B y January 2, we were back to the budget negotiations. Bob Dole wanted to make a deal to reopen the government, and after a couple of days so did Newt Gingrich. In one of our budget meetings, the Speaker admitted that in the beginning he had thought he could keep me from vetoing the GOP budget by threatening to shut the government down. In front of Dole, Armey, Daschle, Gephardt, Panetta, and Al Gore, he said frankly, We made a mistake. We thought you would cave. Finally, on the sixth, with a severe blizzard covering Washington, the impasse was broken, as Congress sent me two more continuing resolutions that put all the federal employees back to work, though they still didnt restore all government services. I signed the CRs and sent the Congress my plan for a balanced budget in seven years.
The next week, I vetoed the Republican welfare reform bill, because it did too little to move people from welfare to work and too much to hurt poor people and their children. The first time I vetoed the Republican welfare reform proposal, it had been a part of their budget. Now a number of their budget cuts were simply put in a bill with the label welfare reform on it. Meanwhile, Donna Shalala and I had already gone far in reforming the welfare system on our own. We had given fifty separate waivers to thirty-seven states to pursue initiatives that were pro-work and pro-family. Seventy-three percent of Americas welfare recipients were covered by these reforms, and the welfare rolls were dropping.
As we headed into the State of the Union speech on the twenty-third, we seemed to be making some progress on a budget agreement, so I used the address to reach out to the Republicans, rally the Democrats, and explain to the American people my position on both the budget debate, and on the larger question that the budget battle presented: What was the proper role of government in the global information age? The basic theme of the speech was the era of big government is over. But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves. This formulation reflected my philosophy of getting rid of yesterdays bureaucratic government while advocating a creative, future-oriented, empowering government; it also fairly described our economic and social policies and Al Gores Rego initiative. By then my case was bolstered by the success of our economic policy: nearly eight million new jobs had been created since the inauguration and a record number of new businesses had been started for three years in a row. U.S. automakers were even outselling their Japanese competitors in America for the first time since the 1970s.
After offering again to work with the Congress to balance the budget in seven years and pass welfare reform, I outlined a legislative agenda concerning families and children, education and health care, and crime and drugs. It emphasized programs that reflected basic American values and the idea of citizen empowerment: the V-chip, charter schools, public school choice, and school uniforms. I also named General Barry McCaffrey to be Americas new drug czar. At the time, McCaffrey was commander in chief of the Southern Command, where he had worked to stop cocaine from being sent to America from Colombia and elsewhere.
The most memorable moment of the evening came near the end of the speech, when, as usual, I introduced the people sitting in the First Ladys box with Hillary. The first person I mentioned was Richard Dean, a forty-nine-year-old Vietnam veteran who had worked for the Social Security Administration for twenty-two years. When I told Congress that he had been in the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City when it was bombed, risked his life to reenter the ruins four times, and saved the lives of three women, Dean got a huge standing ovation from the entire Congress, with the Republicans leading the cheers. Then came the zinger. As the applause died down, I said, But Richard Deans story doesnt end there. This last November, he was forced out of his office when the government shut down. And the second time the government shut down, he continued helping Social Security recipients, but he was working without pay. On behalf of Richard Dean . . . I challenge all of you in this chamber: lets never, ever shut the federal government down again.
This time the gleeful Democrats led the applause. The Republicans, knowing that they had been trapped, looked glum. I didnt think I had to worry about a third government shutdown; its consequences now had a human, heroic face.
Defining moments like that dont happen by accident. Every year we used the State of the Union as an organizing tool for the cabinet and staff to come up with new policy ideas, and then we worked hard on how best to present them. On the day of the speech, we held several rehearsals in the movie theater located between the residence and the East Wing. The White House Communications Agency, which also recorded all my public statements, set up a TelePrompTer and a podium, and various staff members moved in and out through the day in an informal process managed by my communications director, Don Baer. We all worked together, listening to each sentence, imagining how it would be received in the Congress and in the country, and improving the language.
We had defeated the philosophy behind the Contract with America by winning the government shutdown debate. Now the speech offered an alternative philosophy of government and, through Richard Dean, showed that federal employees were good people performing valuable services. It wasnt much different from what I had been saying all along, but in the aftermath of the shutdown, millions of Americans heard and understood it for the first time.
