would law enforcement be a sufficient offensive strategy against terrorists? If not, would greater reliance on military options work? In the middle of 1996, it was clear that we didn’t have all the answers on how to deal with attacks on Americans in this country and overseas, and that the problem would be with us for years to come. The summer began with good news at home and abroad. Boris Yeltsin had been forced into a runoff on July 3 against the ultra-nationalist Gennady Zyuganov. The first election was close, but Boris won the runoff handily, after a vigorous campaign across all his country’s eleven time zones that included American-style campaign events and TV ads. The election was a ratification of Yeltsin’s leadership to secure democracy, modernize the economy, and reach out to the West. Russia still had a number of problems, but I believed it was moving in the right direction.
Things were moving in the right direction in America, too, as the unemployment rate dropped to 5.3 percent, with 10 million new jobs, economic growth at 4.2 percent for the quarter, and a deficit that had dropped to less than half what it was when I took office. Wages were also rising. The next day the stock market fell 115 points, prompting me to tease Bob Rubin again about how much Wall Street hated it when average Americans did well. Actually, it was more complicated than that. The market is about the future; when things are really good, investors tend to think they’ll get worse. Soon they changed their minds, and the market resumed its upward movement.
On July 17, TWA Flight 800 exploded off Long Island, killing some 230 people. At the time everyone assumed—wrongly, as it turned out—that this was a terrorist act; there was even speculation that the plane had been downed by a rocket fired from a boat in Long Island Sound. While I cautioned against jumping to conclusions, it was clear that we had to do more to strengthen aviation safety. Hillary and I went to Jamaica, New York, to meet with the victims’ families, and I announced new measures to increase air travel security. We had been working on the problem since 1993, with a proposal to modernize the air traffic control system; add more than 450 safety inspectors and the issuance of uniform safety standards; and test new high-tech explosive detection machines. Now I said we would hand-search more luggage and screen more bags on domestic and international flights, and would require preflight inspections of every plane cargo hold and cabin before every flight. I also asked Al Gore to head a commission to review aviation safety and security and the air traffic control system, and report back in forty-five days.
Just ten days after the crash, we had an undisputed terrorist incident when a pipe bomb exploded at the Olympics in Atlanta, killing two people. Hillary and I had gone to the opening ceremonies, which featured Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic flame. Hillary and Chelsea loved the Olympics and spent more time attending the events than I did, but I was able to visit with the American team, as well as with athletes from several other nations. Irish, Croatian, and Palestinian athletes thanked me for America’s efforts to bring peace to their homelands. North and South Korean Olympians sat at adjoining tables in the dining room and talked to each other. The Olympics symbolized the world at its best, bringing people together across old divisions. The pipe bomb planted by a homegrown terrorist who had still not been apprehended was a reminder of how vulnerable the forces of openness and cooperation were to those who rejected the values and rules required to build an integrated global community. On August 5, at George Washington University, I gave an extended analysis of how terrorism would affect our future, saying that it had become “an equal-opportunity destroyer, with no respect for borders.” I outlined the steps we were taking to combat “the enemy of our generation” and said we would prevail if we maintained our confidence and our leadership as the world’s “indispensable force for peace and freedom.”
The rest of August was taken up with bill signings, the party conventions, and a positive development in Whitewater World. With the election approaching and the budget fight at least temporarily resolved, members of Congress in both parties were eager to give the American people evidence of bipartisan progress. As a result, they produced a raft of progressive legislation the White House had been fighting for. I signed the Food Quality Protection Act, to increase the safeguarding of vegetables, fruits, and grains from harmful pesticides; the Safe Drinking Water Act, to reduce pollution and provide $10 billion in loans to upgrade municipal water systems in the wake of deaths and illnesses caused by the contamination of drinking water by cryptosporidium; and the bill to increase the minimum wage by 90 cents an hour, give small businesses tax relief for new investments in equipment and for hiring new employees, make it easier for small businesses to offer their employees pension plans with a new 401(k) plan, and provide a new incentive that was very important to Hillary, a $5,000 tax credit for adopting a child, with $6,000 for a child with special needs.
