armed students opened fire on their classmates, killing twelve students and injuring more than twenty others before turning their guns on themselves. It could have been even worse. One teacher, who later died from his wounds, led many students to safety. Medics and police officers saved more lives. A week later, with a bipartisan group of members of Congress and mayors, I announced some measures to make it harder for guns to fall into the wrong hands: applying the Brady law’s prohibition on gun ownership to violent juveniles; closing the “gun show loophole” to require background checks on people who bought guns at such events rather than at gun stores; cracking down on illegal gun trafficking; and prohibiting juveniles from owning assault rifles. I also proposed funds to help schools develop successful violence prevention and conflict-resolution programs like the one I had just observed at T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia.
Senate majority leader Trent Lott called my initiative a “typical knee-jerk reaction,” and Tom DeLay accused me of exploiting Columbine for political gain. But the legislation’s principal sponsor, Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy of New York, wasn’t interested in politics; her husband had been killed and her son badly wounded on a commuter train by a deranged man with a handgun he should never have been able to possess. The NRA and its supporters blamed our violent culture. I agreed that children were exposed to too much violence; that’s why I was supporting Al and Tipper Gore’s drive to get V-chips into new TVs so that parents could limit children’s exposure to excessive violence. But the violence in our culture only strengthened the argument for doing more to keep guns away from children, criminals, and mentally unstable people.
At the end of the month, Hillary and I hosted the largest gathering of heads of state ever to meet in Washington, as the leaders of NATO and the states in its Partnership for Peace gathered to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of NATO, and to reaffirm our determination to prevail in Kosovo. Afterward, Al From of the DLC and Sidney Blumenthal put together another of our “Third Way” conferences to highlight the values, ideas, and strategies Tony Blair and I shared with Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, Wim Kok of the Netherlands, and the new Italian prime minister, Massimo D’Alema. By this time, I was focused on building a global consensus on economic, social, and security policies that I thought would serve America and the world well when my term was over by strengthening the forces of positive interdependence and weakening those of disintegration and destruction. The Third Way movement and the broadening of NATO’s alliance and its mission had moved us a fair distance in the right direction, but as with so many of the best-laid plans, they would later be overtaken and redirected by events, principally the growing hostility to globalization and the rising tide of terror. In early May, shortly after Jesse Jackson persuaded Milosevic to release three U.S. servicemen the Serbs had captured along their border with Macedonia, we lost two American soldiers when their Apache helicopter crashed in a training exercise; they would be the only U.S. casualties in the conflict. Boris Yeltsin sent Victor Chernomyrdin to see me to discuss Russia’s interest in ending the war and its apparent willingness to participate in the peacekeeping force afterward. Meanwhile, we kept the pressure up, as I authorized 176 more aircraft for Wes Clark.
On May 7, we suffered the worst political setback of the conflict when NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese citizens. I soon learned that the bombs had hit their intended target, which had been erroneously identified on the basis of old CIA maps as a Serbian government building used for military purposes. It was the kind of mistake we had worked hard to avoid. The military was mostly using aerial photography for targeting. I had begun meeting with Bill Cohen, Hugh Shelton, and Sandy Berger several times a week to go over the high-profile targets in an attempt to maximize damage to Milosevic’s aggression while minimizing civilian casualties. I was dumbfounded and deeply upset by the mistake and immediately called Jiang Zemin to apologize. He wouldn’t take the call, so I publicly and repeatedly apologized.
Over the next three days, protests escalated all over China. They were especially intense around the American embassy in Beijing, where Ambassador Sasser found himself besieged. The Chinese said they believed the attack was deliberate and declined to accept my apologies. When I finally talked with President Jiang on the fourteenth, I apologized again and told him I was sure he didn’t believe I would knowingly attack his embassy. Jiang replied that he knew I wouldn’t do that, but said he did believe that there were people in the Pentagon or the CIA who didn’t favor my outreach to China and could have rigged the maps intentionally to cause a rift between us. Jiang had a hard time believing that a nation as technologically advanced as we were could make such a mistake.
