UNIT 10READINGS- BUSH AND THE 1990s

AMSCO- The Conservative Resurgence (1990s)Among the important changes during the 1980s and 1990s were the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold

War. In the post-Cold War world, older ethnic and religious conflicts reemerged to threaten the peace with civil wars and terrorism. On the domestic scene, the conservative agenda of the Reagan administration (1981-1989)- for a stronger military, lower taxes, fewer social programs, and traditional cultural values- helped the Republicans become the majority party, which by 2003 controlled the White House and both houses of Congress

PRESIDENT GEORGE H. BUSH AND THE END OF THE COLD WARThe Cold War had threatened the very existence of the planet and of humankind. At the same time, ever since 1945, it had given clear purpose and

structure to US foreign policy. What would be the US role in the world AFTER the Cold War? George H. Bush, a former ambassador to the United Nations and director of the CIA (and the father of George W. Bush), became the first president to define the US role in the new era.

The Election of 1988The Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1986 and hoped that the Iran-Contra scandal and the huge deficits under Reagan would hurt the

Republicans in the presidential race of 1988. Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts, won the Democratic nomination and balanced the ticked by selecting Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas as his running mate. The Republican candidates were Reagan’s vice president, George H. Bush, and a young Indiana senator, Dan Quayle. Bush was no Reagan in front of the camera, but he quickly overtook an expressionless Dukakis by charging that the Democrat was soft on crime (for furloughing criminals) and weak on national defense. Bush also appealed to voters by promising not to raise taxes: “Read my lips- no new taxes.” The Republicans won a decisive victory in November by a margin of 7 million voters. Once again, the Democrats failed to win the confidence of most white middle-class voters. Nevertheless, the voters sent mixed signals by returning larger Democratic majorities to both the House and the Senate. Americans evidently believed in the system of checks and balances, but unfortunately if often produced legislative gridlock in Washington.

The Collapse of Soviet Communism and the Soviet UnionThe first years of the Bush administration were dominated by dramatic changes in the Communist world.

TIANANMEN SQUARE- In China during the spring of 1989, prodemocracy students demonstrated for freedom in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Television cameras from the West broadcast the democracy movement around the world. Under the cover of night, the Chinese Communist government crushed the protest with tanks, killing hundreds and ending the brief flowering of an open political environment in China.

EASTERN EUROPE- Challenges to communism in Eastern Europe produced more positive results. Gorbachev declared that he would no longer support the various Communist governments in Eastern Europe with Soviet armed forces. Starting in Poland in 1989 with the election of Lech Walesa, the leader of the once outlawed Solidarity movement, the Communist Party fell from power in one country after another- Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. The Communists in East Germany were forced out of power after protestors tore down the Berlin Wall, the hated symbol of the Cold War. In October 1990, the two Germanys, divided since 1945, were finally reunited with the blessing of both NATO and the Soviet Union.

BREAKUP OF THE SOVIET UNION- The swift march of events and the nationalist desire for self-determination soon overwhelmed Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. In 1990 the Soviet Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania declared their independence. After a failed coup against Gorbachev by Communist hard-liners, the remaining republics dissolved the Soviet Union in December 1991, leaving Gorbachev a leader with no country. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, joined with nine former Soviet republics to form a loose confederation, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Yeltsin disbanded the Communist party in Russia and attempted to establish a democracy and a free-market economy.

END OF THE COLD WAR- Sweeping agreements to dismantle their nuclear weapons were one tangible proof that the Cold War had ended. Bush and Gorbachev signed the START I agreement in 1991, reducing the number of nuclear warheads to under 10,000 for each side. In late 1992, Bush and Yeltsin agreed to a START II treaty, which reduced the number of nuclear weapons to just over 3,000 each. The treaty also offered US economic assistance to the troubled Russian economy. Even as Soviet communism collapsed, President Bush, a seasoned diplomat, remained cautious. Instead of celebrating final victory in the Cold War, Americans grew concerned about the outbreak of civil wars and violence in the former Soviet Union. In Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia started to disintegrate in 1991, and a civil war broke out in the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. At home, the end of the Cold War raised questions about whether the need still existed for heavy defense spending and large numbers of US military bases.

The Invasion of PanamaSince the outbreak of the Cold War in the 1940s, US intervention in foreign conflicts had been consistently tied to the containment of communism. In

December 1989, US troops were used for a different purpose, as Bush ordered the invasion of Panama to remove General Manuel Noriega. The alleged purpose of the invasion was to stop Noriega from using his country as a drug pipeline to the USA. US troops remained until elections established a more creditable government.

Persian Gulf WarPresident Bush’s hopes for a “new world order” of peace and democracy were challenged in August 1990 when Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein,

invaded oil-rich but weak Kuwait and threatened Western oil sources in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Bush successfully built a coalition of United Nations members to put pressure on Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait. A UN embargo against Iraq, however, had little effect. Bush won congressional approval for a military campaign to roll back Iraq’s act of aggression. In January 1991, in a massive operation called Desert Storm, over half a million Americans were joined by military units from 28 other nations. Five weeks of relentless air strikes were followed by a brilliant ground war conducted by US Genl Norman Schwarzkopf. After only 100 hours of fighting on the ground, Iraq was forced to concede defeat. Some Americans were disappointed that the US stopped short of driving Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Nevertheless, after the victory, Bush enjoyed a boost in his approval rating to nearly 90%.

Domestic Problems:President Bush’s political future seemed secure based on his foreign policy successes, but a host of domestic problems dogged his administration.

NOMINATION OF CLARENCE THOMAS- The president’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court to replace the retiring Thurgood Marshall proved extremely controversial. Thomas’s conservative views on judicial issues were attacked by African American organizations, and charges of sexual harassment against him were widely believed by millions of women. Nevertheless, the Senate confirmed Thomas’ nomination.

TAXES AND THE ECONOMY- Americans were shocked to learn that the government’s intervention to save weak savings and loan institutions and to pay insured depositors for funds lost in failed S&L’s would cost the taxpayers over $250 billion. Also disturbing was the idea that federal budget deficits of over $250 billion a year added over $1 trillion to the national debt during the Bush presidency. Thousands of Republican voters felt betrayed when, in 1990, Bush violated his campaign pledge of “no new taxes” by agreeing to accept the Democratic Congress’ proposed $133 billion in new taxes. The unpopular tax law increased the top income tax rate to 31% and raised federal excise taxes on beer, wine, cigarettes, gasoline, and luxury cars and boats. Most damaging of all for Bush’s reelection prospects was a recession starting in 1990 that ended the Reagan era of prosperity, increased unemployment, and decreased average family income.

POLITICAL INERTIA- President Bush began his administration calling for “a kinder, gentler America” and declaring himself the “education president.” He did sign into law the Americans With Disabilities Act (1990), which prohibited discrimination against citizens with physical and mental disabilities in hiring, transportation,

and public accommodation. Outside of this accomplishment, the president offered little in the way of domestic policy. In the midst of recession, he emphasized cuts in federal programs. This seemed to offer little hope to growing numbers of Americans left behind by the “Reagan revolution.” A Wimp He Wasn’t by John Solomon for Newsweek

George H.W. Bush. He’s 86 now, his eyebrows silver and his legs weakened by Parkinsonism, a vascular disorder akin to Parkinson’s disease. But as George Herbert Walker Bush approaches his twilight years, he is beginning to get his due. President Obama last month [February 2011] awarded him the Medal of Freedom. On March 21, Bush will be feted- by Bill Clinton, no less- at a major Kennedy Center event in Washington honoring his contribution to volunteerism through the Points of Light Foundation. Qualities once branded as vices- his civil tone, willingness to reach across the aisle, even his sway with Mideast strongmen- suddenly seem more like virtues in a world weary of attack politics and confronting a cascading series of global crises.

Reliving History: October 19, 1987:Stigmas that once dogged him- Iran-Contra, the “wimp factor,” “read my lips,” and Dana Carvey’s deadpan caricature- have faded in the public

memory, only to be replaced by a fresh view, aided by newly released documents and longtime aides’ loosening tongues- that 41 may have been a more swashbuckling and politically selfless figure than Americans appreciated during his Washington tenure.

“At the time, [Bush’s style] didn’t seem to be leadership qualities to the public. Some even saw it as weakness,” says Roman Popadiuk, a national-security spokesman in the Bush White House who today heads his presidential-library foundation. “But now people are looking back at how he treated people and how Washington is now. And they’re appreciating how he harkened back to an era in which people were treated with respect and in which politics had some civility,” Popadiuk says. “The mutually cooperative way he tried to address things, the calm way he handled things in crisis. People see it today as a strength.”

As his successor, Bill Clinton, puts it: people have come to value “the contrast between his kind of conservatism and that which dominates today- less extreme in substance, less harsh in rhetoric, more open to reasonable compromise.” State’s Exhibit A in the revisionist history: a little-notices journey in December 1983. Bush was nearly three years into his first term as Ronald Reagan’s vice president. His public schedule suggested a routine visit to pay respects to Argentina’s newly elected president. But according to exclusive interviews with longtime Bush aides, he slipped away on a secret mission known to only a handful of US officials- for a hair-raising confrontation with El Salvadoran military commanders. El Salvador’s military was losing American confidence at the time, amid reports of human-rights abuses and murders of civilians carried out by death squads there. The unsolved killings of three Roman Catholic nuns had rubbed emotions raw. Bush and a small contingent of White House aides and Secret Service agents flew in, bearing a stern warning from Reagan: end the killing. Stop the abuses. And allow fully free and democratic elections- or the United States would instantly cut off aid in the fight against the communist rebels.

Exiting Air Force Two in San Salvador, Bush boarded an Army Black Hawk helicopter, flying high above the treeline to avoid anti-aircraft fire from below. His destination: the president’s mountainside villa. When his advance men first scouted the location, the meeting room’s carpets were stained with a brown, bloody color, and there were similar spatter stains on the walls. “It looked like a meeting had gone terribly wrong and no one survived,” recalls Antonio Benedi, one of Bush’s most trusted advance aides, who accompanied him on the mission. Benedi’s team pondered calling off the meeting, but no one wanted to tell Bush, a former WWII bomber pilot who survived being shot down in the Pacific, that they were afraid for his safety. By the time Bush entered the room, the stains had been scrubbed- but the mood was still grim. As Bush retreated to a room for a private chat with President Alvaro Magana, a group of commanders entered, some strapped with semi-automatic rifles and others with handguns- sending a wave of worry among the veep’s aides. A commotion broke out as the soldiers refused requests to leave their arms outside. Bush poked his head out of the meeting to ask for quiet. “We Americans were outgunned five to one and the prospect of having the VP deliver a message that they clearly didn’t want to hear was stark at best,” Oliver North, a Marine officer assigned to the National Security Council who was along for the ride, tells Newsweek (North of course would go on to become the unrepentant touchstone of the Iran-Contra scandal).

After brief pleasantries, an animated Bush slammed his fist on the conference table, startling the soldiers. North says the scene was surreal. “They’re all senior guys, some of whom we had good reason to believe were involved with death squads. And everybody- including the VP- knew that,” he said. “He delivers this incredibly stark message, ‘If the killings don’t stop and you don’t hold elections, we are going to cut off our aid and it will stop you dead in your tracks and you know what that means,” North recalls. His message dispatched, Bush boarded his Black Hawk again, hoping the abrupt visit would make a lasting impression. North had handed the military leaders a list of death-squad leaders the Americans wanted removed. And then they were off for a public dinner with the Argentinean president. Just two weeks later the veteran Army pilot who flew Bush’s chopper was shot dead in his cockpit in San Salvador, the victim of a communist-rebel gunman, Benedi says. Not long after Bush’s visit, the Salvadoran army reported it had begun disbanding its notorious death squads- and US aid continued to flow as reports of human-rights abuses grew more infrequent. The civil war, however, would rage on for years and reports of death squads returned during Bush’s presidency, when the 1989 slayings of Jesuit priests renewed human-rights concerns.

