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Seven months later the IRA declared a...
Posted on 2010-Feb-11 at 11:56
Seven months later the IRA declared a cease-fireThe visa decision had workedIt was the beginning of my deep engagement in the long, emotional, complicated search for peace in Northern Ireland
On February 3, I began the day at my second National Prayer BreakfastMother Teresa was the guest speaker, and I argued that we should emulate her in bringing more humility and a spirit of reconciliation to politicsThat afternoon I did a little reconciliation work myself, lifting our long trade embargo on Vietnam, based on remarkable cooperation from the Vietnamese government in resolving POW and MIA cases and in returning the remains of slain servicemen to the United StatesMy decision was strongly supported by Vietnam veterans in Congress, especially Senators John Kerry, Bob Kerrey, and John McCain, and Congressman Pete Peterson of Florida, who had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than six years
In the second week of February, after the brutal shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace by Bosnian Serbs had killed dozens of innocent people, NATO finally voted, with the approval of the UN secretary-general, to bomb the Serbs if they didnt move their heavy guns more than a dozen miles away from the cityIt was long overdue, but still not a vote without risk for the Canadians, whose forces in Srebrenica were surrounded by the Serbs, or for the French, British, Spanish, and Dutch, who also had relatively small, and vulnerable, numbers of troops on the ground
Soon afterward, the heavy weapons were removed or put under UN controlSenator Dole was still pushing for a unilateral lifting of the arms embargo, but for the moment I was willing to stick with it, because we had finally gotten a green light for the NATO air strikes, and because I didnt want others to use our unilateral abandonment of the Bosnian fendi handbag replicas embargo as an excuse to disregard the embargoes we supported in Haiti, Libya, and Iraq
In the middle of the month, Hillary and Chelsea left for Lillehammer, Norway, to represent America at the Winter Olympics, and I flew down to Hot Springs for a day to see Dick KelleyIt had been five weeks since Mothers funeral, and I wanted to check on himDick was lonely in their little house, where Mothers presence was still strong in every room, but the old navy veteran was getting his sea legs back and thinking about how to get on with his life
I spent the next two weeks plugging health-care reform and the crime bill in different venues across the country, and dealing with foreign policyWe got a piece of good news when Saudi Arabia agreed to buy $6 billion worth of American planes, after intense efforts by Ron Brown, Mickey Kantor, and Transportation Secretary Federico Pea
We also got a shock when the FBI arrested thirty-one-year veteran CIA agent Aldrich Ames and his wife, breaking one of the biggest espionage cases in American historyFor nine years, Ames had made a fortune giving up information that led to the deaths of more than ten of our sources inside Russia, and had done severe damage to our intelligence capabilityAfter years of trying to catch a spy they knew was there, the FBI, with CIA cooperation, finally nailed himThe Ames case called into question both the vulnerability of our intelligence apparatus and our policy toward Russia: if they were spying on us, shouldnt we cancel or suspend aid to them? In a bipartisan congressional meeting and in responses to press questions, I argued against suspending aidRussia was engaged in an internal struggle between yesterday and tomorrow; yesterdays Russia was spying on us, but our aid was being used to support tomorrows Russia, by strengthening democracy tiffany bracelet and economic reform, and securing and destroying its nuclear weaponsBesides, the Russians werent the only ones with spies
Toward the end of the month, a militant Israeli settler, outraged at the prospect of turning the West Bank back to the Palestinians, gunned down several worshippers at the Mosque of Abraham in HebronThe murderer had struck during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, at a site sacred to both Muslims and Jews because it is thought to be the burial site of Abraham and his wife, SarahIt seemed clear that his intention was to spark a violent reaction that would derail the peace processTo head that off, I asked Warren Christopher to contact Rabin and Arafat and invite them to send negotiators to Washington as soon as possible and have them stay until they had settled on concrete actions to implement their agreement
On February 28, NATO fighters shot down four Serb planes for violating the no-fly zone, the first military action in the forty-four-year history of the allianceI hoped that the air strikes, along with our success in relieving the siege of Sarajevo, would convince the allies to take a stronger posture toward Serb aggression in and around the embattled towns of Tuzla and Srebrenica as well
One of those allies, John Major, was in America that day to talk about Bosnia and Northern IrelandI took him first to Pittsburgh, where his grandfather had worked in the steel mills in the nineteenth centuryMajor seemed to enjoy retracing his roots to the industrial heartland of AmericaThat night he stayed at the White House, the first foreign leader to do so during my tenureThe next day we held a press conference, which was unmemorable except for the larger message it sent: that our disagreement over the Adams visa would not undermine the Anglo-American relationship or keep us from classic louis vuitton bags working together closely on Bosnia and other issuesI found Major to be serious, intelligent, and, as I said earlier, genuinely committed to resolving the Irish problem, despite the fact that the very effort to do so posed a threat to his already precarious situation in ParliamentI thought he was a better leader than his press coverage often suggested, and after our two days together we maintained a friendly and productive working relationship
W hile I was hard at work on foreign affairs, the new world of Whitewater was beginning to take shape at homeIn March, Robert Fiske began his job in earnest by sending out subpoenas to several members of the White House staff, including Maggie Williams and Lisa Caputo, who worked for Hillary and were friends of Vince FostersMack McLarty set up a Whitewater Response Team, led by Harold Ickes, to coordinate responses to questions from Fiske and from the press; to free the rest of the staff, and me, to do the public work we came to Washington to do; and to minimize conversations our staff might have about Whitewater among themselves or with Hillary or meAny such conversations could only expose our young staffers to depositions, political attacks, and big legal billsA lot of people had already acquired a vested interest in finding something wrong; if there was nothing illegal in our long-ago land deal, perhaps they could catch someone doing something wrong in the handling of it
The system worked well enough for meAfter all, I had learned how to lead parallel lives as a child: most of the time, I could shut out all the accusations and innuendo and go on with my workI knew it would be harder to cope with for those who had never lived with the constant threat of arbitrary and destructive attacks, especially in an atmosphere in which there was a presumption of guilt gucci bag attached to any chargeTo be sure, there were some legal experts, like Sam Dash, who talked about how cooperative we were compared with the Reagan and Nixon administrations, because we didnt resist subpoenas and we turned all our records over to the Justice Department and then to FiskeBut the goalposts had been moved: unless Hillary and I could prove ourselves innocent of whatever charges any adversary could come up with, most of the questions would be asked, and the stories written, in a tone of intense suspicion; the underlying current was that we must have done something wrong
For example, as our financial records found their way into the press, the New York Times reported that, starting with a $1,000 investment, Hillary had made $100,000 in the commodities market in 1979, with the help of Jim BlairBlair was one of my closest friends; he did help Hillary and a number of his other friends in trading commodities, but she took her own risks, paid more than $18,000 in brokerage fees, and, following her own instincts, got out of the market before it droppedLeo Melamed, the Republican former chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, on which agricultural commodities are traded, reviewed all of Hillarys trades and said there was nothing wrong with themFor years, the critics would refer to Hillarys commodity profit as prima facie evidence of corruption
The presumption of wrongdoing was reflected in a Newsweek story saying Hillary did not put up her own money for her sweet deal, with an analysis that it said was based on the expert opinion of Professor Marvin Chirelstein of Columbia Law School, one of the nations leading authorities on corporate law and contracts, who had taught me at Yale and who had been asked by our lawyer to review our tax returns for 197879, the period of the Whitewater louis vuitton galliera pm bag invest
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