I had a hard time believing it, too, but that’s what happened. Eventually we got beyond it, but it was tough going for a while. I had just named Admiral Joe Prueher, who was retiring as commander in chief of our forces in the Pacific, to be the new U.S. ambassador to China. He was very respected by the Chinese military, and I believed he would be able to help repair the relationship. By late May, NATO had approved a 48,000-troop peacekeeping force to go into Kosovo after the conflict was concluded, and we had begun quiet discussions about the possibility of sending in ground troops earlier if it became clear that the air campaign wasn’t going to prevail before people were trapped in the mountains by winter. Sandy Berger was preparing a memo for me on options, and I was ready to send troops in if necessary, but I still believed the air war would succeed. On the twenty-seventh, Milosevic was indicted by the war crimes prosecutor in The Hague.
There was a great deal of activity in the rest of the world in May. In mid-month, Boris Yeltsin survived his own impeachment vote in the Duma. On the seventeenth, Prime Minister Netanyahu was defeated for reelection by the Labor Party leader, retired general Ehud Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israeli history. Barak was a brilliant Renaissance man: he had done graduate work in economic engineering systems at Stanford, was a concert-level classical pianist, and repaired clocks as a hobby. He had been in politics only a few years, and his close-cropped hair, intense stare, and blunt, staccato speaking style were more reflective of his military past than of the more murky political waters he now had to navigate. His victory was a clear signal that Israelis saw in him what they had seen in his role model, Yitzhak Rabin: the possibility of peace with security. Equally important, Barak’s large victory margin had given him the chance to have a governing coalition in the Knesset that would support the hard steps to peace, something Prime Minister Netanyahu had never had.
The next day Jordan’s King Abdullah came to see me, full of hope for peace and determination to be a worthy successor to his father. He clearly understood the challenges facing his nation and the peace process. I was also struck by his understanding of economics and the contribution that more growth could make to peace and reconciliation. After the meeting I was convinced that the king and his equally impressive wife, Queen Rania, would be positive forces in the region for a long time to come. On May 26, Bill Perry delivered a letter from me to Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s leader, proposing a road map to the future in which America would provide a broad range of assistance to him if, but only if, he gave up his attempts to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. In 1998, North Korea had taken the constructive step of ending its tests of such missiles, and I thought Perry’s mission had a fair chance to succeed.
Two days later, Hillary and I were at a DLC retreat at White Oak Plantation in northern Florida, which has the largest wild game preserve in the United States. I got up at four in the morning to watch the inaugural ceremonies for Nigeria’s new president, former general Olusegun Obasanjo, on TV. Ever since gaining independence, Nigeria had been riddled by corruption, regional and religious strife, and deteriorating social conditions. Despite its large oil production, the country suffered periodic power outages and fuel shortages. Obasanjo had taken power briefly in a military coup in the 1970s, then had kept his promise to step aside as soon as new elections could be held. Later, he had been imprisoned for his political views and, while incarcerated, had become a devout Christian and had written books about his faith. It was hard to imagine a bright future for sub-Saharan Africa without a more successful Nigeria, by far its most populous nation. After listening to his compelling inaugural address, I hoped Obasanjo would be able to succeed where others had failed.
On the home front, I started the month with an important clean-air announcement. We had already reduced toxic air pollution from chemical plants by 90 percent, and had set tough standards to reduce smog and soot that would prevent millions of cases of childhood asthma. On May 1, I said that after extensive consultation with industry, environmental, and consumer groups, EPA administrator Carol Browner would promulgate a rule to require all passenger vehicles, including gas-guzzling SUVs, to meet the same pollution standards, and that we would cut the sulfur content of gasoline by 90 percent over five years.
I announced a new crime initiative, releasing the funds to complete our efforts to put 100,000 police on the streets (more than half of them were already in service); expanding the COPS program to hire 50,000 more police officers in the highest-crime areas; and making it a federal crime to possess biological agents that could be turned into terrorist weapons without a legitimate, peaceful purpose for having them. The twelfth was a day I had hoped would never come; Bob Rubin was returning to private life. I believed he had been the best and most important Treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton in the early days of our Republic. Bob had also been the first head of
