My Life, page 110
Years later, when I read McDougal’s book, The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk, it sent chills up my spine. She could have ended her suffering at any time, and made a lot of money to boot, just by telling the lies Starr and Hick Ewing wanted her to tell. How she stood up to them I’ll never know, but the sight of her in chains finally began to penetrate the shield the Whitewater reporters had erected around Starr and his staff.
Late in the spring, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Paula Jones suit could go forward while I was still in the White House, dismissing my attorneys’ arguments that the work of the presidency should not be interrupted by the suit, since it could be litigated at the end of my term. The Court’s previous decisions had indicated that a sitting President could not be the subject of a civil suit arising out of his official actions while President because the defense would be too distracting and time-consuming. The Court said that adopting a principle of delay in involving a President’s unofficial acts could cause harm to the other party in the suit, so Jones’s suit should not be delayed. Besides, the Court said, defending the suit wouldn’t be unduly burdensome or time-consuming for me. It was one of the most politically naïve decisions the Supreme Court had made in a long time. On June 25 the Washington Post reported that Kenneth Starr was investigating rumors that twelve to fifteen women, including Jones, had been involved with me. He said he had no interest in my sex life; he just wanted to question anyone with whom I might have had a conversation about Whitewater. Eventually Starr would deploy scores of FBI agents, as well as taxpayer-funded private investigators, to look into the subject in which he professed no interest.
By the end of July, I was getting concerned about the FBI, for reasons far more important than the bureau’s sex inquiries for Ken Starr. There had been a whole series of missteps on Louis Freeh’s watch: botched reports from the FBI forensic laboratory that threatened several pending criminal cases; large cost overruns on two computer systems designed to upgrade the National Crime Information Center and to provide quick fingerprint checks to police officers all across the country; the release of FBI files on Republican officials to the White House; and the naming and apparent attempted entrapment of Richard Jewell, a suspect in the Olympic bombing case who was subsequently cleared. There was also a criminal inquiry under way into the conduct of Freeh’s deputy, Larry Potts, in the deadly standoff at Ruby Ridge in 1992, for which the FBI had been heavily criticized and Potts had been censured before Freeh appointed him.
Freeh had been criticized in the press and by Republicans in Congress, who cited the FBI missteps as the reason for their refusal to pass the provision in my anti-terrorism legislation that would have given the agency wiretap authority to track suspected terrorists as they moved from place to place. There was one sure way for Freeh to please the Republicans in Congress and get the press off his back: he could assume an adversarial position toward the White House. Whether out of conviction or necessity, Freeh had begun to do just that. When the files case became public, his initial reaction was to blame the White House and decline to accept any responsibility for the FBI. When the campaign finance story broke, he wrote Janet Reno a memo that was leaked to the press, urging her to appoint an independent counsel. When reports surfaced of possible attempts by the Chinese government to funnel illegal contributions to members of Congress in 1996, lower-level agents briefed people well down the chain of command in the National Security Council about it and urged them not to tell their superiors. When Madeleine Albright was preparing to go to China, the White House counsel, Chuck Ruff, a respected former U.S. attorney and Justice Department official, asked the FBI for information about Beijing’s plans to influence the government. This was clearly something the secretary of state needed to know about before meeting with the Chinese, but Freeh personally ordered the FBI not to send its prepared reply, despite the fact that it had been approved by the Justice Department and two of Freeh’s top assistants.
