My Life, page 89
After we discussed Cuba, García Márquez lavished most of his attention on Chelsea, who said she had read two of his books. He later told me that he didn’t believe a fourteen-year-old girl could understand his work, so he launched into an extended discussion with her about One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was so impressed that he later sent her an entire set of his novels.
The only business I did on vacation involved Ireland. I granted a visa to Joe Cahill, a seventy-six-yearold hero to Irish Republicans. In 1973, Cahill had been convicted of gunrunning in Ireland, and he continued to promote violence for years afterward. I gave him a visa because he now wanted to promote peace among the IRA’s American supporters, as part of an understanding under which the IRA would, at long last, announce a cease-fire. Cahill came to America on August 30, and the next day the IRA announced a total cessation of violence, opening the way for Sinn Fein’s participation in the peace talks. It was a victory for Gerry Adams and for the Irish government.
When we returned from our vacation, we moved into Blair House for three weeks while the White House air-conditioning system was being repaired. A massive stone-by-stone restoration of the nearly two-hundred-year-old exterior, begun during the Reagan administration, was also still going on. A portion of the White House would be covered by scaffolding all through my first term. Our family always enjoyed the time we spent in Blair House, and this extended visit was no exception, though it caused us to miss a dramatic moment back across the street. On September 12 an inebriated man who was disappointed with his life broke into a small airplane and took off for downtown Washington and the White House. He was trying either to kill himself by crashing into the building or to stage a landing on the South Lawn, like the one executed by a young German pilot in Moscow’s Red Square a few years earlier. Unfortunately, his little Cessna hit the ground too late for the landing, bounced over the hedge and under the giant magnolia tree on the west side of the entrance, then slammed into the large stone base of the White House, killing him instantly. A few years later, another troubled man with a pistol vaulted the White House fence before he was wounded and apprehended by officers of the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service. The White House was a magnet for more than ambitious politicians.
The crisis in Haiti came to a head in September. General Cedras and his thugs had intensified their reign of terror, executing orphaned children, raping young girls, killing priests, mutilating people and leaving body parts in the open to terrify others, and slashing the faces of mothers with machetes while their children watched. By this time, I had been working for a peaceful solution for two years, and I was fed up. More than a year earlier, Cedras had signed an agreement to give up power, but when the time came to leave, he simply refused to go.
It was time to throw him out, but public opinion and congressional sentiment were strongly against it. Though the Congressional Black Caucus, Senator Tom Harkin, and Senator Chris Dodd supported me, the Republicans were solidly opposed, and most Democrats, including George Mitchell, thought I was just taking them out onto another precipice without public support or congressional authorization. There was even division within the administration. Al Gore, Warren Christopher, Bill Gray, Tony Lake, and Sandy Berger were for it. Bill Perry and the Pentagon were not, but they had been working on an invasion plan in case I ordered them to proceed.
I thought we had to go forward. Innocent people were being slaughtered in our own backyard, and we were already spending a small fortune taking care of Haitian refugees. The United Nations was unanimous in supporting the ouster of Cedras.
On September 16, in a last-minute attempt to avoid an invasion, I sent President Carter, Colin Powell, and Sam Nunn to Haiti to try to persuade General Cedras and his supporters in the military and parliament to peacefully accept Aristide’s return and Cedras’s departure from the country. For different reasons, they all disagreed with my determination to use force to restore Aristide. Though the Carter Center had monitored Aristide’s overwhelming election victory, President Carter had developed a relationship with Cedras and was skeptical of Aristide’s commitment to democracy. Nunn was opposed to Aristide’s return until parliamentary elections were held, because he didn’t trust Aristide to protect minority rights without an established countervailing force in parliament. Powell thought only the military and the police could govern Haiti, and that they would never work with Aristide. As subsequent events would prove, there was some merit to their arguments. Haiti was deeply divided economically and politically and had no previous experience with democracy, no significant middle class, and little of the institutional capacity required to operate a modern state. Even if Aristide was returned without a hitch, he might not succeed. Still, he had been elected overwhelmingly, and Cedras and his crew were killing innocent people. We could at least stop that. Despite their reservations, the distinguished trio pledged to faithfully communicate my policy. They wanted to avoid a violent American entry, which could make matters even worse. Nunn spoke to members of Haiti’s parliament; Powell told the Haitian military leaders in graphic terms what would happen if the United States invaded; and Carter worked on Cedras.
