restrictive” environment, but the critical decision about what is least restrictive is made at the child’s school. It took about a year, but eventually Alba got into a regular class. Hillary and I kept in touch with the Somoza family, and in 2002, I spoke at the girls’ high school graduation. They both went on to college, because Anastasia and her parents were determined to give Alba all the opportunities she deserved, and weren’t shy about asking others, including me, to help. Every month, the agency liaison who headed the casework operation sent me a report on the people we’d helped, along with a few of the moving thank-you letters they sent. In addition to the staff cuts, I announced an executive order to cut administrative expenses 3 percent throughout the government, and a reduction in the salaries of top appointees and in their perks, like limousine service and private dining rooms. In a move that would prove to be a tremendous morale booster, I changed the rules of the White House Mess to allow more junior staff to use what had been the private preserve of high-level White House officials.
Our young staffers were working long hours and weekends, and it seemed foolish to me to require them all to leave for lunch, order in, or bring a paper bag with food from home. Besides, access to the White House Mess implied that they, too, were important. The mess was a wood-paneled room with good food prepared by navy personnel. I ordered lunch from it almost every day and enjoyed going down to visit with the young people who worked in the kitchen. Once a week they served Mexican dishes I especially liked. After I left office, the mess was again closed to all but senior staff. I believe our policy was good for morale and productivity.
With all the extra work and fewer people to do it, we would have to rely more than ever not only on those junior staffers, but also on the thousand-plus volunteers who put in long hours, some of them virtually full-time. The volunteers opened the mail, sent form replies when appropriate, filled requests for information, and did countless other tasks, without which the White House would have been far less responsive to the American people. All the volunteers got in return for their efforts, apart from the satisfaction of serving, was an annual thank-you reception Hillary and I hosted for them on the South Lawn. The White House couldn’t function without them.
Besides the specific cuts I had already decided on, I was convinced that with a longer-term systematic approach, we could save a lot more money and improve government services. In Arkansas, I had initiated a Total Quality Management program that had achieved positive results. On March 3, I announced that Al Gore would lead a six-month review of all federal operations. Al took to the job like a duck to water, bringing in outside experts and consulting widely with government employees. He kept at it for eight years, helping us to eliminate hundreds of programs and 16,000 pages of regulations, to reduce the federal workforce by 300,000, making this the smallest federal government since 1960, and to save $136 million in tax money.
While we were getting organized and dealing with the controversies in the press, most of my time in January and February was devoted to filling in the details of the economic plan. On Sunday, January 24, Lloyd Bentsen appeared on
Meanwhile, we were struggling with the budget details. All the spending cuts and taxes that raised real money were controversial. For example, when I met with Senate and House leaders on the budget, Leon Panetta suggested that we have a one-time three-month delay in increasing the Social Security cost-ofliving allowance. Most experts agreed that the COLA was too high, given the low rate of inflation, and the delay would save $15 billion over five years. Senator Mitchell said that the suggested delay was regressive and unfair, and that he couldn’t support it. Neither would the other senators. We’d have to find that $15 billion elsewhere.
