My Life, page 113
After I caught my breath, I asked him another question. “When you were walking out of prison for the last time, didn’t you feel the hatred rise up in you again?” “Yes,” he said, “for a moment I did. Then I thought to myself, ‘They have had me for twenty-seven years. If I keep hating them, they will still have me.’ I wanted to be free, and so I let it go.” He smiled again. This time he didn’t have to say, “And so should you.”
The only vacation day on the trip came in Botswana, which had the highest per capita income in subSaharan Africa and the highest AIDS rate in the world. We went on a safari in Chobe National Park and saw lions, elephants, impalas, hippos, crocodiles, and more than twenty different species of birds. We got very close to a mother elephant and her child—apparently too close. She raised her trunk and sprayed us with water. It made me laugh to think how happy the Republicans would have been if they could have seen their party’s mascot watering me. Late in the afternoon we took a leisurely boat ride down the Chobe River; Hillary and I held hands and counted our blessings as we watched the sun go down.
Our last stop was Senegal, where we visited the Door of No Return on Gorée Island, the point from which so many Africans were taken to slavery in North America. As I had in Uganda, I expressed my regret over America’s responsibility for slavery and the long, hard struggle of African-Americans for freedom. I introduced the large delegation with me “representing over thirty million Americans that are Africa’s great gift to America,” and pledged to work with the Senegalese and all Africans for a better future. I also visited a mosque with President Abdou Diouf, out of respect for Senegal’s overwhelmingly Muslim population; a village that had recovered a section of desert with the help of American aid; and Senegalese troops being trained by American military personnel as part of the African Crisis Response Initiative, which my administration had initiated, our effort to better prepare Africans to stop wars and prevent other Rwandas.
The trip was the longest and most comprehensive ever taken to Africa by an American President. The bipartisan congressional delegation and the prominent citizens who accompanied me, as well as the specific programs I was supporting, including the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, demonstrated to Africans that we were turning a new page in our shared history. For all its problems, Africa was a hopeful place. I had seen it in the faces of the massive crowds in the cities, in those of the schoolchildren and villagers in the bush and on the edge of the desert. And Africa had given me a great gift: in the wisdom of a Rwandan widow and of Nelson Mandela, I had found more peace of mind to face what lay ahead.
On April 1, while we were still in Senegal, Judge Wright granted my lawyers’ motion for a summary judgment in the Jones case, dismissing it without a trial, because she found that Jones had produced no credible evidence to support her claim. The dismissal exposed the raw political nature of Starr’s investigation. Now he was pursuing me on the theory that I had given a false statement in a deposition the judge had said was not relevant, and that I had obstructed justice in a case that had no merit in the first place. No one was even talking about Whitewater anymore. On April 2, to no one’s surprise, Starr said he would press on.
A few days later Bob Rubin and I announced that the United States would block the importation of 1.6 million assault weapons. Although we had banned the manufacture of nineteen different assault weapons in the 1994 crime bill, ingenious foreign gun makers were trying to evade the law by making modifications on guns whose only purpose was to kill people.
Good Friday, April 10, was one of the happiest days of my presidency. Seventeen hours past the deadline for a decision, all the parties in Northern Ireland agreed to a plan to end thirty years of sectarian violence. I had been up most of the night before, trying to help George Mitchell close the deal. Besides George, I talked to Bertie Ahern, and to Tony Blair, David Trimble, and Gerry Adams twice, before going to bed at 2:30 a.m. At five, George woke me with a request to call Adams again to seal the deal. The agreement was a fine piece of work, calling for majority rule and minority rights; shared political decision making and shared economic benefits; continued ties to the United Kingdom and new ties to Ireland. The process that produced the pact began with the determination of John Major and Albert Reynolds to seek peace, continued when John Bruton succeeded Reynolds, and was completed by Bertie Ahern, Tony Blair, David Trimble, John Hume, and Gerry Adams. My first visa to Adams and the subsequent intense engagement of the White House made a difference, and George Mitchell handled the negotiations brilliantly.
Of course, the main credit went to those who had to make the hard decisions, the Northern Irish leaders, Blair, and Ahern, and to the people of Northern Ireland who had chosen the promise of peace over a poisoned past. The agreement would have to be ratified in a referendum by the voters of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic on May 22. With a touch of Irish eloquence, it became known as the Good Friday accord.
At around that time, I also flew to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to discuss our newest shuttle mission to conduct twenty-six experiments on the impact of space on the human body, including how the brain adapts and what happens to the inner ear and the human balance system. One of the crew was in the audience, seventy-seven-year-old senator John Glenn. After flying 149 combat missions in World War II and Korea, John had been one of America’s first astronauts more than thirty-five years earlier. He was retiring from the Senate and was itching to go into space once more. NASA’s director, Dan Goldin, and I were strongly in favor of Glenn’s participation because our space agency wanted to study the effects of space on aging. I had always been a strong supporter of the space program, including the International Space Station and the upcoming mission to Mars; John Glenn’s last hurrah gave us a chance to show the practical benefits of space exploration.
