 How about that 48 hours since that was going to be 40 degrees? I thought you were lucky to finally run out. Well, I don't know. The day turned out pretty well after all. That thing out of the capital, the capital center, those young people, I think that eased some disappointment in their part. That was a great line by your wife when she introduced you. Yes, she couldn't believe it when she turned and came back and hadn't introduced me and reminded her. Mr. President, since our time is short and we want to take advantage of every minute we can, I wonder if we might start with an Armstrong's question today. Big surprise. Fine. Mr. President, how close are we to setting a date for the new round of Armstrong's? Well, obviously this is open for both sides to kind of settle on a date. We have made a proposal of a date and location or at least to have it sometime early in March and in Geneva and we just have not heard back. We're working through diplomatic channels through the ambassadors and we just don't have an answer yet on that but obviously if there's some reason why that's not satisfactory to them we'll continue trying to find a date. Have there been problems in working out at this point with the Soviets? No, we just simply had to come together in our own scheduling and when we thought that we could be ready and then propose this could be a satisfactory time and place for us. Why should something that seems so simple take weeks to resolve? Well, both countries have bureaucracies. No, I think that their system of government and the Politburo and the kind of collective nature of their government I think is to be an explanation that we just haven't had an answer yet. I wonder if I might follow up on that a little bit about their system of government and the transitions they have versus ours. You've blamed your inability to achieve an arms control agreement during the first term on the rapid turnover in Soviet leadership during that period. Does the uncertainty of President Churnenko's health cloud the outlook for the upcoming talks? Well, once again, like previous experiences that we've had here things of this kind we don't know. There just is no way of knowing. But to those who during the campaign seemed so upset about the fact that we hadn't had more negotiations than we did let me just point out some interesting figures. In the 48 years between Roosevelt's coming into office, FDR, my administration, there were eight presidents of the United States and in all those 48 years there were only three leaders of the Soviet Union. Well, I had three before the first three years were up. Do you have a sense or do your reports indicate that this does slow down their ability to make policy decisions on such crucial things as the Armistice? Well, I think that now that the facts have come out on the three previous and the long periods of ill health and so forth obviously this had to have an effect. Do you think that's continuing or is there any indication as well? Well, I don't know. I don't think that enough time has gone by now and you stop to think that those negotiations in Geneva that resulted in the agreement to go forward with arms talks only took place within this month and then the agreement was made that we would have the arm talk and we would come together and settle on a date and a place. We're still in that single month so I don't think that this is much foot dragging. We have only recently settled upon a date that we thought would be satisfactory to us and notified them. If I can change parts of the world a little bit. There have been five Americans seized in Lebanon in the past year. Yet you have remained silent on their disappearance. Is that part of your strategy for dealing with this hostage problem? Yes. This is a situation in which with the safety of those individuals in mind it doesn't mean that we're sitting doing nothing. It just means that it isn't something that we should be talking about publicly. What are we doing with something? Well, that's it. We are active in doing all we can but it isn't something that we want to talk about. Does raising the public focus on this issue make it more difficult to win their freedom? Yes. This again is in the field of terrorism where you have to recognize that you aren't dealing with the government. You are dealing with some unknown personages and you have in mind the safety of those five individuals. And again, as I say, it just isn't something that we want to give the score on. Mr. President, can you say, have we been in direct touch with their captors? I can't talk and won't talk about it. Can you say if we're any closer to having their release now? How close it might be? I'm just not going to talk. Let me go to one more region that has captured your attention a great deal during the last administration. The ban on USA to Nicaraguan rebels ends on February 28th, which is only five weeks from now. Senator Durenberger and others in Congress have proposed that instead of renewing covert CIA support the United States should openly aid the rebels. Is your administration considering that option? I think that there are great difficulties in that. And all I'm going to say about that is that I believe that it is in our national interest and security interest to continue supporting the people of Nicaragua who are asking nothing more than freedom from totalitarianism and the implementing of the democratic principles for which the revolution was fought, the revolution that those people supported. And coupled with that is the fact that Nicaragua, the Nicaraguan government is exporting subversion and attempting the overthrow of a duly elected government in its neighboring, or its neighbor, El Salvador. And all of these things have to be of interest to the United