I’d quoted in Derry the day before. The next morning, as I flew to see our troops in Germany, I had the feeling that my trip had shifted the psychological balance in Ireland. Until then, the advocates of peace had to argue their case to the skeptics, while their adversaries could just say no. After those two days, the burden had shifted to the opponents of peace to explain themselves.
In Baumholder, General George Joulwan, the NATO commander, briefed me on the military plan and assured me that the morale of the troops about to go to Bosnia was high. I met briefly with Helmut Kohl to thank him for his commitment to send four thousand German soldiers, then flew to Spain to thank Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, the current EU president, for Europe’s support. I also acknowledged the leadership of NATO’s new secretary-general, the former Spanish foreign minister Javier Solana, an exceptionally able and delightful man who inspired the confidence of all his NATO leaders, no matter how large their egos.
Three days after I got home, I vetoed the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, because it went too far in limiting access to our courts to innocent investors victimized by securities fraud. Congress overrode my veto, but in 2001, when all the problems with Enron and WorldCom arose, I knew I had done the right thing. I also vetoed another Republican budget. They had made a few changes and tried to make it harder to veto by including their welfare reform bill, but it still cut health and education, raised taxes on the working poor, and relaxed rules that kept pension funds from being depleted for nonpension purposes, less than a year after the Democratic Congress had stabilized America’s pension system.
The next day I submitted my own seven-year balanced budget plan. The Republicans panned it because it didn’t accept all their estimates for revenues and expenses. We were $300 billion apart over seven years, not an insurmountable difference in an annual budget of $1.6 trillion. I was confident we would eventually reach an agreement, though it might take another government shutdown to get us there. In mid-month, Shimon Peres came to see me for the first time as prime minister, to reaffirm Israel’s intention to turn over Gaza, Jericho, other major cities, and 450 villages in the West Bank to the Palestinians by Christmas, and to release at least another 1,000 Palestinian prisoners before the coming Israeli elections. We also discussed Syria, and I was encouraged enough by what Shimon said to call President Assad and ask him to see Warren Christopher about it.
On the fourteenth, I flew to Paris for a day, for the official signing of the agreement ending the Bosnian war. I met with the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, and went to a lunch with them hosted by Jacques Chirac at the Elysee Palace. Slobodan Milosevic was sitting across from me, and we talked for a good while. He was intelligent, articulate, and cordial, but he had the coldest look in his eyes I had ever seen. He was also paranoid, telling me he was sure Rabin’s assassination was the result of betrayal by someone in his security service. Then he said that everyone knew that’s what had happened to President Kennedy, too, but that we Americans “have been successful in covering it up.” After spending time with him, I was no longer surprised by his support of the murderous outrages of Bosnia, and I had the feeling that I would be at odds with him again before long.
When I came home to the budget war, the Republicans shut down the government again and it sure didn’t feel as if Christmas was on the way, though seeing Chelsea dance in
On the eighteenth, I vetoed two more appropriations bills, one for the Department of the Interior, the other for the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development. The next day I signed the Lobbying Disclosure Act, after the House Republicans reversed their opposition, and vetoed a third appropriations bill, for the Departments of Commerce, State, and Justice. This one was really something: it eliminated the COPS program in the face of clear evidence that more police on the beat reduced crime; it eliminated all the drug courts, like those that had been promoted by Janet Reno when she was a prosecuting attorney, which reduced crime and drug abuse; it eliminated the Commerce Department’s Advanced Technology Program, which many Republican businesspeople supported because it helped them become more competitive; and it severely cut funding for legal services for the poor and for foreign operations.
By Christmas, I had felt for some time that if left to our own devices, Senator Dole and I could have resolved the budget impasse fairly easily, but Dole had to be careful. He was running for President, and Senator Phil Gramm was running against him with Gingrich-like rhetoric, in Republican primaries in which the electorate was well to the right of the country as a whole. After breaking for Christmas, I vetoed one more budget bill, the National Defense Authorization Act. This one was tough because the legislation included a military pay increase and a larger military housing allowance, both of which I strongly supported. Nevertheless, I felt I had to do it because the bill also mandated the complete deployment of a national missile defense system by 2003, well before a workable system could be developed or would be needed; moreover, such action would violate our commitments under the ABM Treaty and jeopardize Russia’s implementation of START I and its ratification of START II. The bill also restricted the President’s ability to commit troops in emergencies and interfered too much with important management prerogatives of the Defense Department, including its actions to redress the threat of weapons of mass destruction under the Nunn-Lugar program. No responsible President, Republican or Democrat, could have allowed that defense bill to become law. During the last three days of the year our forces deployed to Bosnia, and I worked with the congressional leaders on the budget, including one seven-hour session. We made some progress, but broke for New Year’s without agreement on the budget or on ending the shutdown. In the first session of the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority had enacted only 67 bills, as compared with 210 in the first year of the previous Congress. And only 6 of the 13 appropriations bills were law, three full months after the beginning of the fiscal year. As our family headed down to Hilton Head for Renaissance Weekend, I wondered whether the American people’s votes in the ’94 elections had produced the results they wanted.
And I thought about the last two emotionally draining, exhausting, jam-packed months, and the fact that the enormity of the events—Rabin’s death, the Bosnian peace and the deployment of our troops, the progress in Northern Ireland, the herculean budget fight—had done nothing to slow down the worker bees in Whitewater World.
On November 29, as I was making my way to Ireland, Senator D’Amato’s committee called L. Jean Lewis to testify again about how her investigation of Madison Guaranty had been thwarted after I became President. During her appearance before Congressman Leach’s committee the previous August, she had been so badly discredited by government documents and her own tape-recorded conversations with Resolution Trust Corporation attorney April Breslaw that I was amazed D’Amato would call her back. On the other hand, hardly anybody knew of the problems with Lewis’s testimony, and D’Amato received a lot of publicity, as Leach had, by simply leveling charges that were unsupported and were actually disproved by subsequent testimony.
Lewis once again repeated her claim that her investigation was thwarted after I was elected. Richard Ben- Veniste, the committee’s minority counsel, confronted her with evidence that, contrary to her sworn deposition, she had tried repeatedly to push federal authorities to act on her referral of Hillary and me as material witnesses in Whitewater before the election, not after I became President, and had told an FBI agent that she was “altering history” by her actions. When Senator Paul Sarbanes read to Lewis from the 1992 letter of U.S. Attorney Chuck Banks saying that acting on her referral would constitute “prosecutorial misconduct,” then referred to a 1993 Justice Department appraisal of Lewis’s inadequate knowledge of federal banking law, Lewis cried, slumped in her chair, and was led away, never to return. Less than a month later, in mid-December, the complete Whitewater story finally came out, when the RTC inquiry from Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro was released. The report was written by Jay Stephens, who, like Chuck Banks, was a Republican former U.S. attorney whom I had replaced. It said, as had the preliminary report in June, that there were no grounds for a civil suit against us in Whitewater, much less any criminal action, and it recommended that the investigation be closed. This was what the
