My Life

space for the President and his seven department heads to sit around it. Since 1898 it had been used for the signing of all treaties, including the temporary nuclear test ban under President Kennedy and the Camp David Accords under President Carter. Before the year was out, I would be using it too.

I filled out the room with a late-eighteenth-century Chippendale sofa, the oldest piece of furniture in the White House collection, and an antique table bought by Mary Todd Lincoln, on which we put the silver commemorative cup from the 1898 treaty. When I got my books and CDs in, and hung some of my old pictures, including an 1860 photo of Abraham Lincoln and Yousuf Karsh’s famous photograph of Churchill, the place had a comfortable, peaceful atmosphere in which I would spend countless hours in the years ahead.

On my first day as President, I started out by taking Mother down to the Rose Garden, to show her exactly where I had stood when I shook hands with President Kennedy almost thirty years ago. Then, in a departure from traditional practice, we opened the White House to the public, providing tickets to two thousand people who had been selected in a postcard lottery. Al, Tipper, Hillary, and I stood in line shaking hands with the ticket holders, then with others who waited in the cold rain for their time to walk through the lower south entrance into the Diplomatic Reception Room to say hello. One determined young man without a ticket had hitchhiked overnight to the White House with his sleeping bag. After six hours, we had to stop, so I went outside to speak to the rest of the crowd gathered on the South Lawn. That night, Hillary and I stood in line for another few hours, to greet our friends from Arkansas and classmates from Georgetown, Wellesley, and Yale.

A few months after the inauguration, a book was published filled with beautiful photographs that capture the excitement and meaning of the inaugural week, with an explanatory text written by Rebecca Buffum Taylor. In her epilogue to the book, Taylor writes:

A shift in political values takes time. Even if successful, its clarity must wait until months or years have passed, until the lens has been extended and recedes again, until far and middle distance merge with what can be seen today.

The words were penetrating, and probably correct. But I couldn’t wait years, months, or even days to see if the campaign and the inauguration had effected a shift in values, deepening the roots and broadening the reach of the American community. I had too much to do, and once again the work quickly turned from poetry to prose, not all of it pretty.

THIRTY-ONE

The next year involved an amazing combination of major legislative achievements, frustrations and successes in foreign policy, unforeseen events, personal tragedy, honest errors, and clumsy violations of the Washington culture, which, when combined with compulsive leaking by a few staffers, ensured press coverage that often resembled what I’d experienced during the New York primary. On January 22, we announced that Zoe Baird had withdrawn her name from consideration for attorney general. Since we had learned about her employment of illegal immigrant workers and her failure to pay Social Security taxes for them during the vetting process, I had to say that we had failed to evaluate the matter properly, and that I, not she, was responsible for the situation. Zoe had not misled us in any way. When the household workers were hired, she had just gotten a new job, and her husband had the summer off from teaching. Apparently, each assumed the other had handled the tax matter. I believed her and kept working for her nomination for three weeks after she first offered to withdraw it. Later, I appointed Zoe to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, where she made a real contribution to the work Admiral Crowe’s group did.

On the same day, the press became infuriated with the new White House when we denied them the privilege, which they’d had for years, of walking from the press room, located between the West Wing and the residence, up to the press secretary’s office on the first floor near the Cabinet Room. This strolling allowed them to hang out in the halls and pepper whoever came by with questions. Apparently, a couple of people high up in the Bush administration had mentioned to their new counterparts that this arrangement impeded efficiency and increased leaks, and the decision was made to change it. I don’t recall being consulted about it, but perhaps I was. The press raised the roof, but we stuck with the decision, figuring they’d get over it. There’s no question that the new policy contributed to freer movement and conversation among the staff, but it’s hard to say it was worth the animosity it engendered. And since, in the first few months, the White House leaked worse than a tar-paper shack with holes in the roof and gaps in the walls, it’s impossible to say that confining the press to quarters did much good.

That afternoon, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I issued executive orders ending the Reagan-Bush ban on fetal-tissue research; abolishing the so-called Mexico City rule, which prohibited federal aid to international planning agencies that were in any way involved in abortions; and reversing the Bush “gag rule” barring abortion counseling at family planning clinics that receive federal funds. I had pledged to take these actions in the campaign, and I believed in them. Fetal-tissue research was essential to finding better treatments for Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, and other conditions. The Mexico City rule arguably led to more abortions, by reducing the availability of information on alternative family planning measures. And the gag rule used federal funds to prevent family planning clinics from telling pregnant women—often frightened, young, and alone—about an option the Supreme Court had declared a constitutional right. Federal funds still could not be used to fund abortions, at home or abroad. On January 25, Chelsea’s first day at her new school, I announced that Hillary would head a task force to come up with a comprehensive health-care plan, working with Ira Magaziner as the lead staff person, domestic policy advisor Carol Rasco, and Judy Feder, who had led our health-care transition team. I was pleased that Ira had agreed to work on health care. We had been friends since 1969, when he had come to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar a year after I did. Now a successful businessman, he had worked on the campaign economic team. Ira believed delivering universal health coverage was both morally and economically imperative. I knew he would give Hillary the kind of support she needed for the grueling task ahead of us.

Heading up the effort to reform health care was an unprecedented thing for a First Lady to do, as was my decision to give Hillary and her staff offices in the West Wing, where the policy action is, as opposed to the traditional office space in the East Wing, where the social affairs of the White House are run. Both decisions were controversial; when it came to the First Lady’s role, it seemed Washington was more conservative than Arkansas. I decided Hillary should lead the health-care effort because she cared and knew a lot about the issue, she had time to do the job right, and I thought she would be able to be an honest broker among all the competing interests in the health-care industry, government agencies, and consumer groups. I knew the whole enterprise was risky; Harry Truman’s attempt to provide universal health coverage had nearly destroyed his presidency, and Nixon and Carter never even got their bills out of committee. With the most Democratic Congress in decades, Lyndon Johnson got Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor, but didn’t even try to insure the rest of those without coverage. Nevertheless, I thought we should try for universal coverage, which every other wealthy nation had long enjoyed, for both health and economic reasons. Almost 40 million people had no health insurance, yet we were spending 14 percent of our gross national product on health care, 4 percent more than Canada, the country with the next- highest rate.

On the night of the twenty-fifth, at their urgent request, I met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss the gays-in-the-military issue. Earlier in the day, the New York Times had reported that, because of strong military opposition to the change, I would delay issuing formal regulations lifting the ban for six months, while the views of senior officers, as well as practical problems, were considered. It was a reasonable thing to do. When Harry Truman ordered the racial integration of the military, he had given the Pentagon even more time to figure out how to carry it out in a way that was consistent with its primary mission of maintaining a well- prepared, cohesive fighting force with high morale. In the meantime, Secretary Aspin would tell the military to stop asking recruits about their sexual orientation and to stop discharging homosexual men and women who had not been discovered to have committed a homosexual act, which was a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Joint Chiefs’ early request for a meeting created a problem. I was more than willing to hear them out, but I didn’t want the issue to get any more publicity than it already was receiving, not because I was trying to hide my position, but because I didn’t want the public to think I was paying more attention to it than to the economy. That’s exactly what the congressional Republicans wanted the American people to think. Senator Dole was already talking about passing a resolution removing my authority to lift the ban; he clearly wanted this to be the defining issue of my first weeks in office. In the meeting, the chiefs acknowledged that there were thousands of gay men and women