We began the year in foreign policy with Warren Christopher hosting talks between the Israelis and Syrians at Wye River Plantation in Maryland. Then, on January 12, I flew overnight to the U.S. Air Force base in Aviano, Italy, that had been the center of our NATO air operations over Bosnia, where I boarded one of our new C-17 transport planes for the flight to Taszar Air Base in Hungary, from which our troops were deploying into Bosnia. I had fought in 1993 to keep the C-17 from being eliminated in the defense downsizing. It was an amazing plane with remarkable cargo capacity and the ability to operate in difficult conditions. The Bosnian mission was using twelve C-17s, and I had to fly one into Tuzla; the regular Air Force One, a Boeing 747, was too big.
After meeting with Hungarian President Arpad Goncz and seeing our troops in Taszar, I flew on to Tuzla in northeastern Bosnia, the area for which the United States was responsible. In less than a month and despite terrible weather, seven thousand of our troops and more than two thousand armored vehicles had crossed the flooded Sava River to reach their duty stations. They had turned an airfield with no lights or navigational equipment into one that was open for business around the clock. I thanked the troops and personally delivered a birthday present to a colonel whose wife had charged me with the duty when I stopped in Aviano. I met with President Izetbegovic, then flew on to Zagreb, Croatia, to see President Tudjman. Both of them were satisfied with the implementation of the peace agreement so far and very glad U.S. troops were part of it.
By the time I got back to Washington, it had been a long day, but an important one. Our troops were involved in NATOs first deployment beyond its members borders. They were working with the soldiers of their Cold War adversaries Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Baltic states. Their mission was pivotal to creating a united Europe, yet it was being criticized in Congress and in coffee shops across America. The troops were at least entitled to know why they were in Bosnia and how strongly I supported them.
Two weeks later the Cold War continued to fade into history as the Senate ratified the START II treaty, which President Bush had negotiated and submitted to the Senate three years earlier, just before he left office. Together with the START I treaty, which we had put into force in December 1994, START II would eliminate two-thirds of the nuclear arsenals the United States and the former Soviet Union had maintained at the height of the Cold War, including the most destabilizing nuclear weapons, the multiple-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Along with START I and II, we had signed an agreement to freeze North Koreas nuclear program, had led the effort to make the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty permanent, and were working to safeguard and ultimately dismantle nuclear weapons and materials under the Nunn-Lugar program. In congratulating the Senate on START II, I asked them to continue making America more secure by passing the Chemical Weapons Convention and my anti-terrorism legislation.
On January 30, Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin of Russia came to the White House for his sixth meeting with Al Gore. After they finished their commission business, Chernomyrdin came to see me to brief me on events in Russia and Yeltsins prospects for reelection. Just before our meeting, I spoke to President Suleyman Demirel and Prime Minister Tansu Ciller of Turkey. They told me that Turkey and Greece were on the brink of military confrontation and implored me to intervene to stop it. They were about to go to war over two tiny Aegean islets called Imia by the Greeks and Kardak by the Turks. Both countries claimed the islets, but Greece apparently had acquired them in a treaty with Italy in 1947. Turkey denied the validity of the Greek claim. There were no people living there, though Turks often sailed to the larger islet for picnics. The crisis was triggered when some Turkish journalists had torn down a Greek flag and put up a Turkish one.
It was unthinkable that two great countries with a real dispute over Cyprus would actually go to war over ten acres of rock islets inhabited by only a couple of dozen sheep, but I could tell that Ciller was genuinely afraid it could happen. I interrupted the Chernomyrdin meeting to get briefed, then placed a series of calls, first to Greek prime minister Konstandinos Simitis, then to Demirel and Ciller again. After all the talk back and forth, the two sides agreed to hold their fire, and Dick Holbrooke, who was already working on Cyprus, stayed up all night to get the parties to agree to resolve the problem through diplomacy. I couldnt help laughing to myself at the thought that whether or not I succeeded in making peace in the Middle East, Bosnia, or Northern Ireland, at least I had saved some Aegean sheep.
