My life

Soon after Chelsea’s graduation, I accepted the recommendation of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission that human cloning was “morally unacceptable” and proposed that Congress ban it. It had become an issue since the cloning of Dolly the sheep in Scotland. Cloning technology had been used for some time to increase agricultural production and to achieve biomedical advances in the treatment of can-cer, diabetes, and other disorders. It held great promise for producing replacement skin, cartilage, and bone tissue for burn and accident victims, and nerve tissue to treat spinal cord injuries. I didn’t want to interfere with all that, but thought we should draw the line at human cloning. Just a month earlier I had apologized for the unconscionable and racist syphilis experiments performed on hundreds of black men decades earlier by the federal government in Tuskegee, Alabama.

In mid-June, I went to the University of California at San Diego to speak about America’s continuing struggle to rid itself of racial discrimination and make the most of our growing diversity. The United States still suffered from discrimination, bigotry, hate crimes, and great disparities in income, education, and health care. I appointed a seven-member commission chaired by the distinguished scholar John Hope Franklin to educate America about the state of race relations and to make recommendations to help build “One America” in the twenty-first century. I would coordinate the efforts through a new White House office headed by Ben Johnson.

In late June, Denver served as the host city for the annual G-7 meeting. I had pledged to Yeltsin that Russia would be fully included, but the finance ministers opposed the move because of Russia’s economic weaknesses. Since Russia depended on the financial support of the international community, they felt it shouldn’t be in on the G-7’s financial decision making. I could understand why the finance ministers needed to meet and make decisions without Russia, but the G-7 was also a political organization; being in it would symbolize Russia’s importance to the future and strengthen Yeltsin at home. We had already called this meeting the Summit of Eight. In the end, we voted to take Russia in as a full member of the new G-8, but to allow the finance ministers of the other seven nations to continue to meet on appropriate matters. Now Yeltsin and I had both kept our Helsinki commitments. At about this time, Mir Aimal Kansi, who was believed to be responsible for murdering two CIA employees and wounding three others at CIA headquarters in 1993, was brought back to the United States from Pakistan to stand trial after intense efforts to secure his extradition by the FBI, the CIA, and the Departments of State, Justice, and Defense. It was strong evidence of our determination to track down terrorists and bring them to justice.