My Life, page 72
On Sunday night, April 18, Janet Reno came to the White House to tell me that the FBI wanted to storm the compound, apprehend Koresh and any of his followers who had taken part in killing the agents or some other crime, and free the rest of them. Janet said she was concerned by FBI reports that Koresh was sexually abusing children, most of them pre-teens, and that he might be planning a mass suicide. The FBI had also told her that it couldn’t keep so many of its resources tied down in one place forever. They wanted to raid the compound the next day, using armored vehicles to break holes in the buildings, then blast tear gas into them, a maneuver they estimated would force all the members to surrender within two hours. Reno had to approve the assault and wanted my okay first.
Several years earlier, I had faced a similar situation as governor. A right-wing extremist group had established a compound in the mountains of north Arkansas. Among the men, women, and children who lived there were two suspects wanted for murder. The people lived in several cabins, each of which had a trapdoor that led to a dugout from which they could fire on approaching authorities. And they had a lot of weapons to fire. The FBI wanted to storm them, too. At a meeting I convened with the FBI, our state police, and cooperating law-enforcement people from Missouri and Oklahoma, I listened to the FBI’s case, then said that before I could approve the action, I wanted someone who’d fought in the jungles of Vietnam to fly over the place in a helicopter and make an assessment. The battlewise veteran who made the inspection for me returned to say, “If those people can shoot at all, you’ll lose fifty men in the assault.” I called off the raid, put a blockade around the camp, cut off food-stamp aid to the several families who had been receiving it, and prevented anyone who left the premises to get supplies from going back. Eventually the holdouts gave in, and the suspects were apprehended with no loss of life. When Janet made her case to me, I thought we should try what had worked in Arkansas before we approved the FBI raid. She countered that the FBI was tired of waiting; that the standoff was costing the government a million dollars a week and tying up law-enforcement resources needed elsewhere; that the Branch Davidians could hold out longer than the Arkansas people had; and that the possibilities of child sexual abuse and mass suicide were real, because Koresh was crazy and so were many of his followers. Finally, I told her that if she thought it was the right thing to do, she could go ahead. The next day, as I watched CNN on a television just outside the Oval Office, I saw Koresh’s compound in flames. The raid had gone terribly wrong. After the FBI fired the tear gas into the buildings where the people were holed up, the Davidians started a fire. It got worse when they opened the windows to let the tear gas out and also let in a hard wind off the Texas plains, which stoked the flames. When it ended, more than eighty people had died, including twenty-five children; only nine survived. I knew I needed to speak to the press and take responsibility for the fiasco. So did Dee Dee Myers and Bruce Lindsey. But several times during the day, when I wanted to go ahead, George Stephanopoulos urged me to wait, saying we didn’t know whether anyone was still alive or whether, if Koresh heard my words, he might snap and kill them, too. Janet Reno did appear before the cameras, explained what happened, and took full responsibility for the raid. As the first woman to hold the attorney general’s post, she thought it was important not to pass the buck. By the time I finally talked to the press about Waco, Reno was being praised and I was being criticized for letting her take the fall.
For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, I had accepted advice that ran counter to my instincts. I didn’t blame George. He was young and cautious and had given me his honest, albeit mistaken, opinion. But I was furious at myself, first for agreeing to the raid against my better judgment, then for delaying a public acknowledgment of responsibility for it. One of the most important decisions a President has to make is when to take the advice of the people who work for him and when to reject it. Nobody can be right all the time, but it’s a lot easier to live with bad decisions that you believed in when you made them than with those your advisors say are right but your gut says are wrong. After Waco, I resolved to go with my gut.
Perhaps one reason I didn’t trust my instincts enough is that the administration was being hammered hard in Washington and I was being second-guessed at every turn. After a great initial appearance on Capitol Hill, Hillary was being criticized for the closed meetings of her health-care task force. Since they were consulting with hundreds of people, nothing they did was secret; they were simply trying to move with dispatch over many immensely complicated matters to reach my overly ambitious goal of presenting a health-care plan to Congress within one hundred days. The task force heard testimony from over 1,100 groups, had more than 200 meetings with members of Congress, and held public meetings all around the country. Its reputation for being secretive was exaggerated. In the end, the task force operation proved too unwieldy and was allowed to expire, and we couldn’t make the hundred-day deadline anyway.
As if all this weren’t enough, I also suffered the defeat of my short-term stimulus package, which was designed to create 500,000 jobs by getting money out quickly to cities and states for infrastructure projects. The economy was still growing slowly, it needed the boost, and the modest nonrecurring expenditures wouldn’t have made our deficit problem worse. The House passed the bill handily and the Senate was for it, too, but Bob Dole had more than forty Republican senators who were willing to filibuster it. After the first filibuster vote, we should have tried to negotiate a smaller package with Dole, or accepted a less ambitious compromise proposal offered by Senators John Breaux and David Boren, two conservative Democrats. Senator Robert Byrd, who was handling the proposal, was adamant that if we didn’t bend, we could break the filibuster. But we couldn’t, and finally admitted defeat on April 21, two days after Waco.
