experiences of the entire trip was a radio call-in show I did with the mayor. There were some good but predictable questions for me on economic and security matters, but the mayor got more questions than I did; his callers were interested in better education and more computers, and worried about the traffic congestion as a result of the city’s growing prosperity and expansion. It struck me that if citizens were complaining to the mayor about traffic jams, Chinese politics was evolving in the right direction.
Before going home, we flew to Guilin for a meeting with environmentalists concerned about the destruction of forests and the loss of unique wildlife, and a leisurely boat trip down the Li River, which flows through a stunning landscape marked by large limestone formations that looked as if they had burst up through the landscape of the gentle countryside. After Guilin, we made a stop in Hong Kong to see Tung Chee-hwa, the chief executive chosen by the Chinese after the British left. An intelligent, sophisticated man who had lived in America for several years, Tung had his hands full balancing the boisterous Hong Kong political culture with the much more conformist Chinese central government. I also met again with democracy advocate Martin Lee. The Chinese had promised to let Hong Kong keep its much more democratic political system, but I had the clear impression that the details of their reunion were still being worked out, and that neither side was fully satisfied with the present state of affairs. In mid-July, Al Gore and I held an event at the National Academy of Sciences to highlight our administration’s efforts to avoid computer meltdowns at the dawn of the new millennium. There was widespread concern that many computer systems would not make the change to the year 2000, which would cause havoc in the economy and disrupt the affairs of millions of Americans. We organized an exhaustive effort led by John Koskinen to make sure all government systems were ready for the new millennium and to help the private sector make the adjustment. We wouldn’t know for sure whether we had been successful until the date arrived.
On the sixteenth, I signed another of my priorities into law, the Child Support Performance and Incentive Act. We had already increased collections 68 percent since 1992; 1.4 million more families were now receiving child support. This bill penalized states that did not automate their child-support files and gave financial rewards to those that were successful in meeting performance goals. Around this time I announced the purchase of eighty billion bushels of wheat for distribution to poor nations with food shortages. Grain prices were down, and the purchase would both meet a humanitarian need and raise the price of wheat as much as thirteen cents a bushel for hard- pressed farmers. Because a severe heat wave was destroying crops in parts of the country, I also asked Congress to pass an emergency farm aid package.
Toward the end of the month, Mike McCurry announced that he would resign as White House press secretary in the fall, and I named his deputy, Joe Lockhart, who had served as press secretary for my reelection campaign, to succeed him. McCurry had done a fine job in a demanding position, answering tough questions, explaining the administration’s policies with clarity and a quick wit, and working long hours with around-the-clock availability. He wanted to see his kids grow up. I liked Joe Lockhart a lot, and the press seemed to like him, too. Besides, he liked to play cards with me; we would have a smooth transition.
In July, as I continued to push my agenda at home, Dick Holbrooke flew to Belgrade to see Milosevic in an attempt to resolve the Kosovo crisis; Prime Minister Hashimoto resigned after election losses in Japan; Nelson Mandela got married to Graca Machel, the lovely widow of a former president of Mozambique and a leading figure in the struggle to stop the use of children in Africa’s wars; and Ken Starr continued to build his case against me.
