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14 A NEW JACKSONIAN ERA, PART ONE President Jimmy Carter had started his presidency by resuming an old feud with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—an interesting exercise but hardly a worthy first priority for a presidency. President Bill Clinton began his by having to withdraw his nomination of Zoe Baird as attorney general, by becoming embroiled in a controversy over gays in the military, and by getting bogged down in an attempted purge of the White House travel o‹ce. Then he became entrapped in a favorite idea of Vice President Al Gore’s, a BTU (energy) tax, and in his naming of Hillary Clinton to develop a healthcare plan that would preempt a number of plans which had been developed by Democratic senators and members of Congress. He did, however, heed the advice of his principal economic- and financial -policy advisors to bite the bullet of federal deficit reduction. The tax increases and spending cuts associated with his budget plan were not the easy political way out. But they were better addressed during the new president’s traditional “honeymoon period,” when he enjoyed much goodwill, than later when they would be more di‹cult to enact.He later would confide to a business audience that he regretted the tax increases in his plan.Whether he truly did or did not, the plan provided exactly the right medicine for the economy at the proper time. One of theWhite House staª members involved in the travel o‹ce fiasco was Deputy Counsel Vince Foster.Foster had been a partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock and was reputed to be Hillary Clinton’s best friend there. Rumors during the campaign had suggested that Foster and Hillary were more than friends and that,while Governor Clinton womanized,Hillary had found a stable alternative relationship with Foster.But Foster was a family man known as a straight arrow, and Hillary was focused on her husband’s career and her own,and on their daughter,Chelsea.The rumors seemed doubtful.Yet,when the Clintons came to theWhite House,Foster spent a disproportionate amount of his working time attending to matters principally involving Hillary’s interests .These included her health-care task force, which she proposed to shield 227 from public oversight. Foster, along with Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell,another former Rose partner,was featured in an unflattering Wall Street Journal article.(In March 1994,Hubbell would be forced to resign from the Justice Department because of investigations into his activities at the Rose Law Firm as well as his role in the Whitewater, Arkansas, real estate venture in which the Clintons also were involved.) On July 20, 1993, Foster’s body would be found at Fort Marcy Park in suburban Virginia,just across the Potomac River from Washington,a revolver in hand. It took only a few days before hard-edged conservative media were speculating that Foster’s body had been rearranged after his death, that law enforcement o‹cers had engaged in some kind of cover-up,and that he could have been murdered to keep him from disclosing damaging information about the Clintons. I did not believe any of it. What was interesting, however, was that Hillary Clinton had Foster’s White House o‹ce immediately sealed and his files removed. Several months later, when media inquiries forced public release of the list of files taken, they included files on the travel o‹ce, the health-care task force,and the Whitewater real-estate scheme which had followed the Clintons to the capital. Clinton’s first big foreign-policy crises came in October 1993, when oldline Kremlin and military leaders attempted a coup to dislodge Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and when forces aligned with a local warlord killed a number of U.S.troops in Somalia,where Clinton had maintained an involvement begun in the prior administration (the latter episode was to become the subject of the film Black Hawk Down). During the same period an American ship carrying civil advisors and U.S. Army engineers was unable to dock in Port-au-Prince,Haiti,when an angry mob threatened it from the pier.The ship turned around. The United States had sent the advisors and soldiers as part of a UN-sponsored attempt to reverse a military coup that had deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. I regarded the commitments in Somalia and Haiti as mistakes.The Somalia venture had begun as a...

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