Bush’s role in Central America would later draw fire from the left. His role in the fall of the Berlin Wall, on the other hand, would irritate conservatives- many of whom still credit Reagan with the historic communist collapse there, even though it occurred on Bush’s watch, and fault 41 for not celebrating the moment more avidly. What the public didn’t know then- and Bush refused to discuss publicly- was that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had sent an urgent cable to Bush on November 9, 1989, as the wall crumbled. In it, he asked the United States not to take provocative action that might instigate a Tiananmen Square-like military crackdown in East Germany. Gorbachev’s communiqué remains classified to this day. But sources familiar with it tell Newsweek that the Soviet leader pleaded that neither side take any action that would lead to confrontation or provoke protests that might spiral out of control. Bush acquiesced, settling for a response so muted that reporters wondered aloud during an Oval Office news conference why he didn’t seem more enthused about the historic crumbling of a communist icon. Bush didn’t let on, staying focused on the plan that he and his national-security aides devised. Six days later, Bush penned a three-page letter to Gorbachev assuring him the United States appreciated the Soviet leader’s careful approach to the events in East Germany and was supportive of the peaceful transition of power.

Bush today seems in some ways out of step with his political party. A career encompassing congressman, Republican National Committee chairman, CIA director, envoy to China, US ambassador to the United Nations, vice president, and the Oval Office seems something of a throwback at a time when Washington experience is a pejorative. When Republicans on Capitol Hill make lock-step opposition to President Obama and his Democratic allies a point of pride, Bush’s genuine and lasting friendship with Bill Clinton- forged when the two worked together to raise money for the last Asian tsunami- feels like a remnant from a distant age. Clinton warmly recalls tussling over sleeping quarters on their trips. “We took one long flight together to Indonesia to tour the tsunami zone and the plane had one small room with a bed,” Clinton tells Newsweek. “He offered the room to me to start and said that we’d switch. But I told him to go ahead and take the room, that I’d be fine sleeping on a mat on the floor. After 40 years of sleep deprivation I can sleep anywhere. He deserved the bed.”

These days, Bush ventures out to his local grocery store, and takes in a ballgame when he can. But he’s slowing down a bit, though he’s characteristically private about it. His legs are losing strength, owing to the Parkinsonism, friends say. The symptoms started a few years ago, when Bush was recovering from back surgery. Now, he sometimes struggles to walk, even with a cane, though his upper body remains strong, friends say. When the elder Bush came to Washington for the Medal of Freedom ceremony with Obama, he stopped first for lunch with some friends, including Benedi. Bush arrived in a wheelchair, then took a seat at the table. But when the time came for him to appear in public, Bush left the chair behind, insisting he walk on his own power at the White House he once ruled- this time with the help of a military aide.

Separated by generation and ideology from the man he was honoring, Obama rattled off a litany of accomplishments, then quipped about one of Bush’s late-in-life exploits that endeared him to many younger generations. “Just to cap it off, well into his 80s, he decides to jump out of airplanes,” the current president said adoringly as he secured the blue-and-white ribbon around Bush’s neck.

Debates Over the Persian Gulf WarAs the international community moved cautiously beyond the Cold War, new challenges tested President George Bush’s vaguely defined “new world

order.” Even before world leaders absorbed the impact of the momentous events in the expiring Soviet Union, a new threat to world stability arose when Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops occupied Kuwait in August 1990… President Bush deftly crafted a United Nations coalition that reversed the invasion. For the president, the greatest challenge lay in persuading the American public and a reluctant Congress that US military intervention in the Middle East was justified. This document set examines the issues that brought about the conflict, focusing on the historic Senate debate that ended in a congressional authorization of force… The political drama of January 1991 reflected deep divisions within American society over the use of war as an instrument of foreign policy. Whatever the positions taken, contemporary observers asserted that the congressional debates constituted an extraordinary exercise in democracy…

President Bush Frames the Debate, 1990:On August 6, in response to the unprovoked Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, I ordered the deployment of US military forces to Saudi Arabia and the Persian

Gulf to deter further Iraqi aggression and to protect our interests in the region. What we’ve done is right, and I’m happy to say that most members of Congress and the majority of Americans agree. From the very beginning, we and our coalition partners have shared common political goals- the immediate, complete, and unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, restoration of Kuwait’s legitimate government, protection of the lives of citizens held hostage by Iraq, both in Kuwait and Iraq, and restoration of security and stability in the Persian Gulf region. To achieve these goals, we and our allies have forged a strong diplomatic, economic and military strategy to force Iraq to comply with these objectives. The framework of this strategy is laid out in 10 United Nations resolutions overwhelmingly supported by the United National Security Council… After consultation with King Fahd and our other allies, I have today directed the secretary of defense to increase the size of US forces committed to Desert Shield to insure that the coalition has an adequate offensive military option should that be necessary to achieve our common goals. Toward this end, we will continue to discuss the possibility of both additional allied force contributions and appropriate United Nations actions…

The Churches of Christ Call for Alternative Solutions, 1990:Two months ago, On September 14, 1990, the Executive Coordinating Committee of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA

addressed a message to its member communions on the Gulf Crisis. That message condemned Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait, raised serious questions about the decision of the US government to send troops to the Gulf region and bout the growing magnitude of US presence, noting that the extent of the commitment of US forces and weaponry was the largest since the Vietnam War. Since then, the US has more than doubled the number of troops sent to the region to a number approaching a half million persons.

The message also questioned the apparent open-ended nature of the US military involvement in the Middle East and the failure on the part of the administration clearly to state its goals. President Bush and administration officials have done little to clarify either of these points. Indeed the rationales offered for the steady expansion of US presence have often been misleading and sometimes even contradictory. Early statements that US forces had been deployed for the defense of Saudi Arabia or the enforcement of UN sanctions have been supplanted by suggestions of broader goals, including expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait by military means, or even offensive action against Iraq itself. The nation still has not been told in clear and certain terms what would be required for the withdrawal of US troops…

Resolution on the Gulf and Middle East Crisis: The General Board of the National Council of Churches, meeting in Portland, Oregon, November 14-15, 1990, recognizing its solidarity with the Christians of the Middle East and with the Middle East Council of Churches:

1. Urges: the government of Iraq to release immediately all those citizens of other nations being held against their will in Kuwait or Iraq and to withdraw immediately its troops and occupation forces from Kuwait.

2. Calls for: the continued rigorous application of the sanctions against Iraq authorized by the United Nations Security Council until such time as it withdraws its forces from Kuwait.

3. Reiterates its opposition: to the withholding of food and medicine against civilian populations.4. Encourages: the secretary-general of the United Nations to exercise fully his own good offices in pursuit of a rapid negotiated resolution of the present conflict in the Gulf.5. Calls upon: the president and US Congress to pursue every means for a negotiated political solution to the crisis in the Gulf, including direct negotiations with Iraq.6. Reiterates support for: the convening under UN auspices of an international conference for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East, as a means of implementing United

Nations Security Council resolutions on Israel and Palestine, Lebanon and Cyprus, recognizing that the present crisis cannot be isolated from the unresolved issues of the region as a whole.

7. Calls for: an immediate halt to the buildup and withdrawal of US troops from the Gulf region except those which might be required and explicitly recommended by the Security Council of the United Nations in accordance with the relevant provisions of the United Nations charter.

8. Calls upon: the US government to give leadership to the institution of an immediate and complete embargo under UN auspices on arms transfers to the Middle East.

Senator John Kerry Questions the President’s Leadership, 1991:Mr. Kerry: Mr. President, I wish, like everyone else here, that we were not at this moment talking about sending people to another war… the question

of being ready and certain is important to many of us of the Vietnam generation. We come to this debate with a measure of distrust, with some skepticism, with a searing commitment to ask honest questions and with a resolve to get satisfactory answers so that we are not misled again. I might add that I also come to this debate determined that whatever happens we will not confuse a war with the warriors. I am determined that our troops will receive complete and total support. And, that if we do go to war, I am committed that we do everything in our power to accomplish our mission with minimum casualties and bring the troops home to the gratitude and respect they deserve. But until the first shot is fired I remain troubled by the unanswered questions and by the human considerations…

There is a rush to war here. I do not know why, but there is a rush to war. There is a rush to have this thing over with. Somehow I cannot help but feel that if we were squared off against a stronger nation there would not be such a rush. Our history with the Soviet Union makes that clear. But with Iraq- we know we can win or think we know we can win. We know they are surrounded. We know our high-technology weapons and targeting capabilities can overwhelm the Iraqi military. And so we think we can get it over with an “acceptable level of casualties”… Are we supposed to go to war simply because one man- the President- makes a series of unilateral decisions that put us in a box- a box that makes that war, to a greater degree, inevitable? Are we supposed to go to war because once the President has announced something publicly, to reverse or question him is somehow detrimental to the Nation despite the fact we are a coequal partner in government?

Obviously, such an argument and such an approach to the governing process of this country makes Congress nothing more than a rubber stamp and literally renders inoperative our coequal decision-making responsibility in a matter of war and peace. It might be wise to remind ourselves that we still are a nation of laws and not of men; that we still elect our Presidents: we do not crown them. We had a revolution more than 200 years ago to settle that question and the Constitution put the war-making power in Congress’s hands precisely to avoid the very individual decision-making- that places us in the box we are told we are in today… We are in this position today because the President of the United States made a series of decisions that have put us in this position, not because we made them or because we fail to make them. The memory of Vietnam says to all of us that it is far, far better than we risk curbing in or reining in this rush to war now, rather than trying to get the American people [to] support it at some time down the road after the shooting has started. Nothing, nothing could faster bring us a repetition of the divisions and the torment this Nation faced during the 1960s and 1970s. Mr. President, in my heart and in my gut and in my mind I do not believe in sending people to war unless it is imperative. And it is not, in my view, imperative that in the next few days we send soldiers to fight a war. We are at this grave moment deciding whether or not we do so for two fundamental reasons: Because President Bush unilaterally decided to increase the troops to 430,000 and because he set a deadline.

We are not here because oil is not reaching the shores of the United States or our economy is crippled. We are not here because there has been an attack or there is the imminent threat of one. We are not here because the world has decided that we go to war. We are not here because the vital interests of the United States are somehow more at stake today than they will be in 3 weeks or 3 months or a year. We are here because the policy of one man suggests that we do not have the patience to wait this out and see if we can settle it differently… This obvious truth is contrary to the testimony of our own intelligence estimates. As CIA Director William Webster testified before the Congress just 1 month ago- on December 5, 1990- the CIA estimated that sanctions would need another 9 months to be effective- only then could we determine the extent to which they were working. That means that according to the Director of the CIA, we cannot conclude that sanctions are ineffective until next September… I end my comments back to where I began: are we ready for what this country and our countrymen will witness and bear? Have we come to the moment, each of us, with the values and interests at stake to call on each of us to send our own children to die?”

Senator John McCain Urges Resistance to Aggression, 1991:Mr. McCain: Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the resolution which is before us, and in support of a resolution which would, if necessary- and I

emphasize only if necessary- give the President the support of his body for the use of force. It is only by supporting our President that we can achieve the goals of our national policy and meet our urgent national security requirements in the Middle East… Mr. President, during this debate we hear references time and time again to the Vietnam War and how people want no more Vietnams. We hear that from the President. No one wants another Vietnam. The President does not, and neither does anyone in this body who has addressed this issue. Clearly, neither we, nor the American people seek a replay of that tragic chapter in our Nation’s history… Yet, this resolution could force a “Vietnam” upon us. If we drag out this crisis and do not act decisively and bring it to a successful resolution, we face the prospect of a much longer and bitter war. If we must use force, we must use it quickly and decisively. We must never again drift into a major conflict in slow stages, denying its seriousness, and setting political rules and constraints that make victory impossible…

Mr. President, this is a critical point in history. We determine at this moment whether we, in the first crisis of the post-Cold War era, can act together with the United Nations and every other civilized nation in the world, to prevent naked international aggression of the most heinous and disgraceful kind. It is clear to me that if we fail to act, our New World order will be inevitably a succession of dictators, or more Saddam Husseins. There is an abundance around this globe of real or would-be dictators who will see a green light. They will see a green light for aggression, and a green light for annexation of its weaker neighbors. We will have created a threat to the stability of this entire globe.

