My Life, page 74
By March, we seemed to be making some progress. Economic sanctions had been strengthened and seemed to be hurting the Serbs, who were also concerned about the possibility of military action by NATO. But we were a long way from a unified policy. On the ninth, in my first meeting with French president François Mitterrand, he made clear to me that, although he had sent five thousand French troops to Bosnia as part of a UN humanitarian force to deliver aid and contain the violence, he was more sympathetic to the Serbs than I was, and less willing to see a Muslim-led unified Bosnia. On the twenty-sixth, I met with Helmut Kohl, who deplored what was happening and who, like me, had favored lifting the arms embargo. But we couldn’t budge the British and French, who felt lifting the embargo would only prolong the war and endanger the UN forces on the ground that included their troops but not ours. Izetbegovic was also in the White House on the twenty-sixth to meet with Al Gore, whose national security aide, Leon Fuerth, was responsible for our success in making the embargo more effective. Both Kohl and I told Izetbegovic we were doing our best to get the Europeans to take a stronger stand to support him. Five days later, we succeeded in getting the United Nations to extend a “no fly” zone over all of Bosnia, to at least deprive the Serbs of the benefit of their monopoly on airpower. It was a good thing to do, but it didn’t slow the killing much. In April, a team of U.S. military, diplomatic, and humanitarian aid personnel returned from Bosnia urging that we intervene militarily to stop the suffering. On the sixteenth, the United Nations accepted our recommendation for declaring a “safe area” around Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia where Serb killing and ethnic cleansing had been especially outrageous. On the twenty-second, at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel publicly pleaded with me to do more to stop the violence. By the end of the month, my foreign policy team recommended that if we could not secure a Serbian cease-fire, we should lift the arms embargo against the Muslims and launch air strikes against Serb military targets. As Warren Christopher left for Europe to seek support for this policy, the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, hoping to avoid the air strikes, finally signed the UN peace plan, even though his assembly had rejected it just six days earlier. I didn’t believe for a minute that his signature signaled a change in his long-term objectives.
At the end of our first one hundred days, we were nowhere near a satisfactory solution to the Bosnian crisis. The British and French rebuffed Warren Christopher’s overtures and reaffirmed their right to take the lead in dealing with the situation. The problem with their position, of course, was that if the Serbs could take the economic hit of the tough sanctions, they could continue their aggressive ethnic cleansing without fear of further punishment. The Bosnian tragedy would drag on for more than two years, leaving more than 250,000 dead and 2.5 million driven from their homes, until NATO air attacks, aided by Serb military losses on the ground, led to an American diplomatic initiative that would bring the war to an end.
I had stepped into what Dick Holbrooke called “the greatest collective security failure of the West since the 1930s.” In his book To End a War, Holbrooke ascribes the failure to five factors: (1) a misreading of Balkan history, holding that the ethnic strife was too ancient and ingrained to be prevented by outsiders; (2) the apparent loss of Yugoslavia’s strategic importance after the end of the Cold War; (3) the triumph of nationalism over democracy as the dominant ideology of post-Communist Yugoslavia; (4) the reluctance of the Bush administration to undertake another military commitment so soon after the 1991 Iraq war; and (5) the decision of the United States to turn the issue over to Europe instead of NATO, and the confused and passive European response. To Holbrooke’s list I would add a sixth factor: some European leaders were not eager to have a Muslim state in the heart of the Balkans, fearing it might become a base for exporting extremism, a result that their neglect made more, not less, likely. My own options were constrained by the dug-in positions I found when I took office. For example, I was reluctant to go along with Senator Dole in unilaterally lifting the arms embargo, for fear of weakening the United Nations (though we later did so in effect, by declining to enforce it). I also didn’t want to divide the NATO alliance by unilaterally bombing Serb military positions, especially since there were European, but no American, soldiers on the ground with the UN mission. And I didn’t want to send American troops there, putting them in harm’s way under a UN mandate I thought was bound to fail. In May 1993, we were still a long way from a solution.
