The highest calling of mankind i have often thought was private equity and then i started interviewing. Ive learned from doing my interviews how leaders make it to the top. I asked him what he wanted, he said 250. I said fine. I did not negotiate, i did not do any due diligence. David you dont feel inadequate being the second wealthiest man in the world, is that right . One of the most recognized names two of the bestknown individuals in the United States over the last four years have been bill and Hillary Clinton. Bill served as president , Hillary Clinton served as Vice President and senator and secretary of state. I had a chance to interview both of them together in their inner sites are quite interesting not only about what theyve done before but what they are working on now. President clinton, lets talk about current affairs. What do you think is the outcome of ukraine . Do you see any resolution in the near term and secretary clinton, your views as well . Bill i dont expect it to be resolved unless Vladimir Putin has a change of heart. Or unless the United States and others walk away from ukraine and they cannot get enough arms and in mission to continue. They have been amazing, they have thought, they have not asked any americans to fight with them. But i think they have a chance to win, i think they will win if we stay with them. David is there any facesaving way out of this or what is your view on how this might resolve . Hillary first, i think it is imperative that we continue and increase our support for ukraine because as bill said, the russians are back to indiscriminate bombing in cities aiming at apartment buildings, hospitals, civilian sites. They have committed war crimes, they are in the midst of committing genocide, with respect of how they are kidnapping children and forcing ukrainians into russia. The bottom line for me is the only potential possible end to the hostilities is either a victory by ukraine including being able to take back the territory seized in 2014 or pushing russia out of what theyve seized since february of last year. So that could give us a breathing space to perhaps have some kind of opportunity to protect ukraines legitimate borders with the exception of what they did not get back from 2014 and to move them forward in reconstruction and rebuilding in the face of devastation. David are you surprised at the u. S. China relationship is as bad as Tiananmen Square . What you think could be done to improve it . Bill i think it is difficult. I think it will get harder if we walk away from ukraine because i think it will increase the willingness of china to attack taiwan. It is a realtime lemma because i work hard with china and tried to build a relationship and we desperately need a cooperative relationship to deal with covid, climate change, north korea, theres a whole lot of things that we ought to be doing together but they make it virtually impossible because again if you decide to stay for life whether your name is Vladimir Putin or xi jinping or smith, your number one priority has got to be crushing, illuminating any source of alternative power in your country and keeping things lathered up by being angry. I believe the best thing to do is to keep talking to them, even while we have to disagree publicly. David are you worried about an invasion of taiwan . Hillary when xi jinping saw that Vladimir Putins invasion did not work as fast and smoothly as he thought it would, and that the world united with a few exceptions to impose sanctions that are not taking a toll as fast as i would like because that would change the power dynamic, but xi jinping found that and i think that before the russian invasion there is a good chance you would have moved on taiwan within two to three years. The timetable has been pushed back. David since youve left washington theres been an increase in divisiveness. Im sure you have noticed. What accounts for this . Its worse than it was when you were there and it was not great then, but now democrats and republicans dont want to talk about this. Do you see any solution in the near term . Bill its because republicans have been rewarded for being divisive. Its great for them because they are great at branding, better than we are. And they convince people that are most leftwing members, 10 of our caucus, represent 100 of us and they cause people to get scared in the middle who are swing voters to forget that their most extreme members represent them in the house and 60 in the senate. I have a lot of republican friends still who just pretend it is not going on or they do not like it and do not support it. You cannot blame people in politics who covet power for doing what works. Its been working for them. David president clinton, if you were to say we should change the way president s are elected, you are probably reasonably happy but do you think direct election of the president would be preferable to the Electoral College method. Bill i think first of all we adopted the Electoral College when we were 13 states and we had a couple of really big states and some really small states that had distinct differences but it also helps to load up the electoral votes of the Southern States that had slaves. And now we know that the effect of the college is to give 36 extra votes to the most culturally conservative and farthest right american states. I have no objection of them voting. I want them all to vote. I would never try to make it harder to vote, i would make it easier. I want the votes counted and i want them all to count but i do not think you can justify that today. Now, if you did it, the first question youve got to ask yourself is would we have a three party or for Party National election . If so, will we have to have a runoff . Should you require a president to have i dont