My brief reverie was shattered the next day, when a small boat laden with explosives blew up beside the USS Cole, in port in Aden, Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed in what was obviously a terrorist attack. We all thought it was the work of bin Laden and al Qaeda, but we couldn’t be sure. The CIA went to work on it, and I sent officials from Defense, State, and the FBI to Yemen, where President Ali Saleh had promised to cooperate fully in the investigation and in bringing the murderers to justice. Meanwhile, I continued to push the Pentagon and the national security team for more options to get bin Laden. We came close to launching another missile strike at him in October, but the CIA recommended that we call it off at the last minute, believing that the evidence of his presence was insufficiently reliable. The Pentagon recommended against putting Special Forces into Afghanistan, with all the attendant logistical difficulties, unless we had more reliable intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts. That left bigger military options: a large-scale bombing campaign of all suspected campsites or a sizable invasion. I thought neither was feasible without a finding of al Qaeda responsibility for the Cole. I was very frustrated, and I hoped that before I left office we would locate bin Laden for a missile strike. After campaign stops in Colorado and Washington, I flew to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for a summit on the Middle East violence with President Mubarak, King Abdullah, Kofi Annan, and Javier Solana, now secretary-general of the European Union. All of them wanted to end the violence, as did Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who was not there but had already weighed in on the subject. Barak and Arafat were present, but might as well have been on opposite sides of the world from each other. Barak wanted the violence stopped; Arafat wanted an inquiry into the alleged excessive use of force by the Israeli military and police. George Tenet worked out a security plan with both sides, and I had to sell it to Barak and Arafat, as well as a statement to be read at the end of the summit. I told Arafat that I had intended to present a proposal to resolve the outstanding issues in the peace talks but couldn’t do so until he agreed to the security plan. There could be no peace without shutting down the violence. Arafat agreed to the plan. We then worked until early in the morning on a statement for me to issue on behalf of all the parties. It contained three parts: a commitment to end the violence; the establishment of a fact-finding committee to look into what had caused the uprising and the conduct of both sides, appointed by the United States with the Israelis and Palestinians and in consultation with Kofi Annan; and a commitment to move forward with the peace talks. It sounds simple, but it wasn’t. Arafat wanted a UN committee and immediate resumption of the talks. Barak wanted a U.S. committee and enough delay to see whether the violence would subside. Mubarak and I finally met alone with Arafat and persuaded him to accept the statement. I couldn’t have done it without Hosni. I had thought he was often too resistant to getting deeply involved in the peace process, but that night he was strong, clear, and effective.
When I returned to the United States, Hillary, Chelsea, and I went to Norfolk, Virginia, for a memorial service for victims of the USS Cole bombing and private meetings with their grieving families. Like the airmen at Khobar Towers, our sailors had been killed in a very different conflict from the kind they had been trained to fight. In this one, the enemy was elusive, everyone was a potential target, our enormous arsenal was not a deterrent, and the openness and information technology of the modern world were being used against us. I knew that eventually we would prevail in the struggle against bin Laden, but I didn’t know how many innocent people would lose their lives before we figured out how to do it. Two days later Hillary, Al and Tipper Gore, and I went to Jefferson City, Missouri, for a memorial service for Governor Mel Carnahan, his son, and a young aide who had been killed when their small plane crashed. Carnahan and I had been close since he endorsed me early in the 1992 campaign. He had been a fine governor and a leader in welfare reform, and at the time of his death he was in a tight race with the incumbent, John Ashcroft, in the U.S. Senate race. It was too late to put someone else on the ballot. A few days later, Jean Carnahan said that if the people of Missouri voted for her husband, she would serve. They did, and Jean served with distinction.
In the last days of October, as the presidential election came down to the wire, I signed a trade agreement with Jordan’s King Abdullah, continued to sign and veto bills, and campaigned in Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and New York, where I did several events for Hillary. The most fun was a birthday celebration in which Robert De Niro gave me instructions on how to talk like a real New Yorker.
Ever since the convention Al Gore had framed the election as a contest of “the people versus the powerful.” That it was; every conceivable conservative interest group—the health insurance industry, the tobacco companies, the heavily polluting industries, the NRA, and many more—was for Governor Bush. The problem with the slogan was that it didn’t give Al the full benefit of our record of economic and social progress or put into sharp relief Bush’s explicit commitment to undo that progress. Also, the populist edge sounded to some swing voters as if Al, too, might change the economic direction of the country. Along toward the end of the month, Al started saying, “Don’t put the prosperity at risk.” By the first of November, he was moving up in the polls, though still down by about four points. In the last week of the campaign, at Governor Gray Davis’s request, I flew to California for two days of campaigning for the ticket and our congressional candidates, did a big event in Harlem for Hillary, then on Sunday went home to Arkansas to campaign for Mike Ross, who had served as my driver in the 1982 governor’s campaign and was running against Republican congressman Jay Dickey. I spent the day before the election and election day doing more than sixty radio interviews across the country urging people to vote for Al and Joe and our local Democrats. I had already recorded more than 170 radio ads and telephone messages to be dialed into homes of hard-core Democrats and minorities, asking them to vote for our candidates.
On election day, Hillary, Chelsea, and I voted at Douglas Grafflin Elementary School, our local polling station in Chappaqua. It was a strange and wonderful experience: strange because the school was the only place I’d ever voted outside Arkansas, and after twenty-six years in political life, my name wasn’t on the ballot; wonderful because I got to vote for Hillary. Chelsea and I voted first, then hugged each other as we watched Hillary close the curtain and cast a ballot for herself. Election night was a roller coaster. Hillary won her election, 55–43 percent, a much larger margin than she had in all the pre-election polls but one. I was so proud of her. New York had put her through the wringer, just as it had done to me in 1992. She had been up, down, and up again, but she kept her bearings and pressed ahead.
As we celebrated her victory at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City, Bush and Gore were neck and neck. For weeks everyone had known the election would be close, with many commentators saying that Gore might lose the popular vote but still win the electoral college. Two days before the election, as I looked at the map and the latest polls, I told Steve Ricchetti that I was afraid the reverse could occur. Our base voters had been activated and would turn out as eagerly as the Republicans who wanted the White House back. Al was going to win big states by large margins, but Bush was going to win more small rural states, and they had an advantage in the electoral college because every state got one electoral vote for each House member plus two extra ones for its senators. Going into election day, I still thought Al would win because he had the momentum and he was right on the issues. Gore did win, by more than 500,000 votes, but the electoral college was in doubt. The race came down to Florida, after Gore won a narrow victory of 366 votes in New Mexico, one of several states that were closer than they would have been had Ralph Nader not been on the ballot. I had asked Bill Richardson to spend the last week in his home state, and he may well have made the difference. Of the states I had won in 1996, Bush picked up Nevada, Arizona, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, and New Hampshire. Tennessee had been growing increasingly Republican. In 1992, 1996, and 2000, the Democratic vote had held steady at between 47 and 48 percent. The NRA also hurt Al badly there and in several other states, including Arkansas. For example, Yell County, where the Clintons had settled a century earlier, is a populist, culturally conservative county a Democrat has to win to carry the state in a tight race. Gore lost it to Bush 50–47 percent. The NRA did that. I might have been able to turn it around, but it would have taken two or three days of rural work to do it, and I didn’t know how big the problem was until I went home right before the election. The gun lobby tried to beat Al in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and might have done so had it not been for a heroic effort by the local labor unions, which had a lot of NRA members themselves. They fought back by saying, “Gore won’t take your gun away, but Bush will take your union away!” Unfortunately, in the rural areas of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, and Ohio, there weren’t enough union members to win the war on the ground.