"Face the Nation" transcript: September 18, 2011

Below is a rush transcript of "Face the Nation" on September 18, 2011, hosted by CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer. The guests are former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

You can watch the full show by clicking on the video player above.

BOB SCHIEFFER: 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 Global Initiative, but I have to begin with a news question. Wwe have confirmed reports that President Obama proposed a new tax on millionaires. This tax would ensure that they have to pay at least the same percentage of their income as middle income tax payers do. Do you think that's a good idea?

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: 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 8 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 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. And 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 hammer down on this deficit problem.

SCHIEFFER: Your Clinton Global Initiative kicks off its seventh year this year, and you're going to be focusing on creating jobs with business people, with CEOs, with smart people from all around the world. I can guarantee 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?

CLINTON: 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. I think that what we try to do is to deal with the world as it is. So for example, if 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 the AFL-CIO president, they actually want to create jobs for a lot of small businesses by investing in building retrofits. And I think you'll see more announcements on that.

I think that this idea of on-shoring jobs that is creating jobs in rural America and 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. And I hope that will be done. Meanwhile, I think a combination of payroll tax changes that Obama recommended, 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 doldrums and 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 and then talk about raising taxes?' Is that basically what you were saying?

CLINTON: Well, 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 is commendable - whether it's good politics or not, it's an honest thing to do. 'We've got a long term debt problem, we've got to deal with this: Here's my long term plan for dealing with it.'

But right now we've got an economic problem. And the truth is that we're never going to balance 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 a hold of the debt problem. And 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 basically is 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 that the president's approval rating are down and so forth, so bad that it's time for panic at the White House. He basically suggested firing everybody over there. You think that would be the right thing to do?

CLINTON: 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 emergency. He offered $450 billion worth of suggestions, $250 billion were tax cuts including big payroll tax reductions that the Republicans previously supported, and $200 billion in spending in infrastructure and retrofitting, 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 long term debt problem, and make it clear that he wants to do this after growth is returned - that you can't get blood out of a turnip.

I think there's a little bit of lag in these polls, when the president proposes something and when the people feel it. Also right now he's just out there running against himself and people's misery - it's tough out there. You've got not only 9% unemployment, you've got who knows how many millions of people aren't in the figures because they aren't out there looking for work. And a lot of others who have part time jobs that want full time jobs.

Everyone understands you can't do miracles. What happened on Sept. 15, 2008, four months before he became president, was a financial crash. If you go back hundreds of years these things take about an average of five years to get over. If we want to speed that up, we're all going to have to work together. We all know that if you look at the elections of the last four years, or five years or ten years or twenty years or thirty years, conflict makes great politics, but it doesn't make very good policy. What we need is a cooperative policy that will put people back to work. I understand what James was saying and he wants President Obama to be reelected, but when you're out there running against yourself and people feel miserable it's hard to see your numbers go up. When he's got a real opponent and people get to evaluate real alternatives and they get to see how the Republicans respond to his speech and his plan, including a lot of they've supported in the past, then I think we'll be in a different world politically. But this is about real people's lives.

SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you about one thing that our next guest on the broadcast, former Vice President Cheney, said: He said your wife, Hillary Clinton, is the most competent person in the administration and 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.

CLINTON: Well, you know I'm very proud of her and so I'm always gratified whenever anyone says anything nice about her. And 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 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. And I think he, by saying something nice about her in the way that 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 that he's still out there hitting the ball.

[Commercial Break]

SCHIEFFER: And we're back now with the former vice president during the Bush administration, Dick Cheney. Well, Mr. Cheney, you heard what Mr. Clinton just said about you. He said it's shocking that you might be playing politics, and that perhaps you were just trying to stir up trouble when you were so complimentary of Hillary Clinton.

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: No, I just thought, Bob, that the Democrats should have as much fun on their side as we're having on our side figuring out who's going to run. And 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: Well, Mr. Vice President, you've had some very good luck with your new book that's out. My understanding is, it's no. 1 on The New York Times' bestseller list. 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." And he said, "Objective historians would analyze and decide their own conclusions." That's not even faint praise when you come right down to it. What did you think about what the president said?

CHENEY: Well, 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. I thought he was very good in terms of making very bold, very tough decisions. And so I was satisfied with the response.

SCHIEFFER: Have you talked to the president since you published the book?

CHENEY: I talked to him when I sent him an early version of it, an early copy couple of weeks ago before it came out, but I haven't talked to him since.

SCHIEFFER: You haven't talked to him since?

CHENEY: No.

SCHIEFFER: How do you judge your relationship with the president right now? And I say that because Barton Gellman, who wrote a biography on you, "Angler," said your book shows mutual disillusionment that developed between you and President Bush. Is that accurate?

CHENEY: No, I don't think it is. I didn't think Gellman's original book was all that accurate either. I believe it's called "Angler," which is my Secret Service code name. He got that part right. 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 a historical perspective. I wanted to put down from my perspective the record of a lot of the events I engaged in, going all the way back to the Nixon administration, the Ford administration, both Bush administrations, my time in Congress. And 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.

