to sign an agreement negotiated with the help of my special envoy, Charles Redman, that established a federation in the areas of Bosnia in which their populations were in a majority, and set up a process to move toward a confederation with Croatia. The fighting between Muslims and Croatians had not been as severe as that in which both sides had engaged with the Bosnian Serbs, but the agreement was still an important step toward peace.
The last days of March marked the beginning of a serious crisis with North Korea. After agreeing in February to let inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) check their declared nuclear sites on March 15, North Korea blocked them from completing their work. The reactor they were studying operated on fuel rods. Once the rods had been exhausted for their original purpose, the spent fuel could be reprocessed into plutonium in sufficient quantities to make nuclear weapons. North Korea also was planning to build two larger reactors, which would have produced many more spent fuel rods. The rods were a dangerous asset in the hands of the most isolated country in the world, a poor one that could not even feed its own people and might feel the temptation to sell the plutonium to the wrong buyer. Within a week I had decided to send Patriot missiles to South Korea and to ask the UN to impose economic sanctions against North Korea. As Bill Perry told a group of editors and reporters on March 30, I was determined to stop North Korea from developing a nuclear arsenal, even at the risk of war. In order to make absolutely certain that the North Koreans knew we were serious, Perry continued the tough talk over the next three days, even saying that we would not rule out a preemptive military strike. Meanwhile, Warren Christopher made sure our message had the right balance. The State Department said we preferred a peaceful solution, and our ambassador to South Korea, Jim Laney, described our position as one of “watchfulness, firmness, and patience.” I believed that if North Korea really understood our position, as well as the economic and political benefits it could realize by abandoning its nuclear program in favor of cooperation with its neighbors and the United States, we could work it out. If we didn’t, Whitewater would soon look like the sideshow it was.
On March 26, I was in Dallas for a happy weekend off, to serve as best man in my brother’s wedding to Molly Martin, a beautiful woman he’d met when, after spending a few years in Nashville, he’d moved to Los Angeles in the hope of reviving his singing career. I was really happy for Roger. On the day after the wedding, we all went to see the Arkansas Razorbacks defeat the University of Michigan in the NCAA Basketball Tournament quarterfinals. That week
I quickly settled on two other prospects: Judge Stephen Breyer, who had already been vetted; and Judge Richard Arnold, chief judge of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in St. Louis and includes Arkansas within its jurisdiction. Arnold was a former aide to Dale Bumpers who came from a long line of distinguished Arkansas lawyers. He was probably the most brilliant man on the federal bench. He graduated at the top of his class at Yale and at Harvard Law School, and had learned Latin and Greek, in part so that he could read early biblical texts. I probably would have appointed him, except for the fact that he had been treated for cancer and his prognosis was not clear. My Republican predecessors had filled the federal courts with young conservatives who would be around a long time, and I didn’t want to risk giving them another position. In May, I made the decision to nominate Judge Breyer. He was equally qualified, and I had been impressed with him in our earlier interview after Justice White resigned. Breyer would be confirmed easily. Richard Arnold, I’m happy to say, is still serving on the Eighth Circuit and still plays an occasional round of golf with me.
Early in April, NATO bombed in Bosnia again, this time to stop the Serbs’ siege of Gorazde. On the same day, mass violence raged in Rwanda. A plane crash killing the Rwandan president and the president of Burundi sparked the beginning of a horrendous slaughter inflicted by leaders of the majority Hutu on the Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers. The Tutsis constituted only 15 percent of the population but were thought to have disproportionate economic and political power. I ordered the evacuation of all Americans and sent troops to guarantee their safety. Within one hundred days, more than 800,000 people in a country of only 8 million would be murdered, most of them with machetes. We were so preoccupied with Bosnia, with the memory of Somalia just six months old, and with opposition in Congress to military deployments in faraway places not vital to our national interests that neither I nor anyone on my foreign policy team adequately focused on sending troops to stop the slaughter. With a few thousand troops and help from our allies, even making allowances for the time it would have taken to deploy them, we could have saved lives. The failure to try to stop Rwanda’s tragedies became one of the greatest regrets of my presidency.
In my second term, and after I left office, I did what I could to help the Rwandans put their country and their lives back together. Today, at the invitation of President Paul Kagame, Rwanda is one of the countries in which my foundation is working to stem the tide of AIDS. On April 22, Richard Nixon died, one month and a day after writing a remarkable seven-page letter to me about his recent trip to Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and England. Nixon said I had earned the respect of the leaders he visited and could not let Whitewater or any other domestic issue “divert attention from our major foreign policy priority—the survival of political and economic freedom in Russia.” He was worried about Yeltsin’s political position and the rise of anti-Americanism in the Duma, and he urged me to keep my close relationship with Yeltsin, but also to reach out to other democrats into Russia; to improve the design and administration of our foreign aid program; and to put a leading businessman in charge of getting more private investment into Russia. Nixon said the ultra-nationalist Zhirinovsky should be exposed “for the fraud he is,” rather than suppressed, and that we should seek “to keep the bad guys—Zhirinovsky, Rutskoi, and the Communists— divided, and to try to get the good guys—Chernomyrdin, Yavlinski, Shahrai, Travkin—to coalesce if possible in a united front for responsible reform.” Finally, Nixon said I should not spread directed aid dollars all over the former Soviet Union, but concentrate our resources beyond Russia on Ukraine: “It is indispensable.” The letter was a tour de force, Nixon at his best in the eighth decade of his life.
All the living former Presidents came to President Nixon’s funeral on the grounds of his presidential library and birthplace. I was somewhat surprised when his family asked me to speak, along with Bob Dole, Henry Kissinger, and California governor Pete Wilson, who as a young man had worked for Nixon. In my remarks, I expressed appreciation for his “wise counsel, especially with regard to Russia,” and I remarked on his continuing vigorous and clearheaded interest in America and the world, mentioning his call and letter to me a month before his death. I referred to Watergate only by indirection, with a plea for reconciliation: “Today is a day for his family, his friends, and his nation to remember President Nixon’s life in totality… may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to an end.” Some of my party’s Nixon-haters didn’t like what I said. Nixon had done a lot more than Watergate with which I disagreed—the enemies list, the prolongation of the Vietnam War and the expanded bombing, the Red-baiting of his opponents for the House and Senate in California. But he had also opened the door to China, signed bills establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, the Legal Services Corporation, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and had supported affirmative action. Compared with the Republicans who took over the party in the 1980s and 1990s, President Nixon was a wild-eyed liberal. On the day after the funeral, I called in to the Larry King show because he was interviewing Dick Kelley and James Morgan about Mother’s book,
On April 29, with virtually the entire cabinet in attendance, I hosted Native American and Native Alaskan tribal leaders on the South Lawn, apparently bringing them to the White House for the first time since the 1820s. Some of them were so wealthy from Indian gaming that they flew to Washington in their own planes. Others, who lived on isolated reservations, were so poor they had to “pass the hat” among their tribes to collect enough money