In my first term, the Republicans resorted to the filibuster to an unprecedented extent, thwarting the will of the congressional majority, out of either conviction or a desire to prove that I couldn’t lead. Senator George Mitchell had to have twelve votes to break filibusters just in my first hundred days. On March 19, we suffered a personal blow that put politics in perspective when Hillary’s dad had a massive stroke. Hillary rushed to his bedside at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Little Rock, with Chelsea and my brother-in-law Tony. Dr. Drew Kumpuris, Hugh’s doctor and our friend, told Hillary that her father had suffered severe brain damage and was in a deep coma from which, in all probability, he would never emerge. I got there two days later. Hillary, Chelsea, Dorothy, and his sons, Hugh and Tony, had been taking turns talking, even singing, to Hugh, who looked as if he was just sleeping peacefully. We didn’t know how long he would last, and I could stay only a day. I left Hillary in the good company of her family, the Thomasons, Carolyn Huber, who had known Hugh ever since her days as the administrator of the Governor’s Mansion, and Lisa Caputo, Hillary’s press secretary and a favorite of Hugh’s because like him she came from eastern Pennsylvania, near his hometown of Scranton. The next Sunday, I flew home again for a couple of days. I wanted to be with my family, even though there was nothing to do but wait. The doctor told us that Hugh was essentially brain dead. Over the weekend, the family decided to take him off the machine that was breathing for him, and we all said prayers and good-byes, but Hugh didn’t go for it. His strong old heart just kept beating. Though I had been able to attend to most of my duties in Arkansas, I had to return to Washington on Tuesday. I hated to leave, knowing it was the last time I’d ever see my father-in-law. I loved Hugh Rodham, with his nononsense gruffness and fierce family loyalty. I was grateful that he had accepted me into the fold twenty years earlier, when I was scruffy, penniless, and, worst of all, a Democrat. I would miss our pinochle games and political arguments, and just knowing he was around.
On April 4, with Hugh still hanging on, Hillary had to return to Washington, too, to get Chelsea back to school after spring break, and to get back to work. She had promised to give a speech on April 6 at the University of Texas at Austin for Liz Carpenter, who had been Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary. Liz pressed her not to cancel, and she decided to go. At a time when she was grief-stricken, she reached deep inside herself to say that, as we moved into the new millennium, “we need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.” Hillary had been moved to make this argument by reading an article written by Lee Atwater shortly before he died at forty of cancer. Atwater had become famous and feared for his ruthless attacks on Democrats while working for Presidents Reagan and Bush. As he faced death, he found that a life devoted only to getting power, wealth, and prestige left a lot to be desired, and he hoped that in a parting shot, he could push us to a higher purpose. In Austin, on April 6, bearing her own sorrow, Hillary tried to define that purpose. I loved what she said and was proud of her for saying it. The next day, Hugh Rodham died. We had a memorial service for him in Little Rock, then took him home to Scranton for the funeral at the Court Street Methodist Church. I eulogized the man who had put aside his Republican convictions to work for me in 1974, and who, through a lifetime of learning from personal experience, had let go of all the bigotries he had grown up with. He lost his racism when he worked with a black man in Chicago. He lost his homophobia when he was befriended and looked after by his gay neighbors, a doctor and a nurse, in Little Rock. He had grown up in football-fanatical eastern Pennsylvania, where the Catholic stars went to Notre Dame and the Protestant ones like him played for Penn State. The divide revealed a prejudice against Catholics that was also part of Hugh’s upbringing. He gave that up, too. We all thought it fitting that his last days were spent in St. Vincent’s Hospital, where the Catholic nuns took loving care of him.
THIRTY-TWO
Though most of the headlines of my early months in office concerned the effort to define, defend, and pass my economic plan; gays in the military; and Hillary’s health-care work, foreign policy was always there, an ever-present part of my daily routine and concern. The general impression among Washington observers was that I wasn’t too interested in foreign affairs and wanted to spend as little time as possible on them. It’s true that the overwhelming focus of the campaign had been on domestic issues; our economic troubles demanded that. But, as I had said over and over, increasing global interdependence was erasing the divide between foreign and domestic policy. And the “new world order” President Bush had proclaimed after the fall of the Berlin Wall was rife with chaos and big, unresolved questions. Early on, my national security advisor, Tony Lake, had declared that success in foreign affairs is often defined by preventing or defusing problems before they develop into headaches and headline grabbers.
“If we do a really good job,” he said, “the public may never know it, because the dogs won’t bark.”
When I took office, we had a whole kennel full of barking hounds, with Bosnia and Russia howling the loudest, and several others, including Somalia, Haiti, North Korea, and Japan’s trade policy, growling in the background.
The breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in the Warsaw Pact nations raised the prospect that Europe might become democratic, peaceful, and united for the first time in history. Whether it would happen turned on four great questions: Would East and West Germany be reunited; would Russia become a truly democratic, stable, nonimperial nation; what would happen to Yugoslavia, a cauldron of diverse ethnic provinces, which had been held together by the iron will of Marshal Tito; and would Russia and the former Communist countries be integrated into the European Union and the transatlantic NATO alliance with the United States and Canada?
