Of course there were political and personal excesses in the 1960s, but the decade and the movements it spawned also produced advances in civil rights, women’s rights, a clean environment, workplace safety, and opportunities for the poor. The Democrats believed in and worked for those things. So did a lot of traditional Republicans, including many of the governors I’d served with in the late 1970s and 1980s. In focusing only on the excesses of the 1960s, the New Right reminded me a lot of the carping that white southerners did against Reconstruction for a century after the Civil War. When I was growing up, we were still being taught how mean the Northern forces were to us during Reconstruction, and how noble the South was, even in defeat. There was something to it, but the loudest complaints always overlooked the good done by Lincoln and the national Republicans in ending slavery and preserving the Union. On the big issues, slavery and the Union, the South was wrong.
Now it was happening again, as the right wing used the excesses of the sixties to obscure the good done in civil rights and other areas. Their blanket condemnation reminded me of a story Senator David Pryor used to tell about a conversation he’d had with an eighty-five-year-old man who told him he had lived through two world wars, the Depression, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and all the other upheavals of the twentieth century. Pryor said, “You sure have seen a lot of changes.” “Yeah,” the old man replied, “and I was against every one of them!”
Still, I didn’t want to demonize Gingrich and his crowd as they had done to us. He had some interesting ideas, especially in the areas of science, technology, and entrepreneurialism, and he was a committed internationalist in foreign policy. Also, I had thought for years that the Democratic Party needed to modernize its approach, to focus less on preserving the party’s industrial-age achievements and more on meeting the challenges of the information age, and to clarify our commitment to middle-class values and concerns. I welcomed the chance to compare our New Democrat ideas on economic and social problems with those embodied in the “Contract with America.” Politics at its best is about the competition of ideas and policy.
But Gingrich didn’t stop there. The core of his argument was not just that his ideas were better than ours; he said his values were better than ours, because Democrats were weak on family, work, welfare, crime, and defense, and because, being crippled by the self-indulgent sixties, we couldn’t draw distinctions between right and wrong.
The political power of his theory was that it forcefully and clearly confirmed the negative stereotypes of Democrats that Republicans had been working to embed in the nation’s consciousness since 1968. Nixon had done it; Reagan had done it; and George Bush had done it, too, when he turned the 1988 election into a referendum on Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance. Now Newt had taken the art of “reverse plastic surgery” to a whole new level of sophistication and harshness. The problem with his theory was that it didn’t fit the facts. Most Democrats were tough on crime, supported welfare reform and a strong national defense, and had been much more fiscally responsible than the New Right Republicans. Most were also hardworking, law-abiding Americans who loved their country, worked in their communities, and tried to raise their children well. Never mind the facts; Gingrich had his story line down pat, and he applied it every chance he got. Soon he would charge, without a shred of evidence, that 25 percent of my White House aides were recent drug users. Then he said that Democratic values were responsible for the large number of out-ofwedlock births to teen mothers, whose babies should be taken away from them and put into orphanages. When Hillary questioned whether infants separated from their mothers would really be better off, he said she should watch the 1938 movie Boys Town, in which poor boys are raised in a Catholic orphanage, well before the dreaded 1960s ruined us all.
Gingrich even blamed the Democrats and their “permissive” values for creating a moral climate that encouraged a troubled South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, to drown her two young sons in October 1994. When it came out that Smith might have been unbalanced because she had been sexually abused as a child by her ultra-conservative stepfather, who was on the board of his local chapter of the Christian Coalition, Gingrich was unfazed. All sins, even those committed by conservatives, were caused by the moral relativism the Democrats had imposed on America since the 1960s. I kept waiting for Gingrich to explain how the Democrats’ moral bankruptcy had corrupted the Nixon and Reagan administrations and led to the crimes of Watergate and Iran-Contra. I’m sure he could have found a way. When he was on a roll, Newt was hard to stop.
As we headed into December, a little sanity crept back into political life when the House and the Senate passed the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT, with large bipartisan majorities. The agreement reduced tariffs worldwide by a whopping $740 billion, opening previously closed markets to American products and services, giving poor countries a chance to sell products to consumers beyond their borders, and providing for the establishment of the World Trade Organization to create uniform trade rules and adjudicate disputes. Ralph Nader and Ross Perot campaigned hard against the pact, claiming it would have horrible consequences, from a loss of American sovereignty to an increase in abusive child labor. Their vocal opposition had little effect; the labor movement was less intensely opposed to GATT than it had been to NAFTA, and Mickey Kantor had done a good job in making the case for GATT to Congress.
Almost unnoticed in the comprehensive legislation that included GATT was the Retirement Protection Act of 1994. The problem of underfunded pensions was first brought to my attention by a citizen at the Richmond debate during the campaign. The bill required corporations with large underfunded plans to increase their contributions, and it stabilized the national pension insurance system and provided better protection to forty million Americans. The Retirement Protection Act and GATT were the last in a long line of major legislative achievements in my first two years, and, given the election results, bittersweet ones.
In early December, Lloyd Bentsen resigned as secretary of Treasury, and I appointed Bob Rubin to succeed him. Bentsen had done a remarkable job, and I didn’t want him to leave, but he and his wife, B. A., wanted to return to private life. The choice of a successor was easy: Bob Rubin had built the National Economic Council into the most important innovation in White House decision making in decades, was respected on Wall Street, and wanted the economy to work for all Americans. Soon afterward, I named Laura Tyson to succeed Bob at the National Economic Council. After hosting a state dinner for the new president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, I flew to Budapest, Hungary, for only eight hours, to attend the meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and sign a series of denuclearization agreements with President Yeltsin, Prime Minister Major, and the presidents of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. It should have produced good news coverage about our shared determination to reduce our arsenals by several thousand warheads and to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to other nations. Instead, the story coming out of Budapest was Yeltsin’s speech criticizing me for trading in the Cold War for a “cold peace” by rushing NATO enlargement to include the Central European nations. In fact, I had done the reverse, by establishing the Partnership for Peace as an interim step to include a much larger number of countries; by setting up a deliberate process for adding new NATO members; and by working hard to establish a NATO-Russian partnership. Since I had no advance warning about Yeltsin’s speech, and he spoke after I did, I was stunned and angry, because I didn’t know what had set him off and because I had no opportunity to respond. Apparently, Yeltsin’s advisors had convinced him that NATO would admit Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1996, just when he would be running for reelection against the ultra-nationalists, who hated NATO expansion, and I would be running against the Republicans, who supported it. Budapest was embarrassing, a rare moment when people on both sides dropped the ball, but I knew it would pass. A few days later, Al Gore went to see Yeltsin when he was in Moscow for the fourth meeting of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission for Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation. Boris told him that he and I were still partners, and Al assured Yeltsin that our NATO policy hadn’t changed. I wasn’t about to jam him for domestic political reasons, any more than I would let him keep NATO’s doors closed indefinitely.