He was extremely upset about the loss of life. ... He's been very willing to use American forces overseas but he's been very reluctant to see them go in harm's way or be put in a situation where a lot of people get killed. He's tried to calibrate carefully various U.S. engagements so that a minimal number of people get killed and it's still an exercise or a demonstration of force.

Somalia wasn't quite his Bay of Pigs, but it came close. It was a situation in which I think he in retrospect realized that as president he had allowed the mission to expand, what's called mission creep, and at the same time he had been withdrawing down the number of forces who could do it. And he left his forces in a situation where they were overexposed to danger. And he knew that. And in retrospect, I think he blamed himself to some extent and I think to some extent he blamed some of his advisors.

Was there a sense there when you were with him that we were going to get out of there as soon as we could, that we were going to cut our losses and leave?

I think that Somalia haunted the administration for a while after that. It was almost like the Vietnam Syndrome. There was a Somalia Syndrome. And that is, don't ever get yourself in a situation like that again where you put people in harm's way and they are not fully protected, you don't know what you're doing.

I was trying to remember whether the Haiti thing came after that.

It did. Yeah. It did. As I recall we had a ship going into Haiti, the Harlan County, and they got there and there was a mob on the pier. And to my astonishment, people in the Harlan County were not armed. And I said, look--and people blame me for some of this, but my argument to the president was-- "You got one of two choices. You either got to go in with force and take care of that unruly mob, you can take them in five minutes. Or you got to get the ship the hell out of there."

The one thing you cannot do is dither. You can't just leave that ship sitting there while you try to figure out what to do. And he ordered them out .... And frankly, I don't blame the Harlan County on Bill Clinton so much. I don't understand why the Pentagon didn't have those people armed going in. They weren't prepared for what amounted to be like a street mob.

...I want to come back to this. The Somalia Syndrome was playing into the Harlan County episode. Because nobody wanted to have Americans leave the Harlan County and go ashore unarmed and get killed by that mob. That would have been awful, and in the back of people's minds was Somalia. And that existed in the back of people's minds for a long time.

You got to remember the people who were around Bill Clinton have a real neuralgia about Vietnam, that Vietnam continues to play through in this generation. This is the generation that is now in power. They grew up in Vietnam. And Tony Lake, his National Security Advisor, was in Vietnam. And Tony takes this very, very seriously, and to his credit.

Tony Lake is one of the kind of people who quietly, as National Security Advisor, went to the funerals of people from Somalia and took his day of Sunday and flew to Kentucky, I think it was, to go privately as a citizen to the funeral. Very quietly and came back. Didn't say anything about it. Didn't want any publicity. But the loss of life was very, very important to the president and the people around him, loss of American life.

To what extent during your tenure did Bill Clinton care about foreign policy?

You got to remember when Bill Clinton was elected the country thought George Bush was spending way too much time on foreign policy and wasn't paying enough attention on the domestic side. So Bill Clinton came in with the understanding of the mandate from the country that was pay attention to the domestic side and forget this foreign policy stuff.

And the truth was it flipped between the Bush administration and the Clinton administration on the attention to foreign policy. Traditionally where presidents have spent maybe 60 percent of their time, 65 percent of their time on foreign policy during the Cold War. With Bush he got up to about 75 percent sometimes. With Clinton it totally flipped and he went to maybe 25 percent of his time on foreign policy at most.

Jim Woolsey, the CIA Director, couldn't get on his schedule to see him. Couldn't get in to see the president?

Couldn't get in. The CIA does a daily briefing with the president. And that's long been the case. And so, Jim Woolsey would come over with his briefers thinking, "Well, I'll get a chance to go in there and talk to him." They had a very hard time getting on his schedule. When the little tiny plane crashed on the White House lawn, the joke around town was that was Jim Woolsey trying to get an appointment to see Bill Clinton. And other governments were having a hard time getting on his schedule.

Now, when he got in trouble over five or six months, Tony Lake and Warren Christopher and others, Sandy Berger, were able to persuade him, "Look,you're good at this foreign policy stuff. You know, you went to school at Georgetown on foreign policy, you enjoy it. But you're not spending sustained attention on it and you really need to do that." And they began correcting that schedule. But for the first few months all the emphasis were somewhere else. And I have to say his attention span on foreign policy remained episodic through much of his presidency. But I think he was better on foreign policy than he's given credit for. I think he's had many more accomplishments than he's given credit for.

Just before Christmas in 1993, the trooper story breaks, first in The American Spectator, then in The Los Angeles Times. How did Bill and Hillary take that story?

That was a tough, tough blow. He acted outraged, and she was clearly outraged; wouldn't say so, but I think she felt a sense of humiliation that went very deep. No first lady likes to be put in that situation, of course. So, it was a very tough time for them.

