Enemies The Clintons

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

The Clintons arrived in Washington in the midst of a media revolution.

Every detail of their White House was scrutinised,

including the July 1993 suicide

of their close friend and counsel Vince Foster.

Cable television was beginning to become a force.

And the competition among cable news

became a vicious fact of Bill Clinton's life.

Sex sold. Corruption sold.

Foster's suicide fuelled media fascination.

Within days of the discovery of his body,

there was speculation about the real cause of his death.

The immediate reaction to Vince Foster's death was,

"What happened here, and were the Clintons involved?

"Were they covering something up?"

There begins bubbling up this notion

that there's a conspiracy.

That Vince Foster's been murdered.

You know, on one account, his body rolled up in a rug,

he's having an affair with Hillary, all of these terrible things.

Attention focused mostly on some files

mysteriously removed from Foster's office after his death,

including documents related to an old Arkansas land deal -

Whitewater.

Whitewater, the scandal that would haunt Clinton's presidency

longer than any other, had its roots in the late 1970s.

At the time, Bill Clinton was a young Attorney General

making just over 25,000 a year.

Hillary, an associate at the Rose law firm in Little Rock,

was the family's main breadwinner.

When an old friend named Jim McDougal approached her

with a plan to build vacation homes along the White River,

Hillary decided to invest.

Here's a guy, McDougal, that comes to him and says,

"Put a little money into this thing."

He said, "Boy, you'll be rich and you'll make money,

"and this is going to be great." Well, I guess in hindsight,

every person promoting any sort of land scheme

thinks it's going to be a world-beater

and we're going to be rich as Midas by the time it's over.

Whitewater was going to the wall.

To prop up his scheme, McDougal made illegal transfers

from his own loan company, Madison Guaranty.

Before long, Madison Guaranty failed.

McDougal was charged with fraud.

President Clinton,

you just mentioned James McDougal, your former business partner.

A lot of questions have been raised about his business practices.

15 years later, President Clinton was asked by reporters

what he and Hillary knew about McDougal's illegal activities.

To the best of my knowledge he was honest in his dealings with me

and that's all I can comment on.

'The White House was totally unprepared for it.

'There was no memo on it, there was no defence group.'

I had nothing to do with the management of Whitewater.

Hillary had nothing to do with it.

We didn't keep the books or the records.

There were some of us who said, "Keep the walls up, keep it back,

"you know, it's none of their business, uh, nothing happened.

"It's a little deal down in Arkansas,

"it's nothing to do with the presidency, and it'll go away."

It didn't go away, but that built up a suspicion,

and, as new things leaked out, as inconsequential as they might be,

the press would say, "Oh, the Clintons have been hiding stuff."

And there was built up, relatively quickly,

that the Clintons were just stonewalling.

The Whitewater scandal couldn't have come at a worse time.

In the late summer of 1993, he needed broad political support,

as his first major piece of legislation,

the federal budget, was headed for a showdown in Congress.

We knew that if Bill Clinton lost that vote,

the signal would be, "He can't get the Democrats in the House

"and the Senate to go along with him."

That means he doesn't have power.

That's the definition of lacking power.

And if, this early in the administration,

our new President lacks power, where do we go next?

Abandoning his campaign promise to cut taxes

and invest in the middle class, Clinton instead took the advice of

the administration's deficit hawks to reduce spending and raise taxes.

Bill Clinton's first big decision was an intellectual act of faith.

We're on the eve of historic action.

Without deficit reduction, we can't have sustained economic growth.

He gambled in the midst of a recession

that he'd get more economic growth if he was fiscally conservative.

And, if he began to reduce the deficit,

that would convince the bond market

to start reducing interest rates, and the economy would grow.

That was just a theory. No-one knew it would work.

More than anything,

Clinton had wanted to invest in the middle class.

The realisation that he couldn't left him deeply disappointed.

He didn't become president to say no.

He didn't become president to administer pain.

He didn't become president because he wanted to placate Wall Street.

But, in fact, his agenda

did require, to some extent, doing all those things.

As the budget reached Congress, Clinton knew it was on a knife-edge.

With Republicans unanimously opposed,

the President needed nearly every Democratic vote to pass the bill,

but the party, like the administration, was in disarray.

Liberal democrats complained about the cuts in spending,

while conservatives opposed the tax hikes.

I think that the President will fail,

the party will fail,

and the country will fail if we enact this budget.

Faced with the possibility of a catastrophic defeat,

Clinton got down to work.

"I knew if I didn't get the economy going,"

he said, "nothing else would matter."

There wasn't anything he wasn't willing to do.

He would call, he would meet, he would grovel, he would strong-arm.

He would use every tactic any leader has at his disposal

to try to get this thing done.

