S aturday, November 4, started out to be a hopeful day. The Bosnian peace talks had begun three days earlier at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and we had just won a vote in Congress to beat back seventeen anti-environment riders to the EPA budget. I had prerecorded my usual Saturday-morning radio address, assailing the cuts that were still in the EPA budget, and was enjoying a rare, relaxing day, until 3:25 p.m., when Tony Lake called me in the residence to tell me that Yitzhak Rabin had been shot while leaving a huge peace rally in Tel Aviv. His assailant was not a Palestinian terrorist but a young Israeli law student, Yigal Amir, who was bitterly opposed to turning over the West Bank, including land occupied by Israeli settlements, to the Palestinians.
Yitzhak had been rushed to the hospital, and for a good while we didnt know how badly hed been wounded. I called Hillary, who was upstairs working on her book, and told her what had happened. She came down and held me for a while as we talked about how Yitzhak and I had been together just ten days before when he had come to the United States to present me with the United Jewish Appeals Isaiah Award. It was a happy night. Yitzhak, who hated to dress up, showed up for the black-tie event in a dark suit with a regular tie. He borrowed a bow tie from my presidential aide, Steve Goodin, and I straightened it for him just before we walked out. When Yitzhak presented the award to me, he insisted that, as the honoree, I stand on his right, even though protocol dictated that foreign leaders stand on the Presidents right. Tonight we reverse the order, he said. I replied that he was probably right to do so before the United Jewish Appeal because, after all, they may be more your crowd than mine. Now I hoped against hope that we would laugh together like that again.
About twenty-five minutes after his first call, Tony called again to say that Rabins condition was grave, but he knew nothing else. I hung up the phone and told Hillary I wanted to go down to the Oval Office. After talking to my staff and pacing the floor for five minutes, I wanted to be alone, so I grabbed a putter and a couple of golf balls and headed for the putting green on the South Lawn, where I prayed to God to spare Yitzhaks life, hit the ball aimlessly, and waited.
After ten or fifteen minutes I saw the door to the Oval Office open and looked up to watch Tony Lake walking down the stone pathway toward me. I could tell by the look on his face that Yitzhak was dead. When Tony told me, I asked him to go back and prepare a statement for me to read.
In the two and a half years we had worked together, Rabin and I had developed an unusually close relationship, marked by candor, trust, and an extraordinary understanding of each others political positions and thought processes. We had become friends in that unique way people do when they are in a struggle that they believe is great and good. With every encounter, I came to respect and care for him more. By the time he was killed, I had come to love him as I had rarely loved another man. In the back of my mind, I suppose I always knew he had put his life at risk, but I couldnt imagine him gone, and I didnt know what I would or could do in the Middle East without him. Overcome with grief, I went back upstairs to be with Hillary for a couple of hours.
The next day Hillary, Chelsea, and I went to Foundry Methodist Church with our guests from Little Rock, Vic and Susan Fleming and their daughter Elizabeth, one of Chelseas closest friends from back home. It was All Saints Day, and the service was full of evocations of Rabin. Chelsea and another young girl read a lesson from Exodus about Moses confronting God in the burning bush. Our pastor, Phil Wogaman, said that the site in Tel Aviv where Rabin laid down his life has become a holy place.
After Hillary and I took communion, we left the church and drove to the Israeli embassy to see Ambassador and Mrs. Rabinovich and sign the condolence book, which lay on a table in the embassys Jerusalem Hall alongside a large photograph of Rabin. By the time we arrived, Tony Lake and Dennis Ross, our special envoy to the Middle East, were already there, sitting in silent respect. Hillary and I signed the book and then went home to get ready to fly to Jerusalem for the funeral.
We were accompanied by former Presidents Carter and Bush, the congressional leadership and three dozen other senators and representatives, General Shalikashvili, former secretary of state George Shultz, and several prominent business leaders. As soon as we landed, Hillary and I went to the Rabin home to see Leah. She was heartbroken, but trying to put on a brave front for her family and her country.
The funeral was attended by King Hussein and Queen Noor, President Mubarak, and other world leaders. Arafat wanted to come, but was persuaded not to because of the risk and the potentially divisive impact of his presence in Israel. It was also a risk for Mubarak, who had recently survived an assassination attempt himself, but he took it. Hussein and Noor were devastated by Rabins death; they genuinely cared about him and thought he was essential to the peace process. For each of his Arab partners, Yitzhaks assassination was a painful reminder of the risks they, too, were running for peace.
