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If there was a 2nd chance, it could’ve been different

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October 9, 2000 

WASHINGTON (AP) - Reflecting on his eight years in office, U.S. President Bill Clinton says if he had been more experienced he would have dealt differently with the conflict in Somalia and with the early challenges of health care reform.

He also says he regrets his handling of the investigation into his Whitewater real-estate dealings.

In the October 16-23 politics issue of The New Yorker magazine, Clinton said his decision in 1993 to try to capture the Somalian warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid was based on the advice of Gen. Colin Powell, who retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff soon after the operation began.

"I'm not blaming him, I'm just saying he was gone," Clinton said. "We had this huge battle in broad daylight where hundreds of Somalis were killed and we lost 18 soldiers in what was a U.N. action ... I think I will always regret that - I don't know if I could have saved those lives or not."

"I would have handled it in a different way if I'd had more experience," he said. "I know I would have."

Explaining his administration's failed attempt to deliver universal health care in 1993, Clinton said officials had pursued too many simultaneous goals.

"We didn't know enough about how the system worked. It can only digest so much at once," he said, noting they were pushing hard on a big economic plan and the North American Free Trade Agreement. "There's no way the system could digest the health care plan."

He added that he should have worked for welfare reform before health care to give Democrats a chance to appeal to more conservatives and moderates. He also defended his wife, Hillary, who led the health care overhaul.

"She gets a total bum rap on this," he said. "She was operating within constraints that we now know are impossible ... it was my mistake, not hers. All she did was what she was asked to do."

Clinton said a good solution for health care would be providing tax credits or vouchers to those who need them.

"That's what you're going to have eventually and if I could do it now that's what I would offer," he said. "The problem is I couldn't do it in '94, with the deficits the way they were, without a tax increase."

Focusing on 1998, the year of his sex scandal with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which led to his impeachment trial, Clinton said "there was obviously a lot of pain involved."

"I had made a terrible personal mistake which I didn't try to correct until almost a year later and I had to live with it, and it caused an enormous amount of pain to my family, to my administration, to the country," he said.

Clinton also said he regretted his handling of the investigation into his Whitewater real-estate dealings.

"What I regret is asking for the special counsel," Clinton said.

In 1994, the president asked Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the Whitewater case. Reno appointed Robert Fiske, who was later replaced by Kenneth Starr.

"I did it because I was exhausted, because I had just buried my mother and because I had people in the White House who couldn't stand the heat and they suggested that I do it, that I had to do it. I knew there was nothing to it, it was just a lie," Clinton said.

For the magazine article, Clinton spoke on two occasions last summer to Joe Klein, the once anonymous author of "Primary Colors," about a fictional 1992 presidential campaign.