have to think twice before letting America go into default.
In the first week of October, the pope came to America again, and Hillary and I went to meet him at Newark’s magnificent Gothic cathedral. As we had in Denver and at the Vatican, His Holiness and I met alone and mostly talked about Bosnia. The pope encouraged our efforts for peace, with an observation that stuck with me: he said the twentieth century had begun with a war in Sarajevo, and I must not allow the century to end with a war in Sarajevo.
When our meeting concluded, the pope gave me a lesson in politics. First, he left the cathedral for a spot a couple of miles away so that he could drive back in his “popemobile,” with its roof of clear, bulletproof glass, waving to the people who had crowded the streets. By the time he reached the church, the congregation was seated. Hillary and I were in the front pew with local and state officials and prominent New Jersey Catholics. The massive oak doors opened, revealing the pontiff in his resplendent white cassock and cape, and the crowd stood and began to clap. As the pope began to walk down the aisle with his arms spread out to touch hands with people on either side of the aisle, the applause turned into cheers and roars. I noticed a group of nuns standing on their pews and screaming like teenagers at a rock concert. When I asked a man near me about it, he explained that they were Carmelites, members of an order that lived a cloistered existence completely apart from society. The pope had given them a dispensation to come to the cathedral. He sure knew how to build a crowd. I just shook my head and said, “I’d hate to have to run against that man.”
On the day after I met with the pope, we made progress on Bosnia, as I announced that all the parties had agreed to a cease-fire. A week later Bill Perry stated that a peace agreement would require NATO to send troops to Bosnia to enforce it. Moreover, since our responsibility to participate in NATO missions was clear, he did not believe we were required to seek advance approval from Congress. I thought Dole and Gingrich might be relieved not to have a vote on the Bosnia mission; they were both internationalists who knew what we had to do, but there were many Republicans in both chambers who strongly disagreed.
On October 15, I reinforced my determination to end the Bosnian war and hold those who had perpetrated war crimes accountable when I went to the University of Connecticut with my friend Senator Chris Dodd to inaugurate the research center named for his father. Before going to the Senate, Tom Dodd had been the executive trial counsel at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. In my remarks, I strongly endorsed the existing war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, to which we were contributing money and personnel, and supported the establishment of a permanent tribunal to deal with war crimes and other atrocities that violated human rights. Eventually, the idea would take root in the International Criminal Court.
While I was dealing with Bosnia at home, Hillary was off on another trip, this time to Latin America. In the post–Cold War world, with America the world’s only military, economic, and political superpower, every nation wanted our attention, and it was usually in our interest to give it. But I couldn’t go everywhere, especially during the budget struggles with Congress. As a result, both Al Gore and Hillary made an unusually large number of important foreign trips. Wherever they went, people knew they spoke for the United States, and for me, and on every trip, without fail, they strengthened America’s standing in the world.
On October 22, I flew to New York to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, using the occasion to call for greater international cooperation in the fight against terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, and narco-trafficking. Earlier in the month, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and nine others had been found guilty in the first World Trade Center bombing case, and not long before, Colombia had arrested several leaders of the infamous Cali drug cartel. In my address I outlined an agenda to build on those successes, including universal adherence to anti–money laundering practices; freezing the assets of terrorists and narco-traffickers, as I had just done with respect to Colombian cartels; a no-sanctuary pledge for members of terrorist or organized crime groups; shutting down the gray markets that provided arms and false identification papers to terrorists and narcotraffickers; intensified efforts to destroy drug crops and decrease demand for drugs; an international network to train police officers and provide them with the latest technology; ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention; and strengthening of the Biological Weapons Convention. The next day I returned to Hyde Park for my ninth meeting with Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin had been ill and was under a lot of pressure at home from the ultra-nationalists over NATO expansion and the aggressive role the United States was playing in Bosnia at the expense of the Bosnian Serbs. He had given a tough speech the day before at the UN, which was mostly for domestic consumption, and I could tell he was stressed out.
