My life, p.107
My Life, page 107
On the day after the inauguration, as a result of an investigation going back several years, the House of Representatives voted to reprimand Speaker Gingrich and fine him $300,000 for several violations of House ethics rules arising out of the use of tax-exempt funds for political purposes that had been given by his supporters to allegedly charitable organizations, and for several untruthful responses to congressional investigators about his activities. The counsel for the House Ethics Committee said that Gingrich and his political supporters had violated the tax laws and that there was evidence the Speaker had intentionally misled the committee about it.
In the late 1980s, Gingrich had led the charge to remove Jim Wright as Speaker of the House because his supporters had bought, in bulk, copies of a privately published book of Wright’s speeches, in an alleged attempt to get around House rules prohibiting members from accepting speaking fees. Though the charges against Gingrich were much more serious, the Republican whip, Tom DeLay, complained that the fine and reprimand were out of proportion to the offense and an abuse of the ethics process. When I was asked about the affair, I could have urged the Justice Department or the U.S. attorney to investigate the charges of tax evasion and false statements to Congress; instead, I said the House should handle it “and then we should get back to the people’s business.” Two years later, when the shoe was on the other foot, Gingrich and DeLay would not be so charitable.
Shortly before the inauguration, in preparation for the second term and the State of the Union, I had gathered about eighty members of the White House staff and the departments for an all-day meeting at Blair House to focus on two things: the meaning of what we had done in the first four years and what we were going to do for the next four.
I believed the first term produced six important accomplishments: (1) restoring economic growth by replacing supply-side economics with our more disciplined “invest and grow” policy; (2) resolving the debate over the role of government in our lives by demonstrating that it is neither the enemy nor the solution, but the instrument to give our people the tools and conditions to make the most of their own lives; (3) reaffirming the primacy of community as the operative political model for America, and rejecting divisions by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political philosophy; (4) replacing rhetoric with reality in our social policy, actually proving government action could make a difference in areas like welfare and crime if it reflected common sense and creative thinking, rather than just tough talk and hot rhetoric; (5) reestablishing the family as the primary unit of society, one that government could strengthen with policies like the family leave law, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the minimum wage increase, the V-chip, the anti–teen smoking initiative, efforts to increase adoption, and new reforms in health and education; (6) and reasserting America’s leadership in the post–Cold War world as a force for democracy, shared prosperity, and peace, and against the new security threats of terror, weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, narco-trafficking, and racial and religious conflicts. These accomplishments gave us a foundation from which we could launch America into the new century. Because the Republicans were in control of Congress and because it is more difficult to enact large reforms when times are good, I wasn’t sure how much we could achieve in my second term, but I was determined to keep trying.
During the State of the Union on February 4, I first asked the Congress to conclude the unfinished business of our country: balancing the budget, passing the campaign finance reform bill, and completing the process of welfare reform by providing more incentives to employers and states to hire recipients and more training, transportation, and child-care support to help people go to work. I also asked for the restoration of health and disability benefits for legal immigrants, which the Republicans had cut off in 1996 to make room in the budget for their tax cuts.
Looking to the future, I asked Congress to join me in making education our number one priority because “every eight-year-old must be able to read; every twelve-year-old must be able to log on to the Internet; every eighteen-year-old must be able to go to college; and every adult American must be able to keep on learning for a lifetime.” I offered a ten-point plan to achieve these goals, including the development of national standards and tests to measure progress in meeting them; certification of 100,000 “master teachers” by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, up from only 500 in 1995; the America Reads tutoring initiative for eight-year-olds, which sixty college presidents had already agreed to support; more children in preschool; public school choice in every state; character education in every school; a multi-billion-dollar school construction and repair program, the first since just after World War II, to repair run-down facilities and help build new ones in school districts so overcrowded that classes were being held in trailers; the $1,500 HOPE Scholarship tax credit for the first two years of college and a $10,000 tuition tax deduction for all higher education after high school; a “GI Bill” for America’s workers to give a skill grant to adults who needed further training; and a plan to connect every classroom and library to the Internet by 2000.
I told the Congress and the American people that one of America’s greatest strengths in the Cold War had been a bipartisan foreign policy. Now, with education critical to our security in the twenty-first century, I asked that we approach it in the same way: “Politics must stop at the schoolhouse door.”
I also asked the Congress to support the other commitments I had made to the American people in my campaign: the expansion of the family leave law; a large increase in AIDS research to develop a vaccine; an extension of health insurance to the children of low-income working people who couldn’t afford it on their own; a comprehensive assault on juvenile crime, violence, drugs, and gangs; a doubling of the number of empowerment zones and the number of toxic waste sites cleaned up; and the continued expansion of community service programs.
In foreign policy, I asked for support for the expansion of NATO; the North Korean nuclear agreement; the extension of our Bosnian mission; our increasing engagement with China; “fast track” authority in trade negotiations, which requires Congress to vote on trade agreements up or down without amendments; a weapons modernization program at the Pentagon to meet new security challenges; and ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which I thought would go a long way toward protecting America from terrorist attacks with poison gas.
