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Q. There's been a lot of debate about how transferable a business leader's skills would be in the political government world. Your style has always been make it happen, and things have happened. Do you see a lot of frustrations, a lot of butting up against brick walls?
A. No. There are a thousand frustrations in making it happen anyway, see. My life has not been limited to the business world. For example, getting the North Vietnamese to change the treatment our POWS received was not a corporate event. That's just something that I had to start from scratch and get millions of people from this country and around the world to express anger about, and they changed the treatment, and more men survived. So can we agree that was not a ceo giving orders?
Now then, my activities on drugs and education were not a ceo giving orders. Again and again and again I've had to go build consensuses, get people to do things, and get them done, and I listen to people. I don't order people around.
Q. What's your current idea on choosing a Vice President? I mean, how are you going to go about it?
A. Just studying the issue. I'm working on it myself. I just want a person who's fully qualified. And I've said again and again, if the American people's reaction is that we ought to reverse the ticket, that's fine with me.
Q. Do you ever have any doubts about what you're doing? Do you ever wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and wonder if this is crazy?
A. I don't wake up in the middle of the night. I'm not strung out. You see, I have a very strong feeling that we all have a thermostat setting on stress.
The one time I could ever relate to stress was during the rescue of our people from Iran. We had people's lives at risk, I had my life at risk, we had the company at risk. My children could have lost a father, putting it on a very personal basis when I was in there in the prisons and what have you. When Paul and Bill and the rescue team were coming out overland, see, they'd done the impossible. They'd got out of prison. And just sitting there and waiting for them to get to the Turkish border, that was stress.
Q. What about Harry Truman's comment after he took over as President when Roosevelt died, "I felt like the sun and the moon and the stars had all fallen on my shoulders"? As you are about to embark on this almost certain race for the White House, don't you worry at some times whether you too are worthy of bearing that weight?
A. Yes. The greatest thing that would break my heart is if I got there and could not do the job for the American people, and that's the reason I've spent so much time telling them that I can't do it by myself. I know that. The thing I will hate, hate -- not dislike, hate -- is the strange life we have created for our President where he is totally out of touch with reality, and where he is fed and briefed, and I will not get in that trap. I will break out of it. And everybody says security, security. You can't really be a good, effective $ leader if you are isolated, and we have totally isolated our President from reality.
Q. Given all the Secret Service protection and all the entourage protection, how would you break out, how could you break out?