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

education and training, and some education hours should count toward work requirements. And the states should be held accountable for how they spend federal welfare dollars.

As Bill gained greater support from the American people in the months preceding the 1996 election, his adversaries desperately cast about for anything that could weaken his momentum. Time magazine recognized the trend in early July, when it ran an article with the headline “The Starr Factor.” It reported, “For months Clinton has been waiting for the GOP contender who would turn the ‘96 race into a real battle. It looks as though he has found him at last―and it’s not Bob Dole. Every serious matter bedeviling the President has Kenneth Starr connected to it somewhere…. With the Dole campaign still unable to gain traction on its own, Republican hopes are riding on a presidency worn to pieces by subpoenas and indictments.”

The latest pseudo-scandal appeared to be timed for the summer convention season and hinged on the actions of two midlevel White House employees, Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca, in the Office of Personnel Security. In 1993, they had requested FBI background files on White House pass holders to assemble a record of everyone with a legitimate White House security pass. The Office of Personnel Security, despite its imposing title, did not perform “security checks”―that was done by the FBI. Nor was it responsible for security-that was the job of the Secret Service. I never quite figured out what else it did, but it was responsible for keeping track of present White House employees, making sure their clearances were up to date, and giving security briefings to new White House personnel. When President Bush left the White House in January 1993, his people took all the files of the Office of Personnel Security―which they were allowed to do under the Presidential Records Act-for the Bush Library. The incoming Administration thus had none of its own records (as distinct from the Secret Service’s records) of the permanent employees in the White House. Livingstone and Marceca were trying to rebuild these OPS records when they received from the FBI hundreds of files, including some from Reagan and Bush officials. They did not recognize the mistake.

When another staffer finally did, she sent the files to the archives rather than returning them to the FBI. The White House acknowledged this bureaucratic snafu and apologized for it. Nonetheless, “Filegate” was added to Kenneth Starr’s list of investigations.

Before the story was put to rest, an FBI agent told the Senate Judiciary Committee staff that his background check of Craig Livingstone suggested that Livingstone was given his job as head of White House personnel security because his mother and I had been friends. In fact, Mrs. Livingstone and I didn’t know one another, but we had been photographed together once in a large group at a White House Christmas party. I was in Bucharest at a school whose curriculum our government was helping to revamp when a traveling American reporter asked me about my relationship with the Livingstone family.

I told him that I didn’t recall meeting Craig or his mother, but if I ever did encounter her, I’d say, “Mrs. Livingstone, I presume?”

During August, I took Chelsea on a college tour through New England. Though I was dreading the moment when she would leave home for college, I was excited about visiting colleges with her. I also secretly hoped she’d fall in love with my alma mater, Wellesley, or at least choose a college on the East Coast so I could easily visit and she could come home on a whim. I worked out a deal with the Secret Service to travel from campus to campus in a nondescript van with as few agents visible as possible. We visited six campuses with relatively little notice, and I would have been thrilled if she had attended any one of them.

Chelsea, however, was eager to see Stanford, so off we went to Palo Alto. The Provost at the time, Condoleezza Rice, graciously welcomed us at the start of a daylong visit that captivated Chelsea. She loved the setting of the University amidst the foothills, the temperate weather and the Mission-style architecture. When I called Bill that night, I told him I thought Stanford was clearly her first choice―the price, I guess, of raising an independent child.

For our summer vacation, we again chose Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I had been frantically trying to finish writing It Takes a Village the year before, and now I was free to hike with Bill and Chelsea through meadows of late summer wildflowers in the Grand Tetons and explore nearby Yellowstone National Park. The sweeping grasslands and geyser basins were preserved for future generations of Americans back in 1872 when the U.S. government designated Yellowstone as the country’s―and the world’s―first national park. Since then, America’s national parks have provided a model and an inspiration for other nations to protect their natural heritage. Whenever I visit one of our national parks, I’m reminded of how our country has been blessed with such abundant natural resources. Our job goes beyond preserving the beautiful scenery; we have to be caretakers of a healthy, balanced environment. In Yellowstone, where gray wolves had been exterminated by trappers, government biologists reintroduced a small population to help restore the natural relationship between predator and prey in the park. During our visit to Yellowstone, Chelsea, Bill and I hiked up to the holding pens where a pack of wolves was being acclimated for release. There were no reporters around, just wildlife officials, us and a few astonished Secret Service agents who never expected to have to protect the First Family from a pack of real wolves.

Bill announced a historic agreement to stop a large, foreign-owned gold mine on the border of Yellowstone from threatening the pristine environment. The older I become, the more passionate I am about protecting our earth from unnecessary and irreversible damage.

A strong economy and a clean environment are not mutually exclusive goals―in fact, they