Bill Clinton: “Well, first of all, those decisions were not made on a political basis, and I did not intervene individually in those…”

“Well, first of all, those decisions were not made on a political basis, and I did not intervene individually in those decisions, nor do I think I should have. I'll tell you what I did do. I asked the Secretary of Defense to be sure that he fulfilled his legal responsibility to consider the economic impact of every State, including California, and because it's so big, all parts of California, before sending the list on to the Congress. And he did that to the best of his ability. There hadn't been a lot of naval closings in the first two rounds. The Navy strongly recommended all the sites, including the ones in the Bay area. I'm concerned about it. If you look at the whole country, the Bay area and perhaps Charleston, South Carolina, were the hardest hit, although the Charleston Yard won't close entirely. But the way the process works, it seems to me, is the only way it can work. And that is for the services to make their recommendation and for the Secretary of Defense to try to evaluate the economic impact-- something, by the way, that can't be done by the services because they don't know what each other is doing; so if the Secretary of Defense doesn't do it, no one can, because they've got the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army cumulatively coming in with these recommendations--and then to send it on to the Congress. I believe that the Bay area ought to do--I think we ought to have two things to be sensitive to what's happened there. One is the base closing commission itself, which has in the two previous cases made modifications in the services' requests, should consider the strongest argument the Bay area can put together for some modification of it. But secondly, the areas that are disproportionately hit, it seems to me, should receive extra attention from this administration in the new conversion effort that we have announced just in the last couple of days. We are going to put into play this year over $1 billion in funds not only for worker retraining but also for community redevelopment and for the development of new technologies and new purposes for economic activity where there has been a severe dislocation. So I am prepared to do that for the Bay area, to make a special effort to focus on their long-term needs so that--and keep in mind, this is not going to happen overnight, this is a longer term phaseout--so that by the time the jobs were actually lost there, we would be ready to move forward with new economic activity, perhaps even before that time. Another issue that relates to all the bases in California, and indeed all the ones in the United States, is that the environmental cleanup at a lot of these bases, especially the air bases, has taken so long that by the time the bases close, they're not ready to be taken over by local community interests, even though if they were ready, economic activity would pick up almost immediately. So another thing we've really focused on is trying to make sure we are moving as aggressively, as quickly as possible on the environmental cleanup. I talked to the Secretary of Defense for an hour about that yesterday when we were on the helicopter going to visit the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt.”