| Circumstances, miscommunication, and psychological barriers had kept it from happening, but at least we now knew what it would take for Israel and Syria to get there once both sides were ready
As spring turned to summer, I hosted our largest state dinner ever, as more than four hundred people gathered under a tent on the South Lawn to honor King Mohammed VI of Morocco, one of whose ancestors was the first sovereign to recognize the United States shortly after our original thirteen states joined together
The next day I corrected an old injustice, awarding the Congressional Medal of Honor to twenty-two Japanese-Americans who had volunteered to serve in Europe during World War II after their families were interned in campsOne of them was my friend and ally Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who had lost an arm and very nearly his life in the warA week later I nominated the first Asian-American to the cabinet: former congressman Norm Mineta of California agreed to serve for the remainder of my term as commerce secretary, replacing Bill Daley, who was leaving to become the chairman of Al Gores campaign
In the last week of the month, I held a gathering in the East Room of the White House, where almost two hundred years earlier Thomas Jefferson had spread out the path-breaking map of the western United States that his aide Meriwether Lewis had made on his courageous expedition from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean in 1803The crowd of scientists and diplomats had gathered to celebrate a twenty-firstcentury map: more than a thousand researchers in the United States, the UK, Germany, France, prada stripe handbag Japan, and China had decoded the human genome, identifying nearly all of the three billion sequences of our genetic codeAfter battling each other for years, Francis Collins, head of the government-funded international human genome project, and Celera president Craig Venter had agreed to publish their genetic data together later in the yearCraig was an old friend, and I had done my best to bring them togetherTony Blair joined us on a satellite hookup, giving me a chance to joke that his infant sons life expectancy had just gone up by about twenty-five years
As the month drew to a close, I announced that our budget surplus would exceed $200 billion, with a ten-year projected surplus of over $4 trillionOnce again, I recommended that we lock away the Social Security surplus, about $2 trillion, and that we save about $550 billion for MedicareIt was beginning to look as if we could handle the baby boomers retirement after all
I also did a number of political events to support Democrats in Arizona and California and to help Terry McAuliffe raise the rest of the money we needed to put on our convention in Los Angeles in AugustWe were working closely with him and the Gore campaign through my political director Minyon Moore
Most polls had Gore trailing Bush, and at my press conference on June 28, I was asked by an NBC News reporter whether Al was being held accountable for the scandals of the administrationI said there was no evidence that he was being punished for my mistakes; that the only wrongdoing he had been accused of involved campaign fund-raising, and he wasnt guilty; and that the other so-called gucci fabric scandals were bogus: The word scandal has been thrown around here like a clanging teapot for seven yearsI also said I knew three things about Al Gore: he had had a more positive impact on our country as vice president than any of his predecessors; he had the right positions on the issues and would keep the prosperity going; and he understood the future, both its possibilities and its dangersI believed if all the voters understood that, Al would win
In the first week of July, I announced that our economy had now produced twenty-two million jobs since I took office, and went out to the Old Soldiers Home a few miles north of the White House to protect the old cottage Abraham Lincoln and his family had used for a summer home when the Potomac generated hordes of mosquitoes and there was no air conditioningSeveral other Presidents had used it, tooIt was one of Hillarys Save Americas Treasures projects, and we wanted to know the old place would be cared for when we left the White House
On July 11, I opened a summit with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat at Camp David in an attempt to resolve the remaining obstacles to peace, or at least to narrow their differences so that we could finish before I left office, a result both leaders said they wanted
They came to the summit with very different attitudesBarak had pushed hard for the summit because the piecemeal approach of the 1993 agreement and the Wye River accord didnt work for himThe 180,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza were a formidable forceEvery Israeli concession that failed to bring an end to terror and a formal Palestinian recognition that imitation louis vuitton wallets the conflict was over was a death by a thousand cutsBarak had just survived a no-confidence vote in the Knesset by only two votesHe was also eager for a deal before September, when Arafat had threatened to unilaterally declare a stateBarak believed that if he could present a comprehensive peace plan to Israeli citizens, they would vote for it as long as Israels fundamental interests were achieved: security, the protection of its religious and cultural sites on the Temple Mount, an end to the Palestinian claim to an unlimited right of return to Israel, and a declaration that the conflict was over
Arafat, on the other hand, didnt want to come to Camp David, at least not yetHe had felt abandoned by the Israelis when they turned to the Syrian track, and was angry that Barak had not kept previous commitments to turn over more of the West Bank, including villages near JerusalemIn Arafats eyes, Baraks unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and his offer to withdraw from the Golan had weakened himWhile Arafat had patiently continued the peace process, Lebanon and Syria had benefited by taking a hard lineArafat also said he needed two more weeks to develop his proposalsHe wanted as close to a hundred percent of the West Bank and Gaza as he could get; complete sovereignty over the Temple Mount and East Jerusalem, except for the Jewish neighborhoods there; and a solution to the refugee problem that did not require him to give up the principle of the right of return
As usual, each leader saw his own position more clearly than he saw the other sideThere was not a high probability of success for the summitI called rolex oyster watch it because I believed that the collapse of the peace process would be a near certainty if I didnt
On the first day, I tried to get Arafat past his grievances to focus on the work ahead and to get Barak to agree on how to move through the issues, especially the most contentious ones: territory, settlements, refugees, security, and JerusalemAs he had at Shepherdstown, Barak wanted to slow-walk things for a couple of daysIt didnt matter that much this timeArafat hadnt come with a set of negotiating points; this was all strange territory to himIn previous negotiations he would just hold out for the best offer he could get from Israel on issues such as land, an airport, connecting roads, and prisoner releases, then pledge his best efforts on the security frontNow if we were going to get this done, Arafat had some compromising of his own to do on concrete matters: He couldnt get a hundred percent of the West Bank or an unlimited right of return to a much smaller IsraelHe also would have to meet some of Israels security concerns about potential enemies east of the Jordan River
I spent the first couple of days trying to get Arafat and Barak in the right frame of mind, while Madeleine, Sandy, Dennis, Gemal Helal, John Podesta, and the rest of our team began working with their Israeli and Palestinian counterpartsI was immensely impressed with the quality of both delegationsThey were all patriotic, intelligent, and hardworking, and they genuinely seemed to want an agreementMost of them had known each other and their counterparts on the other side for years, and the chemistry between the two groups was quite gucci coin wallet g |
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