My Life, page 86
Though she was identified in the article only as Paula, Jones claimed her family and friends recognized her when they read the article. She said she wanted to clear her name, but instead of suing the Spectator for libel, she accused me of sexually harassing her and said that, after she rebuffed my unwanted advances, she was denied the annual pay raises normally given to state employees. At the time she was a clerical employee of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Initially, Jones’s debut with Cliff Jackson didn’t get much publicity, but on May 6, two days before the statute of limitations expired, she filed suit against me, seeking $700,000 for my alleged harassment. Before she filed the suit, Jones’s first lawyer had made contact with a man in Little Rock who got in touch with my office, telling us that the lawyer had said that her case was weak and that if I would pay her $50,000 and help her and her husband, Steve, who turned out to be a conservative Clinton hater, get jobs in Hollywood, she wouldn’t sue me. I didn’t pay because I hadn’t sexually harassed her, and contrary to her other allegation, she had received her annual pay increases. Now I had to hire another lawyer to defend myself, Washington attorney Bob Bennett.
I spent most of the rest of May campaigning for the health-care and crime bills across the country, but there were always other things going on as well. By far the best of them was the birth of our first nephew, Tyler Cassidy Clinton, whom Roger and Molly brought into the world on May 12. On the eighteenth, I signed an important Head Start reform bill, on which Secretaries Shalala and Riley had worked hard; it increased the number of poor children served by the preschool program, improved its quality, and provided services for children under three for the first time with our new Early Head Start initiative.
The next day I welcomed Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao of India to the White House. The Cold War and clumsy diplomacy had kept India and the United States apart for too long. With a population of nearly one billion, India was the world’s largest democracy. Over the previous three decades, tensions with China had driven it closer to the Soviet Union, and the Cold War had pushed the United States closer to India’s neighbor Pakistan. Since becoming independent, the two nations had been involved in a bitter, seemingly endless dispute over Kashmir, the predominantly Muslim region in northern India. With the Cold War over, I thought I had an opportunity, as well as an obligation, to improve U.S.-India relations.
The main sticking point was the conflict between our efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons and India’s drive to develop them, which the Indians saw as a necessary deterrent to China’s nuclear arsenal and a prerequisite to its becoming a world power. Pakistan had developed a nuclear program, too, creating a dangerous situation on the Indian subcontinent. I believed that their nuclear arsenals made both India and Pakistan less secure, but the Indians didn’t see it that way and were determined not to let the United States interfere with what they saw as their legitimate prerogative to proceed with their nuclear program. Even so, the Indians wanted to improve our relations as much as I did. While we didn’t resolve our differences, Prime Minister Rao and I broke the ice and began a new chapter in Indo-U.S. relations, which continued to warm throughout my two terms and afterward. On the day I met with Prime Minister Rao, Jackie Kennedy Onassis died after a battle with cancer. She was only sixty-four. Jackie was the most private of our great public icons, to most people an indelible image of elegance, grace, and grieving. To those lucky enough to know her, she was what she seemed to be, but much more—a bright woman full of life, a fine mother and good friend. I knew how much her children, John and Caroline, and her companion, Maurice Tempelsman, would miss her. Hillary would miss her, too; she had been a source of constant encouragement, sound advice, and genuine friendship. At the end of May, I had to decide whether to extend most-favored-nation status to China. MFN was actually a slightly misleading term for normal trade relations without any extra tariffs or other barriers. America already had a sizable trade deficit with China, one that would grow over the years as the United States purchased between 35 and 40 percent of Chinese exports annually. After the violence in Tiananmen Square and the crackdown on dissidents that followed, Americans from across the political spectrum felt the Bush administration had been too quick to reestablish normal relations with Beijing. During the election campaign I had been critical of President Bush’s policy, and in 1993 I had issued an executive order requiring progress on a range of issues from emigration to human rights to forced prison labor before I would extend MFN to China. In May, Warren Christopher sent me a report saying that all the emigration cases had been resolved; that we had signed a memorandum of understanding on how to deal with the prison labor issue; and that for the first time China had said that it would adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On the other hand, Christopher said, there were still human rights abuses in the arrest and detention of peaceful political dissidents and the repression of Tibet’s religious and cultural traditions.
