My life

The most memorable moment of the evening came near the end of the speech, when, as usual, I introduced the people sitting in the First Lady’s box with Hillary. The first person I mentioned was Richard Dean, a forty-nine-year-old Vietnam veteran who had worked for the Social Security Administration for twenty-two years. When I told Congress that he had been in the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City when it was bombed, risked his life to reenter the ruins four times, and saved the lives of three women, Dean got a huge standing ovation from the entire Congress, with the Republicans leading the cheers. Then came the zinger. As the applause died down, I said, “But Richard Dean’s story doesn’t end there. This last November, he was forced out of his office when the government shut down. And the second time the government shut down, he continued helping Social Security recipients, but he was working without pay. On behalf of Richard Dean . . . I challenge all of you in this chamber: let’s never, ever shut the federal government down again.”

This time the gleeful Democrats led the applause. The Republicans, knowing that they had been trapped, looked glum. I didn’t think I had to worry about a third government shutdown; its consequences now had a human, heroic face.

Defining moments like that don’t happen by accident. Every year we used the State of the Union as an organizing tool for the cabinet and staff to come up with new policy ideas, and then we worked hard on how best to present them. On the day of the speech, we held several rehearsals in the movie theater located between the residence and the East Wing. The White House Communications Agency, which also recorded all my public statements, set up a TelePrompTer and a podium, and various staff members moved in and out through the day in an informal process managed by my communications director, Don Baer. We all worked together, listening to each sentence, imagining how it would be received in the Congress and in the country, and improving the language.

We had defeated the philosophy behind the “Contract with America” by winning the government shutdown debate. Now the speech offered an alternative philosophy of government and, through Richard Dean, showed that federal employees were good people performing valuable services. It wasn’t much different from what I had been saying all along, but in the aftermath of the shutdown, millions of Americans heard and understood it for the first time.

We began the year in foreign policy with Warren Christopher hosting talks between the Israelis and Syrians at Wye River Plantation in Maryland. Then, on January 12, I flew overnight to the U.S. Air Force base in Aviano, Italy, that had been the center of our NATO air operations over Bosnia, where I boarded one of our new C-17 transport planes for the flight to Taszar Air Base in Hungary, from which our troops were deploying into Bosnia. I had fought in 1993 to keep the C-17 from being eliminated in the defense downsizing. It was an amazing plane with remarkable cargo capacity and the ability to operate in difficult conditions. The Bosnian mission was using twelve C-17s, and I had to fly one into Tuzla; the regular Air Force One, a Boeing 747, was too big.

After meeting with Hungarian President Arpad Goncz and seeing our troops in Taszar, I flew on to Tuzla in northeastern Bosnia, the area for which the United States was responsible. In less than a month and despite terrible weather, seven thousand of our troops and more than two thousand armored vehicles had crossed the flooded Sava River to reach their duty stations. They had turned an airfield with no lights or navigational equipment into one that was open for business around the clock. I thanked the troops and personally delivered a birthday present to a colonel whose wife had charged me with the duty when I stopped in Aviano. I met with President Izetbegovic, then flew on to Zagreb, Croatia, to see President Tudjman. Both of them were satisfied with the implementation of the peace agreement so far and very glad U.S. troops were part of it.

By the time I got back to Washington, it had been a long day, but an important one. Our troops were involved in NATO’s first deployment beyond its members’ borders. They were working with the soldiers of their Cold War adversaries Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Baltic states. Their mission was pivotal to creating a united Europe, yet it was being criticized in Congress and in coffee shops across America. The troops were at least entitled to know why they were in Bosnia and how strongly I supported them.