 These are people who are with USA today and who have been on the bus to pay it all around the country. Ken Paulson is my chief of staff. He's from Illinois and has worked on our newspaper. Where abouts? Elmhurst. I know it well. Played against Elmhurst College several times. Did you win? Yes, except for one game. And that was the game that took place, the first game they had to postpone a couple. The first when they had then resumed playing after the death of their captain. And it was very apparent that they had dedicated the game to that dead captain. And emotion has a great deal to do with football. He was a great track star. He went to the University of Missouri. Dan Graney is from Boston. He's a graduate of Harvard. He's the intellectual in our group. The rest of us are barn boys. He was the editor of the Harvard Lampoon and he did to us what the cartoonists and editors do to you all the time. So we hired him to get him off our back. The jokes on me? Yeah, the Lampoon gets at me now and then. I know. Kathleen Smith-Barry with the camera is from Nashville, Tennessee. That's the state that produced Howard Baker among other folks, as you know. She's with our Nashville Tennessean. And Paula Burton is with our TV station in Atlanta. She's a Georgian. Joanna Newman, you've probably seen more than you care to. She's with the White House Press Corps for us. So those are the players. We've been visiting with people around the country, all 50 governors, about 3,000 folks. We're not investigating anybody. There's not a Sam Donaldson in this crowd. We're just all friendly people. And we'll be trying to present an understanding through USA Today to folks around the country of each of the states and its leaders and the people in it. So we're delighted to be able to end up here with you. Well, your paper comes in every morning with our breakfast tray upstairs. Good. I hope you look at it occasionally. Yes, of course. We visited with all the governors, including your successor in California. And that came away with the impression that all those jobs are pretty tough jobs. You've had them both. You've been the governor of California. You're the president. Which is the tougher of the two jobs? And which one is the most fun? Well, I found a certain excitement and pleasure in both of them. But I do believe, having been in both, that that is the best training school for this job. As a matter of fact, earlier in our time, that was normally the source of presidents. It is the nearest thing to this job. The only addition that you have here is the national security part of the job, which is supposed to be the most important according to the Constitution. But they are executives in the same sense. Chief executives in their states. And we have to remember that our government was created to be a federation of sovereign states. And is that a better training job then than being in the U.S. Senate or Congress? Yes, with all due respect to the Senators. I think that a legislative position there, in the manner in which work by committees and so forth, is far different than that job in which they're finally, and so often, comes that moment in which the problem is in front of you and on your desk, and you're responsible. We also visited an ex-governor who wanted to be president out into Peake, Kansas, before you went out. We once sea off landed about a month ago. Yes. And he was getting ready for your visit. After being out there and visiting with him and thinking about it, do you want to live to be a hundred, and do you think you will? Well, considering the alternative, I'm in no hurry to go. Yes, I was quite impressed. Now, I didn't remind him of the fact that when he ran for president, I was on the other side. I was a Democrat. All the press pointed that out. Oh, they did. But I was amazed how sharp he is, how up on everything. Physically, he has a little problem walking and has to have assistance. But he also bore out something that I have believed in throughout much of my life, and that is the old cavalry slogan, that nothing is so good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse, because up until past 90, he was still riding every day. His horse ran. Yeah. You talk about ran? Yeah. He's now turned red out to pasture with some farmer friend. But that was his sport or his athletic endeavor. And I think I'm going to keep on riding. Mr. President, this trip across the country has been an eye-opener for a number of us who have never seen the entire nation, and we were struck by the diversity. Yet, we also saw some common bonds, and I'm curious, what do you believe holds this country together to make it truly one nation? Well, I think... Well, let me, if I can't explain that then with something that is not original with me, it's a concept that was written to me once in a letter. You can go to another country to live. You can go to France and live, but you can't become a Frenchman. You can go to Japan. You can't become Japanese. Whatever country, Greece, Turkey, Germany, anything else. But people from every corner of the world can come to America and become an American. And I think that is one of the great things that we're representative of all. And what is the only thing we have in common? And that is that some place back in the ancestry of each one of us were people who had the courage and the love of freedom to uproot themselves from country and friends and come here, not even knowing the language to begin with, to become a part of this because they saw here something that met that inner demand. Mr. President, in our tours we interviewed all 50 governors, and each one of them is a very aggressive salesman for their state. They're competing with each other for things like Super Collider and also for European business. Is this competitiveness on outgrowth of your new federalism, and do you think it is more harmful than good? Well, I think it was built in. In our Constitution, as a