speak. He was speaking about the future of
Europe. And I stood in line for a long time to go up to talk to him
after it was over, and I remember asking him, you know, he didn't say
very much about Germany, what was Germany's future, what did the
future of Europe have to do with our developing policy in vietnam.
And I was just very interested in all of that.
So I spent a couple
of years kind of searching for my own sense of politics-- carrying
with me sort of my sort of bedrock beliefs in promoting individual
responsibility and promoting the kind of conservatism in which you do
try to sustain institutions like families and communities against the
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onslaught of change so that there can be some anchoring for people as
they go through the last part of the 20th century.
I mean, a lot of my politics is a real mixture, it's an
amalgam of -- and I get so amused when these people characterize me,
you know, she is this, therefore, she believes the following 25
things, half of which I don't believe, but nobody's ever really
stopped to ask me or try to figure out the kind of new sense of
politics that Bill and a lot of us are trying to create.
Q
with labels are -
MRS. CLINTON:
Yes, the labels are irrelevant,
basically.
Q
I think it's -
actually, I think most people feel
that way.
MRS. CLINTON:
Q
They do feel that way.
It is an amalgam for a lot of people.
MRS. CLINTON: Yes, it is. And yet, the political
system and the reporting of it keeps trying to force us back into the
boxes because the boxes are so much easier to talk about.
You know,
it's just -- it's a lot easier.
You don't have to think so much if
you just fall back on the old, discredited, Republican versus
Democrat, liberal versus conservative mind-set. A big disservice to
this process that a lot of us are going through trying to figure out
how you make sense out of responsibility at a individual and a
national level and how you support it, instead of saying one or the
other is the answer.
Q
You also stumbled upon Saul Olinsky, I guess in
college, and that must have been a big influence.
MRS. CLINTON: Well, it was interesting because I was
looking around for a senior thesis subject and I was very interested
in this issue: What is the proper balance between government
programs and individual and community responsibility? And what
olinsky was doing was so interesting to .me because he was trying to
organize people on the grass-roots level, sometimes in opposition to
the government programs of the Great Society that were trying to help
them.
I thought it was a terrific kind of case study for the
tensions between making people independent and dependent, which you
could very loosely 'argue were the kind of conflicts that were going
on. And so I read what he had written and I met him and I talked to
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people about him. And I wrote this senior thesis in which I,
basically, argued that, you know, he was right in some respects to be
against what I called then the welfare files.
You know, even at that
early stage I was just against these people who came up with these
big government programs that were more supportive of the bureaucracy
than actually helpful to people.
I've been on this kick for 25
years. And I really enjoyed getting to meet him because he was a
real character. and he was irascible.
I was talking to Senator Moynihan about him the other
day because Senator Moynihan knew him very well. And he and Senator
Moynihan had very hard-fought, but mutually respectful battles about
all of these issues.
In fact, we had a very nice conversation about
Olinsky because Senator Moynihan is one of the few people that I know
now who knew Olinsky and so I really loved talking to him about that.
But that's what I was trying to work out in my own mind:
I mean, people have to take responsibility for themselves.
They
cannot expect the government to come in and make their lives better.
But they can expect the government to create conditions in which
their responsibility is more likely to be rewarded than penalized.
So that's been a continuing refrain for me and he helped me a lrit
with that.
Q
I read a story, I think it was in The Boston Globe
-- I thought it was a nice story on your time at Wellesley.
MRS. CLINTON:
I've never seen that.
I'd like to see
that.
Q
And there was a story in there about how you took a
black woman to church with you one of the few weeks you were at
Wellesley. And I'm thinking in retrospect that that seems like a
daring thing to have done -
MRS. CLINTON: Well, you know, when I got to Wellesley I
had never had any relationship with any black person my age except in
episodic ways through you know school exchanges or my church work.
And I was exhilarated by my friendships with all different kinds of
people.
I mean, that was one of the greatest experiences that
Wellesley gave me. And I don't think we even thought about it, but
this friend of mine and I went to church together one Sunday and
realized that what we were doing was considered
Q
Was out there or -
MRS. CLINTON: Yes.
I mean, it was considered unusual.
And it was such a telling moment for me because I had not gone to
school with any black kids, I had not gone to church with any black
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kids. And what seemed at the time then so natural, here was this
friend of mine and we were going to go to church together, would be
viewed as unusual was one of those real kind of click experiences
that you know you have in your life. Well, looking back on it now
I guess it still it would be unusual for some people in some parts of
our country, you know. And the churches on Sunday morning -
Q
-- said that the most segregated hours were between
11:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. on Sunday.
MRS. CLINTON:
church life.
Yale?
That's right.
Q
I wanted to talk to you a little about just your
Did you go to church when you were in college and at
MRS. CLINTON:
I went sporadically when I was in college
and law school.
I'd go to chapel at Wellesley and I'd go into town
at Wellesley on occasion. And the same when I was at Yale, I'd go to
chapel or I go to -- there were a couple of small churches in New
Haven that I really liked. There was a real small, beautiful
Episcopal church that I liked to go to at times.
