On Sunday night, April 18, Janet Reno came to the White House to tell me that the FBI wanted to storm the compound, apprehend Koresh and any of his followers who had taken part in killing the agents or some other crime, and free the rest of them. Janet said she was concerned by FBI reports that Koresh was sexually abusing children, most of them pre-teens, and that he might be planning a mass suicide. The FBI had also told her that it couldn’t keep so many of its resources tied down in one place forever. They wanted to raid the compound the next day, using armored vehicles to break holes in the buildings, then blast tear gas into them, a maneuver they estimated would force all the members to surrender within two hours. Reno had to approve the assault and wanted my okay first.
Several years earlier, I had faced a similar situation as governor. A right-wing extremist group had established a compound in the mountains of north Arkansas. Among the men, women, and children who lived there were two suspects wanted for murder. The people lived in several cabins, each of which had a trapdoor that led to a dugout from which they could fire on approaching authorities. And they had a lot of weapons to fire. The FBI wanted to storm them, too. At a meeting I convened with the FBI, our state police, and cooperating law-enforcement people from Missouri and Oklahoma, I listened to the FBI’s case, then said that before I could approve the action, I wanted someone who’d fought in the jungles of Vietnam to fly over the place in a helicopter and make an assessment. The battlewise veteran who made the inspection for me returned to say, “If those people can shoot at all, you’ll lose fifty men in the assault.” I called off the raid, put a blockade around the camp, cut off food-stamp aid to the several families who had been receiving it, and prevented anyone who left the premises to get supplies from going back. Eventually the holdouts gave in, and the suspects were apprehended with no loss of life. When Janet made her case to me, I thought we should try what had worked in Arkansas before we approved the FBI raid. She countered that the FBI was tired of waiting; that the standoff was costing the government a million dollars a week and tying up law-enforcement resources needed elsewhere; that the Branch Davidians could hold out longer than the Arkansas people had; and that the possibilities of child sexual abuse and mass suicide were real, because Koresh was crazy and so were many of his followers. Finally, I told her that if she thought it was the right thing to do, she could go ahead. The next day, as I watched CNN on a television just outside the Oval Office, I saw Koresh’s compound in flames. The raid had gone terribly wrong. After the FBI fired the tear gas into the buildings where the people were holed up, the Davidians started a fire. It got worse when they opened the windows to let the tear gas out and also let in a hard wind off the Texas plains, which stoked the flames. When it ended, more than eighty people had died, including twenty-five children; only nine survived. I knew I needed to speak to the press and take responsibility for the fiasco. So did Dee Dee Myers and Bruce Lindsey. But several times during the day, when I wanted to go ahead, George Stephanopoulos urged me to wait, saying we didn’t know whether anyone was still alive or whether, if Koresh heard my words, he might snap and kill them, too. Janet Reno did appear before the cameras, explained what happened, and took full responsibility for the raid. As the first woman to hold the attorney general’s post, she thought it was important not to pass the buck. By the time I finally talked to the press about Waco, Reno was being praised and I was being criticized for letting her take the fall.
For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, I had accepted advice that ran counter to my instincts. I didn’t blame George. He was young and cautious and had given me his honest, albeit mistaken, opinion. But I was furious at myself, first for agreeing to the raid against my better judgment, then for delaying a public acknowledgment of responsibility for it. One of the most important decisions a President has to make is when to take the advice of the people who work for him and when to reject it. Nobody can be right all the time, but it’s a lot easier to live with bad decisions that you believed in when you made them than with those your advisors say are right but your gut says are wrong. After Waco, I resolved to go with my gut.
