Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (104 page)

113
. Critics of Clinton charged that he authorized these raids in order to distract attention from mounting scandals that were then threatening his presidency. For these scandals, see the next chapter.

114
. This briefing included the warning that Al Qaeda members had recently been engaged in surveillance of federal buildings in New York City. Bush administration spokespeople maintained, however, that it was not specific enough to have enabled them to expect the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Most top officials in the Bush administration, like those in the Clinton administration, could not imagine attacks such as these.

115
.
Boston Globe
, July 23, 2004. Many civil libertarians questioned the accuracy of the no-fly list.

116
.
New York Times
, July 25, 2004.

1
. See
Clinton: The Starr Report
(London, 1998), 204–13. Hereafter cited as
Starr Report
. For a lengthy narrative placing Clinton’s troubles within the larger political struggles of the era, see Haynes Johnson,
The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years
(New York, 2001), 227–439.

2
. For the origins of these actions, see
chapter 10
.

3
. 520 U.S. 681 (1997).

4
. See Ronald Dworkin, “The Wounded Constitution,”
New York Review of Books
, March 18, 1999, 8–9.

5
. William Berman,
From the Center to the Edge: The Politics and Policies of the Clinton Presidency
(Lanham, Md., 2001), 79–81; Joe Klein,
The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton
(New York, 2002), 177–81, 199–201; Johnson,
The Best of Times
, 265–77.

6
. Johnson,
The Best of Times
, 292–95; Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 79–81, 84–86.

7
. Johnson,
The Best of Times
, 239–40. Johnson adds that Morris then said, “You bet your ass.”

8
. Ibid., 233.

9
. Ibid., 245.

10
. Ibid., 319–32.

11
. Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 84–85.

12
. Ibid.

13
. For instance, Garry Wills, “The Tragedy of Bill Clinton,”
New York Review of Books
, Aug. 12, 2004, 60–64.

14
. In early 2004, seven additional nations in Eastern Europe joined NATO. They were Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Then, as in 1998, Russia worried that the expansion of NATO forces to its borders threatened its security.
New York Times
, April 3, 2004.

15
. Johnson,
The Best of Times
, 338–49.

16
.
Starr Report
, 199–201.

17
.
New York Times
, Sept. 12, 1998; Andrew Sullivan, “Lies That Matter,”
New Republic
, Sept. 14, 21, 1998, 22.

18
. Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 86, 107.

19
. Jones, however, appealed this decision, and Clinton decided in November 1998 to settle rather than risk a trial. The settlement cost him $850,000, which he agreed to pay to Jones, and stipulated that he would not have to apologize or to admit guilt. Had he agreed to settle earlier, Jones’s litigation would have ended, and Lewinsky’s name would not have later come to the attention of Jones’s attorneys, and through them to Starr. Ibid., 90.

20
. Ibid., 86.

21
. Johnson,
The Best of Times
, 320–21.

22
. See Alan Wolfe,
One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other
(New York, 1998). Wolfe noted that popular attitudes about homosexuality, still predominantly negative in 1998, were the slowest to change. But these, too, haltingly liberalized in subsequent years.

23
. Steven Gillon,
Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever, and How It Changed America
(New York, 2004), 306–8.

24
. President Andrew Johnson, impeached (but not convicted) in 1868, had been elected as Lincoln’s vice president in 1864.

25
.
New York Times
, March 21, 2002.

26
. Ibid., Dec. 11, 1998.

27
. Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 94.

28
. Johnson,
The Best of Times
, 453.

29
. James Patterson,
America Since 1945: A History
(Fort Worth, 2000), 278.

30
. For the struggles over policy regarding Kosovo, see Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 96–100; and William Hitchcock,
The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Continent, 1945–2002
(New York, 2003), 402–9.

31
. David Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals
(New York, 2001), 422–53.

32
. A fact that the administration of George W. Bush, which failed to secure U.N. sanction in 2003 for an invasion of Iraq, was later to point out.

33
. Joe Klein, “Closework,”
New Yorker
, Oct. 1, 2001, 44–49.

34
. Two Americans died in a helicopter crash.

35
.
New York Times
, March 25, 2004, May 21, 2005. Another legacy of Kosovo was the replacement in July 1999 of Clark. Defense Secretary William Cohen and the Joint Chiefs resented what they considered Clark’s headstrong attitude during the struggles over American policy in the area. Clinton signed the order removing Clark from his post. Clark retired from the army in 2000 and ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2004.

36
. For numbers concerning America’s annual trade deficits (which rose from $67 billion in 1991 to $463 billion in 2000, see
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 793.