Just when I thought things couldnt get any weirder in Whitewater World, they did. On January 4, Carolyn Huber found copies of Hillarys records for work the Rose firm had done for Madison Guaranty in 1985 and 1986. Carolyn had been our assistant at the Governors Mansion and had come to Washington to help us with our personal papers and correspondence. She had already assisted David Kendall in turning over fifty thousand pages of documents to the independent counsels office, but for some reason this copy of the billing records wasnt among them. Carolyn found it in a box she had moved to her office from the third-floor residence storage area the previous August. Apparently, the copy had been made in the 1992 campaign; it had Vince Fosters notes on it, because he was handling press questions for the Rose firm at the time.
On the surface, it must have looked suspicious. Why were the records turning up after all this time? If you had seen the disordered array of papers we brought up from Arkansas, you wouldnt have been surprised. Im amazed that we found as much material as we did in a timely fashion. At any rate, Hillary was glad the records had been found; they proved her contention that she had done only a modest amount of work for Madison Guaranty. In a few weeks, the RTC would issue a report saying just that.
But thats not how the independent counsel, congressional Republicans, and the Whitewater reporters played it. In his New York Times column, William Safire called Hillary a congenital liar. Carolyn Huber was called up to Congress to testify before Al DAmatos committee on January 18. And on the twenty-sixth, Kenneth Starr hauled Hillary before the grand jury for four hours of questioning.
Starrs summons was a cheap, sleazy publicity stunt. We had turned the records over voluntarily as soon as we found them, and they proved the truth of Hillarys account. If Starr had more questions, he could have come to the White House to ask them, as he had done three times before, rather than make her the first First Lady to appear before a grand jury. In 1992, President Bushs White House counsel, Boyden Gray, had withheld his bosss diary for more than a year, until after the election, in direct violation of a subpoena from the Iran-Contra prosecutor. No one put Gray or Bush before a grand jury, and the press uproar was nowhere near as great.
I was more troubled by the attacks on Hillary than on those directed at me. Because I was helpless to stop them, all I could do was stand by her, telling the press that America would be a better place if everybody in this country had the character my wife has. Hillary and I explained to Chelsea what was going on; she didnt like it but seemed to take it in stride. She knew her mother a lot better than her assailants did.
Still, it was wearing on all of us. I had been struggling for months to keep my anger from interfering with my work, as I dealt with the budget fight, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and Rabins death. But it had been very hard; now I was anxious for Hillary and Chelsea as well. I was also concerned about all the other people being pulled into the congressional hearings and into Starrs net who were being hurt emotionally and financially.
Five days after the billing records were turned over, Hillary was scheduled to do an interview with Barbara Walters so that she could discuss her new book, It Takes a Village. Instead, the interview turned into a session on the billing records. It Takes a Village became a bestseller anyway, as Hillary bravely set out from Washington on a book tour across the country and found legions of friendly and supportive Americans who cared more about what she had to say about improving childrens lives than about what Ken Starr, Al DAmato, William Safire, and their friends had to say about her.
Those boys certainly seemed to get a big kick out of beating up on Hillary. My only consolation was the sure knowledge, rooted in twenty-five years of close observation, that she was a lot tougher than they would ever be. Some guys dont like that in a woman, but it was one of the reasons I loved her.
In early February, as the presidential campaign kicked into high gear, I returned to New Hampshire to highlight both the positive impact of my policies there and my commitment not to forget about the state after I took office. Although I had no primary opponent, I wanted to carry New Hampshire in November, and I needed to deal with the one issue I thought could keep me from doing it: guns.
One Saturday morning, I went to a diner in Manchester full of men who were deer hunters and NRA members. In impromptu remarks, I told them that I knew they had defeated their Democratic congressman, Dick Swett, in 1994 because he voted for the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. Several of them nodded in agreement. Those hunters were good men who had been frightened by the NRA; I thought they could be stampeded again in 1996 only if no one presented them with the other side of the argument in language they could understand. So I gave it my best shot: I know the NRA told you to defeat Congressman Swett. Now, if you missed a day, or even an hour, in the deer woods because of the Brady bill or the assault weapons ban, I want you to vote against me, too, because I asked him to support those bills. On the other hand, if you didnt, then they didnt tell you the truth, and you need to get even.