Q
So you shopped around, you never stayed with the -
MRS. CLINTON: No, I shopped around.
But it was mostly
more because I wanted to go to different services and I wanted to go
to different churches or I'd hear that somebody was going to preach a
great sermon or that somebody, you know, some church had a great
choir.
So I was, you know, just real open. And I knew that I wasn't
going to be living in those communities when I graduated from college
and law school, and so I kept my membership at home.
Q
And I think there was an interview in the United
Methodist magazine -- what's that called -- the New World Outlook,
when you talk a lot about -- you talk a bit about how when you met
the President you talked about your religious beliefs and how
important they were to you.
MRS. CLINTON:
Yes, we did that a lot.
Q
Have you found a church here or are you just -
you're in a position of really not being able to have a -- well, I
guess you could have a church.
MRS. CLINTON: Well, I'm trying.
I mean, we've been
gone lots of Sundays. You know what I loved is going to church at
Camp David.
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Q
Oh, is there a chapel out there?
MRS. CLINTON: Yes. And we went to Easter service
there.
It was wonderful.
I mean, it really had a great feeling.
I
like the Navy Chaplain a lot. I've been to church at Camp David
twice, and I've been to church here maybe three or four other times.
But I haven't really gotten a church yeti I'm still kind of just
visiting around and meeting people.
I'm finding that because of our
movements back and forth and all the other stuff, I haven't quite
gotten my routine down yet.
Q
How tied is -- I mean, I think you somewhat
answered the question -- but how tied are your religious beliefs and
your feeling of your own purpose for being here and the purpose of
your life tied to your commitment to social action?
MRS. CLINTON: Very tied.
I don't really see them as
separate, I see them as part of the same set of feelings and
convictions.
Q
Very tied.
MRS. CLINTON:
Very.
Well, in fact, part of the same.
Q
Does it feel like a sense of mission, that that's
just really who you are what you are supposed to be doing? Does it
feel like -
MRS. CLINTON:
just feels that
Q
It just feels like who I am.
I .mean, it
It's not something you have to make yourself do?
MRS. CLINTON: No, because I just think about how all of
my life I've tried to lead an integrated life. And so the spiritual
and the emotional and psychological and physical -- all of that -- I.
mean, I'm not there, I don't want to mislead you.
But I'm trying
very hard to have that be like the primary purpose of my life.
I
mean, I want to feel as though I've led a coherent, integrated life.
And the spiritual part of my life is a very important element to me
in defining who I am and what I care'about. And it's a real
benchmark. I mean, when I disappoint myself because of a way that
I've treated somebody or behaved, it's against a backdrop of
believing that there's some effort I should make to try to be better
than that. And it's something real personal to me.
Q
Let's talk about your Austin speech and the
politics of meaning. How important -- I read a little thing from
Michael Lerner, his editorial which talks about the politics of
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meaning.
written?
Have you been very influenced by some of the things he's
MRS. CLINTON: Not knowingly, although I had a wonderful
conversation with Michael during the -- I met him for the first time
during the Holocaust reception we had out here. And I had read some
of his early stuff, like in '88, '89, '87, somewhere around back then
why the Democrats were always losing.
I don't really remember it,
other than it was sort of part of the backdrop against which my
husband was thinking all of these things.
But I think he's done some
very good work, and he's brought me and sent me a lot of the stuff
that he's written and I'm now reading all of that.
I've been more influenced by Havel.
I mean, I have read
Havel stuff. I don't know that he ever quite used the term "politics
of meaning," but he talked a lot about the need for more
understanding, that people in political life and those who cared
about politics needed not to be so obsessed with the programmatic or
the issue-driven or the factual side, so much as they needed to be
looking for meaning and understanding and interpreting what was
happening to people.
I think there's a convergence. Michael came to see me
the other day and brought me a huge stack of things that I should
read, which I will.
But I think there's a convergence of a lot of
people. Much of the energy animating the responsible fundamentalist
right has come from their sense of life getting away from us and
meaning being lost and people being turned into kind of amoral
decision-makers, because there wasn't any overriding values that they
related to. And I have a lot of sympathy for that.
I battled hard, for example, for religious parents in
Arkansas to be able to teach their own families.
I championed home
schooling 13 years ago or whenever it was, because my view was that
for parents to make that kind of commitment to their families is a
value we should support. It gives meaning to their life, and through
it, meaning to a lot of other people's lives.
Q
It's been a long time since Democrats, though,
talked about God.
MRS. CLINTON:
Q
I know, and -
-- belonged to the Republicans for 12 years.
MRS. CLINTON:
Yes. And I'm not in any way casting any
doubt on their right to claim whatever they wish to claim. But the
problem is that the issue of meaning and the issue of our daily
experience being grounded in some sense of a greater whole than what
MORE
�- 14
we can understand can be viewed from so many different perspectives.
