Authors: Unknown
A showdown had been brewing on the federal budget since the prior spring, when the Republicans who controlled Congress started drafting funding bills to reflect the principles of their Contract with America. They called for both a huge tax cut and a balanced budget in seven years, a combination that defied the laws of arithmetic and could be achieved only with deep reductions in education, environmental protection and health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. They proposed a welfare reform package that included draconian social-engineering ideas such as denying welfare payments-for life-to single mothers under eighteen. They vowed to cancel a scheduled decrease in Medicare premiums, effectively raising rates for seniors.
Bill was always willing to work with the Republicans, but their budget was unacceptable.
He signaled that he would veto any bill that weakened Medicare, hurt children and left the poor without a safety net. And he announced that he would offer his own balanced budget, without the cruel cuts and phony numbers of the Gingrich plan. By the end of the summer recess, the Republicans still didn’t have a budget agreement, and at the close of the federal fiscal year on September 30, the government ran out of operating funds. Congress and the President agreed on a “continuing resolution” or CR―a temporary budget extension―that authorized the Treasury to issue checks while negotiations continued. But this stopgap resolution was due to expire at midnight, November 13, and there was neither a new budget nor an agreement on extending the CR.
As the budget deadline approached, I was trying to meet my own publishing deadline for my unfinished book, madly drafting and redrafting chapters in longhand. But I weighed in directly and through my staff about how crucial I thought it was for Bill to stand against the budget priorities articulated by Gingrich.
Despite Republican threats to shut down the government, Bill rejected the new resolution sent to him after Rabin’s funeral, which was even harsher. Gingrich seemed to be playing a game of political “chicken,” but he had misjudged his adversary. Bill vetoed this resolution too.
While Bill was engaged in roundthe-clock negotiations in the West Wing, he checked in often to ask what I thought about a particular issue. He knew I was concerned about the Republican proposals on Medicare and Medicaid, and I asked him if one of my staff members, Jennifer Klein, could participate in the negotiations and help analyze and document exactly how the Republican proposals would endanger Medicare and dismantle Medicaid. On these sensitive topics I wanted a direct channel to Bill’s staff. He agreed, and for the duration of the budget battles, Jen helped Chris Jennings―the President’s top health care adviser and someone I relied on for his expertise throughout my time at the White House―lead the Administration’s effort to protect these and other health care programs.
On November 13, the government ran out of money to spend, and the President under the law had to shut it down. This was an excruciating decision for Bill, and it showed. He worried about the effects of closing the government’s doors and furloughing 500,000 federal workers. Only employees deemed “essential” could legally remain on the job, working without pay. A program like Meals on Wheels was not funded, putting at risk about six hundred thousand of the elderly who depended on it. The Federal Housing Administration couldn’t process thousands of home sales. The Department of Veterans Affairs stopped paying widows and other beneficiaries their due proceeds from veterans’ life insurance policies.
The national monuments on the Mall closed their doors. Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon turned away visitors. Two truckloads of Christmas trees destined for the annual Pageant of Peace in Washington were stranded somewhere east of Ohio because the National Park Service couldn’t unload them or plant them for the ceremony.
A peculiar quiet settled over the White House. Most of the employees in the residence and East Wing were sent home. The Secret Service was considered essential; clerks and florists were not. The West Wing staff was reduced from 430 to about go; my official staff was cut to 4. Volunteers filled in to try to manage the work that didn’t stop under any circumstances. But these were small inconveniences. If there were no resolution, the real problems would begin at the end of the month, when government paychecks were due to go out. And I worried about what we would do if another national emergency or international crisis occurred.
Each side of the aisle blamed the other for the government shutdown, but Gingrich tipped his hand at a breakfast meeting with reporters on November 15. Gingrich suggested that he had sent a tougher version of the budget resolution to the White House because he felt that Bill had snubbed him on Air Force One during the return trip from Prime Minister Rabin’s funeral.