Hussein gave a magnificent eulogy, and Rabins granddaughter Noa Ben ArtziPelossof, then doing her service in the Israeli army, moved the audience by speaking to her grandfather: Grandpa, you were the pillar of fire before the camp, and now we are just a camp left alone in the dark, and were so cold. In my remarks, I tried to rally the people of Israel to keep following their fallen leader. That very week, Jews around the world were studying that portion of the Torah in which God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, or Yitzhak; once Abraham demonstrated his willingness to obey, God spared the boy. Now God tests our faith even more terribly, for he has taken our Yitzhak. But Israels covenant with God, for freedom, for tolerance, for security, for peacethat covenant must hold. That covenant was Prime Minister Rabins lifes work. Now we must make it his lasting legacy. I closed with Shalom, chaver.
Somehow those two words, Shalom, chaverGood-bye, friendhad captured the feelings of Israelis about Rabin. I had a number of Jewish staff members who spoke Hebrew and knew how I felt about Rabin; I am still grateful that they gave me the phrase. Shimon Peres later told me that chaver means more than mere friendship; it evokes the comradeship of soul mates in common cause. Soon Shalom, chaver began to appear on billboards and bumper stickers all across Israel.
After the funeral I held a few meetings with other leaders at the King David Hotel, with its magnificent view of the Old City, then headed back to Washington. It was almost 4:30 a.m. when we touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, and all the weary travelers staggered off the plane to get whatever rest they could before the budget battle moved into its final phase.
Ever since the new fiscal year had begun on October 1, the government had been running on a continuing resolution (CR), which authorized funding for departments until their new budgets were enacted. It wasnt all that unusual for a new fiscal year to begin without Congress passing a couple of appropriations bills, but now we had the whole government on a CR, with no end in sight. By contrast, in my first two years, the Democratic Congress had approved the budgets on time.
I had offered a plan to balance the budget in ten years, and then one to balance it in nine, by 2004, but the Republicans and I were still far apart on our budgets. All my experts believed the GOP cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, education, the environment, and the EITC were larger than they needed to be to finance their tax cuts and reach balance, even in seven years. We had differences over the estimates of economic growth, medical inflation, and anticipated revenues. When they controlled the White House, the Republicans had consistently overestimated revenues and underestimated spending. I was determined not to make that mistake, and had always used conservative estimates that had enabled us to beat our deficit reduction targets.
Now that they controlled the Congress, the Republicans had gone too far in the other direction, underestimating economic growth and revenues and overestimating the rate of medical inflation, even as they promoted HMOs as a surefire way to slow it down. Their strategy appeared to be the logical extension of William Kristols advice in his memo to Bob Dole, urging that he block all action on health care. If they could cut funding for Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment, middle-class Americans would see fewer benefits from their tax dollars, feel more resentful paying taxes, and become even more receptive to their appeals for tax cuts and their strategy of waging campaigns on divisive social and cultural issues like abortion, gay rights, and guns.
President Reagans budget director, David Stockman, had acknowledged that his administration had intentionally run huge deficits to create a crisis that would starve the domestic budget. They succeeded partially, underfunding but not eliminating investments in our common future. Now the Gingrich Republicans were trying to use a balanced budget with unreasonable revenue and spending assumptions to finish the job. I was determined to stop them; the future direction of our nation hung in the balance.
On November 10, three days before the expiration of the continuing resolution, Congress sent me a new one that threw down the gauntlet: the price for keeping the government open was signing a new CR that increased Medicare premiums 25 percent, cut funding for education and the environment, and weakened environmental laws.
The following day, just a week after Rabins assassination, I gave my radio address on the Republican attempts to pass their budget through the back door of the CR. It was Veterans Day, so I pointed out that eight million of the seniors whose Medicare premiums would be raised were veterans. There was no need for the GOPs draconian cuts: the combined rates of unemployment and inflation were at a twenty-five-year low; federal employment as a percentage of the overall workforce was the smallest since 1933; and the deficit was down. I still wanted to balance the budget, but in a way that was consistent with our fundamental values and without threats and without partisan rancor.
