Authors: Unknown
I was planning to go to Latin America in October for the first time to attend the annual meeting of the First Ladies of the Western Hemisphere. Bill and I had hosted a Summit of the Americas in Miami in December 1994, which had given us the opportunity to meet all the Hemisphere’s leaders and their spouses. Bill was determined that the U.S. play a positive role in promoting democratic values in the area, since every country―
with the exception of Cuba―was now a democracy.
This was good news for the people of the region and for the United States, but our government needed to help our neighbors make progress in improving their economies, alleviating poverty, decreasing illiteracy and improving health care. The end of internal conflicts and the promise of expanded trade and investment opportunities could raise the standard of living and might someday lead to a Hemispheric alliance from the Canadian arctic to the southern tip of Argentina. But a tremendous amount of work had to be done to create the possibility of such prosperity.
On this trip, however, I was heading south to visit U.S. development programs that were assisting women and children, whose status directly reflects a nation’s economic and political progress. I was eager for the opportunity to work with my counterparts to develop and implement a common agenda to eradicate measles and reduce maternal mortality rates throughout the Hemisphere. In the past, American policy in the region led to the funneling of foreign aid to military juntas that opposed communism and socialism but sometimes repressed their own citizens. Successive American governments supported regimes that committed human rights violations against people from El Salvador to Chile.
The Clinton Administration hoped to make it clear that the days of the U.S. ignoring such abuses were over.
I first stopped in Nicaragua, a country of over four million people ravaged by years of civil war and a massive earthquake that had almost flattened the capital, Managua, in 1972. Violeta Chamorro, Nicaragua’s first woman President, headed an ambitious but fragile government in a country that had known only dictatorship and war in past decades.
In 1990, in one of the first legitimately democratic elections in Nicaragua’s history, President Chamorro won a surprise victory as leader of an opposition movement. An elegant, striking woman, she welcomed me to her hacienda-like house in Managua. She had turned it into a shrine to her late husband, a crusading newspaper editor who was assassinated by the forces loyal to dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1978. Displayed in the yard was her husband’s bullet-riddled car―a memento mori of the dangerous environment in which she governed. Once again, I was struck by the courage of a woman whose personal tragedy led her to fight for democracy and against unaccountable power.
In one of Managua’s poorest barrios, I visited women who had formed a microcredit borrowing group called “Mothers United.” Supported by USAID and run by the Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA), these women were an excellent example of successful American foreign aid at work. They showed me the products they made or purchased to re-sell-mosquito netting, baked goods, automobile parts. One of the women surprised me when she said she had seen me on television, visiting the site of the SEWA project in Ahmadabad, India. “Are Indian women like us?” she asked. I told her that the Indian women I met also wanted to improve their lives by earning money that would enable them to send their children to school, fix up their homes and reinvest profits in their businesses. The encounter made me more determined in my efforts to increase the amount of money our government invested in microcredit projects around the world and to establish microcredit projects in our country. In 1994, I had advocated the creation of the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI) to support communitybased banks across the United States dedicated to providing grants, loans and equity financing to people in distressed areas that had been deserted by traditional banks. I was convinced that microcredit could help individuals, but most countries needed good national economic policies like those that were working in Chile, where I went next.
Chile had suffered for years under the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who left office in 1989. Under its democratically elected President, Eduardo Frei, Chile was becoming a global model of economic and political success. Frei’s wife, Marta Larrachea de Frei, was a First Lady after my own heart. Assisted by a professional staff, she tackled issues ranging from microfinance to education reform. At a microcredit project in Chile’s capital, Santiago, Marta and I met a woman who used her loan to buy a new sewing machine for her dressmaking business. When she told us that she felt “like a caged bird who had been set free,” I hoped that all women would eventually be free and prepared to make their own choices in life―just like Marta’s four daughters and mine.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, President of Brazil since 1994, had also come to office determined to revitalize the economy after a period of instability His wife, Ruth Cardoso, a sociologist, assumed a formal position in her husband’s government working to improve the living conditions for poor Brazilians in crowded cities and vast rural areas. I met with the Cardosos at the presidential residence in Brasilia, a modernistic complex of glass, steel and marble. At the gathering Ruth had convened, we discussed the status of women in Brazil. It was a mixed assessment. For educated, affluent women, choices were wide open, in sharp contrast to the vast majority of Brazilian women, who lacked education and opportunities. The Cardosos told me they were focused on changing the education system, in which disparities were intensified because public primary education in many parts of the country was available only a few hours a day, limiting the opportunity for a good education to those who could afford private schools or tutors. Access to higher education was largely free to the students who qualified, but most of them were upper class.