And here's what you said: "George Bush made courageous decisions as president, and to this day I wish that pardoning Scooter Libby had been one of them." Is that a way of saying that he didn't have the courage to pardon...?

CHENEY: No, it's a way of saying... 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 hoo-hah about who leaked Valerie Plame's name to the press. It was Rich Armitage, the 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, but I thought he deserved a pardon. Now in fairness to the president, the president heard me out on that subject on a number of occasions. He let me speak my peace. 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.

And I've got to give the president credit. There were a number of occasions where we disagreed. That's not surprising, I've disagreed with every president I've ever worked for. He was good about letting me have my say, and then he'd make his decision.

SCHIEFFER: But to say that you wish he had the courage to do this - isn't that a really harsh way to put it? I mean, maybe he thought he had the courage to do what he thought was right.

CHENEY: I'm sure he did. I had strong feelings about the subject. I really, well I make the case in the book. That'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 leak. Not Scooter Libby, not anybody on my staff. All of my staff had been drug before the grand jury and had to hire lawyers and go through that process, while the guys over at State knew what happened and never said anything about it to anybody.

SCHIEFFER: One of the people who in the administration who reacted pretty strongly to some of your allegations was Colin Powell, because you had suggested in the book it's probably a good thing that he left, that he didn't go into the second term ... he also said basically you overshot the runway with some of your allegations, and that you took a lot of cheap shots. But he said a few other things and I want to play you just a little sound bite of one thing he said because I want to get your reaction to it:

Video Clip from "Face the Nation," 8.29.11::

COLIN POWELL: "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 and I had told him what I thought about every issue of the day. Mister Cheney may forget that I'm the one who said to President Bush 'If you break it, you own it, and you've got to understand that if we have to go to war in Iraq, we've to be prepared for the whole war, not just the first phase.' And Mister Cheney and many of his colleagues were not prepared for what happened after the fall of Baghdad.

SCHIEFFER: And that, 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 were thinking this was going to be a walk in the park and 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?

CHENEY: Well, I think, first of all, in terms of what I chose to write - I had enough material, Bob, for four or five books. Forty years in this town, you pick up a lot of material. And, but I was doing one book, I wanted to keep it under 600 pages, which is the guidance that I'd 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 Chiefs of Staff. We worked together in the Pentagon through Desert Storm and so forth. I selected him to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. So I think that was a good relationship, it worked well. Then fast forward to the time when I'm Vice President and he's Secretary of State, it didn't work as well. And that's basically what I reported on in the book.

SCHIEFFER: But to get back to the original question, are there things that the administration could have done better after the fall? Because the suggestion was once Saddam Hussein goes everything will be fine, and it didn't work out that way.

CHENEY: That's correct, there are a number of things that happen any time you're into one of those operations. We expected, for example, that the fields, oil fields would be set on fire, as they had been previously. That didn't happen. We expected that once you took away that top layer of 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 we expected to happen that didn't, there were other things ...

SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you this...was it a mistake to get rid of all the people in the army? To disband the army as they did?

CHENEY: Well, it may have been a mistake. It wasn't as though we had total control over everything. In effect, what happened for a large part of it was they just packed up and went home. They disappeared back into the countryside and went back to their private lives. So they weren't there, it wasn't as though they'd all found a place where they were waiting for us to come in and take command of the army.

SCHIEFFER: Also, what you said about Condoleezza Rice. At one point she came into your office and you described her as, she was tearfully made a statement. She says that's not her, that that never happened.

CHENEY: Well, I've got to disagree with her. I do remember it very well, and it had to do with the Valerie Plame case. We had had debates internally, she went out on her own, unilaterally, and apologized for the so-called '16 words' that had been included in the president's State of the Union speech. In reality those words were true, they were correct.

And what it did was it set off a firestorm among the press, and in part contributed to this whole atmosphere that lead to the prosecution, for example, of Scooter Libby. She did come in and say she'd been wrong.

SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you quickly, we have about 20 seconds left. Is this book it for you? Are there any oral tapes, oral histories - I think of this because of the Caroline, I mean the Jacqueline Kennedy tapes that have come out - or will this be your legacy?

CHENEY: 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 it any thought. I'm basking in the glow of having the number one bestseller.

SCHIEFFER: Alright, we have to go. Thank you so much.

[Commercial Break]

SCHIEFFER: 2011 marks my 20th year as moderator of "Face the Nation," and as I skimmed the archives this week I realized just how many broadcasts - more than a thousand - 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 were literally thousands - senators, presidents, ball players and 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 have been a place where Washington's key newsmakers talked to each other and, more importantly, to the American people. We are the second-oldest program on television; "Meet the Press" is the oldest. When my late, great friend Tim Russert took over that program he said anchoring a Sunday talk show was like being given custody of a national treasure. I couldn't have said it better.

In the midst of a communications revolution, we have changed the least. No bells and whistles - we just sit the key newsmakers down, turn on the lights, and ask them questions. Millions of you still believe it's important to hear their answers. We thank you for that, and for having us in your home all these years.