At the end of the first one hundred days of a new presidency, the press always does an assessment of how well the new administration is doing in keeping its campaign promises and dealing with the other challenges that have arisen. The consensus of the reviews was that my initial performance was mixed. On the positive side of the ledger, I had created a National Economic Council in the White House and put together an ambitious economic program to reverse twelve years of trickle-down economics, and it was making progress in the Congress. I had signed the family leave law, and the “motor voter” law to make voter registration easier, and had reversed the Reagan-Bush abortion policies, including the ban on fetal-tissue research and the gag rule. I had reduced the size of the White House staff, despite its increasing workload; for example, we received more mail in the first three and a half months than had come to the White House in all of 1992. I had also ordered a reduction of 100,000 in total federal employment, and put Vice President Gore in charge of finding new savings and better ways to serve the public with a “reinventing government” initiative whose considerable results would eventually prove the skeptics wrong. I had sent legislation to Congress to create my national service program, to double the Earned Income Tax Credit and create empowerment zones in poor communities, and to dramatically cut the cost of college loans, saving billions of dollars for both students and taxpayers. I had put health-care reform on a fast track and had taken strong action to strengthen democracy and reform in Russia. And I was blessed with a hardworking and able staff and cabinet who, apart from the leaks, worked well together, without the backbiting and infighting that had characterized many previous administrations. After a slow start, I had filled more required presidential appointments in the first hundred days than President Reagan or President Bush had in the same period of time, not bad considering how cumbersome and overly intrusive the whole appointments process had become. At one point, Senator Alan Simpson, the witty Republican whip from Wyoming, joked to me that the process was so overdone that he “wouldn’t even want to have dinner with someone who could be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.”
On the negative side, I had temporarily dropped the middle-class tax cut in the face of the growing deficit; lost the stimulus program to a Republican filibuster; maintained the Bush policy of forcibly returning Haitian refugees, though we were taking in more Haitians by other means; lost the gays-in-themilitary fight; delayed presenting the health-care plan beyond my hundred-day goal; mishandled at least the public part of the Waco raid; and failed to convince Europe to join with the United States in taking a stronger stand in Bosnia, although we had increased humanitarian aid, strengthened sanctions against Serbia, and created an enforceable no-fly zone.
One reason my scorecard was mixed was that I was trying to do so much in the face of determined Republican opposition and mixed feelings among the American people about how much government could or should do. After all, the people had been told for twelve years that government was the source of all our problems, and was so incompetent it couldn’t organize a two-car parade. Clearly, I had overestimated how much I could do in a hurry. The country had been going in one direction for more than a decade, living with wedge politics, reassuring bromides about how great we were, and the illusory, though fleeting, comforts of spending more and taxing less today and ignoring the consequences for tomorrow. It was going to take more than a hundred days to turn things around. In addition to the pace of change, I may have overestimated the amount of change I could achieve, as well as how much of it the American people could digest. In one post–hundred-days analysis, a Vanderbilt University political scientist, Erwin Hargrove, observed, “I wonder whether the president isn’t spreading himself too thin.” He was probably right, but there was so much to do, and I didn’t stop trying to do it all at once until the voters hit me between the eyes with a two-by-four in the 1994 midterm elections. I had let my sense of urgency blot out the memory of another of my laws of politics: Everyone is for change in general, but against it in particular, when they themselves have to change. The public struggles of the first hundred days didn’t occur in a vacuum; at the same time, my family was adjusting to a dramatic change in our way of life and dealing with the loss of Hillary’s dad. I loved being President and Hillary was deeply committed to her health-care work. Chelsea liked her school and was making new friends. We enjoyed living in the White House, hosting the social events, and having our friends stay with us.
The White House staff was getting used to a first family that kept longer, and later, hours. Though I came to rely on them and greatly value their service, it took me a while to get used to all the help I had in the White House. As governor, I’d lived in a mansion with a fine staff, and had been driven everywhere by the state police security detail. But on weekends, Hillary and I usually cooked for ourselves, and I drove the car to church on Sundays. Now I had valets who laid my clothes out every morning, packed for my trips, and went along to unpack and steam the wrinkles out; butlers who stayed late, came early, and worked weekends, serving me food and bringing me diet drinks and coffee; navy stewards who performed those same functions when I was in the Oval Office and traveling; a kitchen staff who prepared food for us even on weekends; ushers to take me up and down in the elevator and bring me papers to sign and memos to read at all hours; round-the-clock medical care; and the Secret Service, who wouldn’t even let me ride in the front seat, much less drive. One of the things I liked best about living in the White House was the fresh flowers that filled the residence and office spaces. The White House always had beautifully arranged flowers. It’s one of the things I would miss most after I left.
