The poll authors, one Republican and one Democrat, are quoted as saying, “The White House should find this both satisfying and sobering. Satisfying because the basic ideas which they have drawn up are the right ideas in the view of many people. But sobering because they clearly have communicated very little to the public and in that respect have ceded too much to the interest groups.”
Despite this, Congress was moving forward. The bill had been referred to five committees in Congress, three in the House and two in the Senate. The House Labor committee voted out a health-care bill in April that was actually more comprehensive than our bill. The other four committees were hard at work trying to forge consensus.
The first week of May was another example of everything happening at once. I answered the questions of international journalists in a global forum sponsored by President Carter’s center at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta; signed the School-to-Work bill; congratulated Rabin and Arafat for their agreement on handling the handover of Gaza and Jericho; lobbied the House of Representatives to pass a ban on deadly assault weapons; cheered its passage by two votes, in the face of fierce opposition from the NRA; announced that the United States would increase its assistance to South Africa in the aftermath of its first full and fair election, and that Al and Tipper Gore, Hillary, Ron Brown, and Mike Espy would head our delegation to President Mandela’s inauguration; held a White House event to highlight the special problems of women without health insurance; tightened sanctions on Haiti because of the continued killing and mutilation of Aristide supporters by Lieutenant General Raoul Cedras; appointed Bill Gray, head of the United Negro College Fund and former chairman of the House Budget Committee, to be special advisor to me and Warren Christopher on Haiti; and got sued by Paula Jones. It was just another week at the office.
Paula Jones had first appeared in public the previous February at the Conservative Political Action Committee convention in Washington, D.C., where Cliff Jackson introduced her, allegedly for the purpose of “clearing her name.” In David Brock’s American Spectator article based on the allegations of the Arkansas state troopers, one of their charges was that I had met with a woman in a Little Rock hotel suite who later told the trooper who had taken her there that she wanted to be my “regular girlfriend.”
Though she was identified in the article only as Paula, Jones claimed her family and friends recognized her when they read the article. She said she wanted to clear her name, but instead of suing the Spectator for libel, she accused me of sexually harassing her and said that, after she rebuffed my unwanted advances, she was denied the annual pay raises normally given to state employees. At the time she was a clerical employee of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Initially, Jones’s debut with Cliff Jackson didn’t get much publicity, but on May 6, two days before the statute of limitations expired, she filed suit against me, seeking $700,000 for my alleged harassment. Before she filed the suit, Jones’s first lawyer had made contact with a man in Little Rock who got in touch with my office, telling us that the lawyer had said that her case was weak and that if I would pay her $50,000 and help her and her husband, Steve, who turned out to be a conservative Clinton hater, get jobs in Hollywood, she wouldn’t sue me. I didn’t pay because I hadn’t sexually harassed her, and contrary to her other allegation, she had received her annual pay increases. Now I had to hire another lawyer to defend myself, Washington attorney Bob Bennett.
I spent most of the rest of May campaigning for the health-care and crime bills across the country, but there were always other things going on as well. By far the best of them was the birth of our first nephew, Tyler Cassidy Clinton, whom Roger and Molly brought into the world on May 12. On the eighteenth, I signed an important Head Start reform bill, on which Secretaries Shalala and Riley had worked hard; it increased the number of poor children served by the preschool program, improved its quality, and provided services for children under three for the first time with our new Early Head Start initiative.
The next day I welcomed Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao of India to the White House. The Cold War and clumsy diplomacy had kept India and the United States apart for too long. With a population of nearly one billion, India was the world’s largest democracy. Over the previous three decades, tensions with China had driven it closer to the Soviet Union, and the Cold War had pushed the United States closer to India’s neighbor Pakistan. Since becoming independent, the two nations had been involved in a bitter, seemingly endless dispute over Kashmir, the predominantly Muslim region in northern India. With the Cold War over, I thought I had an opportunity, as well as an obligation, to improve U.S.-India relations.
The main sticking point was the conflict between our efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons and India’s drive to develop them, which the Indians saw as a necessary deterrent to China’s nuclear arsenal and a prerequisite to its becoming a world power. Pakistan had developed a nuclear program, too, creating a dangerous situation on the Indian subcontinent. I believed that their nuclear arsenals made both India and Pakistan less secure, but the Indians didn’t see it that way and were determined not to let the United States interfere with what they saw as their legitimate prerogative to proceed with their nuclear program. Even so, the Indians wanted to improve our relations as much as I did. While we didn’t resolve our differences, Prime Minister Rao and I broke the ice and began a new chapter in Indo-U.S. relations, which continued to warm throughout my two terms and afterward. On the day I met with Prime Minister Rao, Jackie Kennedy Onassis died after a battle with cancer. She was only sixty-four. Jackie was the most private of our great public icons, to most people an indelible image of elegance, grace, and grieving. To those lucky enough to know her, she was what she seemed to be, but much more—a bright woman full of life, a fine mother and good friend. I knew how much her children, John and Caroline, and her companion, Maurice Tempelsman, would miss her. Hillary would miss her, too; she had been a source of constant encouragement, sound advice, and genuine friendship. At the end of May, I had to decide whether to extend most-favored-nation status to China. MFN was actually a slightly misleading term for normal trade relations without any extra tariffs or other barriers. America already had a sizable trade deficit with China, one that would grow over the years as the United States purchased between 35 and 40 percent of Chinese exports annually. After the violence in Tiananmen Square and the crackdown on dissidents that followed, Americans from across the political spectrum felt the Bush administration had been too quick to reestablish normal relations with Beijing. During the election campaign I had been critical of President Bush’s policy, and in 1993 I had issued an executive order requiring progress on a range of issues from emigration to human rights to forced prison labor before I would extend MFN to China. In May, Warren Christopher sent me a report saying that all the emigration cases had been resolved; that we had signed a memorandum of understanding on how to deal with the prison labor issue; and that for the first time China had said that it would adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On the other hand, Christopher said, there were still human rights abuses in the arrest and detention of peaceful political dissidents and the repression of Tibet’s religious and cultural traditions.