This disparity between rich and poor was made vivid in a stop in Salvador de Bahia on Brazil’s coast. Well-known for its exciting mix of cultural influences, Salvador is a city pulsating with the influences of the Afro-Brazilians whose ancestors had been brought there as slaves. In a square overflowing with jubilant revelers, I watched a performance by the band Olodum, a local sensation that had become world renowned as Paul Simon’s backup band. Comprised of dozens of young men pounding drums of all shapes and sizes, Olodum made music that was electric and deafening, leaving the crowd dancing on the cobblestones.
If Olodum evoked the positive expression of people’s lives in Salvador, a maternity hospital I visited the next morning bespoke the hardships of everyday living. Half the patients were mothers with their newborns; the other half were gynecological patients, many admitted because of botched back-alley abortions. The Minister of Health, who served as my guide for the hospital visit, bluntly told me that despite laws against abortion, “Rich women have access to contraception if they choose; poor women do not.”
By the time I arrived in Asuncion, capital of landlocked Paraguay, for the meeting of the Western Hemisphere’s First Ladies, I had seen evidence of the myriad problems confronting Latin America, as well as grassroots solutions. At the conference, we worked together on a plan to immunize all children against measles and to expand opportunities for girls to attend school. On the way to a reception hosted by President Juan Carlos Wasmosy and his wife, Maria Teresa Carrasco de Wasmosy, at the presidential palace, I climbed aboard the bus and spotted an empty seat next to an amiable-looking lady with white hair. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember who she was. Probing for clues, I asked her how long it had taken her to reach Paraguay (which would give me an idea of her country’s geographical location) and how things were going in her homeland. “Fine,”
she said stone-faced. “Except for the embargo.”
I had managed to seat myself next to Pilma Espin, Fidel Castro’s sister-in-law, who was representing him at the conference. Thankfully no one misinterpreted my seating arrangement as a rapprochement to Cuba.
Although this trip lasted only five days, it became a blueprint for my future travels to Central and South America and the Caribbean, and the personal interactions reinforced the value of building relationships that can smooth the path toward cooperation on important projects.
I had already seen the importance of such relationships in the context of the Middle East. A few weeks before my trip to Latin America, Queen Noor of Jordan, Leah Rabin of Israel and Suzanne Mubarak of Egypt had come to Washington with their husbands for the signing of a historic peace accord ending Israel’s military occupation of certain West Bank cities. Before the formal signing ceremony in the East Room on September 28, 1995, I hosted a tea for the spouses of attending Middle Eastern leaders.
In the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor, Leah, Suzanne, Noor and I greeted one another like old friends. We did our best to welcome a new member of the group, Suha Arafat, wife of the Palestinian leader. I was curious about her. I knew that she came from a prominent Palestinian family and that her mother, Raymonda Tawil, was a famous poet and essayist, an unconventional woman in her culture. Suha, who had worked for the PLO before her surprise marriage, was much younger than Arafat. She had recently given birth to a daughter, and that gave us common ground for conversation. Each of us tried to make her feel comfortable, but Suha seemed ill at ease.
Leah, Suzanne, Noor and I often discussed the ongoing negotiations. No state secrets were exchanged, but we could provide an informal conduit of information and feedback, and Noor or Leah sometimes called me with a message that the King or Prime Minister wanted to convey to the President through informal channels.
I now look back on that tranquil afternoon in the fall of 1995 as a period of calm before a terrible storm.
In his remarks at the treaty signing in the East Room later that day, King Hussein kidded me about the no-smoking rule I had introduced to the White House. “At least Prime Minister Rabin and I did not smoke while we are here…. Thank you so much for your good influence in that regard.” I had offered to waive the rule for him and Prime Minister Rabin, but he declined any “special privilege.” “Besides,” he added, “it will guarantee short meetings!”
