My life

Another GOP proposal that met stiff resistance was its move to eliminate the Department of Education, which, like the school lunch program, had always enjoyed strong bipartisan support. When Senator Dole said the department had done more harm than good, I joked that he might be right, because for most of the time since its inception, the department had been under the control of Republican secretaries of education. By contrast, Dick Riley was doing far more good than harm. While pushing back on the Republican proposals, I was also promoting our agenda in ways that didn’t require congressional approval and demonstrated that I had gotten the message from the last election. In the middle of March, I announced a regulatory reform effort developed by Al Gore’s Reinventing Government project that focused on improving our environmental protection efforts through providing market incentives to the private sector, rather than imposing detailed regulations; the 25 percent reduction in paperwork requirements would save them 20 million work hours per year. The “Rego” effort was working. We had already reduced the federal workforce by more than 100,000

and eliminated 10,000 pages of federal personnel manuals; soon we would earn almost $8 billion by auctioning slices of the broadcast spectrum for the first time; and eventually we would scrap 16,000

pages of federal regulations with no harm to the public interest. All the Rego changes were developed according to a simple credo: protect people, not bureaucracy; promote results, not rules; get action, not rhetoric. Al Gore’s highly successful initiative confounded our adversaries, elated our allies, and escaped the notice of most of the public because it was neither sensational nor controversial. By my third St. Patrick’s Day as President, the occasion had grown from a celebration into an annual opportunity for the United States to advance the peace process in Northern Ireland. That year, I was giving the traditional Irish greeting, céad míle fáilte, “a hundred thousand welcomes,” to a new Irish prime minister, John Bruton, who was continuing the peace policy of his predecessor. At noon, I met Gerry Adams for the first time at the Capitol, as Newt Gingrich hosted his first St. Patrick’s Day Speaker’s luncheon. I had given Adams a second visa after Sinn Fein had agreed to discuss with the British government the IRA’s laying down of arms, and had invited him, along with John Hume and representatives of Northern Ireland’s other main political parties, both Unionist and Republican, to the St. Patrick’s Day reception at the White House that night.

When Adams showed up at the lunch, John Hume encouraged me to go over and shake hands with him, so I did. At the White House reception that night, the assembled crowd listened to a superb Irish tenor, Frank Patterson. Adams was having such a good time that he wound up singing a duet with Hume. All this may sound routine now, but at the time it represented a sea change in American policy, one the British government and many in our own State Department still opposed. Now I was consorting not only with John Hume, the champion of peaceful change, but with Gerry Adams, whom the British still considered a terrorist. Physically, Adams was a striking contrast to the gentle, slightly rumpled, professorial Hume. He was bearded, taller, younger, and leaner, hardened by his years on the edge of destruction. But Adams and Hume shared some important traits. Behind their glasses were eyes that revealed intelligence, conviction, and that uniquely Irish mixture of sadness and humor born of hopes often dashed but never abandoned. Against all odds, they both were trying to free their people from the shackles of the past. Before long, David Trimble, who led the largest Unionist party, would join them at the White House on St. Patrick’s Day and in the quest for peace.