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One of the very first things you did in office was try to overturn the military’s ban on gays. Why did this backfire, and what did you learn from that?

It backfired partly because the people that were against it were clever enough to push a vote in the Senate disapproving of the change in the policy. I wanted to do it the way Harry Truman integrated the military. He issued an executive order and gave the military leaders a couple of years to figure out how best to do it. But a lot of the gay groups wanted it done right away and had no earthly idea what kind of reaction would come. They were shocked by the amount of congressional opposition.

A lot of people think I compromised with the military. That’s not what happened. If I was going to be able to do anything, I had to have a veto-proof minority in either the House or the Senate. But the Senate voted 68 to 32 against my policy, which meant that I could not sustain my policy in either house. And it was only then that I worked out with Colin Powell this dumbass “don’t ask, don’t tell” thing.

Would you do it any differently now?

I wish I had been able to get an agreement on the part of everybody involved to take this out of politics. But the Republicans decided that they didn’t want me to have a honeymoon. They wanted to make me the first president without one, and—now that we were living in a twenty-four-hour news cycle—the press happily went along.

In your first year in office, you regularly talked with Richard Nixon.

I had him back to the White House. I just thought that I ought to do it. He had lived a constructive life in his years out of the White House; he had written all these books; he tried to be a force in world affairs. He paid a high price for what he did, and I just thought it would be a good thing for the country to invite him back. He told me he identified with me because he thought the press had been too hard on me in ’92 and that I had refused to die, and he liked that. He said a lot of life was just hanging on. We had a good talk about that. I always thought that he could have been a great president if he had been more trusting of the American people.

What did you do when you heard the news about the shootings at Columbine?

I called the local officials and the school officials from the Oval Office. That was only the most recent and the most grotesque of a whole series of highly visible school shootings that we had. One of them, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, was in my home state—I knew some of the people who run the school.

I thought a lot of things. Number one: How’d those kids get all those guns? And how could they have had that kind of arsenal without their parents knowing? And I thought, after I read a little about it: How did they get so lost, without anybody finding them before they went over the edge? We had a spate of killings associated with a kind of darkness on the Net.

What do you mean, “darkness on the Net”?

Well, I mean, those kids were apparently into some sort of a satanic thing. I worried then—I’m worried now—about the people in our society, particularly children, that just drift off. Maybe one of those kids could have been saved if somebody had been there to help, and then all those other children would still be alive.

It seems shocking that we didn’t get any major new gun-control legislation in the wake of that event.

The truth is that when legislation time comes, a lot of the people in Congress are still frightened of the NRA. The NRA is great at terrifying people with inflammatory rhetoric. Did you see the tirade that Charlton Heston carried on against Al Gore and me, saying that we were glad some of these people were killed, because it gave me an excuse to take people’s guns away?

You got the Brady Bill and a partial assault-weapons ban through Congress in your first term. Why didn’t you seize the opportunity, with this post-Columbine atmosphere? You called a White House conference on violence in movies