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

Patti when Bill called urgently from the Oval Office with the news that there had been an explosion at the Alfred E Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City. The three of us immediately went into the kitchen and turned on the small television to see the screen filled with the first horrifying pictures broadcast from the scene.

We learned over the next few hours that the damage had been caused by a truck bomb, but no one had solid information about who was responsible. Bill immediately dispatched teams from FEMA, the FBI and other government agencies to Oklahoma City to handle the emergency and to lead the investigation. Because the federal offices were destroyed by the bombing, many essential personnel were dead or injured. A Secret Service agent who had left the White House just seven months earlier for assignment to Oklahoma was one of five agents killed that day. Among the 168 innocent people who died in the bombing were nineteen children, most of whom attended the day care center on the second floor of the building.

The images from Oklahoma City were disturbingly intimate: a little girl, limp as a rag doll, carried out of the smoking rubble by a heartbroken fireman; a terrified office worker being lifted onto the stretcher. The familiarity of the setting and the number of casualties brought the tragedy home to America in ways that other atrocities up until then could not.

That was the point of the attack.

We were also reminded that the “bureaucrats” who were always under attack by antigovernment zealots could be our neighbors, friends or relatives-that they have real lives and could lose them.

The first thing people needed was information about the bombing and then the reassurance that everything possible was being done to protect them from further attacks. I was particularly concerned about children who were aware of the explosion at the child care center and might fear that their own schools weren’t safe. We talked with Chelsea and asked for her advice about how to reassure young children.

On Saturday after the bombing, in a television and radio broadcast, Bill and I talked to a group of children whose parents were federal employees working for the same federal agencies as those attacked in Oklahoma. We thought it was important that as a mother and a father we both speak to the anxieties about such a terrible tragedy.

“It’s okay to be frightened by something as bad as this,” Bill told the children sitting on the floor of the Oval Office as their parents stood nearby.

“I want you to know that your parents … love you and are going to do everything they can to take care of you and to protect you,” I said. “There are many more good people in the world than bad and evil people.”

Bill told the children that we would catch and punish whoever caused the bombing.

And then he asked them to express their own thoughts about it.

“It was mean,” said one child.

“I feel sorry for the people that died,” said another.

One question broke my heart, and I couldn’t answer it. “Who would want to do that to kids who had never done anything to them?”

The rest of the country was seeing Bill as I knew him, a man with an unparalleled empathy and ability to bring people together in difficult times. Before we left the next day to visit families of the victims and to take part in a prayer service, we planted a dogwood tree on the South Lawn in memory of the victims. Bill and I met with a number of victims and their families in private before attending the large memorial service where Bill and the Rev. Billy Graham spoke, helping to heal a hurting nation. Whenever I watched Bill embrace sobbing family members, talk with heartbroken friends or comfort the terminally ill, I fell in love with him all over again. His sympathy draws from a deep well of caring and emotion that enables him to reach out to people in pain.

By the time we got to Oklahoma City, a suspect had been arrested who had ties to militant antigovernment groups. It appeared that Timothy McVeigh had chosen April 19

to attack the country he had come to despise because it was the anniversary of the terrible Waco fire, which killed over eighty members of the Branch Davidian cult, including children. McVeigh and his ilk represented the most alienated and violent elements of the extreme right wing, whose actions sickened every sensible American. Rightwing radio talk shows and websites intensified the atmosphere of hostility with their rhetoric of intolerance, anger and antigovernment paranoia, but the Oklahoma City bombing seemed to deflate the militia movement and marginalize the worst haters on the airwaves.

Bill spoke forcefully against the hate-mongers and antigovernment zealots in a commencement speech at Michigan State University in early May. “There is nothing patriotic about hating your country, or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government.”

While the country coped with the Oklahoma City tragedy, the Office of the Independent Counsel did not rest. On Saturday, April 22, after the children’s meeting in the Oval Office, Kenneth Starr and his deputies arrived at the White House to take sworn statements from me and the President. I had been interviewed by Robert Fiske the previous year, before he was replaced, but this would be my first encounter with Starr and his staff. Preparing for the interview was not something that David Kendall or I took lightly.

Knowing that every word I uttered would be dissected by the OIC, David insisted that I cram in prep time no matter how busy I was. Often that meant meeting late at night or spending hours digesting information that he delivered to me in large black binders. I came to dread the sight of those binders because they were tangible reminders of the trivialities and minutiae I would be subjected to under oath, all of which could be used to trip me up legally.

Bill went