A few days later, at the Library of Congress, I signed the Telecommunications Act, a sweeping overhaul of the laws affecting an industry that was already one-sixth of our economy. The act increased competition, innovation, and access to what Al Gore had dubbed the information superhighway. There had been months of sparring over complex economic issues, with the Republicans favoring greater concentration of ownership in media and telecommunications markets, and the White House and the Democrats supporting greater competition, especially in local and long-distance telephone service. With Al Gore taking the lead for the White House and Speaker Gingrich in his positive entrepreneurial mode, we reached what I thought was a fair compromise, and in the end the bill passed almost unanimously. It also contained a requirement that new television sets include the V-chip, which I had first endorsed at the Gores annual family conference, to allow parents to control their childrens access to programs; by the end of the month, executives from most of the television networks would agree to have a rating system for their programs in place by 1997. Even more important, the act mandated discounted Internet access rates for schools, libraries, and hospitals; the so-called E-rate would eventually save public entities about $2 billion a year.
The next day, the bloom came off the Irish rose, as Gerry Adams called to tell me the IRA had ended its cease-fire, allegedly because of foot-dragging by John Major and the Unionists, including their insistence on IRA arms decommissioning in return for Sinn Feins participation in the political life of Northern Ireland. Later that day a bomb exploded at Canary Wharf in London.
The IRA would keep it up for more than a year, at great cost to themselves. While they killed two soldiers and two civilians and injured many others, they suffered the deaths of two IRA operatives, the breakup of their bombing team in Britain, and the arrest of numerous IRA operatives in Northern Ireland. By the end of the month, peace vigils were being held all over Northern Ireland to demonstrate the continuing support of ordinary citizens for peace. John Major and John Bruton said they would resume talks with Sinn Fein if the IRA reinstated its cease-fire. With John Humes support, the White House decided to maintain contact with Adams, waiting for the moment when the march toward peace could resume.
The peace process in the Middle East was also threatened in late February, as two Hamas bombs killed twenty-six people. With elections coming up in Israel, I assumed Hamas was trying to defeat Prime Minister Peres and provoke the Israelis to elect a hard-line government that would not make peace with the PLO. We pushed Arafat to do more to prevent terrorist acts. As I had told him when we signed the original agreement back in 1993, he could never be the most militant Palestinian again, and if he tried to keep one foot in the peace camp and the other on the terrorist side he would eventually be undone.
We also had trouble closer to home when Cuba shot down two civilian planes flown by the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue, killing four men. Castro hated the group and the leaflets critical of him that it had dropped over Havana in the past. Cuba claimed the planes were shot in its airspace. They werent, but even if they had been, the downings still would have violated international law.
I suspended charter flights to Cuba, restricted travel by Cuban officials in the United States, expanded the reach of Radio Mart, which beamed pro-democracy messages into Cuba, and asked Congress to authorize compensation out of Cubas blocked assets in the United States to the families of the men who were killed. Madeleine Albright asked the United Nations to impose sanctions and went to Miami to deliver a fiery speech to the Cuban-American community, telling them that the shootdown reflected cowardice, not cojones. Her macho remarks made her a heroine among South Floridas Cubans.
I also committed to signing a version of the Helms-Burton bill, which stiffened the embargo against Cuba and restricted the Presidents authority to lift it without congressional approval. Supporting the bill was good election-year politics in Florida, but it undermined whatever chance I might have if I won a second term to lift the embargo in return for positive changes within Cuba. It almost appeared that Castro was trying to force us to maintain the embargo as an excuse for the economic failures of his regime. If that wasnt the objective, then Cuba had made a colossal error. I later received word from Castro, indirectly of course, that the shootdown was a mistake. Apparently he had issued earlier orders to fire on any aircraft that violated Cuban airspace and had failed to withdraw them when the Cubans knew the Brothers to the Rescue planes were coming.
In the last week of the month, after visiting areas devastated by recent flooding in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Pennsylvania, I met with the new Japanese prime minister in Santa Monica, California. Ryutaro Hashimoto had been Mickey Kantors counterpart before becoming the head of the Japanese government. An avid practitioner of kendo, a Japanese martial art, Hashimoto was a tough, intelligent man who enjoyed combat of all kinds. But he was also a leader with whom we could work; he and Kantor had concluded twenty trade agreements, our exports to Japan were up 80 percent, and our bilateral trade deficit had declined for three years in a row.
