Bill Clinton

by Michael Tomasky

  Earlier in the fall, Clinton had signed the law creating his AmeriCorps program to enable young people to spend a year performing community service. And in the greatest foreign policy coup of his early presidency, he hosted Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at the White House after Israeli and Palestinian negotiators had completed the Oslo framework for a peace settlement. Clinton was justifiably proud of that moment—and justifiably worried about the stagecraft. He got Rabin, however reluctantly, to agree to shake Arafat’s hand in front of the Rose Garden cameras, but both Clinton and Rabin were mortified at the thought that Arafat would attempt a double-cheek kiss, the traditional Arab greeting. Clinton spent time with his aides portraying the two principals, practicing how he would grab Arafat gently by the arm to prevent him from leaning in for the buss.

  But the artillery shells kept coming. The Washington Post and the New York Times kept publishing stories about the Whitewater deal—stories that proved nothing but suggested plenty. Over the course of the fall, cries began to mount for Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint a special prosecutor to look into whether the Clintons (as investors) had done anything illegal, or whether Bill Clinton (as governor) had pressured state officials to do favors for the couple’s coinvestors, Jim McDougal and his wife, Susan.

  As the administration marched toward completing its first year, the internal debate on whether to accede to this demand moved to center stage. Bernard Nussbaum, the White House counsel, argued strenuously against a special prosecutor, saying—presciently, it turned out—that a prosecutor with an unlimited budget would keep turning over rocks until he found something. David Gergen, the erstwhile Republican presidential aide whom Clinton had asked in mid-1993 to come in and bring some order to the playground-ish chaos that had reigned in the early months, agreed with Nussbaum but advised Clinton to turn over all the pertinent records to the media. George Stephanopoulos and deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, sensing inevitability, suggested that Clinton just go ahead and get it over with. Clinton himself didn’t want to, mostly on constitutional and statutory grounds; the independent counsel law stipulated that one should be named only when there existed “credible evidence” of wrongdoing, which did not exist. “My instincts,” he wrote, “were to release the records and fight the prosecutor, but if the consensus was to do the reverse, I could live with it.”

  And so, on January 7, 1994, word got out that Reno favored the appointment of a special prosecutor: to investigate Whitewater and, preposterously, the suicide of Vince Foster, a White House aide who had killed himself in July 1993 after having been the subject of a series of innuendo-rich editorials in the Wall Street Journal, which speculated that he’d skirted the law on a number of fronts, and even groused about Foster’s failure to supply the Journal with a photograph of himself in a timely way. Foster was a former law partner of Hillary’s at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, and as a child he had been little Billy Blythe’s neighbor and oldest friend.

  So Clinton chose to live with it—and, four years later, nearly died by it.

  4

  The Limits of Power

  Foreign policy hadn’t been much of an issue in the 1992 campaign. The Cold War was over and won. The Berlin Wall had come down in 1989, and the Soviet Union itself, the great ideological foe of seven decades whose mere presence had done so much to define U.S. foreign policy, domestic policy, and even societal culture, had ceased to be on Christmas Day 1991. Islamic fundamentalism existed, certainly, but it was mostly a regional problem. Anxiety about the state of the world was low, while anxiety about the state of the economy was high.

  The Cold War victory was sweet, but it had created a paradoxical problem for the American military, and for the American foreign policy establishment more generally: What were they to do now? The Soviet Union’s existence had made their raison d’être clear; now what? What was a hegemonic military in a comparatively stable world supposed to do with itself, and what should the new imperatives of American foreign policy be? These were the urgent questions of the day. Many spoke of “humanitarian intervention” as a new course for America, inserting the military into desperate situations around the world to save lives, and to do so in places where U.S. strategic interests were not directly threatened—a clear break from Cold War realpolitik. A darker current, housed in President Bush’s Defense Department, which was led by Dick Cheney, argued that the United States would still face unforeseeable smaller threats and that it might have to start a preemptive war or two to show the world who was boss.

  Clinton, like any governor, lacked foreign policy experience. But in his case the situation was worse. The draft issue made it difficult for a significant percentage of Americans to imagine him as a credible commander in chief. And his reputation as a shifty pol who would say whatever was needed to please audiences didn’t help. On the campaign trail Clinton tried to argue that he’d supported the Persian Gulf War, the only war the United States had won since World War II. But the Chicago Tribune was not alone in observing that “his campaign has not been able to produce any evidence that puts Clinton squarely on record behind the president’s policy before the war started.” A quote from early 1991 failed to clarify matters. “I guess I would have voted with the majority if it was a close vote,” Clinton said of the congressional vote to authorize that war. “But I agree with the arguments the minority made.” Nevertheless, the voters placed the world in his hands.

