of the economy and the state of the obama white house. then, we'll talk to former vice president cheney about his controversial new book that has some members of the bush administration crying foul. plus, i'll have a personal word on my big 2-0. some thoughts on my 20th anniversary of asking questions on "face the nation." captioning sponsored by cbs from cbs news in washington, "face the nation" with bob schieffer. >> schieffer: good morning again and welcome to "face the nation." former president bill clinton is joining us today from his home in chappaqua, new york. mr. president, welcome to the broadcast. i want to ask you about your clinton global initiative. but i have to begin with a news question because we have confirmed reports that tomorrow the president is going to propose a new tax on

millionaires, everybody who makes over a million dollars. this tax would ensure that they have to pay at least the same percentage of their income as middle-income taxpayers do. do you think that's a good idea? >> i do. i don't know when it's supposed to take effect. you know, my position has been that we need a long-term deficit reduction plan, along the lines that the simpson/bowles commission and all these other bipartisan groups have proposed. they all contain both spending reductions below what everybody thinks we'll spend now and revenue increases. and if you look at the group that has had the biggest income increases and the benefit of most of the tax cuts of the previous eight years before the obama administration took office, those of us in that income group-- we're in the best position to make a contribution to changing the debt structure

of the country. but right now-- and i think the president is doing the right thing to put out a budget plan. i don't know when the timing kicks in for these things, but i think that we need to focus right now on putting the country back to work. i'd like to see the economic plan that he talked about in his address to congress enacted first. then, when the economy starts growing again in a year or two, then i'd like to put the hammer down on this deficit problem. >> schieffer: well, your clinton global initiative kicks off its seventh year this year. you are going to be focusing on creating jobs with business people, with ceos, with smart people from all around the world. i can guarantee you the obama white house is going to be listening. what do you think is the secret? what do they need to do to start getting people back to work here? >> well, first of all, it is a problem nationwide... i mean, worldwide.

there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of people looking for jobs all over the world who don't have them. one of the most successful things i've been able to do in haiti, for example, is help the arts and crafts people be stronger than they were before the earthquake. this is a problem worldwide. but i think that what we try to do is to deal with the world as it is. so, for example, if the banks aren't loaning money to things that i think will create jobs, we look for other ways to do it. the pension funds of the labor unions and the public employees have a lot of money that isn't earning a lot in the stock market now. so, under the leadership of afl- cio president, they actually want to create jobs for a lot of small businesses by investing in building retrofits. i think you'll see more announcements on that there. i think that this idea of on- shoring jobs-- that is, creating jobs in rural america in areas of high unemployment that used to be sent somewhere overseas is

going to get a lot of attention here. there are lots of very specific things that, when you add them all up, can really make a difference. i don't believe america can return to the full employment days of the '90s until we clear this bank debt over the mortgage crisis. i hope that will be done. but in the meanwhile, i think a combination of the payroll tax changes that president obama recommended, the setting up an investment bank and doing more in infrastructure, and then looking at areas of specific opportunities to put people to work can really create millions of jobs and get us out of the worst of this doldrum. that's what i'd like to see america focus on. >> schieffer: do i take it from your first answer, though, that you're saying let's get the jobs programs going, get the economy moving up, and then talk about raising taxes? is that basically what you were

saying? >> i don't have any objection to talking about it now. i think what the president wants to do is to tell the american people-- commendable, but whether it's good politics or not it's an honest thing to do. "we have a long-term debt problem. we have to deal with this. here's my long-term plan for dealing with it." but right now, we've got an economic problem. the truth is that we're never going to balance the budget again, as we did when i was president, without a combination of three things: spending restraint, new revenues, and more economic growth. if you don't have all three, we can't get ahold of the debt problem. you have to do them in order, so the first and most important thing is to restore economic growth. i think that is the president's position. what he's saying about taxing upper-income people is what he's always said. i don't think that's such a draconian thing. he's asking us to return to the

tax rates of the '90s for the wealthiest americans, who have been the big beneficiaries of this last decade, which has been very tough on the middle class and low-income people. >> schieffer: mr. president your old advisor, james carville, said flatly that things are so bad... >> (laughing) >> schieffer: ...that approval ratings are down and so forth. so bad that it's time for panic at the white house. he basically suggested firing everybody there. do you think that would be the right thing to do? >> i think the right thing to do is what the president did. i thought he gave a good speech to congress with an economic plan to deal with the immediate emergencies. he offered $450 billion worth of suggestions. $250 billion were tax cuts, including big payroll tax reductions that the republicans have previously supported. and $200 billion in spending in infrastructure and retrofitting and fixing and modernizing schools-- things that will immediately put people to work.

