My life

troops and cost nearly $500 million, but even after all the slaughter, it would still save many lives. On July 25, King Hussein and Prime Minister Rabin came to town to sign the Washington declaration, formally ending the state of belligerency between Jordan and Israel and committing themselves to negotiating a full peace agreement. They had been talking secretly for some time, and Warren Christopher had worked hard to facilitate their agreement. The next day, the two leaders spoke to a joint session of Congress, and the three of us held a press conference to reaffirm our commitment to a comprehensive peace involving all the parties to the Middle East conflict. The Israeli-Jordanian agreement stood in stark contrast to recent terrorist attacks against a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, and others in Panama and London, all of which Hezbollah was believed to be responsible for. Hezbollah was armed by Iran and aided by Syria in conducting operations against Israel from southern Lebanon. Since the peace process could not be completed without an agreement between Israel and Syria, Hezbollah’s activities presented a serious potential obstacle. I had called President Assad to tell him about the Israeli-Jordanian announcement, to ask him to support it, and to assure him that Israel and the United States were still committed to successful negotiations with his country. Rabin left the door open to talks with Syria by saying that the Syrians could limit but not end Hezbollah’s activities. Hussein responded that not just Syria but the entire Arab world should follow Jordan’s lead and reconcile with Israel.

I closed the press conference by saying that Hussein and Rabin must have “put peace in the air all over the world.” Boris Yeltsin had just informed me that he and President Meri had agreed that all Russian troops would be withdrawn from Estonia by August 31.

In August it gets hot in Washington, and Congress usually leaves town. In 1994, Congress stayed in session almost the entire month to deal with crime and health care. Both the Senate and House had passed versions of the crime bill, which provided 100,000 more community police, tougher penalties for repeat offenders, and more funds for both prison construction and prevention programs to keep young people out of trouble.

When the conference committee met to resolve the differences between the Senate and House crime bills, the Democrats folded the assault weapons ban into the compromise bill. As I’ve said, the ban had passed the House as a separate matter by only two votes, in the face of furious opposition by the National Rifle Association. The NRA had already lost the fight to defeat the Brady bill and was determined to prevail on this one, so that Americans would retain their right to “keep and bear” rapidfire large-magazine weapons designed for one purpose only: to kill a great many people in a hurry. These weapons worked; crime victims shot with them were three times more likely to die than those whose assailants fired regular handguns.

The conference decided to combine the ban with the crime bill because, while we had a clear majority for the ban in the Senate, we didn’t have the sixty votes necessary to break a certain filibuster by NRA supporters. The Democrats in the conference knew it would be much harder to filibuster the overall crime bill than the assault weapons ban standing alone. The problem with the strategy was that it forced the House Democrats from rural pro-gun districts to vote on the assault weapons ban all over again, risking the failure of the whole bill, and putting them at risk of losing their seats if they voted for it. On August 11, the House defeated the new crime bill, 225–210, on a procedural vote, with 58

Democrats voting against it and only 11 Republicans voting for it. A few of the Democratic “no” votes were liberals who opposed the bill’s expansion of the death penalty, but most of our defectors were voting with the NRA. A sizable group of Republicans said they wanted to support the bill, including the assault weapons ban, but thought it spent too much money overall, especially on prevention programs. We were in trouble on one of my most important campaign commitments, and I had to do something to turn it around.

The next day, before the National Association of Police Officers in Minneapolis, with Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York and Mayor Ed Rendell of Philadelphia, I tried to frame the choice as one between the police and the people on one side and the NRA on the other. Surely we had not reached the point where the only way to keep congressional seats safe was to leave the American people and police officers in greater danger.