In the last week of the month, I signed the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, which helped millions of people by allowing them to take their health insurance from job to job while prohibiting insurance companies from denying anyone coverage because of a preexisting health problem. I also announced the Food and Drug Administration’s final rule to protect young people from the dangers of tobacco. It required young people to prove their age with an ID card before buying cigarettes and significantly restricted advertising and vending machine placement by tobacco companies. We had made some enemies in the tobacco industry, but I thought the effort would save some lives.
On August 22, I signed a landmark welfare reform bill, which had passed with bipartisan majorities of more than 70 percent in both houses. Unlike the two bills I had vetoed, the new legislation retained the federal guarantee of medical care and food aid, increased federal child-care assistance by 40 percent to $14 billion, contained the measures I wanted for tougher child-support enforcement, and gave states the ability to convert monthly welfare payments into wage subsidies as an incentive for employers to hire welfare recipients.
Most advocates for the poor and for legal immigration, and several people in my cabinet, still opposed the bill and wanted me to veto it because it ended the federal guarantee of a fixed monthly benefit to welfare recipients, had a five-year lifetime limit on welfare benefits, cut overall spending on the food stamp program, and denied food stamps and medical care to low-income legal immigrants. I agreed with the last two objections; the hit on legal immigrants was particularly harsh and, I thought, unjustifiable. Shortly after I signed the bill, two high officials in the Department of Health and Human Services, Mary Jo Bane and Peter Edelman, resigned in protest. When they left, I praised them for their service and for following their convictions.
I decided to sign the legislation because I thought it was the best chance America would have for a long time to change the incentives in the welfare system from dependence to empowerment through work. In order to maximize the chances of success, I asked Eli Segal, who had done such a good job in setting up AmeriCorps, to organize a Welfare to Work Partnership to enlist employers who would commit to hiring welfare recipients. Eventually, twenty thousand companies in the partnership would hire more than one million people off welfare.
At the signing ceremony, several former welfare recipients spoke up for the bill. One of them was Lillie Hardin, the Arkansas woman who had so impressed my fellow governors ten years earlier when she said the best thing about leaving welfare for work was that “when my boy goes to school and they ask him, ‘What does your mama do for a living?’ he can give an answer.” Over the next four years, the results of welfare reform would prove Lillie Hardin right. By the time I left office, the welfare rolls had been reduced from 14.1 million to 5.8 million, a 60 percent decrease; and child poverty was down 25 percent to its lowest point since 1979.
Signing the welfare reform bill was one of the most important decisions of my presidency. I had spent most of my career trying to move people from welfare to work, and ending welfare “as we know it” had been a central promise of my 1992 campaign. Though we had pursued welfare reforms through granting waivers from the existing system to most states, America needed legislation that changed the emphasis of assistance to the poor from dependence on welfare checks to independence through work. The Republicans held their convention in San Diego in mid-month, nominating Bob Dole and his choice for vice president, former New York congressman, secretary of housing and urban development, and Buffalo Bills star quarterback Jack Kemp. Kemp was an interesting man, a free-market conservative with a genuine commitment to bringing economic opportunity to poor people and an openness to new ideas from all quarters, and I thought he would be an asset to Dole’s campaign. The Republicans didn’t make the mistake of opening with harsh right-wing rhetoric as they had done at their convention in 1992. Featuring Colin Powell, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Representative Susan Molinari, and Senator John McCain, they presented a more moderate, positive, and forward-looking image to the American people. Elizabeth Dole gave an impressive and effective nominating speech for her husband, leaving the podium to speak in a conversational way as she walked among the delegates. Dole gave a good speech, too, focusing on his lifetime of duty, his tax cuts, and his advocacy of traditional American values. He derided me for being part of a baby boomer “elite who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered, and never learned.” He promised to build a bridge back to a better past of “tranquillity, faith, and confidence in action.” Dole also took a swipe at Hillary for the theme of her book, that “it takes a village” to raise a child, saying that Republicans thought parents raised children while Democrats thought government should do the job. Dole’s attack wasn’t too harsh, and in a couple of weeks Hillary
