Freeh had been criticized in the press and by Republicans in Congress, who cited the FBI missteps as the reason for their refusal to pass the provision in my anti-terrorism legislation that would have given the agency wiretap authority to track suspected terrorists as they moved from place to place. There was one sure way for Freeh to please the Republicans in Congress and get the press off his back: he could assume an adversarial position toward the White House. Whether out of conviction or necessity, Freeh had begun to do just that. When the files case became public, his initial reaction was to blame the White House and decline to accept any responsibility for the FBI. When the campaign finance story broke, he wrote Janet Reno a memo that was leaked to the press, urging her to appoint an independent counsel. When reports surfaced of possible attempts by the Chinese government to funnel illegal contributions to members of Congress in 1996, lower-level agents briefed people well down the chain of command in the National Security Council about it and urged them not to tell their superiors. When Madeleine Albright was preparing to go to China, the White House counsel, Chuck Ruff, a respected former U.S. attorney and Justice Department official, asked the FBI for information about Beijing’s plans to influence the government. This was clearly something the secretary of state needed to know about before meeting with the Chinese, but Freeh personally ordered the FBI not to send its prepared reply, despite the fact that it had been approved by the Justice Department and two of Freeh’s top assistants.
I didn’t believe Freeh was foolish enough to think the Democratic Party would knowingly accept illegal contributions from the Chinese government; he was just trying to avoid criticism from the press and the Republicans, even if it damaged our foreign policy operations. I thought back to the call I had received the day before I appointed Freeh from the retired FBI agent in Arkansas pleading with me not to name him and warning that he would sell me down the river the minute it would benefit him to do so. Whatever Freeh’s motives, the behavior of the FBI toward the White House was just one more example of how crazy Washington had become. The country was in good shape and getting better, and we were advancing peace and prosperity throughout the world, yet the mindless search for scandal continued. A few months earlier Tom Oliphant, the thoughtful and independent-minded Boston Globe columnist, summed up the situation welclass="underline"
The grand and vainglorious forces running The Great American Scandal Machine are very big on how things seem. The machine’s lifeblood is appearances, which generate questions, creating more appearances, all in turn generating a righteous frenzy that demands intense inquiry by super-scrupulous inquisitors who must at all costs be independent. The frenzy, of course, can be resisted only by the complicit and the guilty.
August began with good and bad news. Unemployment was down to 4.8 percent, the lowest since 1973, and confidence in the future remained high in the aftermath of the bipartisan balanced budget agreement. On the other hand, the cooperation didn’t extend to the appointments process: Jesse Helms was holding up my nomination of the Republican governor of Massachusetts, Bill Weld, to be ambassador to Mexico because he felt Weld had insulted him, and Janet Reno told the American Bar Association that there were 101 vacant federal judgeships because the Senate had confirmed only nine of my nominees in 1997, none for the court of appeals.
After a two-year hiatus, our family went back to Martha’s Vineyard for our August vacation. We stayed at the home of our friend Dick Friedman near Oyster Pond. I celebrated my birthday by going for a jog with Chelsea, and I persuaded Hillary to play her annual round of golf with me at the Mink Meadows public course. She had never liked golf, but once a year she humored me by strolling around a few holes. I also played a lot of golf with Vernon Jordan at the wonderful old Farm Neck course. He liked the game a lot more than Hillary did.
The month ended as it began, with both good and bad news. On the twenty-ninth, Tony Blair invited Sinn Fein to join the Irish peace talks, giving the party formal standing for the first time. On the thirtyfirst, Princess Diana was killed in an auto crash in Paris. Less than a week later, Mother Teresa died. Hillary was very saddened by their deaths. She had known and liked both of them very much, and she represented the United States at both funerals, flying first to London, then to Calcutta a few days later. During August, I also had to announce a major disappointment: the United States would not be able to sign the international treaty banning land mines. The circumstances leading to our exclusion were almost bizarre. The United States had spent $153 million on demining all over the world since 1993; we had recently lost a plane with nine people on board after depositing a demining team in southwest Africa; we had trained more than 25 percent of the world’s demining experts; and we had destroyed 1.5 million of our own mines, with another 1.5 million scheduled to be destroyed by 1999. No other nation had done as much as America to rid the world of dangerous land mines.
Near the end of negotiations on the treaty, I had asked for two amendments: an exception for the heavily marked UN-sanctioned minefield along the Korean border, which protected the people of South Korea and our troops there; and a rewording of the provision approving anti-tank missiles that covered those manufactured in Europe but not ours. Ours were just as safe and worked better to protect our troops. Both amendments were rejected, partly because the Landmine Conference was determined to pass the strongest possible treaty in the wake of the death of its most famous champion, Princess Diana, and partly because some people at the conference just wanted to embarrass the United States or bully us into signing the treaty as it was. I hated not to be part of the international agreement because it undermined our leverage in trying to stop the manufacture and use of more land mines, some of which could be bought for as little as three dollars each, but I couldn’t put the safety of our troops or the people of South Korea at risk.
On September 18, Hillary and I took Chelsea to Stanford. We wanted her new life to be as normal as possible and had worked with the Secret Service to make sure she would be assigned young agents who would dress informally and be as unobtrusive as they could be. Stanford had agreed to bar media access to her on campus. We enjoyed the welcoming ceremonies and visits with the other parents, after which we took Chelsea to her dorm room and helped her move in. Chelsea was happy and excited; Hillary and I were a little sad and anxious. Hillary tried to deal with it by scurrying around and helping Chelsea organize things, even lining her drawers with Contac paper. I had carried her luggage up the stairs to her room, then fixed her bunk bed. After that, I just stared out the window, as her mother got on Chelsea’s nerves with all the fixing up. When the student speaker at the convocation, Blake Harris, had said to all the parents that our children would miss us “in about a month and for about fifteen minutes,” we all laughed. I hoped it was true, but we sure would miss her. When it was time to go, Hillary had pulled herself together and was ready. Not me; I wanted to stay for dinner.
On the last day of September, I attended the retirement ceremony of General John Shalikashvili and gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He had been a superb chairman of the Joint Chiefs, supporting the expansion of NATO, the creation of the Partnership for Peace, and the deployment of our troops in more than forty operations, including Bosnia, Haiti, Iraq, Rwanda, and the Taiwan Strait. I had really enjoyed working with him. He was intelligent, straight-talking, and completely committed to the welfare of our men and women in uniform. As his replacement I named General Hugh Shelton, who had so impressed me with his handling of the Haiti operation.