37
. Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 106.

38
. Tests of anti–missile missiles, however, encountered embarrassing failures in the early 2000s.
New York Times
, Dec. 16, 2004.

39
. Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 115.

40
. Peter Peterson,
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
(New York, 2004).

41
. Recession did arrive in early 2001. The Dow, which had peaked at 11,722 in January 2000, plunged to 9,796 by March 2002. The NASDAQ fell by 39 percent in 2000, its worst decline ever in a given year.

42
. A mostly favorable assessment of the 1996 welfare law, by scholars with no conservative axes to grind, concluded in 2004 that single–mother families—benefiting not only from welfare reform but also from minimum wage laws and from the Earned Income Tax Credit—were “significantly better off” than they had been before 1996. Scott Winship and Christopher Jencks, “Welfare Reform Worked,”
Christian Science Monitor
, July 21, 2004. Many liberals, however, still opposed the changes.

43
.
Public Papers of the Presidents, 2000–2001
, vol. 1 (Washington, 2002), 129–40.

44
. Campaign finance regulations stipulated that candidates who expected to receive federal funding during the pre–nomination period must adhere to spending limits (including $19 million in federal money) of $45 million. The Bush organization, having collected considerably more, rejected the federal money, thereby freeing itself from spending caps. He was the first major-party nominee in American history to be able to do that. In 2004, both Bush and his Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, rejected federal funding during the pre–nomination phase of their presidential campaigns.

45
. For accounts of the campaign and election, see Jules Witcover,
Party of the People: A History of the Democrats
(New York, 2003), 699–724; Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 109–11, 114–16, 118–20; Johnson,
The Best of Times
, 519–34.

46
. For Gore, see David Remnick, “The Wilderness Campaign,”
New Yorker
, Sept. 13, 2004, 56–71.

47
. James Mann,
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet
(New York, 2004), 256.

48
. John Cassidy, “Goodbye to All That,”
New Yorker
, Sept. 15, 2003, 92–95. In January 2001, the Congressional Budget Office predicted a cumulative federal budget surplus by 2011 of more than $5 trillion. In September 2004, anticipating continuing federal deficits, the same office predicted a cumulative shortfall between 2005 and 2014 of $2.3 trillion.
New Yorker
, Nov. 1, 2004, 38.

49
. Byron Shafer,
The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics
(Lawrence, Kans., 2003), 26–51.

50
.
New York Times
, April 20, 2004;
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 235. The presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, Harry Browne, won 348,431 votes, or 0.36 percent of the total.

51
. It was later estimated that Gore won 63 percent of votes from people who lived in union households. Bush carried only 32 percent of these voters. The AFL-CIO, anxious to beat Bush, contributed $41 million to Gore’s campaign in 2000.
New York Times
, March 9, 2004.

52
. Polling later indicated that Gore won 54 percent of votes from women, to 43 percent for Bush. Gore captured 63 percent of the votes of single women, compared to 32 percent for Bush, and 51 percent of married women (to 49 percent for Bush). Among married men voters, Gore trailed Bush by 58 percent to 38 percent. See Louis Menand, “Permanent Fatal Errors: Did the Voters Send a Message?”
New Yorker
, Dec. 6, 2004, 54–60; Peter Keating, “Wake–up Call,”
AARP: The Magazine
, Sept./Oct. 2004, 60;
New York Times
, Sept. 22, 2004.

53
.
New York Times,
Feb. 29, 2004. Gore carried 39 percent of these churchgoers. But Bush advisers, including Karl Rove, who was regarded as an unusually shrewd political operator, were unhappy with the turnout of evangelical Christian voters in 2000 and resolved to raise it by 4 million votes in 2004.

54
. David Margolick et al., “The Path to Florida,”
Vanity Fair
, Oct. 2004, 310–22, 355–69.

55
. Most Americans blamed the inflexibility of Yasser Arafat, head of the PLO, for the failure of these efforts, which had seemed somewhat promising during a summit at Camp David in July but had virtually collapsed by late September. A second, more violent Palestinian intifada, this one aided by terrorist organizations and featuring suicide bombers, had then broken out. See Dennis Ross,
The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace
(New York, 2004). After witnessing Arafat’s performance, George W. Bush decided to have nothing to do with him. Instead, he offered strong support to the policies of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s hawkish new prime minister. By September 2004, four years after the start of the intifada, some 4,000 people (three-fourths of them Palestinians, of whom more than half were civilians) had been killed in the fighting.
New York Times
, Oct. 3, 2004.