But the days when a president could command votes,

even from members of his own party, were long over.

Bill Clinton was used to Arkansas.

You know, he knew the good old boys, he knew who he had to go to.

He could walk on the floor of the legislature

and basically, you know,

with a smile and a pat on the back, he could get any vote he wanted.

That wasn't true, here in Washington.

In many ways it was frustrating for him

because he really felt he knew what was best

for the country and that by the sheer power of his personality

and his words and his smile, that somehow he could make it work.

In early August, the final budget bill reached the floor of the House.

All eyes turned to a freshman Democrat

from a historically Republican district,

Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky.

We had her down as voting yes, and she votes no, early on.

And so we said, "Go in there, find out what the hell's going on,

"try to turn her vote around."

First of all, as a former member,

if you're going to vote against the leadership,

vote and get the hell out of there.

She didn't do that, she stayed there.

So suddenly these guys are all pouring on her,

and she's standing there, and they're saying, "Come on,

"you've got to change your vote, this is important to the Administration."

She then says something like, "I'll do this,

but the President has to come into my district."

So they call me, back in the office, and they say,

"Will the President come into her district?"

And I say, "Absolutely!

"Whatever it takes, we're going to do it."

With the vote, and his presidency on the line,

Clinton paced nervously in a small office in the West Wing.

We're all crowded around this little television set,

really with quite a high level of uncertainty.

Finally, Mezvinsky cast her vote "yes" and the budget passed.

With an equally narrow victory in the Senate,

Clinton's final budget became law.

Not even he foresaw the economic boom it would set off.

It contributed enormously to what turned out to be the longest

economic expansion in the nation's history.

22 million new jobs were created, productivity went up.

Incomes rose at all levels.

And, for the first time in 30 years, we had a federal surplus.

But beyond America's shores, a troubled world

would wait no longer for the President's attention.

EXPLOSION

GUNSHOTS

The Cold War had kept a lot of tensions quiet

and a lot of groups quiet.

And now, with that over, all of the old animosities,

all of the old hatreds -

ethnic hatreds, regional tensions -

that had been under that iceberg of the Cold War

were now popping out, and were real problems.

How much did the United States want to get involved in problems

in the rest of the world, which tended to be localised problems?

Were those worthy of our time and attention?

This was uncharted territory.

We were all reaching for,

all searching for, some new grand unifying theory.

Give us a new way of looking at the world.

Clinton had little to offer in the realm of foreign affairs.

The first President since World War II who had not worn

a military uniform, he lacked confidence as a Commander in Chief.

Clinton came to the White House

with very little knowledge of the US military.

Famously, he didn't even know how to salute.

To a great many people in this country,

that was legitimately something to be worried about.

Clinton's first major foreign policy crisis came in Somalia.

Mohamed Farrah Aidid was terrorizing the local population

in an effort to suppress his opponents in a civil war.

Clinton ordered US Special Forces into Somalia to capture Aidid.

During a mission on October 3rd,

two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down.

American forces sent in to assist were pinned down

by overwhelming firepower.

GUNSHOTS

18 US soldiers were killed, with 84 more wounded.

Around the world, images of a dead American soldier

being dragged through the streets inflamed public opinion.

You need to understand the average citizen.

In their minds, we have gone there on a humanitarian mission

to offer a helping hand, and we get attacked and humiliated.

"Why are we there? Why should we continue to help?

"Why are you keeping the boys there? Bring the boys home."

That sort of political pressure

that President Clinton and his team had to deal with.

Public opinion contained what seemed a clear lesson.

Military intervention, without a compelling national interest,

came with unforeseeable risks and costs.

It sent a chill through the administration and made them

much more reluctant to intervene in other parts of the world,

and where that came home, in the most profound way,

and one that Bill Clinton came to deeply, deeply regret, was in Rwanda.

Rwanda was suffering through its own civil war between two tribes,

Hutus and Tutsis.

In early April 1994, the Rwandan president's plane was shot down.

The Hutu government blamed Tutsi rebels.

When the plane was shot down, all hell broke loose

and that became the trigger which set off this mass killing.

The killing caught the Clinton administration entirely by surprise.

That night, I was leaving the office and I noticed on CNN,

on the television screen, there was shooting going on.

And I said to my assistant, "What's going on? What is that?"

He said, "Oh, it's, it's R-wanda.

"There's some kind of operation going on over there."

I said, "Is that real? Is that on time?" He said, "Yes, sir."

Some 800,000 Tutsis were massacred.

But with the Black Hawk Down incident still fresh,

the Clinton administration did virtually nothing

to stop the slaughter.

We needed international support in Rwanda,

but the will to intervene was not there.