The next day I went to the Pentagon to review the invasion plan with General Shalikashvili and the Joint Chiefs, and, by teleconference, with Admiral Paul David Miller, the commander of the overall operation, and Lieutenant General Hugh Shelton, commander of the Eighteenth Airborne Corps, who would lead our troops onto the island. The invasion plan called for a unified operation involving all branches of the military. Two aircraft carriers were in the waters off Haiti, one transporting Special Operations forces and the other carrying soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division. Air force planes were set to provide necessary air support. The marines were assigned to occupy Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city. Planes carrying Eighty-second Airborne Division paratroopers would fly out of North Carolina and drop them over the island at the outset of the assault. Navy SEALs would go in early and scan designated areas. They had already done a test run that morning, coming out of the water and onto land without incident. Most troops and equipment were to enter Haiti in an operation called “RoRo,” for “roll on, roll off”; troops and vehicles would roll onto landing vessels for the trip to Haiti, then roll off on the Haitian shoreline. When the mission was accomplished, the process would be reversed. Besides the U.S. forces, we had support from twenty-five other countries that had joined the UN coalition. As the deadline for our attack approached, President Carter called me pleading for more time to persuade Cedras to leave. Carter desperately wanted to avoid a forced invasion. So did I. Haiti had no military capability; it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. I agreed to give him three more hours, but made it clear that any agreement he made with the general could not include another delay in the handover to Aristide. Cedras couldn’t have more time to murder children, rape young girls, and slash women’s faces. We had already spent $200 million taking care of the Haitians who had left their country. I wanted them to be able to go home.
In Port-au-Prince, as the three-hour deadline ran out, an angry mob gathered outside the building where the Americans were still talking. Every time I talked with Carter, Cedras had proposed a different deal, but they all gave him some wiggle room to hang around and delay Aristide’s return. I rejected them all. With the danger outside and the deadline for invasion at hand, Carter, Powell, and Nunn kept trying to persuade Cedras, to no avail. Carter pleaded for more time. I agreed to another delay, until 5 p.m. The planes with the paratroopers were scheduled to arrive just after dark, at about six. If the three of them were still there negotiating then, they would be in much greater danger from the mob. At 5:30 p.m. they were still in place and already in greater peril, because Cedras knew the operation had begun. He had had someone watching the airstrip in North Carolina, when our sixty-one planes carrying the paratroopers took off. I called President Carter and told him that he, Colin, and Sam had to leave immediately. The three of them made one last appeal to the titular head of Haiti, eighty-one-year-old President Emile Jonassaint, who at last told them he would choose peace instead of war. When all the cabinet members but one agreed with him, Cedras finally relented, less than an hour before the skies over Port-au-Prince would have been filled with parachutes. Instead, I ordered the planes to turn around and come home.
The next day General Shelton led the first of the fifteen-thousand-member multinational force into Haiti without a shot being fired. Shelton cut a striking figure. He was about six feet five inches tall, with chiseled features and a slow southern drawl. Though he was a couple of years older than I, he still did regular parachute jumps with his troops. He looked as if he could have deposed Cedras all by himself. I had visited General Shelton not long before at Fort Bragg, after a plane crash at nearby Pope Air Force Base had killed several servicemen. On Shelton’s office wall were pictures of two great Confederate Civil War generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. When I saw Shelton on television as he stepped ashore, I remarked to one of my staff that America had come a long way if a man who revered Stonewall Jackson could be the liberator of Haiti.
