My life, p.106
My Life, page 106
Our team had accomplished a lot in the last four years under extreme duress. This was the result of my own early mistakes, the first two years of intensely negative press coverage, the loss of Congress in ’94, the financial and emotional toll of Whitewater, too much personal tragedy, and the constant demands inherent in trying to turn the country around. I had done my best to keep my own and everybody else’s spirits up, and to keep us all from being too distracted by the tragedies, the trash, and the mishaps. Now that the American people had given us another term, I was hoping that in the next four years we would be freer to do the public’s business without the turmoil and strife of the first term. I had been inspired by a statement made in late October by the archbishop of Chicago, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, a tireless advocate for social justice whom Hillary and I knew and admired very much. Bernardin was desperately ill and didn’t have long to live when he said, “A dying person does not have time for the peripheral or the accidental… it is wrong to waste the precious gift of time given to us on acrimony and division.”
In the week after the election, several people central to the administration announced their intention to leave by the end of the year, including Leon Panetta and Warren Christopher. Chris had lived on an airplane for four years, and Leon had seen us through the budget battles, not to mention staying up on election night playing hearts with me. Both of them wanted to go home to California and to a more normal life. They had served me and the nation well, and I would miss them. On November 8, I announced that Erskine Bowles would become the new chief of staff. His youngest child was off to college now, and Erskine was free to serve again, though it would cost him an arm and a leg to do so, as he once again gave up his lucrative business ventures.
Thank goodness, Nancy Hernreich and Betty Currie were staying. By this time, Betty knew most of my friends around the country, could handle a lot of the phone traffic, and was a wonderful help to me in the office. Nancy understood the dynamics of our office and my need for both involvement in and distance from the details of the day-to-day work. She did everything she could to make it easier for me to do my job, and kept the Oval Office operations in great shape. My then presidential aide, Stephen Goodin, was leaving, but we had lined up a good replacement: Kris Engskov, who had been at the White House from the start and whom I first met in north Arkansas way back in 1974 during my first campaign. Since the President’s aide sat just outside the Oval Office door, was with me all of the time, and was always by my side, it was good to have someone I’d known so long and who liked so much doing the job. I was also glad to have Janis Kearny, the White House diarist. Janis had been the editor of the Arkansas State Press, Little Rock’s black newspaper, and she was keeping meticulous records of all our meetings. I don’t know what I would have done without my Oval Office team.
A week later, after I announced an eighteen-month extension of our mission in Bosnia, Hillary and I were on our way to Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand for a combination of work and a vacation that we needed. We began with three days of pure fun in Hawaii, then flew on to Sydney, Australia. After a meeting with Prime Minister John Howard, a speech to the Australian parliament in Canberra, and a day in Sydney, including an unforgettable game with one of the greatest golfers of our time, Greg Norman, we flew north to Port Douglas, a coastal resort on the Coral Sea near the Great Barrier Reef. While there, we walked through the Daintree Rainforest with an aboriginal guide, toured a wildlife preserve where I cuddled a koala named Chelsea, and snorkeled around the magnificent reef. Like coral reefs the world over, it was threatened by ocean pollution, global warming, and physical abuse. Just before we went out to see it, I announced America’s support for the International Coral Reef Initiative, which was designed to prevent further destruction of reefs everywhere. We flew from Australia to the Philippines for the fourth Asian Pacific leaders’ meeting, hosted by President Fidel Ramos. The principal result of the conference was an agreement I had worked for that eliminated all tariffs on an array of computers, semiconductors, and telecommunications technology by 2000, a move that would result in more exports and more high-wage jobs for America. We visited Thailand to honor the king’s fiftieth year on the throne of one of America’s oldest allies in Southeast Asia: the United States had signed a treaty of amity and commerce with the king of Siam in 1833. King Bhumibol Adulyadej was an accomplished pianist and a big jazz fan. I presented him with a golden anniversary gift any jazz aficionado would appreciate, a large portfolio of photographs of jazz musicians, autographed by the superb jazz photographer Herman Leonard. We got home in time for our traditional Thanksgiving at Camp David. This year our group included our two delightful young nephews, Roger’s son, Tyler, and Tony’s son, Zach. Watching them play together made the spirit of the season come alive.
