On March 25, Hillary began her first extended overseas trip without me, a twelve-day visit to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. She took Chelsea along on what would be an important effort for the United States and a grand personal odyssey for them both. While the rest of my family was far away, I traveled closer to home, going to Haiti to visit the troops, meet with President Aristide, exhort the people of Haiti to embrace a peaceful democratic future, and participate in the handover of authority from our multinational force to the United Nations. In six months, forces from thirty nations had worked together under American leadership to remove more than 30,000 weapons and explosive devices from the streets and train a permanent police force. They had ended repressive violence; reversed the outmigration of Haitians, who were now coming home; and protected democracy in our hemisphere. Now the United Nations mission of more than 6,000 military personnel, 900 police officers, and dozens of economic, political, and legal advisors would take over for eleven months, until the election and inauguration of a new president. The United States would play a part, but our force levels and expenses would drop, as thirty-two other nations stepped forward to participate. In 2004, after President Aristide resigned and flew into exile amidst renewed violence and strife, I thought back to what Hugh Shelton, the commander of the American forces, had told me: “The Haitians are good people and they deserve a chance.” Aristide certainly made mistakes and was often his own worst enemy, but the political opposition never really cooperated with him. Also, after the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, they were unwilling to give the financial assistance that might have made a difference.
Haiti will never develop into a stable democracy without more help from the United States. Still, our intervention saved lives and gave Haitians their first taste of the democracy they had voted for. Even with Aristide’s serious problems, the Haitians would have been far worse off under Cedras and his murderous coup. I remain glad that we gave Haiti a chance.
The Haitian intervention also provided strong evidence of the wisdom of multilateral responses in the world’s trouble spots. Nations working together, and through the UN, spread the responsibilities and costs of such operations, reduce resentment against the United States, and build invaluable habits of cooperation. In an increasingly interdependent world, we should work this way whenever we can. FORTY-THREE
I spent the first two and a half weeks of April meeting with world leaders. Prime Minister John Major, President Hosni Mubarak, and Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan and Prime Minister Tansu Ciller of Turkey, two intelligent, very modern women leaders of Muslim countries, came to see me. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich gave a speech on his first hundred days as Speaker. To hear him tell it, you would think the Republicans had revolutionized America overnight, and in the process changed our form of government to a parliamentary system under which he, as prime minister, set the course for domestic policy, while I, as President, was restricted to handling foreign affairs. For the moment, the Republicans were dominating the news, based on the novelty of their control of Congress and their assertions that they were making big changes. Actually, they had enacted only three relatively minor parts of their contract, all of which I supported. The hard decisions were still ahead of them.
In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, I spelled out the parts of the contract I agreed with, on which I would seek compromise, and those I opposed and would veto. On April 14, four days after Senator Dole announced his candidacy for President, I quietly filed for reelection. On the eighteenth, I held a press conference and was asked more than twenty questions about a wide variety of topics, foreign and domestic. The next day they would all be forgotten and there would be only two words on the lips of every American: Oklahoma City.
In late morning I learned that a truck bomb had exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, leaving the building a rubble and killing an unknown number of people. I immediately declared a state of emergency and sent an investigative team to the site. When the magnitude of the recovery effort became apparent, firefighters and other emergency workers came from all over the country to help Oklahoma City dig through the rubble in a desperate attempt to find any survivors.
America was riveted and heartbroken by the tragedy; it claimed the lives of 168 people, including nineteen children who were in the building’s day-care center when the bomb exploded. Most of the dead were federal employees who worked for the several agencies that had offices in the Murrah Building. Many people assumed that Islamic militants were responsible, but I cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the perpetrators’ identity.
Soon after the bombing, Oklahoma lawmen arrested Timothy McVeigh, an alienated military veteran who had come to hate the federal government. By the twenty-first, McVeigh was in FBI custody and had been arraigned. He had chosen April 19 to bomb the federal building because it was the anniversary of the FBI raid on the Branch Davidians at Waco, an event that, to right-wing extremists, represented the ultimate exercise of arbitrary, abusive government power. Anti-government paranoia had been building in America for years, as more and more people took the historical skepticism of Americans toward government to a level of outright hatred. This animus led to the rise of armed militia groups that rejected the legitimacy of federal authority and asserted the right to be a law unto themselves. The atmosphere of hostility was intensified by right-wing radio talk-show hosts, whose venomous rhetoric pervaded the airwaves daily, and by Web sites encouraging people to rise up against the government and offering practical assistance, including easy-to-follow instructions on how to make bombs.
In the wake of Oklahoma City, I tried to comfort and encourage those who had lost their loved ones, and the country at large, and to step up our efforts to protect Americans from terrorism. In the more than two years since the World Trade Center bombing, I had increased counterterrorism resources for the FBI and CIA and instructed them to work together more closely. Our law-enforcement efforts had succeeded in returning several terrorists to the United States for trial after they fled to foreign countries and in preventing terrorist attacks on the United Nations, on the Holland and Lincoln tunnels in New York City, and on planes flying out of the Philippines to America’s West Coast. Two months before Oklahoma City, I had sent anti-terrorism legislation to Congress asking, among other things, for one thousand more law-enforcement officials to fight terrorism; a new counterterrorism center under the direction of the FBI to coordinate our efforts; and approval to use military experts, normally prohibited from involvement in domestic law enforcement, to help with terrorist threats and incidents within the country involving chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. After Oklahoma City, I asked the congressional leaders for expedited consideration of the legislation and, on May 3, proposed amendments to strengthen it: greater law-enforcement access to financial records; authority to conduct electronic surveillance on suspected terrorists when they move from place to place, without having to go back to court for a new order to tap each specific site; increased penalties for knowingly providing firearms or explosives for terrorist acts against current or former federal employees and their families; and a requirement that markers, called taggants, be put into all explosive materials so that they could be traced. Some of these measures were bound to be controversial, but, as I said to a reporter on May 4, terrorism “is the major threat to the security of Americans.” I wish I had been wrong.