To put him more at ease, I flew him to Hyde Park in my helicopter so that he could see the beautiful foliage along the Hudson River on an unseasonably warm fall day. When we arrived, I took him out to the front yard of the old house with its sweeping view of the river, and we talked awhile, sitting in the same chairs Roosevelt and Churchill had used when the prime minister visited there during World War II. Then I brought him into the house to show him a bust of Roosevelt sculpted by a Russian artist, a painting of the President’s indomitable mother done by the sculptor’s brother, and the handwritten note FDR had sent to Stalin informing him that the date for D-day had been set. Boris and I spent the morning talking about his precarious political situation. I reminded him that I had done everything I could to support him, and though we disagreed on NATO expansion, I would try to help him work through it.
After lunch we retuned to the house to talk about Bosnia. The parties were about to come to the United States to negotiate what we all hoped would be a final pact, the success of which depended on both a multinational NATO-led force and the participation of Russian troops, to reassure the Bosnian Serbs that they too would be treated fairly. Finally, Boris agreed to send troops, but said they could not serve under NATO commanders, though he would be glad to have them serve “under an American general.” I assented, as long as it was understood that his troops would not in any way interfere with NATO’s command and control.
I regretted that Yeltsin was in so much trouble back home. Yes, he had made his share of mistakes, but against enormous odds he had also kept Russia going in the right direction. I still thought he would come out ahead in the election.
At the press conference after our meeting, I said that we had made progress on Bosnia and that we would both push for the ratification of START II and work together to conclude a comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty in 1996. It was a good announcement, but Yeltsin stole the show. He told the press that he was leaving our meeting with more optimism than he had brought to it, because of all the press reports saying that our summit “was going to be a disaster. Well, now, for the first time, I can tell you that you’re a disaster.” I almost fell over laughing, and the press laughed too. All I could say to them in response was “Be sure you get the right attribution there.” Yeltsin could get away with saying the darnedest things. There’s no telling how he would have answered all the Whitewater questions. October was relatively quiet on the home front, as the budget pot slowly simmered toward a boil. Early in the month, Newt Gingrich decided not to bring the lobbying-reform legislation to a vote and I vetoed the legislative appropriations bill. The lobbying bill required lobbyists to disclose their activities and prohibited them from giving lawmakers gifts, travel, and meals beyond a modest limit. The Republicans were raising a lot of money from lobbyists by writing legislation that gave tax breaks, subsidies, and relief from environmental regulations to a wide array of interest groups. Gingrich saw no reason to disturb a beneficial situation. I vetoed the legislative appropriations bill because, apart from the appropriations act for military construction, it was the only budget bill Congress had passed as the new fiscal year started, and I didn’t think Congress should be taking care of itself first. I didn’t want to veto the bill and had asked the Republican leaders just to hold it until we had finished a few other budget bills, but they sent it to me anyway.
While the budget battle continued, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary and I received a report from my Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments detailing thousands of experiments done on humans at universities, hospitals, and military bases during the Cold War. Most of them were ethical, but a few were not: in one experiment scientists injected plutonium into eighteen patients without their knowledge; in another, doctors exposed indigent cancer patients to excessive radiation, knowing they would not benefit from it. I ordered a review of all current experimentation procedures and pledged to seek compensation in all appropriate cases. The release of this formerly classified information was part of a wider disclosure policy I followed throughout my tenure. We had already declassified thousands of documents from World War II, the Cold War, and President Kennedy’s assassination. At the end of the first week of October, Hillary and I took a weekend off to fly to Martha’s Vineyard for the wedding of our good friend Mary Steenburgen to Ted Danson. We had been friends since 1980; our children had played together since they were young, and Mary had worked her heart out for me all over the country in 1992. I was thrilled when she and Ted met and fell in love, and their wedding was a welcome relief from the strains of Bosnia, Whitewater, and the budget battle. At the end of the month, Hillary and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary. I got