know 40 of the vote, 45 . Abraham lincoln got elected with 39 . In a lot of countries have this, by the way. You have to get a majority or something over a minimum amount to be president. If you are not going to go to a parliamentary system, you have to have some sort of threshold. David i assume you prefer direct election . Hillary i definitely prefer direct election. David the Health Care System you are trying to promote when you were first lady is what we have now. I dont know if people thank you for it. Do you think at the time that having a first lady be involved in policy was upsetting to members of congress and do you think that was part of the problem . Hillary i do think so. I would have been shocked when bill asked me if i wanted to work on health care because i had at his request worked on reforming Public Education in arkansas and when one thinks of arkansas as being much more conservative than washington dc but maybe it was because i knew people on a first name basis, i worked with them. We really had a respectful arrangement. And it was a shock for a first lady to take a public role on a Major Initiative of her husbands. Its not that other first ladies had not been influential, but it was a shock to the system. So that is just one of those lessons learned. David sodavid i want to ask you, there is a famous passage in your life where you are at the yellow lies yale library and you see bill clinton looking at you and you say stop looking at me, lets have a conversation or Something Like that. Had you not been in the same Yale Law School class at the same time, how do you think your life would be different . Do you think you would have been president of the United States sooner or would you have gone into Public Service . How do you get would be different . Hillary wow. I think it would have been more boring. David when you told your parents removing to arkansas what did they say . Hillary my father, you know, when i was growing up my father was a very big supporter of republicans. He loved eisenhower, he was a world war ii veteran. He really loved that. So when i brought bill home the first time, it was not that he was from arkansas, it was that he was a democrat. Bill hillary came from a town where goldwater beat johnson and the other 20 thought that goldwater was too liberal. I loved her father and her mother who was a liberal democrat. It was interesting how you can listen to their marriage unfold with advice and everything. He was a really good guy and smart and he wound up working as a volunteer in my campaign for congress. I really him. David when you were president three times we had a budget surplus. Thats when you have more money than you spend and at one point it was thought we would run out of having any federal treasury bills because we were not going to have any debt. Any ideas on how we can get back to that kind of situation . Bill i did have a big argument with alan greenspan, he was to my left. He said were not going to be able to have interest how do we set Interest Rates on federal securities if we have no debt . I said that as a highclass problem. Lets deal with that we get to it. But let me say i supported president obamas Stimulus Program and i supported the bill that President Trump passed and president obama passed. When you have zero to negative Interest Rates, you cannot run a balanced budget or start cutting spending without making the economy worse. But when you do have Interest Rates, then you have to deal with your debt issue or otherwise you spend more and more of your money paying interest on the debt and you have nothing left for education and health and all the scientific research. Here is what i think, i think it is nuts to make a big issue of this debt limit thing. Because that says simply it is a stupid rule that we have in america that congress has to approve twice paying for something theyve already voted to spend on. And a lot of these people who are opposing raising the debt ceiling voted for most of the debt that is embedded there. So bottom line, we should bring the deficit down as much as we can but we ought to pay our debts. You cannot spend money, borrow it and then refused to pay the people that loaned it to you if you want to be a great country. David you ran for the president ial nomination, barack obama became the nominee and he offered secretary of state and you turn that down initially. Why did you turn it down . Bill she turns everything down. She turned me down three times when i asked her to marry me her default answer is no. Hillary there is some truth to that. But eventually i do say yes to these charming men like bill clinton and barack obama. David theres a photo of you in the situation room looking at the effort to capture osama bin laden. What were you looking at . Were you afraid it was not going to work and when did you realize that it did work . Hillary we were all afraid something would go wrong. I was part of the small group that studied all of the intelligence that had been gathered to make recommendations to the president about whether to do something and if so what. It was the most intense public deliberation, Public Service deliberation i have ever been art of and it was secret, i could not tell bill or talk to anybody because of how closely held it was, but we were in the small situation room off the big one and we were watching a screen because we had video from a drone above. We had video of what was happening as the helicopters came into land. One of the helicopters, its tail clipped the wire on the wall surrounding a little area where animals were kept and so when the helicopter tail hit we knew it was disabled and that was the moment that the picture was taken because we all had flashbacks to when president carter tried to rescue the hostages in