In December, I had to reconstitute a large part of my administration. Bill Perry, John Deutch, Mickey Kantor, Bob Reich, Hazel O’Leary, Laura Tyson, and Henry Cisneros were all leaving. We were losing valuable people in the White House, too. Harold Ickes was returning to his law practice and consulting business, and Deputy Chief of Staff Evelyn Lieberman was going to the State Department to head the Voice of America.
Early in the month I announced my new national security team: Madeleine Albright as secretary of state; Bill Cohen, former Republican senator from Maine, as secretary of defense; Tony Lake as CIA director; Bill Richardson as UN ambassador; and Sandy Berger as national security advisor. Albright had done an outstanding job at the United Nations and understood the challenges we faced, especially in the Balkans and the Middle East. I thought she had earned the chance to be the first female secretary of state. Bill Richardson had proved himself to be a skilled diplomat by his efforts in North Korea and Iraq, and I was pleased when he agreed to become America’s first Hispanic ambassador to the United Nations. Bill Cohen was an articulate, youthful-looking politician who had been an innovative thinker on defense issues for years. He had helped to craft the START I treaty and had played a key role in the legislation that reorganized and strengthened the military command structure in the 1980s. I wanted a Republican in the cabinet, liked and respected Cohen, and thought he could fill Bill Perry’s very big shoes. When I pledged to him that I would never politicize defense decisions, he accepted the job. I hated to lose John Deutch at the CIA. He had done a fine job as deputy secretary of defense, then had stepped into the tough CIA job after Jim Woolsey’s brief tenure. Tony Lake’s work at the National Security Council had given him a unique understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of our intelligence operations, which were especially critical now with the threat of terrorism on the rise. I didn’t consider anyone other than Sandy Berger for the job of national security advisor. We had been friends for more than twenty years. He felt comfortable bringing me bad news and disagreeing with me at meetings, and he had done a superb job on a whole range of issues in the first term. Sandy’s analytical powers were considerable. He thought through problems to the end, seeing potential pitfalls that others missed, without being paralyzed by them. He understood my strengths and weaknesses and how to make the most of the former and minimize the latter. He also never allowed his ego to get in the way of good decision making.
George Stephanopoulos was leaving, too. He had told me not long before the election that he was burned out and had to go. Until I read his memoir, I had no idea how difficult the pressure-packed years had been for him, or how hard he had been on himself, and me. George was going on to a career in teaching and television, where I hoped he would be happier.
Within two weeks I had filled the remaining vacancies in the cabinet. I named Bill Daley of Chicago to be secretary of commerce after Mickey Kantor, to my regret, told me he wanted to return to private life. Daley was a talented man who had led our campaign for NAFTA. Charlene Barshefsky had been acting trade representative in the eight months since Mickey Kantor had gone to Commerce. She was doing a terrific job, and it was time to take the word “acting” out of her title. I also appointed Alexis Herman to succeed Bob Reich at the Labor Department; Assistant HUD
Secretary Andrew Cuomo to follow Henry Cisneros at HUD; Federico Peña to replace Hazel O’Leary at Energy; Rodney Slater, the federal highway administrator, to succeed Peña as secretary of transportation; Aida Alvarez to become head of the Small Business Administration; Gene Sperling to head the National Economic Council on the departure of Laura Tyson; Dr. Janet Yellen, who had taught Larry Summers at Harvard, to be chair of the Council of Economic Advisers; Bruce Reed to be my domestic policy advisor, replacing Carol Rasco, who was going to the Department of Education to run our America Reads program; and Sylvia Matthews, a brilliant young woman who worked for Bob Rubin, to replace Harold Ickes as deputy chief of staff.
