The trial had nothing to do with Whitewater, Hillary, or me. I mention it here because David Hale dragged me into it. He had swindled the SBA out of millions of dollars and was cooperating with Starr in hopes of getting a reduced prison sentence. In his testimony at the trial, Hale repeated his charge that I had pressured him to make a $300,000 loan to the McDougals.
I testified that Hale’s account of his conversations with me was false and that I knew nothing of the dealings between the parties that had given rise to the charges. The defense attorneys believed that once the jury knew that Hale had lied about my role in his dealings with the McDougals and Tucker, his entire testimony would be compromised and the prosecutor’s case would collapse, and therefore the defendants themselves did not need to testify. There were two difficulties with the strategy. First, against all advice, Jim McDougal insisted on testifying in his own defense. He had done so in a previous trial arising out of the collapse of Madison Guaranty in 1990, and he had been acquitted. But the manic depression from which he suffered had progressed since then, and according to many observers, his rambling, erratic testimony damaged not just himself but also Susan and Jim Guy Tucker, who did not testify in their own defense, even after McDougal had unwittingly imperiled them. The other problem was that the jury didn’t have all the facts about David Hale’s connections to my political adversaries; some of them weren’t yet known, and others were ruled inadmissible by the judge. The jury didn’t know about the money and support Hale had been receiving from a clandestine effort known as the Arkansas Project.
The Arkansas Project was funded by the ultra-conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife from Pittsburgh, who had also pumped money into the American Spectator to fund its negative stories on Hillary and me. For example, the project had paid one former state trooper $10,000 for the ridiculous yarn accusing me of drug smuggling. Scaife’s people also worked closely with allies of Newt Gingrich. When David Brock was working on the Spectator article featuring the two Arkansas state troopers who claimed they had procured women for me, Brock had received not only his salary from the magazine but also secret payments from Chicago businessman Peter Smith, the finance chairman of Newt’s political action committee.
Most of the Arkansas Project’s efforts centered on David Hale. Working through Parker Dozhier, a former aide to Justice Jim Johnson, the project set up a haven for Hale at Dozhier’s bait shop outside Hot Springs, where Dozhier gave Hale cash and the use of his car and fishing cabin while Hale was cooperating with Starr. During this time Hale also received free legal advice from Ted Olson, a friend of Starr’s and a lawyer for the Arkansas Project and the American Spectator. Olson later became the solicitor general in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department after a Senate hearing in which he was less than candid about his work for the Arkansas Project.
For whatever reasons, the jury convicted all three defendants on several of the charges against them. In his closing, the lead OIC prosecutor went out of his way to state that I was not “on trial” and that there had “been no allegations of wrongdoing” directed at me. But Starr now had what he really wanted: three people he could pressure to give him something damaging on us in order to avoid a jail sentence. Since there was nothing to tell, I didn’t worry about it, though I regretted the cost to the taxpayers of Starr’s far-flung efforts, and the mounting casualties among people in Arkansas whose principal sin was that they had known Hillary and me before I became President.
I also had serious doubts about the jury verdict. Jim McDougal’s mental illness had progressed to the point where he was probably not competent to stand trial, much less testify. And I felt that Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker might have been convicted only because they were caught up in Jim McDougal’s downward mental spiral and David Hale’s desperate effort to save himself. May was a relatively quiet month on the legislative front, which enabled me to do some campaigning in several states and to enjoy some of the ceremonial duties of the presidency, including the presentation of a Congressional Gold Medal to Billy Graham, the annual WETA-TV “In Performance” concert on the South Lawn, featuring Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt, and a state visit from the Greek president, Constantinos Stephanopoulos. When we were involved in high-stakes foreign and domestic problems, I often had a hard time relaxing enough to fully enjoy such things.
On May 15, I announced the latest round of community policing grants, which brought us to 43,000 of the 100,000 new police officers I’d promised. That same day Bob Dole announced that he was resigning from the Senate to pursue his presidential campaign full-time. He called to tell me of his decision and I wished him well. It was the only sensible course for him; he didn’t have time to campaign against me and be majority leader, and the positions the Senate and House Republicans were taking on the budget and other matters were hurting him in his presidential race.