iran. It meant we would have to send in another helicopter that was waiting to get it in there quickly enough. We had to do all of this within 20 or 30 minutes because when people were starting to wake up and we had helicopters landing, there was obviously noise. People were living in homes around the compound, it was a hot night, people were sleeping on the roofs. You were aware that people were waking up and started to wonder what was going on, so when the helicopters landed and the navy seals, Seal Team Six got out to go into the compound, we couldnt see that. There was no video of that. We were all holding our breath. We had to wait until we got news from inside the compound and there was a firefight. Lagarde sand one of his adult sons were shooting and then eventually bin laden was shot and then his body had to be taken out of the compound, loaded onto a helicopter because we had to be sure about identification to have credibility with the world and we had to blow up the helicopter because it was an advanced helicopter with advanced electronics. We didnt want the pakistanis to get it because we thought they were given to the russians and the chinese. All of this was going on and i think we were holding our breath for 20 minutes. It was just so intense. Thankfully, president obama made the right decision and it worked. David when Something Like that is happening you cannot say to your husband i have a secret, i cant tell you. Bill she called me as soon as its over. They said we got him and i said who . Because he knew how hard i tried to get him when i was president. And he said bin laden, hilary didnt tell you . And i said mr. President , didnt you tell her not to tell anybody read she did not tell anybody. You asked me in the beginning i said color is a was because it had been awarded. Its because the left gives up on people. David final question for both of you, we are just about out of time, so in your long distinguished career, what would you say you are most proud of having accomplished . Hillary i had been a senator for about eight months when 9 11 happened and it was the most devastating, horrible experience for our city and our country. But it was also an absolute mandate to act, to help people who had been directly affected, to help victims families, to rebuild new york. It was so bipartisan. He started with a question about that, i just want to tell a little story here because Chuck Schumer and i were the only plane in the sky on september 11 12th because we were flown down to meet with the governor and mayor giuliani to survey what had happened. And it was just overwhelming to have seen it firsthand. The television could not capture it and we spent the day in meetings talking about what we were going to do and that night around 8 00 or 9 00, Chuck Schumer and i were in a meeting with all the state, local, federal officials and we were handed a note from our staff who was with us in the note said the white house has just sent a budget request to deal with 9 11 for 20 billion and theres not a penny for new york in it. I took the last train back to washington and that afternoon we go to the white house. So its the two senators from virginia, allen and warner and chuck and i were in with the president. And i could see on his face, this was a devastating obviously crisis that had to be dealt with and he says to us im with you, what do you need . And we said 20 billion in any said youve got it and his staff fell off their chairs. So we were going to the cabinet room, we got up to leave and john warner who was one of my favorite colleagues of all time stopped me and goes hillary, have him make that commitment in public in this meeting. I said ok, john. We go in, its all the members of congress from new york, connecticut, new jersey. Mostly new york and virginia. In the president is talking about how we are going to protect the country and do this and all that. He finishes talking and then i say i just want to thank you mr. President for committing 20 billion to new york. And literally by the time we got back to the senate, his staff was trying to undo that. And telling the Republican Leaders do not put it in the bill, so we just kept calling the white house and bush just set i gave my word and im going to follow through. That was an amazing moment for me. David you look back on your service, what are you most proud of having achieved . Bill can i add one thing to what she said . One thing i like about george w. Bush, we have fought, we have disagreed, he started out more conservative than his father. We do speeches together that are funny because we badmouth each other in a funny way. But he will listen and if he thinks you are right, he will switch. And if he thinks you are wrong you will bargain. Thats all you can ever ask and that is what you should remember. When you ask me in the beginning and i said the polarization was because the right had been rewarded, it is because the left gives up on people. We should not talk down about people. The one thing i loved about Elijah Cummings and john lewis is they treated people respectfully and they kept trying read they kept knocking on the door. Theres some other people out there where you cant knock on the door. David no regrets about not going into private equity . Neither of you regret that . On behalf of everyone at the 92nd street y bill you take care of all the stuff that requires real money. He gives a lot of that money away. What do you get from the Morgan StanleyClient Experience . Listening more than talking, and a personalized plan to guide you through a changing world. When people ask are you afraid of what might happen i say no because of the goodness of the american people, the strength of our democracy, we will prevail. My motto is the flag is still there. Francine