then, i think he's going to put out a plan to deal with the long-term debt problem and make it clear that he wants to do this after growth has returned. that you can't get blood out of a turnip. i think that there's a little bit of lag in these polls between when the president proposes something and people feel it. also, right now, he's just out there running against himself and people's misery. it's tough out there. you have not only 9% unemployment, you have how many million people that aren't in the figures because they quit looking for work and others who have part-time jobs who want full-time jobs. everyone understands you can't do miracles. what happened on september 15, 2008, four months before he became president, was a financial crash. if you go back hundreds of years, these things take an average of about five years to get over. if we want to speed that up, we're all going to have to work together.

now, we all know that, if you look at the elections of the last four years or five years or ten years or 20 years or 30 years, conflict makes great politics, but it doesn't make very good policy. what we need is a cooperative policy that will put americans back to work. i think that... i understand what james was saying. he wants president obama to be re-elected, but when you're out there running against yourself and people feel miserable, it's hard to see your numbers go up. when he has a real opponent and people get to evaluate real alternatives, and they get to see other republicans respond to his speech and his plan, including a lot of ideas they have supported in the past, then i think we'll be in a different world politically. but this is about people's real lives. >> schieffer: let me just ask you about one thing that our next guest on this broadcast, former vice president cheney, said. he said your wife, hillary clinton, is the most competent person in the administration.

he suggested that maybe she would be a stronger candidate than barack obama. i wanted to give you a chance, if you care to, to endorse the vice-president's statement. >> ( laughter ) well, (laughing), you know, i'm very proud of her. so i'm always gratified whenever anyone says anything nice about her. i very much agree that she's done a good job. but i also have a high regard for vice-president cheney's political skills. and i think one of those great skills is sowing discord among the opposition. so, i think that he's right that she's done a heck of a good job, but she is a member of this administration and committed to doing it. i think he, by saying something nice about her and the way he did it, knew that it might cause a little trouble. i don't want to help him succeed in his political strategy. but i admire the fact that he's still out there hitting the

ball. >> schieffer: thank you so much, mr. president. it's always a pleasure to have you. in a minute, former vice president dick cheney.

>> schieffer: and we're back now with the former vice president during the bush administration, dick cheney. mr. cheney, you heard what former president clinton just said about you. he said, shocking, that you might be playing politics and that perhaps you were just trying to stir up trouble when you were so complimentary to hillary clinton. >> no, i just thought, bob, that the democrats ought to have as much fun on their side as we're having on our side in figuring out who is going to run so i made the suggestion. i'm glad to see that he thought there was some merit to the idea. he didn't endorse it obviously but he had to think about it. >> schieffer: mr. vice president, you had very good luck with your new book that's

out. my understanding it's now number one on the "new york times" best seller list. >> that's right. >> schieffer: the other side of it is, it hasn't gotten very good reviews from some of your colleagues in the bush administration. even president bush when he was asked about it said i'm glad members of my family are giving their version of what it was like to serve the country. i did the same thing. i put my version out there. then he said objective historians would analyze and decide their own conclusions. that's not even faint praise really when you come right down to it. what did you think about what the president said? >> i thought it was appropriate under the circumstances. i said some very nice things about president bush. because i thought he was an effective president. very good in terms of making very bold, very tough decisions. >> schieffer: have you talked to the president since you wrote the book? >> excuse me. i talked to him when i sent

him an early version of it, an early copy a couple of weeks ago before it came out but i haven't talked to him since. >> schieffer: you haven't talked to him since. >> no. >> schieffer: how do you judge your relationship with the president right now? i say this because barton gelman who wrote a biography about you called "angler" said that your book shows a mutual disillusionment that developed between you and president bush. is that accurate? >> no, i don't think it is. i didn't think gelman's original book was all that accurate here. i believe it's called angler which was my secret service code name. i thought he got that part right. but i think the book is... well, it's what i experienced, what i saw, what i believed. it covers my entire life. especially the 40 years i spent in washington. and i had a lot of fun doing it. it was meant as, you know, a

historical perspective. i wanted to put down from my perspective the record of a lot of the events that i engaged in went back to the nixon administration, the ford administration, both bush administrations, my time in congress. that was my objective. >> schieffer: you were though clearly disappointed and said so in the book with the president's refusal to pardon your friend and your top aide scooter libby who had been charged with obstruction of justice and perjury growing out of this whole controversy with valerie plame and all of that. here's what you said. you said george bush made courageous decisions as president. to this day i wish that pardoning scooter lib he would have been one of them. is that a way of saying he didn't have the courage. >> it means exactly what it said. the fact is i argued strenuously on scooter's

behalf. i really thought he got a bum deal. that he should not have been indicted. we had this whole who-rah about who leaked plame's name to the press. it was dick armitage deputy secretary of state. nothing ever happened to rich. instead they spent two-and-a-half years and finally got to the point where they could try to indict scooter. i have thought he deserved a pardon. in fairness to the president, the president heard me out on that subject on a number of occasions. he let me speak my piece. in the end he made the decision. that's his prerogative. he's president of the united states. the last time we talked about it was the last lunch we had in january of '09. i've got to give the president credit. there were a number of occasions when we disagreed. it's not surprising. i've disagreed with every president i ever worked her. ... i ever worked for. he let me have my say and then he would make his decision. >> schieffer: to say you wished he had had the courage to do this.