Bob Reich had done a good job at the Department of Labor and as a member of the economic team, but it was becoming difficult for him; he disagreed with my economic and budget policies, believing I had put too much emphasis on deficit reduction and invested too little in education, training, and new technologies. Bob also wanted to go home to Massachusetts to his wife, Clare, and their sons. I was heartsick about losing Henry Cisneros. We had been friends since before I ran for President, and he had done a brilliant job at HUD. For more than a year, Henry had been subject to an investigation by an independent counsel for making incorrect statements about his personal expenses in his FBI vetting interview for the HUD job. The law made it a crime for a nominee to make a “material” misstatement, one that would affect the confirmation process. Senator Al D’Amato, whose committee had recommended Cisneros’s confirmation, wrote a letter saying that Henry’s misstatement of the details of his expenses would not have affected his vote or that of any other senator on the committee. Prosecutors from the Justice Department’s public integrity office argued against a special prosecutor. Unfortunately, Janet Reno referred the Cisneros case to Judge Sentelle’s panel anyway. True to form, they saddled him with a Republi-can special prosecutor: David Barrett, an active partisan who, though accused of no wrongdoing, reportedly had close ties with officials who were convicted in the HUD scandals of the Reagan administration. No one had accused Henry of any impropriety in his job, but he had been plunged into Whitewater World anyway. Henry’s legal bills had left him deeply in debt and he had two kids in college. He had to earn more money to support his family and pay his lawyers. I was just thankful he had stayed for the full four years.
Though I had made a lot of changes, I thought we could maintain the spirit of camaraderie and teamwork that had marked the first term. Most of the new appointees were transferring from other positions in the administration, and many of my cabinet members were staying put. There were several interesting developments in foreign policy in December. On the thirteenth, the UN Security Council, with the strong support of the United States, selected a new secretary-general, Kofi Annan of Ghana. Annan was the first person from sub-Saharan Africa to hold the post. As the UN undersecretary for peacekeeping during the previous four years, he had supported our efforts in Bosnia and Haiti. Madeleine Albright thought he was an exceptional leader and had urged me to support him, as had Warren Christopher, Tony Lake, and Dick Holbrooke. Kofi was an intelligent, impressive man with a quiet but commanding presence. He had given most of his professional life in service to the United Nations, but he was not blind to its shortcomings, nor wedded to its bad habits. Instead, he was committed to making the UN’s operations more efficient and more accountable. That was important on the merits and vital to my ability to persuade the congressional Republicans to pay our UN dues. We were $1.5 billion in arrears, and since 1995, when the Republicans took over, the Congress had refused to pay until the UN reformed itself. I thought the refusal to pay our back dues was irresponsible and damaging to both the UN and the United States, but I agreed that reform was imperative. In the Middle East, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat were trying to resolve their differences, with Netanyahu going to Gaza for three hours of talks on Christmas Eve day. As the year ended, my envoy, Dennis Ross, was shuttling back and forth between them, trying to close a deal on the turnover of Hebron to the Palestinians. It wasn’t done yet, but I began 1997 with more hope for the peace process than I’d had in months.
After spending the first days of the New Year on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a part of our nation Presidents rarely visit, my family went home to get ready for the inauguration and my fifth year as President. In many ways, it would be the most normal year of my presidency so far. For most of the year, Whitewater World was just a low-grade fever that spiked up from time to time with the campaign finance investigations, and I was free to do my job.
In the run-up to the inauguration, we held a series of events to emphasize that things were going in the right direction, highlighting 11.2 million new jobs in the previous four years, the largest decline in the crime rate in twenty-five years, and a 40 percent drop in the student-loan default rate. I corrected an old injustice by giving the Congressional Medal of Honor to seven African-American veterans of World War II. Amazingly, no Medals of Honor had ever been awarded to blacks who served in that war. The selections were made after an exhaustive study of battle records. Six of the medals were awarded posthumously, but one of the recipients, seventy-seven-year-old Vernon Baker, was at the White House for the ceremony. He was an impressive man of quiet dignity and clear intelligence: as a young lieutenant in Italy more than fifty years earlier, he had single-handedly wiped out three enemy machine-gun units, an observer post, and a dugout. When asked how he had dealt with discrimination and prejudice after having given so much to his country, Baker said he had lived his life by a simple creed: “Give respect before you expect it, treat people the way you want to be treated, remember the mission, set the example, keep going.” It sounded good to me.