By the time I became President, Germany had been reunited under the visionary leadership of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, with the strong support of President Bush and despite reservations in Europe about the political and economic power of a resurgent Germany. The other three questions were still open, and I knew that one of my most important responsibilities as President was to see that they were answered correctly.
During the election campaign, both President Bush and I had supported aid to Russia. At first I was more assertive than he was, but after prodding by former president Nixon, Bush announced that the G-7, the seven largest industrial nations—the United States, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan—would provide $24 billion to support democracy and economic reform in Russia. By the time Yeltsin came to Washington in June 1992 as Russia’s president, he was grateful and openly supporting Bush’s reelection. As I mentioned earlier, Yeltsin did agree to a courtesy meeting with me at Blair House on June 18, thanks to the friendship between Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev and Toby Gati, one of my foreign policy advisors. It didn’t bother me that Yeltsin was supporting Bush; I just wanted him to know that if I won, I would support him.
In November, a couple of days after the election, Yeltsin called to congratulate me and to urge me to come to Moscow as soon as possible to reaffirm America’s support for his reforms in the face of mounting opposition at home. Yeltsin had a hard row to hoe. He had been elected president of Russia in June 1991, when Russia was still part of the crumbling Soviet Union. In August, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was put under house arrest at his summer retreat on the Black Sea by conspirators intent on staging a coup d’état. Russian citizens took to the Moscow streets in protest. The defining moment of the drama came when Yeltsin, in office for just two months, climbed on a tank in front of the Russian White House, the parliamentary building under siege by the coup plotters. He urged the Russian people to defend their hard-won democracy. In effect, he was telling the reactionaries, “You may steal our freedom, but you’ll have to do it over my dead body.” Yeltsin’s heroic clarion call galvanized domestic and international support, and the coup failed. By December, the Soviet Union had dissolved into a collection of independent states, and Russia had taken the Soviet seat on the United Nations Security Council.
But Yeltsin’s problems were not over. Reactionary elements, smarting from their loss of power, opposed his determination to withdraw Soviet troops from the Baltic nations of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Economic disaster loomed, as the rotting remains of the Soviet economy were exposed to free-market reforms, which brought inflation and the sale of state-owned assets at low prices to a new class of ultrarich businessmen called “oligarchs,” who made America’s robber barons of the late nineteenth century look like Puritan preachers. Organized-crime networks also moved into the vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet state and spread their tentacles across the globe. Yeltsin had destroyed the old system, but had not yet been able to build a new one. He also had not developed a good working relationship with the Duma, Russia’s parliament, partly because he was by nature averse to compromise, partly because the Duma was full of people who longed for the old order or an equally oppressive new one rooted in ultra-nationalism.
Yeltsin was up to his ears in alligators, and I wanted to help him. I was encouraged to do so by Bob Strauss, whom President Bush had sent to Moscow as our ambassador even though he was an ardent Democrat and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Strauss said I could work with Yeltsin and give him good political advice, and he urged me to do both. I was inclined to accept Yeltsin’s invitation to go to Russia, but Tony Lake said Moscow shouldn’t be my first foreign stop, and the rest of my team said it would divert attention from our domestic agenda. They made strong arguments, but the United States had a big stake in Russia’s success, and we sure didn’t want hard-liners, either Communists or ultra-nationalists, in control there. Boris made it easier when he suggested a meeting in a mutually acceptable third country.
About this time, I persuaded my old friend and Oxford housemate Strobe Talbott to leave Time magazine and come to work in the State Department to help us with policy on the former Soviet Union. By then, Strobe and I had been discussing Russian history and politics for almost twenty-five years. Ever since he translated and edited Khrushchev’s memoirs, Strobe had known and cared more about Russia and the Russian people than anyone else I knew. He had a fine analytical mind and a fertile imagination behind his proper professorial façade, and I trusted both his judgment and his willingness to tell me the unvarnished truth. There was no position in the State Department hierarchy that described what I wanted Strobe to do, so he set out to create one, with the blessing of Warren Christopher and the help of Dick Holbrooke, an investment banker and veteran foreign policy hand who had provided advice during the campaign and who would become one of the most important figures in my administration. Eventually, Strobe’s new job had a title: ambassador-at-large and special advisor to the secretary of state on the new independent states of the former Soviet Union. He later became deputy secretary of state. I don’t think five people could repeat Strobe’s title, but everybody knew what he did: he was our “go to” man on Russia. For eight years, he was by my side in all my meetings with Presidents Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, eighteen with Yeltsin alone. Since Strobe spoke fluent Russian and took copious notes, his participation with me and his own interactions with the Russians guaranteed a precision and accuracy in our work that would prove invaluable. Strobe chronicles our eight-year odyssey in his book The Russia Hand, which is remarkable not only for its insights but for the verbatim accounts of the colorful conversations I had with Yeltsin. Unlike what happens in most books of the genre, the quotes are not reconstructions; they are, for good or ill, what we actually said. Strobe’s main point is that I became my own “Russia hand” because, while not an expert on Russia, I knew “one big thing: on the twin issues that had constituted the casus belli of the cold war—democracy versus dictatorship at home and cooperation versus competition abroad”—Yeltsin and I were, “in principle, on the same side.”