And she in that kind of environment, her first response is to rally the troops and get people out defending the president. I think that's one of the great contributions she's made to him over time. She's the one who steadies things up. She deploys people, gets them out there.

But I think it was privately just very, very difficult for her. Now, I believe that the Troopergate story was a turning point on the health care fight. Let me explain why. Up until that time, she had been very, very involved in sort of the effort to put together the health care plan. It had been early presentations in the fall of 1993. The Troopergate story came along in December. I think it put him in a substantially one-down situation, with her psychologically in the dynamics of a marriage.

I can't prove this. My sense has been they are on a see-saw in their relationship. When that relationship works, they're very good partners. But when she goes up and he goes down, or he goes up and she goes down, there, the balance gets out of whack. On health care, what happened was that that Troopergate story put that see-saw up so that she went way up and he went way down. And I never saw him challenge her on health care in the weeks that followed. On the politics of what was going on, on sort of how to get it presented to the Congress properly. How to get it through the Congress. I really think that it sealed her position. It put her firmly in charge of how to get health care done.

Is this because he's in the dog house? Is that what you're saying here?

Absolutely. Watching him in that time, it was very much like watching a golden retriever that has pooped on the rug and just curls up and keeps his head down. And it put him in a situation where he was in her dog house. And I think it put him in a situation where on health care he never challenged it in a way he ordinarily would have, had he been under different psychological situation.

And, of course, the Troopergate story set off the Paula Jones case. Paula was mentioned in The American Spectator story and that led to the lawsuit. So it had other consequences. But it had a real change in the dynamics I sensed, at least in the White House, and it couldn't have come at a worse time. It was really very, very damaging.

I don't want to put the blame on her on health care. I don't think that's fair. I don't think she ever should have been asked to put the health care thing together. I think Donna Shalala should have been asked to put that together and I think Mrs. Clinton could have led the crusade to get it passed. But ultimately this was Bill Clinton's White House. He was the guy elected president. Ultimately if your wife gets assigned health care that's his decision.

And so, you have to say Mr. President, you did a lot of really good things as president but turning the health care program over to Mrs. Clinton, who had never really worked in Washington before and asking her to do something that massive was like giving her a mission impossible. It just was more than she should have been asked to do. And I do think that the dynamics of the relationship had something to do with it.

You mention Troopergate leads to Paula Jones. She gives this press conference and there's a sort of interesting strategy that develops from the White House.

The president's lawyer had a good line on the lawsuit, this was "tabloid trash" with a legal caption on it. You also had a not-too-subtle attack on Paula Jones herself. You have James Carville out on the talk show saying, "Drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, no telling what you're going to find."

So, here you have the White House attacking the press again, shaming the press, and attacking the integrity of the woman bringing the charges. What was your view about the strategy?

I'm the wrong person to ask. I was not there for that. I had left by then, but I think the record is pretty clear that by attacking Paula Jones personally that the prospects for getting a settlement went down the drain. That she felt insulted and pushed on. I think they were very, very close to getting a settlement from everything I've understood about it. And by attacking her it really went down the other way. And James Carville has been a first-rate political strategist and helper for Bill Clinton over a long period of time and a big, big defender of his. But it's up to the president to determine how he wants the people who are loyal to him to support him. If you took a Franklin Roosevelt in that situation he would not have allowed somebody to go after Paula Jones in the way they went after her. He would've understood "Let's cut our losses. Let's get this behind us. Let's get a settlement done and get this woman out of the headlines. We don't need this."

And, instead, by going out and attacking, I think you you get her into a situation where it goes the other way. Now, I want to contrast that--and this is a very interesting point and it may seem like a stretch.

Contrast that to the way Bob Rubin worked with Bill Clinton on the Alan Greenspan relationship. Bill Clinton's tendency was to go out early on in his presidency and go out and attack Alan Greenspan on interest rates. He thought they were way too tight and thought they were holding back the economy and he wanted to go out there and attack him. And Bob Rubin came to him and said, "Mr. President, you can't do that. If you attack him, you'll challenge his manhood and if you challenge his manhood he's going to tighten some more just to show you that he's independent."

And Bob Rubin understood and as a result the president listened to that, decided that is right, that's wise, didn't attack him. And lo and behold Greenspan got us through this thing and they've had a fabulous relationship since, and Bill Clinton has twice reappointed Alan Greenspan. And it's been a terrific economy, partly because of that relationship. I think if they had the same kind of restraint with regard to Paula Jones that they had toward the Fed, there would have been a very different outcome.

By the end of '94, I mean you've been brought in as you say largely to bring this president back to the center. There was a profile problem he had after his early couple of years. He had gone way to the left and Hillary was blamed for part of that.

