ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 7, 1997 TAG: 9702070072
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The Washington Post
IN AN UNUSUAL MOVE, the Clintons shared some of their personal feelings at a prayer meeting Thursday.
President Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton came to the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday to accuse, to confess and to forgive.
With the president in recent weeks urging the nation to purge itself of anger and cyncism, he and his wife each declared that they, too, have fallen prey to such sentiments. And in unusually personal remarks - interwoven with both complaint and conciliation - they said they were counting on the power of prayer to heal themselves and their political tormenters.
Washington is a town ``ripped with people who are self-righteous, sanctimonious and hypocritical,'' President Clinton told the breakfast gathering. ``I plead guilty from time to time.''
When he first came to power, Clinton said, he was stunned at how ``mean'' Republicans were to him, and how the spirit of ``payback'' had infected the capital. ``So then pretty soon I was behaving that way,'' he recalled. ``I'd wake up in the morning my heart was getting a little hard. And I thought `Now, who can I get even with?'''
Politicians and the news media have fallen ``in a deep hole'' of cynicism, he said, ``So I ask you to pray for us.''
A few hours later, it was the first lady's turn for confession at a luncheon speech to the same audience. The night before, while paying a courtesy call to the prayer group, she said she was ``taken aback'' when a man came up to her and asked for forgiveness. ``For most of the last four years, I have worked very hard to destroy you,'' she quoted him as saying.
``Of course, I forgive you,'' Hillary Clinton said she responded.
Only later, she recounted, did she come up with the response she wished she had given: ``What I should have said is, `I don't know you and I don't know anything about you, but I want you to forgive me also, because I am sure that in my moments of frustration and anger I have said terrible things about people like you - and I have thought even worse.'''
The annual day of prayer - a 45-year-old Washington tradition - draws nearly 4,000 people from around the world, including politicians, judges, diplomats, bureaucrats, foreign leaders and soldiers.
The remarks of both Clintons were, at least in part, impromptu. While they were driving to the Washington Hilton Thursday morning, Hillary Clinton said, her husband was discarding the text his speechwriters had prepared and crafting more personal remarks. As he got up to speak, she said, she was as curious as anyone else about what would pour out.
The president's remarks were a more personal version of a theme he has pressed for several weeks. In last month's inaugural address and Tuesday's State of the Union speech, Clinton called on the nation to unify, and quoted a Biblical passage from Isaiah as he urged people to be ``repairers of the breach.''
Thursday, Clinton said he wanted to be more specific and more personal about who was in that breach. He mentioned three groups. One was the poor, he said, repeating his call for people to help former welfare recipients move into work. The second group are citizens from imperiled people around the world in places from Bosnia to Haiti, who need U.S. aid.
But Clinton became most impassioned when he came to the third group: politicians and the news media who cover them. While his words called for forgiveness, the president also showed the sense of grievance that friends and advisers say he feels deeply toward Washington's political culture.
``You know how cynical the press is about the politicians,'' he said. ``They think we're all - whatever they think. What you should know is that the politicians have now become just as cynical about the press, because cynicism breeds cynicism. We are in a world of hurt. We need help. We are in the breach.''
Clinton said he likewise has been enraged at Republicans, a group he now says he is determined to work with cooperatively. When he came to Washington, he recalled, ``I got so mad at our friends in the Congress and the Republican Party because they were real mean to me over something.''
He said he asked aides why the opposition was so vindictive and they told him: ``Well, they think the Democrats in Congress did this to the Republican presidents.''
``I said, `I didn't even live here then,''' Clinton said.
``I try to tell everybody around the White House all the time, I have concluded a few things in my life, and one of them is that you don't ever get even,'' Clinton said. ``The harder you try, the more frustrated you're going to be, because nobody ever gets even. And when you do, you're not really happy.''
LENGTH: Medium: 86 linesby CNB