They knew what was happening,

but they were not about to take the risks.

Rwanda lived in the shadow of Somalia,

and paid the price for what had happened in Somalia.

Clinton was trapped in no man's land.

If Somalia had demonstrated the risks of military intervention,

Rwanda proved the costs of doing nothing.

I know the president felt awful afterwards. Awful.

As it came out, and we understood the scale, the enormity,

we realised that... there are sins of omission,

as well as sins of commission.

This was a horrible omission.

Here we go.

All right. Flip it, Chels.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

After a year Hillary described as "hellish,"

the Clintons were looking forward to their first Christmas in Washington.

Escaping the White House, they visited close friends

and even shopped at a local mall.

Bill and Hillary had always been doting parents to Chelsea,

trying to keep her life as normal as possible.

Both Hillary and Bill in their own way were fabulous parents,

very protective of Chelsea,

and managed to keep a cordon of privacy around her,

let her grow up more or less naturally.

For the most part, the press respected Chelsea's privacy,

but showed no such consideration for her parents.

In mid-December, the First Family's hopes for a quiet Christmas

were dashed when a call from the Washington Post

once again plunged them into the Whitewater scandal.

I got a call from Bob Kaiser,

who was then the number two editor at the Washington Post.

And he said, "David, you know, we've known each other a long time,

"and we've made numerous requests to the White House

"for some "Whitewater-related documents,

"that we're getting stonewalled,

"and we're about to go on the attack."

Many advised the President

to turn over his private papers on Whitewater to the Post.

I said, "Mr President, this is a flagship newspaper.

"They're going to put a team of investigative reporters on this

"if you don't give these documents over.

"No-one knows where that's going to go.

"Why don't we just do it now and just, you know,

do the fair and square thing?"

He said, "I agree, let's do it," He said, "But there's one problem."

He said, "I'm in this with Hillary. You've got to go convince Hillary."

Hillary's attitude toward the press and thus towards the Washington Post

was to pull back, to reveal nothing.

To keep the media or anybody else

who's asked questions about their inside life at bay.

So she's locked down.

Finally after about two weeks,

I got a call from the counsel's office saying,

"By the way, David, we have now sent a letter

"to the Washington Post and we'll read it to you."

I said, "Fine, let me hear the letter." And basically it said,

"Dear Washington Post, screw you. No documents."

Clinton's refusal to turn over his private Whitewater records

was a red flag to many of his political enemies.

In early January, Republican Senator Robert Dole

demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor

to investigate Whitewater.

If there's nothing to hide, why not lay it all out there?

But every day there's another little drip coming from somewhere.

Dole's demand restarted the argument inside the White House.

Most of Clinton's advisors urged him to appoint a special prosecutor,

but Hillary and White House counsel Bernie Nussbaum argued against it.

I said to the President, "They'll investigate you,

"They won't find anything because you did nothing in Whitewater,

"but they'll investigate."

"Somebody did something in Arkansas in the last 20 years."

"They will try to find that person.

"Then they will try to get that person, to save their neck,

"to remember something that you did in Arkansas

"in the last 20 years which was illegal.

"This will last, Mr President, as long as you're President and beyond."

The contrary argument was,

"We're trying to run a presidency and a White House here.

"This is not going to go away."

"Yes, you can stave it off for a while,

"but at some point everything is going to come out."

And that's when Clinton said, "I can't take it anymore.

"Tell me what to do.

"You got to, got to give me...tell me what to do!" He screams at me.

We finally persuaded Hillary, much against her better instincts,

to call the President

and say that we wanted him to authorise Attorney General Reno

to appoint a special counsel.

Exhausted and distraught over the recent death of his mother,

Clinton did not put up a fight.

On January 20 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno,

acting on Clinton's authorization, appointed lawyer Robert Fiske

as special counsel in the Whitewater matter.

Most of the newspapers in the country asked me

to have a special counsel appointed. That's what I have done.

I did it so that I could go on with my work.

I want a full investigation.

I want this thing to be done, fully, clearly, and to be over with.

Years later, Clinton would say,

"It was the worst mistake of my presidency."

By the spring of 1994, Bill Clinton had endured 18 months

of attacks by his political enemies, the press, and even other Democrats.

Tired of being on the back foot,

he set out to reclaim his Presidency with one grand gesture.

For 60 years, this country has tried to reform health care.

President Roosevelt tried, President Truman tried,

President Nixon tried, President Carter tried.

Every time, the special interests were powerful enough to defeat them.

But not this time.

APPLAUSE

Healthcare was to be the giant monument of the Clinton presidency.

Under our plan, every American would receive a healthcare security card.

To lead the signature initiative of his presidency,

Clinton turned as he had before to the person he trusted most.

