Before leaving Japan, I visited U.S. forces from the Seventh Fleet aboard the USS Independence, attended an elegant state dinner hosted by the emperor and empress at the Imperial Palace, made a speech to the Japanese Diet, and enjoyed a lunch hosted by the prime minister that featured Americanborn sumo wrestlers and an outstanding Japanese jazz saxophonist. To reinforce the importance of American-Japanese ties, I had named former vice president Walter Mondale as our ambassador. His prestige and skill at handling difficult problems sent an unmistakable message to the Japanese that they were important to the United States. We flew on to St. Petersburg, Russia. On April 19, the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Al Gore went to Oklahoma to speak for the administration, while I marked the occasion during a visit to the Russian military cemetery and prepared for a summit on nuclear safety with Boris Yeltsin and the G7 leaders. Yeltsin had suggested the summit to highlight our commitment to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, START I and START II, and our joint efforts to secure and destroy nuclear weapons and materials. We also agreed to improve safety at nuclear power plants, end the dumping of nuclear materials in the oceans, and help Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma close the Chernobyl power plant within four years. Ten years after the tragic accident there, it was still running. On the twenty-fourth, I was back home, but not out of foreign affairs. President Elias Hrawi of Lebanon was at the White House at a tense moment in the Middle East. In response to a barrage of Katyusha rockets fired into Israel from southern Lebanon by Hezbollah, Shimon Peres had ordered retaliatory attacks that killed many civilians. I had much sympathy for Lebanon; it was caught up in the conflict between Israel and Syria, and was full of terrorist operatives. I reaffirmed America’s steadfast support for UN Security Council Resolution 425, which calls for a truly independent Lebanon. The news from the Middle East was not all bad. While I was meeting with the Lebanese president, Yasser Arafat persuaded the PLO executive council to amend its charter to recognize Israel’s right to exist, a policy shift very important to the Israelis. Two days later Warren Christopher and our Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, secured an agreement among Israel, Lebanon, and Syria to end the Lebanese crisis and enable us to get back to the business of peace.
Shimon Peres came to see me at the end of the month to sign an anti-terrorism cooperative agreement that included $50 million for our joint efforts to reduce Israel’s vulnerability to the kind of suicide bombings that had recently caused such havoc and heartbreak.
Just a week earlier, I had signed the anti-terrorism legislation that the Congress had finally passed, a full year after Oklahoma City. In the end, the bill had won strong bipartisan support after the deletion of the provisions requiring traceable markers in black and smokeless powder and giving federal authorities the ability to conduct the kind of roving wiretaps on suspected terrorists that already could be used against organized crime figures. The bill would give us more tools and resources to prevent terrorist attacks, disrupt terrorist organizations, and increase controls over chemical and biological weapons. The Congress also agreed to let us put chemical taggants in plastic explosives and left open the option requiring them in other types of explosives not clearly prohibited by the law. April was another interesting month in Whitewater World. On the second, Kenneth Starr appeared in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans on behalf of four big tobacco companies that, at the same time, were engaged in a heated dispute with my administration over their marketing of cigarettes to teenagers and how much authority the FDA had to stop them. Starr didn’t see any conflict of interest in keeping up a lucrative law practice in which he was paid large sums by my adversaries. USA Today had already revealed that in a court appearance defending the Wisconsin school voucher program, which I opposed, Starr had been paid not by the state but by the ultra-conservative Bradley Foundation. Starr was investigating the Resolution Trust Corporation for its inquiry into the conduct of our accuser, L. Jean Lewis, while the RTC was negotiating with his law firm to settle a suit the agency had filed against the firm for its negligence in its representation of a failed Denver savings-and-loan institution. And, of course, Starr had offered to go on television to defend Paula Jones’s lawsuit. Robert Fiske had been removed as the Whitewater independent counsel on the tenuous claim that his appointment by Janet Reno created the appearance of a conflict of interest. Now we had a prosecutor with real conflicts. As I said, Starr and his allies in Congress and on the federal courts had created a new definition of “conflict of interest”: anyone who might remotely be favorable or, as in Fiske’s case, even fair to Hillary and me was by definition conflicted; Ken Starr’s blatant political and economic conflicts of interest and the extreme bias against me they reflected presented no problem at all to his assumption of unlimited and unaccountable authority to go after us and many other innocent people. Starr and his allies’ curious view of what constituted a conflict of interest was never more apparent than in their treatment of Judge Henry Woods, a highly respected veteran jurist and former FBI agent who was assigned to preside over the trial of Governor Jim Guy Tucker and others whom Starr had indicted on federal charges completely unrelated to Whitewater. They involved the purchase of cable television stations. At first, neither Starr nor Tucker objected to Woods hearing the case; he was a Democrat but had never been close to the governor. Judge Woods dismissed the indictments after he determined that Starr had exceeded his authority under the independent counsel law because the charges had nothing to do with Whitewater.
Starr appealed Woods’s decision to the Eighth Circuit Court and requested that the judge be thrown off the case for bias. The members of the appeals panel that heard the case were conservative Republicans appointed by Reagan and Bush. The lead judge, Pasco Bowman, rivaled David Sentelle in his right-wing politics. Without even giving Judge Woods an opportunity to defend himself, the court not only reversed his decision and reinstated the indictment but also kicked him off the case, citing not court records, but newspaper and magazine articles critical of him. One of the articles filled with false charges was written by Justice Jim Johnson in the right-wing Washington Times. After the ruling Woods pointed out that he was the only judge in American history to be removed from a case on the basis of press articles. When another enterprising defense lawyer appealed to the Eighth Circuit to get a trial judge removed and cited the Woods case as precedent, a different, less ideological panel refused the request and criticized the Woods decision, saying it was both unprecedented and unjustified. Of course it was, but there were different rules for Whitewater.
On April 17, even the New York Times couldn’t take it any longer. Calling Starr “defiantly blind to his appearance problems and indifferent to the special obligation he owes to the American people” for his refusal “to divest himself of his own political and financial baggage,” the Times said Starr should step down. I couldn’t deny that the grand old paper still had a conscience; they didn’t want Hillary and me handed over to a lynch mob. The rest of the Whitewater media was silent on the subject. On April 28, I gave four and a half hours of videotaped testimony in another Whitewater trial. In this one, Starr had indicted Jim and Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker for misappropriating funds from Madison Guaranty and from the Small Business Administration. The loans were not repaid, but the prosecutors didn’t dispute that the defendants intended to repay them; instead, they were charged with crimes arising from the fact that the borrowed money was used for purposes other than those described on the loan application papers.