Senator George Mitchell Chooses Economic Sanctions Over War, 1991:Mr. Mitchell: Mr. President, first I want to say that every Member of the Senate firmly shares the convictions expressed by the Senator from Georgia

with respect to the support of American military personnel, our men and women, in the event that hostilities break out. That support is firm and unshakable… the President has submitted to the Congress a written request for authorization to use military force. That is the title of the resolution. In the current circumstances, clearly, it would be of such a scope and intensity that can only be described as war. So the second resolution is, plainly, by its own words, and by the circumstances which exist in the Persian Gulf, an authorization for war. Of that there can be no doubt or dispute. That is what we will be voting for or against today. I urge my colleagues to vote against authorizing an immediate war. I have discussed two things we have heard a lot about. Let me close by discussing something we have heard little about. It is this question: in the event of war, why should it be an American war, made up largely of American troops, American casualties, American deaths? The first resolution, the Nunn resolution, directly addresses this concern by supporting “efforts to increase the military and financial contributions made by allied nations.” The second resolution does not mention that subject.

Certainly, the United States has a high responsibility to lead the international community in opposing aggression… it may become necessary to use force to expel Iraq from Kuwait. But because war is such a grave undertaking, with such serious consequences, we should make certain that war is employed only as a last resort. War carries with it great costs and high risk. The possibilities of spending billions of dollars; a greatly disrupted oil supply and oil price increases; a war widened to included Israel, Turkey, or other allies; the long-term American occupation of Iraq; increased instability in the Persian Gulf region; long-standing Arab enmity against the United States; a return to isolationism at home. All of these risks are there.

But the largest risk, the greatest risk, the most profound risk is that of the loss of human life. How many people will die? How many young Americans will die? And for the families of those young Americans who die, for every one of us, the truly haunting question will be: did they die unnecessarily? No one will ever be able to answer that question, for if we go to war now, no one will ever know if sanctions would have worked, if given a full and fair chance. I urge my colleagues to vote for the first resolution, the Nunn resolution to vote for continuing economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure. I urge my colleagues to vote against the second resolution, to vote against an authorization for immediate war.

“Equal Responsibility- A Woman Fights in the Persian Gulf War” by Rhonda CornumIraq invaded its neighbor Kuwait in August 1990. In response, the US sent more than 500,000 troops to the Persian Gulf, and war began when Iraq

failed to withdraw by January 15, 1991. US forces won an overwhelming victory in a matter of weeks. Rhonda Cornum, a US medical officer attached to a combat unit, served in the Persian Gulf War and was captured by Iraqi troops. She describes he own experiences, as well as the changing role of women in the military.

We knew by the end of December that our mission would be a major helicopter assault deep into Iraq to cut off the Republican Guard… At that point, I thought the ground campaign was going to be ugly, and we were told to prepare for up to 25% of the combat units to be wounded or killed. One out of every four of the people I was caring for would be wounded or killed; one out of every four of the people I considered my friends would be hurt or dead before I went home. Those were hard numbers to turn over in my head, and it made me even more dedicated to making sure the medical side was as ready as it could be… I wasn’t afraid that I would panic in combat or fail to do my job; I knew I could do it. By then my medics and I had treated enough victims of car wrecks, airplane crashes, and gunshots that I felt good about our medical skills. We had scrounged supplies and equipment from around the theater, even things we didn’t have at Fort Rucker [Alabama]. Kory brought us some extra stretchers he didn’t need. We borrowed big catheters from one unit and chest tubes from another. We needed the tubes to inflate collapsed lungs. I didn’t have any packaged blood because most healthy young people will live a while without extra blood, as long as they have some kind of liquid volume. So IV fluid was vital to keep the remaining red blood cells circulating… The hardest part for me was trying to keep everybody else motivated and to convince them that our 18 Apaches could handle an entire division of Iraqi tanks. For the first few days the weather was so bad that the helicopters were grounded and we were practically defenseless; we wouldn’t have been able to fly either to fight or to escape. My medics all carried M-16 rifles, and I carried my 9mm pistol, and I suppose we could have stood in the bottom of the trench and tried to fight off an attack, but the odds would not have been very good. I did occasionally imagine having to kill another human being, but my job was to save lives, not take them. As medical people, we were allowed to defend ourselves but we were not supposed to engage the enemy. The rules were a little hazy for people assigned to combat units like we were…

Part of my responsibility [after the war ended] is to understand what happened to me and help others learn from my experience. This is similar to what we always do in the Army after an exercise or an operation: an after-action report of “lessons learned.” I have some lessons that I learned from my 6 months in Saudi Arabia and my week as a prisoner of war in Iraq. The lessons are personal, professional, and I suppose political…

The war dramatized the fact that the role of women in the military has already changed. We are no longer nurses and typists serving in rear areas- there were nearly 41,000 women in the Gulf working as doctors, nurses, pilots, mechanics, truck drivers, cooks, clerks, intelligence officers, communication

experts, and in a host of other specialties. There were women in every part of the theater, from the headquarters of General Schwarzkopf to a few women in the foxholes in Iraq and Kuwait. In my opinion, the war showed that America is ready for Army women, all of whom volunteered, to serve throughout the Army and not be excluded from combat jobs. Parents back home didn’t miss their sons less than their daughters, and kids didn’t miss their dads more or less than their moms… I believe the military pays members for two things: the jobs they do and the willingness to risk their lives if called to war… As a female soldier, I would resent being excluded [from combat]. We preach “equal opportunity” everywhere. I believe we should also be preaching “equal responsibility…” Some Lessons from the Cold War by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

It is too soon to know what the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War means for the future of humankind. But it is not too soon to reflect on some lessons of the Cold War, which on at least one occasion- the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962- almost exploded into a nuclear holocaust and the end of the world as we know it. How did humankind survive the Cold War? What caused and sustained it? The experts do not agree. Some see the Cold War as fundamentally an ideological struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of autocracy. Still others view the Cold War as a geopolitical and military contest that involved not just a Soviet-United States confrontation but a Western Europe-Soviet confrontation as well. While some specialists maintain that the Cold War strengthened hard-liners in the Soviet Union and sustained Communist rule there, others, such as Ronald Steel, believe that American policymakers exaggerated the military capacity of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, thus creating a bogus enemy that justified huge American defense build-ups. In the selection that follows, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., one of our greatest historians, argues that it is irrelevant to allocate blame for the Cold War. it emerged, he says, from the efforts of the US and the USSR to fill the “power vacuum” left by WWII, and it developed into “a holy war” because of very real ideological difference between the two new superpowers and their allies. At bottom, Schlesinger believes, the Cold War was a “fundamental debate” between communism and liberalism, including democratic socialism, and that debate charged the Cold War with its religious intensity. Now that the holy war is over, Schlesinger suggests 6 fallacies that helped make it so long, so dark, and so dangerous. These fallacies, Schlesinger suggests, resulted from the perception of events by both sides. Yes, the perception of reality is the crucial element in understanding the past. How people perceive events and the motives of an alleged enemy determine how they act, and how they act in turn affects the course of subsequent events. When it comes to the Cold War, human error, exaggeration, misunderstanding, overinterpretation- all played a key role in shaping and sustaining tensions between East and West. Schlesinger hopes that his 6 fallacies, or errors of perception, judgment, and action, will benefit future policymakers, so that the world can avoid another Cold War, another “intimate brush with collective suicide.” In the end, he argues, “Democracy won the political argument between East and West” and “the market won the economic argument.” Yet in retrospect, Schlesinger says, the Cold War can only remind us “of the ultimate independence of nations and of peoples.”

In those faraway days when the Cold War was young, the English historian Sir Herbert Butterfield lectured at Notre Dame on “The Tragic Element in Modern International Conflict.” Historians writing about modern wars, Butterfield said, characteristically start off with a “heroic” vision of things. They portray good men struggling against bad, virtue resisting evil. In this embattled mood, they see only the sins of the enemy and ignore the underlying structural dilemmas that so often provoke international clashes. As time passes and emotions subside, history enters the “academic” phase. Now historians see “a terrible human predicament” at the heart of the story, “a certain situation that contains the element of conflict irrespective of any special wickedness in any of the parties concerned.” Wickedness may deepen the predicament, but conflict would be there anyway. Perspective, Butterfield proposed, teaches us “to be a little more sorry for both parties than they knew how to be for one another.” History moves on from melodrama to tragedy.

Butterfield made a pretty good forecast of the way Cold War historiography has evolved in the more than 40 years since he spoke. In the US the “heroic” phase took two forms: the orthodox in the 1940s and 1950, with the Russians cast as the villains, and the revisionist in the 1960s, with the Americans as the villains. By the 1980s, American Cold War historians discerned what one of the best of them, John Lewis Gaddis, called an “emerging post-revisionist synthesis.” History began to pass from a weapon in the battle into a more analytical effort to define structural dilemmas and to understand adversary concerns. Glasnost permitted comparable biographical evolution in the former Soviet Union. Quite right: The more one contemplates the Cold War, the more irrelevant the allocation of blame seems. The Second World War left the international order in acute derangement. With the Axis sates vanquished, the Western European allies spent, the colonial empires in tumult and dissolution, great gaping holes appeared in the structure of world power. Only 2 nations- the United States and the Soviet Union- had the military strength, the ideological conviction, and the political will to fill these vacuums.

But why did this old-fashioned geopolitical rivalry billow up into a holy war so intense and obsessive as to threaten the very existence of human life on the planet? The 2 nations were constructed on opposite and profoundly antagonistic principles. They were divided by the most significant and fundamental disagreements over human rights, individual liberties, cultural freedom, the role of civil society, the direction of history, and the destiny of man. Each state saw the other as irrevocably hostile to its own essence. Given the ideological conflict on top of the geopolitical confrontation, no one should be surprised at what ensued. Conspiratorial explanations are hardly required. The real surprise would have been if there had been no Cold War.

And why has humanity survived the Cold War? The reason that the Cold War never exploded into hot war was surely (and by providential irony) the invention of nuclear weapons. One is inclined to support the suggestion (Elspeth Rostow’s, I think) that the Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to the atomic bomb. At last this curious episode in modern history is over, and we must ask what lessons we may hope to learn from a long, costly, dark, dreary, and dangerous affair; what precautions humanity should take to prevent comparable episodes in the future. I would suggest half a dozen fallacies that the world might well forego in years to come.

The first might be called the fallacy of overinterpreting the enemy. In the glory days of the Cold War, each side attributed to the other a master plan for world domination joined with diabolical efficiency in executing the plan. Such melodramatic imagining of brilliant and demonic enemies was truer to, say, Sax Rohmer, the creator of Dr. Fu Manchu, than to shuffling historical reality. No doubt Soviet leaders believed that the dialectic of history would one day bring about the victory of communism. No doubt Western leaders believed that the nature of man and markets would one day bring about the victory of free society. But such generalized hopes were far removed from operational master plans. “The superpowers,” as Henry Kissinger well put it, “often behave like 2 heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even 2 blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.”

The room has happily survived. But the blind men meanwhile escalated the geopolitical/ideological confrontation into a compulsively interlocked heightening of tension, spurred on by authentic differences in principle, by real and supposed clashes of interest, and by a wide range of misperception, misunderstanding, and demagoguery. Each superpower undertook for what it honestly saw as defensive reasons actions that the other honestly saw as unacceptably threatening and requiring stern countermeasures. Each persevered in corroborating the fears of the other. Each succumbed to the propensity to perceive local conflicts in global terms, political conflicts in moral terms, and relative difference in absolute terms. Together, in lockstep, they expanded the Cold War.