This is a crucial moment

in the fight for healthcare reform in our nation.

We all know our country needs health security that's decent,

affordable for every American.

There are those who would cynically say he owed her

for standing by her man, despite Gennifer Flowers

and all the rest during the campaign.

But I think it was something else.

Clinton...

..adores her.

And he especially adores her mind.

We cannot provide primary preventive health care in America

if we don't make better use of our nurses.

Bill Clinton really believed

that if anybody was going to come up with the answer

to the most vexing public policy problem out there,

it was going to be Hillary.

It was one of the stupidest political decisions

Bill Clinton ever made.

And now it's time for everybody to board their busses.

Hillary Clinton took to her new job

with all the energy and determination

pent up during the previous year.

This issue affects everybody.

In forums and town meetings across the country,

she heard stories of insurance abuse, exorbitant healthcare bills

and poor-quality care.

But once back in Washington, she shut out nearly every outside voice,

relying on a tight circle of advisors to write a 1,300-page plan

that would radically reshape the nation's healthcare system.

There was a rigidity and an unwillingness to really listen.

The mark of a good politician is to listen

and to be able to understand what's really being said.

The frailty of Hillary was it was too cloistered, too walled off,

and she really thought what she perceived

as the public opinion in favour of healthcare

would override the resistance in Congress

and of the special interests, and it was a big mistake.

This was covered under our old plan.

Oh, yeah, that was a good one, wasn't it?

By the summer, Hillary's plan

was being pilloried by the health insurance industry

as a big government takeover of healthcare.

We spent more than a year trying to legislate something

the country didn't want.

Having choices we don't like is no choice at all.

-They choose.

-We lose.

We scared people by saying,

"The healthcare system isn't working,

"and here comes the government to fix it."

Ronald Reagan had been schooling this public for many years now

that the government is the problem.

People didn't think, "Oh, great, here comes the government."

Reagan had won that argument.

Clinton did nothing to hedge Hillary's "all or nothing" bet

or avert the looming political catastrophe.

In the President's mind this was something he had given to Hillary

and he was very, very reluctant to override her.

I think that because of the husband-wife relationship,

that it was not something that he was willing to take on.

-CHANTING:

-Socialised medicine makes me sick.

Socialised medicine makes me sick.

Throughout the summer of 1994,

as politicians heard from their frightened constituents,

Hillary's healthcare bill lost support.

Before it even came up for a vote in Congress,

the Clinton healthcare bill was dead.

The defeat of healthcare was a huge defeat.

It was the number-one objective,

and to have it defeated...

was a repudiation, in a sense.

Or at least felt like a repudiation of the Clinton administration.

Weakened by scandal and the defeat of healthcare,

Clinton was about to be challenged by a new and formidable rival.

I am a genuine revolutionary. They are the genuine reactionaries,

We are going to change their world. They will do anything to stop us.

They will use any tool. There is no...

Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich had spent more than a decade

planning his assault on the Democratic Party.

He was a giant personality.

He was one of the best policy wonks and thinkers of new ideas around.

But his style was very different from mine.

His personality, his approach was,

if it's not arrogance, it's at least over-confidence.

Gingrich's ultimate goal was nothing less than

a dismantling of what he called the "liberal welfare state."

He would begin by trying to break the Democrats' 40-year stranglehold

on the House of Representatives in the upcoming mid-term elections.

We had some people that were not satisfied

to just passively go along

with being in an abused, mistreated minority.

There were a lot of Republicans that had been in the minority for so long

they thought, "This is where we belong and this is OK,

"if they'll just give us a crumb or two."

Newt started rocking the boat.

Gingrich decided the best way to achieve a Republican victory

in the mid-terms was to run against Clinton.

Republican candidates across the country

morphed their Democratic opponents into the President.

Look at congressman Tim Johnson's voting record.

It looks just like Bill Clinton's liberal agenda.

Clinton was sure his record could yet win over the American people.

By the fall of 1994, the economy was growing again...

..but scandals, the failure of healthcare and foreign policy

weighed heavily on public opinion.

'I remember him saying to me on God knows how many speeches,'

"Harold, if I can just communicate to enough Americans

"what we have done and where we want to take the country,

"we'll win this."

I now declare the polls open.

'One of the big questions

'is whether the Republicans have been successful'

in turning this election into a referendum on Bill Clinton

as they had wanted.

Our exit polls are turning up bad news all over the country

for President Clinton and his Party.

'I had called a friend at NBC

'to find out what the 1.30 exit polls looked like'

and she told me, "Well, Tony, I actually haven't seen the ex...

"1.30 exit polls, they're holding them back.

' "Apparently you guys are doing so well

' "that there must be something wrong with the polling." '

That was the beginning of a hopeful evening

that turned into a glorious one.