I didn’t believe Freeh was foolish enough to think the Democratic Party would knowingly accept illegal contributions from the Chinese government; he was just trying to avoid criticism from the press and the Republicans, even if it damaged our foreign policy operations. I thought back to the call I had received the day before I appointed Freeh from the retired FBI agent in Arkansas pleading with me not to name him and warning that he would sell me down the river the minute it would benefit him to do so. Whatever Freeh’s motives, the behavior of the FBI toward the White House was just one more example of how crazy Washington had become. The country was in good shape and getting better, and we were advancing peace and prosperity throughout the world, yet the mindless search for scandal continued. A few months earlier Tom Oliphant, the thoughtful and independent-minded Boston Globe columnist, summed up the situation well:
The grand and vainglorious forces running The Great American Scandal Machine are very big on how things seem. The machine’s lifeblood is appearances, which generate questions, creating more appearances, all in turn generating a righteous frenzy that demands intense inquiry by super-scrupulous inquisitors who must at all costs be independent. The frenzy, of course, can be resisted only by the complicit and the guilty.
August began with good and bad news. Unemployment was down to 4.8 percent, the lowest since 1973, and confidence in the future remained high in the aftermath of the bipartisan balanced budget agreement. On the other hand, the cooperation didn’t extend to the appointments process: Jesse Helms was holding up my nomination of the Republican governor of Massachusetts, Bill Weld, to be ambassador to Mexico because he felt Weld had insulted him, and Janet Reno told the American Bar Association that there were 101 vacant federal judgeships because the Senate had confirmed only nine of my nominees in 1997, none for the court of appeals.
After a two-year hiatus, our family went back to Martha’s Vineyard for our August vacation. We stayed at the home of our friend Dick Friedman near Oyster Pond. I celebrated my birthday by going for a jog with Chelsea, and I persuaded Hillary to play her annual round of golf with me at the Mink Meadows public course. She had never liked golf, but once a year she humored me by strolling around a few holes. I also played a lot of golf with Vernon Jordan at the wonderful old Farm Neck course. He liked the game a lot more than Hillary did.
The month ended as it began, with both good and bad news. On the twenty-ninth, Tony Blair invited Sinn Fein to join the Irish peace talks, giving the party formal standing for the first time. On the thirtyfirst, Princess Diana was killed in an auto crash in Paris. Less than a week later, Mother Teresa died. Hillary was very saddened by their deaths. She had known and liked both of them very much, and she represented the United States at both funerals, flying first to London, then to Calcutta a few days later. During August, I also had to announce a major disappointment: the United States would not be able to sign the international treaty banning land mines. The circumstances leading to our exclusion were almost bizarre. The United States had spent $153 million on demining all over the world since 1993; we had recently lost a plane with nine people on board after depositing a demining team in southwest Africa; we had trained more than 25 percent of the world’s demining experts; and we had destroyed 1.5 million of our own mines, with another 1.5 million scheduled to be destroyed by 1999. No other nation had done as much as America to rid the world of dangerous land mines.
Near the end of negotiations on the treaty, I had asked for two amendments: an exception for the heavily marked UN-sanctioned minefield along the Korean border, which protected the people of South Korea and our troops there; and a rewording of the provision approving anti-tank missiles that covered those manufactured in Europe but not ours. Ours were just as safe and worked better to protect our troops. Both amendments were rejected, partly because the Landmine Conference was determined to pass the strongest possible treaty in the wake of the death of its most famous champion, Princess Diana, and partly because some people at the conference just wanted to embarrass the United States or bully us into signing the treaty as it was. I hated not to be part of the international agreement because it undermined our leverage in trying to stop the manufacture and use of more land mines, some of which could be bought for as little as three dollars each, but I couldn’t put the safety of our troops or the people of South Korea at risk.
On September 18, Hillary and I took Chelsea to Stanford. We wanted her new life to be as normal as possible and had worked with the Secret Service to make sure she would be assigned young agents who would dress informally and be as unobtrusive as they could be. Stanford had agreed to bar media access to her on campus. We enjoyed the welcoming ceremonies and visits with the other parents, after which we took Chelsea to her dorm room and helped her move in. Chelsea was happy and excited; Hillary and I were a little sad and anxious. Hillary tried to deal with it by scurrying around and helping Chelsea organize things, even lining her drawers with Contac paper. I had carried her luggage up the stairs to her room, then fixed her bunk bed. After that, I just stared out the window, as her mother got on Chelsea’s nerves with all the fixing up. When the student speaker at the convocation, Blake Harris, had said to all the parents that our children would miss us “in about a month and for about fifteen minutes,” we all laughed. I hoped it was true, but we sure would miss her. When it was time to go, Hillary had pulled herself together and was ready. Not me; I wanted to stay for dinner.