isn't that a really harsh way to put it? maybe he thought he had the courage to do what he thought was right. >> i'm sure he did. i had strong feelings about the subject. i make the case in the book. it's the only time i've ever said anything about the case or written about it is in that book. i held my fire throughout all of those months of investigations and trials and so forth. what we found out after the fact was that rich armitage was the source of the leak, not scooter libby. not anybody on my staff although my staff had been dragged before the grand jury and had to hire lawyers and go through all that processes hil the guys over at state knew exactly what had happened but never said anything about it to anybody. >> schieffer: one of the people in the administration who reacted pretty strongly to some of your allegations was colin powell. because you had suggested in the book it was probably a good thing that he left. that he didn't go into the second term.

he also said basically you had overshot the runway with some of your allegations and you took a lot of cheap shots. but he said a couple of other things. i want to play just a little sound bite of one thing he said here because i want to get your reaction to it. >> sure. >> he says that i went out of my way not to present my positions to the president but to take them outside of the administration. that's nonsense. the president knows that i told him what i thought about every issue of the day. mr. cheney may forget that i'm the one who said who president bush, if you break it, you own it. you have got to understand that if we have to go to war in iraq, we have to be prepared for the whole war not just the first phase. and mr. cheney and many of his colleagues did not prepare for what happened after the fall of baghdad. >> schieffer: that's what i want to ask you about. this idea. you don't write much about what happened after the fall of baghdad because a lot of people in the administration

was thinking this would be a walk in the park. it turned out to be anything but. do you think in retrospect you could have done something different or some things could have been done better than they were. >> first of all in terms of what i chose to write, i had enough material, bob, for four or five books. 40 years in this town, you pick up a lot of material. but i was doing one book. i wanted to keep it under 600 pages which is the guidance that i had received from the experts. and with respect to general powell, i had the impression in terms of the comments he made that he hadn't read the book at the time that he made the comments. it had just come out. i don't think he had access to a copy. but i said some very good things about general powell. in his role as chairman of the joint chief of staff. we worked together in the pentagon through desert storm. i selected him to be chairman of the joint chiefs. that was a good relationship. it worked well. then fast forward to our time when i'm vice president and he's secretary of state.

it didn't work as well. that's basically what i reported on in the book. >> schieffer: to get back to the original question, are there things that the administration could have done better after the fall? because they the suggestion was once saddam hussein goes, everything will be fine. it didn't work out that way. >> that's correct. there were a number of things that happened any time you're into one of those operations. we expected, for example, that the oil fields would be set on fire as they had been previously. that didn't happen. we expected that once you took away the top layer of the leadership from the various agencies and ministries in iraq that the professional bureaucracy underneath could carry on. that didn't happen. so there were things that.... >> schieffer: let me just ask you this. >> there were other things that did happen that hadn't been.... >> schieffer: was it a mistake to get rid of all the people in the army to disband the army as you did? >> it may have been a mistake.

it wasn't as though we had total control over it. in fact, what happened were a large part of it was they just packed up and went home. disappeared back into the countryside and went back to their private lives. so they weren't there. it wasn't as though they had all found a place where they were waiting for us to come in and take command of the army. >> schieffer: what you said about condi rice, at one point you came into the office and you described her as tearfully making a statement. she says that's not her, that that never happened. >> well, i've got to disagree with her. i do remember it very well. it had to do with valerie plame case. we had had debates internally. she went out on her own unilaterally and apologized to the so so-called 16 words that have been included in the president's state of the union speech. in reality those words were true. they were correct. what it did was it set off a

fire storm among the press. part contributor to this whole atmosphere for the prosecution of scooter libby. she did come in and said she had done wrong. >> schieffer: we have about 20 seconds left. is this book it for you? are there any oral tapes, oral histories? i think of because of the jacqueline kennedy tapes that have come out. or will this be your legacy? >> well, right now it's the only one i've written. will i do another one at some point? i don't know, bob. i haven't given any thought. i'm basquing in having the number one best seller. >> schieffer: we'll be back in a moment. thank you. >> thank you. [ female announcer ] the road is not exactly a place of intelligence. ♪ across the nation over 100,000 miles

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as i skimmed the archives this week, i realize just how many broadcasts-- more than 1,000-- and how many haircuts have gone by since that first one. this week, some of those who have been on the broadcast during those years will join us at a washington gathering. they won't all be there, of course. there will were literally thousands-- senators, presidents, ball players, sports officials-- who talked to us everywhere from this studio to the floor of political conventions to the super bowl. our only broadcast that included a blimp shot, by the way. over the years we've made a lot of news. we have been parodied, and we've been a place where washington's key news makers talk to each other and more importantly to the american people. with the second oldest program on television-- "meet the press is the oldest. when my late great friend tim russert took over that program

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