When we moved in, Hillary redid the little kitchen so that we could eat dinner there at night when it was just the three of us. The upstairs dining room was beautiful, but too big and formal for our taste unless we had guests. Hillary also fixed up the solarium on the third floor, a bright room that leads out to a balcony and the White House roof. We turned it into a family room. Whenever we had relatives or friends staying with us, we always gravitated to the solarium, to talk, watch TV, and play cards or board games. I became addicted to Master Boggle and a game called UpWords; it’s basically a threedimensional Scrabble game in which you get more points not by using odd letters or landing on certain spaces, but by building words upon words. I tried to get my family and friends into UpWords, succeeding with some more than others. My brother-in-law Hugh played countless games of UpWords with me, and Roger liked it. But Hillary, Tony, and Chelsea preferred our old standby, pinochle. I continued to play hearts with my staff and we all got hooked on a new card game that Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw taught us when they were visiting. It had a perfect name for Washington political life: Oh Hell!
The Secret Service had been with me since the New Hampshire primary, but once I got into the White House, I presented a challenge to them with my morning jogs. I had several jogging routes. Sometimes I drove out to Haines Point, which had a three-mile route around a public golf course. It was flat, but could be tough in the winter when the winds off the Potomac were strong. From time to time I also ran at Fort McNair, which has an oval route on the grounds of the National Defense University. My favorite jog by far was just to run out the Southwest Gate of the White House to the Mall, then up to the Lincoln Memorial, back down to the Capitol, and home. I met a lot of interesting people on those runs, and never tired of running through American history. When the Secret Service finally asked me to stop because of security concerns, I did, but I missed it. To me, these public runs were a way to keep in touch with the world beyond the White House. To them, with the memory of John Hinckley’s assassination attempt on President Reagan never far from their minds and with more knowledge than I had of the hate mail I was getting, my contacts with the public were a worrisome risk to be managed. Al Gore helped me a lot in the early days, encouraging me to keep making hard decisions and put them behind me, and giving me a continuing crash course in how Washington works. Part of our regular routine was having lunch alone in my private dining room once a week. We took turns saying grace, then proceeded to talk about everything from our families to sports, books, and movies to the latest items on his agenda or mine. We kept our lunch schedule up for eight years, except when one of us was gone for several days at a stretch. Though we had a lot in common, we were very different, and the lunches kept us closer than we otherwise would have been in the Washington pressure cooker, and eased my adjustment to my new life.
All things considered, I felt pretty good, personally and politically, about the first one hundred days. Still, I was under a lot of stress. So was Hillary. For all our excitement and commitment, we were tired going in, not having taken any real time off after the election. Then we were denied the honeymoon traditionally given new Presidents, partly because of the way the gays-in-the military issue surfaced early, perhaps because we made the press angry by restricting access to the West Wing. Hillary’s father’s death was a painful loss to her. I missed Hugh, too, and for a while, it was harder for both of us to operate at the top of our games. Though we very much enjoyed the work, the physical and emotional toll of the first hundred days was considerable.