In the speech, I tried to reach out to Republicans as well as Democrats, telling them that I would defend any member’s vote on the right kind of balanced budget and quoting a scripture verse, Isaiah 58:12: “thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.” In one way or another, that’s what I had been trying to do for most of my life.
The media’s limited appetite for policy, compared with breaking scandal, became humorously apparent near the end of my speech. I had what I thought was a fine closing: I pointed out that “a child born tonight will have almost no memory of the twentieth century. Everything that child will know about America will be because of what we do now to build a new century.” I reminded all who were listening that there were just over a thousand days until that new century, “a thousand days to build a bridge to a land of new promise.” While I was making my pitch, the networks split the television screen so that viewers could also watch the jury render its verdict in the civil suit against O. J. Simpson over the murder of his wife, a suit brought after the jury in the criminal case failed to convict him. The television audience heard the civil jury rule against Simpson and my exhortations about the future simultaneously. I felt fortunate that I wasn’t cut off completely, and that the public response to the speech was still positive.
Two days later I presented my budget plan to Congress. The budget brought America into balance in five years; increased investment in education by 20 percent, including the largest increase in college aid in fifty years since the GI Bill; cut spending in hundreds of other programs; provided targeted middleclass tax relief, including a $500-per-child tax credit; secured the Medicare Trust Fund, which was about to go broke, for ten years; provided health insurance to five million uninsured children, respite care for families caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, and, for the first time, mammograms for older women under Medicare; and reversed the downward spiral in international affairs spending so that we could do more to promote peace and freedom and to fight terrorism, weapons proliferation, and narco-trafficking. Unlike two years earlier, when I had forced the Republicans to make their harsh budget proposals public before coming forward with my own, I went first. I thought it was the right thing to do, and also good politics. Now when the Republicans presented their budget, with its bigger tax cuts for upper-income people, they would have to cut back on my education and health-care proposals to pay for them. This wasn’t 1994; the public had figured things out, and the Republicans wanted to get reelected. I felt sure that, within a few months, Congress would pass a balanced budget that would be pretty close to my plan. A couple of weeks later, another attempt to pass the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution failed in the Senate as Senator Bob Torricelli of New Jersey decided to vote against it. It was a courageous vote. New Jersey was an anti-tax state, and Bob had voted for the amendment as a congressman. I hoped that his bravery would get us past the posturing and on to the business of actually balancing the budget.
In mid-month we got another economic boost when American-led negotiations in Geneva produced an agreement to liberalize world trade in telecommunications services, opening 90 percent of the markets to U.S. firms. The negotiations were launched by Al Gore and conducted by Charlene Barshefsky. Their work was certain to bring new jobs and services at lower prices to Americans, and to spread the benefits of new technologies across the world.
Around this time I was in Boston with Mayor Tom Menino. Crime, violence, and drug use were going down in America, but they were still on the rise among people under eighteen, though not in Boston, where no child had died from gun violence in eighteen months, a remarkable achievement for a large city. I proposed child trigger locks on guns to prevent accidental shootings, a massive anti-drug advertising campaign, required drug tests for young people seeking driver’s licenses, and reforms in the juvenile justice system, including the kind of probation and after-school services that Boston had implemented so successfully.
There were some interesting developments in Whitewater World in February. On the seventeenth, Kenneth Starr announced he would leave his post on August 1 to become dean of the Pepperdine University Law School in southern California. He had obviously decided that Whitewater was a dry hole and this was a graceful way out, but he received heavy criticism for his decision. The press said it looked bad because his Pepperdine position had been funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, whose funding of the Arkansas Project was not yet public knowledge, but who was widely recognized as an extreme rightwinger with an animus toward me. I thought their objection was flimsy; Starr was already earning lots of money representing political opponents of my administration while serving as independent counsel, and he would in fact reduce his conflicts of interest by going to Pepperdine. What really rocked Starr was all the heat he got from the Republican right and the three or four reporters who were deeply vested in finding something we’d done wrong, or at least in continuing the torment. By then, Starr had already done a lot for them: he had saddled a lot of people with big legal bills and damaged reputations, and, at enormous cost to taxpayers, had managed to drag the investigation out for three years, even after the RTC report said there was no basis for any civil or criminal action against Hillary and me. But the right wing and the Whitewater press knew that if Starr quit, it was a tacit admission that there was “no there there.” After they beat him up for four days he announced he would stay on. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The press was also still writing about fund-raising in the 1996 campaign. Among other things, they were agitated that I had invited people who had contributed to my campaign in 1992 to spend the night at the White House, even though, as with all guests, I paid for the costs of meals and other refreshments. The implication was that I had been selling overnights in the White House to raise money for the DNC. It was ridiculous. I was an incumbent President who led in the polls from start to finish; raising money was no problem, and even if it had been, I would never have used the White House in that way. At the end of the month, I released a list of all overnight guests in the first term. There were hundreds of them, about 85 percent of whom were relatives, friends of Chelsea’s, foreign visitors and other dignitaries, or people whom Hillary and I had known before I started running for President. As for my supporters from ’92 who were also my friends, I wanted as many of them as possible to have the honor of spending the night in the White House. Often, given the long hours I worked, the only time I had to visit with people in an informal way was late at night. There was never a single case when I raised money because of this practice. My critics seemed to be saying that the only people who shouldn’t be overnight guests were friends and supporters. When I released the list, many people on it were questioned by the press. One reporter called Tony Campolo and asked if he’d given me a contribution. When he said he had, he was asked how much. “I think $25,” he said, “but it might have been $50.” “Oh,” the reporter replied, “we don’t want to talk to you,” and hung up.