The month ended on a high note as Hillary and I celebrated Chelseas sixteenth birthday by taking her to see Les Misrables at the National Theatre, then hosting a busload of her friends for a weekend at Camp David. We liked all Chelseas friends, and we loved seeing them shooting at one another with paintball guns in the woods, bowling and playing other games, and generally being kids as their high school years were drawing to a close. The best part of the weekend for me was giving Chelsea a driving lesson around the Camp David compound. I missed driving and wanted Chelsea to enjoy it, and to do it safely and well.
The Middle East peace process was shaken again in the first weeks of March when, on successive days, a new round of Hamas bombs in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv killed more than thirty people and wounded many more. Among the dead were children, a Palestinian nurse who lived and worked among her Jewish friends, and two young American women. I met with their families in New Jersey and was deeply moved by their steadfast commitment to peace as the only way to prevent more children from being killed in the future. In a televised address to the people of Israel, I stated the obvious, that the terrorist acts were aimed not just at killing innocent people but at killing the growing hope for peace in the Middle East.
On March 12, Jordans King Hussein flew on Air Force One with me to a Summit of Peacemakers hosted by President Mubarak in Sharm el-Sheikh, a beautiful resort on the Red Sea favored by European scuba-diving enthusiasts. Hussein had come to see me at the White House a few days earlier to condemn the Hamas bombings and was determined to rally the Arab world to the cause of peace. I really enjoyed the long flight with him. We had always gotten along well, but we had become closer friends and allies in the aftermath of Rabins assassination.
Leaders of twenty-nine nations from the Arab world, Europe, Asia, and North America, including Boris Yeltsin and UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, joined Peres and Arafat at Sharm el-Sheikh. President Mubarak and I co-chaired the meeting. We and our staffs had worked day and night to ensure that we would come out of the conference with a clear and concrete commitment to fighting terror and preserving the peace process.
For the first time, the Arab world stood with Israel in condemning terror and promising to work against it. The united front was essential to give Peres the support necessary to keep the peace process going and to reopen Gaza, so that the thousands of Palestinians who lived there but had jobs in Israel could go back to work; it was also necessary to give Arafat the backing to make an all-out effort against the terrorists, without which Israeli support for peace would collapse.
On the thirteenth, I flew to Tel Aviv to discuss specific steps the United States could take to help the Israeli military and police. In a meeting with Prime Minister Peres and his cabinet, I pledged $100 million in support and asked Warren Christopher and CIA director John Deutch to stay in Israel to accelerate the implementation of our joint efforts. In the press conference with Peres after our meeting, I acknowledged the difficulty of providing complete protection from young men who have bought some apocalyptic version of Islam and politics that causes them to strap their bodies with bombs in order to commit suicide and kill innocent children. But I said we could improve our capacity to prevent such events and to break up the networks of money and national support that made them possible. I also used the occasion to urge congressional action on the anti-terrorism legislation that had been held up for more than a year.
After the press conference and a question-and-answer session with young Israeli students in Tel Aviv, I met with the Likud Party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. The Hamas bombings had made a Likud victory in the election more likely. I wanted Netanyahu to know that if he won, I would be his partner in the fight against terror, but I also wanted him to stick with the peace process.
I couldnt go home without making the trip up Mount Herzl to visit Rabins grave. I knelt, said a prayer, and, following Jewish custom, placed a small stone on Yitzhaks marble marker. I also took another small rock from the ground around the grave home with me as a reminder of my friend and the job he had left for me to do.
While I was preoccupied with trouble in the Middle East, China roiled the waters of the Taiwan Strait by test-firing three missiles close to Taiwan in an apparent attempt to discourage the Taiwanese politicians from pushing for independence in the election campaign then under way. Ever since President Carter normalized relations with mainland China, the United States had followed a consistent policy of recognizing one China while continuing to have good relations with Taiwan, and saying that the two sides should resolve their differences peacefully. We had never said whether we would or wouldnt come to the defense of Taiwan if it were attacked.
