Living History by Unknown (best non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

arms―a trick my Secret Service agents had taught me. I got my second wind in time for a private dinner with the King and Queen at their official residence.

Rather than a formal palace, they lived in a large comfortable home, tastefully but modestly furnished. The four of us ate at a small round table in the corner of a warm and inviting room. We spent the night in al-Hashimiya Palace, a modern royal guest home on a hill northwest of town with a splendid view of the sun-bleached hills and minarets of the Hashemite desert kingdom.

From Jordan we went to Israel, where Leah Rabin had a third birthday cake waiting for me and Bill delivered another historic address―this time before the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem. Heading back home, I believed I was leaving Israel another step closer to peace and security.

This trip highlighted Bill’s milestones in foreign affairs. In addition to his pivotal role in easing the tensions in the Middle East, he was now focusing on the decades-long Troubles in Northern Ireland. And, after a harrowing year of diplomacy and the landing of American troops in Haiti, the junta had finally agreed to step down and return the elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power. Out of sight of the public and press, a nuclear crisis in North Korea had been defused for the time being, as the result of a 1994

accord in which North Korea agreed to freeze and ultimately to dismantle its dangerous nuclear weapons program in exchange for aid from the United States, Japan and South Korea. Although we later learned that the North Koreans breached the spirit, if not the letter, of that agreement, at the time it averted a potential military conflict. Had the agreement not been reached, North Korea could have produced enough plutonium by the year 2002. to make dozens of nuclear weapons, or become a plutonium factory, selling the world’s most lethal substance to the highest bidder.

Bill’s actions on the world’s stage gave him a bump in the opinion polls in the last week of October, and he was urged to get out on the campaign trail to support Democratic candidates. As always, he solicited opinions from a variety of friends and confidants, formal and informal advisers.

I felt it might be better for Bill not to campaign so much if the American people preferred seeing him as a statesman, not a politician. In the end, Bill couldn’t resist the lure of the campaign trail and became campaigner-in-chief for his party.

It had been an uneasy season, both out on the hustings and back at the White House, where two unsettling incidents had occurred. In September, a man crashed a small plane into the Executive Mansion, just west of the South Portico entrance. Fortuitously, we were sleeping in Blair House that night because the renovations of the heating and airconditioning system in the residence forced us out of our private quarters. The pilot was killed in the wreck, and no one knows exactly why he staged his stunt. Apparently he was depressed and looking for attention but may not have meant to kill himself. In retrospect, the fact that he could so easily breach security should have made everyone more aware of the dangers even a small plane could pose.

Then, on October 29, I was at a campaign event with Senator Dianne Feinstein at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco when the Secret Service ushered me into a small side room. The head of my detail, George Rogers, told me the President was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. “I don’t want you to worry,” Bill said, “but you’re going to hear that someone just shot at the White House.” A man in a raincoat had been lingering at the fence along Pennsylvania Avenue when he suddenly pulled a semi-automatic rifle from under his coat and opened fire. Several passersby tackled him before he could reload and, miraculously, nobody was injured. It was a Saturday, and Chelsea was at a friend’s house while Bill was upstairs watching a football game. They were never in physical danger, but it was disconcerting to learn that just before he started shooting, the gunman had seen a tall, white-haired visitor on the grounds who looked from a distance like the President. The shooter was an unbalanced gun advocate who had made threatening calls to a Senator’s office because he was angry about the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. The new law had prevented him from buying a pistol a month earlier. By the time I red-eyed back to the White House, everything looked normal, except for a few bullet holes in the West Wing facade.

Later that day, Bill and I spoke to Dick Morris on the speakerphone in my little study next to the master bedroom in the White House. He had analyzed the polling data he’d amassed and told us we were going to lose both the House and the Senate decisively.

I absorbed the bad news that confirmed my gut instincts. Bill, too, believed Morris’s assessment. He did the only thing he thought would help, heading out to campaign even harder. That week he barnstormed Detroit, Duluth and points west and east. It didn’t make much difference.

I began my schedule on Election Day much as I would any other. I greeted Eeva Ahtisaari, First Lady of Finland, and Tipper Gore and I met with Marike de Klerk, the former First Lady of South Africa, who was visiting Washington. Toward the end of the afternoon, the mood in the White House corridors was funereal.

Bill and I had dinner with Chelsea in the little kitchen on the second floor. We wanted to be alone as we absorbed the election returns, which forecast a full-blown disaster. Although Senator Feinstein narrowly won reelection, the Democrats lost eight Senate seats and an astounding fifty-four seats in the House―ushering in the first Republican majority since the Eisenhower Administration. Democratic incumbents were routed everywhere.

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