In overinterpreting the motives and actions of the other, each side forgot Emerson’s invaluable precept: “In analyzing history, do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite simple.” Both superpowers should have known from their own experience that governments mostly live from day to day responding to events as they come, that decisions are more often the result of improvisation, ignorance, accident, fatigue, chance, blunder, and sometimes even plain stupidity than of orchestrated master plans. One lesson to be drawn from the Cold War is that more things in life are to be explained by cock-up, to use the British term, than by conspiracy.

An accompanying phenomenon, at first a consequences and later a reinforcing cause of over -interpretation, was the embodiment of the Cold War in government institutions. Thus our second fallacy: the fallacy of over-institutionalizing the policy. The Soviet Union, a policy state committed to dogmas of class war and capitalist conspiracy and denied countervailing checks of free speech and press, had institutionalized the Cold War from the day Lenin arrived at the Finland Station. In later years the Cold war became for Stalin a convenient means of justifying his own arbitrary power and the awful sacrifices he demanded from the Soviet peoples. “Stalin needed the Cold War,” observed Earl Browder, whom Stalin purged as chief of the American Communist party, “to keep up the sharp international tensions by which he alone could maintain such a regime in Russia.”

In Washington by the 1950s the State Department, the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Council developed vested bureaucratic interests in the theory of a military expansionist Soviet Union. The Cold War conferred power,

money, prestige, and public influence on these agencies and on the people who ran them. By the natural law of bureaucracies, their stake in the conflict steadily grew. Outside of government, arms manufacturers, politicians, professors, publicists, pontificators, and demagogues invested careers and fortunes in the Cold War. In time, the adversary Cold War agencies evolved a sort of tacit collusion across the Iron Curtain. Probably the greatest racket in the Cold War was the charade periodically enacted by generals and admirals announcing the superiority of the other side in order to get bigger budgets for themselves. As President John F. Kennedy remarked to Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review, in the spring of 1963, “The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another.”

Institutions, alas, do not fold their tents and silently steal away. Ideas crystallized in bureaucracies resist change. With the Cold War at last at an end, each side faces the problem of deconstructing entrenched Cold War agencies spawned and fortified by nearly half a century of mutually profitable competition. One has only to reflect on the forces behind the anti-Gorbachev conspiracy of August 1991 [which sought in vain to overthrow him].

A third fallacy may be called the fallacy of arrogant prediction. As a devotee of a cyclical approach to American political history, I would not wish to deny that history exhibits uniformities and recurrences. But it is essential to distinguish between those phenomena that are predictable and those that are not. Useful historical generalizations are mostly statements about broad, deep-running, long-term changes: the life-cycle of revolutions, for example, or the impact of industrialization and urbanization, or the influence of climate or sea power or the frontier. The short term, however, contains too many variables, depends too much on accident and fortuity and personality, to permit exact and specific forecasts.

We have been living through extraordinary changes in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, in South Africa and in the Middle East. What is equally extraordinary is that no one foresaw these changes. All the statesmen, all the sages, all the prophets, all those bearded chaps on “Nightline”- all were caught unaware and taken by surprise; all were befuddled and impotent before the perpetual astonishments of the future. History has an abiding capacity to outwit our certitudes. Just a few years back some among us were so absolutely sure of the consequences if we did not smash the Reds at once that they called for preventive nuclear war. Had they been able to persuade the US government to drop the bomb on the Soviet Union in the 1950s or on China in the 1960s… but, thank heaven, they never did; and no one today, including those quondam preventive warriors themselves, regrets the American failure to do so.

The Almighty no doubt does know the future. But He has declined to confide such foresight to frail and erring mortals. In the early years of the Cold War, [theologian] Reinhold Niebuhr warned of “the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink… when they try to play the role of God to history.” Let us not fall for people who tell us that we must take drastic action today because of their conjectures as to what some other fellow or nation may do five or ten or twenty years from now. Playing God to history is the dangerous consequence of our fourth fallacy- the fallacy of national self-righteousness. “No government or social system is so evil,” President Kennedy said in his American University speech in 1963, “that its people must be condemned as lacking in virtue,” and he called on Americans as well as Russians to reexamine attitudes toward the Cold War, “for our attitude is as essential as theirs.” This thought came as rather a shock to those who assumed that the American side was so manifestly right that self-examination was unnecessary.

Kennedy liked to quote a maxim from the British military pundit Liddell Hart: “Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes- so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil-nothing is so self-blinding.” Perhaps Kennedy did not always live up to those standards himself, but he did on great occasions, like the Cuban missile crisis, and he retained a capacity for ironical objectivity that is rare among political leaders. Objectivity- seeing ourselves as others see us- is a valuable adjunct to statesmanship. Can we be so sure that our emotional judgments of the moment represent the last word and the final truth? The angry ideological conflicts that so recently obsessed us may not greatly interest our posterity. Our great-grandchildren may well wonder what in heaven’s name those disagreements could have been that drove the Soviet Union and the United States to the brink of blowing up the planet.

Men and women a century from now will very likely find the Cold War as obscure and incomprehensible as we today find the 30 Years War- the terrible conflict that devastated much of Europe not too long ago. Looking back at the 20 th century, our descendants will very likely be astonished at the disproportion between the causes of the Cold War, which may well seem trivial, and the consequences, which could have meant the veritable end of history. Russians and Americans alike came to see the Cold War as a duel between two superpowers, a Soviet-American duopoly. But the reduction of the Cold War to a bilateral game played by the Soviet Union and the United States is a fifth fallacy. The nations of Europe were not spectators at someone else’s match. They were players too.

Revisionist historians, determined to blame the Cold War on an American drive for world economic hegemony, have studiously ignored the role of Europe. Washington, they contend, was compelled to demand an “open door” for American trade and investment everywhere on the planet because American capitalism had to expand in order to survive. The Soviet Union was the main obstacle to a world market controlled by the United States. So, by revisionist dogma, American leaders whipped up an unnecessary Cold War in order to save the capitalist system.

No matter that some fervent open door advocates, like Henry A. Wallace, were also fervent opponents of the Cold War. No matter that the republics of the former Soviet Union now want nothing more than American trade and investment and full integration into the world market. And no matter that most Western European nations in the 1940s had Socialist governments and that the democratic socialist leaders- Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin in Britain, Leon Blum and Paul Ramadier in France, Paul Henri Spaak in Belgium, Kurt Schumacher, Ernst Reuter, and Willy Brandt in West Germany- had powerful reasons of their own to fear the spread of Stalinist influence and Soviet power.

Such men could not have cared less about an open door for American capitalism. They cared deeply, however, about the future of democratic socialism. When I used to see Aneurin Bevan, the leader of the left wing of the British Labour Party, in London in 1944, he doubted that the wartime alliance would last and saw the struggle for postwar Europe as between the democratic socialists and the Communists. “The Communist Party,” Bevan wrote in 1951, “is the sworn and inveterate enemy of the Socialist and Democratic Parties. When it associates with them it does so as a preliminary to destroying them.” Many in the Truman administration in the 1940s espoused this view and, dubbing themselves (in private) NCL, favored American support for the non-Communist Left.

The democratic socialists, moreover, were in advance of official Washington in organizing against the Stalinist threat. Despite his above-the-battle stance at Notre Dame, Herbert Butterfield himself wrote in 1969, “A new generation often does not know (and does not credit the fact when informed) that Western Europe once wondered whether the United States could ever be awakened to the danger from Russia.” The subsequent opening of British Foreign Office papers voluminously documents Sir Herbert’s point. Far from seeing President Truman in the revisionist mode as an anti-Soviet zealot hustling a reluctant Europe into a gratuitous Cold War, the Foreign Office saw him for a considerable period as an irresolute waffle distracted by the delusion that the United States could play mediator between Britain and the Soviet Union. Ernest Bevin, Britain’s Socialist foreign secretary, thought Truman’s policy was “to withdraw from Europe and in effect leave the British to get on with the Russians as best they could.” A true history of the Cold War must add European actors to the cast and broaden both research nets and analytical perspectives.

The theory of the Cold War as a Soviet-American duopoly is sometimes defended on the ground that, after all, the United States and the Soviet Union were in full command of their respective alliances. But nationalism, the most potent political emotion of the age, challenged the reign of the superpowers almost from the start: Tito [of Yugoslavia], Mao, and others vs. Moscow; De Gaulle, Eden and others vs. Washington. Experience has adequately demonstrated how limited superpowers are in their ability to order their allies around and even to control client governments wholly dependent on them for economic and military support. Far from clients being the prisoners of the superpower, superpowers often end as prisoners of their clients. These are lessons Washington has painfully learned (or at least was painfully taught; has the government finally learned from them?) in Vietnam, El Salvador, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait. As for the Soviet Union, its brutal interventions and wretched Quislings in Eastern Europe only produced bitterness and hatred. The impact of clients on principals is another part of the unwritten history of the Cold War. The Cold War was not a bilateral game.

Nor was it- our sixth and final fallacy- a zero-sum game. For many years, Cold War theology decreed that a gain for one side was by definition a defeat for the other. This notion led logically not to an interest in negotiation but to a demand for capitulation. In retrospect the Cold War, humanity’s most intimate brush with collective suicide, can only remind us of the ultimate interdependence of nations and of peoples.

After President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev stared down the nuclear abyss together in October 1962, they came away determined to move as fast as they could toward détente. Had Kennedy lived, Khrushchev might have held on to power a little longer, and together they would have further subdued the excesses of the Cold War. They rejected the zero-sum approach and understood that intelligent negotiation brings mutual benefit. I am not an unlimited admirer

of Ronald Reagan, but he deserves his share of credit for taking Mikhail Gorbachev seriously, abandoning the zero-sum fallacy he had embraced for so long, and moving the Cold War toward its end.

And why indeed has it ended? If the ideological confrontation gave the geopolitical rivalry its religious intensity, so the collapse of the ideological debate took any apocalyptic point out of the Cold War. The proponents of liberal society were proven right. After 70 years of trial, communism turned out- by the confession of its own leaders- to be an economic, political, and moral disaster. Democracy won the political argument between East and West. The market won the economic argument. Difficulties lie ahead, but the fundamental debate that generated the Cold War is finished.

UNIT 10READINGS- CLINTON AND THE 1990s

AMSCO- THE CLINTON YEARS, 1993-2001: PROSPERITY AND PARTISANSHIPDuring the last years of the 20th century, the US enjoyed a period of unrivaled economic growth and technological innovation. The end of the Cold War

allowed Americans to focus more on economic and domestic issues. But, during this period, American politics became more divided, bitter, and scandal-driven.

Anti-Incumbent Mood:A stagnant economy, huge budget deficits, and political deadlock fueled a growing disillusionment with government, especially as practices in the

nation’s capital. The movement to impose term limits on elected officials gained popularity on the state level, but the Supreme Court ruled in US Term Limits Inc. v. Thorton (1995) that the states could not limit the tenure of federal lawmakers without a constitutional amendment. Another reflection of Americans’ disillusionment with Washington politics was the ratification in 1992 of the 27 th Amendment. First proposed by James Madison in 1789, this amendment prohibited members of Congress from raising their own salaries. Future raises could not go into effect until the next session of Congress.

The Election of 1992:As expected, George H. Bush was nominated by the Republicans for a second term. After a long career in public service, the president seemed tired

and out of touch with average Americans, who were more concerned about their paychecks than with Bush’s foreign policy successes. WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON- Among Democrats, Bill Clinton, the youthful governor of Arkansas, emerged from the primaries as his party’s choice for president. The first member of the baby-boom generation to be nominated for president, Clinton proved an articulate and energetic campaigner. He presented himself as a moderate “New Democrat,” who focused on economic issues such as jobs, education, and health care, which were important to the “vital center” of the electorate. The strategy was known among his political advisers as “It’s the economy, stupid!”

H. ROSS PEROT- Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire, entered the 1992 race for president as an independent. Able to use his own resources to finance a series of TV commercials, Perot appealed to millions with his anti-Washington, anti-deficit views. On Election Day, Perot captured nearly 20% of the popular vote for the best third-party showing since Theodore Roosevelt and the Bull Moose campaign of 1912.

