Tuesday, June 6, 2006

LITTLE ROCK -- Welcome to the William J. Clinton Presidential Center. Your personal tour guide: President Bill Clinton.

"There were lots of times when Republicans thought I was right about an issue but they were determined not to let anything happen," Clinton says in a new audio tour of his presidential library. "I know that when I got elected president, a lot of those folks just went into denial."

The library, along the Arkansas River in downtown Little Rock, will begin offering the audio tour Saturday. The tour was Clinton's idea and is the first narrated by a former president for a presidential library, said Jordan Johnson, spokesman for the William J. Clinton Foundation.

Visitors pay an extra $3 for a device shaped like an oversize cordless phone. For each exhibit, Clinton recounts his thoughts on and memories of the topic.

He describes the impeachment hearings, for example, as an ideological battle that went overboard.

"So when I won, it was a profound sort of psychological shock to a lot of them," he says of his opponents, with a chuckle. "Then they went into overdrive fighting me. They weren't accomplishing anything, just banging away. Then they did what people who care too much about power do: They overdid it."

Clinton's commentary also addresses his childhood as well as issues such as crime, foreign affairs and the economy. He speaks of hosting state dinners for foreign leaders and his wife's role as first lady.

He describes choosing a running mate as one of the most important decisions for a presidential hopeful. He says he chose Al Gore because the Tennessee Democrat complemented him and provided a more moderate perspective.

Although Clinton says the Oval Office was "the best place in the world to work," he had another favorite spot in the White House: his private office. "I restored it to look the way it did after the Civil War, and I brought in a desk, which was Ulysses Grant's Cabinet table," Clinton says.

"And I would go in there, often after Hillary went to bed, or late at night, play my music, and that's where I did my reading and thinking and that's where my daughter would find me late at night when she called me from Stanford. I had a lot of happy times there."

Johnson said Clinton spent hours walking through the library while aides followed with a tape recorder. He recorded his thoughts in a handful of visits.

"Hopefully, visitors will go away with an experience that sheds some light on the personal experience of being president," Johnson said.

-- Associated Press