China was extremely sensitive to other nations “interfering” in its political affairs. The Chinese leaders also felt that they were managing all the change they could handle with their economic modernization program and attendant huge population shifts from inland provinces to booming coastal cities. Because our engagement had produced some positive results, I decided, with the unanimous support of my foreign policy and economic advisors, to extend MFN and, for the future, to delink our human rights efforts from trade. The United States had a big stake in bringing China into the global community. Greater trade and involvement would bring more prosperity to Chinese citizens; more contacts with the outside world; more cooperation on problems like North Korea, where we needed it; greater adherence to the rules of international law; and, we hoped, the advance of personal freedom and human rights. In the first week of June, Hillary and I went to Europe to honor the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, June 6, 1944, when the United States and its allies crossed the English Channel and stormed the beaches of Normandy. It was the largest naval invasion in history and marked the beginning of the end of World War II in Europe.
The trip began in Rome, with a visit to the Vatican to see the pope and Italy’s new prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, the country’s biggest media owner and a political novice, who had put together an interesting coalition that included an extreme right-wing party that evoked comparisons with fascism. Despite his incomplete recovery from a broken leg, His Holiness Pope John Paul II was vigorous in discussing world issues, ranging from whether religious liberty could be secured in China to the possibilities of cooperation with moderate Muslim countries to our differences over how best to limit population explosion and promote sustainable development in poor nations. Berlusconi was, in some ways, Italy’s first television-age politician: charismatic, strong-willed, and determined to bring his own brand of discipline and direction to Italy’s notoriously unstable political life. His critics accused him of trying to impose a neo-fascist order on Italy, a charge he strongly denied. I was pleased with Berlusconi’s assurances that he was committed to preserving democracy and human rights, maintaining Italy’s historic partnership with the United States, and fulfilling Italy’s NATO responsibilities in Bosnia.
On June 3, I spoke at the American cemetery at Nettuno, once scarred by battle, now lush with pine and cypress trees. Row after row of marble headstones display the names of the 7,862 soldiers buried there. The names of another 3,000 Americans whose bodies were never found are inscribed in the chapel nearby. All of them died too young, in the liberation of Italy. This was the battle theater in which my father had served.
The next day we were in England, at Mildenhall Air Force Base near Cambridge, where we went to another American cemetery, this one with the names of 3,812 airmen, soldiers, and sailors who had been based there, and another Wall of the Missing with more than 5,000 names on it, including two who never returned from their flights over the English Channel: Joe Kennedy Jr., the oldest of the Kennedy children, who everyone thought would become the politician in the family; and Glenn Miller, the American bandleader whose music was all the rage in the 1940s. At the event the Air Force Band played Miller’s theme song, “Moonlight Serenade.”
After a meeting with John Major at Chequers, the fifteenth-century country residence of the British prime minister, Hillary and I attended a mammoth dinner in Portsmouth, where I was seated next to the queen. I was taken with her grace and intelligence and the clever manner in which she discussed public issues, probing me for information and insights without venturing too far into expressing her own political views, which was taboo for the British head of state. Her Majesty impressed me as someone who, but for the circumstance of her birth, might have become a successful politician or diplomat. As it was, she had to be both, without quite seeming to be either.
After the dinner we were guests of the royal family on their yacht, the HMS Britannia, where we had the pleasure of spending time with the Queen Mother, who at ninety-three was still lively and lovely, with luminous, piercing eyes. The following morning, the day before D-day, we all attended the Drumhead Service, the religious ceremony for “the Forces Committed” to battle. Princess Diana, who was separated but not divorced from Prince Charles, also came. After saying hello to Hillary and me, she went out into the crowd to shake hands with her fellow countrymen, who were obviously happy to see her. During the little time I had spent with Charles and Diana, I liked them both and wished that life had dealt them a different hand.
