My life

I spent most of the rest of the month in states I’d won in ’92. On a western swing, I also campaigned in Arizona, a state that hadn’t voted for a Democrat for President since 1948, but that I thought I could carry because of its growing Hispanic population and the discomfort of many of the state’s moderate and traditional conservative voters with the more extreme politics of the Republican Congress. On the sixteenth, I received the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP usually endorsed Republicans for President, but our White House had worked with them for four years to put more police on the streets, take guns out of the hands of criminals, and ban cop-killer bullets; they wanted four more years of that kind of cooperation.

Two days later, I announced one of the most important environmental accomplishments of my entire eight years in office, the establishment of the 1.7 million–acre Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument in the remote and beautiful red rock area of southern Utah, which contains fossils of dinosaurs and the remains of the ancient Anasazi Indian civilization. I had the authority to do so under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows the President to protect federal lands of extraordinary cultural, historic, and scientific value. I made the announcement with Al Gore on the edge of the Grand Canyon, which Theodore Roosevelt had first protected under the Antiquities Act. My action was necessary to stop a large coal mine that would have fundamentally changed the character of the area. Most of the Utah officials and many who wanted the mining operation’s economic boost were against it, but the land was priceless, and I thought the monument designation would bring in tourism income that over time would more than offset the loss of the mine.

Apart from the size and exuberance of the crowds, the September events offered anecdotal evidence that things were going our way. After a rally in Longview, Texas, as I was shaking hands in the crowd, I met a single mother of two who had left welfare to serve in AmeriCorps and was using its scholarship money to go to Kilgore Junior College; another woman who had used the family leave law when her husband became ill with cancer; and a Vietnam veteran who was grateful for the health and disability benefits for children born with spina bifida as a result of their fathers’ exposure to Agent Orange during the war. He had his twelve-year-old daughter with him. The child had spina bifida and had already endured a dozen operations in her short life.

The rest of the world didn’t stop for our campaign. In the first week of September, Saddam Hussein was making trouble again, assaulting and occupying the town of Irbil in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, in violation of restrictions imposed on him at the end of the Gulf War. Two Kurdish factions had been vying for control of the area; after one of them decided to support Saddam, he had attacked the other. I ordered bomb and missile attacks on the Iraqi forces and they withdrew. On the twenty-fourth, I went to New York for the opening session of the United Nations, where I was the first of many world leaders to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, using the pen with which President Kennedy had signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty thirty-three years earlier. In my remarks, I outlined a broader agenda to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction, urging the UN members to bring the Chemical Weapons Convention into force, strengthen the compliance provisions of the Biological Weapons Convention, freeze the production of fissile materials for use in nuclear weapons, and ban the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of anti-personnel land mines. While the UN was discussing nonproliferation, the Middle East exploded again. The Israelis had opened a tunnel that ran under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City. The ruins of the Temples of Solomon and Herod were under the mount, atop which stood the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, two of the holiest sites to Muslims. Since the Israelis took East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, the Temple Mount, called Haram al-Sharif by the Arabs, had been under the control of Muslim officials; when the tunnel was opened, the Palestinians saw it as a threat to their religious and political interests, and riots and shooting broke out. After three days, more than sixty people had died, with many more wounded. I called on both sides to end the violence and get back to implementing the peace agreement, while Warren Christopher burned up the phone lines with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat to stop the bloodshed. On Christopher’s advice, I invited Netanyahu and Arafat to the White House to talk things over.