I then flew to Chile for a state visit and the second Summit of the Americas. After the long, harsh dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile seemed firmly committed to democracy under the leadership of President Eduardo Frei, whose father had also been president of Chile in the 1960s. Shortly after the summit, Mack McLarty resigned as my special envoy to the Americas. By then my old friend had made more than forty trips to the region in the four years since he had taken the job and, in so doing, had sent an unmistakable message that the United States was committed to being a good neighbor. The month ended on two high notes. I held a reception for members of Congress who had voted for the 1993 budget, including those who had lost their seats for doing so, to announce that the deficit had been completely eliminated for the first time since 1969. It was a development that would have been unthinkable when I took office, and impossible without the hard vote for the economic plan in 1993. On the last day of the month, the Senate voted, 80–19, to approve another of my major priorities—bringing Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO.
In mid-May our efforts to ban nuclear testing were shaken when India conducted five underground tests. Two weeks later, Pakistan responded with six tests of its own. India claimed its nuclear weapons were needed as a deterrent to China; Pakistan said it was responding to India. Public opinion in both nations strongly supported the possession of nuclear weapons, but it was a dangerous proposition. For one thing, our national security people were convinced that, unlike the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, India and Pakistan knew little about each other’s nuclear capabilities and policies for using them. After the Indian tests, I urged Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif not to follow suit, but he couldn’t resist the political pressure.
I was deeply concerned about India’s decision, not only because I considered it so dangerous, but also because it set back my policy of improving Indo-U.S. relations and made it harder for me to secure Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. France and the UK had already done so, but there was a growing sense of isolation and unilateralism in Congress, as evidenced by the failure of the fast-track legislation and the refusal to pay our UN dues or our contribution to the International Monetary Fund. The IMF funding was especially important. With an Asian financial crisis threatening to spread to fragile economies in other parts of the world, the IMF needed to be able to organize an aggressive and well-funded response. The Congress was compromising the stability of the global economy.
While the nuclear testing controversy was unfolding, I had to leave on another trip, to the annual G-8 summit being held in Birmingham, England. On the way, I stopped in Germany for a meeting with Helmut Kohl at Sans Souci, the palace of Frederick the Great; for a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Berlin airlift; and for a public appearance with Kohl at a General Motors Opel plant in Eisenach, in the former East Germany.
Kohl was in a tough fight for reelection, and my appearances with him beyond the airlift ceremonies raised a few questions, especially since his Social Democratic Party opponent, Gerhard Schroeder, was running on a platform that was a lot like what Tony Blair and I were advocating. Helmut had already served longer than any German chancellor except Bismarck, and he was behind in the polls. But he had been America’s friend, and mine, and no matter how the election came out, his legacy was secure: a reunited Germany, a strong European Union, a partnership with democratic Russia, and German support for ending the Bosnian war. Before I left Germany, I also had a good talk with Schroeder, who had risen from modest beginnings to the summit of German politics. He struck me as tough, smart, and clearheaded about what he wanted to do. I wished him well, and told him that if he won I would do whatever I could to help him succeed.
When I arrived in Birmingham, I saw that the city had undergone a remarkable revival and was much more beautiful than it had been when I first visited there almost thirty years earlier. The conference had a useful agenda, calling for international economic reforms; greater cooperation against drug trafficking, money laundering, and trafficking in women and children; and a specific alliance between the United States and the European Union against terrorism. However important, it was overshadowed by unfolding world events: the Indian nuclear tests; the political and economic collapse of Indonesia; the stalled peace process in the Middle East; the looming prospect of war in Kosovo; and the coming referendum on the Good Friday accord. We condemned the Indian nuclear tests, reaffirmed our support for the Nuclear Nonproliferation and Comprehensive Test Ban treaties, and said we wanted a global treaty to stop the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons. On Indonesia, we urged both economic and political reforms, which seemed unlikely to occur because the country’s finances were in such a terrible mess that the necessary reforms would make life even harder for ordinary Indonesians in the short run. Within a couple of days, President Suharto resigned, but Indonesia’s problems did not leave with him. They would soon claim more of my time. Nothing could be done on the Middle East for the moment, until the Israeli political situation was sorted out.
In Kosovo, the southernmost province of Serbia, the majority of the people were Albanian Muslims who were chafing under Milosevic’s rule. After Serbian attacks on the Kosovars earlier in the year, the United Nations had placed an arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) and several nations had imposed economic sanctions on Serbia. A Contact Group consisting of the United States, Russia, and several European nations was working to defuse the crisis. The G-8 supported the Contact Group’s efforts, but soon we would have to do more.
Again, the only good news was in Northern Ireland. More than 90 percent of Sinn Fein party members had endorsed the Good Friday accord. With both John Hume and Gerry Adams working for it, a huge Catholic vote in favor of the agreement was certain. Protestant opinion was more closely divided. After consulting with the parties, I decided not to go from Birmingham to Belfast to speak in person for the agreement. I didn’t want to give Ian Paisley any ammunition to attack me as an outsider telling the Northern Irish what to do. Instead, Tony Blair and I met with reporters and did two lengthy television interviews with the BBC and CNN supporting the referendum.