The next day I called for a global ban on anti-personnel land mines. There were about 100 million land mines, mostly relics of past wars, just beneath the surface of the earth in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Many of them had been there for decades but were still lethal; twenty-five thousand people were killed or maimed by them every year. The damage they were doing, especially to children in places like Angola and Cambodia, was awful. There were a lot of them in Bosnia, too; the only casualty our troops had suffered came when an army sergeant was killed trying to pick up a land mine. I committed the United States to destroy four million of our own so-called dumb, or non–self-destructing, mines by 1999 and to help other nations with their demining efforts. Soon we would be financing more than half the cost of demining worldwide.
Unfortunately, what should have been a life-affirming event was marked by yet another tragedy, as I announced that our chief of naval operations, Admiral Mike Boorda, had died that afternoon of a selfinflicted gunshot wound. Boorda was the first enlisted man ever to rise through the ranks to the navy’s highest position. His suicide was triggered by news stories alleging that he had worn two Vietnam battle ribbons on his uniform that he hadn’t earned. The facts were in dispute and, in any case, should not have diminished his standing after a long career marked by devotion, stellar service, and evident courage. Like Vince Foster, he had never had his honor and integrity questioned before. There’s a big difference between being told that you are no good at your job and being told that you’re just no good. In mid-May, I signed the reauthorization of the Ryan White CARE Act, which funded medical and support services for people with HIV and AIDS, the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four. Now we had doubled the money available for AIDS care since 1993, and one-third of the 900,000 people with HIV were receiving services under the act. That same week I also signed a bill known as Megan’s Law. Named after a little girl who had been killed by a sex offender, the legislation gave states the power to notify communities of the presence of violent sex offenders; several studies had shown they are rarely rehabilitated. After the ceremony I flew to Missouri to campaign with Dick Gephardt. I really admired Gephardt, a hardworking, smart, kind man who looked twenty years younger than he was. Even though he was the Democratic leader in the House, he regularly came home on weekends to go into neighborhoods and knock on his constituents’ doors to talk with them. Often, Dick would give me a list of things he wanted me to do for his district. While lots of congressmen asked for things from time to time, the only other member who regularly provided me a typed “to do” list was Senator Ted Kennedy. At the end of the month, I announced that the Veterans Administration would provide compensation to Vietnam veterans for a series of severe illnesses, including cancers, liver disorders, and Hodgkin’s disease, that were associated with exposure to Agent Orange, a cause long championed by Vietnam veterans, Senators John Kerry and John McCain, and by the late Admiral Bud Zumwalt. On May 29, I stayed up until well past midnight watching the election returns in Israel. It was a real cliffhanger, as Bibi Netanyahu defeated Shimon Peres by less than 1 percent of the vote. Peres won the Arab vote by a large majority, but Netanyahu beat him badly enough among Jewish voters, who made up more than 90 percent of the electorate, to win. He did it by promising to be tougher on terrorism and slower with the peace process, and by using American-style television ads, including some attacking Peres that were made with the help of a Republican media advisor from New York. Peres resisted the pleas of his supporters to answer the ads until the very end of the campaign, and by then it was too late. I thought Shimon had done a good job as prime minister, and he had given his entire life to the state of Israel, but in 1996, by a narrow margin, Netanyahu proved to be a better politician. I was eager to determine whether and how he and I could work together to keep the peace process going. In June, against the backdrop of the presidential campaign, I focused on two issues, education and the disturbing rash of black church burnings then sweeping the country. At the Princeton University commencement, I outlined a plan to open the doors of college to all Americans and to make at least two years of college as universally available as high schooclass="underline" a tax credit modeled on Georgia’s Hope Scholarships of $1,500 (the average cost of community college tuition) for two years of higher education; a tax deduction of $10,000 a year for all higher education beyond the first two years; a $1,000 scholarship to students in the top 5 percent of every high school graduating class; funds to increase college work-study positions from 700,000 to 1 million; and annual increases in Pell Grants for lowerincome students. In mid-month I went to Grover Cleveland Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to support the community’s curfew program, one of several such efforts across the country requiring young people to be in their homes after a certain hour on school nights; they had led to a decline in crime and an improvement in student learning. I also endorsed the policy of requiring school uniforms for elementary and middle school students. Almost without exception, school districts that required uniforms experienced higher student attendance, less violence, and increased student learning. The distinctions between poor and wealthier students diminished as well.