My Life, page 87
Based on previous experience, I was unwilling to trust North Korea and would leave the sanctions hanging until we received official confirmation of North Korea’s change in policy. Within a week we got it, when President Kim sent me a letter confirming what he had told Carter and accepting our other preconditions for talks. I thanked President Carter for his efforts and announced that North Korea had agreed to all our conditions, and that North and South Korea had agreed to discuss a possible meeting between their presidents. In return, I said that the United States was willing to start talks with North Korea in Geneva the following month, and that while they were taking place we would suspend our sanctions efforts.
At the end of June, I announced several staff changes that I hoped would better equip us to deal with our large legislative agenda and the elections just four months away. A few weeks earlier Mack McLarty had told me he thought it was time for him to change jobs. He had taken a lot of hits for the Travel Office and had endured countless press stories criticizing our decision-making process. Mack suggested that I appoint Leon Panetta chief of staff, because he had a good understanding of Congress and the press and would run a tight ship. When word got out about Mack, others also favored Leon for the job. Mack said he would like to try to build bridges to moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress, and to oversee our preparations for the Summit of the Americas, to be held in Miami in December.
I thought Mack had done a better job than he had gotten credit for, managing a much smaller White House with a much heavier workload, and playing a pivotal role in our victories on the economic plan and NAFTA. As Bob Rubin often said, Mack had established a collegial atmosphere within the White House and with the cabinet that many previous administrations never achieved. This environment had helped us to get a lot done, both in Congress and with the government agencies. It had also encouraged the kind of free and open debate that led to criticism of our decision-making process, but that, given the complexity and novelty of many of our challenges, led to better decisions. Moreover, I doubted there was much we could do, apart from reducing the leaks, to avoid the negative press coverage. Professor Thomas Patterson, an authority on the media’s role in elections, had recently published an important book, Out of Order, which helped me to better understand what was going on, and to take it less personally. Patterson’s thesis was that press coverage of presidential campaigns had become steadily more negative over the past twenty years or so, as the press had come to see itself as the “mediator” between candidates and the public, with the responsibility to tell the voters how they should view the candidates and what was wrong with them. In 1992, Bush, Perot, and I had all received more negative than positive coverage.
In his postscript to the 1994 edition of Out of Order, Patterson said that, after the ’92 election, the media for the first time had taken its negative bias from the campaign straight into its coverage of the administration. Now, he said, a President’s news coverage “depends less on his actual performance in office than on the media’s cynical bias. The press nearly always magnifies the bad and underplays the good.” For example, the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs said that, on my handling of domestic policy issues, the coverage was 60 percent negative, mostly focusing on broken campaign commitments, even though, as Patterson said, I had kept “dozens” of my campaign commitments and that I was a President who “should have acquired a reputation for fulfilling his promises,” in part by prevailing in Congress on 88 percent of contested votes, a mark bettered only by Eisenhower in 1953 and Johnson in 1965. Patterson concluded that the negative coverage drove down not only my approval rating but also public support for my programs, including health care, and thus “imposed extraordinary costs on the Clinton presidency and the national interest.”
In the summer of 1994, Thomas Patterson’s book helped me to see that there might be nothing I could do to change the press coverage. If that was true, I had to learn to handle it better. Mack McLarty had never sought the chief of staff’s job, and Leon Panetta was willing to take on the challenge. He had already built a record at OMB that would be hard to improve on—our first two budgets were the first in seventeen years to be adopted by Congress on time; the budgets guaranteed three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since Truman was President; and perhaps most impressive, they brought the first reduction in discretionary domestic spending in twenty-five years, while still providing increases for education, Head Start, job training, and new technologies. Perhaps as chief of staff, Leon could more clearly communicate what we had done and were trying to accomplish for America. I named him, and appointed Mack counselor to the President, with the job description he had recommended.