“It’s petty, but I think it’s human,” Gingrich said. “You’ve been on the plane for twentyfive hours and nobody has talked to you and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp…. You just wonder, where is their sense of manners? Where is their sense of courtesy?”
The next day the front page of the New York Daily News featured the enormous headline CRY BABY over a cartoon image of Gingrich in diapers. That afternoon the White House released a photograph taken by White House photographer Bob McNeely. There was Gingrich on the flight, talking with the President and Majority Leader Dole, looking perfectly content. Gingrich’s quote―and the photograph―were all over the media. With one self-indulgent remark, he punctured his credibility and ensured that the American people knew to blame Congress, not the Administration, for the government shutdown.
The fight was not over, but the field was shifting.
The government was closed for six days, the longest shutdown in history. Both sides finally agreed to another CR that would finance the government until December 15.
Many people had suffered enormous anxiety and hardship, but for the long-term sake of the country, it was essential for Bill to stand his ground.
When I look at our schedules from the last three months of 1995, it’s hard to believe how many events and issues we were tackling. I finally put the finishing touches on It Takes a Village during another Thanksgiving at Camp David surrounded by our families and good friends. Then it was time to kick off the Christmas season with the Pageant of Peace and National Tree Lighting Ceremony, which included those Ohio Scotch pines that had finally been delivered when the government reopened.
On November 28, Bill and I embarked on an official trip to England, Ireland, Germany and Spain. I first went to England in 1973 with Bill when we skipped our Yale Law School commencement. As cash-starved students, we flew on student standby fares for less than one hundred dollars apiece, stayed in cheap bed-and-breakfasts or on friends’
couches and kept whatever schedule we chose. In 1995, however, we were returning to England on Air Force One, driving the streets in an armored limousine and scheduled to the minute.
Bill’s relations with Prime Minister Major had gotten off to a rocky start when we learned that Major’s government cooperated with the first Bush Administration by attempting to unearth records of Bill’s activities in England during the student protests against the Vietnam War. No such records existed, but overt meddling in American politics by the Tories was disconcerting. Relations were further strained in 1994 when Bill granted a visa to Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army.
No American President had ever become involved in mediating the Irish Troubles, but Bill was determined to help work toward a solution. There was no doubt that Adams had been somehow involved in IRA activities in the past, and the U.S. State Department agreed with the British government’s arguments against granting the visa. But the Irish government had decided that dealing with Adams and Sinn Fein made sense. They argued that Bill could play a role in creating an environment conducive to peace negotiations.
In this case and others, Bill was willing to take political risks to demonstrate that you don’t make peace with your friends and you can’t make peace with your enemies unless you’re willing to talk to them. He decided to grant the visa, and his bet paid off.
Northern Ireland was enjoying a cease-fire, and we would soon be on our way to Belfast to celebrate.
Of all the trips we took during the eight years of Bill’s Presidency, this one was among the most special. Bill was proud of his Irish ancestry through his mother, a Cassidy. Chelsea fell in love with Irish folk tales when she was a little girl. She first saw Ireland in 1994 in the middle of the night at Shannon Airport during a refueling stop on our flight to Russia. She asked if she could go out into the field and touch Irish soil. I watched as she picked up some sod and put it in a bottle to take home. One of Bill and Chelsea’s favorite books was Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization, which Bill gave to friends and colleagues. Yet except for the stopovers at Shannon Airport, none of us had been to Ireland, north or south.
Now we felt the emotional resonance of the beautiful traditional Gaelic greeting: Céad mile fáilte―“One hundred thousand welcomes.” Our first stop in Belfast was the Mackie plant, a factory that assembled textile machinery and one of the few in Northern Ireland that successfully integrated Catholic and Protestant employees in its workforce. Two children, a Catholic schoolgirl whose father had been murdered in 1987 and a Protestant boy, joined hands to introduce Bill. Because of the history of sectarian separatism, most people in Belfast lived in religiously segregated neighborhoods and went to church-run schools.
This joint appearance by the children was meant to symbolize a new vision for the future.
