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I thought Congress would be so shocked and the public so galvanized that we would have a window of opportunity.

So what happened?

The GOP leadership just delayed until the fever went down. They knew that they couldn’t afford to have their members voting wrong on closing the gun-show loophole or banning the importation of large-capacity ammunition clips—which allows people to get around the assault-weapons ban. We finally got a majority vote for it in the Senate. Al Gore broke the tie. But we couldn’t get a bill out of the conference committee in the House. If we could ever have gotten a clean vote—

Then you would have won that vote?

Oh, absolutely. We could win the vote today if we could get a vote. But the leadership in the Republican Party—as long as they’re in the majority in both houses—can control things. You can write the rules so that you can just keep stuff from coming up.

I’ll remind you that one of the reasons that Democrats are in the minority today is because of the Brady law and the assault-weapons law. There’s not a single hunter that’s missed an hour of hunting, not a single sport shooter has missed an event. They acted like it was the end of the world. But half a million felons, fugitives and stalkers haven’t gotten handguns because of the Brady law.

How do you feel about the genocide in Rwanda? Is there anything that we could have done to prevent it? Do you feel any responsibility, personally?

I feel terrible about it. The thing that was shocking about Rwanda was that it happened so fast, and it happened with almost no guns. The idea that 700,000 people could be killed in a hundred days, mostly with machetes, is hard to believe. It was an alien territory; we weren’t familiar. I think and hope that the United States will be much more involved in Africa from now on. If we had done all the things we’ve done since Rwanda in Africa—what would have happened is, the African troops would have moved in, they would have stopped it, and we could have given them the logistical support they needed to stop it.

Why do you think you were such a lightning rod for partisanship and bitterness and so much hatred during your terms in Washington?

There were a lot of reasons. Mostly, it’s just because I won. [The Republicans] believed the only reason they lost in 1976 to Jimmy Carter was because of Watergate. They believed that from the time Mr. Nixon won in ’68, they had found a foolproof formula to hold the White House forever. They really believed that America saw Republicans as the guarantor of the country’s superiority in values and prudence in financial matters and that they could always turn Democrats into cardboard cutouts of what they really were. They could sort of caricature them as almost un-American. So I came along, and I had ideas on crime and welfare and economic management and foreign policy that were difficult for them to characterize in that way. And we won. . . . And they were really mad.

I think, secondly, I was the first baby-boomer president. Not a perfect person—never claimed to be. And I opposed the Vietnam War. I think that made them doubly angry, because they thought I was a cultural alien and I made it anyway.

So you think the culture wars were very much a part of this atmosphere?

Mmm-hmm. I also think they were even more angry because I was a white Southern Baptist. They didn’t like losing the White House, and they didn’t like me. They didn’t like what they thought I represented. They had worked very hard to have the old white-male Southern culture dominate the political life of America. And they saw me as an apostate—which I welcome. When I take on the NRA or do something for gay rights, to them, it’s worse if I do it. It’s like a Catholic being pro-choice.

Were you surprised by the difficulties you had in your own party? Pat Moynihan criticized your health care proposal and your economic plan.

I didn’t take offense at that. Moynihan believed, first of all—with some justification—that he knew more about most areas of social policy