By late 1997, when it became clear that Russia had even larger stocks of germ warfare agents than we had believed, I authorized American cooperation with scientists who had worked at the institutes where a lot of the bioweapons had been built in the Soviet era, in the hope of finding out exactly what was going on and preventing them from providing their expertise or biological agents to Iran or other high bidders.
In March 1998, Dick Clarke gathered about forty members of the administration at Blair House for a “table top exercise” on handling terrorist attacks of smallpox, a chemical agent, and a nuclear weapon. The results were troubling. With smallpox, it took them too much time and the loss of too many lives to bring the epidemic under control. The stocks of antibiotics and vaccines were inadequate, the quarantine laws were antiquated, the public-health systems were in bad shape, and the state emergency plans were not well developed.
A few weeks later, at my request, Clarke assembled seven scientists and emergency response experts, including Craig Venter; Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize–winning biologist who had spent decades crusading against biological weapons; and Jerry Hauer, director of Emergency Management in New York City. Along with Bill Cohen, Janet Reno, Donna Shalala, George Tenet, and Sandy Berger, I met with the group for several hours to discuss the threat and what to do about it. Although I had been up most of the previous night helping to close the Irish peace agreement, I listened carefully to their presentation and asked a lot of questions. Everything I heard confirmed that we were not prepared for bio-attacks, and that the coming ability to sequence and reconfigure genes had profound implications for our national security. As the meeting was breaking up, Dr. Lederberg gave me a copy of a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association devoted to the threat of bioterrorism. After reading it, I was even more concerned.
Less than a month later, the group sent me a report containing its recommendations for spending almost $2 billion over the next four years to improve public-health capabilities, build a national stockpile of antibiotics and vaccines, especially against smallpox, and increase research into the development of better medicines and vaccines through genetic engineering.
On the day of the Annapolis speech, I signed two more presidential directives on terrorism. PDD-62 created a ten-point counterterrorism initiative, assigning responsibility to various government agencies for specific functions, including the apprehension, return, and prosecution of terrorists and the disruption of their networks; preventing terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction; managing the aftermath of attacks; protecting critical infrastructure and cybersystems; and protecting Americans at home and overseas.
PDD-62 also established the position of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Infrastructure Protection; I appointed Dick Clarke, who had been our point person on anti-terrorism from the start. He was a career professional who had served under Presidents Reagan and Bush, and was appropriately aggressive in his efforts to organize the government to fight terror. PDD-63 established a National Infrastructure Protection Center to prepare for the first time a comprehensive plan to protect our critical infrastructure, such as transportation, telecommunications, and water systems. At the end of the month, Starr tried and failed again to force Susan McDougal to testify before the grand jury; questioned Hillary for nearly five hours and for the sixth time; and indicted Webb Hubbell again on tax charges. Several former prosecutors questioned the propriety of Starr’s highly unusual move; essentially Hubbell was being charged again for overcharging his clients because he hadn’t paid taxes on the money. To make matters worse, Starr also indicted Hubbell’s wife, Suzy, because she had signed their joint income tax returns, and Webb’s friends, accountant Mike Schaufele and lawyer Charles Owen, because they had given Hubbell advice on his financial affairs, free of charge, when he was in trouble. Hubbell was blunt in his response: “They think by indicting my wife and my friends that I will lie about the President and the First Lady. I will not do so… I’m not gonna lie about the President. I’m not gonna lie about the First Lady, or anyone else.”
In early May, Starr continued his strategy of intimidation by indicting Susan McDougal on charges of criminal contempt and obstruction of justice for her continuing refusal to talk to the grand jury, the same offense for which she had already served eighteen months for civil contempt. This one took the cake. Starr and Hick Ewing couldn’t bully Susan McDougal into lying for them and it was driving them nuts. Although it would take Susan nearly another year to prove it, she was tougher than they were, and in the end she would be vindicated.
In June, Starr finally got into a little hot water. After Steven Brill published an article in Brill’s Content on Starr’s operation that highlighted the OIC’s strategy of unlawful news leaks, and reported that Starr had admitted the leaks in a ninety-minute interview, Judge Norma Holloway Johnson ruled that there was “probable cause” to believe that Starr’s office had engaged in “serious and repetitive” leaks to the news media and that David Kendall could subpoena Starr and his deputies to find the source of the leaks. Because the judge’s decision involved grand jury proceedings, it was rendered in secret. Strangely, it was one aspect of Starr’s operation that was not leaked to the press. On May 29, Barry Goldwater died at the age of eighty-nine. I was saddened by his passing. Although we were of different parties and philosophies, Goldwater had been uncommonly kind to Hillary and me. I also respected him for being a genuine patriot and an old-fashioned libertarian who thought the government should stay out of citizens’ private lives and who believed political combat should focus on ideas, not personal attacks.
I spent the rest of the spring lobbying for my legislative program and doing the business at hand: issuing an executive order to prohibit discrimination against gays in federal civilian employment; supporting Boris Yeltsin’s new economic reform program; receiving the emir of Bahrain at the White House; addressing the UN General Assembly session on global drug trafficking; hosting a state visit for South Korean president Kim Dae Jung; holding a National Ocean Conference in Monterey, California, where I extended the ban on oil drilling off the California coast for fourteen years; signing a bill that provided funds to buy bulletproof vests for the 25 percent of our law-enforcement officers who didn’t have them; speaking at three university commencements; and campaigning for Democrats in six states. It was a busy but fairly normal month, except for an unhappy trip I took to Springfield, Oregon, where a troubled fifteen-year-old boy armed with a semiautomatic weapon had killed and wounded several of his classmates. It was the latest in a series of school shootings that included lethal incidents in Jonesboro, Arkansas; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; and Edinboro, Pennsylvania. The killings were both heartbreaking and perplexing, because the overall juvenile crime rate was finally declining. It seemed to me that the violent outbursts were due, at least in part, to the excessive glorification of violence in our culture and the easy availability of deadly weapons to children. In all the school shooting cases, including several others in which no deaths had occurred, the young perpetrators seemed to be enraged, alienated, or in the grip of some dark philosophy of life. I asked Janet Reno and Dick Riley to put together a guide for teachers, parents, and students on the early warning signals troubled young people frequently exhibited, with suggested strategies on how to deal with them. I went to the high school in Springfield to meet with the victims’ families, listen to accounts of what had happened, and speak to the students, teachers, and citizens. They were traumatized, wondering how such a thing could have occurred in their community. Often at times like this, I felt all I could do was share people’s grief, reassure them that they were good men and women, and encourage them to pick up the pieces and go on.