matter of fact, part of the Constitution or the bringing about of the Constitution, a large part, was due to the fact that the 13 colonies, which then became the states of the New Republic, had a relationship that was very often terribly hostile and even threats of leaving the Union and there would even talk of creating several countries instead of one. And then they met in the Constitution and they brought about this relationship. Yes, it is a natural competition, but it is a fair competition. Yes, states want to bring industries to their states and so forth, and yet it's all done in this unity of one nation and there is never any thought of any of them. They've willingly given a certain authority to the federal government, which over the recent years, the federal government has tried to expand. I remember back when Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran his first term in 1932. He didn't sound like Democrats sound today. He ran on the basis that the federal government should return to states and local authorities the autonomy and authority that had been unjustly seized by the federal government because the whole principle of this country was to leave as much as possible of authority at the levels of government nearest to the people, closest to them. And so I think that's just a good sign of energy and so forth for states to not huddle together and be out there competing but competing within the laws that have been laid down. Mr. President, you were born and raised in small towns in Illinois and many of your predecessors, like Jimmy Carter, was raised in the plains. Is there something in small town values that makes for a better president? I don't know whether it makes for a better president, but I'll tell you that one of my regrets with my own children was that they had to be raised in a city. Now, I don't mean to hurt the feelings of the people who live in great cities but there is something about a small town that, with the very fact that you know everybody by name, literally, and certainly if it's getting up a little more to a somewhat larger level. As I had that experience, I was born in a town of 850 people but then we moved to Dixon where I really did my growing up and going through school and high school and so forth and that was about 10,000. But I have a little story that I think illustrates the kind of thing that exists in a small town. As a boy, I had a dog that was the love of my life. He was named Bobby Jiggs and Bobby Jiggs ran away. He was lost and I was broken hearted. Then I looked out a window and here came a squad car down the middle of the street and leaning out the window was the policeman that wasn't driving and in front of them coming down the middle of the street was Bobby Jiggs and he was every time Bobby Jiggs tried to sash his nose or they were behind him and the policeman was yelling and even knew his name and they ran him right into our yard. They'd found him clear over on the other side of town and they knew where he belonged. Now that wasn't just us. We were small fry. You had to say, my golly, they probably know everybody's dog in town. Mr. President, I was wondering recently whether your recent hostage crisis has given you a more sympathetic view of Jimmy Carter in his, has it changed your view of what it must have? The hostage situation? Well, I guess there were two things about that. One is I did not go around saying things I should do because I have always felt that in this job, the person in this job has access to all the information that no one else has. I think all of us got a little impatient at times about this because here we knew where the hostages were and it was a government that was responsible for keeping them. But I have always felt that whenever the constitutional rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness of any American are being unjustly denied, whether here within our own country or elsewhere, it is the responsibility of 250 million Americans in this country to see that that is rectified and those rights are restored. Mr. President, can we turn to your activity later today as you mentioned of the 250 million Americans? You're going to greet the Pope. There's a man who's elected for life and he leads 630 million people or Catholics as their leader around the world. A year elected for a maximum of eight years, you lead 250 million people. Which is the better job? Which would you rather be, President or Pope? I couldn't be Pope because I'm a Protestant. That got me out of that one, didn't it? Which is the better job then? If a person had a choice of being President or Pope, which do you think has the most attraction? Well, it's hard for me to conceive of someone ever being in that position of having such a choice but I would have to say that his calling is certainly to a higher level than even this one is and although I call upon his superior, I think maybe as often as he does for help, as you know Lincoln, I don't know of any President who has ever failed to do that. Lincoln said that he had been driven to his knees many times because there was no place else to go and he also said that he couldn't meet the responsibilities of this position for 15 minutes if he did not feel that he could call upon someone who was stronger and wiser than all others. So I think the Pope's calling is, as I say, to completely different to... There are some Cardinals in this country who have been mentioned or have indicated an aspiration to becoming Pope at all if an American had a choice, we're in that position of setting his sights on being the Pope or the President. Which do you think they should opt for? Well, I think that the, as I say, someone who feels a calling to a position of that kind, I think that takes precedence and, of course, it could be now that this Pope has broken the age-old tradition of all Popes being Italian, that I'm sure that the papacy is open to Catholic clergy all over the