On the last day of September, I attended the retirement ceremony of General John Shalikashvili and gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He had been a superb chairman of the Joint Chiefs, supporting the expansion of NATO, the creation of the Partnership for Peace, and the deployment of our troops in more than forty operations, including Bosnia, Haiti, Iraq, Rwanda, and the Taiwan Strait. I had really enjoyed working with him. He was intelligent, straight-talking, and completely committed to the welfare of our men and women in uniform. As his replacement I named General Hugh Shelton, who had so impressed me with his handling of the Haiti operation.
The early fall was largely devoted to foreign affairs, as I took my first trip to South America. I traveled to Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina to express the importance of Latin America to America’s future and to keep pushing the idea of a free trade area covering all the Americas. Venezuela was our number one oil supplier and had always made more petroleum available to the United States when we needed it, from World War II to the Gulf War. My visit was brief and uncomplicated; its highlight was a speech to the people of Caracas at the tomb of Simón Bolívar.
Brazil was a different story. There had long been tensions between our two countries; many Brazilians had long resented the United States. Brazil was the leader of the Mercosur trading bloc, which also included Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and which had a larger volume of trade with Europe than with the United States. On the other hand, the Brazilian president, Henrique Cardoso, was a modern, effective leader who wanted a good relationship with the United States and who understood that a stronger partnership with us would help him to modernize his country’s economy, reduce its chronic poverty, and increase its influence in the world.
I had been fascinated by Brazil since the great jazz saxophonist Stan Getz popularized its music in America in the 1960s, and ever since then I had wanted to see its cities and beautiful landscapes. I also respected and liked Cardoso. He had already been to Washington on a state visit, and I thought he was one of the most impressive leaders I had met. I wanted to affirm our mutual dedication to a closer economic partnership and to support his policies, especially those to sustain Brazil’s vast rain forest, which had been severely reduced by overclearing, and to improve education. Cardoso had initiated an intriguing program called bolsa escola, which made monthly cash payments to poor Brazilians if their children attended school at least 85 percent of the time.
There was an interesting moment in our press conference, which, besides several questions on AmericanBrazilian relations and climate change, included four from the American press on the ongoing controversy back home over the financing of the ’96 campaign. A reporter asked if it embarrassed me or the country to have such questions asked on a foreign trip. I replied, “That’s a decision for you. You have to decide what questions you’re going to ask. I can’t be embarrassed about how you decide to do your job.”
After a visit to a school in a poor neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro with Brazil’s soccer legend Pelé, Hillary and I went to Brasília for a state dinner at the presidential residence, where Henrique and Ruth Cardoso gave us a taste of the Brazilian music I had loved for more than thirty years, a women’s percussion ensemble playing pulsating rhythms on different-sized metal plates tied to their bodies, and a fabulous singer from Bahia, Virginia Rodrigues.
Argentina’s President Carlos Menem had been a strong ally of the United States, supporting America in the Gulf War and in Haiti and adopting a strong free-market economic policy. He hosted a barbeque at the Rural Center in Buenos Aires that included tango lessons for Hillary and me and a demonstration of Argentine horsemanship: a man riding around the rodeo arena standing atop two broad-shouldered stallions.
