On February 28, NATO fighters shot down four Serb planes for violating the no-fly zone, the first military action in the forty-four-year history of the alliance. I hoped that the air strikes, along with our success in relieving the siege of Sarajevo, would convince the allies to take a stronger posture toward Serb aggression in and around the embattled towns of Tuzla and Srebrenica as well. One of those allies, John Major, was in America that day to talk about Bosnia and Northern Ireland. I took him first to Pittsburgh, where his grandfather had worked in the steel mills in the nineteenth century. Major seemed to enjoy retracing his roots to the industrial heartland of America. That night he stayed at the White House, the first foreign leader to do so during my tenure. The next day we held a press conference, which was unmemorable except for the larger message it sent: that our disagreement over the Adams visa would not undermine the Anglo-American relationship or keep us from working together closely on Bosnia and other issues. I found Major to be serious, intelligent, and, as I said earlier, genuinely committed to resolving the Irish problem, despite the fact that the very effort to do so posed a threat to his already precarious situation in Parliament. I thought he was a better leader than his press coverage often suggested, and after our two days together we maintained a friendly and productive working relationship.
THIRTY-EIGHT
W hile I was hard at work on foreign affairs, the new world of Whitewater was beginning to take shape at home. In March, Robert Fiske began his job in earnest by sending out subpoenas to several members of the White House staff, including Maggie Williams and Lisa Caputo, who worked for Hillary and were friends of Vince Foster’s. Mack McLarty set up a Whitewater Response Team, led by Harold Ickes, to coordinate responses to questions from Fiske and from the press; to free the rest of the staff, and me, to do the public work we came to Washington to do; and to minimize conversations our staff might have about Whitewater among themselves or with Hillary or me. Any such conversations could only expose our young staffers to depositions, political attacks, and big legal bills. A lot of people had already acquired a vested interest in finding something wrong; if there was nothing illegal in our long-ago land deal, perhaps they could catch someone doing something wrong in the handling of it. The system worked well enough for me. After all, I had learned how to lead parallel lives as a child: most of the time, I could shut out all the accusations and innuendo and go on with my work. I knew it would be harder to cope with for those who had never lived with the constant threat of arbitrary and destructive attacks, especially in an atmosphere in which there was a presumption of guilt attached to any charge. To be sure, there were some legal experts, like Sam Dash, who talked about how cooperative we were compared with the Reagan and Nixon administrations, because we didn’t resist subpoenas and we turned all our records over to the Justice Department and then to Fiske. But the goalposts had been moved: unless Hillary and I could prove ourselves innocent of whatever charges any adversary could come up with, most of the questions would be asked, and the stories written, in a tone of intense suspicion; the underlying current was that we must have done something wrong. For example, as our financial records found their way into the press, the