  The most pressing global crisis was Bosnia. Yugoslavia had been cobbled together by the great powers after World War I. It was the convergence point of three distinct religion-based cultures: Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the remnants of Islam from the days of the Ottoman Empire. During most of the Cold War, Yugoslavia was neither East nor West, and only a dictator such as Josip Broz Tito was able to hold its patchwork of ethnicities and religions together. When the Cold War ended, the place exploded. The different regions declared their independence as nations. The new republic of about four million people called Bosnia and Herzegovina was plurality Muslim but multiethnic, with a large Serbian population within its borders. Bosnia’s leaders sought to build a pluralistic society, but next door in the larger and stronger Serbia, the new leader, Slobodan Milosevic, a remorselessly chauvinistic nationalist, saw matters differently, especially with regard to the Bosnian Serbs.

  In the spring of 1992, after a series of diplomatic failures, fighting broke out. The Serbs laid siege to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital and one of the most gloriously beautiful cities of southern Europe. A new phrase entered the political lexicon: ethnic cleansing, the displacement, torture, and slaughter of thousands of civilians on account of their ethnic identity. It was the worst violence on European soil since World War II, and while the Serbs weren’t the only ones with blood on their hands, Milosevic drew comparisons, not wholly inapt, to Hitler. Western intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens demanded a humanitarian intervention. But the Bush administration, whose policy of refraining from direct involvement in post–Cold War European matters had for the most part served it well, did nothing. As Bush’s secretary of state James Baker had said to Congress: “We don’t have a dog in this fight.”

  Baker was an old-school, Cold War–era realist. Clinton’s worldview was more informed by his generational experiences—including Vietnam and the rise of human rights as a legitimate concern—and his view of the Balkans conflict reflected that. During the presidential campaign, he’d come out in favor of NATO air strikes against Serbian aggression and of lifting a 1991 arms embargo that had been imposed on all parties but affected the new Bosnian state most adversely.

  As this was mostly a European matter, the views of America’s European allies mattered, too. Germany’s Helmut Kohl was mostly with Clinton, but Britain’s John Major and France’s François Mitterrand were implacably opposed to anything that might escalate the violence. So NATO couldn’t agree on a course of action, and neither for the most part could the United
Nations, since Russia, Serbia’s chief ally, could be assured of vetoing any strongly anti-Serbian action on the Security Council. The UN, however, had established a no-fly zone, and when four Serbian aircraft violated it in February 1994, NATO jets shot them down. In May of that year, the Senate passed, at Bob Dole’s behest, a resolution urging that the United States unilaterally lift the arms embargo. Clinton was reluctant to do this, he writes in My Life, because he thought unilateral action would weaken the UN and because he “didn’t want to divide the NATO alliance.” Clinton brought in the veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke to try to sort the mess out, but the conflict ground on. The real showdown with Milosevic would come a few years—and many thousands of dead bodies—later.

  As bad as things were in the Balkans, the single biggest foreign policy catastrophe of the early Clinton years happened elsewhere—in Somalia. A civil war had ravaged the country for two years, devastating the population and rendering Somalia (in another new phrase from the era) a “failed state.” Calls for humanitarian intervention arose, and in December 1992, during his final weeks in office, President Bush responded. He ordered a deployment of 28,000 American troops into Somalia, promising that they “will not stay one day longer than is absolutely necessary.”

  Inevitably, it dragged on. In October 1993, U.S. Delta Forces launched an assault on the militia of strongman Mohamed Farah Aidid in Mogadishu, the capital. Aidid’s men shot down two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, killing eighteen American soldiers—at the time, the largest single-day loss of life for the United States since Vietnam. American news broadcasts showed images of Somalis dragging American soldiers’ bodies through the barren capital’s streets. Clinton told his aides he couldn’t believe “we’re being pushed around by these two-bit pricks.” He got the United States disentangled fast, as public opinion demanded. Americans decided that they’d better think twice about these humanitarian interventions, but Americans weren’t the only ones watching; a little-known Islamic fundamentalist based in Sudan named Osama bin Laden made a mental note that the great United States seemed to have no stomach for death.

  The Mogadishu tragedy would have further disastrous consequences a few months later, when the Clinton administration made no effort to stop a genocide in the tiny East African nation of Rwanda in the spring of 1994. For three months the majority Hutu government of Rwanda slaughtered as much as 70 percent of the minority Tutsi population, along with many moderate Hutus. While it’s impossible to know how much of the bloodshed the United States could have prevented, we do know that Clinton never once convened his top foreign policy advisers to discuss the issue.

  The final foreign policy crisis of Clinton’s early tenure unfolded in Haiti, where a duly elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, had been deposed in a coup d’état in 1991. Aristide had been popularly elected in the wake of the collapse of the brutal François Duvalier dictatorship; he was a man of the left who had vowed to challenge the established order in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation. After a mere eight months, the military overthrew him. The new regime of Raoul Cédras crushed the aspirations of the people and cut a lurid swath of rape and murder and torture (lacerating mothers’ faces as their children watched) across Haiti. Clinton attempted diplomacy while also imposing sanctions. In July 1993, Cédras signed an agreement saying he would give up power. He did not, and by September 1994, Clinton had made his decision—he would use American military force to put Aristide back in the presidential palace. During the Cold War, the United States had propped up the sanguinary Duvaliers because they were anticommunist. Now Clinton was ordering the United States military to bring a leftist back to power. It sure wasn’t the Cold War anymore.