Photo Insert 2
The inauguration and an inaugural ball, January 20, 1993
Al Gore and I with the cabinet: (standing, from left) Madeleine Albright, Mack McLarty, Mickey Kantor, Laura Tyson, Leon Panetta, Carol Browner, Lee Brown; (seated, from bottom left) Lloyd Bentsen, Janet Reno, Mike Espy, Robert Reich, Henry Cisneros, Hazel O’Leary, Richard Riley, Jesse Brown, Federico Peña, Donna Shalala, Ron Brown, Bruce Babbitt, Les Aspin, and Warren Christopher
Al and I praying at our weekly lunch
With Mother, Dick Kelley, and Champ, in Hot Springs
Mack McLarty and I attending the Summit of the Americas, in Santiago, Chile
In the residence private study, with Presidents George Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford on the eve of the announcement of the campaign for NAFTA
With the White House residence butlers and staff
With Hillary in Wyoming
Mother, Roger, and I celebrate our last Christmas together.
Chelsea in The Nutcracker
Ron Brown and I playing an impromptu basketball game in South Central Los Angeles
Al and I, on the South Lawn, announcing the elimination of forklifts of government regulations, part of our Reinventing Government initiative
Straightening Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s tie. It would be our last time together.
Tony Lake informs me of Rabin’s death.
Arriving on Marine One, with Bruce Lindsey and Erskine Bowles
Bosnia briefing in the White House Situation Room
With AmeriCorps volunteers at a tornado site in Arkansas
Chelsea’s graduation from Sidwell Friends
Rahm Emanuel and Leon Panetta brief me in the Oval Office dining room.
Riding with Harold Ickes in Montana
With Hillary
Al and I on the edge of the Grand Canyon establishing the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument
On the golf course with Frank Raines, Erskine Bowles, Vernon Jordan, and Max Chapman
A strategy meeting in the Yellow Oval Room
With Republican leaders Representative Newt Gingrich and Senator Bob Dole in the Cabinet Room
With Democratic leaders Representative Richard Gephardt and Senator Tom Daschle in the Oval Office
Russian president Boris Yeltsin and I in Hyde Park, New York
With German chancellor Helmut Kohl at Warburg Castle
Reading “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” to children in the East Room with Hillary and Chelsea
Chelsea and I at Ron Brown’s funeral
Our friends Queen Noor and King Hussein join Hillary and me on the Truman Balcony.
Speaking about America’s bridge to the twenty-first century at Arizona State University
Promoting education at an event in California
Celebrating our 1996 victory aboard Air Force One
Signing an executive order with representatives of Native American Tribal Governments
Visiting with the troops in Kuwait
Briefing in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, with my Middle East team: Madeleine Albright, Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Rob Malley, Bruce Reidel, and Sandy Berger. Deputy Chief of Staff Maria Echaveste is at far right.
With the economic team in the Oval Office
Playing cards with Bruce Lindsey, Doug Sosnik, and Joe Lockhart on Marine One
My legal team: Cheryl Mills, Bruce Lindsey, David Kendall, Chuck Ruff, and Nicole Seligman
With White House valets Fred Sanchez and Lito Bautista, my doctor Connie Mariano, valet Joe Fama, and Oval Office steward Bayani Nelvis
Oval Office steward Glen Maes shows Al and me the cake he made for my birthday.