This is a truly a wildly historic night.

I mean, this is just... You know.

'The Republican Revolution of Election '94'

shook Capitol Hill like an earthquake today.

Its reverberations went into state houses

and moved the whole political landscape sharply to the right.

By the end of the night,

Republicans had picked up 54 seats in the House

and eight in the Senate,

winning control of both chambers of Congress.

'After the mid-terms, the President, I think, felt that...

'he was almost a hostage in his own White House.

'He was unhappy with the White House staff,

'he was unhappy with the policy direction...'

and so he actually began a very quiet operation

to begin to change his administration.

Beginning in early 1995,

White House staffers began to notice a change in the president.

His speeches contained unfamiliar language and cadences.

In meetings, he'd get up abruptly and leave the room.

Many aides felt he was no longer listening to them.

The influence of one significant new appointment was becoming apparent.

Dick Morris, an abrasive political consultant from New York,

had set up shop in the White House.

Morris, who had a history with the Clintons,

began to chair weekly strategy meetings

that were attended by most of the president's senior staff.

'Clinton typically dominates any group or discussion that he's in.'

In the meetings on the second floor of the residence,

which we had every week,

Clinton would literally sit there for an hour, sometimes,

hardly saying a word, listening to Morris.

'When I first started to work for Clinton in the White House

'he had two big negatives - '

a third of the country thought he was immoral

and a third of the country thought he was weak.

And I basically went to him and I said,

"I can't do much about the immoral, but we sure can solve the weak."

And therefore we embarked on a conscious strategy

of making sure people saw Clinton as strong.

The heart of Morris's operation was his polling,

which he used to diagnose where Clinton's weaknesses lay

and how he could correct them.

'They polled everything.

'They polled every last word that came out of his mouth.'

They polled where he should go on vacation!

Instead of going to Martha's Vineyard,

that elite island off the coast of Massachusetts,

they had him riding a horse in Wyoming.

I think Bill Clinton's allergic to horses!

But that's what the focus group said would be a more acceptable vacation.

'One of the big problems was the relationship

'between Bill and Hillary.

'Voters thought that it was a zero-sum game -

'that for Hillary to be strong Bill would have to be weak.

'And as a result the perception of Hillary's strength

'became a perception of Bill's weakness.'

The polling made me understand that

and when I came back to work for Clinton,

one of the first things I did was to tell Hillary,

"You can be as influential as you want to be, but do it in private.

"Don't sit in on the strategy meetings,

"don't make the appointments, don't make everybody be cleared with you.

"In the bedroom at night, tell him what to do,

"but don't let it be seen in public."

Morris's advice hit home.

After the stunning defeat in the mid-term elections,

Hillary had received a large share of the blame.

'She had been caught out trying to be a co-President.'

'That just wasn't going to fly.

'And that's when she really had to begin to really re-examine,

'again, as she did as Governor's wife,'

"What does the public want from me in this role?",

and to take on, gradually, a little bit more of the traditional role

of First Lady.

Well, welcome to the White House

and the beginning of the Christmas Season here...

Unsatisfied by her ceremonial role as First Lady,

Hillary began working on issues important to her,

but not alarming to the public.

She began writing a book about children

and travelled abroad with Chelsea to advocate for women's rights.

She wrote a weekly syndicated column

and even consulted a psychic in the White House.

But it wasn't enough.

'She felt, for one of the rare times in her life, completely depressed.'

She said everything that she was doing wasn't working,

she just didn't know what to do any more.

It's cos she really wanted to be in there, right at Bill Clinton's side,

fighting all the political battles that he was doing.

The president wants to defend Washington bureaucracy,

Washington red tape, and Washington spending,

and higher taxes to pay for less out of Washington...

While the Clintons struggled,

their deadly rival, Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich,

was dominating politics in Washington and spoiling for a fight.

In the spring of 1995, Gingrich picked his battleground.

What you currently have

is a system designed to be a centralised bureaucracy...

In May, Gingrich unveiled a plan to eliminate the federal budget deficit

in seven years through huge cuts in government spending.

Gingrich had managed to shift the focus of power and media attention

from Clinton to himself.

With Gingrich in the spotlight,

Clinton seemed increasingly peripheral.

April 18th, 1995.

Bill Clinton gives a press conference

and we're all over him about his lack of power.

Newt's running the town! Newt's in control!

-Yes, Jean.

-President Clinton,

Republicans have dominated political debate in this country

since they took over Congress in January

and even tonight, two of the major broadcast networks

declined to broadcast this event live.

Do you worry about making sure your voice is heard in the coming months?

Clinton is forced to say that the President is still relevant here.

