Living History (48 page)

I learned more about the prevalence and impact of breast cancer, as well as obstacles to its prevention and treatment, from talking with doctors, patients and survivors at “listening sessions” I convened in senior centers and hospitals across the country. Starting at a meeting of the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC) in Williamsburg, Virginia, during the 1992 campaign, I was struck by the resilience of breast cancer survivors.

When the bus carrying attendees broke down en route, the women simply got off and hitchhiked the rest of the way. I worked with the NBCC, founded by a determined survivor and advocate, Fran Visco, over the course of the Administration to obtain more funding for research and expanded treatment for uninsured women.

I met frequently with breast cancer survivors at the White House. Through the experiences of my motherin-law and so many others, I understood the fear and uncertainty that accompanies a cancer diagnosis. One of the most faithful volunteers in my office at the White House, Miriam Leverage, battled breast cancer for six years before succumbing to the disease in 1996 after a valiant fight. A retired schoolteacher and proud grandmother, Miriam underwent two surgeries, radiation treatment and five rounds of chemotherapy.

She always reminded me and my staffers to perform self-examinations and get regular mammograms, something I had done every year since turning forty.

I launched the Medicare Mammography Awareness Campaign in conjunction with Mother’s Day in 1995 to raise awareness about the importance of early detection and to make sure that women eligible under Medicare took advantage of mammography. Only 40 percent of older women, whose mammograms were paid for by Medicare, actually had the screening. Because one in eight women in our country is expected to develop breast cancer, early detection is essential. I worked with corporate sponsors, public relations professionals and representatives of consumer groups on the “Mama-gram” campaign to encourage older women to get mammograms and to educate them about the benefits of early detection. The national campaign included inserts in Mother’s Day greeting and floral cards, reminding mothers of the importance of regular mammograms, along with promotional store displays, printed grocery bags and public service announcements.

Over the next few years, I worked to expand Medicare coverage so that more women would be eligible for annual mammograms without having to make a copayment, and I was pleased when Bill announced new regulations to ensure the safety and quality of mammography. These efforts dovetailed with my work to support increased funding for research on breast cancer detection, prevention, treatment and potential cures, and to launch a breast cancer stamp with the U.S. Postal Service that channels a portion of its revenues to research.

One of the most vexing and heartbreaking issues that came to my attention as I crisscrossed the U.S. was Gulf War syndrome. Thousands of men and women who served our nation in the military in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 suffered from a variety of ailments, among them chronic fatigue, gastrointestinal disorders, rashes and respiratory problems. I received haunting letters from vets who had risked their lives on behalf of our country abroad and couldn’t keep jobs or support their families at home because of these illnesses. One veteran I met, Colonel Herbert Smith, had led a healthy and productive life before his tour in the Persian Gulf. While serving in Operation Desert Storm, he developed swollen lymph nodes, rashes, fatigue, joint pain and fever. After six months in the Gulf, he was forced to return home. Yet doctors were unable to diagnose his illness or offer treatment.

It was heartbreaking to hear Col. Smith describe the agony of living day after day, year after year, not knowing why he had become sick. Even worse for Col. Smith was the skepticism about his illness he en countered from some military doctors. One military doctor accused him of “bleeding” himself to fake anemia in order to receive disability benefits. Col. Smith developed nerve damage to his brain and vestibular system, leaving him severely disabled and unable to continue working. And yet his pleas and those of other veterans were not being heard.

I called for a comprehensive study of Gulf War syndrome, including efforts to determine whether our troops could have been exposed to chemical or biological agents or been affected by oil fires, radiation or other toxins. I met with officials from the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services to determine what the government should do both to respond to the needs of these veterans and to prevent similar problems in the future. I recommended a Presidential Advisory Committee that Bill appointed to review the issue. He later signed legislation to cover disability benefits for eligible Gulf War veterans with undiagnosed illnesses and directed the Veterans Administration to set up better systems to screen and monitor our troops in the future.

Domestic issues like these dominated my White House agenda during the spring of 1995. Then, the attention of the entire nation turned to an unfathomable tragedy.

For me, April 19 began as an ordinary day of meetings and interviews. Around 11

A.M., I was sitting in my favorite chair in the West Sitting Hall, going over scheduling requests with Maggie and Patti when Bill called urgently from the Oval Office with the news that there had been an explosion at the Alfred E Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City. The three of us immediately went into the kitchen and turned on the small television to see the screen filled with the first horrifying pictures broadcast from the scene.

We learned over the next few hours that the damage had been caused by a truck bomb, but no one had solid information about who was responsible. Bill immediately dispatched teams from FEMA, the FBI and other government agencies to Oklahoma City to handle the emergency and to lead the investigation. Because the federal offices were destroyed by the bombing, many essential personnel were dead or injured. A Secret Service agent who had left the White House just seven months earlier for assignment to Oklahoma was one of five agents killed that day. Among the 168 innocent people who died in the bombing were nineteen children, most of whom attended the day care center on the second floor of the building.

The images from Oklahoma City were disturbingly intimate: a little girl, limp as a rag doll, carried out of the smoking rubble by a heartbroken fireman; a terrified office worker being lifted onto the stretcher. The familiarity of the setting and the number of casualties brought the tragedy home to America in ways that other atrocities up until then could not.

That was the point of the attack.

We were also reminded that the “bureaucrats” who were always under attack by antigovernment zealots could be our neighbors, friends or relatives-that they have real lives and could lose them.

The first thing people needed was information about the bombing and then the reassurance that everything possible was being done to protect them from further attacks. I was particularly concerned about children who were aware of the explosion at the child care center and might fear that their own schools weren’t safe. We talked with Chelsea and asked for her advice about how to reassure young children.

