My life

The next day I witnessed the ceremony and thanked the Israelis and Jordanians for their courage in leading the way to peace. It was a hot and clear day, and the breathtaking backdrop of the Rift Valley was perfect for the grandeur of the occasion, but the sun was so bright bouncing off the desert sand that it almost blinded me. I nearly passed out, and if my alert presidential aide, Andrew Friendly, hadn’t come to my rescue with sunglasses, I might have fainted and spoiled the whole occasion. After the ceremony Hillary and I drove the short distance with King Hussein and Queen Noor to their vacation home in Aqaba. It was Hillary’s birthday, and they gave her a cake with trick candles Hillary couldn’t blow out, prompting me to kid her that her advancing years had diminished her lung capacity. Both Hussein and Noor were intelligent, gracious, and visionary. Noor, a Princeton graduate, was the daughter of a distinguished Arab-American father and Swedish mother. Hussein was a short but powerfully built man with a winning smile, a dignified manner, and wise eyes. He had survived several assassination attempts in his long reign, and he knew well that “taking risks for peace” was far more than a fine-sounding phrase. Hussein and Noor became real friends of ours. We laughed a lot together, forgetting our duties whenever we could in favor of stories about our lives, our kids, and our shared interests, including horses and motorcycles. In the years ahead, Noor would join us in vacation singalongs in Wyoming; I would go to their home in Maryland for one of Hussein’s birthday parties; and Hillary and Noor would talk often. They were a blessing in our lives. Later that day I became the first American President to speak to the Jordanian parliament in Amman. The best-received lines in the speech were directed to the Arab world at large: “America refuses to accept that our civilizations must collide. We respect Islam . . . the traditional values of Islam, devotion to faith and good work, to family and society, are in harmony with the best of American ideals. Therefore, we know our people, our faiths, our cultures can live in harmony with each other.”

The next morning I flew to Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, to see President Assad. No American President had been there in twenty years because of Syria’s support for terrorism and its domination of Lebanon. I wanted Assad to know that I was committed to a SyrianIsraeli peace based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338, and that, if an agreement were reached, I would work hard to improve relations with his country. I took some heat for going to Syria because of its support for Hezbollah and other violent anti-Israeli groups, but I knew there would never be security and stability in the region unless Syria and Israel were reconciled. My meeting with Assad produced no big breakthrough, but he did give me some encouraging hints about how we might move forward. It was clear that he wanted to make peace, but when I suggested that he ought to go to Israel, reach out to the Israeli citizens, and make his case in the Knesset as Anwar Sadat had done, I could tell that I was beating a dead horse. Assad was brilliant but literal-minded and extremely cautious. He enjoyed the security of his beautiful marble palace and his daily routine in Damascus, and he couldn’t imagine taking the political risk of flying to Tel Aviv. As soon as our meeting and the obligatory press conference were over, I flew to Israel to tell Rabin what I’d learned. In a speech to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, I thanked and praised Rabin and assured the Knesset members that as Israel took steps toward peace, the United States would move to enhance its security and economic progress. It was a timely message because Israel had recently suffered yet another deadly terrorist attack. Unlike the Palestinian agreement, which many Israelis opposed, the Jordan peace pact had the support of nearly everyone in the Knesset, including the leader of the Likud opposition, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. The Israelis admired and trusted King Hussein; they remained uncertain about Arafat.

On the twenty-eighth, after an emotional visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s magnificent Holocaust memorial, Hillary and I said good-bye to Yitzhak and Leah Rabin, and I flew to Kuwait to see the emir and to thank our troops for forcing the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from the Kuwait border through their rapid deployment to the area. After Kuwait, I flew to Saudi Arabia for a few hours to see King Fahd. I had been impressed by Fahd’s call, in early 1993, asking me to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian Muslims. On this occasion, Fahd received me warmly and thanked me for America’s rapid move to defuse the crisis with Iraq. It had been a successful and encouraging visit, but I had to go home to face the election music.

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