On Monday night the Congress finally sent me an extension of the debt limit. It was worse than the CR, another backdoor effort to pass the budget cuts and weaken environmental laws. The legislation also stripped from the secretary of the Treasury the fund management flexibility he had had since the Reagan years to avoid defaults under extraordinary circumstances. Even worse, it lowered the debt limit again after thirty days, virtually ensuring a default.
Gingrich had been threatening since April to shut the government down and put America in default if I didnt accept his budget. I couldnt tell whether he really wanted to do it or whether he simply believed all the press coverage during my first two years that, in the face of ample evidence to the contrary, had portrayed me as too weak, too willing to abandon commitments, too eager to compromise. If so, he should have paid more attention to the evidence.
On November 13, with the existing CR scheduled to expire at midnight, the negotiators met one more time to try to resolve our differences before the government shutdown. Dole, Gingrich, Armey, Daschle, and Gephardt were there, as were Al Gore, Leon Panetta, Bob Rubin, Laura Tyson, and other members of our team. The atmosphere was already tense when Gingrich started the meeting by complaining about our TV ads. We had started running ads in targeted states in June to highlight administration achievements, beginning with the crime bill. When the budget debate heated up after Labor Day, we put up new ads targeting the proposed Republican cuts, especially in Medicare and Medicaid. After Newt carried on for a while, Leon Panetta tersely reminded him of all the terrible things hed said about me before the 1994 election: Mr. Speaker, you dont have clean hands.
Dole tried to calm things, saying that he didnt want the government to shut down. At that point, Dick Armey broke in to say Dole didnt speak for the House Republicans. Armey was a big man who always wore cowboy boots and seemed to be in a constant state of agitation. He launched into a tirade about how the House Republicans were determined to be true to their principles, and how angry he was that my TV ads on the Medicare cuts had frightened his elderly mother-in-law. I replied that I didnt know about his mother-in-law, but if the Republican budget cuts were to become law, large numbers of elderly people would be forced out of nursing homes or lose their home health care.
Armey replied gruffly that if I didnt give in to them, they would shut the government down and my presidency would be over. I shot back, saying I would never allow their budget to become law, even if I drop to 5 percent in the polls. If you want your budget, youll have to get someone else to sit in this chair! Not surprisingly, we didnt make a deal.
After the meeting, Daschle, Gephardt, and my team were elated by my confrontation with Armey. Al Gore said he just wished everyone in America had heard my declaration, except I should have said I didnt care if I fell to zero in the polls. I looked back at him and said, No, Al. If we drop to 4 percent, Im caving. We all laughed, but our insides were still in knots.
I vetoed both the CR and the debt ceiling bill, and the next day at noon large portions of the federal government shut down. Almost 800,000 workers were sent home, disrupting the lives of millions of Americans who needed their applications for Social Security, veterans benefits, and business loans processed, their workplaces inspected for safety, their national parks open for visits, and much more. After the vetoes, Bob Rubin took the unusual step of borrowing $61 billion from retirement funds to pay our debt and avert default for a while longer.
Not surprisingly, the Republicans tried to blame me for the shutdown. I was afraid theyd get away with it, given their success at blaming me for the partisan divide in the 94 election. Then I got a break when, at a breakfast with reporters on the fifteenth, Gingrich implied that he had made the CR even harsher because Id snubbed him during the flight back from Rabins funeral by not talking to him about the budget and asking him to leave the plane by the back ramp instead of the front one with me. Gingrich said, Its petty but I think its human . . . nobody has talked to you and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp. . . . You just wonder, where is their sense of manners? Perhaps I should have discussed the budget on the way home, but I couldnt bring myself to think about anything but the purpose of the sad trip and the future of the peace process. I did visit with the Speaker and the congressional delegation, as a photograph of Newt, Bob Dole, and me talking on the plane showed. As for getting off the back of the plane, my staff thought they were being courteous, because that was the exit closest to the cars that were picking up Gingrich and the others. And it was four-thirty in the morning; there were no cameras around. The White House released the photo of our conversation, and the press lampooned Gingrichs complaints.
On the sixteenth, at a news conference, I continued to ask the Republicans to send me a clean CR and to begin good-faith budget negotiations, even as they threatened to send me another one with all the same problems. The night before, I signed the Department of Transportation appropriations bill, only the fourth of the needed thirteen, and canceled my scheduled trip to the Asia Pacific leaders meeting in Osaka, Japan.
