It’s getting on a year since I left the cabinet. Mostly I’ve spent the time reintroducing myself to my family. Some who leave cabinet posts suffer painful decompression, not unlike deep-sea divers who come back to the surface too quickly. My ascent to fresh air has been relatively pain-free. The only symptom I’ve noticed is a slight disorientation stemming from having to do normal things for myself rather than rely on aides. Call it staff deprivation. Driving myself through rush-hour traffic, getting lost in an underground garage, standing for an hour in line to buy airline tickets, endlessly exchanging voicemails: the simple irritations of private life were denied me for the four years I devoted to the grand irritations of public life.
There is also, I confess, a certain frustration in no longer being in the loop, nor even near it. At this writing, the American economy continues to be strong. Unemployment is down, as is inflation. Growth and productivity are up. Corporate profits and the stock market are soaring. (There are signs that the market may be settling down, however.) America is preeminent in the world, without enemy or rival. If ever there was a time to get on with the unfinished agenda of creating real opportunity for all of our citizens, it is now. And yet that agenda is still very much unfinished: Adjusted for inflation, half of all workers are still earning less than they did in 1989. And despite modest gains among the working poor, the 1990s have witnessed greater polarization of income than at any other time since the Second World War. We are fast becoming two cultures—one of affluence and contentment, the other of insecurity and cynicism.
The nation is strangely immobilized. Rather than giving us the confidence we need to move forward, the good news seems rather to have anesthetized us. A future generation looking back on this era may wonder why—when we had no hot or cold war to fight, no depression or recession to cope with, no great drain on our resources or our spirits—we did so little. Little, that is, relative to what the situation demanded; little, relative to what we could have done. Did we simply assume that the economic expansion would last forever? That the sharp disparities of income, wealth, and opportunity would not have serious consequences, or that they would automatically shrink? That we would never again face common threats of the sort which draw upon the reservoirs of trust and solidarity which we allowed to run dry?
How the national debate is framed—what options are put before the public—can be more important, ultimately, than the immediate choices made. The framing defines the breadth of the nation’s ambition, and thus either raises or lowers expectations, fires or depresses imaginations, ignites or deflates political movements. A future generation pondering this era may find it strange that America focused most of its collective energies between the start of 1993 and the end of 1997 on bringing the federal budget into balance by the year 2002, while cutting taxes (mostly on the wealthy) and reducing spending (mostly on the poor and near-poor). Republicans have wanted to do all this somewhat more aggressively than Democrats; Democrats, to do it somewhat more equitably than Republicans. But the differences are ones of degree. The larger issues facing the nation—which will loom even larger when the economy cools—have either been put aside, or are assumed, by way of magical reasoning, to be remedied by one or the other of these barely distinguishable directions.
The budget deficit, which so obsessed the nation during the years of this chronicle, began to vanish during the spring and summer of 1997, even before the White House and Congress reached agreement, with great fanfare, on how to make it do so officially. The truly astonishing thing was not the economy’s buoyancy at the time, but how our leaders chose to spend most of the unexpected bounty: Rather than on what had been neglected and was most needed—child care, universal health care, better schools, jobs for the poor who would be shoved off welfare, public transportation, or other means of helping the bottom half of our population move upward—they dedicated it to the largest federal tax cut on higher incomes since Ronald Reagan signed the tax reduction bill in 1981.
Was this the inevitable end of the path down which the nation began traveling five years earlier? If so, why had we begun down this path? If not, where did we lose our way? I have no clear answers for those who may ponder these questions years from now, even though I was at the upper reaches of our government through part of the era in question and was in this sense complicit. Perhaps, by viewing these years through my eyes, among others, and with the further advantage of hindsight, it will be possible to gain a fuller understanding.
I was gratified at the public’s response to this book, which became a national bestseller. Most reviewers were friendly. However, on the heels of success came controversy over the accuracy of some of the dialogue and details of some incidents I report. You are duly warned, had you not assumed it already, that most of the quotes in this book should be considered paraphrases rather than verbatim accounts, as is often true of memoirs. Not until late on the night of a particular encounter or event, and sometimes not until days later, did I have an opportunity to enter into my journal fragments of dialogue or an outline of what had transpired. After leaving the cabinet, I briefly reviewed and consolidated my notes, checking sources when I wasn’t confident of my memory. But memory is fallible. Where I have subsequently learned of errors or misinterpretations I have made changes in this edition. In no instance, however, are the changes of material importance to the story I relate.
This book is not an exercise in investigative journalism, nor does it pretend to be a work of historical reportage like the footnote-studded personal histories of some former statesmen. It is, rather, the personal testament of one mans experience during four extraordinary years.