movement of the last decade, these goals would be focused on outputs, not inputs, obligating all of us to achieve certain results. I argued that we would look foolish unless we came out of Charlottesville with a bold commitment that would put new energy into education reform. From the start, most of the governors were behind the cause and supported the idea of making the summit the start of something big. Some of the President’s people weren’t so sure. They were afraid of committing him to a big idea that could get him into trouble by raising expectations of new federal funding. Because of the deficit and the President’s “no new taxes” pledge, that wasn’t in the cards. In the end, the White House came around, thanks to John Sununu, who was then the White House chief of staff. Sununu convinced his White House colleagues that the governors couldn’t go home emptyhanded, and I promised to minimize public pressure from the governors for more federal money. The final summit declaration said, “The time has come, for the first time in U.S. history, to establish clear national performance goals, goals that will make us internationally competitive.”
At the end of the summit, President Bush hand-wrote me a very cordial note, thanking me for working with his staff on the summit and saying he wanted to keep education reform “out there above the fray” as we headed into the 1990 midterm election. I wanted that, too. The governors’ education committee immediately began a process to develop the goals, working with the White House domestic-policy advisor, Roger Porter, who had gone to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar a year after I did. We worked furiously over the next four months to reach agreement with the White House in time for the President’s State of the Union address.
By the end of January 1990, we had agreed on six goals for the year 2000:
• By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn.
• By the year 2000, the high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent.
• By the year 2000, American students will leave grades four, eight, and twelve having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography; and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our modern economy.
• By the year 2000, U.S. students will be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement.
• By the year 2000, every adult in America will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
• By the year 2000, every school in America will be free of drugs and violence and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.
On January 31, I sat in the gallery of the House of Representatives as President Bush announced these goals, said they were developed jointly by the White House and the Governors’ Task Force on Education, and reported that they would be part of a more comprehensive goals-and-objectives statement that we would present to all the governors at their winter meeting the next month. The document the governors adopted in late February was a worthy successor to the 1983
I spent the last months of 1989 trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life. There were good arguments against running for a fifth term. I was discouraged by my inability to raise the funds necessary to keep moving forward in education, early-childhood development, and health care. I could stop after ten years, look back on a decade of real accomplishments under difficult circumstances, and leave open the option of running for President in 1992. Finally, if I ran again, I might not win. I had already served longer than anyone but Orval Faubus. And the polls indicated that a lot of people wanted a new governor.
On the other hand, I loved both politics and policy. And I didn’t want to leave office with the bad taste of 1989’s money failures in my mouth. I still had an able, energetic, and extremely honest team. The whole time I was governor, only twice had I been offered money to make a decision a particular way. A company that wanted to win the bid to provide medical services in the prison system offered me a substantial amount through a third party. I had the company taken off the bid list. A county judge asked me to see an elderly man who wanted a pardon for his nephew. The old fellow had had no contact with state government in decades and obviously thought he was doing what he had to do when he offered me $10,000 for the pardon. I told the man it was lucky for him I was hard of hearing, because he might have just committed a crime. I suggested that he go home and give the money to his church or a charity, and said I’d look into his nephew’s case.
On most days, I still looked forward to going to work, and I had no idea what I’d do if I gave it up. At the end of October, I went out to the state fair, as I did every year. That year, I sat at a booth for several hours and talked to anyone who wanted to see me. Along toward the end of the day, a man in overalls who looked to be about sixty- five dropped by to visit. It was an enlightening experience. “Bill, are you gonna run again?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I replied. “If I do, will you vote for me?” “I guess so. I always have,” he answered. “Aren’t you sick of me after all these years?” I inquired. He smiled and said,
“No, I’m not, but everybody else I know is.” I chuckled and answered, “Don’t they think I’ve done a good job?” He shot back, “Sure they do, but you got a paycheck every two weeks, didn’t you?” It was a classic example of another of Clinton’s laws of politics: All elections are about the future. I was supposed to do a good job, just like everyone else who worked for a living. A good record is helpful mostly as evidence that you’ll do what you say if reelected.
In November, the Berlin Wall, symbol of the Cold War divide, fell. Like all Americans, I cheered at the sight of young Germans tearing it down and taking chunks of it for souvenirs. Our long standoff against Communist expansion in Europe was ending with the victory of freedom, thanks to the united front presented by NATO and the constancy of American leaders from Harry Truman to George Bush. I thought back to my own trip to Moscow almost twenty years earlier, the eagerness of young Russians for information and music from the West, and the hunger for freedom that it represented. Not long afterward, I received two pieces of the Berlin Wall from my longtime friend David Ifshin, who had been in Berlin on that fateful night of November 9 and joined in with the Germans in chipping away at the wall. David had been an intense and visible opponent of the Vietnam War. His joy at the fall of the wall symbolized the promise that all Americans saw in the post–Cold War era. In December, my old pastor and mentor, W. O. Vaught, lost his battle with cancer. He had retired from Immanuel a few years earlier and was replaced by Dr. Brian Harbour, a fine young pastor who represented the dwindling ranks of progressive Southern Baptists with whom I identified. Dr. Vaught had remained active in retirement until his illness made him too weak to travel and speak. A couple of years earlier, he had come to visit me in the Governor’s Mansion. He said he wanted to tell me three things. First, he said he knew I was concerned about the morality of capital punishment, though I had always supported it. He told me that the biblical commandment “Thou shall not kill” did not forbid lawful executions, because the root Greek word did not cover all killing. He said the literal meaning of the commandment was “Thou shall not commit murder.” Second, he said he was concerned about fundamentalist attacks on me for my pro-choice position on abortion. He wanted me to know that, while he believed abortion was usually wrong, the Bible did not condemn it, nor did it say life begins at conception, but when life has been “breathed into” a baby, when it is slapped on the behind after being taken out of the mother’s body. I asked him about the biblical statement that God knows us even when we are in our mother’s womb. He replied that the verse simply refers to God being omniscient, and that it might as well have said God knew us even before we were in our mother’s womb, even before anyone in our direct line was born.
The final thing Dr. Vaught said took me aback. He said, “Bill, I think you’re going to be President someday. I think you’ll do a good job, but there’s one thing above all you must remember: God will never forgive you if you don’t stand by Israel.” He believed God intended the Jews to be at home in the Holy Land. While he didn’t disagree that the Palestinians had been mistreated, he said the answer to their problem had to include peace and security for Israel.
In mid-December, I went to see Dr. Vaught. He was wasting away, too weak to leave his bedroom. He asked me to move his Christmas tree into his bedroom so that he could enjoy it in his last days. Fittingly, Dr. Vaught died on Christmas Day. Jesus never had a more faithful follower. And I never had a more faithful pastor and counselor. Now I would have to navigate the path he had predicted, and the perils of my own soul, without him.
