My life

In June, Starr finally got into a little hot water. After Steven Brill published an article in Brill’s Content on Starr’s operation that highlighted the OIC’s strategy of unlawful news leaks, and reported that Starr had admitted the leaks in a ninety-minute interview, Judge Norma Holloway Johnson ruled that there was “probable cause” to believe that Starr’s office had engaged in “serious and repetitive” leaks to the news media and that David Kendall could subpoena Starr and his deputies to find the source of the leaks. Because the judge’s decision involved grand jury proceedings, it was rendered in secret. Strangely, it was one aspect of Starr’s operation that was not leaked to the press. On May 29, Barry Goldwater died at the age of eighty-nine. I was saddened by his passing. Although we were of different parties and philosophies, Goldwater had been uncommonly kind to Hillary and me. I also respected him for being a genuine patriot and an old-fashioned libertarian who thought the government should stay out of citizens’ private lives and who believed political combat should focus on ideas, not personal attacks.

I spent the rest of the spring lobbying for my legislative program and doing the business at hand: issuing an executive order to prohibit discrimination against gays in federal civilian employment; supporting Boris Yeltsin’s new economic reform program; receiving the emir of Bahrain at the White House; addressing the UN General Assembly session on global drug trafficking; hosting a state visit for South Korean president Kim Dae Jung; holding a National Ocean Conference in Monterey, California, where I extended the ban on oil drilling off the California coast for fourteen years; signing a bill that provided funds to buy bulletproof vests for the 25 percent of our law-enforcement officers who didn’t have them; speaking at three university commencements; and campaigning for Democrats in six states. It was a busy but fairly normal month, except for an unhappy trip I took to Springfield, Oregon, where a troubled fifteen-year-old boy armed with a semiautomatic weapon had killed and wounded several of his classmates. It was the latest in a series of school shootings that included lethal incidents in Jonesboro, Arkansas; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; and Edinboro, Pennsylvania. The killings were both heartbreaking and perplexing, because the overall juvenile crime rate was finally declining. It seemed to me that the violent outbursts were due, at least in part, to the excessive glorification of violence in our culture and the easy availability of deadly weapons to children. In all the school shooting cases, including several others in which no deaths had occurred, the young perpetrators seemed to be enraged, alienated, or in the grip of some dark philosophy of life. I asked Janet Reno and Dick Riley to put together a guide for teachers, parents, and students on the early warning signals troubled young people frequently exhibited, with suggested strategies on how to deal with them. I went to the high school in Springfield to meet with the victims’ families, listen to accounts of what had happened, and speak to the students, teachers, and citizens. They were traumatized, wondering how such a thing could have occurred in their community. Often at times like this, I felt all I could do was share people’s grief, reassure them that they were good men and women, and encourage them to pick up the pieces and go on.

As spring turned to summer, it was time for my long-planned visit to China. Although the United States and China still had significant differences over human rights, religious and political freedom, and other matters, I was looking forward to the trip. I thought Jiang Zemin had done well on his trip to the United States in 1997 and he was eager to have me reciprocate.