The reception that evening at the nearby Corcoran Gallery turned into an oratory marathon. As Yitzhak Rabin, who followed Yasir Arafat’s epic-length speech, finally took the podium, he looked directly at Arafat and said, “You know, … in Israel there is a saying: What is a Jewish sport? … Speechmaking.” He paused for a beat. “I start to believe, Chairman Arafat, that you are close to being Jewish.” Arafat joined in as the audience roared with good-natured laughter.
After he returned home, Rabin escalated his efforts to ensure a future in which Israel would be secure from violence and terrorism. Tragically, he did not live to realize his dream.
On Saturday, November 4, 1995, I was upstairs working on my book when Bill called to tell me that Rabin had been shot as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv. His assassin was not a Palestinian or an Arab, but a fanatic rightwing Israeli who condemned Rabin for negotiating with the Palestinians and agreeing to trade land for peace. I ran downstairs and found Bill surrounded by advisers. I threw my arms around him and just held on.
This was a deeply personal loss. We admired Rabin as a leader, and Bill regarded him as a friend―even as something of a father figure. Bill and I retreated to our bedroom, to be alone with our grief. Two hours later in the Rose Garden, Bill made one of the most eloquent and heartfelt statements of his Presidency, bidding farewell to a great leader and friend: “Tonight, the land for which he gave his life is in mourning. But I want the world to remember what Prime Minister Rabin said here at the White House barely one month ago: ‘We should not let the land flowing with milk and honey become a land flowing with blood and tears. Don’t let it happen.”‘
“Now it falls to us, all those in Israel, throughout the Middle East and around the world who yearn for and love peace to make sure it doesn’t happen. Yitzhak Rabin was my partner and my friend. I admired him, and I loved him very much. Because words cannot express my true feelings, let me just say shalom, chaver―goodbye, friend.”
Those last words in Hebrew became a validating and rallying cry. When we arrived in Israel for Rabin’s funeral, we saw billboards and bumper stickers quoting Bill.
Bill invited a distinguished delegation, including former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W Bush, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and forty members of Congress, to travel with us to at tend the funeral in Jerusalem on November 6. Upon our arrival, Bill and I went immediately to see Leah at her residence. My heart was breaking for her. Like Jackie Kennedy, she had been with her husband when he was shot down. She looked drawn and older than she had just weeks earlier in Washington. We found few words adequate to convey our desolation. At the funeral service at Hat Herzl Cemetery, Arab Kings, Prime Ministers and Presidents paid their respects to a warrior who died for peace. After Bill delivered his eulogy, Leah gave him a long, loving hug. The most poignant tribute was the most personal. Rabin’s granddaughter Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof spoke to her beloved grandfather: “Grandpa, you were the pillar of fire before the camp, and now we’re just a camp left alone in the dark, and we’re so cold.”
For security reasons, Arafat did not attend the funeral, but Bill met with Mubarak, Hussein and Shimon Peres, the acting Prime Minister, who had negotiated the Oslo Accords and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Arafat and Rabin in 1994. As Rabin’s granddaughter eloquently reminded us, peace is like a fragile hearth fire that has to be constantly tended or it will die.
On the long flight back to Washington, Bill invited Presidents Carter and Bush to join him in the Air Force One conference room to reminisce about Rabin and to discuss the status of the Middle East peace process. Carter had successfully overseen the Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt, and Bush had convened the Madrid Conference, which brought all the parties in the Middle East together for peace talks for the first time. When we finally decided to get some rest, Bill and I headed to the private presidential quarters at the front of the plane, which include an office, a bathroom and a compartment with two sofa beds. Bill and I weren’t sure how to accommodate two ex-Presidents, so we offered them the pull-down beds in the comfortable and relatively spacious doctors’ and nurses’ room. The rest of our invited guests stretched out on couches or in their seats in the VIP cabins at the back of the plane. A few days later we learned that Newt Gingrich was resentful over his accommodations and what he viewed as the unceremonious back-stair exit offered him and other guests when the plane arrived at Andrews Air Force Base.