Living History (74 page)

South Africa’s summer was ending, and there was a chill in the air as Bill walked through the cell blocks on Robben Island with Mandela. Black prisoners had been required to wear shorts when working in the limestone quarry on the island, even in cool weather. The coloreds, or mixed-race prisoners, wore long pants. During monotonous hours of rock breaking, Mandela drew letters in the limestone powder, trying to teach his fellow prisoners how to read when the guards weren’t looking. Years of exposure to the caustic dust damaged Mandela’s tear ducts, and caused his eyes to water and itch. But they lit up whenever he was around his new love, Graça Machel, the widow of Samora Machel, the President of Mozambique, who died in a suspicious plane crash in 1986. She was a guiding light in her own war-torn country and had championed the causes of women and children across Africa. Mandela’s marriage to Winnie, which had included decades of separation, prison and exile, did not survive. He was at ease around Graça and clearly smitten.

Under the prodding of his old friend Archbishop Tutu, they married in July 1998.

Mandela insisted that Bill and I call him by his colloquial tribal name, Madiba. We were more comfortable addressing him as “Mr. President.” We simply honored and admired him so much. Mandela repeatedly asked why we hadn’t taken Chelsea out of school to come with us. “You tell her that when I come to the United States she has to see me,” he said. “No matter where I am.”

Bill and I wished Chelsea were with us too. We were on our way to Botswana, a landlocked arid nation with the contrasting distinction of having one of the highest per capita incomes in sub-Saharan Africa and the highest AIDS infection rate in the world. The government was attempting to marshal its resources to combat the spread of the disease and trying to provide treatment, but the costs were prohibitive without international assistance.

This visit convinced Bill to push hard to triple U.S. funding for international AIDS

programs in just two years and to make a substantial financial commitment to fund efforts to develop a vaccine.

Although our trip thus far had been exhilarating, it had not yet included any chance for Bill to see the wildlife that Chelsea and I had marveled at the year before. During a brief visit to the Chobe National Park, Bill and I woke up before dawn for a morning game drive. After sighting elephants, hippos, eagles, crocodiles and a mother lion and four cubs, we spent the late afternoon floating down the Chobe River. We sat alone in the back of a boat as the sun went down on a day I’ll never forget.

At our final stop in Senegal, Bill went to Gorée Island, as I had. He saw the Door of No Return and delivered a moving apology for America’s role in slavery. The statement was controversial among some Americans, but I believed it was appropriate. Words matter, and words from an American President carry great weight around the world. Expressing regret for genocide in Rwanda and our legacy of slavery sent a message of concern and respect to Africans who confront the intertwined challenges of poverty, disease, repression, starvation, illiteracy and war. But Africa needs more than words; it needs investment and trade if its economies are ever going to develop. That requires both significant changes in most governments and a partnership with the United States. That’s why the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which Bill proposed and Congress passed, is so critical. It creates incentives for American companies to do business in Africa.

Within a month, still talking and thinking about Africa, Bill and I were off to China for a state visit. I was delighted that we could take Chelsea and my mother along and excited about returning for a longer stay that would allow me to see more than I had during my 1995 visit.

China was already modernizing its economy, and its future direction would have a direct impact on American interests. Bill favored engagement with China, but as I had learned in 1995, that was easier said than done. We embarked on a long-planned state visit that spring, hoping to confront China’s violations of human rights while opening up its huge market to American business and reaching some understanding about Taiwan. A difficult balancing act.

Because it was a state visit, the Chinese government insisted on a formal arrival ceremony in Beijing. We usually conduct these ceremonies on the White House South Lawn, and the Chinese usually con duct theirs in Tiananmen Square. Bill and I debated whether we should attend a ceremony in Tiananmen Square, where Chinese authorities had used tanks to forcibly suppress pro-democracy demonstrations in June of 1989. Bill didn’t want to appear to endorse China’s repressive tactics and violations of human rights, but he understood the square’s importance over centuries of Chinese history and agreed to respect the Chinese request. I was haunted by the events at Tiananmen, remembering the square as we had seen it in television footage in 1989―students constructing a makeshift “Goddess of Democracy” resembling our Statue of Liberty, in defiance of soldiers like the ones in the honor guard lined up in formation, waiting to be reviewed by the President of the United States.

I had met President Jiang Zemin in October of 1997 when he and his wife, Madame Wang Yeping, came to the United States for a state visit. Jiang spoke English and conversed easily. Before the visit, many of my friends had asked me to raise with him the issue of China’s suppression of Tibet. I had met with the Dalai Lama to discuss the Tibetans’

plight, and so I asked President Jiang to explain China’s repression of the Tibetans and their religion.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Tibet has historically been a part of China. The Chinese are the liberators of the Tibetan people. I have read the histories in our libraries, and I know Tibetans are better off now than they were before.”

“But what about their traditions and the right to practice their religion as they choose?”

He became passionate, even banging the table once. “They were victims of religion.

They are now freed from feudalism.”

Despite a developing global culture, the same facts can be and often are viewed through starkly different historical and cultural prisms and the word “freedom” is defined to fit one’s political perspective. Still, I didn’t think Jiang, who is quite sophisticated and had succeeded in opening up and modernizing the Chinese economy, was being quite straight with me on Tibet. The Chinese, for historical and psychological reasons, were obsessed with avoiding internal disintegration. In the case of Tibet, that led to overreaction and oppression, as obsessions often do.

During our visit to China, Bill and I again raised our concerns about Tibet and the general state of human rights in China. Predictably, the Chinese leaders were adamant and dismissive. When I’m asked why a U.S. President should visit any country with whom we have such serious differences, my answer is always the same: America, the most diverse nation in human history, now wields unparalleled power. But we can be quite insular and uninformed about other countries and their perspectives. Our leaders and our people benefit from learning more about the world in which we live, compete and try to cooperate.

