My life полностью

In his postscript to the 1994 edition of Out of Order, Patterson said that, after the ’92 election, the media for the first time had taken its negative bias from the campaign straight into its coverage of the administration. Now, he said, a President’s news coverage “depends less on his actual performance in office than on the media’s cynical bias. The press nearly always magnifies the bad and underplays the good.” For example, the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs said that, on my handling of domestic policy issues, the coverage was 60 percent negative, mostly focusing on broken campaign commitments, even though, as Patterson said, I had kept “dozens” of my campaign commitments and that I was a President who “should have acquired a reputation for fulfilling his promises,” in part by prevailing in Congress on 88 percent of contested votes, a mark bettered only by Eisenhower in 1953

and Johnson in 1965. Patterson concluded that the negative coverage drove down not only my approval rating but also public support for my programs, including health care, and thus “imposed extraordinary costs on the Clinton presidency and the national interest.”

In the summer of 1994, Thomas Patterson’s book helped me to see that there might be nothing I could do to change the press coverage. If that was true, I had to learn to handle it better. Mack McLarty had never sought the chief of staff’s job, and Leon Panetta was willing to take on the challenge. He had already built a record at OMB that would be hard to improve on—our first two budgets were the first in seventeen years to be adopted by Congress on time; the budgets guaranteed three years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since Truman was President; and perhaps most impressive, they brought the first reduction in discretionary domestic spending in twenty-five years, while still providing increases for education, Head Start, job training, and new technologies. Perhaps as chief of staff, Leon could more clearly communicate what we had done and were trying to accomplish for America. I named him, and appointed Mack counselor to the President, with the job description he had recommended.

The inauguration and an inaugural ball, January 20, 1993

Al Gore and I with the cabinet: (standing, from left) Madeleine Albright, Mack McLarty, Mickey Kantor, Laura Tyson, Leon Panetta, Carol Browner, Lee Brown; (seated, from bottom left) Lloyd Bentsen, Janet Reno, Mike Espy, Robert Reich, Henry Cisneros, Hazel O’Leary, Richard Riley, Jesse Brown, Federico Peña, Donna Shalala, Ron Brown, Bruce Babbitt, Les Aspin, and Warren Christopher

Al and I praying at our weekly lunch

With Mother, Dick Kelley, and Champ, in Hot Springs

Mack McLarty and I attending the Summit of the Americas, in Santiago, Chile

In the residence private study, with Presidents George Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford on the eve of the announcement of the campaign for NAFTA

With the White House residence butlers and staff

With Hillary in Wyoming

Mother, Roger, and I celebrate our last Christmas together.

Chelsea in The Nutcracker

Ron Brown and I playing an impromptu basketball game in South Central Los Angeles

Al and I, on the South Lawn, announcing the elimination of forklifts of government regulations, part of our Reinventing Government initiative

Straightening Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s tie. It would be our last time together.

Tony Lake informs me of Rabin’s death.

Arriving on Marine One, with Bruce Lindsey and Erskine Bowles

Bosnia briefing in the White House Situation Room

With AmeriCorps volunteers at a tornado site in Arkansas

Chelsea’s graduation from Sidwell Friends

Rahm Emanuel and Leon Panetta brief me in the Oval Office dining room.

Riding with Harold Ickes in Montana

With Hillary

Al and I on the edge of the Grand Canyon establishing the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument

On the golf course with Frank Raines, Erskine Bowles, Vernon Jordan, and Max Chapman

A strategy meeting in the Yellow Oval Room

With Republican leaders Representative Newt Gingrich and Senator Bob Dole in the Cabinet Room

With Democratic leaders Representative Richard Gephardt and Senator Tom Daschle in the Oval Office

Russian president Boris Yeltsin and I in Hyde Park, New York

With German chancellor Helmut Kohl at Warburg Castle

Reading “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” to children in the East Room with Hillary and Chelsea

Chelsea and I at Ron Brown’s funeral

Our friends Queen Noor and King Hussein join Hillary and me on the Truman Balcony.

Speaking about America’s bridge to the twenty-first century at Arizona State University

Promoting education at an event in California

Celebrating our 1996 victory aboard Air Force One

Signing an executive order with representatives of Native American Tribal Governments

Visiting with the troops in Kuwait