On May 20, two days before the vote, I also delivered a brief radio address to the people of Northern Ireland, pledging America’s support if they voted for “a lasting peace for yourselves and your children.”
That’s exactly what they did. The Good Friday accord was approved by 71 percent of the people in Northern Ireland, including a solid majority of Protestants. In the Irish Republic, more than 90 percent of the people voted for it. I was never more proud of my Irish heritage. After a stop in Geneva to urge the World Trade Organization to adopt a more open decision-making process, take more account of labor and environmental conditions in trade negotiations, and listen to the representatives of ordinary citizens who felt left out of the global economy, I flew home to America, but not away from the world’s problems.
That week, at the commencement ceremony of the U.S. Naval Academy, I outlined an aggressive approach to deal with sophisticated global terrorist networks, including a plan to detect, deter, and defend against attacks on our power systems, water supplies, police, fire and medical services, air traffic control, financial services, telephone systems, and computer networks, and a concerted effort to prevent the spread and use of biological weapons and protect our people from them. I proposed to strengthen the inspection system of the Biological Weapons Convention; vaccinate our armed forces against biological threats, especially anthrax; train more state and local officials and National Guard personnel to respond to biological attacks; upgrade our system of detection and warning; stockpile medicines and vaccines against the most likely biological attacks; and increase research and development to create the next generation of vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tools.
Over the previous several months I had become particularly worried about the prospect of a biological attack, perhaps with a weapon that had been genetically engineered to resist existing vaccines and medicines. The previous December, at Renaissance Weekend, Hillary and I had arranged to have dinner with Craig Venter, a molecular biologist whose company was attempting to finish sequencing the human genome. I asked Craig about the possibility that genetic mapping would permit terrorists to develop synthetic genes, reengineer existing viruses, or combine smallpox with another deadly virus to make it even more harmful.
Craig said those things were possible and urged me to read Richard Preston’s new novel, The Cobra Event, a thriller about a mad scientist’s efforts to reduce the world’s population by infecting New York City with a “brainpox,” a combination of smallpox and an insect virus that destroys nerves. When I read the book I was surprised that Preston’s acknowledgments included more than one hundred scientists, military and intelligence experts, and officials in my own administration. I urged several cabinet members and Speaker Gingrich to read it.
We had begun working on the biological warfare issue in 1993, after the World Trade Center bombing made it clear that terrorism could strike at home, and a defector from Russia had told us that his country had huge stocks of anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, and other pathogens, and had continued to produce them even after the demise of the Soviet Union. In response, the mandate of the Nunn-Lugar program was broadened to include cooperation with Russia on biological as well as nuclear weapons. After the sarin gas release in the Tokyo subway in 1995, the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), headed by National Security Council staffer Richard Clarke, began to focus more on planning defenses against chemical and biological attacks. In June 1995, I signed Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 39 to allocate responsibilities among various government agencies for preventing and dealing with such attacks, and for reducing terrorists’ capabilities through covert action and aggressive efforts to capture terrorists abroad. In the Pentagon, a few military and civilian leaders were interested in the issue, including the commandant of the Marine Corps, Charles Krulak, and Richard Danzig, the undersecretary of the navy. In late 1996, the Joint Chiefs endorsed Danzig’s recommendation to vaccinate the entire military force against anthrax, and Congress moved to tighten control over biological agents in American labs, after a fanatic, using false identification, was caught buying three vials of plague virus from a lab for about $300.
By late 1997, when it became clear that Russia had even larger stocks of germ warfare agents than we had believed, I authorized American cooperation with scientists who had worked at the institutes where a lot of the bioweapons had been built in the Soviet era, in the hope of finding out exactly what was going on and preventing them from providing their expertise or biological agents to Iran or other high bidders.
In March 1998, Dick Clarke gathered about forty members of the administration at Blair House for a “table top exercise” on handling terrorist attacks of smallpox, a chemical agent, and a nuclear weapon. The results were troubling. With smallpox, it took them too much time and the loss of too many lives to bring the epidemic under control. The stocks of antibiotics and vaccines were inadequate, the quarantine laws were antiquated, the public-health systems were in bad shape, and the state emergency plans were not well developed.
A few weeks later, at my request, Clarke assembled seven scientists and emergency response experts, including Craig Venter; Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize–winning biologist who had spent decades crusading against biological weapons; and Jerry Hauer, director of Emergency Management in New York City. Along with Bill Cohen, Janet Reno, Donna Shalala, George Tenet, and Sandy Berger, I met with the group for several hours to discuss the threat and what to do about it. Although I had been up most of the previous night helping to close the Irish peace agreement, I listened carefully to their presentation and asked a lot of questions. Everything I heard confirmed that we were not prepared for bio-attacks, and that the coming ability to sequence and reconfigure genes had profound implications for our national security. As the meeting was breaking up, Dr. Lederberg gave me a copy of a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association devoted to the threat of bioterrorism. After reading it, I was even more concerned.
