My life

In early December, Lloyd Bentsen resigned as secretary of Treasury, and I appointed Bob Rubin to succeed him. Bentsen had done a remarkable job, and I didn’t want him to leave, but he and his wife, B. A., wanted to return to private life. The choice of a successor was easy: Bob Rubin had built the National Economic Council into the most important innovation in White House decision making in decades, was respected on Wall Street, and wanted the economy to work for all Americans. Soon afterward, I named Laura Tyson to succeed Bob at the National Economic Council. After hosting a state dinner for the new president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, I flew to Budapest, Hungary, for only eight hours, to attend the meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and sign a series of denuclearization agreements with President Yeltsin, Prime Minister Major, and the presidents of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. It should have produced good news coverage about our shared determination to reduce our arsenals by several thousand warheads and to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to other nations. Instead, the story coming out of Budapest was Yeltsin’s speech criticizing me for trading in the Cold War for a “cold peace” by rushing NATO enlargement to include the Central European nations. In fact, I had done the reverse, by establishing the Partnership for Peace as an interim step to include a much larger number of countries; by setting up a deliberate process for adding new NATO members; and by working hard to establish a NATO-Russian partnership. Since I had no advance warning about Yeltsin’s speech, and he spoke after I did, I was stunned and angry, because I didn’t know what had set him off and because I had no opportunity to respond. Apparently, Yeltsin’s advisors had convinced him that NATO would admit Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1996, just when he would be running for reelection against the ultra-nationalists, who hated NATO expansion, and I would be running against the Republicans, who supported it. Budapest was embarrassing, a rare moment when people on both sides dropped the ball, but I knew it would pass. A few days later, Al Gore went to see Yeltsin when he was in Moscow for the fourth meeting of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission for Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation. Boris told him that he and I were still partners, and Al assured Yeltsin that our NATO policy hadn’t changed. I wasn’t about to jam him for domestic political reasons, any more than I would let him keep NATO’s doors closed indefinitely.

On December 9, I was in Miami to open the Summit of the Americas, the first meeting of all the hemisphere’s leaders since 1967. The thirty-three democratically elected leaders of Canada, Central and South America, and the Caribbean were there, including forty-one-year-old President Aristide of Haiti and his neighbor, President Joaquín Balaguer of the Dominican Republic, who was eighty-eight years old, blind, and infirm, but mentally still sharp as a tack.

I had initiated the summit to promote a free trade area in all the Americas, from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego; to strengthen democracy and effective government throughout the region; and to show that America was determined to be a good neighbor. The gathering was a big success. We committed ourselves to establishing a free trade area of the Americas by 2005, and left feeling that we were going into the future together, a future where, in the words of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, “There is no such thing as a lone struggle, no such thing as a lone hope.”

On December 15, I gave a televised address to outline my proposals for middle-class tax cuts in the coming budgets. The move was opposed by some people in the administration and criticized by some in the media as an attempt to copy the Republicans, or as a belated attempt to return to a 1993 campaign promise the voters had punished me for not keeping. For both policy and political reasons, I was trying to get back in the tax-cut hunt with the Republicans before the new Congress convened. The GOP

contract contained tax proposals that I thought were unaffordable and too heavily tilted to upper-income Americans. On the other hand, the United States was still suffering from two decades of middle-class income stagnation, the main reason people hadn’t felt the economy improving. We had made a dent in the problem by doubling the Earned Income Tax Credit. Now the right kind of tax cuts could raise middle-class incomes without derailing deficit reduction or our ability to invest in the future, and would fulfill my 1992 campaign commitment.