Living History (66 page)

was Museveni’s wife, Janet, who was an active participant in the National Prayer breakfast.

When I helped dedicate the AIDS Information Center, I learned from an American doctor there that the policy of testing and providing results in the same day, pioneered at the clinic, was being put to use in the United States. Our foreign assistance was advancing the search for a vaccine and cure in Uganda, and the U.S. was also benefiting.

No issue is more critical in Africa than stopping the ongoing conflicts―tribal, religious and national―that destroy lives and impede progress on every front. Eritrea is Africa’s newest nation, a democracy born out of a thirty-year civil war of independence from Ethiopia, in which women fought alongside men. As I stepped off the plane in Asmara, I saw a red, white and blue banner that said, YES, IT DOES TAKE A VILLAGE.

Women in brilliantly colored dresses greeted me by throwing popcorn at me, a welcoming practice meant to protect visitors from evil forces and to assure good fortune. As we drove from the airport, another large banner proclaimed, WELCOME, SISTER.

The President of Eritrea, Isaias Afwerki, and his wife, Saba Haile, a former freedom fighter, lived in their own small house, but they received me at the Presidential Palace. As we watched folk dancers perform in a courtyard built by the Italians during their colonial occupation, I asked President Afwerki, who had given up his university studies to fight in the resistance, if he had ever found time to dance during their long war. “Of course,” he replied. “We had to dance to remind ourselves of a world without war.”

In late May 1998, conflict broke out again between Ethiopia and Eritrea over a disputed border. Thousands were killed and the promise of peace for both peoples was tragically delayed. Bill sent Tony Lake, his former National Security Adviser, and Susan Rice, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, to the region. Eventually the Clinton Administration helped broker a peace agreement. I can only hope now that the potential I saw for a better future―complete with popcorn and dancing―can be realized in both nations.

When Chelsea and I returned from Africa, we regaled Bill with our adventures. His summit with Boris Yeltsin had been productive, but not nearly as illuminating or exotic as our trip. Bill’s leg was healing, but he was still hobbling around the White House on crutches. The Republican opposition wasn’t about to allow a time out for injury. A month earlier, in February 1997, Kenneth Starr’s prosecutorial career took a bizarre turn when he announced that he was resigning as independent counsel to accept a position at Pepperdine University as Dean of the law school and head of its new school of public policy.

But Starr’s exit strategy backfired when rightwing pundits blasted him for quitting the investigation before finding something to implicate us. At the same time, some in the media picked up a thread that directly connected the supposedly impartial independent counsel to one of his decidedly partisan patrons. It turned out that Starr’s Deanship was to be underwritten by a generous gift from Richard Mellon Scaife, a regent of Pepperdine University. Within days, Starr bowed to pressure from the right and changed his mind about taking the job. He apologetically announced that he would stay on as independent counsel until his work was done.

I don’t know if we would have been better off with or without Starr. But one possible consequence of Starr’s remaining at the OIC was an even more desperate effort to find anything to justify the continued investigations. David Kendall, who constantly monitored the media coverage of Whitewater, noted an increase in stories emanating from Starr’s office. Newspaper reports indicated that OIC investigators were revisiting “sources” in Arkansas, such as the trooper bodyguards, to probe the President’s personal life. Meanwhile, Jim McDougal had made a deal with prosecutors for a reduced sentence.

He was eager to grant interviews, and changed his story, once again trying to implicate Bill and me in his schemes. His ex-wife, Susan, was suffering in jail for refusing to testify before the Whitewater Grand Jury, which she insisted was a trap to charge her with perjury for telling the truth. Anyone who believes that prosecutors can’t abuse the American criminal justice system should read Susan’s book, The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk: Why I Refused to Testify Against the Clintons and What I Learned in Jail. It’s a chilling account of the abuse she suffered from Starr’s crowd and a sobering reminder that protecting our freedom depends on guaranteeing the rule of law for everyone.