Regardless of how much we have in common with people everywhere, deep differences are created by history, geography and culture and those can be bridged only―if at all―through direct experience and relationships. A high-profile presidential visit, with the attention it generates in the country visited and back in America, at least can lay the basis for greater understanding and trust. Because China is so important, the argument for an official visit was particularly compelling.

The Center for the Women’s Law Studies and Legal Services of Beijing University is a small legal aid office surprisingly similar to the one I had run as a young law professor at the University of Arkansas. The Center was aggressively using the law to advance women’s rights, a first step in enforcing a 1992 law protecting women’s rights. The Center had tried to put teeth in the law, bringing a class-action suit on behalf of factory workers who had not been paid in months, suing an employer who forced women engineers to retire earlier than their male colleagues and helping to prosecute a rapist. I met several of the Center’s clients, including one woman who was fired when she had her first child without the approval of her company’s family planning unit. Set up in 1995 with financing from the Ford Foundation, the Center had already given advice to nearly four thousand people and provided free legal services in over one hundred cases. I was encouraged to see advocacy like this as well as the experiment in village democracy China had undertaken.

Change in China is a certainty; progress toward greater freedom is not. I think the United States has a big stake in fostering closer ties and understanding.

The Chinese government surprised us by permitting the uncensored broadcast of the news conference Bill and Jiang held―during which they had an extended exchange on the subject of human rights, including Tibet―and of Bill’s address to students at Beijing University, in which he stressed that “true freedom includes more than economic freedom.”

Bill, Chelsea, my mother and I toured the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. We attended Sunday services at the state-sanctioned Protestant Chongwenmen Church―a right forbidden to many―to demonstrate our public support for greater religious freedom in China. Early one morning we visited the “dirt market,” a flea market where vendors unable to get space in the large permanent tent displayed their wares on blankets on the dirt outside. And President Jiang hosted Bill and me at a magnificent state dinner in the Great Hall of the People, which featured traditional Chinese and Western music. Before the performance concluded, both leaders had taken turns conducting the People’s Liberation Army Band. The next night, Jiang invited us, along with Chelsea and my mother, to a small private dinner at the compound, where he and the other highest-ranking officials lived with their families. After dining in an old tea house, we walked outside into the soft summer night to sit on the bank of a small lake. The lights of Beijing were faint in the distance.

If Beijing is China’s Washington, D.C., Shanghai is its New York. Bill’s schedule was filled with meetings with businessmen and a visit to the Shanghai Stock Exchange. I encountered another funny but telling instance of control by the Chinese government. We had scheduled an informal luncheon at a restaurant as a break in the relentless official schedule. When we arrived, Bob Barnett, who was doing advance for the site, told me that a few hours earlier the police had showed up and told everyone working in the nearby stores to leave. They were replaced by attractive young people wearing Western clothes.

At the modern Shanghai Library, which would be an architectural treasure in any city, I spoke about the status of women, constructing my remarks around the old Chinese aphorism that women hold up half the sky. But in most places, I added, when you combine both unpaid domestic work and income-producing work, we end up holding more than half.

Intent on emphasizing religious freedom, Secretary Albright and I toured the newly restored Ohel Rachel Synagogue, one of several synagogues built by the large Jewish community that had flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Jews fled to Shanghai from Europe and Russia. Most of the Jews left China after the Communists seized power because the government did not officially recognize Judaism and the synagogues.

Ohel Rachel had been used as a warehouse for decades. Rabbi Arthur Schreier from the Park East Synagogue in New York City, who along with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Dr. Donald Argue had reported to Bill on the status of religious freedom in China, presented a new Torah for the restored Ark.

From the frenzied pace of Shanghai we flew to Guilin, a place favored by artists over the centuries. The gently winding Li River flows between tall formations of spirelike limestone mountains. Many of China’s most stunning vertical landscape paintings depict this beautiful place.

As soon as we returned from China, I focused on our own cultural and artistic history and a celebration of the millennium that I had been thinking about for months. Democracy requires large reservoirs of intellectual capital to continue the extraordinary enterprise of our nation’s founders, intellectual giants whose imaginations and philosophical principles enabled them to envision, and then devise, our enduring system of government.

Sustaining our democracy for more than 225 years assumes American citizens who understand our nation’s rich past, including its productive alliances abroad, and can imagine the future we should create for our children. Over the last several years, I had become concerned about a cavalier anti-intellectualism in our public discourse. Some members of Congress had proudly announced that they had never traveled outside of our country.

The arrival of a new millennium offered an opportunity to showcase the history, culture and ideas that have made America the longest living democracy in human history and are crucial to the preparation of our citizens for the future. I wanted to focus attention on America’s cultural and artistic history. I enlisted my creative deputy chief of staff, Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, to head our millennium effort, and together, we adopted a theme that summed up my hopes for our endeavor: “Honor the Past, Imagine the Future.”

I organized a series of White House lectures and performances in the East Room in which scholars, historians, scientists and artists explored issues from the cultural roots of American jazz to genetics to women’s history. The brilliant scientist Stephen Hawking explored the latest breakthroughs in cosmology. Dr. Vinton Cerf and Dr. Eric Lander discussed the Human Genome Project, which is unlocking the secrets of our genetic makeup. Already we know that all human beings are 98.9 Percent genetically the same, which has important implications for our peaceful coexistence in an all-too violent world. The great trumpeter Wynton Marsalis illustrated why jazz is the music of democracy.

Our poets laureate joined with teenagers to recite their own works. These forums became the first cybercasts from the White House, allowing people all over the world to enjoy them and participate in the question-and-answer sessions afterwards.