My life

stance in Bosnia, and Clark had been an integral part of Dick Holbrooke’s negotiating team. I felt he was the best person to continue our firm commitment to peace in the Balkans. In April, I saw King Hussein and Prime Minister Netanyahu in an attempt to keep the peace process from falling apart. Violence had broken out again, in the wake of an Israeli decision to build new housing in Har Homa, an Israeli settlement on the outskirts of East Jerusalem. Every time Netanyahu took a step forward, as with the Hebron agreement, his governing coalition made him do something that drove a wedge between Israel and the Palestinians. During the same period, a Jordanian soldier had gone berserk and killed seven Israeli schoolchildren. King Hussein immediately went to Israel and apologized. That diffused the tensions between Israel and Jordan, but Arafat was left with the continuing demand of the United States and Israel that he suppress terror while living with the Har Homa project, which he felt contradicted Israel’s commitment not to change areas on the ground that were supposed to be resolved in the negotiations.

When King Hussein came to see me, he was worried that the step-by-step peace process that had been working under Rabin couldn’t succeed now because of the political constraints on Netanyahu. Netanyahu was concerned about that, too; he had expressed some interest in trying to accelerate the process by moving to the difficult final status issues quickly. Hussein thought that if this could be done, we should try. When Netanyahu came to the White House a few days later, I told him I would support this approach, but in order to get Arafat to agree, he would have to find a way to follow through on the interim steps the Palestinians had already been promised, including the opening of the Gaza airport, safe passage between Gaza and the Palestinian areas in the West Bank, and economic assistance. I spent most of the month in an intense effort to convince the Senate to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention: calling and meeting with members of Congress; agreeing with Jesse Helms to move the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the U.S. Information Agency into the State Department in return for his allowing a vote on the CWC, which he opposed; and holding an event on the South Lawn with distinguished Republicans and military supporters of the treaty, including Colin Powell and James Baker, to counter conservative Republican opposition from people like Helms, Caspar Weinberger, and Donald Rumsfeld.

I was surprised at the conservative opposition, since all our military leaders strongly supported the CWC, but it reflected the right’s deep skepticism about international cooperation in general and its desire to maintain maximum freedom of action now that the United States was the world’s only superpower. Near the end of the month, I reached an agreement with Senator Lott to add some language that he felt strengthened the treaty. Finally, with Lott’s support, the CWC was ratified, 74–26. Interestingly, I watched the Senate vote on television with Japanese prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, who was in town to meet with me the next day, and I thought he would like to see the ratification after what Japan had suffered in the sarin gas attack.

On the home front, I named Sandy Thurman of Atlanta, one of America’s foremost AIDS advocates, to head the Office of National AIDS Policy. Since 1993 our overall investment in combating HIV and AIDS had increased 60 percent, we had approved eight new AIDS drugs and nineteen others for AIDSrelated conditions, and the death rate was going down in America. Still, we were a long way from a vaccine or a cure, and the problem had exploded in Africa, where we weren’t doing enough. Thurman was bright, energetic, and forceful; I knew she would keep us all on our toes. On the last day of April, Hillary and I made public Chelsea’s decision to attend Stanford in the fall. In her typically methodical way, Chelsea had also visited Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, and Wellesley, and had been to several of them twice to get a feel for the academic and social life of each institution. Given her excellent grades and test scores, she had been accepted by all of them, and Hillary had hoped she would stay closer to home. I always suspected Chelsea would like to get far away from Washington. I just wanted her to go to a school where she would learn a lot, make good friends, and enjoy herself. But her mother and I were going to miss her badly. Having Chelsea at home in our first four years in the White House, going to her school and ballet events, and getting to know her friends and their parents had been a joy, repeatedly reminding us, no matter what else was going on, of what a blessing our daughter was.