But the search for meaning should cut across all kinds of religious
and ideological boundaries. That's what we should be struggling
about, not "you have a corner on God and I don't," or, It you're the
real true person and this other one isn't. 1t That is an unfortunate
and, in many ways, destructive debate.
What we ought to start from is a sense, I think, that is
widely shared now in a lot of elements of society that being
economically prosperous, having a rich country, having most people
able to participate in the market and have luxuries beyond their
grandparents' wildest dreams and all of the stuff that we now have is
not sufficient for either a meaningful personal life or a meaningful
community life. Now, then we can argue over what is or is not the
appropriate way to -
Q
-- the government replace
MRS. CLINTON: No. The answer to that is a no-brainer.
But there are things that government can do that is more likely to
create a condition for more people to be secure enough to take
responsibility for themselves and therefore participate fully in this
search for meaning.
You know, if you treat people like they're disposable
commodities, whether it's in the workplace or in a government program
where you look on them with contempt because of who they are or what
race they are, you are bound and guaranteed to get the kind of
division and alienation that we currently have. And so there are
ways that government can promote an environment in which .
responsibility truly has a chance to flourish.
That's really the
motivating force behind welfare reform.
Some people may want to do
it because they want to punish people because they're not worthy, but
where the President comes from and where I corne from is that we want
government to be empowering and uplifting, not degrading and
demeaning and dependency-producing, which is basically what we've
had. Maybe out of good motive, but nevertheless the results have not
worked.
Q
Are you with the President on welfare reform?
MRS. CLINTON:
Q
Absolutely.
One hundred percent?
MRS. CLINTON:
Absolutely.
Q
-- attempts by many opinion magazines that paint
you as more ideologically to the left.
MORE
�- 15
MRS. CLINTON:
I think so much of that is rooted in
their desire to sort of put me in a corner or a box and try to
understand me, because I apparently pose problems for them, which it
too bad for them. But there are ways of doing it that are more
likely to be successful than other ways.
But in terms of our ultimate goals, I mean, I would like
to see welfare as we know it over the next years abolished. That's
what I would like to see.
I do not like it, I do not think it is
good for the women or children who are trapped within it. And one of
my great goals in this health care effort is to remove the Medicaid
incentive for people to stay on welfare by having a system of health
care that is available to every American so that you don't have the
unfair situation now where some women stay on welfare because they
get Medicaid; other women who are single parents struggling in the
job market from day to day with the fear that their family will be
felled by some health disaster, but are working and not able to get
health care.
So there's a lot about this that I believe in very
strongly, that I think will, if we do it right, result in a better
situation for the people in general.
Q
•
Thank you.
MRS. CLINTON: If you need to finish up on this -- no,
I've really enjoyed this. And I really have appreciated your writing
over the past x-number of months. You know, Peter O'Toole and
everybody else.
t really do. I understand you've been on a
sabbatical or something.
Q
I have a wonderful deal.
I only work six months a
year for the paper. It doesn't mean I'm not working.
MRS. CLINTON:
Q
Well, good, good.
Thank you again.
END
•
That ought to be fun.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Lissa Muscatine - Press Office
Creator
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First Lady's Office
Press Office
Lissa Muscatine
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1993 - 1997
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
<a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/36239" target="_blank">Collection Finding Aid</a>
<a href="http://catalog.archives.gov/id/7431941" target="_blank">National Archives Catalog Description</a>
Identifier
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2011-0415-S
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Lissa Muscatine first served in the Clinton Administration as a speechwriter. Within the First Lady’s Office, she served as Communications Director to the First Lady.</p>
<p>Lissa Muscatine’s records consist of materials from First Lady Hillary Clinton’s Press Office, highlighting topics such as health care, women’s rights, the Millennium Council, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, and deal extensively with press interviews given by the First Lady; her domestic and foreign travel; and speeches and remarks, on a wide variety of topics, given by her before and during her time as First Lady. The records include interview transcripts, press releases, speeches and speech transcripts.</p>
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
Clinton Presidential Records: White House Staff and Office Files
Publisher
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Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
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Adobe Acrobat Document
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1,324 folders in 27 boxes
Text
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Original Format
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Paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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FLOTUS Press Office Interview Transcripts Volume I 01/29/93---9/30/93 [Binder]: [04/28/93 Sherrill, Martha Washington Post]
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
Box 1
<a href="http://clintonlibrary.gov/assets/Documents/Finding-Aids/Systematic/2011-0415-S-Muscatine.pdf" target="_blank">Collection Finding Aid</a>
<a href="http://catalog.archives.gov/id/7431941" target="_blank">National Archives Catalog Description</a>
Creator
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First Lady's Office
Press Office
Lissa Muscatine
Identifier
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2011-0415-S
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
Clinton Presidential Records: White House Staff and Office Files
Publisher
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Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
Format
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Adobe Acrobat Document
Medium
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Reproduction-Reference
Date Created
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11/26/2012
Source
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2011-0415-S-flotus-press-office-interview-transcripts-volume-i-01-29-93-9-30-93-binder-04-28-93-sherrill-martha-washington-post
7431941