In the last week of the month, I held a gathering in the East Room of the White House, where almost two hundred years earlier Thomas Jefferson had spread out the path-breaking map of the western United States that his aide Meriwether Lewis had made on his courageous expedition from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean in 1803. The crowd of scientists and diplomats had gathered to celebrate a twenty-first–century map: more than a thousand researchers in the United States, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, and China had decoded the human genome, identifying nearly all of the three billion sequences of our genetic code. After battling each other for years, Francis Collins, head of the government-funded international human genome project, and Celera president Craig Venter had agreed to publish their genetic data together later in the year. Craig was an old friend, and I had done my best to bring them together. Tony Blair joined us on a satellite hookup, giving me a chance to joke that his infant son’s life expectancy had just gone up by about twenty-five years. As the month drew to a close, I announced that our budget surplus would exceed $200 billion, with a tenyear projected surplus of over $4 trillion. Once again, I recommended that we lock away the Social Security surplus, about $2.3 trillion, and that we save about $550 billion for Medicare. It was beginning to look as if we could handle the baby boomers’ retirement after all. I also did a number of political events to support Democrats in Arizona and California and to help Terry McAuliffe raise the rest of the money we needed to put on our convention in Los Angeles in August. We were working closely with him and the Gore campaign through my political director Minyon Moore. Most polls had Gore trailing Bush, and at my press conference on June 28, I was asked by an NBC
News reporter whether Al was being held accountable for the “scandals” of the administration. I said there was no evidence that he was being punished for my mistakes; that the only wrongdoing he had been accused of involved campaign fund-raising, and he wasn’t guilty; and that the other so-called scandals were bogus: “The word ‘scandal’ has been thrown around here like a clanging teapot for seven years.” I also said I knew three things about Al Gore: he had had a more positive impact on our country as vice president than any of his predecessors; he had the right positions on the issues and would keep the prosperity going; and he understood the future, both its possibilities and its dangers. I believed if all the voters understood that, Al would win.
In the first week of July, I announced that our economy had now produced twenty-two million jobs since I took office, and went out to the Old Soldiers’ Home a few miles north of the White House to protect the old cottage Abraham Lincoln and his family had used for a summer home when the Potomac generated hordes of mosquitoes and there was no air conditioning. Several other Presidents had used it, too. It was one of Hillary’s Save America’s Treasures projects, and we wanted to know the old place would be cared for when we left the White House.
On July 11, I opened a summit with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat at Camp David in an attempt to resolve the remaining obstacles to peace, or at least to narrow their differences so that we could finish before I left office, a result both leaders said they wanted.
They came to the summit with very different attitudes. Barak had pushed hard for the summit because the piecemeal approach of the 1993 agreement and the Wye River accord didn’t work for him. The 180,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza were a formidable force. Every Israeli concession that failed to bring an end to terror and a formal Palestinian recognition that the conflict was over was a death by a thousand cuts. Barak had just survived a no-confidence vote in the Knesset by only two votes. He was also eager for a deal before September, when Arafat had threatened to unilaterally declare a state. Barak believed that if he could present a comprehensive peace plan to Israeli citizens, they would vote for it as long as Israel’s fundamental interests were achieved: security, the protection of its religious and cultural sites on the Temple Mount, an end to the Palestinian claim to an unlimited right of return to Israel, and a declaration that the conflict was over.
Arafat, on the other hand, didn’t want to come to Camp David, at least not yet. He had felt abandoned by the Israelis when they turned to the Syrian track, and was angry that Barak had not kept previous commitments to turn over more of the West Bank, including villages near Jerusalem. In Arafat’s eyes, Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and his offer to withdraw from the Golan had weakened him. While Arafat had patiently continued the peace process, Lebanon and Syria had benefited by taking a hard line. Arafat also said he needed two more weeks to develop his proposals. He wanted as close to a hundred percent of the West Bank and Gaza as he could get; complete sovereignty over the Temple Mount and East Jerusalem, except for the Jewish neighborhoods there; and a solution to the refugee problem that did not require him to give up the principle of the right of return. As usual, each leader saw his own position more clearly than he saw the other side. There was not a high probability of success for the summit. I called it because I believed that the collapse of the peace process would be a near certainty if I didn’t.
On the first day, I tried to get Arafat past his grievances to focus on the work ahead and to get Barak to agree on how to move through the issues, especially the most contentious ones: territory, settlements, refugees, security, and Jerusalem. As he had at Shepherdstown, Barak wanted to slow-walk things for a couple of days. It didn’t matter that much this time—Arafat hadn’t come with a set of negotiating points; this was all strange territory to him. In previous negotiations he would just hold out for the best offer he could get from Israel on issues such as land, an airport, connecting roads, and prisoner releases, then pledge his best efforts on the security front. Now if we were going to get this done, Arafat had some compromising of his own to do on concrete matters: He couldn’t get a hundred percent of the West Bank or an unlimited right of return to a much smaller Israel. He also would have to meet some of Israel’s security concerns about potential enemies east of the Jordan River.
I spent the first couple of days trying to get Arafat and Barak in the right frame of mind, while Madeleine, Sandy, Dennis, Gemal Helal, John Podesta, and the rest of our team began working with their Israeli and Palestinian counterparts. I was immensely impressed with the quality of both delegations. They were all patriotic, intelligent, and hardworking, and they genuinely seemed to want an agreement. Most of them had known each other and their counterparts on the other side for years, and the chemistry between the two groups was quite good.
We tried to create a comfortable, informal atmosphere for the Israelis and Palestinians. In addition to our regular Middle East team, I asked Hillary’s aide, Huma Abedin, to join us. An Arabic-speaking Muslim American raised in Saudi Arabia, Huma was an impressive young woman who understood the Middle East and was especially effective at making the Israeli and Palestinian delegates feel at home and at ease. Capricia Marshall, the White House social secretary, arranged for the White House butlers, chefs, and valets to come help the Camp David staff in making sure the meals were enjoyable. And Chelsea stayed with me the whole time, entertaining our guests and helping me deal with the endless hours of tension.