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

from New York’s Kennedy Airport, and the terrorist bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. military installation in Saudi Arabia, that killed nineteen Americans.

Since his first State of the Union, Bill had sounded the alarm on global terrorism. In the 1980s, terrorism was not regarded as a pressing national security threat, though more than five hundred Americans were killed by terrorists in that decade. The 1993 World Trade Center and 1995 Oklahoma City bombings escalated Bill’s concern. He frequently talked publicly and privately about how easy travel, open borders and technology gave terrorists new opportunities and means to wreak violence and fear. He immersed himself in the literature on the subject and he met regularly with experts on chemical and biological warfare. He would often return to the residence anxious to tell me about these meetings.

What he learned dismayed him. In 1995, he sent comprehensive anti-terrorism legislation to Congress to toughen laws for prosecuting terrorists, to ban fundraising that channeled money to terrorist causes or organizations and to increase controls over biological and chemical weapon materials. The legislation that finally passed in 1996 omitted key elements that he had requested, so he went back to Congress for increased funding and authority, including provisions for wiretapping and chemical identification. It was difficult, however, to focus public attention or muster congressional support for the actions he thought necessary.

Domestic issues dominated both the Democratic and Republican agendas in the months before the summer’s political conventions. The Republicans were hammering on their usual issues: bashing big spending liberals and “social engineering” programs: welfare, abortion rights, gun control and environmental protection. Bill’s reelection campaign centered on government policies that he argued would build community, expand opportunity, demand responsibility and reward enterprise.

I thought about how to present the issues I championed and better relate them to the public’s concerns. Countless families, including my own, tend to congregate after school or work to discuss the issues of the day, often sitting around the kitchen table. I began describing Democratic Party issues as “kitchen table issues,” which became a catchphrase in the campaign. The discussion of kitchen table issues led some Washington pundits to talk derisively about “the feminization of politics,” an attempt to marginalize, even trivialize, policies such as family leave or extended mammogram coverage for older women or adequate hospital stays for mothers after delivering their babies. With that in mind, I coined my own term―“the humanization of politics”―to publicly advance the idea that kitchen table issues mattered to everybody, not just to women.

By 1996, as he had promised in the 1992 campaign, Bill had reduced the nation’s deficit by more than half, presided over a booming economy that had created 10 million jobs, cut taxes through the Earned Income Tax Credit for 15 million low-wage workers, protected workers from forfeiting their health care coverage when they lost their jobs and raised the minimum wage. And we were successful in passing initial reform in our nation’s adoption laws: a nonrefundable tax credit of up to $5,000 per child for all parents who adopt and $6,000 for parents who adopt children with special needs; and a prohibition on denying or delaying adoptions on the basis of race, color or national origin. Ever since I had worked on behalf of foster children as a law student, I had hoped to improve the chances that foster children would find permanent, loving families. These new provisions helped, but I knew that more needed to be done. I convened adoption experts in a series of White House meetings in 1996 and outlined a blueprint that led to the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, which for the first time provided financial incentives for states to move children from foster care to permanent adoptive homes.

Time was also running out for the sixty-year-old welfare system, which had helped to create generations of welfare-dependent Americans. Bill had promised it would be reformed, and the White House had been engaged in months of difficult negotiations and bare-knuckled political conflict. The Republicans knew the public strongly favored welfare reform, and they hoped either to railroad Bill into passing a bill that was far too hard on women and children, denying essential services to millions of needy recipients, or to use his vetoes of their punitive proposals against him in the upcoming election. Instead, welfare reform became a success for Bill. I strongly argued that we had to change the system, although my endorsement of welfare reform came at some personal cost.

America’s first welfare program was introduced in the 1930s to help widows with children at a time when there were few opportunities for women to enter the workplace.

By the mid-1970s, the percentage of births to unwed mothers was rising, and by the mid-1980s unmarried mothers were the overwhelming majority of welfare recipients. By and large, they were women with little education and few job skills. Even if they could find work, they could not earn enough to escape poverty or get jobs with health insurance for their children; therefore there was little incentive for them to leave welfare for work.

Staying home became a rational choice for some in the short run, but it led to the development of a permanent welfare class, and it fed taxpayer resentment, especially among low-income working parents. I didn’t think it was fair that one single mother improvised to find child care and got up early every day to get to work while another stayed home and relied on welfare. I shared Bill’s belief that we should provide incentives and support like child care and health insurance to help people work instead of rely on welfare.

During Bill’s first term as Governor, Arkansas participated in a Carter Administration “demonstration” project designed to provide more support and encouragement to move people from welfare to work. Seven years later in 1987 and again in 1988, Bill was the lead Democratic governor working with Congress and the Reagan White House on welfare reform. He chaired the National Governors Association hearings, where he