I think it was partly to get him sort of righted, to help get him out of the ditch. His presidency had gone into a ditch and my job was to help him get out of the ditch.

One of the things that you were arguing for strenuously to do was NAFTA. Why was that such a critical moment for Clinton at that time?

NAFTA, in my judgment, was one of the finest hours of Bill Clinton's presidency. And people like Bill Daley and Rahm Emanuel, and others--Mickey Kantor--deserve a great deal of credit for. What was really important about NAFTA was, first of all, it was good policy. Secondly, and very, very importantly, it was courageous of Bill Clinton to go out for NAFTA because he had the labor unions all on the other side. His entire political base was saying, "don't do this." He had a lot of people in the White House saying, "Don't do this. This is a loser. You're going to lose this thing and you're going to really tee-off your base and they're going to leave you."

And he said, "No, no, it's good for the country" and he went out and fought for something. And he showed people that he had some guts. He showed people that when it came to sort of, "I'll do something because if the country's interest is at stake I'll fight for it." And I think that was a terrific moment for him. I think NAFTA, passing NAFTA and getting the budget bill passed the first year were like two of the most important moments of his presidency. And they sent a signal to an awful lot of people, but particularly NAFTA sent a signal that at the end of the day Bill Clinton was not driven entirely by polls and by politics, he had some guts and he had a sense of what was best.

The tragedy that came later was that after he lost the 1994 elections and the Republicans took over--that Dick Morris who was the master strategist and I think one of the cleverest people who's ever been around Bill Clinton and has the best insights into Bill Clinton as a politician--the tragedy was that Dick Morris persuaded him he had to get away from that kind of thing and he had to go very political in order to survive. And he moved away from those kind of efforts.

I think if he'd stuck to his guns as he did on NAFTA, I think he would have sent a lot of signals to people that this is a gutsy guy.

You were still around at the election of '94?

I was over at the State Department by that time.

By this point Clinton is sort of upset with his whole team. There are big, big changes in the White House. What was his feeling? I mean why did you get moved to the State Department? Did he tell you?

I asked to leave. I wanted to get out before the '94 elections. I had told him when I came in I didn't want to be around for elections. I could help him with the governing but I thought it was inappropriate for me to be there for an election period when inevitably it was going to get partisan and I had worked for Republicans. I just didn't feel comfortable about that...

Did you talk to him after the elections? I mean did you get a sense from him--

Yes, I talked to him. He went through another downward spiral. This presidency has been on a roller coaster from day one. And what you find is in year one he starts high coming off the transition, 59 percent, he goes way down the first six months, he brings himself back up, and then he gets health care and he goes down and then he gets the defeat in '94 and he goes way down. And with Dick Morris there he picks himself back up again. And then, of course, he goes down after the Monica business and he has never fully--

Did he take any responsibility, himself, for losing the Congress in '94? Did he ever face that he was partly responsible for that?

He was really, really angry at just a variety of things. He was angry at the Republicans, he was angry at the consultants. And he felt that if this the way that politics is going to be played in Washington, by God, he'd play it this way. His view was the Republicans have been cynical all along about politics, "They come in here and they don't stick to their guns, they just do the things that are political so they can get reelected. I came in the first two years and tried to do the right thing for the country, got my head handed to me. And by God, I'm not going to do that again. I'll do what basically I need to do."

He was very much fighting back to get elected. And that's why I think Dick Morris understands that. Dick Morris said--he's written in his book he wrote--"You got to understand that there are two sides to Bill Clinton. There's the good government Bill Clinton, and then there's the guy who's the politician. And if his survival is challenged he's going to turn into a politician." But that's what happened after the '94 election.

Why did he get rid of his political team?

He thought they had let him down. He thought that they had misjudged the tenor of the times. I think he blamed them in part for health care that they had been deeply involved in. I frankly think that they paid a bigger price than they should have. I think these were very talented people. And they had served him well over a long period of time. But hey, look, it's, like a losing baseball team, you fire the manager, get a new manager. That's where he was.

Looking back now, what do you consider his legacy to be, his historical legacy?

I think historians are always going to be ambivalent about Bill Clinton, just as they are about Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. And that's because there is a bright side of Bill Clinton who has accomplished enormous things for the country. The country is clearly better off than it was the day he was first elected.

The 1990s are going to be remembered as one of the brightest decades of the 20th Century. And he was one of the prime movers in that decade. Many of the steps he took were small, to be sure, but the decade turned out very well. We're better off economically, we're at peace, and a lot of cultural indicators like divorce rates, teenage crime, teenage pregnancy, are moving in the right direction.