  It was a brave and risky (and, to critics, foolhardy) decision on Clinton’s part: American public opinion was firmly against using the military in this way. The Pentagon opposed the intervention as well. But the mission was accomplished with no loss of life, setting a precedent that the United States was capable of a quick and successful humanitarian intervention, provided success was measured as accomplishing a limited mission and not transforming the society. Haiti did not become a paradise, but Aristide went on to serve his country as president twice, and the nation has seen some improvements on political pluralism, civil liberties, and the rule of law.

  In confronting these three foreign policy crises early in his term, Clinton helped define the priorities of a post–Cold War America. Beyond these, a range of calamities asserted themselves. In June 1994, North Korea began removing weapons-grade plutonium, five or six bombs’ worth, from fuel rods at a research reactor. The world came closer than it knew in June 1994 to full-scale war on the Korean peninsula—the Clinton administration very seriously considered a preemptive strike against the North’s nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, and it feared that such an action would provoke Pyongyang to attack the South. It was former president Jimmy Carter’s fortuitous presence in the North Korean capital, where he was meeting with dictator Kim Il Sung as a private citizen, that helped stave off hostilities. Carter hustled to find a diplomatic answer.

  Events in Northern Ireland also took the new president, and the world, somewhat by surprise. In November 1993, word was leaked that the British government and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which had been in a virtual state of war since 1969, had been engaged in secret cease-fire talks. The revelation damaged British prime minister John Major, but the next month Major and Albert Reynolds, his Irish counterpart whose government had also been in secret talks with the Provisional IRA, signed the Downing Street Declaration, which provided a framework for an IRA cease-fire and, down the road, potential Irish unification. This placed in Clinton’s lap the delicate issue of whether to grant Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams a visa to visit the United States—something utterly unheard of for a Northern Irish leader (or terrorist, depending on how one saw things). Adams’s very voice had been banned from the BBC since 1988. Britain, by far America’s closest ally, lobbied furiously against the visa. But Clinton became convinced that Adams was serious about peace, and he granted the visa. It was a gamble that enraged conservatives and infuriated John Major, who didn’t take Clinton’s phone calls for weeks, but it was one that history would largely reward.

  * * *

  For Bill Clinton, as for most presidents, foreign policy decisions were often made in response to unpredictable world events; in the realm over which the president had more opportunity to take the initiative, domestic policy, there was a clear top priority for 1994: health care reform.

  The priority had been established by Clinton’s presidential campaign, and by history. Health care reform, specifically the idea of some kind of universal health insurance coverage, was the one piece of great unfinished business from the New Deal era. The nations of Europe had all initiated different forms of universal coverage, but in the United States what developed was a system in which health coverage was tied to one’s job. Lyndon Johnson got Congress to pass socialized medicine for the elderly (Medicare) in 1965, but the insurance lobbies, which under any government-administered system would stand to lose millions of customers, were powerful enough to block anything more comprehensive.

  Health care reform mostly disappeared as an issue in American politics during the 1970s and ’80s. But over the course of the 1980s, things started to change: costs increased; insurers and employers began to shift more of the burden of those costs to customers; and more people lost their insurance altogether. Still, public frustration was diffuse, and no one campaigned on it, until a special election in Pennsylvania for the U.S. Senate in 1991, when the Democrat, Harris Wofford, rode the issue to an upset victory over the heavily favored Republican, Dick Thornburgh. Two of Wofford’s advisers, James Carville and Paul Begala, would go on to hold senior positions in Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and they saw in health care a winning issue for Clinton.

  So Clinton campaigned hard on reform and put Hillary in charge of the effort at the beginning of his presidency. The budget and NAFTA may have taken pre
cedence in 1993, but the First Lady and Ira Magaziner assembled a task force in the administration’s early days that conducted public hearings around the country and private meetings in Washington. The latter provided a fat target, as the administration’s foes, led by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, promoted lurid gossip about what manner of socialistic evils the First Lady was up to behind closed doors. The nascent conservative movement was against any efforts at reform, but Republicans in Congress weren’t, necessarily; according to Clinton, Senate Republican leader Bob Dole was telling him privately that a compromise could be worked out.

  In September 1993, Clinton tried to kick-start the effort with a speech to a joint session of Congress that had not, at first, gone auspiciously. When the president stood at the rostrum to begin his speech, he noticed that the teleprompter in front of him was scrolling the wrong text; it had been loaded with a previous speech he’d given to Congress months before. It was seven or so minutes before his aides loaded the right text into the device, minutes during which Clinton delivered the speech extemporaneously—and expertly. Maybe his improvisational skills could get a bill passed, too.

  The principles of reform he laid out in that speech were centered on the idea of “managed competition.” The marketplace for health coverage would still be a private one, but the government would manage the competition to structure and adjust the market, to establish equitable rules, and more. The end goals were universal coverage and cost control. The president tried to sum it all up in six words: “security, simplicity, savings, choice, quality, and responsibility.”