He insisted on taking the testimony of several of my Secret Service agents, including Larry Cockell, the head of my detail. The Secret Service had resisted this, and former President Bush had written two letters opposing it. Except when the President is on the residence floor of the White House, the Secret Service is always with him or just outside the door of whatever room he is in. Presidents depend on the Secret Service to protect them, and to protect their confidences. The agents overhear all kinds of conversations involving national security, domestic policy, political conflicts, and personal struggles. Their dedication, professionalism, and discretion had served Presidents of both parties and the nation well. Now Starr was willing to put all that at risk—to investigate not espionage, or Watergate-like abuses of the FBI, or Iran-Contra–like willful defiance of the law, but whether I had given false answers and encouraged Monica Lewinsky to do the same in response to questions asked in bad faith, in a case that had been thrown out of court because it had no merit in the first place. By the end of the month, Starr had granted Monica Lewinsky immunity from prosecution in return for her testimony before the grand jury, and had subpoenaed me to testify as well. On the twenty-ninth, I agreed to testify voluntarily and the subpoena was withdrawn. I can’t say I was looking forward to it. Early in August, I met with ten Indian tribal leaders in Washington to announce a comprehensive effort to increase educational, health care, and economic opportunities for Native Americans. My assistant for intergovernmental affairs, Mickey Ibarra, and Lynn Cutler, my liaison to the tribes, had worked hard on the initiative and it was sorely needed. Although the United States was enjoying its lowest unemployment rate in twenty-eight years, the lowest crime rate in twenty-five years, and the smallest percentage of our citizens on welfare in twenty-nine years, Native American communities that had not grown wealthy from gambling operations were still in bad shape. Fewer than 10 percent of Native Americans went to college, they were three times more likely to suffer from diabetes as white Americans, and they still had the lowest per capita income of any American ethnic group. Some of the tribal communities had unemployment rates in excess of 50 percent. The leaders were encouraged by the new steps we were taking, and after the meeting I had some hope that we could help them. The next day the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were hit by bombs that exploded within five minutes of each other, killing 257 people, including 12 Americans, and injuring 5,000 others. The initial evidence indicated that Osama bin Laden’s network, which became known as al Qaeda, had launched the attacks. In late February, bin Laden had issued a fatwa calling for attacks on American military and civilian targets anywhere in the world. In May, he had said his supporters would hit U.S. targets in the Gulf and talked about “bringing the war home to America.” In June, in an interview with an American journalist, he had threatened to bring down U.S. military aircraft with anti-aircraft missiles. By this time, we had been following bin Laden for years. Early in my first term, Tony Lake and Dick Clarke had pressed the CIA for more information about the wealthy Saudi, who had been expelled from his own country in 1991, had lost his citizenship in 1994, and had taken up residence in Sudan. At first, bin Laden seemed to be a financier of terrorist operations, but over time we would learn that he was the head of a highly sophisticated terrorist organization, with access to large amounts of money beyond his own fortune, and with operatives in several countries, including Chechnya, Bosnia, and the Philippines. In 1995, after the war in Bosnia, we had thwarted mujahedin attempts to take over there and, in cooperation with local officials, had also stopped a plot to blow up a dozen planes flying out of the Philippines to the West Coast, but bin Laden’s transnational network continued to grow. In January 1996, the CIA had established a station focused exclusively on bin Laden and his network within its Counterterrorism Center, and shortly thereafter we began to urge Sudan to expel bin Laden. Sudan was then a virtual safe haven for terrorists, including the Egyptians who had tried to kill President Mubarak the previous June and who had succeeded in assassinating his predecessor, Anwar Sadat. The nation’s leader, Hasan al-Turabi, shared bin Laden’s radical views, and the two of them were involved in a whole host of business ventures, running the gamut from legitimate operations to weapons manufacturing and support for terrorists.
As we pressed Turabi to expel bin Laden, we asked Saudi Arabia to take him. The Saudis didn’t want him back, but bin Laden finally left Sudan in mid-1996, apparently still on good terms with Turabi. He moved to Afghanistan, where he found a warm welcome from Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, a militant Sunni sect that was bent on establishing a radical Muslim theocracy in Afghanistan. In September 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul and started seizing other areas of the country. By the end of the year, the CIA’s bin Laden unit had developed significant information on him and his infrastructure. Almost a year later, Kenyan authorities arrested a man they believed was involved in a terrorist plot against the U.S. Embassy there.
In the week after the bombings, I kept up my regular schedule, traveling to Kentucky, Illinois, and California to promote the Patients’ Bill of Rights and our clean water initiative, and to help Democrats up for election in those states. Beyond the public events, I spent most of my time with our national security team discussing how we were going to respond to the African attacks. On August 13, there was a memorial service at Andrews Air Force Base for ten of the twelve American victims. The people bin Laden believed deserved to die just because they were Americans included a career diplomat I had met twice and his son; a woman who had just spent her vacation caring for her aged parents; an Indian-born foreign service officer who had traveled the world working for her adopted country; an epidemiologist working to save African children from disease and death; a mother of three small children; a proud new grandmother; an accomplished jazz musician with a day job in the foreign service; an embassy administrator who had married a Kenyan; and three sergeants, one each in the army, the air force, and the Marine Corps.