When the service was over, we boarded the Britannia for lunch and sailed out into the English Channel, to begin the crossing among a huge fleet of ships. After a short sail, we said good-bye to the royal family and boarded a small boat crewed by U.S. Navy SEALs, which took us to the aircraft carrier George Washington for the rest of the voyage. Hillary and I enjoyed dinner with some of the six thousand sailors and marines who manned the ship, and I worked on my speeches.
On D-day, I spoke at Pointe du Hoc, Utah Beach, and the U.S. cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. Each site was filled with veterans from World War II.
I also took a walk on Utah Beach with three veterans, one of whom had won the Medal of Honor for heroism on that fateful day fifty years earlier. This was his first trip back. He told me we were standing almost exactly where he had landed in 1944. Then he pointed up the beach and told me his brother had landed a few hundred yards in that direction. He said, “It’s funny how life works out. I won the Medal of Honor and my brother was killed.” “You still miss him, don’t you?” I asked. I’ll never forget his reply: “Every day, for fifty years.”
At the ceremony, I was introduced by Joe Dawson of Corpus Christi, Texas, who, as a young captain, was credited as being the first officer to successfully reach the top of the forbidding bluffs of Normandy under withering German fire. Almost 9,400 Americans died on D-day, including thirty-three pairs of brothers, a father and his son, and eleven men from tiny Bedford, Virginia. I acknowledged that those who survived and had returned to the scene of their triumph “may walk with a little less spring in their step and their ranks are growing thinner. But let us never forget, when they were young, these men saved the world.”
The next day I was in Paris to meet with Mayor Jacques Chirac, speak to the French National Assembly in the Palais Bourbon, and attend a dinner hosted by President François Mitterrand at the Elysée Palace. Mitterrand’s dinner ended about midnight, and I was surprised when he asked me if Hillary and I would like to see the “New Louvre,” the magnificent creation of Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei. Mitterrand was seventy-seven and in ill health, but he was eager to show off France’s latest masterpiece. When François, U.S. ambassador Pamela Harriman, Hillary, and I arrived, we found that our tour guide was none other than Pei himself. We looked at the magnificent glass pyramid, the restored and adapted old buildings, and the excavated Roman ruins for more than an hour and a half. Mitterrand’s energy never flagged as he supplemented Pei’s narrative to make sure we didn’t miss anything. The final day of the trip was a personal one, a return to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. It was one of those perfect English spring days. The sun was shining, a breeze was blowing, and the trees, wisteria, and flowers were all in bloom. In brief remarks, I referred to the D-day commemoration, then said, “History does not always give us grand crusades, but it always gives us opportunities.” We had plenty of them, at home and abroad: restoring economic growth, extending the reach of democracy, ending environmental destruction, building a new security in Europe, and halting “the spread of nuclear weapons and terrorism.” Hillary and I had had an unforgettable week, but it was time to get back to those “opportunities.”
The day after I returned, Senator Kennedy’s Labor and Human Resources Committee reported out a health-care reform bill. It was the first time legislation providing universal coverage had ever even made it out of a full congressional committee. One Republican, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, had voted for it. Jeffords encouraged me to keep reaching out to Republicans. He said that with a couple of amendments that wouldn’t gut the bill we could pick up a few more votes.