The Constitution gives me relevance,

the power of our ideas gives me relevance,

the record we have built up over the last two years

and the things we are trying to do to implement it give it relevance.

The President is relevant here...

'It was AWFUL!'

You know, "The President is still relevant."

Just the fact that he felt compelled to say those words says everything.

I am willing to work with the Republicans.

The question is, what happens now?

'About a third of the building has been blown away.'

'The next day, on April 19th, the bomb went off at Oklahoma City.'

CHILD CRYING AND SCREAMING

It was the largest domestic terrorist event in American history.

'That changed everything.'

The bombing in Oklahoma City...

was an attack on innocent children...

and defenceless citizens.

It was an act of cowardice... and it was evil.

The United States will not tolerate it...

and I will not allow the people of this country

to be intimidated by evil cowards.

Within 48 hours of the incident,

the FBI arrested 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh,

a former soldier with a burning hatred for the government.

Four days after the bombing,

Clinton travelled to Oklahoma City to console the mourners.

I went with him down to Oklahoma City for that Sunday morning.

On the flight we worked on the speech some more.

He was very focused on what to say.

'I remember we went into what I think they call the Cow Palace,

'and I've never been in a setting that was as eerily silent

'as that one was... except for the sound of sobbing.'

You have lost too much...

but you have not lost everything.

And you have certainly not lost America...

..for we will stand with you.

'He spoke to the country as a unifying, a healing figure'

but, very subtly and appropriately, he also drew attention to the fact

that the rhetoric Timothy McVeigh was using

was not all that different from the rhetoric that the talk show hosts,

and the militias and even some of the members of Congress were using.

Let us teach our children that the God of comfort

is also the God of righteousness.

Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind.

Bill Clinton had begun to find his voice at home

but he commanded little respect on the international stage.

War had broken out in Europe.

The former state of Yugoslavia had fractured

and disintegrated into civil war along old ethnic divides.

Bosnian Serbs had begun wiping out the largely Muslim population

in their own country.

'In 1995, the massacres in Bosnia were in full swing - '

daily rivers of blood.

Really, it was appalling.

GUNFIRE

After two years of this kind of savagery,

Bill Clinton had a disaster on his hands.

This was genocide in Europe.

Mr President, I cannot NOT tell you something.

I have been in the former Yugoslavia.

We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country!

'The ongoing scenes of this horrific genocidal slaughter'

going on by the Serbs against the Muslims

was just undermining Clinton's image day after day.

Clinton would complain, "The media's trying to force me into a war

"and I don't want it.

"I'm not going to go into my own Vietnam."

And every night these images came on the screen.

European leaders implored Clinton to act.

"The position of leader of the free world,"

complained French President Jacques Chirac, "is vacant."

Privately, Clinton had begun to rethink his policy.

On July 11 1995,

Bosnian Serb soldiers overran the city of Srebrenica

and murdered more than 8,000 defenceless men and boys.

Finally, Clinton made use of American power.

On August 30th, fighter planes from NATO bases across Europe,

acting on the president's go-ahead,

launched a massive attack against Serbs in Bosnia.

For the next two weeks, NATO pilots flew 3,500 sorties.

On September 14, Serbian guns fell silent.

Two months later, Clinton convened the warring parties in Dayton, Ohio

to negotiate an end to hostilities.

The parties have agreed to put down their arms

and roll up their sleeves and work for peace.

'Finally when you got tough and you said, "Enough already,

' "we don't accept genocide at the end of the 20th century

' "in our backyard," they got serious and it stopped.

'And then the United States, not the Europeans,

'led the Dayton Peace Process.'

And to this day, imperfect as it may be, it has held.

The same month, Clinton visited the troubled country of Northern Ireland

where crowds hailed him as a peacemaker.

The young people, Catholic and Protestant alike,

made it clear to me, not only with their words

but by the expressions on their faces, that they want peace.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

After three years as president,

he had developed a new vision of America's interests abroad.

It would come to be known as The Clinton Doctrine.

'It's easy to say that we really have no interest

'in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia,'

or who owns a strip of brush land in the Horn of Africa,

or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River.

But the true measure of our interest

lies not in how small or distant these places are,

or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names.

The question we must ask is, what are the consequences

to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread?

We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere.

But where our values and our interests are at stake,

and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.

'There was a Clinton Doctrine,

'but it wasn't purely a military doctrine.

'It was a national security doctrine.

'President Clinton thought

'the United States is an indispensable nation.'

You can't do things without the United States.

It may not be only the United States, and it's not doing it alone.

But it's the United States that brings the decisive edge

in being able to get things done.

And that where you can make a difference, you should.

In the latest poll I saw,

86% of the American people said, 'Balance the budget NOW.