Playing with Buddy and my nephews Zachary and Tyler on the South Lawn
Socks briefing the press
South African president Nelson Mandela and I in the cell on Robben Island, where he had spent the first eighteen of his twenty-seven years in captivity
With Japanese prime minister Keizo Obuchi in Tokyo
With Chinese president Jiang Zemin in the Oval Office
The Vallenato Children performing in Cartagena, with Chelsea and the president of Colombia, Andrés Pastrana
The G-8 meeting in Denver: (left to right) Jacques Delors, Tony Blair, Ryutaro Hashimoto, Helmut Kohl, Boris Yeltsin, me, Jacques Chirac, Jean Chrétien, Romano Prodi, and Wim Kok
With the cabinet: (first row) Bruce Babbitt, William Cohen, Madeleine Albright, me, Larry Summers, Janet Reno; (second row) George Tenet, Togo West, Bill Richardson, Andrew Cuomo, Alexis Herman, Dan Glickman, John Podesta, William Daley, Donna Shalala, Rodney Slater, Richard Riley, Carol Browner; (back row) Thurgood Marshall, Jr., Bruce Reed, James Lee Witt, Charlene Barshefsky, Martin Baily, Jack Lew, Barry McCaffrey, Aida Alvarez, Gene Sperling, and Sandy Berger
With Tony Blair at Chequers
Hillary and I touring a Kosovar refugee camp in Macedonia
Hillary and I with a newborn child named Bill Clinton in Wanyange, Uganda
Addressing a crowd of more than 500,000 in Independence Square, Ghana
Commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the voting rights march in Selma, Alabama, by crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, and other veterans of the civil rights movement who had marched arm in arm with Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hillary, Chelsea, and I at an MIA excavation site in Vietnam, with the Evert family
Being showered with rose petals in a traditional ceremony in Naila, India
Camp David Middle East peace summit, with Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Chairman Yasser Arafat, and my Arabic translator and Middle East advisor, Gemal Helal
With Gerry Adams, John Hume, and David Trimble on St. Patrick’s Day 2000
Addressing a crowd in Market Square, Dundalk, Northern Ireland
Bringing the Internet into America’s classrooms, with Dick Riley
With my presidential aides Doug Band, Kris Engskov, Stephen Goodin, and Andrew Friendly
The special agents in charge, presidential protective division, United States Secret Service, with Nancy Hernreich, director of Oval Office Operations, and my secretary Betty Currie
Celebrating with my staff after my final address to the nation
February 7, 2000: Hillary announces her campaign for the Senate
Chelsea and I wait for Hillary as she casts her first vote as a candidate, Chappaqua, New York.
My last moments in the Oval Office after placing the traditional letter to its next occupant on the Resolute desk
THIRTY-NINE
June brought the first real action from Robert Fiske. He had decided to conduct an independent inquiry into Vince Foster’s death since so many questions had been raised about it in the media and by Republicans in Congress. I was glad Fiske was looking at it. The scandal machine was trying to get blood out of a turnip, and maybe this would shut them up and give Vince’s family some relief. Some of the charges and antics would have been funny except for the tragedy involved. One of the loudest and most sanctimonious of the “Foster was murdered” crowd was Republican congressman Dan Burton of Indiana. In an attempt to prove that Vince couldn’t have killed himself, Burton went out in his backyard and shot a revolver into a watermelon. It was nutty. I never could figure out what Burton was trying to prove.
Fiske interviewed Hillary and me. It was a straightforward, professional session, and afterward I knew he would be thorough and believed he would finish his inquiry in a timely fashion. On June 30, he issued preliminary findings on Vince’s death, as well as on the much-ballyhooed conversations between Bernie Nussbaum and Roger Altman. Fiske said that Vince’s death was a suicide and found no evidence that it had anything to do with Whitewater. He also found that Nussbaum and Altman had not acted improperly.
From then on, Fiske was scorned by the conservative Republicans and their allies in the media. The Wall Street Journal had already pushed the press to be even more aggressive in writing stories critical of Hillary and me, however much they might later be “overtaken by other facts.” Some conservative commentators and members of Congress began calling for Fiske’s resignation. Senator Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina was especially vocal, spurred on by a new staff member, David Bossie, who had been Floyd Brown’s partner in Citizens United, a right-wing group that had already spread a lot of false stories about me.
On the same day that Fiske issued his report, I drove another nail in my own coffin by signing the new independent counsel law. The law permitted Fiske to be reappointed, but the “Special Division” of the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals could also remove him and appoint another prosecutor, starting the process all over again. Under the statute, the judges on the Special Division would be selected by Chief Justice Rehnquist, who had been an extremely conservative Republican activist before he came to the Supreme Court.
I wanted Fiske to be grandfathered in, but my new head of legislative affairs, Pat Griffin, said some Democrats were afraid it wouldn’t look good. Lloyd Cutler said there was nothing to worry about because Fiske was clearly independent and there was no way he would be replaced. He told Hillary he would “eat his hat” if it happened.