world. I never thought of it, though, as being something that someone went out and saw it like you seek the presidency. And as a matter of fact, I've always thought about this job that you don't decide you should try for this job. The people let you know whether you should try for it or not. Mr. President, Vice President Bush has portrayed himself as the candidate with experience. Can you give us an example or two of where Vice President Bush has been the pivotal player in a policy decision? Well, I can't answer it in that context, but let me just say, I don't know that there has ever been a Vice President who has been more completely involved in all that goes on than this Vice President. When I was governor, I made up my mind that the Lieutenant Governor should be like the executive Vice President in a corporation. He should not be just sitting over in the sideline waiting for something to happen to the governor. And I did this with the Lieutenant Governor in California, and I had the same resolution when I came here that the Vice President, you don't leave that kind of ability out in another room while you're discussing all the things that go on in the decisions to be made. And so he hasn't just been feeling my pulse and sitting by. He has been actively engaged. He's been all over the world on our behalf as an emissary and not just a funeral with actual missions. Mr. President, since your recent operations I sometimes feel I know more about your body than I do about my own. Sometimes the sketches on the air bothered me. Yeah, it was funny. How do you feel about that? I would be a little perturbed. Well, I recognize that you give up a certain amount of privacy when you take this job, but I must say I did get a little weary of reading all the diagnoses and prognoses that were being made during my time and particularly more recently when I found that I was supposed to be shuffling and hesitant and aged beyond my ears. That was a little bothersome. But embarrassing too? Well, never mind. I'm glad they don't do it to me. I tried not to be. The biggest wound that I have suffered and all of that though just simply has to do with the most recent incident. All my life, well almost, clear back into teenage for seven years, beginning in my teens I was a lifeguard. And most of my life I have never been without the marks of a bathing suit because of tanning. And during my motion picture days it gave me extra sleep because I was one of the few that didn't have to wear makeup. I had a year-round tan and now as a result of this I can't do that anymore. And I'm a missionary for telling you all don't lie on the beach and get tanned. Mr. President, you've indicated that after you leave office you'll campaign for various candidates and causes. Could you tell us what some of those might include? Well, you know as your sort of titular head of the party in this job so you have to be during the primaries and until the nominations are made you can't show any preference for anyone. But I do believe that there is a difference in the leadership of the two parties and what they stand for and having been in the other party. So I have to believe that the Republican Party today is more like the Democratic Party when I was a lad and they seem to kind of reverse their positions. The Republican Party was the party of high tariffs and the party of protectionism and so forth and that's all been reversed, other things too. But yes, I believe that as long as I can it's an obligation to do what you can to use the experience to go before the people. As a matter of fact you referred to one thing a little while ago that I would not do it all while I'm in this job but that I would like to do once I'm not in the job and that is remove the amendment to the Constitution that limits the president to two terms and I don't do that for behalf of who might be president but I think it's an invasion of the Democratic rights of the people to tell the people that they can't vote for whoever they want to vote for and for as long as they do. When you stop to think that a congress that has people that have been in there for 30 or 40 years in their jobs telling the American people they can't have a president they might want for more than two and it was born out of a kind of get-even with FDR for his seeking for terms but I'd like to see that changed. Mr. President, you've been generous with your time and candid with your comments and we appreciate it. I want to tell you that with the bus to pay behind us next year we're going on a jet to pay we're going to do the seven continents about 30 countries and maybe if you're willing we'll come back and talk with you at the end of that one. I'd like that. We'll probably be asking powerful people like Howard and your State Department and Defense Department to help us open some doors over there. Having been a number of them now myself quite a number more than I ever thought I would see when I was growing up and I can make a prediction you will come home hard and fast Americans. We expect that. Thank you. We want to leave a little memento with you. It's inexpensive. Maybe it'll hold some papers down on your desk and have you think about USA Today. Well thank you very much. I'm pleased to have that. Good luck. Thank you. You really think you'll be here for last year? I am afraid to say that because so often they take that as a sign of it. Thank you so much. Because you know there was really a stage of I mean in 1986 and I would pledge that I would be there in 1987 made that agreement. But I'm hopeful. It's very hopeful. I think he's got some real problems and within his own country. So people will eject from the glass most. Thank you Mr. President. Thank you Mr. President. I'd like to say on behalf of our driver, Joel's driver, we still have a couple of guys. We're five minutes late over each day so I'm going to go see the constitutional essay. Very nice to meet you. Thank you very much.