After announcing the attacks in Martha’s Vineyard, I flew back to Washington to speak to the American people for the second time in four days, telling them I had ordered the strikes because al Qaeda was responsible for the embassy bombings, and bin Laden was “perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today,” a man who had vowed to wage a terrorist war on America with no distinction between military personnel and civilians. I said that our attacks were not aimed against Islam “but against fanatics and killers,” and that we had been fighting against them on several fronts for years and would continue to do so, because “this will be a long, ongoing struggle.”
Around the time I spoke of the long struggle, I signed the first of a series of orders to prepare for it by using all the tools available. Executive Order 13099 imposed economic sanctions on bin Laden and al Qaeda. Later the sanctions were extended to the Taliban as well. To date, we had not been effective in disrupting terrorists’ financial networks. The executive order invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which we had earlier used successfully against the Cali drug cartel in Colombia. I had also asked General Shelton and Dick Clarke to develop some options for dropping commando forces into Afghanistan. I thought that if we took out a couple of al Qaeda’s training operations it would show them how serious we were, even if we didn’t get bin Laden or his top lieutenants. It was clear to me that the senior military didn’t want to do this, perhaps because of Somalia, perhaps because they would have to send in the Special Forces without knowing for certain where bin Laden was, or whether we could get our troops back out to safety. At any rate, I continued to keep the option alive. I also signed several Memoranda of Notification (MONs) authorizing the CIA to use lethal force to apprehend bin Laden. The CIA had been authorized to conduct its own “snatch operation” against bin Laden the previous spring, months before the embassy bombings, but it lacked the paramilitary capability to do the job. Instead, it contracted with members of local Afghan tribes to get bin Laden. When field agents or the Afghan tribals were apparently uncertain of whether they had to try to capture bin Laden before they used deadly force, I made it clear that they did not. Within a few months I had extended the lethal force authorization by expanding the list of targeted bin Laden associates and the circumstances under which they could be attacked.
By and large, the response of the congressional leaders of both parties to the missile strikes was positive, in large part because they had been well briefed and Secretary Cohen had assured his fellow Republicans that the attack and its timing were justified. Speaker Gingrich said, “The United States did exactly the right thing today.” Senator Lott said the attacks were “appropriate and just.” Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, and all the Democrats were supportive. Soon I was heartened by the arrest of Mohamed Rashed, an al Qaeda operative who was a suspect in the Kenyan embassy bombing. Some people criticized me for hitting the chemical plant, which the Sudanese government insisted had nothing to do with the production or storage of dangerous chemicals. I still believe we did the right thing there. The CIA had soil samples taken at the plant site that contained the chemical used to produce VX. In a subsequent terrorist trial in New York City, one of the witnesses testified that bin Laden had a chemical weapons operation in Khartoum. Despite the plain evidence, some people in the media tried to push the possibility that the action was a real-life version of Wag the Dog, a movie in which a fictional President starts a made-for-TV war to distract public attention from his personal problems. The American people had to absorb the news of the strike and my grand jury testimony at the same time. Newsweek ran an article reporting that the public’s reaction to my testimony and television address about it was “calm and measured.” My job rating was 62 percent, with 73 percent supporting the missile strikes. Most people thought I had been dishonest in my personal life but remained credible on public issues. By contrast, Newsweek said, “the first reaction of the pundit class was near hysteria.” They were hitting me hard. I deserved a whipping, all right, but I was getting it at home, where it should have been administered.
For now, I just hoped that the Democrats wouldn’t be pushed by the media pounding into calling for my resignation, and that I would be able to repair the breach I had caused with my family and with my staff, cabinet, and the people who had believed in me through all the years of constant attacks. After the speech I went back to the Vineyard for ten days. There was not much thaw on the family front. I made my first public appearance since my grand jury testimony, traveling to Worcester, Massachusetts, at the invitation of Congressman Jim McGovern, to promote the Police Corps, an innovative program that provided college scholarships to people who committed to becoming law-enforcement officers. Worcester is an old-fashioned blue-collar city; I was somewhat apprehensive about the kind of reception I would get there, and was encouraged to find a large enthusiastic crowd at an event attended by the mayor, both senators, and four Massachusetts congressmen. Many people in the crowd urged me to keep doing my job; several said they had made mistakes in their lives, too, and were sorry that mine had been aired in public.
On August 28, the thirty-fifth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech, I went to a commemorative service at Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs, which had been a vacation mecca for African-Americans for more than a century. I shared the platform with Congressman John Lewis, who had worked with Dr. King and was one of the most powerful moral forces in American politics. He and I had been friends for a long time, going back well before 1992. He was one of my earliest supporters and had every right to condemn me. Instead, when he rose to speak, John said that I was his friend and brother, that he had stood with me when I was up and would not leave me when I was down, that I had been a good President, and that if it were up to him, I would continue to be. John Lewis will never know how much he lifted my spirits that day.
We returned to Washington at the end of the month to face another tremendous problem. The Asian financial crisis had spread and was now threatening to destabilize the entire global economy. The crisis had begun in Thailand in 1997, then infected Indonesia and South Korea, and now it had spread to Russia. In mid-August, Russia had defaulted on its foreign debt, and by the end of the month the Russian collapse had caused large drops in stock markets across the world. On August 31, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 512 points, following a drop of 357 just four days earlier; all the gains of 1998 were wiped out.
Bob Rubin and his international economics team had been working on the financial crisis since Thailand’s trouble began. Although the details of each nation’s problem were somewhat different, there were some common elements: flawed banking systems, bad loans, crony capitalism, and a general loss of confidence. The situation was aggravated by the lack of economic growth in Japan over the past five years. With no inflation and a 20 percent savings rate, the Japanese could stand it, but the absence of growth in Asia’s largest economy increased the adverse consequences of bad policies elsewhere. Even the Japanese were getting restless; the stagnant economy had contributed to the election losses that had led to the recent resignation of my friend Ryutaro Hashimoto as prime minister. China, with the region’s fastest-growing economy, had kept the crisis from growing even worse by refusing to devalue its currency.