In early July, I returned to Europe for the G-7 summit in Naples. On the way, I stopped in Riga, Latvia, to meet with the leaders of the Baltic states and celebrate the withdrawal of Russian troops from Lithuania and Latvia, a move we had helped to speed up by providing a large number of housing vouchers for Russian officers who wanted to go home. There were still Russian troops in Estonia, and President Lennart Meri, a filmmaker who had always opposed Russian domination of his country, was determined to get them out as soon as possible. After the meeting there was a moving celebration in Riga’s Freedom Square, where I was welcomed by about forty thousand people waving flags in gratitude for America’s steadfast support of their newfound freedom.
The next stop was Warsaw, to meet with President Lech Walesa and emphasize my commitment to bringing Poland into NATO. Walesa had become a hero, and free Poland’s natural choice for president, by leading the Gdansk shipyard workers’ revolt against communism more than a decade earlier. He was deeply suspicious of Russia and wanted Poland in NATO as soon as possible. He also wanted more American investment in Poland, saying the country’s future required more American generals, “starting with General Motors and General Electric.”
That night Walesa hosted a dinner to which he invited leaders of all political views. I listened with fascination to a heated argument between Mrs. Walesa, a feisty mother of eight children, and a legislative leader who was also a potato farmer. She was railing against communism, while he argued that farmers had been better off under communism than they were today. I thought they were going to come to blows. I tried to help by reminding the legislator that even under communism the Polish farms were in private hands; all the Polish Communists had done was to purchase the food and sell it in Ukraine and Russia. He conceded the point, but said he had always had a market and a good price for his crops. I told him he had never been under a completely Communist system like Russia’s, where the farms themselves were collectivized. Then I explained how the American system worked, and how all successful free-market systems also had some form of cooperative marketing and price supports. The farmer remained skeptical, and Mrs. Walesa remained adamant. If democracy is about free and unfettered debate, it had certainly taken hold in Poland.
My first day at the Naples summit was devoted to Asia. Kim Il Sung had died the previous day, just as talks with North Korea resumed in Geneva, throwing the future of our agreement with North Korea into doubt. The other G-7 member with a big interest in the issue was Japan. There had been tensions between the Japanese and the Koreans for decades, going back before World War II. If North Korea had nuclear weapons, there would be great pressure on Japan to develop a nuclear deterrent, an action that, given their own painful experience, the Japanese did not want to take. The new Japanese prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama, who had become Japan’s first socialist prime minister by joining in a coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party, assured me that our solidarity on North Korea would remain intact. Out of respect for Kim Il Sung’s death, the Geneva talks were suspended for a month. The most important decisions we made in Naples were to provide an aid package to Ukraine and to include Russia in the political part of all future summits. Bringing Russia into the prestigious circle gave Yeltsin and other reformers pushing for closer ties to the West a big boost, and guaranteed that our future gatherings would be more interesting. Yeltsin was always entertaining. Chelsea, Hillary, and I loved Naples, and after the meetings, we took a day to see Pompeii, which the Italians had done a marvelous job of recovering from the ashes of the volcano that engulfed the town in A.D. 79. We saw wall paintings with colors that had retained their rich texture, including some that were first-century versions of political posters; open-air food stands that were early precursors of today’s fastfood restaurants; and the remains of several bodies remarkably preserved by the ashes, among them a man lying with his hand over the face of his obviously pregnant wife, with two other children beside them. It was a powerful reminder of the fragile and fleeting nature of life. The European trip ended in Germany. Helmut Kohl took us to visit his hometown, Ludwigshafen, before I flew to Ramstein Air Base to see our troops, many of whom would soon be leaving the military in the post–Cold War downsizing. The servicemen and -women at Ramstein, just like their counterparts in the U.S. Navy I had met in Naples, mentioned only one domestic issue to me: health care. Most of them had children, and in the military they had taken health coverage for granted. Now they worried that because of defense downsizing they were going home to a country that would no longer provide health care for their kids.
