My life

My sense of my own mortality and human frailty and the unconditional love I’d had as a child had spared me the compulsion to judge and condemn others. And I believed my personal flaws, no matter how deep, were far less threatening to our democratic government than the power lust of my accusers. In late January, I had received a moving letter from Bill Ziff of New York, a businessman I’d never met but whose son was a friend of mine. He said that he was sorry for the pain Hillary and I had endured but that much good had come of it, because the Americans people had shown maturity and judgment in seeing through “the demonizing mullahs in our midst. Though it was never your intention, you have done more to expose their underlying agenda than any President in history, including Roosevelt.”

Whatever the motives of my adversaries, it became clear, on those solitary nights in my upstairs office, that if I wanted compassion from others, I needed to show it, even to those who didn’t respond in kind. Besides, what did I have to complain about? I would never be a perfect person, but Hillary was laughing again, Chelsea was still doing well at Stanford, I was still doing a job I loved, and spring was on the way. FIFTY-TWO

O n February 19, a week after the Senate vote, I gave the first posthumous pardon ever granted by a President, to Henry Flipper, the first black graduate of West Point, who, because of his race, had been wrongfully convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer 117 years earlier. Such actions by a President may seem unimportant compared with the power of current events, but correcting historical mistakes matters, not only to the descendants of those who were wronged but to us all. In the last week of the month, Paul Begala announced his departure from the White House. I had relished having Paul there, because he had been with me since New Hampshire and he was smart, funny, combative, and effective. He also had small children who deserved more time with their father. Paul had stuck with me through the impeachment battle; now he needed to leave. The only news out of Whitewater World was the lopsided vote of the American Bar Association, 384–49, on a resolution calling for the repeal of the independent counsel law, and a news report saying the Justice Department was investigating whether Kenneth Starr had deceived Janet Reno about his office’s involvement with the Jones case and about the reasons he gave her for adding the Lewinsky matter to his jurisdiction.

March began with the announcement that after months of complex negotiations, the administration had succeeded in preserving the largest unprotected stand of old-growth redwoods in the world, the Headwaters Forest in northern California. The next week I took a four-day trip to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to highlight a new era of democratic cooperation in a region in which, not long before, America had supported repressive regimes with horrible human rights records as long as they were anti-Communist. Viewing the aftermath of natural disasters that American troops were helping with, speaking to the parliament in El Salvador, where recent adversaries in a bloody civil war now sat together in peace, apologizing for America’s past actions in Guatemala—all these seemed to me to be signs of a new era of democratic progress I was committed to support. By the time I returned, we were moving toward another Balkan war, this time in Kosovo. The Serbs had launched an offensive against rebellious Kosovar Albanians a year earlier, killing many innocent people; some women and children were burned in their own homes. The last round of Serb aggression had sparked another exodus of refugees and had increased the desire of Kosovar Albanians for independence. The killings were all too reminiscent of the early days of Bosnia, which, like Kosovo, bridged the divide between European Muslims and Serb Orthodox Christians, a dividing line along which there had been conflict from time to time for six hundred years. In 1974, Tito had given Kosovo autonomy, allowing it self-government and control over its schools. In 1989, Milosevic had taken autonomy away. The tensions had been rising ever since, and had exploded after the independence of Bosnia was secured in 1995. I was determined not to allow Kosovo to become another Bosnia. So was Madeleine Albright.

By April 1998, the United Nations had imposed an arms embargo, and the United States and its allies had imposed economic sanctions on Serbia for its failure to end the hostilities and begin a dialogue with the Kosovar Albanians. By the middle of June, NATO had begun to plan for a range of military options to end the violence. As summer came, Dick Holbrooke was back in the region to try to find a diplomatic solution for the standoff.