'Don't wait, don't postpone, don't give us promises.'

APPLAUSE

Back in Washington, the ideological war at home was heating up.

Speaker Newt Gingrich was standing by his balanced budget proposal,

daring the president to veto it.

Once again, Clinton hoped to use his powers of persuasion

to end the impasse.

'He was thinking,

'What I'm going to do is I'm going to capture these guys.'

'Because A, I'm smarter than they are, and B,

'that's my whole life's learning, is how to capture people.

'And I'm going to do it through sheer force of personality.

'I can sit down with Newt Gingrich,

'I can sit down with the devil himself, and I can cut a deal.'

Gingrich would not yield to Clinton's charms.

'The one thing that the House of Representatives has'

is the power of the purse. We can deny money.

It is the only thing that the House of Representatives alone can do,

can refuse to vote an appropriation.

So inevitably, whatever the fight was going to be,

it was going to come down to us denying the White House money.

Unless the president agreed to huge cuts in healthcare,

Congress would refuse to appropriate money for the federal government,

shutting it down.

Clinton seemed caught between two toxic political choices.

If he opposed Gingrich's balanced budget plan,

he would be portrayed as a defender of big government deficits.

If he gave in, he would effectively cede control of the government

to Gingrich and the Republicans.

There was a third option.

Dick Morris had been polling the Republicans' proposed budget cuts

and believed he had found an opening.

'I did a poll for Clinton where I tested each of those cuts

'and its impact, and I said to him',

"Do you want the four-hour briefing or the one-word briefing?"

And he said, "start with the one word." I said, "Medicare."

I said, "None of the other cuts are nearly as important

"as the cut they're proposing in Medicare."

The public supported a balanced budget, Morris argued,

but not at the expense of their most cherished federal program.

I said that what's important

is that you take away from the Republicans

the balanced budget issue.

If you can show how you can balance the budget without cutting Medicare,

but by cutting everything else, then you can call their bluff,

and then all of a sudden it becomes a question

of what do we cut? Not do we cut?

Morris called his strategy "triangulation."

Clinton seized on it

as a way to regain the initiative from the Republicans.

In June, over the strong objections of liberals on his staff,

he announced his own balanced budget plan,

protecting Medicare and Medicaid.

There is an alternative, a way to balance this budget.

It's not that we shouldn't balance the budget, we should, I strongly support it,

we ought to do that, I believe we're going to do that.

But we don't have to do it in a draconian way

that hurts the American people.

Whether or not to balance the budget, we can't win that fight. We're going to lose.

'Once you accept that we're going to balance the budget,

'now let's fight about what we're going to cut

'and what we're going to protect. That's a fight we can win.'

Are you going to protect Medicare? Social Security?

You want to shut down the government over that? Let's go.

In mid-November,

with the issue of healthcare cuts still dividing the two sides,

the federal government ran out of money and shut down.

Nearly a million federal employees were instantly laid off.

Government offices closed.

All but the most essential services ground to a halt.

"The Washington passport agency is closed for lack of funding..."

-"..shutdown of the federal government..."

-"social security..."

"The national park service..."

"..is closed indefinitely."

'Clinton took a gamble,

'the biggest gamble of his presidency to that point'

in saying, "No, I'm going to let the government shut down,

"rather than accept the cuts that you're proposing here."

"Day three and nobody moves,

"least of all the 800,000 federal workers forced to stay home."

The American people should not be held hostage any more

to the Republican budget priorities.

-CHANTING:

-Work, work, put the government back to work.

Through a first shutdown in November and then a longer one in December,

neither Clinton nor Gingrich blinked.

It was high-stakes poker.

Whichever side was blamed for the shutdown

would probably lose the next presidential election.

The pressure on the President was enormous.

Day 13 of the federal budget crisis and the shutdown

that's brought parts of the government to a dead stop.

The major players were all assembled in Washington today,

and they were talking, but not to each other.

Now one of the major problems we have in America

is we have a President who doesn't mind playing,

he doesn't mind talking, but he seems to hate working.

We're working.

This was all sui generis, this was completely new,

nobody knew the temperament of the country,

how it was going to play out.

And it was literally hour by hour, certainly day by day.

With the government closed,

Clinton prowled the empty halls of the White House.

Among the few people permitted to come to work

were the White House interns,

including a 22-year-old named Monica Lewinsky.

The daughter of a Beverly Hills doctor and his socialite wife,

Lewinsky was a graduate of Oregon's Lewis & Clark College.

She had an air of confidence,

even boldness, that set her apart from her fellow interns.

On November 15th, the second day of the shutdown,

Clinton and Lewinsky struck up a conversation

in which Lewinsky confessed she had a huge crush on the President.