Members of Starr’s team, and Starr himself, appeared to be leaking secret grand jury testimony, which was against the law. In a New York Times Magazine article on June 1, 1997, Starr questioned my truthfulness and alluded to possible obstruction charges. For David Kendall that was the last straw, and he suggested it was time for a counteroffensive.

He wrote a letter, which Bill and I approved, accusing Starr of a “leak and smear”

campaign in the media. Three former special prosecutors, including a conservative Republican former U.S. Attorney, publicly agreed with Kendall that the OIC’s behavior was outrageous. But the public relations war continued.

Meanwhile, the Paula Jones sexual harassment case got a second wind. Back in January, Bob Bennett, Bill’s lawyer in the Jones case, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that a President should not be burdened by defending civil lawsuits while in office. Bennett’s point was that if this was allowed, any President could be tied up in litigation brought by his political enemies or by publicity seekers, and it would erode the ability of the Chief Executive to perform his duties. But on May 27, 1997, all nine justices concurred that the President’s privilege did not extend to civil suits, and Jones v. Clinton could go forward. I thought it was a terrible decision and an open invitation for political opponents to sue any President.

Chelsea chose to go to Stanford, three thousand miles away, and I looked ahead to her high school graduation and departure for college with a knot in my stomach. I tried not to reveal my looming sense of loss to her, fearing I might spoil this special moment in her life. I comforted myself by spending as much time with her as I could, and I commiserated with other mothers suffering from impending separation anxiety during a month of intensive preparation for a hallowed Sidwell Friends tradition: the Mother-Daughter Show. Mothers of Sidwell daughters are encouraged to take part in an evening of comic sketches that poke gentle fun at their graduating seniors. I teamed up with several moms of Chelsea’s friends for skits in which each of us played the part of our daughters.

My role involved a lot of pirouetting like a ballerina and chatting on the telephone about plans to go out. The opening scene required us to drape ourselves in sheets like togas and sing “I Believe I Can Fly.” I was able to get in touch with my inner ham, but fortunately for Chelsea, my voice was drowned out by the other mothers during this opening musical number.

The graduation ceremony of the Sidwell Friends Class Of 1997 was much like any other, except that the President of the United States gave the commencement address. He brought me to tears when he asked the graduates to recognize that their parents might “seem a little sad or act a little weird. You see, today we are remembering your first day in school and all the triumphs and travails between then and now. Though we have raised you for this moment of departure and we are very proud of you, a part of us longs to hold you once more as we did when you could barely walk, to read to you just one more time, Good Night, Moon or Curious George or The Little Engine That Could.” When we returned from the ceremony, the entire White House staff had gathered in the East Room to congratulate Chelsea. Everyone got a piece of Roland Mesnier’s fabulous graduation cake that was, fittingly, shaped like an open book. These men and women had first met Chelsea as a child wearing braces and had watched and helped her blossom into a wonderful young woman.

As summer approached, the administration was gearing up for three big jobs: negotiating a balanced budget with Congress, holding an economic summit in Denver, Colorado, and organizing a high-level meeting in Madrid on the controversial expansion of NATO.

One of the most important lessons I learned during my years as First Lady was how dependent the affairs of state and the policies of nations are on the personal relationships among leaders. Even ideologically opposed countries can reach agreements and forge alliances if their leaders know and trust one another. But this sort of diplomacy requires constant nurturing and informal dialogue among the principals, which is one reason why the President, Vice President and I took frequent trips overseas.

The G-7 summit, an annual meeting of the world’s major industrial nations―the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada―had increasingly become a political as well as an economic forum. Russia had been invited as a guest at previous G-7 summits, but by 1997, when the United States was scheduled to host the meeting in Denver, Boris Yeltsin was pushing for his country’s full inclusion. The Finance Ministers of several member states opposed the change on the ground that Russia was still economically weak, dependent on the G-7 and the international financial institutions for support and often resistant to reforms necessary for long-term prosperity. But Bill and his fellow leaders thought it was important to support Yeltsin and felt that it would send an important message to the Russian people about the positive benefits of cooperation with the United States, Europe and Japan. So Russia was invited, and the June gathering in Denver was hastily renamed the “Summit of Eight,” later to officially become the G-8.