It seemed to me that the Middle East and Taiwan were polar opposite foreign policy problems. If nothing was done by political leaders in the Middle East, things would get worse. By contrast, I thought that if the politicians in China and Taiwan didnt do anything foolish, the problem would resolve itself over time. Taiwan was an economic powerhouse that had moved from dictatorship to democracy. It wanted no part of the mainlands bureaucratic communism. On the other hand, Taiwanese businesspeople were investing heavily in China, and there was travel back and forth. China liked the Taiwanese investment, but could not agree to give up its claim to sovereignty over the island; finding the right balance between economic pragmatism and aggressive nationalism was a constant challenge for Chinas leaders, especially during election season in Taiwan. I thought China had gone too far with the missile tests, and quickly, but without fanfare, I ordered a carrier group from the U.S. Navys Pacific fleet to sail to the Taiwan Strait. The crisis passed.
After a rocky start in February, Bob Dole won all the Republican primaries in March, wrapping up his partys nomination with a late-month victory in California. Even though Senator Phil Gramm, who ran to the right of Dole, would have been easier to beat, I was pulling for Dole. No election is a sure thing, and if I lost, I believed the country would be in more solid and more moderate hands with him.
While Dole was moving toward the nomination, I campaigned in several states, including an event in Maryland with General McCaffrey and Jesse Jackson to highlight our efforts to stem teen drug use, and a stop at Harman International, a manufacturer of premier speakers in Northridge, California, to announce that the economy had produced 8.4 million jobs in just over three years since I took office; I had promised 8 million in four years. Middle-class incomes were also beginning to rise. In the last two years, two-thirds of the new jobs created were in industries that paid above the minimum wage.
During the course of the month, we didnt reach agreement on the appropriations bills still outstanding, so I signed three more CRs and sent my budget for the next fiscal year up to Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, the House continued to follow the NRA, voting to repeal the assault weapons ban and to delete from the anti-terrorism legislation sections the gun lobby opposed.
At the end of the month, I initiated an effort to accelerate the approval of anti-cancer drugs by the Food and Drug Administration. Al Gore, Donna Shalala, and FDA administrator David Kessler had worked to cut the average approval process for new drugs from thirty-three months in 1987 to just under a year in 1994. The latest approval for an AIDS drug was issued in just forty-two days. It was important for the FDA to determine how drugs would affect the body before they were approved, but the process should be as speedy as safety permitted; lives were riding on it.
Finally, on March 29, eight months after Bob Rubin and I had first requested it, I signed a bill to increase the debt limit. The Damocles sword of default was no longer hanging over our budget negotiations.
On April 3, with springtime in full bloom in Washington, I was working in the Oval Office when I received word that the air force jet carrying Ron Brown and a U.S. trade and investment delegation he had organized to increase the economic benefits of peace to the Balkans had flown off course in bad weather and crashed into St. Johns Mountain near Dubrovnik, Croatia. Everyone on board was killed. Barely a week earlier, on their trip to Europe, Hillary and Chelsea had been on the same plane with some of the same crew members.
I was devastated. Ron was my friend and my best political advisor in the cabinet. As chairman of the DNC, he had brought the Democratic Party back from our loss in 1988 and played a pivotal role in uniting the Democrats for the 1992 election. In the aftermath of the 1994 congressional election losses, Ron had remained upbeat, lifting everyones spirits with his confident prediction that we were doing the right things on the economy and would win in 1996. He had revitalized the Commerce Department, modernizing the bureaucracy and using it to further not only our economic objectives but our larger interests in the Balkans and Northern Ireland. He had also worked hard to increase U.S. exports to ten emerging markets that were sure to loom large in the twenty-first century, including Poland, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and Indonesia. After he died I received a letter from a business executive who had worked with him, saying he was the finest Secretary of Commerce the United States ever had.
Hillary and I drove to Rons house to see his wife, Alma, and his children, Tracey and Michael, and Michaels wife, Tammy. They were part of our extended family, and I was relieved to see them already surrounded by loving friends and dealing with their loss by telling Ron Brown stories; there were many worth repeating from the long journey he had traveled from his boyhood home at the old Hotel Teresa in Harlem to the pinnacle of American politics and public service.
When we left Alma, we went downtown to the Commerce Department to talk to the employees, who had lost both their leader and their friends. One of those who died was a young man Hillary and I knew well. Adam Darling was the idealistic and spunky son of a Methodist minister who had entered our lives in 1992 when he made news by riding his bicycle across America to support the Clinton-Gore ticket.
A few days lat............