While I was searching for common ground, the Republicans spent much of July moving their budget proposals through the Congress. They proposed big cuts in education and training. The Medicare and Medic ...

FORTY-THREE Ispent the first two and a half weeks of April meeting with world leaders. Prime Minister John Major, President Hosni Mubarak, and Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan and Prime Mini ...

Just before Christmas, Al Gore and I announced the designation of the first cities and rural communities as ：empowerment zones,； making them eligible, under the 1993 economic plan, for tax incentive ...

FORTY-ONE By October, the polls we were getting didn・t look too bad, but the atmosphere on the campaign trail still didn・t feel good. Before we left for the Middle East, Hillary had cal ...

After we discussed Cuba, Garcia Marquez lavished most of his attention on Chelsea, who said she had read two of his books. He later told me that he didn・t believe a fourteen-year-old girl could ...

THIRTY-NINE June brought the first real action from Robert Fiske. He had decided to conduct an independent inquiry into Vince Foster・s death since so many questions had been raised about it in ...

I quickly settled on two other prospects: Judge Stephen Breyer, who had already been vetted; and Judge Richard Arnold, chief judge of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in St. Louis and i ...

In early January, Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds informed us that, like John Hume, he now favored granting the visa because Adams was working for peace, and he felt the visa would give him lever ...

THIRTY-SEVEN The year 1994 was one of the hardest of my life, one in which important successes in foreign and domestic policy were overshadowed by the demise of health-care reform and an obsession wi ...

The battle of Mogadishu haunted me. I thought I knew how President Kennedy felt after the Bay of Pigs. I was responsible for an operation that I had approved in general but not in its particulars. Unl ...

THIRTY-FIVE After the budget passed, Congress went on its August recess and I was eager to take my family on vacation for two much-needed weeks on Martha・s Vineyard. Vernon and Ann Jordan had ...

In 1993, because Japan was dealing with economic stagnation and political uncertainty, I knew it would be hard to get changes in trade policy, but I had to try. Clearly our large trade deficit with Ja ...

THIRTY-THREE While deficit reduction was essential to my economic strategy, it was not sufficient to build a sustained, widely shared recovery. In the early months, we filled out the agenda with init ...

On Sunday, April 4, we met in a more formal setting to discuss security issues, with Yeltsin and his advisors sitting across the table from me and mine. As before, Yeltsin began aggressively, demandin ...

On the home front, February ended in violence. On the twenty-sixth, a bomb exploded at Manhattan・s World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than one thousand. The investigation ...

THIRTY-ONE The next year involved an amazing combination of major legislative achievements, frustrations and successes in foreign policy, unforeseen events, personal tragedy, honest errors, and clums ...

THIRTY On Sunday, January 17, Al and Tipper Gore, Hillary, and I began inaugural week with a tour of Monticello, followed by a discussion of Thomas Jefferson・s importance to America with young ...

After the tax presentation, Roger Altman and Larry Summers argued for a short-term stimulus package to go with the deficit-reduction plan. They recommended about $20 billion of spending and business-t ...

TWENTY-NINE On the day after the election, awash in congratulatory calls and messages, I went to work on what is called the transition. Is it ever! There was no time to celebrate, and we didn・ ...

President Bush was effective in his closing statement by asking the audience to think about who they wanted to be President if our country faced a major crisis. Perot spoke well about education, the d ...