States. You say there are difficulties in making it open, and yet this is a democracy and the covert nature of the aid has hardly been a secret. What are the difficulties in simply saying, yes, we're going to do this. It's right and we're going to do it. But because in the world of international law you find that you've changed the situation completely, then find yourself having to weigh what are then considered acts of war. Allow that line, Mr. President. There are a lot of people around the world who think that the United States looks a little selfish almost by refusing to acknowledge the world court jurisdiction in the Nicaragua case. What do you say to them? Well, I say that what we've done is in keeping with the United Nations Charter. That international court was never supposed to involve itself in political affairs, nor is it supposed to involve itself in armed struggles. And we would be sitting there, apparently on trial, with a majority of the jury consisting of representatives of governments that don't even recognize the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. And that's a little ridiculous. Let's switch to the domestic area. All right. You've said you're going to do something to save the Medicare system from going broke. What are you going to do? Well, I'm not sure that we're completely ready until our budget package goes up there with the proposals that we'll make, but we have been discussing ways of capping some of the charges that can be made on Medicare patients, both by doctors and hospitals, things of that kind. Because the Medicare trust fund is somewhat not as completely so as the situation that prevailed until we came to a bipartisan agreement with regard to Social Security itself, and that is an outgo exceeding the income. And as I say, it isn't as desperate a situation as the other was, but the program needs being put on a better financial and fiscal base than it is at present, because down the road you could see us then approach the same kind of problem that we dealt with in Social Security. Would capping medical and doctors and hospitals fees be sufficient? Well, this is one of the things that we're still working on. We certainly do not want to limit medical service to the elderly. The doctors say if you cap their fees you'll limit it because they will simply serve others from whom they can get their full fee. Well, of course, they're free to do that. I remember a time before government was involved in medical care when most doctors considered it to simply be an obligation that they had patients they carried on their books knowing that they would never receive their full fee or even any fee from some of them. Has that philosophy changed, do you think? Well, I think that when government does step in and intervene, then in the sense that you've said to those individual practitioners that now they don't have to bear the burden by themselves that all their fellow citizens are going to bear it. But you think that's part of the doctor's responsibility to carry patients who can't pay? Well, they always felt it was their responsibility. You talk a lot about voluntary effort and support, private initiative. Is that the kind of private initiative that you think is necessary to have the community pick up where the government can't help? Well, and where it can be done better for the private sector. But let me make it plain in this case, I am not suggesting that doctors are selfishly standing there and victimizing their fellow citizens at all. I think you'll still find many instances of doctors doing what needs to be done and without any thought of remuneration. The Medicare program did get itself into a position where I think there was also a thing to look at is patient abuse, and that is overstaying their time in a hospital simply because they had no responsibility for paying for it. Excessive calling of the doctor simply because no longer is there any charge to the patient. I'm sure that if we're going to have a program of this kind, it's our obligation. To see that the program is not abused by patients or by practitioners. Do you think there is widespread abuse in Medicare? Well, let me just give an example. I'll go back to my Governor days. When we learned that a woman had had 40, I believe the figure was 42, physical examinations in one month by 42 different doctors. Now, the doctors didn't know about each other. Very obviously, this had to be a hypochondriac who was trying to find a doctor that would tell her she was sick. And there was no adverse finding from any of the 42 examinations, and the only ones who knew that this was going on other than the woman who was doing it was when the bill came for payment and you said, how can this be? But I think a little policing to make sure that this can't happen. How widespread is that sort of thing? Well, I don't know, but we know the opportunity is there. Another big federal program that phases your decision soon. In fact, I think you've had to make some already. Your administration is moving to cut price supports to farmers in order to return U.S. agriculture to a free market system. How many farmers do you expect will go bankrupt during that transition or shake out? Well, I don't know, and I would hope that that won't happen. We're not instantly pulling the rug out from under them. You can't have for virtually a half a century an industry that is geared to a certain government support program and then instantly pull that rug out. But the overwhelming majority of farmers have made it plain that they believe the best answer for them is to get back out into the free market. And we believe that also. If you go back to earlier days, some years ago when the farm program was into effect, there were always parts of the farm