My life

My first day at the Naples summit was devoted to Asia. Kim Il Sung had died the previous day, just as talks with North Korea resumed in Geneva, throwing the future of our agreement with North Korea into doubt. The other G-7 member with a big interest in the issue was Japan. There had been tensions between the Japanese and the Koreans for decades, going back before World War II. If North Korea had nuclear weapons, there would be great pressure on Japan to develop a nuclear deterrent, an action that, given their own painful experience, the Japanese did not want to take. The new Japanese prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama, who had become Japan’s first socialist prime minister by joining in a coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party, assured me that our solidarity on North Korea would remain intact. Out of respect for Kim Il Sung’s death, the Geneva talks were suspended for a month. The most important decisions we made in Naples were to provide an aid package to Ukraine and to include Russia in the political part of all future summits. Bringing Russia into the prestigious circle gave Yeltsin and other reformers pushing for closer ties to the West a big boost, and guaranteed that our future gatherings would be more interesting. Yeltsin was always entertaining. Chelsea, Hillary, and I loved Naples, and after the meetings, we took a day to see Pompeii, which the Italians had done a marvelous job of recovering from the ashes of the volcano that engulfed the town in A.D. 79. We saw wall paintings with colors that had retained their rich texture, including some that were first-century versions of political posters; open-air food stands that were early precursors of today’s fastfood restaurants; and the remains of several bodies remarkably preserved by the ashes, among them a man lying with his hand over the face of his obviously pregnant wife, with two other children beside them. It was a powerful reminder of the fragile and fleeting nature of life. The European trip ended in Germany. Helmut Kohl took us to visit his hometown, Ludwigshafen, before I flew to Ramstein Air Base to see our troops, many of whom would soon be leaving the military in the post–Cold War downsizing. The servicemen and -women at Ramstein, just like their counterparts in the U.S. Navy I had met in Naples, mentioned only one domestic issue to me: health care. Most of them had children, and in the military they had taken health coverage for granted. Now they worried that because of defense downsizing they were going home to a country that would no longer provide health care for their kids.

Berlin was booming, full of construction cranes, as the city prepared to resume its role as the capital of a united Germany. Hillary and I walked with the Kohls out of the Reichstag along the line where the Berlin Wall had stood and through the magnificent Brandenburg Gate. President Kennedy and President Reagan had given memorable speeches just outside the gate on the western side of the wall. Now I was standing on a podium on the eastern side of unified Berlin, facing an enthusiastic crowd of fifty thousand Germans, many of them young people wondering about their future in a very different world from the one their parents had known.

I urged the Germans to lead Europe toward greater unity. If they did so, I pledged in German, “Amerika steht an Ihrer Seite jetzt und für immer.” (America is on your side, now and forever.) The Brandenburg Gate had long been a symbol of its time, sometimes a monument to tyranny and a tower of conquest, but now it was what its builders had meant it to be, a gateway to the future. When I returned home, the foreign policy work continued. Increased repression in Haiti had led to a new flood of boat people and the suspension of all commercial air trafÞc. By the end of the month, the UN

Security Council had approved an invasion to dislodge the dictatorship, an action that seemed more and more inevitable.

On July 22, I announced a large increase in emergency aid to Rwandan refugees, with U.S. military forces establishing a base in Uganda to support round-the-clock shipments of relief supplies to the tremendous number of refugees in camps near the Rwandan border. I also ordered the military to establish a safe water supply and distribute as much clean water as possible to those at risk of cholera and other diseases, and announced that the United States would be delivering twenty million oral rehydration therapy packages over the next two days to help stem the cholera outbreak. Within a week we had delivered more than 1,300 tons of food, medicine, and other supplies, and were producing and distributing more than 100,000 gallons of safe water a day. The entire effort would require about 4,000