Our euphoria was short-lived. Two days later, Bob Dole, after having told me earlier that we would work out a compromise on the issue, announced that he would block any health-care legislation and make my program a major issue in the November congressional elections. A few days later, Newt Gingrich was quoted as saying the Republican strategy was to make health-care reform unpassable by voting against improving amendments. He was as good as his word. On June 30, the House Ways and Means Committee voted out a universal coverage bill without a single Republican vote. The Republican leaders had received a memorandum from William Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, urging them to kill health-care reform. Kristol said the Republicans couldn’t afford to allow anything to pass; a success on health care would present a “serious political threat to the Republican Party,” while its demise would be a “monumental setback for the President.” At the end of May, at a Memorial Day retreat, the Republican congressional leaders decided to adopt Kristol’s position. I wasn’t surprised that Gingrich would follow Kristol’s hard line; his goal was to win the House and push the country to the right. Dole, on the other hand, was genuinely interested in health care and knew we needed to reform the system. But he was running for President. All he had to do was to hold forty-one of his fellow Republicans for a filibuster and we were sunk. On June 21, I transmitted to Congress a welfare reform bill designed by Donna Shalala, Bruce Reed, and their topflight policy people to make welfare “a second chance, not a way of life.” The bill was the product of months of consultations with every affected interest group, from governors to people on welfare. The legislation required able-bodied people to go to work after two years on welfare, during which time the government would provide education and training for them. If there was no privatesector job available, the welfare recipient would be required to take a government-subsidized one. Other provisions were designed to make sure recipients wouldn’t be worse off economically in the workforce than they had been on welfare, including more money for child-support enforcement, and continuing health and nutritional coverage for a transition period under Medicaid and the food stamp program. These changes, plus the large EITC tax cut for low-wage workers enacted in 1993, would be more than enough to make even low-wage jobs more attractive than welfare. Of course, if we passed health-care reform, lower-income workers would have permanent, not just temporary, health coverage, and welfare reform would be even more successful.
I also proposed to end the perverse incentive in the present system under which young teen mothers received more aid if they moved out of their homes than if they continued to live with their parents and stayed in school. And I urged Congress to toughen the child-support enforcement law, to force absent parents to come up with more of the startling $34 billion worth of court-ordered, but still unpaid, child support. Secretary Shalala had already granted several states “waivers” from existing federal rules to pursue many of these reforms, and they were producing results: the welfare rolls were already dropping sharply.
June was a big month for international affairs: I tightened sanctions on Haiti; Hillary and I hosted a state dinner for the emperor and empress of Japan, both highly intelligent, gentle people who spread goodwill for their country wherever they went; and I met with King Hussein of Jordan, and the presidents of Hungary, Slovakia, and Chile. By far the biggest foreign policy issue, however, was North Korea. As I mentioned earlier, North Korea had prevented inspections by the IAEA to make sure their spent fuel rods were not being reprocessed into plutonium for nuclear weapons. In March, when the inspections were stopped, I had pledged to seek UN sanctions against North Korea and refused to rule out military action. It got worse after that. In May, North Korea began to discharge fuel from a reactor in a way that prevented the inspectors from adequately monitoring its operation and determining what use was being made of the spent fuel.
President Carter called me on June 1 and said he would like to go to North Korea to try to resolve the problem. I sent Ambassador Bob Gallucci, who was handling the matter for us, down to Plains, Georgia, to brief Carter on the seriousness of the North Korean violations. He still wanted to go, and after consulting with Al Gore and my national security team, I decided it was worth trying. About three weeks earlier, I had received a sobering estimate of the staggering losses both sides would suffer if war broke out. I was in Europe for D-day, so Al Gore called Carter and told him that I had no objection to his going to North Korea as long as President Kim Il Sung understood that I would not agree to a suspension of the sanctions unless North Korea let the inspectors do their jobs, agreed to freeze its nuclear program, and committed to a new round of talks with the United States on building a non-nuclear future. On June 16, President Carter called from Pyongyang and then did a live interview on CNN saying that Kim would not expel the inspectors from its nuclear complex as long as good-faith efforts were made to resolve the differences over international inspections. Carter then said that because of this “very positive step,” our administration should ease its sanction efforts and start high-level negotiations with North Korea. I replied that if North Korea was prepared to freeze its nuclear program, we would return to talks, but it wasn’t clear to me that North Korea had agreed to that.
