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If you know your own strength, and you know what your objectives are, and you can achieve those objectives without taking lives of your own men and women in uniform. There is usually still time for the killing, if that has to happen. If you are willing to use your power but you give people a chance to get out from under it in an honorable way that fulfills your objectives, that is a measure of strength, not weakness.
TIME: Your friends growing up said you were always the kind of person who was breaking up fistfights. Were you ever in a fistfight growing up?
Clinton: I remember one actually that's very revealing about this whole deal. There was a guy who was a year older than me but not as big as me. He started picking on me at school one day when I was in the eighth grade. And I felt sort of sorry for him, because I knew he had a difficult life, and he was always kind of in a sour mood. And I let him throw a hit on me. He walked home one day; I was walking home from school. I bet that fellow followed me for 30 minutes trying to hit me on the shoulder. And finally I turned around and decked him, and he ran off. I was really afraid I'd hurt him. But he finally -- I told him not to do it, and he didn't believe me.
And the people who are dealing with me in the U.S. will find that out. I realize -- since the people that I deal with around the world may not know me as well as the people I grew up with, and may have never seen that story -- that's something that I have to be very clear and explicit about. I think it is clear and explicit now in a way that it may not have been six months ago. And I would hope that what happened in Haiti and Iraq would make it clear for all other countries in the future for as long as I'm sitting here.