Cedras promised to cooperate with General Shelton and to leave power by October 15, as soon as the general amnesty law required by the UN agreement was passed. Although I almost had to forcibly remove them from Haiti, Carter, Powell, and Nunn had done a courageous job under difficult and potentially dangerous circumstances. A combination of dogged diplomacy and imminent force had avoided bloodshed. Now it was up to Aristide to honor his commitment of “no to violence, no to vengeance, yes to reconciliation.” As with so many such statements, this would prove to be easier said than done.
Because the restoration of democracy in Haiti occurred without incident, it didn’t turn out to have the negative impact the Democrats had feared. We should have been in good shape going into the elections: the economy was producing 250,000 jobs a month, with unemployment dropping from over 7 percent to under 6 percent; the deficit was coming down; we had passed important legislation on crime, education, national service, trade, and family leave; and I was making headway on our foreign policy agenda with Russia, Europe, China, Japan, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Haiti. But despite the record and the results, we were in trouble heading into the last six weeks of the election, for a variety of reasons: many people hadn’t felt the economic improvements yet; no one believed the deficit was coming down; most people were unaware of the legislative victories and didn’t know or didn’t care about the foreign policy progress; the Republicans and their media and interest group allies had constantly and effectively attacked me as a wild-eyed liberal who wanted to tax them into the poorhouse and take their doctors and guns away; and the general press coverage was overwhelmingly negative. The Center for Media and Public Affairs issued a report saying that in my first sixteen months, there was an average of nearly five negative comments a night on the evening network news programs, far more than the first President Bush had received in his first two years. The center’s director, Robert Lichter, said I had the “misfortune of being president at the dawning of an age that combines attack-dog journalism with tabloid news.” There were some exceptions, of course. Jacob Weisberg wrote that “Bill Clinton has been more faithful to his word than any other chief executive in recent memory,” but that
“voters mistrust Clinton in part because the media keeps telling them not to trust him.” Jonathan Alter wrote in Newsweek, “In less than two years, Bill Clinton had already achieved more domestically than John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush combined. Although Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan often had their way with Congress, Congressional Quarterly says it’s Clinton who has had the most legislative success of any President since Lyndon Johnson. The standard for measuring results domestically should not be the coherence of the process but how actual lives are touched and changed. By that standard, he’s doing well.”
Alter may have been right, but if so, it was a well-kept secret.
FORTY
Things grew worse as September drew to a close. Acting base-ball commissioner Bud Selig announced that the players’ strike couldn’t be resolved and he was canceling the rest of the season, and the World Series, for the first time since 1904. Bruce Lindsey, who had helped to settle the airline strike, tried to resolve the standoff. I even invited the representatives of the players and owners to the White House, but we couldn’t settle it. If our national pastime was being canceled, things could not be going in the right direction.
On September 26, George Mitchell formally threw in the towel on health-care reform. Senator Chafee had continued to work with him, but he couldn’t bring enough Republicans along to break Senator Dole’s filibuster. The $300 million that the health insurance and other lobbies had spent to stop healthcare reform was well invested. I put out a brief statement saying I would try again next year. Though I had felt for months that we were beaten, I was still disappointed, and I felt bad that Hillary and Ira Magaziner were taking the rap for the failure. It was unfair for three reasons. First, our proposals were not the big government–run nightmare that the health-insurance companies’ ad campaigns had made them out to be; second, the plan was the best Hillary and Ira could do, given the charge from me: universal coverage without a tax increase; and finally, it wasn’t they who had derailed health-care reform—Senator Dole’s decision to kill any meaningful compromise had done that. I tried to cheer up Hillary by telling her that there were bigger mistakes in life than “getting caught red-handed” trying to provide health insurance to forty million Americans who were without it.