RESULTS- Despite the serious challenge from Perot, the front-runners still divided up all the electoral votes: 370 for Clinton (43% popular vote), 168 for Bush (37% popular vote). Clinton and his running mate, Sen. Albert Gore of Tennessee, did well in the South and recaptured the majority of the elderly and blue-collar workers from the Republicans. In addition, the Democrats again won control of both houses of Congress. The new Congress better reflected the diversity of the US population. Among its 66 minority members and 48 women was Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, the first African American woman elected to the Senate.

Clinton’s First Term (1993-1997):During the first two years of the Clinton administration, Senate Republicans used filibusters to kill the president’s economic stimulus package,

campaign-finance reform, environmental bills, and health care reform. The president assigned his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to head a task force to propose a plan for universal health coverage, which had been a goal of the Democrats since the Truman presidency. The complicated health care proposal ran into determined opposition from the insurance industry, small business organizations, and the Republicans, and it failed to pass again. Clinton also failed to end discrimination against gays in the military and settled for the rule, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Under this policy, member of the military could still be expelled for being gay or lesbian, but they would not routinely be asked or expected to volunteer information about their sexual orientation.

EARLY ACCOMPLISHMENTS- The Democratic Congress started out in 1993 by passing the Family and Medical Leave Act and the “motor-voter” law that enabled citizens to register to vote as they received their driver’s licenses. The Brady Handgun bill, which mandated a five-day waiting period for the purchase of handguns, was enacted. In 1994, Congress enacted Clinton’s Anti-Crime bill, which provided $30 billion in funding for more police protection and crime-prevention programs. The legislation also banned the sale of most assault weapons, which angered the gun lobby. After protracted negotiations and compromise, Congress passed a deficit-reduction budget that included $225 billion in spending cuts and $241 billion in tax increases. Incorporated in this budget were the president’s requests for increased appropriations for education and job training. Clinton also won a notable victory by signing the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which created a free-trade zone with Canada and Mexico. Despite these accomplishments, Clinton’s apparent waffling on policies and eagerness to compromise seemed to confirm his negative image as “Slick Willie.”

Republicans Take Over Congress:In the midterm elections of November 1994, the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954. They benefited

from the perception that the Democratic Congress was inept and dedicated to increasing taxes and federal regulations. President Clinton adjusted to his party’s defeat by declaring in his 1995 State of the Union address, “The era of big government is over.”

ZEALOUS REFORMERS- Newt Gingrich, the newly elected Speaker of the House, led the Republicans in an attack on federal programs and spending outlined in their campaign manifesto, “Contract with America.” While the president and moderates agreed with the goal of a balanced budget, Clinton proposed a “leaner, not meaner” budget. This confrontation resulted in two shutdowns of the federal government in late 1995, which many Americans blamed on an overzealous Congress. Anti-government reformers were not helped by the mood after the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City by militia-movement extremists. The bombing took 169 lives, the worst act of terrorism in the nation’s history until the attacks on September 11, 2001

BALANCED BUDGET- Finally, in the 1996 election year, Congress and the president compromised on a budget that left Medicare and Social Security benefits intact, limited welfare benefits to 5 years under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, set some cubs on immigrants, increased the minimum wage, and balanced the budget. The spending cuts and tax increases made during Clinton’s first term, along with record growth in the economy, helped to eliminate the deficit in federal spending in 1998 and produced the first surplus since 1969. In his battle with the Republican Congress, President Clinton captured the middle ground by successfully characterizing the Republicans as extremists, and by taking over their more popular positions, such as balancing the budget and reforming welfare. He was also aided in 1996 by a fast-growing economy that had produced over 10 million new jobs.

The Election of 1996:Sen Bob Dole of Kansas, the majority leader of the Senate, became Clinton’s Republican opponent. His campaign, which proposed a 15% tax cut, never

captured the voters’ imagination. Character attacks and massive campaign spending by both sides did little to bring more people to the polls, and the turnout

dropped below 50% of eligible voters. The Clinton-Gore ticked won with 379 electoral votes (49.2% popular vote), while dole and his running mate, Jack Kemp, captured 159 electoral votes (40.8% popular vote). Ross Perot ran again, but had little impact on the election.Clinton became the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to be reelected president. The Republicans could celebrate retaining control of both houses of Congress, which they had not done since the 1920s.

Clinton’s Second Term- Prosperity and Poisonous Politics:During President Clinton’s second term (1997-2001), the United States enjoyed the longest peacetime economic expansion in his history, with annual

growth rates of over 4%. Technological innovations in computers, the Internet, and wireless communications fueled increased national productivity (a gain of over 5% in 1999) and made “e- (or electronic) commerce” part of American life. After years of heavy competition with Europe and Asia, American businesses had become proficient in cutting costs, which both increased their profitability and held down the US inflation rate to 2-3% a year. Investors were rewarded with record gains in the stock market (over 22% average annual gains in Standard and Poor’s Index of 500 leading stocks). The number of households worth $1 million or more quadrupled in the 1990s, to over 8 million, or one in 14 households. The unemployment rate fell from 7.5% in 1992 to a 30-year low of 3.9% in 2000, and the unemployment of African Americans and Hispanics was the lowest on record. During the peak of prosperity from 1997-99, average and lower-income Americans experienced the first gains in real income since 1973. However, the economic boom was over by 2001, and both investors and wage earners faced another recession.

ISSUES OF THE SURPLUS- The prosperity of the late 1990s shifted the debate in Washington to what to do with the federal government’s surplus revenues, projected to be $4.6 trillion over the first ten years of the 21 st century. In 1997 Congress and the president did compromise on legislation that cut taxes on estates and capital gains, and gave tax credits for families with children and for higher education expenses. As Clinton’s second term progressed, the struggle between the Democratic president and the Republican Congress intensified. The Republicans pressed for more tax revenue cuts, such as the elimination of the “death tax” (estate taxes) and the “marriage penalty” (taxes on two-income families), while the president held out for using the projected surplus to support Social Security, expand Medicare, and reduce the national debt.

INVESTIGATIONS AND IMPEACHMENT- From the early days of the Clinton presidency, President Clinton, his wife, Hilary, cabinet members, and other associates had been under investigation by Congress and by congressionally appointed independent prosecutors (a legacy of the independent prosecutor law of the Watergate era). Some Democrats viewed these investigations as a “right-wing conspiracy” to overturn the elections of 1992 and 1996. After long and expensive investigations, the Clintons were not charged with illegalities in the Whitewater real estate deal, the firings of White House staff (“Travel-gate”), or the political use of FBI files (“File-gate”). However, independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr charged that President Clinton, during his deposition in a civil suit about alleged sexual harassment while governor of Arkansas, had lied about his relations with a young woman who has served as a White House intern.

IMPEACHMENT- In December 1998, the House voted to impeach the president on two counts, perjury and obstruction of justice. Members of both parties and the public condemned Clinton’s reckless personal behavior, but popular opinion did not support the largely Republican attempt to remove him from office. In the fall elections, Democrats gained House seats and Newt Gingrich resigned as speaker. In February 1999, after a formal trial in the Senate, neither impeachment charge was upheld even by a Senate majority, much less the two-thirds vote needed to remove a president from office. However, the Republicans damaged Clinton’s reputation by making him the first president to be impeached since 1868. A weary Congress in 2000 allowed the controversial law establishing the independent prosecutor’s office to lapse.

Foreign Policy in the Clinton Administration:The end of the Cold War, while taking away the Soviet threat, exposed dozens of long-standing ethnic, religious, and cultural conflicts in a world of 190

nations. During Clinton’s first term, Secretary of State Warren Christopher conducted a low-key foreign policy, which critics though lacked coherent purpose. In 1997 Madeline K. Albright became the first woman to serve as secretary of state. She proved more assertive in the use of American power, but questions still remained about the role of the United States, especially the use of its armed forces for peacekeeping in foreign nations’ internal conflicts.

PEACEKEEPING- The first deaths of US soldiers in humanitarian missions during the Clinton administration came in the civil war in Somalia in 1993. In 1994, after some reluctance, the president sent 20,000 troops into Haiti to restore its elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, after a military coup and deteriorating economic conditions had caused an exodus of Haitians to Florida. The US also played a key diplomatic role in negotiating an end to British rule and the armed conflict in Northern Ireland in 1998.

EUROPE- Under President Boris Yeltsin, Russia struggled with attempted economic reforms and rampant corruption. In 2000 his elected successor, Vladimir Putin, had to deal with the physical breakdown of systems, such as Russia’s space station, and the accidental sinking of a nuclear submarine, which killed all on board. Relations with the United States were strained by Russia’s brutal repression of the civil war in Chechnya, the admittance in 1999 of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to NATO, and by Russia’s support of Serbia in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. In the latter, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic carried out a series of armed conflicts to suppress independence movements in the former Yugoslav provinces of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Hundreds of thousands of members of ethnic and religious minorities were killed in a process that was labeled “ethnic cleansing.” A combination of diplomacy, bombing, and troops from NATO countries, including the United States, stopped the bloodshed first in Bosnia in 1995 and again in Kosovo in 1999. The Serbian people themselves removed Milosevic from power in the 2000 election, and an international tribunal tried him for the crime of genocide. These Balkan wars proved to be the worst conflict Europe had seen since World War II, and were a troubling reminder of how World War I had started.

ASIA- Nuclear proliferation became a growing concern in the 1990s, when North Korea stepped up its nuclear reactor and missile programs, and India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons for the first time in 1998. North Korea agreed to halt the development of nuclear weapons after direct negotiations with the Clinton administration, but later secretly restarted the program. In 1995, 20 years after the fall of Saigon to the Communists, the United States established diplomatic relations with Vietnam. The Clinton administration continued to sign trade agreements with China through his second term, hoping to improve diplomatic relations and encourage reform within China, despite protests from human rights activists and labor unions at home, and Chinese threats to the still-independent island nation of Taiwan.

MIDDLE EAST- Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s continued defiance of UN weapons inspectors led to the suspension of all inspections in 1998. President Clinton responded with a series of air strikes against Iraq, but Hussein remained in power, as support for US economic sanctions declined in Europe and the Middle East. The United States continued to assist in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which resulted in the return of home rule to the Palestinians in the Gaza strip and parts of the West Bank territories, and the signing of a peace treaty with King Hussein of Jordan in 1994. The peace process slowed after the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in 1995, and it broke down later in 2000 over issues of Israeli security and control of Jerusalem. Renewed violence in Israel also provided a new round of anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world.

GLOBALIZATION- The surging increases in trade, communications, and the movement of capital around the world during this era were key parts of the process of globalization. Globalization promoted the development of global and regional economic organizations. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1994 to oversee trade agreements, enforce trade rules, and settle disputes. The powerful International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank made loans to and supervised the economic policies of poorer nations with debt troubles. The European Union (EU) became a unified market of 15 nations, 12 of which adopted

a single currency, the euro, in 2002. The EU planned to grow to 25 nations, and promised to become an economic superpower of the 21 st century. The Group of Seven (G-7), the world’s largest industrial powers (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States), which controlled two-thirds of the world’s wealth, remained the leading economic powers, but China and India enjoyed rapid development. The growing gap between the rich and poor nations of the world caused tensions, especially over the debts the poor nations owed to powerful banks and the richest nations. Workers and unions in the richest nations often resented globalization, however, because they lost their jobs to cheaper labor markets in the developing world.

The Wisdom To Let the Good Times Roll by Richard W. StevensonNY Times December 25, 2000

Washington, December 24- Aside from his impeachment, nothing defined Bill Clinton’s years in the White House more than prosperity. Not until the final days of his presidency was there more than a bump in what early this year became the longest economic expansion on record. Jobs were plentiful. Wages rose and poverty fell. Advances in technology reinvigorated some industries and created others. Even after tumbling this year, the stock market produced substantial gains for the growing ranks of shareholders. The nation’s resurgent financial strength complemented its military muscle in projecting American power around the world.

