THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

Internal Transcript January 17, 2002

INTERVIEW OF THE PRESIDENT

BY
TOM BROKAW, NBC
Office of THE VICE PRESIDENT

11:03 A.M. EST

Q Who determines when you go to the cave, and what are

the circumstances?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's basically a process, Tom, of
trying to avoid bunching up too much. It's not an absolute
requiement that the President and I always be apart. Obviously,
today, for example, we're both here.
But the threat has changed since 9/11, if you will, that it
used to be the greatest threat to a President was some nut with a
gun, a sole actor, if you will. Now you have to consider the
possibility of conspiracies, the large number of foreign
terrorists coming into the country who might target the
government of the United States -- which we think they did on
September llth. They weren't successful, thanks to the people on
United 93, who took it down in Pennsyvlania.
But we now have to deal with a different kind of threat than
we did before.
Q But you made the decision based on the daily threat
assessment, or do you make it more randomly?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's more randomly. And we make it
based primarily on being unpredictable. But, as I say, and we do
try to avoid bunching up and being in the same locale at the same
time. We take extra precautions now to make sure there is always
a successor outside the city of Washington. Today, Colin Powell
is traveling through Central Asia. Usually, a Cabinet member,
somebody who is in the line of succession -- the Speaker, for
example, and Denny Hastert is back home in Illinois today. But
we're not all at one place at one time.
Q You're going to have to rewrite the whole President
Bush playbook, aren't you? I mean, you came into office

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 determined not to get involved in nation-building. You were much
more interested in unilateralism. Now, you've got alliances all
over the world. You're going to have to rebuild Afghanistan and
God knows what else.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I've got a different take on it,
Tom. I think we've been successful -- I don't call it
unilateralism; I call it leadership. I think the President has
been very forceful in dealing with allies. He was early on.
There was some criticism, for example, of stepping out on Kyoto,
or on some of the other issues that we dealt with, on ABM treaty,
for example.
But it's good, tough, aggressive U.S. leadership that has
made it possible for us to do what we've done on Afghanistan.
And allies, in part, sign on because they know you mean business,
because they take you seriously, and because we've demonstrated
the depth of our commitment.
And interesting things happen along the way. What
originally was going to be a huge flap of allies on the ABM
treaty, in fact, we went forward and did what we said we were
going to do -- we have gotten out of the ABM treaty with almost
no fuss at all. Everybody sort of said, okay, fine, that's the
right thing to do.
So it's that aggressive leadership that makes it possible to
have allies, and the President --
Q But you are going to have to do nation-building and
we're going to have a troop presence in places that we never
anticipated.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, in terms of nation-building,
clearly, we do have to be concerned about the aftermath in
Afghanistan. You don't want it to revert back "to the situation
we had before, where terrorists could base out of there.
We do now have a greater reach, if you will, militarily,
than we had before the events of September llth. We've got
troops in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and parts of the
world, part of the old Soviet empire that are now friendly to the
U.S., willing to have our forces base there so that we can
undertake our activities against terrorism in Afghanistan.
Q There's also, in a curios way, a political bonus to all
this. Nobody wants war, but when there is war, the country
rallies behind the leadership of the administration. Some groups
-- environmentalists, for example -- are saying, well, they're
using the cover of war to roll back some of the environmental
gains that were made during the Clinton administration. People
in Nevada are saying, he came out here two years ago and told us

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 they'd never store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain; now they've
decided to do that.
Can you front load some of this stuff under the cover of war
and get ready for --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: What we said on Nevada and nuclear
waste -- I was the guy who delivered the message -- was that we
would follow a very rigorous procedure, we'd use EPA standards,
in terms of deciding whether or not we had achieved the level of
safety that's required.
Now, Secretary Abraham thinks we have. We've still got a
long way to go, it's not a done deal yet.
Q The govenror is not too happy, though.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I mean, it's bound to be
controversial, without question. But, you know, these are tough
decisions. If you're not prepared to make tough decisions, you
shouldn't run for President. And the President has been very
good at taking on these issues and making the tough decisions.
In terms of trying to roll back environmental protection,
though, that's simply not true. Ask them to cite where we've
done that. The fact of the matter is we think we've got good,
solid environmental policy going forward. We haven't repealed
any fundamental environmental law at all. Our Justice Department
just ruled the other day on an important area, for example, with
respect to a new source review on the Clean Air Act, that the
aggressive posture EPA had been pursuing was, in fact, the
correct one.
Q Enron. Why shouldn't the American public know all the
details about those six meetings that the Enron executives had
with your "staff, or with you, during the energy task force?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, there's an important principle
involved here, Tom. What we've done -- what we've had is a
request from Congress that I release the names of everybody I met
with as we went through the process of putting together the
energy package, what they said to me, what kind of advice they
gave .
I think that's a terrible precedent to set. I think it's a
mistake for us to be in a position where the President and THE
VICE PRESIDENT can't sit down with anybody we want to and talk
about any subject we want to, without the people who give us
advice having to consider the likelihood that everything they say
to us will be public. If we were unable to receive honest advice
from people, it would significantly inhibit the quality of the
decision making process we do down here.