The month ended on a happy note, as Hillary and I took Chelsea and eleven of her girlfriends to dinner at the Bombay Club restaurant in Washington for her seventeenth birthday, and later to New York to see some plays, and Hillary won a Grammy Award for the audio version of It Takes a Village. She has a great voice, and the book was full of stories she loved to tell. The Grammy was another reminder that at least beyond the Washington Beltway, a lot of Americans were interested in the same things we were. In mid-February, Prime Minister Netanyahu came to see me to discuss the current state of the peace process, and Yasser Arafat did the same in early March. Netanyahu was constrained politically in what he could do beyond the Hebron deal. The Israelis had just begun to elect their prime minister directly, so Netanyahu had a four-year term, but he still had to put together a majority coalition in the Knesset. If he lost his coalition on the right, he could form a national unity government with Peres and the Labor Party, but he didn’t want to do that. The hard-liners in his coalition knew this and were making it difficult for him to keep moving toward peace by opening the Gaza airport or even letting all the Palestinians from Gaza come back to work in Israel. Psychologically, Netanyahu faced the same challenge Rabin had: Israel had to give up something concrete—land, access, jobs, an airport—in return for something far less tangible: the best efforts of the PLO to prevent terrorist attacks.
I was convinced Netanyahu wanted to do more, and afraid that if he couldn’t, Arafat would find it more difficult to keep the lid on violence. To further complicate matters, whenever the peace process slowed, or the Israelis retaliated for a terrorist attack or began another building program in a West Bank settlement, there was likely to be a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for its continued violation of UN resolutions, and doing so in a way that suggested what the negotiated settlement should be. The Israelis depended on the United States to veto such measures, which we normally did. That enabled us to maintain our influence with them, but weakened our claim to be an honest broker with the Palestinians. I had to keep reminding Arafat that I was committed to the peace process and that only the United States could help bring it about, because the Israelis trusted America, not the European Union or Russia, to protect its security.
When Arafat came to see me I tried to work through the next steps with him. Not surprisingly, he saw things differently from Netanyahu; he thought he was supposed to prevent all violence and wait around for Netanyahu’s politics to permit Israel to honor its commitments under the peace agreement. I had developed a comfortable working relationship with both leaders by then and had decided the only realistic option was to keep the process from falling apart by staying in constant touch, putting things back on track when they did fall apart, and maintaining momentum, even if it came in baby steps. On the night of March 13, after appearances in North Carolina and south Florida, I went to Greg Norman’s house in Hobe Sound to visit with him and his wife, Laura. It was a very pleasant evening, and the time got away from us. Before I knew it, it was after one o’clock in the morning, and since we were supposed to play in a golf tournament a few hours later, I got up to leave. As we were walking down the steps, I didn’t see the last one. My right foot came down on the step’s edge and I began to fall. Had I fallen forward, the worst that could have happened was scratched palms. Instead, I jerked backward, heard a loud pop, and fell. The sound was so loud that Norman, who was a few feet in front of me, heard it, turned around, and caught me, or I would have been hurt far worse than I was. An ambulance took me on the forty-minute drive to St. Mary’s Hospital, a Catholic institution the White House medical team had chosen because it had an excellent emergency room. I was there for the rest of the night in agonizing pain. When an MRI revealed that I’d torn 90 percent of my right quadriceps, I was flown back to Washington. Hillary met Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base and watched as they lowered me out of the belly of the plane in a wheelchair. She had been scheduled to leave for Africa, but delayed her trip to get me through the necessary surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital. About thirteen hours after my injury, a fine surgical team led by Dr. David Adkison gave me an epidural, put on some music by Jimmy Buffett and Lyle Lovett, and talked me through the surgery. I could see what they were doing in a glass panel above the operating table: the doctor drilled holes in my kneecap, pulled the torn muscle through them, sutured the ends to the solid part of the muscle, and put me back together. After it was over, Hillary and Chelsea helped me get through one horrible day of pain; then things began to get better.
