| A few days later, Janet Reno asked Ken Starr to investigate the files caseIn 2000, the OIC found that the incident had been simply a mistakeThe White House had not engaged in any kind of political espionagethe Secret Service had given the Personnel Security Office an outdated list of White House employees, which included Republicans names, and this was the list that had been sent to the White House
Late in June, at the annual Gore family conference in Nashville, I called for an expansion of the family leave law to allow people to take up to twenty-four hours a year, or three more workdays, to attend parent-teacher conferences at their childrens school or to take their children, or a spouse, or their parents for routine medical care
The problem of balancing work and family was weighing heavily on me because of the toll it was taking on the White HouseBill Galston, a brilliant member of the Domestic Policy Council staff whom I had first met through the DLC and who was a continuous source of good ideas, had recently resigned to spend more time with his ten-year-old son: My boy keeps asking where I amYou can get somebody else to do this job; no one else can do that job
My deputy chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, who had become a close friend and golfing partner and who was a superb manager and our best liaison to the business community, was going home, tooHis wife, Crandall, a Wellesley classmate of Hillarys, ran a big textile company and had to travel a lotTwo of their kids were in college; their youngest was about to start his senior year in high schoolErskine told imitation gucci wallets me he loved his job, but my boy should not be at home alone in his last year in high schoolI dont want him ever to wonder whether he was the most important thing in the world to his parents
I respected and agreed with the decisions Bill and Erskine had made, and I was thankful that Hillary and I lived and worked in the White House so we had no long commutes to and from work, and at least one of us was almost always with Chelsea for dinner at night and when she got up in the morningBut the experience of my staff members brought home the fact that all too many Americans, in all kinds of jobs earning widely different incomes, went to work every day worried sick that they were neglecting their kids for their jobsThe United States provided less support for balancing work and family than any other wealthy nation, and I wanted to change that
Unfortunately, the Republican majority in Congress were opposed to imposing any new requirements on employersA young boy had recently approached me and offered to tell me a joke; as he said, Once you become President, its hard to find a joke you can tell in publicHere it is: Being President with this Congress is like standing in the middle of a cemeteryThere are a lot of people under you, but nobody is listening
At the end of the month, as I was preparing to leave for Lyon, France, for the annual G-7 conference, which would primarily be devoted to terrorism, nineteen air force personnel were killed and almost three hundred Americans and others were injured when terrorists drove a truck containing a powerful bomb to a security louis vuitton back pack barrier just outside Khobar Towers, a military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi ArabiaWhen an American patrol approached the truck, two of its occupants fled and the bomb explodedI sent an FBI team of more than forty investigators and forensic experts to work with Saudi authoritiesKing Fahd called me to express his condolences and solidarity, and to pledge the commitment of his government to apprehend and punish the men who had killed our airmenEventually, Saudi Arabia would execute the people it determined to be responsible for the attack
The Saudis had allowed us to establish the base after the Gulf War in the hope that having Uforces pre-positioned in the Gulf would deter further aggression by Saddam Hussein and allow us to respond quickly if deterrence was unsuccessfulIt achieved that objective, but the base also made our forces more vulnerable to terrorists in the regionThe security provisions at Khobar were plainly inadequate; the truck had been able to get too close to the building because our people and the Saudis had underestimated the ability of terrorists to build a bomb that powerfulI appointed General Wayne Downing, former commander in chief of the USpecial Operations Command, head of a commission to recommend what steps we should take to make our troops stationed overseas more secure
As we prepared for the G-7 summit, I asked my staff to draw up recommended steps that the international community could take to work together more effectively against global terrorismAt Lyon, the leaders agreed to more than forty of them, including speeding up the extradition ladies cartier watch sales and prosecution of terrorists, doing more to seize the resources that funded their violence, improving our internal defenses, and limiting terrorists access to high-tech communications equipment as much as possible
By 1996, my administration had settled on a strategy for fighting terror that focused on preventing serious incidents, capturing and punishing terrorists through international cooperation, interrupting the flow of money and communications to terrorist organizations, cutting off access to weapons of mass destruction, and isolating and imposing sanctions on nations that support terrorismAs President Reagans bombing raid on Libya in 1986 and the attack I ordered on Iraqs intelligence headquarters in 1993 demonstrated, American power could deter states that were directly involved in terrorist acts against us; neither nation attempted another oneHowever, it was more difficult to get at non-state terrorist organizations; the military and economic pressures that were effective against nations were not as easily applied to them
The strategy had brought many successeswe had prevented several planned terrorist attacks, including attempts to bomb the Holland and Lincoln tunnels in New York and to blow up several planes flying from the Philippines to the United States, and had brought terrorists back to the United States from all over the world to stand trialOn the other hand, terror is more than a form of international organized crime; because of their stated political objectives, terrorist groups often enjoy both state sponsorship and popular supportMoreover, rolex oyster watch getting to the bottom of the networks could raise difficult and dangerous questions, as the Khobar Towers investigation did when the possibility of Irans support for the terrorists was raisedEven if we had a good defense against attacks, would law enforcement be a sufficient offensive strategy against terrorists? If not, would greater reliance on military options work? In the middle of 1996, it was clear that we didnt have all the answers on how to deal with attacks on Americans in this country and overseas, and that the problem would be with us for years to come
The summer began with good news at home and abroadBoris Yeltsin had been forced into a runoff on July 3 against the ultra-nationalist Gennady ZyuganovThe first election was close, but Boris won the runoff handily, after a vigorous campaign across all his countrys eleven time zones that included American-style campaign events and TV adsThe election was a ratification of Yeltsins leadership to secure democracy, modernize the economy, and reach out to the WestRussia still had a number of problems, but I believed it was moving in the right direction
Things were moving in the right direction in America, too, as the unemployment rate dropped to 5 percent, with 10 million new jobs, economic growth at 4 percent for the quarter, and a deficit that had dropped to less than half what it was when I took officeWages were also risingThe next day the stock market fell 115 points, prompting me to tease Bob Rubin again about how much Wall Street hated it when average Americans did wellActually, it was more complicated than cartier pasha that |
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