Bill was determined to bring Yeltsin into the inner circle of world leaders. The strategy was to enhance Yeltsin’s status in Russia, since he was perceived to be his country’s best hope for democracy, and to entice the Russians into accepting the expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe. Madeleine Albright and Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State and Russia expert, were the main architects of this approach within the Administration.

Madeleine worked tirelessly to cajole and sometimes push Moscow into the Western orbit, which I’m told earned her the Russian nickname “Madame Steel.”

In the early days of Bill’s Presidency, I questioned the value of state visits in which the men sequestered themselves for meetings and the wives were treated to stagemanaged tours of cultural landmarks. Now I realized that forging good relationships with my fellow spouses provided convenient low-key communication among the heads of states. I also found many of my counterparts to be fascinating companions, and some became good friends.

In Denver, I invited the visiting First Ladies on a scenic train ride up to Winter Park ski resort for lunch with a mountaintop view of the Colorado Rockies. I was just getting to know Cherie Blair, wife of Britain’s newly elected Prime Minister, Tony Blair, but I already liked her enormously. I knew most of the other women from previous summits, and was excited to see Naina Yeltsin evolve in her role since we’d first met in Tokyo in 1993. She had been a civil engineer who had worked on water systems and then was thrust into the treacherous waters of Russian politics. From the beginning she was personable and articulate about children and their health care needs. In 1995, I had helped her secure a donation of nutritional formula Russia needed to treat children suffering from phenylketonuria (PKU), an inherited disease that affects the central nervous system.

Aline Chretien, whose husband, Jean, had been elected Prime Minister of Canada in 1993, was intelligent, sharply observant and elegant. I was impressed by her self-discipline and willingness to take on new challenges. During the eight years we saw each other, she studied and faithfully practiced piano. She also knew how to have fun. We had a great time skating together on the frozen canals around Ottawa in 1995. Kamiko Hashimoto of Japan, lively and curious, made a wonderful impression. Flavia Prodi of Italy, a serious and thoughtful academic, tried to explain Italian politics, which seemed to change constantly while Italian society and culture persisted no matter who was governing.

As the train rolled through the spectacular scenery, some folks came out along the track to wave, and a few held signs welcoming our visitors. Then, while I was standing outside on the platform of the last car, two young men appeared out of nowhere, bent over, dropped their pants, and mooned us. I was momentarily horrified, but then I had to laugh at such an irreverent and unforgettable addition to my carefully planned spousal itinerary.

Although the Denver meetings were serious and often tense, we tried to put everyone at ease at the evening social events. In deference to the once wild West, the main dinner party had a frontier theme, complete with rattlesnake and buffalo, a mini rodeo and a country and western band. Bill gave his guests cowboy boots as gifts. Prime Ministers Ryutaro Hashimoto of Japan and Jean Chretien of Canada happily donned their boots, pulling up their pant legs to show them off when they arrived for dinner.

Sharing meals is an important element of diplomacy and sometimes a tricky one. The night before the meeting convened in Denver, Madeleine Albright invited her Russian counterpart, Yevgeny Primakov, to dinner at a local restaurant. She treated him to a regional delicacy called “mountain oysters,” a polite term for deep-fried cow testicles. I assured the spouses that they were not on my menu.

Whenever we traveled abroad, the State Department always gave us fact sheets about the countries we visited, along with helpful protocol hints. Sometimes I was warned about unusual foods I might be served and how I could avoid eating them without insulting my hosts. One veteran Foreign Service officer suggested I should “push the food around” on my plate to simulate consumption, a trick well-known to every five-year-old.

But no diplomatic manual could possibly have prepared me for my dining experiences with Boris Yeltsin.

I like and respect Yeltsin and I consider him a true hero who saved democracy twice in Russia: first when he climbed onto a tank in Red Square in 1991 and spoke out in defiance of the military coup attempt and again in 1993, when a military cabal tried to take over the Russian White House and Yeltsin stood firmly for democracy, aided by strong support from Bill and other world leaders. He is also, in his own way, delightful company.