THIRTY-THREE
While deficit reduction was essential to my economic strategy, it was not sufficient to build a sustained, widely shared recovery. In the early months, we filled out the agenda with initiatives to expand trade, increase investment in education and training, and promote a host of micro-economic issues aimed at particular trouble spots or targets of opportunity. For example, I offered proposals to help military and civilian personnel who had lost their jobs as a result of the post–Cold War decline in defense spending; urged our major federal research labs—Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico, and Livermore in California—to use the massive scientific and technological resources that had helped win the Cold War to develop new technologies with commercial applications; announced a micro-loan program to support budding entrepreneurs, including welfare recipients eager to get off the rolls, who often had good ideas but couldn’t meet the credit standards of traditional lenders; increased the volume of Small Business Administration loans, especially to women and minorities; and named a National Commission to Ensure a Strong and Competitive Airline Industry, chaired by former Virginia governor Jerry Baliles. The airline manufacturers and carriers were in trouble because of the economic downturn, fewer orders for military planes, and stiff competition from the European manufacturer Airbus. I also offered plans to help communities develop commercial uses for the military facilities that would be closed as defense was downsized. As governor, I had dealt with the closing of an air force base, and I was determined to give more aid to those facing the same challenge now. Since California was, by itself, the world’s sixth-largest economy, and it had been hit especially hard by defense downsizing and other problems, we developed a special plan to promote recovery there. John Emerson had the responsibility of riding herd on the project and other matters of concern to his native state. He was so unrelenting in doing so that he became known around the White House as the “Secretary of California.”
One of the most effective things we did was to reform the regulations governing financial institutions under the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. The law required federally insured lenders to make an extra effort to give loans to low-and modest-income borrowers, but before 1993 it had never had much impact. After the changes we made, between 1993 and 2000, banks would offer more than $800 billion in home mortgage, small-business, and community development loans to borrowers covered by the law, a staggering figure that amounted to well over 90 percent of all the loans made in the twenty-three years of the Community Reinvestment Act.
May was an interesting month, and valuable for my continuing political education. On the fifth, I awarded my first Presidential Medal of Freedom to my old mentor Senator Fulbright on his eightyeighth birthday. Al Gore’s father was at the ceremony, and when he reminded Fulbright that he himself was only eighty-five, Fulbright replied, “Albert, if you behave yourself, you’ll make it, too.” I admired both men for what they’d done for America; I wondered if I would live as long as they had; if so, I hoped I could wear the years as well.
In the third week of the month, I went to California to emphasize the investments in the economic plan for education and inner-city development at a town hall meeting in San Diego, a community college in Van Nuys with a large Hispanic enrollment, and a sporting-goods store in South Central Los Angeles where the riots had occurred a year earlier. I especially enjoyed the last event. The athletic store, called the Playground, had a basketball court out back, which had become a gathering place for young people. Ron Brown was with me, and we took some of the kids and played each other in an impromptu basketball game, after which I talked about the potential of empowerment zones to create more successful businesses like the Playground in poor communities all across America. I’m pretty sure this was the first time a President ever played basketball with inner-city kids in their backyard, and I hoped that pictures of the game would send a message to America about the new administration’s priorities, and to young people in particular that I cared about them and their futures. Unfortunately, most Americans never heard about the basketball game because I got a haircut. I hadn’t found a barber in Washington yet; I couldn’t go back to Arkansas every three weeks to see Jim Miles, and my hair was too long. Hillary had had her hair done by a man in Los Angeles, Cristophe Schatteman, who was a friend of the Thomasons and whom I liked very much. I asked Cristophe if he would be willing to give me a quick trim. He agreed to do it and met me in my private quarters on Air Force One. Before we started, I asked the Secret Service not once, but twice, to make sure I wouldn’t cause any delay in takeoffs or landings if I put off our departure for a few minutes. They checked with the airport personnel, who said it would be no problem. Then I asked Cristophe just to make me presentable as quickly as possible. He did, in ten minutes or so, and we took off. The next thing I knew, there was a story out that I had kept two runways tied up for an hour, inconveniencing thousands of people, while I got a $200 haircut from a fancy hairdresser who was known only by his first name. Forget the basketball game with inner-city kids; the irresistible news was that I had shed my Arkansas roots and populist politics for an expensive indulgence. It was a great story, but it wasn’t true. First of all, I didn’t pay $200 for the ten-minute trim. Second, I didn’t keep anybody waiting to take off or land, as the Federal Aviation Administration records showed when they were finally released a few weeks later. I was appalled that anyone would think I’d do such a thing. I might have been President, but Mother would still have given me a whipping if I’d kept a lot of people waiting an hour while I got a haircut, much less a $200 one.