There were almost these sparks flying between them

from that first moment when they saw each other,

and as Monica said, "He gave me the full Bill Clinton

"and undressed me with his eyes."

Hours later, the two had their first sexual encounter.

'It's almost as though there was a part of Bill Clinton

'that he had no control over.'

That whenever it had the opportunity to come out, would come out.

And with no forethought, with no calculation,

with no sense of the consequences, it was simply going to happen.

And that's terrifying.

"At this hour, US President Bill Clinton"

is meeting with top Congressional leaders

in another attempt to resolve their budget stand-off.

As Clinton recklessly pursued his affair with Lewinsky,

he and Gingrich were locked in their own high-wire embrace.

The President offered compromise after compromise,

but Gingrich would not budge.

Unless Clinton agreed to his formula of budget and tax cuts,

he would keep the government closed.

'They believed that he was soft, that he could be pushed around,

'and that they could have their way.

'They believed that he lacked the confidence to stand up to them.'

They believed they understood his psychology,

and they thought that they had the political upper hand.

Clinton sensed that his political enemies had overreached

and were out of step with the American people.

As long as they insist on plunging ahead

with a budget that violates our values,

in a process that is characterised more by pressure

than constitutional practice, I will fight it.

I am fighting it today, I will fight it tomorrow.

APPLAUSE

I will fight it next week, and next month.

I will fight it until we get a budget

that is fair to ALL Americans.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

'There is a moment I will never forget in the Oval Office.'

We had been going through negotiations on the budget.

And there were some of us that were nervous

that President Clinton might go too far.

That he might want to go so far in compromising

that he might hurt himself politically.

And so we kept putting different offers on the table,

and they kept coming back and saying, "not good enough."

And we finally reached a day

where he wanted to do one more compromise, one more step.

Newt Gingrich said, "No."

And Bill Clinton basically looked at them and said,

"You know, Newt... I can't do what you want me to do.

"I don't believe it's right for the country.

"And it may cost me the election, but I can't do it."

And my first reaction was,

he's drawn a line that he had to draw.

He understood that he would have to take a risk of not winning,

and winning was what he was always about.

From that moment I think, in many ways,

it became a renewal of Bill Clinton, in terms of who he was,

both within himself and with the American people.

-ALL:

-We want to work.

As of last night, the public appeared to be more sympathetic

to Mr Clinton's position.

46% blame the Republicans, 27% Mr Clinton.

'Many traditional Americans, including some Republicans,

'were outraged that a Speaker of the House

'would shut down the government.'

Newt Gingrich is not the president, he shouldn't be acting like it.

Suddenly, Bill Clinton became the embodiment

of the traditional America.

He's the President of the United States.

Whether you agree with him or not,

no-one has the right to shut down the government

when he's the President.

Finally, Senator Bob Dole,

worried that the shutdown would hurt his presidential campaign,

corralled the necessary votes in the Senate to reopen the government.

Clinton had won.

APPLAUSE

In the weeks that followed,

Clinton staked out a middle ground between the two parties

with a vision of government that was neither enemy nor saviour.

The era of big government is over.

APPLAUSE

But...

But we cannot go back to the time

when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

It was a real change in his vision of how the presidency could work.

He had started with this heroic notion of the presidency,

passing big laws, doing grand things,

and then the public just rejected it.

It hit a brick wall of what the public thought of government.

And he realised that he had to change how he was president,

and he had to re-build that public trust in government.

Clinton now announced a stream of initiatives

designed to show middle-class Americans

that he understood, and could improve, their lives.

'After the government shutdown',

we adopted a political strategy based on one word - values.

And our concept was that we would help you raise your child better.

We have worked very hard to help communities fight crime.

'I'll provide you with drug-free school zones, school uniforms,

'medical leave for your children.'

Reduce teen smoking by raising the price of cigarettes,

putting into place tough restrictions on advertising.

'I'll give you all of these weapons to raise better children.'

This is a v-chip,

and it will be required to be put in all new television sets.

Not even the Republicans could stand in Clinton's way.

'After trying to move heaven and earth, big swathes'

in his first two years,

he started feeding us up small pieces of bills

and he'd get into our knickers

with ideas that we really could not vote against.

100,000 cops on the street.

Are Republicans going to vote against more enforcement officers?

APPLAUSE

It was a politics of the possible.

Not the things he dreamed of doing, but the things he COULD do.

'He crafted a whole new view in American politics,

'literally a third way, a moderate way',

and achieved the results the American people wanted.

Three years into his first term,

with approval ratings on the rise,

Clinton could once again call himself "The Comeback Kid."

But as with nearly every Bill Clinton comeback,

it was soon followed by yet another scandal.

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