My life

I met with Zhu in the Yellow Oval Room the night before the start of his official visit. I told him frankly that my advisors were split but that we would work all night if it was important to have the deal done while he was in the United States. Zhu said if the timing was bad we could wait. Unfortunately the false story that we had a deal leaked, so that when it didn’t happen, Zhu was hurt for the concessions he had made and I was criticized as having turned away a good agreement under pressure from the opponents of China’s entry into the WTO. The story was reinforced by a spate of antiChina stories circulating in the media. The allegations that the Chinese government had steered funds into the 1996 campaign had not been resolved, and Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese-American employee of our national energy lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, had been accused of stealing sensitive technology for China. All of my team wanted China in the WTO this year; now it was going to be harder to achieve. On April 12, a jury rendered its verdict in Kenneth Starr’s case against Susan McDougal, who had been charged with obstruction of justice and criminal contempt for her continued refusal to testify before the grand jury. She was acquitted on the obstruction of justice charge and, according to press reports, the jury deadlocked 7–5 for acquittal on the contempt charges. It was an amazing verdict. McDougal admitted that she had refused a court order to testify because she didn’t trust Starr and his chief deputy, Hick Ewing. She testified that, now, in open court, she would be glad to answer any questions that the OIC had wanted to ask in the secret grand jury proceedings. She said that even though she had been offered immunity, she had refused to cooperate with the OIC because Starr and his staff had repeatedly tried to get her to lie to incriminate Hillary or me, and she believed that if she testified truthfully before the grand jury he would indict her for her refusal to lie. To close her defense, she called Julie Hiatt Steele, who testified that Starr had done exactly that to her, indicting her after she twice refused to lie for him in a grand jury proceeding.

The victory couldn’t give Susan McDougal her lost years back, but her vindication was a stunning setback for Starr, and a sweet triumph for all the other people whose lives and savings he had destroyed. On the twentieth, America suffered another horrible school shooting. At Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two heavily armed students opened fire on their classmates, killing twelve students and injuring more than twenty others before turning their guns on themselves. It could have been even worse. One teacher, who later died from his wounds, led many students to safety. Medics and police officers saved more lives. A week later, with a bipartisan group of members of Congress and mayors, I announced some measures to make it harder for guns to fall into the wrong hands: applying the Brady law’s prohibition on gun ownership to violent juveniles; closing the “gun show loophole” to require background checks on people who bought guns at such events rather than at gun stores; cracking down on illegal gun trafficking; and prohibiting juveniles from owning assault rifles. I also proposed funds to help schools develop successful violence prevention and conflict-resolution programs like the one I had just observed at T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia.

Senate majority leader Trent Lott called my initiative a “typical knee-jerk reaction,” and Tom DeLay accused me of exploiting Columbine for political gain. But the legislation’s principal sponsor, Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy of New York, wasn’t interested in politics; her husband had been killed and her son badly wounded on a commuter train by a deranged man with a handgun he should never have been able to possess. The NRA and its supporters blamed our violent culture. I agreed that children were exposed to too much violence; that’s why I was supporting Al and Tipper Gore’s drive to get V-chips into new TVs so that parents could limit children’s exposure to excessive violence. But the violence in our culture only strengthened the argument for doing more to keep guns away from children, criminals, and mentally unstable people.