couple of days, both sons-in-law were killed. Their brief journey to freedom had provided the UN inspectors with so much information that more chemical and biological stocks and laboratory equipment were destroyed during the inspections process than during the Gulf War.
August was also a big month in Whitewater World. Kenneth Starr indicted Jim and Susan McDougal and Governor Jim Guy Tucker on charges unrelated to Whitewater, and the Senate and House Republicans held hearings all month. In the Senate, Al D’Amato was still trying to prove there was something more to Vince Foster’s death than a depression-induced suicide. He hauled Hillary’s staff and friends before the committee for bullying questioning and ad hominem attacks. D’Amato was especially unpleasant to Maggie Williams and his fellow New Yorker Susan Thomases. Senator Lauch Faircloth was even worse, scoffing at the notion that Williams and Thomases could have had so many phone conversations about Vince Foster just to share their grief. At the time, I thought that if Faircloth really didn’t understand their feelings, his own life must have been lived in an emotional wilderness. The fact that Maggie had passed two lie detector tests about her actions in the aftermath of Vince’s death didn’t temper D’Amato’s and Faircloth’s accusatory questioning.
In the House Banking Committee, Chairman Jim Leach was behaving much like D’Amato. From the beginning, he trumpeted every bogus charge against Hillary and me, alleging that we had made, not lost, money on Whitewater, had used Madison Guaranty funds for personal and political expenses, and had engineered David Hale’s SBA fraud. He kept promising “blockbuster” revelations, but they never materialized.
In August, Leach held a hearing starring L. Jean Lewis, the Resolution Trust Corporation investigator who had named Hillary and me as witnesses in a criminal referral shortly before the 1992 election. At the time, the Bush Justice Department inquired about Lewis’s referral and the Republican U.S. attorney in Arkansas, Charles Banks, told them that there was no case against us, that it was an attempt to influence the election, and that to launch an investigation at that time would amount to “prosecutorial misconduct.”
Nevertheless, Leach referred to Lewis as a “heroic” public servant whose investigation had been thwarted after my election. Before the hearings began, documents were released that supported our position, including Banks’s letter refusing to pursue Lewis’s allegations because of lack of evidence, and internal FBI cables and Justice Department evaluations saying that “no facts can be identified to support the designation” of Hillary and me as material witnesses. Although there was almost no press coverage of the documents refuting Lewis, the hearings fizzled.
By the time of the August hearings and Starr’s latest round of indictments, I had settled into a routine of handling press questions about Whitewater with as little public comment as possible. I had learned from the press coverage over the gays-in-the-military issue that if I gave a meaty answer to a question on whatever the press was obsessing about, it would be on the evening news, blocking out whatever else I was doing in the public interest that day, and the American people would think I was spending all my time defending myself instead of working for them, when in fact Whitewater took up very little of my own time. On a scale of 1 to 10, a 7 answer on the economy was better than a 10 answer on Whitewater. So, with the help of constant reminders from my staff, I held my tongue on most days, but it was hard. I had always hated abuse of power, and as false charges flew, evidence of our innocence was ignored, and more blameless people were hounded by Starr, I was seething inside. No one can be as angry as I was without doing himself harm. It took me too long to figure that out.
September began with a memorable trip to Hawaii to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, followed by Hillary’s trip to Beijing to address the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. Hillary gave one of the most important speeches delivered by anyone in our administration during our entire eight years, asserting that “human rights are women’s rights” and condemning their all-too-frequent violation by those who sold women into prostitution, burned them when their marriage dowries were deemed too small, raped them in wartime, beat them in their homes, or subjected them to genital mutilation, forced abortions, or sterilization on them. Her speech got a standing ovation and struck a responsive chord with women all over the world, who knew now, beyond a doubt, that America was pulling for them. Once again, despite the abuse she had been taking on Whitewater, Hillary had come through for a cause she deeply believed in, and for our country. I was so proud of her; the unfair hard knocks she had endured had done nothing to dull the idealism that I had fallen in love with so long ago.