On Saturday after the bombing, in a television and radio broadcast, Bill and I talked to a group of children whose parents were federal employees working for the same federal agencies as those attacked in Oklahoma. We thought it was important that as a mother and a father we both speak to the anxieties about such a terrible tragedy.

“It’s okay to be frightened by something as bad as this,” Bill told the children sitting on the floor of the Oval Office as their parents stood nearby.

“I want you to know that your parents … love you and are going to do everything they can to take care of you and to protect you,” I said. “There are many more good people in the world than bad and evil people.”

Bill told the children that we would catch and punish whoever caused the bombing.

And then he asked them to express their own thoughts about it.

“It was mean,” said one child.

“I feel sorry for the people that died,” said another.

One question broke my heart, and I couldn’t answer it. “Who would want to do that to kids who had never done anything to them?”

The rest of the country was seeing Bill as I knew him, a man with an unparalleled empathy and ability to bring people together in difficult times. Before we left the next day to visit families of the victims and to take part in a prayer service, we planted a dogwood tree on the South Lawn in memory of the victims. Bill and I met with a number of victims and their families in private before attending the large memorial service where Bill and the Rev. Billy Graham spoke, helping to heal a hurting nation. Whenever I watched Bill embrace sobbing family members, talk with heartbroken friends or comfort the terminally ill, I fell in love with him all over again. His sympathy draws from a deep well of caring and emotion that enables him to reach out to people in pain.

By the time we got to Oklahoma City, a suspect had been arrested who had ties to militant antigovernment groups. It appeared that Timothy McVeigh had chosen April 19

to attack the country he had come to despise because it was the anniversary of the terrible Waco fire, which killed over eighty members of the Branch Davidian cult, including children. McVeigh and his ilk represented the most alienated and violent elements of the extreme right wing, whose actions sickened every sensible American. Rightwing radio talk shows and websites intensified the atmosphere of hostility with their rhetoric of intolerance, anger and antigovernment paranoia, but the Oklahoma City bombing seemed to deflate the militia movement and marginalize the worst haters on the airwaves.

Bill spoke forcefully against the hate-mongers and antigovernment zealots in a commencement speech at Michigan State University in early May. “There is nothing patriotic about hating your country, or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government.”

While the country coped with the Oklahoma City tragedy, the Office of the Independent Counsel did not rest. On Saturday, April 22, after the children’s meeting in the Oval Office, Kenneth Starr and his deputies arrived at the White House to take sworn statements from me and the President. I had been interviewed by Robert Fiske the previous year, before he was replaced, but this would be my first encounter with Starr and his staff. Preparing for the interview was not something that David Kendall or I took lightly.

Knowing that every word I uttered would be dissected by the OIC, David insisted that I cram in prep time no matter how busy I was. Often that meant meeting late at night or spending hours digesting information that he delivered to me in large black binders. I came to dread the sight of those binders because they were tangible reminders of the trivialities and minutiae I would be subjected to under oath, all of which could be used to trip me up legally.

Bill went in for his interview in the Treaty Room, the President’s study on the second floor of the residence. Representing the White House were Abner Mikva, a former Congressman and federal judge, now White House counsel, and Jane Sherburne, an experienced litigator who had left her private law firm to handle legal issues attached to the investigation.

They were joined by our private attorneys, David Kendall and his partner Nicole Seligman, two of the smartest and most caring people I’ve ever known. Starr and three other lawyers sat on one side of the long conference table we had brought in for the interviews. We sat on the other.

As he came out of his interview, Bill told me his encounter with Starr had been amiable, and, to my amazement, Bill had asked Jane Sherburne to give Starr and his assistants a tour of the Lincoln Bedroom next door. Somewhat characteristically, I was not prepared to be as charitable as my husband, and this was only the first illustration of the differences between Bill’s way of dealing with Starr and mine. We were both in the eye of the storm, but I seemed to be buffeted by every gust of wind, while Bill just sailed along. The idea of hardcore Republican partisans rummaging through our lives, looking at every check we had written in twenty years, and harassing our friends on the flimsiest of excuses infuriated me.

The Republicans opened up a new front when Al D’Amato, the Republican Senator from New York and Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, convened hearings on Whitewater. I have since made my peace with Senator D’Amato, now one of my most prominent constituents, but the hearings he and his fellow Republican Senators and their staffs conducted inflicted great emotional and monetary damage on innocent people.

Despite Fiske’s finding that Vince Foster’s death was a suicide unrelated to Whitewater, D’Amato seemed to be fixated on Vince’s death, and he paraded past and present White House aides in front of the cameras to grill them about the sad event. Maggie Williams, normally centered and strong, was brought to tears by relentless questioning about events surrounding Vince Foster’s death. It was unbearable to watch Maggie raked over the coals again and again and to know that her legal bills were mounting daily.

D’Amato called my friend Susan Thomases a liar as she tried to answer his questions.

Her decades-long struggle with multiple sclerosis had impaired her memory, and she tried as hard as she could to respond to the bullying interrogation. I couldn’t console her or anyone caught up in this nightmare, because any discussion I might have with someone about any matter the investigators chose to ask about could suggest collusion or coaching. I had to avoid any discussion that could cause someone to answer “Yes” if asked whether he or she had talked to me.

Standing on the sidelines, unable to speak out to defend my friends and colleagues, or even to speak to them about the injustices they were enduring, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And it would get worse before it got better.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS

The arrest of a dissident is not unusual in China, and Harry Wu’s imprisonment might have received scant attention in the American media. But China had been chosen to host the upcoming United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, and I was scheduled to attend as honorary Chair of the U.S. delegation. Wu, a human rights activist who had spent nineteen years as a political prisoner in Chinese labor camps before emigrating to the United States, was arrested by Chinese authorities on June 19, 1995, as he entered Xinjiang Province from neighboring Kazakhstan.