In political terms, Mr. Clinton drew vital succor from the economy. His re-election in 1996, his survival in office after his relationship with a White House intern and whatever authority he enjoyed in his policy clashes with Republicans derived at least in part from the widespread sense that times, for most people, have never been better. Economists, historians, and members of both parties will no doubt debate for years whether Mr. Clinton was lucky or good when it came to the economy. The debate will only become more intense if the sharp deceleration of the economy over the past few weeks leads to a recession, as some analysts think is possible. “Any president in large measure is evaluated on the state of the economy during his administration,” said Leon E. Panetta, who was Mr. Clinton’s budget director and chief of staff. “It that’s the test with Clinton, it will clearly show the economy to be his greatest triumph.”

Even his supporters concede that Mr. Clinton was fortunate to occupy the White House during a period when the economy enjoyed the payoff from decades of technological progress, generating a cascade of unanticipated tax revenues. Supporters contend that Mr. Clinton realized early that reducing the federal deficit would be crucial and that his management of economic policy spurred growth and lead to revenue surpluses.

Republicans, though, bristle at any suggestion that Mr. Clinton deserves anything more than token credit, and in any case his economic record is not without blemishes. Although the unemployment rate fell during his presidency, many high-paying jobs in manufacturing were lost to foreign competition. Consumers ran up staggering levels of personal debt. The trade deficit surged. Farmers suffered from low prices. And even as the gap between rich and poor remained stubbornly wide, the administration often seemed lulled, like much of the rest of the nation, by the relentless march of stock quotations across the bottom of the screen on CNBC.

To his critics, the best that can be said is that nothing he did derailed an expansion that had its origins in the early 1980s, was reinvigorated with the end of the Cold War and was interrupted briefly in the early 1990s by the Persian Gulf War. The economy has been growing without interruption since March 1991, nearly two years before Mr. Clinton took office. “This is a pretty smart guy riding a big canoe down a big river,” said Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House. “And he didn’t capsize it. But the canoe was going to go down the river, and the river is huge.”

His claim to credit rests primarily on his handling of two issues: budget policy and trade. His predecessor, George Bush, had started to deal with the rapidly mounting federal deficit in 1990 by agreeing with Democrats in Congress on a package of tax increases and spending restraints. But when Mr. Clinton took office in 1993, the fiscal mess was getting worse. Mr. Clinton responded by pushing through legislation that provided for immediate tax increase and delayed spending cuts to bring down the deficit. It was a move that united Republican lawmakers against him and cost his party dearly in the 1994 midterm elections, but also gave him cover to call for increased spending on his priorities- education, health care, and environmental protection. He agreed later to balance the budget, albeit under intense Republican pressure. As deficits gave way to large and growing surpluses, he pushed to pay off the national debt.

Mr. Clinton’s fiscal policy served as a laboratory for a change in economic thought. For decades, governments had operated in the belief that running deficits was often good because it would stimulate activity and employment in an economy running at less than its potential. But that traditional assumption, based on the economic theories of John Maynard Keyes, has been turned on its head, at least in the United States. Deficits are now considered growth-sapping, draining capital from the private sector, pushing up interest rates and creating uncertainty on Wall Street.

Balanced budgets- or better yet, surpluses- are believed to hold down interest rates, free capital for the private sector and reassure investors about long-term economic stability. Lawrence H. Summers, the treasury secretary, said recently that, “propelled by the experience of recent years, it has become conventional wisdom that reducing budget deficits and running surpluses is expansionary, not contradictionary, and that that is the way forward.”

Much to the frustration of Republicans, who consider him an unreconstructed tax-and-spend liberal, Mr. Clinton has blurred if not cast off his party’s longstanding reputation for profligacy. By focusing the debate on the affordability of Republican calls for tax cuts and not on calls by Democrats for additional spending, he has been able to use the surplus to pay for his priorities while accusing Republicans of playing fast and loose with the economy. Indeed, Democrats at the end of the Clinton era have a credible if disputed claim to being the party of fiscal responsibility, a political transformation of the first order. “I knew if we could just get the deficit down, get interest rates down, get out of the way of the economy and then do some things that would speed it up,” Mr. Clinton said this year, “it would be great.”

In the international sphere, Mr. Clinton recognized early on the power of globalization to reshape economies. Despite protests from organized labor and many Democrats, he decided that the United States had more to gain than to lose from pushing for trade pacts that opened American markets to competitors in return for new export opportunities. With help from Republicans, he ratified the creation of a free trade zone in North America, reduced trade barriers and brought China into the world trading system. But on trade, unlike on budget policy, he was never able to unite his party, and he leaves the Democrats as divided over how to face the global economy as they were when he took office. To a degree that was striking for a Democratic president, Mr. Clinton struck closely to orthodox, even conservative, economic policy, sometimes to a degree that unsettled or disheartened his party’s core constituencies.

In fighting poverty, he sought to shift his party’s emphasis from entitlements to programs that reward work, like the earned-income tax credit for the working poor. He upset liberal Democrats by signing a bill to force welfare recipients into the work force more quickly at a time when there was no assurance there would be jobs for them. But for the most part Mr. Clinton was able to hold the Democratic coalition together by linking his policies to job creation and economic opportunity, and then pointing to falling unemployment, rising incomes, low interest rates, stable prices and improved international competitiveness as validation of his strategy. “The bottom line is that it worked,” said John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO.

Mr. Clinton has been president at a time of immense economic change. It has been a period when market forces have swept the globe, burying the remnants of communism in the former Soviet Union and its clients, enticing and simultaneously punishing much of the developing world and making the United States more than ever the capital of capitalism.

Fascinated by policy and convinced from the start of his first presidential campaign that his political fate would be determined in large part by the economy, Mr. Clinton was as fully engaged in economic policy as any president has been. Breaking with the practice of the two preceding administrations, he adopted a hands-off policy toward the Federal Reserve Board. In doing so, he granted Alan Greenspan, the chairman, considerable freedom at a time when the Fed was coming to the conclusion that the technology-enhanced economy was capable of much faster growth than the old theories had predicted.

Mr. Clinton and his team handled several international financial crises adeptly, and despite occasional protests from exporters, they stuck consistently to a policy of supporting a strong dollar, a stance that helped hold down inflation and attract foreign investment. Though his Justice Department brought an antitrust case against the Microsoft Corporation, his administration continued the decades-long move toward deregulation of many industries, especially telecommunications. And he generally kept the federal government from meddling in the most far-reaching technological development of the 1990s, the Internet.

But he had his share of setbacks, mistakes and disappointments. He put the troubled future of Social Security on the national agenda in 1998. But he underestimated the ideological divide between the parties on the issue, and found his ability to maneuver constrained by his need not to alienate members of his

party during his impeachment. He also tried to address Medicare’s long-term financial troubles. But when a bipartisan commission came back with a more conservative approach than he and many Democrats could swallow, he backed away. He occasionally ignored the advice of his advisers in search of short-term political benefit, as when he released oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last fall just as oil prices were becoming an issue in the presidential campaign. But for the most part, his economic policy was less subject than most other areas of his presidency to the criticism that he had few convictions and was guided by polls and his political needs. “In many ways, as an economist, I’ve been impressed at the Clinton administration’s ability to rise above the Beltway politics of Washington,” said Diane C. Swonk, chief economist at the Bank One Corporation in Chicago.

Mr. Clinton’s approach to the economy evolved gradually from his days as a candidate through his first years in office. Campaigning in 1992, Mr. Clinton promised something for everyone: a package of spending to give the still-feeble recovery a jump; a longer-term package of government spending on needs like education, health and the environment, and a tax cut for the middle class. It was by no means apparent that dealing with the deficit was at the top of his list. On December 3, 1992, Mr. Clinton held his first meeting with Mr. Greenspan. The Fed chairman told the president-elect that the best thing he could do for the economy would be to undertake a deficit-reduction effort big enough to be judged credible by the bond market. If Mr. Clinton could show Wall Street that he was intent on getting the deficit under control, Mr. Greenspan told him, investors would conclude that the threat of inflation was diminishing, and they would put downward pressure on long-term interest rates. Lower rates, in turn, would make it easier for consumers to buy cars and houses, and make it more affordable for businesses to build factories or develop technologies.

Four days later, Mr. Clinton’s advisers told him of new projections showing that the deficit was going to be considerably larger than anticipated. On January 7, 1993, less than two weeks before Inauguration Day, Mr. Clinton gathered his economic team in Little Rock, Arkansas. “Less than an hour into the meeting, he looked at us all around the dining room in the Governor’s Mansion and said deficit reduction is a threshold issue,” said Robert E. Rubin, the former Wall Street executive who was Mr. Clinton’s economic policy coordinator and who later became treasury secretary. “He said if we don’t do this, we can’t do anything else.” This was largely unchartered territory for a Democratic president. Republicans had always found it easy to embrace deficit reduction, at least in principle, partly for economic reasons but also because it fit their ideological push for smaller, less influential government.

In early 1993 there was no established and politically comfortable deficit-reduction rationale for a Democrat. But with a little prodding from Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Rubin and others, Mr. Clinton grasped that, through the mechanism of lower interest rate and stronger growth, deficit reduction could be made meaningful to lunch-bucket Democrats. Mr. Rubin recalled, “Clinton said, ‘I have a jobs program, and my jobs program is deficit reduction.’” The new administration eventually settled on a plan that called for slightly less than a $500 billion deficit reduction over 5 years, largely through a tax increase on the wealthy, at a time when the deficit was running at nearly $300 billion a year. He persuaded his party members in Congress to go along, but only barely, and attracted not a single Republican vote in either chamber.

Did the plan work? Long-term interest rates did go down. The economy, which was already strengthening, warmed so much that the Federal Reserve stepped in to cool it in 1994, driving rates back up. Nonetheless, job growth accelerated and unemployment fell steadily, from 7% in mid-1993 to around 6% a year later and to about 4% throughout this year. But the economy at that point was being driven at least as much by developments having little to do with government policy as it was by anything happening in Washington. Facing intense global competition and pressure from shareholders, companies were reaping the benefits of years of cost cutting and investments in technology. The most basic measure of economic potential, the growth rate of productivity, or output per hour, began creeping up after years of lackluster performance.

But if the long-term economic outlook was improving, the immediate political impact of the 1993 budget plan was grim for Democrats. The tax increase, along with the administration’s ill-fated health care proposal the next year, led voters in 1994 to hand control of the House and the Senate to Republicans. With the Republican takeover of Congress, the question was no longer whether the two parties would act to reduce the deficit further; it was whether Mr. Clinton would match the Republican promise for a balanced budget.

Mr. Clinton had made some tough decisions in his first term: pushing the North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress over the objections of much of his party, and bailing Mexico out of a financial crisis. But it was unclear in early 1995 that a Democratic president could eliminate the budget deficit without sacrificing everything that made him a Democrat, most notably support for poverty-fighting entitlement programs like food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid. Most of Mr. Clinton’s advisers eventually accepted the political need to endorse the principle of a balanced budget. But they were content to let the Republicans put out their plan first, convinced that the Republicans would pay a heavy political price once they had to propose specific budget cuts. But Mr. Clinton was impatient. His new adviser, Dick Morris, pushed the president to get out in front of the issue, even if it meant proposing his own cuts. The more liberal members of the White House staff could see that Mr. Clinton was torn, and they feared that he would rush in with a proposal that would endanger what they saw as sacrosanct commitments. Among themselves, staff members talked of quitting should Mr. Clinton cut a deal with Mr. Gingrich and the Republicans.

On April 10, Alan Cohen, a budget analyst at the Treasury Department, ran some numbers. He found out that if Mr. Clinton were to propose balancing the budget in 10 or 11 years rather than 5 or 7, as the Republicans were proposing, the administration could protect its priority programs and still eliminate the deficit. He gave his one-page analysis to Mr. Rubin, who showed it to the president. On May 29, 1995, Memorial Day, the president called his economic team and senior advisers to the Oval Office. When he criticized the Republican budget, Mr. Clinton asked them, what was he to say when he was asked where his budget plan was. His voice heavy with sarcasm, he imagined his response: why should he have a balanced budget? He was only the president of the United States.