J
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 There's nothing secret about what we did. We set up a task
force that I ran, at the direction of the President. We produced
105 policy recommendations. It was all done in public. We
actually produced -- printed thousands of copies of it,
distributed it all over town.
Now, in terms of the people we met with -- we met with all
kinds of folks: people from the energy industry; we met. with
utilities; we met with consumers and environmentalists;
congressmen; governors. It's the normal way we make policy
around here.
But what's been requested, in this particular case, is for
the first time, as Vice President I should be required to tell a
member of Congress every time I meet with somebody, what they say
to me, what the subjects were that were discussed. We think
that's a bad precedent.
The lawyers have made the case for us that, in fact, that
would seriously weaken and undermine the Presidency; it would
inhibit future White Houses, in terms of their operations; and
that we've got a very strong legal case here. So we may well
have to fight it out in courts.
Q But, legally, why not protect the others and
politically deal with just the Enron piece of it? Because it's
not going to go away, do you think?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Enron, in terms of their role here, was
minor, no more significant than any other energy company. I
talked to dozens of companies during the course of that process
and that had absolutely nothing to do with the tragedy that
ultimately befell Enron.
The Enron situation, obviously, is of concern. But the
President made it very clear we want a very thorough
investigation of what happened at Enron; if laws were broken,
people ought to be prosecuted. And he's also working and given
directions to his Cabinet, Agencies and Departments to make sure
we look at things like pension reform, and so forth, to protect
American people in the future so that it doesn't happen again.
But all of that is separate and apart from what we did here.
Q Back to the matter of terrorism. The President told me
this morning that he's very concerned that there are still cells
out there in this country, and that we could be living in an
alert for the rest of your term. Do you share that assessment?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I do. I think the numbers vary in
terms of the estimates of how many people went through the
training camps but, clearly, there were thousands and thousands
of people that were trained in the terrorist training camps in
Afghanistan under Osama bin Laden as part of the al Qaeda

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 organization. And they're now operating in 50 or 60 countries
around the world.
We know they had significant operations here. But just
since the events of September llth, we've also uncovered cells in
Germany, Spain, Italy and Southeast Asia. The folks in Singapore
recently wrapped up a couple of major cells there. They are all
over the world, and there are probably some right here in the
United States, as well, too, that we don't know about yet.
So the only safe assumption for us is, is that this is going
to be a long-term struggle and we have to be prepared to deal
with it wherever we find it.
Q Any interview with you comes around to your health at
some point. How are you feeling?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Good. Well-behaved, clean living.
Q Can I check that out with Mrs. Cheney?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: You certainly can. She's in charge of
the food supply. We live a very healthy and sensible life, do
those things that are prudent, you want to do, with somebody with
my history.
Q And your enthusiasm for continuing for as long as you
| possibly can?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: As long as I can do the job and the
President wants me to do it, I'm delighted to be here. You know,
I never planned to come back. When I was first in the West Wing
over 30 years ago, I shared a closet on the top floor with
another guy, worked for Don Rumsfeld. And you were here in those
days, covering the White House. _
To come back now, this is my third White House tour, my
fifth time in government, and have an opportunity to serve at
this time with this President is something that I wouldn't have
missed for the world. It's really been a tremendous experience.
Q Will there ever be, in your long and distinguished
life, another day like 9/11?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I hope not. I hope not. That was the
kind of event -- clearly, everybody remembers where they were
then. And the circumstances, the loss of life, the attack upon
the United States is something we need to really do everything we
can to prevent ever having it happen again. And that's the
business we're about.
Q Do you think the American people have a full
i realization of that task?
i

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 THE VICE PRESIDENT: I think a lot of them do. I'm not sure
that it's really still struck home to everybody. A lot of folks
out there I think, as they should, have gone on with their lives
and weren't imminently or directly affected by it. But I think
they'll see, as we go forward, that we're still very vulnerable,
we've got a lot of work to do to harden the target, so to speak,
to make it tougher for them to come after us.
In the final analysis, no defense is going to be perfect
against a terrorist. You might be 99 percent successful, but
that 1 percent can kill you, especially if they can get in with
weapons of mass destruction. And the only way for us to
guarantee that that doesn't happen again is to go on offense. We
have to go destroy the terrorists before they can strike us, and
that's what we're about.
Q Mr. Vice President, thank you.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Tom. Good to see you again.
END 11:14 A . M . EST

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