Over the weekend of January 30–31, I brought the cabinet and senior White House staff to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Camp David is a beautiful wooded site, with comfortable cabins and recreational facilities, staffed by men and women from the navy and the Marine Corps. It was the perfect setting for us to get to know one another better and talk about the year ahead. I also invited Stan Greenberg, Paul Begala, and Mandy Grunwald. They felt that they had been shut out of the transition, and that an obsession with the deficit had overtaken every other objective I had advanced in the campaign. They thought Al and I were courting disaster by disregarding the deeper concerns and interests of the people who had elected us. I sympathized with them. For one thing, they hadn’t been in on the hours of discussions that led most of us to the conclusion that if we didn’t deal with the deficit, we couldn’t achieve sustained strong growth and that my other campaign commitments, at least those that cost money, would die in the stagnant backwater of a sluggish economy. I let Mandy and Stan start the discussion. Mandy outlined the anxiety of the middle class about jobs, retirement, health care, and education. Stan said that voters’ most important concerns were, in order, jobs, health-care reform, welfare reform, and then deficit reduction, and that if deficit reduction was going to require the middle class to pay more taxes, I had darn sure better do something else for them. Hillary then described how we’d failed in Arkansas in my first term by doing too many things at once, without a clear story line and an effort to prepare people for a long, sustained struggle. Then she told them about the success we’d had the second time around, by focusing on one or two issues every two years, and laying out long-term goals, along with short-term benchmarks of progress against which we could be judged. That kind of approach, she said, enabled me to develop a story line people could understand and support. In response, someone pointed out that we couldn’t develop a story line as long as we were awash in leaks, all of which concerned the most controversial proposals. After the weekend, the consultants tried to come up with a communications strategy that would take us beyond the daily leaks and controversies.
The rest of the retreat was devoted to more informal, personal conversations. On Saturday night there was a session, run by a facilitator who was a friend of Al Gore’s, in which we were supposed to bond by sitting in a group, taking turns telling something about ourselves the others didn’t know. Though the exercise got mixed reviews, I actually enjoyed it, and managed to confess that, as a child, I was overweight and often ridiculed. Lloyd Bentsen thought the whole exercise was silly and went back to his cabin; if there was something about him the rest of us didn’t know, it was intentional. Bob Rubin stayed, but said he didn’t have anything to say—apparently such group unburdening wasn’t the key to his success at Goldman Sachs. Warren Christopher did participate, probably because he was the most disciplined man on the planet and thought this baby-boomer version of Chinese water torture would somehow strengthen his already considerable character. All in all, the weekend was helpful, but the real bonding would come in the fires of the struggles, victories, and defeats that lay ahead. On Sunday night, we were back in the White House to host the annual National Governors Association dinner. It was Hillary’s first formal event as First Lady, and she was nervous, but it went well. The governors were concerned about the economy, which diminished state revenues, forcing them to cut services, raise taxes, or both. They understood the necessity of reducing the deficit, but didn’t want it to come at their expense, in the form of responsibilities shifting from the federal government to the states without funds being provided to pay for them.
On February 5, I signed my first bill into law, keeping another campaign commitment. With the Family and Medical Leave Act, the United States at last joined more than 150 other countries in guaranteeing workers some time off when a baby is born or a family member is sick. The bill’s principal sponsor, my longtime friend Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, had worked for years to enact it. President Bush had vetoed it twice, saying it would prove too burdensome for business. While the legislation had some strong Republican supporters, most Republicans had voted against it for the same reason. I believed that family leave would be good for the economy. With most parents in the workforce, by choice or necessity, it is imperative that Americans be able to do well both on the job and at home. People who are worried about their infants or their sick parents are less productive than those who go to work knowing they’ve done right by their families. During my time as President, more than thirty-five million people would take advantage of the Family and Medical Leave law.
In the next eight years, and even after I left office, more people would mention it to me than any other bill I signed. Many of their stories were powerful. Early one Sunday morning, when I came in from my jog, I ran into a family touring the White House. One of the children, a teenage girl, was in a wheelchair and obviously very ill. I greeted them and said that if they’d wait for me to shower and get dressed for church, I’d take them into the Oval Office for a picture. They waited and we had a good visit. I especially enjoyed my talk with the brave young girl. As I walked away, her father grabbed my arm and turned me around, saying, “My little girl is probably not going to make it. The last three weeks I’ve spent with her have been the most important of my life. I couldn’t have done it without the family leave law.”
In early 2001, when I took my first shuttle flight from New York to Washington as a private citizen, one of the flight attendants told me that both her parents had been desperately ill at the same time, one with cancer, the other with Alzheimer’s. She said there was no one to care for them in their last days except her and her sister, and