Less than three weeks later Mr. Clinton unveiled a plan that he said would eliminate the deficit in 10 years. Republicans assailed it as unrealistic and too slow, but that was not the point. From that moment, both parties were committed to a goal that a few years earlier was politically and economically unthinkable. At midmorning on May 2, 1997, negotiators from the White House huddled in an office beneath the Capitol with the members of the House and Senate budget committees to complete a deal to balance the budget.

It had been a long road. A bitter standoff in late 1995 and early 1996 had led to a government shutdown. The issue was put on the back burner during the 1996 campaign, but in early 1997 White House officials opened talks with Republicans in Congress. Their instructions from Mr. Clinton were clear: get an agreement. The final task on that spring morning was to divide an unexpected windfall, the result of a last-minute re-estimate of the fiscal outlook by the Congressional Budget Office. With the economy getting stronger, tax revenues were pouring in much faster than expected. The deal they unveiled later that day promised a balanced budget in 5 years, by 2002, and a reduction in the capital gains tax to boot. But within months it was clear that the fiscal situation was improving far faster than the agreement had contemplated. Not only was the deficit about to disappear, but surpluses were just over the horizon.

At the White House in the fall of 1997, Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economic Council, convened a series of secret meetings to plot strategy for the new age of surpluses. The surplus, the president’s economic and political advisers decided, should go first to shoring up Social Security, which was going to run short of money as the baby boomer generation retired. And committing the surplus to Social Security, the most untouchable of programs, would be a politically impregnable roadblock to using it for tax cuts.

“What should we do with this projected surplus?” Mr. Clinton asked in his 1998 State of the Union address, delivered in the deepening shadow of accusations that he had lied under oath about his sexual relationship with a White House intern. “I have a simple four-word answer: Save Social Security First.” As a practical matter, reserving the surplus for Social Security meant using it to pay down the national debt, the $3.5 trillion hangover from decades of deficit spending.

Over the next several years, with little debate, Congress and the administration drifted into an agreement that showed every sign of being unbreakable: the better portion of the surplus would be off limits for tax cuts and new spending, and would be used only to reduce debt or fill Social Security’s long-term financing gap. In a little over a decade, if the surplus projections and the agreement hold, the debt will be paid off.

White House officials took it as the highest praise when Mr. Greenspan, in a meeting with Mr. Clinton last January, said the president should be congratulated for setting off a bidding war between the parties over which could do more debt reduction. It is disheartening to some Democrats that in an age of fiscal plenty, the most lasting achievement of the Clinton era may have been not in health care or education or the environment or poverty reduction, but in cleaning up the government’s books and keeping Wall Street happy.

Not to Mr. Clinton. Asked in an appearance last summer about the “toughest one or two decisions” and the “highest moments, just the greatest feelings” he had encountered as president, he put one episode in both categories: pushing through his first deficit-reduction package in 1993. “I knew it was going to turn the country around,” he said. “I just knew it.” The Clinton Legacy.

Bill Gates: Enigmatic Genius of Microsoft by Walter Isaacson 1997We are living today in the midst of a technological revolution whose historical significance has already eclipsed that of the Industrial Revolution. Such

technological innovations as television, fax and photocopy machines, communication satellites, cell phones, teleconferences, telecommuting, and computers with email and Internet capabilities have profoundly altered our lives. The advent of the computer is perhaps the most important technological achievement of all. The computer has made space programs and missile and air-defense systems possible; it has revolutionized the armed services and their weapons of war. It has completely transformed our methods of literary composition, book publishing, and filmmaking. It is the nerve-center of governments, economics, educational institutions, and transportation and business operations the world over. The computer and the World Wide Web have helped convert our planet into a community of interconnected and interdependent nations. The computer has changed the way we work, play, think, and speak. Indeed, it has added a new nomenclature (megabyte, software, surf, browser, laptop, user-friendly, RAM) to our vocabulary.

In the last two decades, we have also witnessed a revolution in personal computers (PC’s). The leading spirit of the PC revolution is William “Bill” Henry Gates III, co-founder of Microsoft and the subject of the following selection by Times writer Walter Isaacson. At age 14, Gates established his first company, Traf-o-Data, which sold systems that counted traffic flow; young Gates earned $20,000 from that venture. In 1973, he entered Harvard with plans to become a lawyer. Two years later he dropped out, moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and with Paul Allen formed Microsoft (Allen soon left the company because of a personality clash with Gates). Microsoft’s first important contract, negotiated with the Tandy Corporation, was to create software for its Radio Shack computers. In 1980, now relocated in Seattle, Washington, Microsoft began an association with International Business Machines (IBM), which was starting to build personal computers meant for home use. In the late 1980s, Gates’ company introduced the Windows operating system, which provided a “user-friendly” method of operating IBM-compatible computers with a hand-operated “mouse.” By the late 1990s, Bill Gates had thoroughly “thrashed competitors in the world of desktop operation systems and application software,” so much so that Microsoft had a near monopoly in the field, with a market value of $160 billion….

What follows is an intimate portrait of Bill Gates, described by Isaacson as “one of the most important minds and personalities of our era.” A plump man in his mid-forties, Gates is something of an enigma… The richest person in the world often speaks in a youthful slang: a good strategy is “really neat,” “supercool,” and “hardcore.” A bad strategy is “really dumb” and “random to the max.” Above all, Gates is fiercely competitive and has cutthroat instincts…. For years, competitors have accused Gates of unfair and even illegal business practices: they claim that he has tried to eliminate competition in desktop operating systems, so that he can dominate everything…

He’s the most famous businessman in the world. Reams have been written about how he dominated the revolution in personal computing and is now poised to turn Microsoft into a media and Internet behemoth. What beliefs drive this man who, as much as anyone, will determine the way we look not only at computers but at ourselves and our world? … When Bill Gates was in the 6 th grade, his parents decided he needed counseling. He was at war with his mother Mary, an outgoing woman who harbored the belief that he should do what she told him. She would call him to dinner form his basement bedroom, which she had given up trying to make him clean, and he wouldn’t respond. “What are you doing?” she once demanded over the intercom. “I’m thinking,” he shouted back. “You’re thinking?” she asked. “Yes, mom, I’m thinking,” he said fiercely, “have you ever tried thinking?” The psychologist they sent him to “was a really cool guy,” Gates recalls. He gave me books to read after each session, Freud stuff, and I really got into psychology theory.” After a year of sessions and a battery of tests, the counselor reached his conclusion. “You’re going to lose,” he told Mary. “You had better adjust to it because there’s no use trying to beat him.” Mary was strong-willed and intelligent herself, he husband recalls, “but she came around to accepting that it was futile truing to compete with him.”

A lot of computer companies have concluded the same. In the 21 years [as of 1997] since he dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, William Henry Gates III, has thrashed competitors in the world of desktop operating systems and application software. Now he is attempting the audacious feat of expanding Microsoft from a software company into a media and content company. In the process he has amassed a fortune worth $23.9 billion. The 88% rise in Microsoft stock in 1996 meant he made on paper more than $10.9 billion, or about $30 million a day. That makes him the world’s richest person, by far. But he’s more than that. He has become the Edison and Ford of our age. A technologist turned entrepreneur, he embodies the digital era.

His success stems from his personality: an awesome and at times frightening blend of brilliance, drive, competitiveness, and personal intensity. So too does Microsoft’s. “The personality of Bill Gates determines the culture of Microsoft,” says his intellectual sidekick Nathan Myhrvold. But though he has become the most famous business celebrity in the world, Gates remains personally elusive to all but a close circle of friends.

Part of what makes him so enigmatic is the nature of his intellect. Wander the Microsoft grounds, press the Bill button in conversation and hear it described in computer terms: he has “incredible processing power” and “unlimited bandwidth,” and agility at “parallel processing” and “multitasking.” Watch him at his desk, and you see what they mean. He works on two computers, one with four frames that sequence data streaming in from the Internet, the other handling the hundreds of email messages and memos that extend his mind into a network. He can be so rigorous as he processes data that one can imagine his mind may indeed be digital: no sloppy emotions or analog fuzziness, just trillions of binary impulses coolly converting input into correct answers.

“I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence,” Gates says over dinner one night at a nearly deserted Indian restaurant in a strip-mall near his office. Even while eating, he seems to be multitasking: ambidextrous, he switches his fork back and forth throughout the meal and uses whichever hand is free to gesture or scribble notes. “All the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion,” he explains. Earthly life is carbon based, he notes, and computers are silicon based, but that is not a major distinction. “Eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.” The notion, he admits, is a bit frightening, but he jokes that it would also be cheating. “It’s like reverse-engineering someone else’s product in order to solve a challenge.” Might there be some greater meaning to the universe?... The search for evidence about the soul that underlies Bill Gates’ intellectual operating system is a task that even this boyish man might find a challenge…

In 1986, after Microsoft became successful, Gates built a four-house vacation compound dubbed Gate-away for his family. There his parents would help him replicated his summer activities on a grander scale for dozens of friends and co-workers in what became known as the Microgames. “There was always a couple of mental games as well as performance and regular games,” says Bill Sr. as he flips through a scrapbook. These were no ordinary picnics: one digital version of charades, for example, had teams competing to send numerical messages using smoke-signal machines, in which the winners devised their own 4-bit binary code.

“We became concerned about him when he was ready for junior high,” says his father. “He was so small and shy, in need of protection, and his interests were so different from the typical 6 th grader’s.” His intellectual drive and curiosity would not be satisfied in a big public school. So they decided to send him to an elite private school across town… Learning BASIC language from a manual with his pal Paul Allen, Trey [as his father calls him] produced two programs in the 8th grade: one that converted a number in one mathematical base to a different base, and another (easier to explain) that played tic-tac-toe. Later, having read about Napoleon’s military strategies, he devised a computer version of Risk, a board game he liked in which the goal is world domination.

Trey and Paul were soon spending their evenings at a local company that had bought a big computer and didn’t have to pay for it until it was debugged. In exchange for computer time, the boys’ job was to try (quite successfully) to find bugs that would crash it. “Trey got so into it,” his father recalls, “that he would sneak out of the basement door after we went to bed and spend most of the night there.” The combination of the counseling and the computer helped transform him into a self-assured young businessman. By high school he and his friends had started a profitable company to analyze and graph traffic data for the city. “His confidence increased, and his sense of humor increased,” his father says. “He became a great storyteller, who could mimic the voices of each person. And he made peace with his mother.”

“In 9th grade,” Gates recalls over dinner one night,” I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn’t been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A’s without taking a book home. I didn’t go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam. That established my independence and taught me that I didn’t need to rebel anymore.” By 10 th grade he was teaching computers and writing a program that handled class scheduling, which had a secret function that placed him in classes with the right girls.

His best friend was Kent Evans, son of a Unitarian minister. “We read Fortune together; we were going to conquer the world,” says Gates… Together with Paul Allen, they formed the official-sounding Lakeside Programmers Group and got a job writing a payroll system for a local firm. A furious argument, the first of many, ensued when Allen tried to take over the work himself. But he soon realized he needed the tireless Gates back to do the coding. “Ok, but I’m in charge,” Gates told him, “and I’ll get used to being in charge, and it’ll be hard to deal with me from now on unless I’m in charge.” He was right. To relieve the pressures of programming, Evans took up mountain climbing. One day Gates got a call from the headmaster: Evans had been killed in a fall. “I had never thought of people dying,” Gates says… “At the funeral I was supposed to speak, but I couldn’t get up. For two weeks I couldn’t do anything at all.” After that be became even closer to Paul Allen. They learned an artificial-intelligence language together and found odd jobs as programmers. “We were true partners,” Gates says. “We’d talk for hours every day.” After Gates went off to Harvard, Allen drove his rattletrap Chrysler cross-country to continue their collaboration. He eventually persuaded Gates to become that university’s most famous modern dropout in order to start a software company, which they initially dubbed Micro-soft (after considering the name Allen & Gates, Inc), to write versions of BASIC for the first personal computers. It was an intense relationship: Gates the workaholic code writer and competitor, Allen the dreamy visionary.