And he has something to do with that. And, yet, at the same time, there is this other side, the downside, the negative side. He goes in the history as the first elected president to be impeached. He goes into history as the first president who's had his whole sexual life thoroughly opened up in the press. He goes into history with an administration that has a very tainted ethical record, just whole episodes that have bedeviled him.

Nothing as serious as Watergate. But the whole conjure of things we call Whitewater, you know, have left a definite stain on it, and I think historians are going to have a hard time with it. I think they are going to have a hard time sort of juggling how you weigh those two things in the end.

And Lyndon Johnson's always faced this. Now, what's happening with Lyndon Johnson is that he paid a heavy price in the beginning on Vietnam and now he's being recognized for what he did in civil rights and his reputation is getting better. I think Bill Clinton over time will fare better in the history books than he will immediately. I think he's going to look better over time. I also think that the country is better prepared for the 21st Century than we think we are. We are in better shape as a people than we think we are. And I think people will look back and say, "You know, Bill Clinton told us about this bridge and we never understood what the hell it was, but it turned out he prepared the country." Over the time he was president a lot of things happened that made us better prepared for the 21st Century. And I think he'll get some credit for that.

And this gets a little esoteric, but let me just put this over. Bill Clinton has introduced a different kind of leadership to the presidency. We traditionally like leaders who are very strong and have a sense of direction and go right this way and here, "Follow me." He has almost a feminine kind of style. It's more like "Bring this in, get this viewpoint, get this viewpoint, and we'll sort of synthesize everything and we'll try this and we'll move forward."

And I think we're seeing more and more of leadership like that in the corporate sector and in other kinds of organizations, in which there are many more voices at the table--the diversity that he's introduced, and looking for additional voices, trying to bring other voices in. I am a traditionalist. I prefer, "Let's go this direction." But I think there is an argument to be said for someone who has a 360 degree vision and draws the best from various traditions to put it together. And I think we're going to see more and more of that in the future.

In May, I had the opportunity to go to the White House and hear Bill Clinton speak extemporaneously and he was like the best I'd heard him in a long, long time. I couldn't believe it. I went to some of his people and said "Has he been speaking like this recently?" And they said, "He's entered a zone in the last few weeks that nobody quite understands, but its like a baseball player who's on a hitting streak. And the baseball player gets in that zone and he sees the ball coming toward him from the pitcher bigger than it really is and can hit it more easily."

And somehow he has been liberated. And over the course of his last year, he's willing to talk about things he would never talk about in a way. He's willing to talk more about himself. I think he's coming to grips with sort of his own place in history, who he is as a person. I think he's a much more mature man now than he was when he was first elected.

In my judgment he went on this roller coaster ride that was in his presidency. It was the first four, five, six months when he went straight down and then over the next several months he pulled himself straight back up again. And he was the prime architect of his recovery.

And then the Troopergate thing hit and then health care went down the early next year and then he lost the Congress and then he went right back down again on the roller coaster. But to some extent what you have to understand about the presidency is, you don't have long to make your big accomplishments. When Lyndon Johnson was elected in 1964, he went to his people and said, "We've got about a year to get things done." Because power slips away in this office, it evaporates very quickly. And the problem with coming in with those big early losses and going down on the roller coaster those first six months, he's lost precious time.

That first six to nine months in the presidency are the most important time you have as president of the whole eight years. That's when you can get more done with the Congress, that's when you're fresh, when the country's with you, things haven't hit from the outside. And inevitably, in every presidency, you're going to have some things that come in from the outside that come banging on you which you can't expect. And so things that happened to him late in the first year--Vince Foster happened in the middle of the year, he couldn't help that, or The Los Angeles Times and the Troopergate story. Those outside things come up and banging up against you. And if you don't get it early, you don't get it. It's really hard.

I think the strength of Bill Clinton is that he could overcome. Most people in that job would never have been able to pull out of that first tailspin that he went into. But he did. And that's the remarkable thing about Bill Clinton--how good he is at pulling himself out of the tailspins. He is "the Comeback Kid." The other remarkable thing about Bill Clinton is how he gets himself into trouble so he goes in those tailspins. And that's what's been hard to reconcile.

As you were saying before, there is a part of his character that seems to enjoy living dangerously.

Yes. He likes to live dangerously. It's the eight years of living dangerously. Some really high points, some very strong things, but he likes to live life right at the edge. And there's something about him psychologically that has thrived on that all his life, Now, I happen to believe that he's coming out of it. I sense a man who is coming more into his own than he has been any time in his life. That he's coming to grips with himself in ways that he has not before and it's healthy. You know, as a person, I think he has always believed, as a Southern Baptist, in the powers of redemption and I think he's in the process of sort of pulling himself together.