Bill Clinton: “For one thing, since I signed this treaty--let's look at the facts here--I've spoken about this 30 times or more. We…”

“For one thing, since I signed this treaty--let's look at the facts here--I've spoken about this 30 times or more. We always start a big public campaign in terms of White House events and other things. Go back, and look at this. Look at NAFTA. Look at the Chemical Weapons Convention. Go back. When we know that we're on a hearing schedule and we're going to have a vote, until we were given 8 or 10 days notice, we had no earthly idea there would ever be hearings, much less a vote on this. So this whole thing came as a complete surprise to us when we realized that we had 8 or 10 days on a subject that we thought they had decided in a very determined way not to bring up, because Senator Helms had made it clear that he didn't want to bring it up, and he wouldn't even talk about it until he disposed of two other treaties that he said were ahead of it in his consideration. We had no earthly idea that it was going to be on the Senate calendar. So we did our best. We kept asking. And we thought if we ever got a yes, the yes would be like the yes we got on chemical weapons. ``Yes, we can have this vote in a couple of months. We'll have 2 or 3 weeks of hearings.'' If we had had a normal process, you would have seen a much more extensive public campaign. There was simply no time to put it together. But I talked about this over and over and over again in many different contexts. And I think that, given the time we had, we did the best we could. And besides that, once it became clear to me that they not only were going to force this close vote but that they weren't going to do what they do in every single treaty where there's serious consideration, namely, to allow the Senators of both parties to offer safeguards, to offer reservations, to offer clarifications, so that the treaty means something. If you remember, the only way we ever passed the chemical weapons treaty is when the Senate--including Senator Helms--participated with us in a process that led to over 20 explicit safeguards and reservations. That's what the Senate is supposed to do. We said, ourselves, that we thought the treaty required six safeguards that we hoped would be put on it. And they said, ``Not only are we going to make them vote on the treaty, we're not going to let you put your safeguards on there.'' So I think that ought to give you some indication of what was afoot here. We did the best we could with the time we had.”