The following day, just a week after Rabin’s 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 GOP’s draconian cuts: the combined rates of unemployment and inflation were at a twentyfive-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 didn’t accept his budget. I couldn’t 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 he’d said about me before the 1994 election: “Mr. Speaker, you don’t have clean hands.”
Dole tried to calm things, saying that he didn’t want the government to shut down. At that point, Dick Armey broke in to say Dole didn’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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, you’ll have to get someone else to sit in this chair!” Not surprisingly, we didn’t 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 didn’t care if I fell to zero in the polls. I looked back at him and said, “No, Al. If we drop to 4 percent, I’m 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 they’d 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 I’d snubbed him during the flight back from Rabin’s 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, “It’s petty but I think it’s 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 couldn’t 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 Gingrich’s 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.