A day after the Medal of Honor ceremony, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat called me to say they had finally reached an agreement on the Israeli deployment in Hebron, bringing to a successful conclusion the talks we had launched in September. The Hebron deal was a relatively small part of the peace process, but it was the first time Netanyahu and Arafat had accomplished something together. If it had not been achieved, the entire peace process would have been in grave peril. Dennis Ross had been working with them virtually around the clock for a couple of weeks, and both King Hussein and Warren Christopher had pressed the parties to agree in the closing days of the negotiations. President Mubarak weighed in, too, when I called him for help at one o’clock in the morning in Cairo at the end of Ramadan. The Middle East was like that; it often took all hands on board to get things done. Three days before the inauguration I awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bob Dole, noting that from his service in World War II, in which he was badly wounded coming to the aid of a fallen comrade, through all the ups and downs of his political career, Dole had “turned adversity to advantage and pain to public service, embodying the motto of the state he loved and went on to serve so well: Ad astra per aspera, to the stars through difficulties.” Though we had been opponents and disagreed on many issues, I liked Dole. He could be mean and tough in a fight, but he lacked the fanaticism and hunger for personal destruction that characterized so many of the hard-right Republicans who now dominated his party in Washington.
I had had a fascinating visit with Dole a month earlier. He came to see me with a little toy for our cat, Socks, which he said was from his dog. We discussed the election, foreign policy, and the budget negotiations. The press was still buzzing about campaign finance abuses. Besides the DNC, the Republican National Committee and the Dole campaign had committed some violations. I had been criticized for inviting supporters to spend the night at the White House and for hosting morning coffees with administration members, supporters, contributors, and others who had no political ties to us. I asked Dole, based on his years of experience, whether politics and politicians in Washington were more or less honest than they had been thirty years earlier. “Oh, it’s not close,” he said. “Much more honest today.” Then I asked, “Would you agree that people think things are less honest?” “Sure,” he said, “but they’re wrong about it.”
I was strongly supporting the new campaign finance reform bill sponsored by Senator John McCain and Senator Russ Feingold, but I doubted that its passage would increase public confidence in the integrity of politicians. Fundamentally, the press objected to the influence of money on campaigns, though most of the money was spent on media advertising. Unless we were to legislate free or reduced-cost airtime, which the media generally opposed, or to adopt public financing of campaigns, an option with little public or congressional support, the media would continue to be the largest consumer of campaign dollars, even as they pilloried politicians for raising the funds to pay them. In my inaugural address, I painted the most vivid picture I could of what America might be in the twentyfirst century, and said that the American people had not “returned to office a President of one party and a Congress of another… to advance the politics of petty bickering and extreme partisanship they plainly deplored,” but to work together on “America’s mission.”
The inaugural ceremonies, like our November victory celebration, were more serene, even relaxed, this time around, though the morning church service was enlivened by the fiery sermons of the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Tony Campolo, an Italian evangelical from Philadelphia who was perhaps the only white preacher in America who could keep up with Jesse. The atmosphere at the congressional luncheon was friendly, as I noted that the new Senate majority leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, and I shared a profound debt to Thomas Jefferson: if he hadn’t decided to buy the vast Louisiana Territory from France, neither of us would have been there. Ninety-four-year-old Senator Strom Thurmond was seated next to Chelsea and told her, “If I were seventy years younger, I’d court you!” No wonder he had lived so long. Hillary and I attended all fourteen inaugural balls; at one of them I got to dance with my beautiful daughter, now a senior in high school. She wouldn’t be home much longer, and I savored the moment.