While Bill met with the various factions, I split off to meet with women leaders of the peace movement. Because they were willing to work across the religious divide, they had found common ground. At the Lamplighter Traditional Fish and Chips restaurant, I met sixty-five-yearold Joyce McCartan, a remarkable woman who had founded the Women’s Information Drop-in Center in 1987 after her seventeen-year-old son was shot dead by Protestant gunmen. She had lost more than a dozen family members to violence. Joyce and other women had set up the center as a safe house: a place for women of both religions to convene and talk over their needs and fears. Unemployment was high, and both Catholic and Protestant women worried about young people in the community who had nothing to do. The nine women sitting around the table described how frightened and worried they were when their sons and husbands left the house and how relieved they were when they arrived safely back home. “It takes women to bring men to their senses,”
Joyce said.
These women hoped that the cease-fire would continue and that the violence would end once and for all. They poured tea from ordinary stainless steel teapots, and when I remarked how well they kept the tea warm, Joyce insisted I take a pot to remember them by. I used that dented teapot every day in our small family kitchen at the White House. When Joyce died shortly after our visit, I was honored to be asked to return to Belfast in 1997 to deliver the first Joyce McCartan Memorial Lecture at the University of Ulster. I brought the teapot with me and put it on the podium as I spoke of the courage of Irish women like Joyce who, at kitchen tables and over pots of tea, had helped chart a path to peace.
From Belfast, we helicoptered on Marine One to Derry along the coast of Northern Ireland. Derry is the home of John Hume, one of the architects of the peace process who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with David Trimble, the leader of the largest Protestant party, the Ulster Unionist Party. A large rumpled man with a kind face and silver tongue, Hume was the leader of the SDLP, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, founded in 1970 to push for a peaceful resolution to the Troubles. He had been on the front lines of nonviolence and reconciliation for decades, and Bill wanted to acknowledge, in Hume’s community, the personal risk he had taken for peace. Chanting, “We want Bill, we want Bill,” tens of thousands thronged the streets in the freezing cold to roar their approval of Bill and America, and I was filled with pride and respect for my husband.
Another huge crowd awaited us at the City Hall when we returned to Belfast for the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony. A young naval steward accompanying the President surveyed the sea of faces. “These people all look the same,” he said. “Why have they been killing each other?”
I stood before the crowd and read excerpts from letters written by children expressing their hopes for a lasting peace. Then Bill, with two young letter writers at his side, threw the switch that illuminated the lights on the Christmas tree. He, too, spoke of hope and peace, and he told everyone assembled at this festive gathering that our day in Belfast and in Derry and Londonderry County would long be with us as one of the most remarkable of our lives. I wholeheartedly agreed.
We ended the evening at a reception at Queens University sponsored by the English Secretary for Northern Ireland, Sir Patrick Mayhew, and attended by representatives of the various factions. Many had been in the same room together only once before, when they came to the White House to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day the previous March. At the Belfast gathering, the Catholic leadership stood near the band, while the Protestants clung to the opposite side of the room. Ian Paisley, the hardcore Protestant leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, made an appearance but wouldn’t shake hands with the “papists.”
Like fundamentalists everywhere, he seemed stuck in a time warp, unwilling to concede a new reality.
The next morning we flew to Ireland’s capital, Dublin. Since the early 19gos Ireland had been referred to by economists as the “Celtic Tiger” because of explosive economic growth and a new prosperity that was actually bringing Irish immigrants back home. Bill had appointed Jean Kennedy Smith, President Kennedy’s sister, as Ambassador to Ireland in 1993, and she was doing a terrific job. In Dublin, we paid an official courtesy call on Mary Robinson, the first female President of Ireland, at her official residence, Aras an Uachtarain. President Robinson and her husband, Nick, down-to-earth and easy to talk to, were committed to the Irish peace process and eager to hear about Belfast and Derry. She showed us a light that is kept burning in the front window to welcome anyone Irish who, having left Ireland, finds the way home.