My life полностью

Soon I put out a strong statement reaffirming my commitment, drafted by my foreign policy aide Nancy Soderberg. My law school classmate former congressman Bruce Morrison, of Connecticut, organized Irish-Americans for Clinton. The group would play a major role in the campaign and in the work we would do afterward. As Chelsea noted in her Stanford senior thesis on the Irish peace process, I first got involved in the Irish issue because of the politics of New York, but it became one of the great passions of my presidency.

In an ordinary Democratic primary, a campaign with this kind of support would be assured an easy victory. But this was not an ordinary primary. First, there was the opposition. Jerry Brown was working like a demon, determined to rally the liberal voters in this last, best chance to stop my campaign. Paul Tsongas, encouraged by his showing in Connecticut, let it be known that he wouldn’t mind his supporters voting for him one more time. The presidential candidate of the New Alliance Party, an articulate, angry woman named Lenora Fulani, did what she could to help them, bringing her supporters to a health-care event I held in a Harlem hospital and shouting down my speech. Jesse Jackson practically moved to New York to help Brown. His most important contribution was to persuade Dennis Rivera, head of one of the city’s largest and most active unions, Service Employees International Union Local 1199, not to endorse me and to help Jerry instead. Brown returned the favor by saying that, if nominated, he would name Jesse as his running mate. I thought Brown’s announcement would help him among New York’s black voters, but it also galvanized a lot of new support for me in the Jewish community. Jackson was believed to be too close to Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan, who was known for anti-Semitic remarks. Still, Jesse’s support was a net plus for Brown in New York.

Then there was the media. The big papers had been camping out in Arkansas for weeks, looking for whatever they could find on my record and my personal life. The New York Times had started the ball rolling in early March with the first of its Whitewater stories. In 1978, Hillary and I, along with Jim and Susan McDougal, took out bank loans of more than $200,000 to invest in land along the White River in northwest Arkansas. Jim was a land developer whom I had met when he ran Senator Fulbright’s office in Little Rock. We hoped to subdivide the property and sell it at a profit to retirees who had begun moving to the Ozarks in large numbers in the sixties and seventies. McDougal had been successful in all his previous land ventures, including one in which I had invested a few thousand dollars and earned a modest profit. Unfortunately, in the late seventies, interest rates went through the roof, the economy slowed, land sales dropped, and we lost money on the venture.