Over the years they would have ferocious fights, and Allen would, after a Hodgkin’s disease scare, quit the company and become estranged. But Gates worked hard to repair the relationship and eventually lured Allen, who is now one of the country’s biggest high-tech venture-capital investors (and owner of the Portland Trail Blazers), back onto the Microsoft board…

When Microsoft began to grow in 1980, Gates needed a smart non-techie to help run things, and he lured Steve Ballmer [a former Harvard football-team manager and personal friend], who had worked for Procter & Gamble, to Seattle as an equity partner… As with Allen, the relationship was sometimes stormy. “Our first major row came when I insisted it was time to hire 17 more people,” Ballmer recalls. “He claimed I was trying to bankrupt him.” Gates has a rule that Microsoft, rather than incurring debt, must always have enough money in the bank to run for a year even with no revenues… “I was living with him at the time, and I got so pissed off I moved out.” The elder Gates smoothed things over, and soon the new employees were hired.

“Bill brings to the company the idea that conflict can be a good thing,” says Ballmer. “The difference from P&G is striking, Politeness was at a premium there. Bill knows it’s important to avoid that gentle civility that keeps you from getting to the heart of an issue quickly. He likes it when anyone, even a junior employee, challenges him, and you know he respects you when he starts shouting back.” Around Microsoft, it’s known as the “math camp” mentality…: The contentious atmosphere can promote flexibility. The Microsoft Network began as a proprietary online system like CompuServe or America Online. When the open standards of the Internet changed the game, Microsoft was initially caught flat-footed. Arguments ensued. Soon it became clear it was time to try a new strategy and raise the stakes. Gates turned the company around in just one year to disprove the maxim that a leader of one revolution will be left behind by the next…

If Ballmer is Gates’ social goad, his intellectual one is Nathan Myhrvold (pronounced Meer-voll), who likes to joke that he’s got more degrees than a thermometer, including a doctorate in physics from Princeton… Microsoft has long hired based on IQ and “intellectual bandwidth.” Gates is the undisputed ideal. Gates, Ballmer, and Myhrvold believe it’s better to get a brilliant but untrained young brain- they’re called “Bill clones”- than someone with too much experience. The interview process tests not what the applicants know but how well they can process tricky questions… Gates’ intellect is marked by an ability, as he puts it, to “drill down.” On a visit to Time Inc’s new media facility, he answered questions from a collection of magazine editors as if by rote, but on his way out he asked to see the Internet servers and spent 45 minutes grilling the claque of awed techies there. Broad discussions bore him, he shows little curiosity about other people, and he becomes disengaged when people use small talk to try to establish a personal rapport. Even after spending a lot of time with him, you get the feeling that he knows much about your thinking but nothing about such things as where you live or if you have a family. Or that he cares…

Gates is ambivalent about his celebrity. Although he believes that fame tends to be “very corrupting,” he is comfortable as a public figure and as the personification of the company he built… he remains unaffected, wandering Manhattan and Seattle without an entourage or driver….

The phone in Gates’ office almost never rings. Nor do phones seem to ring much anywhere on the suburban Microsoft “campus,” a cluster of 35 low-rise buildings, lawns, white pines and courtyards that resemble those of a state polytechnic college. Gates runs his company mainly through three methods: he bats out 100 email messages a day (and night), often chuckling as he dispatches them; he meets every month or so with a top management group that is still informally known as the boop (Bill and the Office of the President); and most important, taking up 70% of his schedule by his own calculation, he holds 2-3 small review meetings a day with a procession of teams working on the company’s various projects.

There is a relaxed, nonhierarchical atmosphere as the 7 young managers of the “WebDVD” group, all in the standard winter uniform of khakis and flannel shirts, gather in a windowless conference room near Gates’ office. They have been working for almost a year on a digital videodisc intended to provide content along with Web browsing for television sets, and he wants to review their progress before leaving for Japan, where he will meet with such potential partners as Toshiba… Gates doesn’t address anyone by name, hand out praise or stoke any egos. But he listens intently, democratically. His famous temper is in check, even when he disagrees with someone’s analysis of the DVD’s capability to handle something called layering. “Educate me on that,” he says in challenging the analysis, and after a minute or so cuts off the discussion by saying, “Send me the specs.”

Gates does not hide his cutthroat instincts. “The competitive landscape here is strange, ranging from Navio to even WebTV,” he says. He is particularly focused on Navio, a consumer-software consortium recently launched by Netscape and others designed to make sure that Windows and Windows CE (its consumer-electronics cousin) do no become the standard for interactive television and game machines. “I want to put something in our products that’s hard for Navio to do. What are their plans?” The group admits that their intelligence on Navio is poor. Gates rocks harder. “You have to pick someone in your group… whose task it is to track Navio full time. They’re the ones I worry about. Sega is an investor. They may be willing to feed us info.” Then he moves on to other competitors. “What about the Planet TV guys?”…

Though the videodisc is not at the core of Microsoft’s business, this is a competition Gates plan to win. The group argues that the $10-per-unit royalty is too low. “Why charge more?” he asks. They explain that it will be hard to make a profit at $10, given what they are putting in. Gates turns stern. They are missing the big picture. “Our whole relationship with the consumer-electronic guys hands in the balance,” he declares. “We can get wiped.” Only the paranoid survive. “The strategic goal here is getting Windows CE standards into every devise we can. We don’t have to make money over the next few years. We didn’t make money on ms-dos in its first release. If you can get into this market at $10, take it.” They nod.

His mother may have come to terms with this competitive intensity, but much of the computer world has not. There are Websites dedicated to reviling him, law firms focused on foiling him and former friends who sputter at the mention of his name. Companies such as Netscape, Oracle and Sun Microsystems publicly make thwarting his “plan for world domination” into a holy crusade. The criticism is not just that he is successful but that he has tried to leverage, unfairly and perhaps illegally, Microsoft’s near monopoly in desktop operating systems in ways that would let him dominate everything from word processing and spreadsheets to Web browsers and content. The company is integrating its Internet Explorer browser and Microsoft Network content into its Windows operating system, a process that will culminate with the “Active Desktop” planned for Windows 97… Critics see a pattern of Microsoft’s playing hardball to make life difficult for competing operating systems and applications: Microsoft Word has been buggy on Macintosh [now Apple] operating systems, users have found it tricky to make Netscape their default browser when going back and forth from Windows to the Microsoft Network, and application developers have complained that they don’t get the full specs for new releases of Windows as quickly as Microsoft’s own developers do.

“They’re trying to use an existing monopoly to retard introduction of new technology,” says Gary Reback, the Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer representing Netscape and other Microsoft competitors. The stakes are much higher than whose Web browser wins. Netscape is enhancing its browser to serve as a platform to run applications. “In other words, says Reback, “if Netscape is successful, you won’t need Windows or a Microsoft operating system anymore.” On the other hand, if Microsoft is allowed to embed its Web browser into its operating system in a manner that maintains its monopoly, Reback warns, “where will it stop? They’ll go on to bundle in content, their Microsoft Network, financial transactions, travel services, everything. They have a game plan to monopolize every market they touch.” Gates makes no apologies. “Any operating system without a browser is going to be… out of business,” he says. “Should we improve

our product, or go out of business?” Later, on his trip to Japan, he returns to the subject… “Customers are benefiting here in the same way they benefited from graphical interfaces, multitasking, compressions and dozens of other things,” he writes. “If improving a produced based on customer input is willful maintenance of trying to stay in business and not have Netscape turn their browser into the most popular operating system, then I think that is what we are supposed to do.”

Though the stakes are clear, the law (which was developed in the era of railway barons) is not. After deadlocking, the Federal Trade Commission in 1993 surrendered jurisdiction over Microsoft to the Justice Department. FTC Commissioner Christine Varney, an expert in the field, says it’s hard to apply antitrust law in a fluid situation. “My concern is with the law’s ability to keep pace with market conditions in fields that change so rapidly,” she says. “Once it’s clear a practice is noncompetitive, the issue may already be moot.”

… He hopes to be running Microsoft for another 10 years, he says, then promises to focus as intensely on giving his money away. He says he plans to leave his children about $10 million each. “He will spend time, at some point, thinking about the impact his philanthropy can have… he is too imaginative to just do conventional gifts.” Already he’s given $34 million to the University of Washington, partly to fund a chair for human genome-project researcher Leroy Hood; $15 million (along with $10 million from Ballmer) for a new computer center at Harvard; and $6 million to Stanford. An additional $200 million is in a foundation run by his father, and he has talked about taking over personally the funding of Microsoft’s program to provide computers to inner-city libraries, to which he’s donated $3 million in book royalties… Asked about his regrets, Gates talks about not getting a Microsoft E-mail application to the market quickly enough. “We were too busy, and at a retreat where I wrote our next priorities on a board, everyone said I had to take one off, so we took off E-mail.”

After investigating Microsoft’s operations, the Federal Department of Justice agree with Gates’ critics and brought an anti-trust suit against the Microsoft Empire. In 1999, US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Microsoft was guilty of using its monopoly of the desktop computer market to destroy competition. The judge ordered that Microsoft had to break up. According to the Washington Post, “it was the most significant anti-trust decree since AT&T in 1982 and Standard Oil in 1911.”

UNIT 10Name: _______________________________________________________________ Date: ________________ Pd: __

QUESTIONS- Papa Bush, Clinton and the 90s Readings

1. President George H.W. Bush received his greatest public approval for:a. The appointment of the first African American to the Supreme Courtb. His conduct of foreign affairs in the Middle Eastc. Holding the line against tax increasesd. The invasion of Grenada

2. The end of the Cold War resulted in all of the following EXCEPT:a. Improved US relations with Russiab. Improved US relations with North Koreac. Major agreements on disarmamentd. A reunified Germany

3. The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 was most closely associated with the slogan or phrase:a. “The economy, stupid”b. “Government is not the solution, it is the problem”c. Read my lips- no new taxes”d. “Baby-boomers” and “yuppies”

4. Which of the following rends or conditions did NOT characterize American society in the early 1990s?a. Economic pressures arising from technological changeb. Increasing respect for political leaders in Washingtonc. Increasing inequality in the distribution of income and wealthd. Increased public concern about federal budget deficits

5. Clinton’s popularity during his presidency can be attributed mainly to:a. Willingness to take on unpopular causes, such as gay rights and health care reformb. Successes in foreign affairs and peacekeepingc. Improving economic conditions for average Americansd. Incremental approach to legislation

6. Which of the following problems during the Clinton presidency presented the most serious possibility of developing into an international crisis?

a. Civil war in Somalia b. Nuclear weapons program in North Koreac. Civil war in the Balkansd. Terrorism in Yemen

7. The growing strength of the Republican Party in Congress and on the national level in the 1990s can be primarily attributed to the:a. Campaign finance and election reform championed by Republicans in the 1970sb. Shift of white conservative voters in the South from the Democratic to the Republican Partyc. Conservative fiscal policies and debt reduction under the Reagan and Bush administrationsd. Improper behavior by and impeachment of Bill Clinton

8. Analyze the domestic and foreign policies of President George H.W. Bush. Refer to specific examples from the readings to support your answer.

9. How did President Bush contribute to the end of the Cold War? Refer to specific examples from the readings.

10. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of President Bush’s administration. Why do you think he was a one-term president? Refer to specific examples from the readings to support your answer.

11. What were the reasons behind the US fighting in the Persian Gulf War? What were the consequences of that war? Refer to specific examples from the readings to support your answer.

12. Analyze the foreign policies and domestic policies of President Bill Clinton. Refer to specific examples from the readings.

13. Analyze the reasons why President Clinton was a two-term president. Refer to specific examples from the readings.

14. How did the technology boom in the 90s revolutionize the world? Refer to specific examples from the readings.

15. Why was President Clinton impeached in the 90s? Compare that scandal with the Watergate scandal.