My life

billion to repair schools; the largest increase ever in Head Start; enough money to put 1.3 million students in after-school programs; a 25 percent increase in the fund to hire 100,000 teachers; and more funding for Pell Grants, for our Gear Up mentoring program, and for our efforts to turn around failing schools. The bill also included the New Markets initiative, a large increase in biomedical research, health-care coverage for welfare recipients and disabled people moving into the workforce, and the Millennium Debt Relief initiative.

John Podesta, Steve Ricchetti, my legislative aide Larry Stein, and our whole team had done a great job. My last year, when I was supposed to be a lame duck, had resulted in the passage of a surprising number of the State of the Union recommendations. Besides those mentioned above, Congress had passed the Africa-Caribbean trade bill, the China trade bill, the Lands Legacy initiative, and a large increase in child-care assistance to working families.

I was still deeply disappointed in the election outcome and concerned about the Middle East, but after the visit to Ireland and England and the budget victories, I was finally getting into the Christmas spirit. On the eighteenth, Jacques Chirac and Romano Prodi came to the White House for my last meeting with European Union leaders. By then we were old friends, and I was glad to receive them one last time. Jacques thanked me for supporting the growth of the EU and transatlantic relations. I responded that we had managed three great questions well: the growth and expansion of the EU; the expansion of NATO

and the new relationship with Russia; and the problems of the Balkans. While I was meeting with Chirac and Prodi, the Middle East teams began talks at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, Hillary received Laura Bush at the White House, and our family went house shopping in Washington. The people of New York had decided she wasn’t leaving town after all. Eventually we found a lovely house that bordered Rock Creek Park in the embassy area off Massachusetts Avenue.

The next day President-elect Bush came to the White House for the same meeting I had had with his father eight years earlier. We talked about the campaign, White House operations, and national security. He was putting together an experienced team from past Republican administrations who believed that the biggest security issues were the need for national missile defense and Iraq. I told him that based on the last eight years, I thought his biggest security problems, in order, would be Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda; the absence of peace in the Middle East; the standoff between nuclear powers India and Pakistan, and the ties of the Pakistanis to the Taliban and al Qaeda; North Korea; and then Iraq. I said that my biggest disappointment was not getting bin Laden, that we still might achieve an agreement in the Middle East, and that we had almost tied up a deal with North Korea to end its missile program, but that he probably would have to go there to close the deal.

He listened to what I had to say without much comment, then changed the subject to how I did the job. My only advice was that he should put together a good team and try to do what he thought was right for the country. Then we talked a little more politics.

Bush had been a very adept politician in 2000, building a coalition with moderate rhetoric and quite conservative-specific proposals. The first time I had seen him give his “compassionate conservative”

speech in Iowa, I knew he had a chance to win. After the primaries he was badly positioned way out on the right and behind in the polls, but he had walked back to the center by moderating his rhetoric, urging the Republican Congress not to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, and even supporting my position on a couple of foreign policy issues. When he was governor, his conservatism had been leavened by the need to work with a Democratic state legislature and by the support he had received from Democratic lieutenant governor Bob Bullock, who wielded a lot of the day-to-day power under the Texas system. Now he would govern with a conservative Republican Congress. He had to choose his own way. After our meeting I knew he was fully capable of getting his way, but I couldn’t tell whether it would be the path he had followed as governor or the one he had taken to defeat John McCain in the South Carolina primary.