On November 19, I made a move toward the Republicans, saying that, in principle, I would work for a seven-year balanced budget agreement but would not commit to the GOP tax and spending cuts. The economy had continued to grow, with the deficit dropping more than expected; Panetta, Alice Rivlin, and our economics team believed we could now get to balance in seven years without the harsh cuts the Republicans were pushing. I signed two more appropriations bills, for the legislative branch and for the Treasury Department, the Postal Service, and general government operations. With six of the thirteen bills signed, about 200,000 of the 800,000 federal employees were back at work.
On the morning of November 21, Warren Christopher called me from Dayton to say that the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia had reached a peace agreement to end the war in Bosnia. The agreement preserved Bosnia as a single state to be made up of two parts, the Bosnian Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serb Republic, with a resolution of the territorial disputes over which the war was begun. Sarajevo would remain the undivided capital city. The national government would have responsibility for foreign affairs, trade, immigration, citizenship, and monetary policy. Each of the federations would have its own police force. Refugees would be able to return home, and free movement throughout the country would be guaranteed. There would be international supervision of human rights and police training, and those charged with war crimes would be excluded from political life. A strong international force, commanded by NATO, would supervise the separation of forces and keep the peace as the agreement was being implemented.
The Bosnian peace plan was hard-won and its particulars contained bitter pills for both sides, but it would bring an end to four bloody years that claimed more than 250,000 lives and caused more than two million people to flee their homes. American leadership was decisive in pushing NATO to be more aggressive and in taking the final diplomatic initiative. Our efforts were immeasurably helped by the Croatian and Bosnian military gains on the ground, and the brave and stubborn refusal of Izetbegovic and his comrades to give up in the face of Bosnian Serb aggression.
The final agreement was a tribute to the skills of Dick Holbrooke and his negotiating team; to Warren Christopher, who at critical points was decisive in keeping the Bosnians on board and in closing the deal; to Tony Lake, who initially conceived and sold our peace initiative to our allies and who, with Holbrooke, pushed for the final talks to be held in the United States; to Sandy Berger, who chaired the deputies committee meetings, which kept people throughout the national security operation informed of what was going on without allowing too much interference; and to Madeleine Albright, who strongly supported our aggressive posture in the United Nations. The choice of Dayton and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was inspired, and carefully chosen by the negotiating team; it was in the United States, but far enough away from Washington to discourage leaks, and the facilities permitted the kind of proximity talks that allowed Holbrooke and his team to hammer out the tough details.
On November 22, after twenty-one days of isolation in Dayton, Holbrooke and his team came to the White House to receive my congratulations and discuss our next steps. We still had a big selling job on the Hill and with the American people, who, according to the latest polls, were proud of the peace agreement but were still overwhelmingly opposed to sending U.S. troops to Bosnia. After Al Gore kicked off the meeting by saying that the military testimony to date had not been helpful, I told General Shalikashvili that I knew he supported our involvement in Bosnia but that many of his subordinates remained ambivalent. Al and I had orchestrated our comments to emphasize that it was time for everybody in the government, not just the military, to get with the program. They had the desired effect.
We already had strong support from some important members of Congress, especially Senators Lugar, Biden, and Lieberman. Others offered a more qualified endorsement, saying that they wanted a clear exit strategy. To add to their numbers, I began to invite members of Congress to the White House, while sending Christopher, Perry, Shalikashvili, and Holbrooke to the Hill. Our challenge was complicated by the ongoing debate over the budget; the government was open for the time being, but the Republicans were threatening to shut it down again on December 15.
On November 27, I took my case for U.S. involvement in Bosnia to the American people. Speaking from the Oval Office, I said that our diplomacy had produced the Dayton accords and that our troops had been requested not to fight, but to help the parties implement the peace plan, which served our strategic interests and advanced our fundamental values.
Because twenty-five other nations had already agreed to participate in a force of sixty thousand, only a third of the troops would be Americans. I pledged that they would go in with a clear, limited, achievable mission and would be well trained and heavily armed to minimize the risk of casualties. After the address I felt that I had made the strongest case I could for our responsibility to lead the forces of peace and freedom, and hoped that I had moved public opinion enough so that Congress would at least not try to stop me from sending in the troop............