Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

out for years, details of the secret Arkansas Project began to be aired in public for the first time. Hale was a well-paid pawn in a furtive campaign designed to discredit Bill and bring down his administration. Not only was Hale paid at least $56,000 in cash by the OIC after he agreed to testify, Hale was also secretly paid by the Arkansas Project. Journalist David Brock later disclosed that Hale was paid from the “educational” slush fund at the American Spectator financed by Richard Mellon Scaife. Brock later wrote, “At its inception … the Arkansas Project was a means of providing covert support for Hale to implicate Clinton in a crime.”

When Judge Henry Woods was shown evidence of the group’s complicity in the smear campaign against him, he demanded a federal investigation of the Arkansas Project.

The federal judges of his district―who had been appointed by both Democrats and Republicans―unanimously joined in this demand. But no investigation of Judge Woods’s charges ever took place. Judge Woods took senior status in 1995 and died in 2002. He was one among many good people tarred by Starr’s partisan brush.

After the OIC had finished presenting its case, which relied heavily on Hale’s testimony, Jim McDougal, increasingly erratic, insisted on testifying in his own defense.

Many observers felt that his testimony seriously damaged the defense case for all three defendants. The prosecutors were able to convict the three on several felony counts. Tucker resigned as Governor while pursuing his appeals. And Kenneth Starr turned up the pressure on Jim and Susan McDougal to produce incriminating evidence that didn’t exist.

As the convoluted facts of Whitewater finally started coming out in court, I could feel a subtle change in the atmospheric pressure in Washington. On Capitol Hill, Senator D’Amato stopped his Whitewater hearings when the Democrats threatened a filibuster to block his funding. For the first time in years, I was beginning to hope that we could put Whitewater behind us.

Yet despite these hopeful moments, the spring of 1996 was not destined to be a time of celebration. On April 3, an Air Force T-43 jet carrying the Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, his staff and a delegation of American business leaders crashed into a hillside along the coast of Croatia in a violent rainstorm. Ron had gone to the Balkans to promote investment and trade as part of the administration’s long-term strategy for peace in that troubled region. This was typical of Ron’s approach in the Cabinet. He instinctively understood that promoting global economic opportunity was good for America’s strategic interests and good for American business. Ron and thirty-two other Americans and two Croatians died in the crash.

I was devastated. Ron and his wife, Alma, were dear friends. They had been among our staunchest allies since the 1992 campaign, when Ron served effectively as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Ron had guided the party through the ups and downs of that campaign with aplomb and good humor. Even when Bill’s prospects dimmed in the face of relentless attacks, Ron never faltered. He believed Bill could and would win if Democrats persevered. And he was right. Ron was also great fun. With a smile on his face and a perpetual twinkle in his eyes, he could cheer up anyone, and I was his beneficiary time and again. “Don’t let the whiners get you down,” he’d remind me.

Upon hearing the news, Bill and I went to see Alma and Ron’s children, Michael and Tracey. Their house, full of family and friends, felt like the site of a revival meeting as we all laughed and cried and told stories about Ron. I later learned that Ron’s plane was the same aircraft―and had been staffed by some of the same crew―that had flown Chelsea and me only a week earlier, on that resplendent clear afternoon over Turkey.

Bill and I met the U.S. Air Force plane carrying thirty-three flagdraped caskets at Dover Air Base in Dover, Delaware. Among the victims was Lawry Payne, a smart and enterprising man who advanced some of my trips, and Adam Darling, a twenty-nineyear-old Commerce Department staffer who had become a favorite of Bill’s and mine after he volunteered to ride his bicycle across the country in support of Bill’s 1992 campaign.

In his brief remarks on the tarmac, Bill reminded us that the crash victims who died in the service of their country represented the best America had to offer.

“The sun is going down on this day,” he said as I blinked back tears. “The next time it rises it will be Easter morning, a day that marks the passage from loss and despair to hope and redemption, a day that more than any other reminds us that life is more than what we know … sometimes even more than what we can bear. But life is also eternal … What they did while the sun was out will last with us forever.”

PRAGUE SUMMER

When I ventured for the first time to Central and Eastern Europe over the Fourth of July in the summer of 1996, infant democracies had replaced communism in the former Soviet-bloc countries. Hundreds of millions of people had been liberated from lives of tyranny behind the Iron Curtain, but as I was to see for myself, embracing democratic values is just the first step. Building functioning democratic governments, creating free markets and establishing civil societies after decades of dictatorship requires time, effort and patience as well as financial aid and investment, technical training and moral support from countries like ours.

As part of his foreign policy agenda, Bill supported the expansion of NATO eastward from the Atlantic to include countries of the former Warsaw Pact. He believed this was essential to strengthening America’s long-term relationships with Europe and to further European integration. There was significant opposition to NATO expansion from within the United States and Russia, which did not want to see NATO at its own borders. The challenge for Bill and his team was to determine which countries were already eligible for