By the middle of the month, Dick Holbrooke had persuaded the foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia to agree on a set of basic principles as a framework to settle the Bosnian conflict. Meanwhile, NATO air strikes and cruise missile attacks continued to pound Bosnian Serb positions, and Bosnian and Croatian military gains reduced the percentage of Bosnia controlled by the Serbs from 70 to 50 percent, close to what a negotiated settlement would likely require. September 28 capped off a good month in foreign policy, as Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat came to the White House for the next big step in the peace process, the signing of the West Bank accord, which turned over a substantial portion of land to Palestinian control.
The most significant event occurred away from the cameras. The signing ceremony was scheduled to occur at noon, but first Rabin and Arafat met in the Cabinet Room to initial the annex to the agreement, three copies that included twenty-six different maps, each reflecting literally thousands of decisions the parties had reached on roads, crossings, settlements, and holy sites. I was also asked to initial the pages as the official witness. About midway through the process, when I had stepped outside to take a call, Rabin came out and said, “We have a problem.” On one of the maps, Arafat had spotted a stretch of road that was marked as under Israeli control but that he was convinced the parties had agreed to turn over to the Palestinians. Rabin and Arafat wanted me to help resolve the dispute. I took them into my private dining room and they began to talk, with Rabin saying he wanted to be a good neighbor and Arafat replying that, as descendants of Abraham, they were really more like cousins. The interplay between the old adversaries was fascinating. Without saying a word, I turned and walked out of the room, leaving them alone together for the first time. Sooner or later, they had to develop a direct relationship, and today seemed the right moment to begin.
Within twenty minutes they had reached an agreement that the disputed crossing should go to the Palestinians. Because the world was waiting for the ceremony and we were already late, there was no time to change the map. Instead, Rabin and Arafat agreed to its modification with a handshake, then signed the maps before them, legally binding themselves to the incorrect designation of the disputed road.
It was an act of personal trust that would have been unthinkable not long before. And it was risky for Rabin. Several days later, with Israelis evenly divided on the West Bank accord, Rabin survived a noconfidence vote in the Knesset by only one vote. We were still walking a tightrope, but I was optimistic. I knew the handover would proceed according to the handshake, and it did. It was the handshake even more than the official signing that convinced me that Rabin and Arafat would find a way to finish the job of making peace.
The fiscal year ended on September 30, and we still didn’t have a budget. When I wasn’t working on Bosnia and the Middle East, I had spent the entire month traveling the country campaigning against the Republicans’ proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, the direct student-loan program, AmeriCorps, environmental enforcement, and the initiative to put 100,000 new police officers on the street. They were even proposing to cut back the Earned Income Tax Credit, thus raising taxes on lowerincome working families at the same time they were trying to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans. At virtually every stop, I pointed out that our fight was not about whether to balance the budget and reduce the burden of unnecessary government, but how to do it. The big dispute involved what responsibilities the federal government should assume for the common good.
In response to my attacks, Newt Gingrich threatened to refuse to raise the debt limit and thus put America in default if I vetoed their budget bills. Raising the debt limit was merely a technical act that recognized the inevitable: as long as America continued to run deficits, the annual debt would increase, and the government would be required to sell more bonds to finance it. Increasing the debt limit simply gave the Treasury Department authority to do that. As long as Democrats were in the majority, Republicans could cast symbolic votes against raising the debt limit and pretend that they hadn’t contributed to the necessity to do it. Many Republicans in the House had never voted to raise the debt limit and didn’t relish doing so now, so I had to take Gingrich’s threat seriously. If America defaulted on its debt, the consequences could be severe. In more than two hundred years, the United States had never failed to pay its debts. Default would shake investor confidence in our reliability. As we headed into the final showdown, I couldn’t deny that Newt had a bargaining chip, but I was determined not to be blackmailed. If he followed through on his threat, he would be hurt, too. Default ran the risk of increasing interest rates, and even a small increase would add hundreds of billions of dollars to home mortgage payments. Ten million Americans had variable-rate mortgages tied to federal interest rates. If Congress didn’t raise the debt limit, people could pay what Al Gore called a “Gingrich surcharge” on their monthly mortgage payments. The Republicans would
