Bill Clinton: “Yes. You know, we've had now, for a few years, women in combat pilot roles, and they've performed very well. And I…”

“Yes. You know, we've had now, for a few years, women in combat pilot roles, and they've performed very well. And I think, to me, the most important thing is that this was done in Desert Fox without a lot of fanfare. The military did it without a lot of fanfare, and the women pilots themselves did it without a lot of fanfare. They worked for a long time; they trained for a long time; they waited for a long time. And when their chance came to do their job, they did their job without making a big deal of it, and they did it very, very well. So I like the fact that it was done and the way it was done. I think since I've been President we've opened something like 250,000 duty positions to women that were not open previously. And it's making a big difference. And there all these disputed areas of training, deployment areas, but I think that the disputes should not be allowed to obscure the underlying reality that the military has dealt with the gender difference in the same way it dealt over time with racial differences, to open up a maximum number of roles and give people the maximum opportunity to live up to their own ability. We were talking before about the pardon I gave posthumously to Henry Flipper, who was the first African-American graduate of West Point, remarkable engineer, good soldier, unfairly discharged. He was cleared of his dishonorable discharge over 20 years ago but never given a pardon, I think because we had never given a posthumous pardon before. But the Defense Department and I very much wanted to do it. We gave the fourth star to Benjamin O. Davis not very long ago in tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen. I think that looking backward is really a way of--in this context--is a way of ensuring you'll continue to go forward. It's a way of reminding us how far we've come and what we missed when we deny any group of people who wanted to contribute to our military the chance to do so. And I hope that this forward movement will continue. I mean, there will always be controversies around the edges, rules to be worked out, difficulties to be dealt with, but when you give patriotic Americans who want to serve and who can serve well, the chance to do it, you win. Mrs. Cohen. Sir, if I may ask you a personal question, you have been a champion of diversity, you have always defended and stood up for the underdog, whether it's gender, whether it's race, whether it's age, whether even it's orientation. Where does that come from?”