President Menem also took us to Bariloche, a beautiful resort town in Patagonia, to discuss global warming and what I hoped would be our common response to the problem. The international conference on climate change was coming up in December in Kyoto, Japan. I strongly favored setting aggressive targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions for both developed and developing nations, but I wanted to achieve the targets not through regulations and taxes but through market incentives to promote energy conservation and the use of clean energy technology. Bariloche was a perfect site to highlight the importance of the environment. Just across the cold, clear lake from the Llao Llao Hotel where we stayed, Hillary and I walked through the magical Arrayanes forest, with its barkless myrtle trees. The trees were stained orange by tannic acid and were cool to the touch. Their survival resulted from perfect soil, clean water, clean air, and a moderate climate. The right action against climate change would preserve the fragile, unique trees and the stability of much of the rest of our planet. On October 26, back in Washington, Capricia Marshall, Kelly Craighead, and the rest of Hillary’s staff put together a big fiftieth birthday celebration for her under a tent on the South Lawn. Chelsea came home to surprise her. There were tables with food and music from every decade of her life, with people standing by them who had known her in each period: from Illinois in the fifties, Wellesley in the sixties, Yale in the seventies, and Arkansas in the eighties.
The next day, Jiang Zemin came to Washington. I invited him to the residence for an informal meeting that night. After almost five years of working with him, I was impressed with Jiang’s political skills, his desire to integrate China into the world community, and the economic growth that had accelerated under his leadership and that of his prime minister, Zhu Rongji, but I was still concerned about China’s continued suppression of basic freedoms and its imprisonment of political dissidents. I asked Jiang to release some dissidents and told him that in order for the United States and China to have a long-term partnership, our relationship had to have room for fair, honest disagreement. When Jiang said he agreed, we proceeded to debate how much change and freedom China could accommodate without risking internal chaos. We didn’t resolve our differences, but our mutual understanding increased, and after Jiang went back to Blair House, I went to bed thinking that China would be forced by the imperatives of modern society to become more open, and that in the new century it was more likely that our nations would be partners than adversaries. The next day at our press conference, Jiang and I announced that we would increase our cooperation to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction; work together on the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and on fighting organized crime, drug trafficking, and alien smuggling; expand America’s efforts to promote the rule of law in China by helping to train judges and lawyers; and cooperate to protect the environment. I also pledged to do all I could to bring China into the World Trade Organization. Jiang echoed my remarks and told the press we had also agreed to regular summit meetings and the opening of a direct telephone “hot-line” to assure that we could maintain direct communication. When we opened the floor to questions, the press asked the inevitable ones about human rights, Tiananmen Square, and Tibet. Jiang seemed a little taken aback but maintained his good humor, essentially repeating what he had said to me on the subjects the night before, and adding that he knew he was visiting a democracy where the people were free to voice their different opinions. I replied that while China was on the right side of history on so many issues, on the human rights issue “we believe the policy of the government is on the wrong side of history.” A couple of days later, in a speech at Harvard, President Jiang acknowledged that mistakes had been made in dealing with the demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. China often moved at a pace that seemed maddeningly slow to Westerners, but it was not impervious to change.
October brought two developments on the legal front. After Judge Susan Webber Wright dismissed with prejudice (meaning they could not be refiled) two of the four counts in Paula Jones’s lawsuit, I offered to settle it. I didn’t want to, because it would take about half of everything Hillary and I had saved over twenty years, and because I knew, on the basis of the investigative work my legal team had done, that we would win the case if it ever went to trial. But I didn’t want to waste any days in the three years I had left on it.
Jones refused to accept the settlement unless I also apologized for sexually harassing her. I couldn’t do that because it wasn’t true. Not long afterward, her lawyers petitioned the court to be released of their duties. Soon they were replaced by a Dallas firm closely associated with and funded by the Rutherford Institute, another right-wing legal foundation financed by my opponents. Now there was no longer even a pretense that Paula Jones was the real plaintiff in the case that bore her name. Early in the month, the White House turned over videotapes of forty-four of the much-discussed White House coffees to the Justice Department and the Congress. They proved what I’d said all along, that the coffees were not fund-raisers, but wide-ranging and often interesting discussions with some people who were supporters and some who weren’t. The only thing most of the critics could do was to complain that they weren’t released sooner.