In spite of our defeat, all the work Hillary, Ira Magaziner, and the rest of our people had done would not be in vain. In the years ahead, many of our proposals would find their way into law and practice. Senator Kennedy and Republican senator Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas would pass a bill guaranteeing that workers wouldn’t lose their insurance when they changed jobs. And in 1997, we would pass the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), providing health care to millions of children in the largest expansion of health insurance since Medicaid was enacted in 1965. CHIP would help bring about the first decline in twelve years in the number of Americans without health insurance. There would be many other health-care victories as well: a bill allowing women to stay in the hospital for more than twenty-four hours after childbirth, ending HMO-ordered “drive-by” deliveries; increased coverage for mammograms and prostate screenings; a diabetes self-management program called the most important advance since insulin by the American Diabetes Association; large increases in biomedical research and in the care and treatment of HIV/AIDS at home and abroad; childhood immunization rates above 90 percent for the first time; and the application by executive order of a patient’s “bill of rights” guaranteeing the choice of a doctor and the right to prompt, adequate treatment for the eighty-five million Americans covered by federally funded plans. But that was all in the future. For now, we had taken a good shellacking. That’s the image people would take into the elections.
Near the end of the month, Newt Gingrich gathered more than three hundred Republican incumbents and candidates for a rally on the Capitol steps to sign a “Contract with America.” The details of the contract had been percolating for some time. Newt had put them together to show that the Republicans were more than naysayers; they had a positive agenda. The contract was something new to American politics. Traditionally, midterm elections had been fought seat by seat. National conditions and a President’s level of popularity could be a boost or a drag, but the conventional wisdom held that local factors were more important. Gingrich was convinced that the conventional wisdom was wrong. He boldly asked the American people to give the Republicans a majority, saying, “If we break this contract, throw us out. We mean it.”
The contract called for a constitutional balanced budget amendment and the line-item veto, which enables the President to delete specific items in appropriations bills without having to veto the entire piece of legislation; stiffer penalties for criminals and repeal of the prevention programs in my crime bill; welfare reform, with a two-year limit on able-bodied recipients; a $500 child tax credit, another $500 credit for the care of a parent or grandparent, and tougher child-support enforcement; repeal of the taxes on upper-income Social Security recipients that were part of the 1993 budget; a 50 percent cut in the capital gains tax, and other tax cuts; an end to unfunded federal mandates on state and local government; a large increase in defense spending; tort reform to limit punitive damages; term limits for senators and representatives; a requirement that Congress, as an employer, follow all laws it has imposed on other employers; a reduction in congressional committee staffs by a third; and a requirement that 60 percent of each house of Congress approve any future tax increase.
I agreed with many of the particulars of the contract. I was already pushing welfare reform and tougher child-support enforcement, and had long supported the line-item veto and ending unfunded mandates. I liked the family tax credits. Though several of the specifics were appealing, the contract was, at its core, a simplistic and hypocritical document. In the twelve years before I became President, the Republicans, with the support of a few Democrats in Congress, had quadrupled the national debt by cutting taxes and increasing spending; now that Democrats were reducing the deficit, they wanted the Constitution to require a balanced budget, even as they recommended large tax cuts and big increases in defense spending without saying what other spending they would cut to pay for them. Just as they had done in the 1980s and would do again in the 2000s, the Republicans were trying to abolish arithmetic. As Yogi Berra said, it was déjà vu all over again, but in a nice new package. Besides giving the Republicans a national platform for the 1994 campaign, Gingrich provided them with a list of words to use in defining their Democratic opponents. His political action committee, GOPAC, published a pamphlet entitled Language: A Key Mechanism of Control. Among the “contrasting words” Newt suggested for labeling Democrats were: betray, cheat, collapse, corruption, crisis, decay, destruction, failure, hypocrisy, incompetent, insecure, liberal, lie, pathetic, permissive, shallow, sick, traitors. Gingrich was convinced that if he could institutionalize that kind of name-calling, he could define the Democrats into a minority party for a long time.