program that were not government controlled or regulated or supported or subsidized. And the curious thing was that at the very height of that, and I'm speaking back in earlier farm programs even before I was governing, but just to show you what the effect can be, you found that the parts of agriculture that were out of the free market, there was an every year an increase in the per capita use of their purchase of their product. By contrast, there was a per capita decline in the sale of the product that were under the government programs. And we just, I think, and just not too many years ago, the Department of Agriculture did come way down on the total throughout the year of support payments. And we found out again that the actual per capita income of farmers in America increased. And that's why I believe that most farmers, as I say, farm organizations want a procedure that gets us back to the marketplace. What is the administration going to do to increase access to credit by farmers? Well, as you know, we had a program in which we offer that in this kind of emergency situation that is in place of guaranteeing loans and actually offering outright loans. Mr. President, you're fond of telling us, and the statistics do show that more people are working as a result of economic recovery today than certainly during the recession a couple of years ago. But they also show that the number of poor people in the country continues to increase, to more than 35 million people, even in a time of economic growth and lower inflation. Why is that? Well, the beginning of the increase in poverty started after the war on hunger began. The Great Society programs that were put into implementation in the latter half of the 60s and then on through the 70s, there had been, up until then, I think you'll find a decrease in poverty, in poverty figures, and then it turned around and they began increasing. And under the previous administration to ours, the increase in poverty was at about a 9.1% rate. We have reduced it down to about a 5% rate. So it is still increasing, but we've reduced the rate of increase in that. Now I think part of that could have had to do with our control of inflation. For the last three years, inflation has averaged in the United States, the cost-price index. I know that some of these terms have different, inflation can have a different context than cost-price. The consumer price index has averaged 3.9% for the last three years, down from double-digit for three years previously. So I think this could have an effect too in this reduction, but it shows that in the war on poverty, poverty won. Now we're making some changes and where some people are complaining as if we're lacking in compassion, I don't think so. I think when you ensure that we're making an improvement now on who lives below poverty, that is a plus when we can show that more people are working and we've reduced the unemployment level. I think that all of this shows that we're on the right track. Let's do one more. Two? Yeah, one more. Two quick ones. Two quick ones. Mr. President, you called George Bush the best vice president in history. Will you urge him to run for the presidency in 1988? I think this is one that as I am supposed to be titular head of the party, but I won't answer on that, but I will just say I stand by when I've said I don't believe there's ever been a vice president to my knowledge that was as involved in the doings of government and policymaking and all as he has been and has been as hard working as he has been. Have you explained your position to him? Oh, he knows that, yes. You've just named an experienced business executive, Don Regan, as your chief of staff for the second term. Do you expect, as he apparently does, that he will be the CEO, if you will, and you will be the chairman of the board? Well, whether we use those titles, maybe I don't understand the difference between CEO and chairman of the board out in the corporation well enough myself. But I think that his whole approach to this is that the policies are mine and that he is there to carry out the policies. Does it free you to do more big thinking and concentrate on particular issues instead of having so much of the nitty-gritty to face? Well, no, I don't think there's going to be anything of a change in that regard. I know that the functions of his job that he has to do with management, you might say office management, he's a proven expert in that both in private life and over as secretary of the Treasury. Okay, well, on our way out, Mr. President, you in your last interview expressed considerable irritation with all of the reports about who's in charge, whether or not you're detached from leadership. And as a representative of the world's largest news-gathering organization, we have more newspapers, more radio and television stations than anyone in the world. And we'd like to ask if you would be willing to let me go around with you for a day or two and describe what it is you do and how you do it. Well, if I fly on the wall, I think I'm going to have to leave this to them in case I don't find that I've got 365 days a year with somebody wanting to be with me. But let's us talk about that. Murray, we just told us the day in the life of... Sorry. Thank you, sir. You bet. How's Mike? Just fine. Is he? Oh, Mike Dever. Oh, wait a minute. I just said goodbye to Mike. Oh. My son, Mike Dever is... I know they're running a lot of tests and so forth over there and seem to get a handle on what laid him low. I think he thought too long. He just had the flu. So I can't give you a report on that, but it seems to be... It's nothing serious, I hope. No, I don't think... No concern at this point? No. Uh-uh. Thank you. Thank you, sir. I guess I might as well stay right here.