I was eager to determine whether and how he and I...
I was eager to determine whether and how he and I could work together to keep the peace process going

In June, against the backdrop of the presidential campaign, I focused on two issues, education and the disturbing rash of black church burnings then sweeping the countryAt the Princeton University commencement, I outlined a plan to open the doors of college to all Americans and to make at least two years of college as universally available as high school: a tax credit modeled on Georgias Hope Scholarships of $1,500 (the average cost of community college tuition) for two years of higher education; a tax deduction of $10,000 a year for all higher education beyond the first two years; a $1,000 scholarship to students in the top 5 percent of every high school graduating class; funds to increase college work-study positions from 700,000 to 1 million; and annual increases in Pell Grants for lower-income students

In mid-month I went to Grover Cleveland Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to support the communitys curfew program, one of several such efforts across the country requiring young people to be in their homes after a certain hour on school nights; they had led to a decline in crime and an improvement in student learningI also endorsed the policy of requiring school uniforms for elementary and middle school studentsAlmost without exception, school districts that required uniforms experienced higher student attendance, less violence, and increased student learningThe distinctions between poor and wealthier students diminished as well

Some of my critics ridiculed my chanel tote bags emphasis on what they called small bore issues like curfews, uniforms, character education programs, and the V-chip, saying it was all politics, as well as a reflection of my inability to pass big programs in the Republican CongressAt the time, we were also implementing the large education and crime programs passed in my first two years, and I had another major education initiative before CongressBut I knew that federal money and laws could only give Americans the tools to make their lives better; the real changes still had to be effected by citizens at the grassroots levelPartly as a result of our promotion of school uniforms, more and more school districts embraced them, with positive results

On June 12, I was in Greeleyville, South Carolina, to dedicate the new Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, after the congregations old church had been burnedLess than a week earlier, a church in Charlotte, North Carolina, had become the thirtieth black church to be burned in the previous eighteen monthsThe whole black community in America was in an uproar and expected me to do something about itI endorsed bipartisan legislation to make it easier for federal prosecutors to punish those who burn houses of worship, and pledged federal loan guarantees to support low-interest loans for the rebuilding effortsThe church burnings seemed to feed off one another, much as a rash of synagogue defacements had in 1992They werent connected by a conspiracy, but by a contagion of the heart, a hatred of those who are different

During this time, I also had to acknowledge a problem in my White House louis vuitton monogram canvas galliera pm operation so severe that I felt it was the first issue of my administration that merited an independent investigation

In early June, news reports revealed that three years earlier, in 1993, my White House Office of Personnel Security had obtained from the FBI hundreds of FBI file summaries on people who had been cleared for entry into the Bush and Reagan White HousesThe files had been obtained when the office was attempting to replace security files on current White House employees, since those files had been taken away by the departing Bush administration for deposit in the Bush LibraryThe White House had no business possessing confidential FBI reports on RepublicansI was outraged when I heard about it

On June 9, Leon Panetta and I apologized for the incidentWithin a week, Louis Freeh announced that the FBI had wrongly turned over 408 files to the White HouseA few days later, Janet Reno asked Ken Starr to investigate the files caseIn 2000, the OIC found that the incident had been simply a mistakeThe White House had not engaged in any kind of political espionagethe Secret Service had given the Personnel Security Office an outdated list of White House employees, which included Republicans names, and this was the list that had been sent to the White House

Late in June, at the annual Gore family conference in Nashville, I called for an expansion of the family leave law to allow people to take up to twenty-four hours a year, or three more workdays, to attend parent-teacher conferences at their childrens school or to take their children, or a spouse, or their parents for routine medical dolce and gabbana cheap replica handbags care

The problem of balancing work and family was weighing heavily on me because of the toll it was taking on the White HouseBill Galston, a brilliant member of the Domestic Policy Council staff whom I had first met through the DLC and who was a continuous source of good ideas, had recently resigned to spend more time with his ten-year-old son: My boy keeps asking where I amYou can get somebody else to do this job; no one else can do that job

My deputy chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, who had become a close friend and golfing partner and who was a superb manager and our best liaison to the business community, was going home, tooHis wife, Crandall, a Wellesley classmate of Hillarys, ran a big textile company and had to travel a lotTwo of their kids were in college; their youngest was about to start his senior year in high schoolErskine told me he loved his job, but my boy should not be at home alone in his last year in high schoolI dont want him ever to wonder whether he was the most important thing in the world to his parents

I respected and agreed with the decisions Bill and Erskine had made, and I was thankful that Hillary and I lived and worked in the White House so we had no long commutes to and from work, and at least one of us was almost always with Chelsea for dinner at night and when she got up in the morningBut the experience of my staff members brought home the fact that all too many Americans, in all kinds of jobs earning widely different incomes, went to work every day worried sick that they were neglecting their kids for their jobsThe United States provided less support men's rolex watch for balancing work and family than any other wealthy nation, and I wanted to change that

Unfortunately, the Republican majority in Congress were opposed to imposing any new requirements on employersA young boy had recently approached me and offered to tell me a joke; as he said, Once you become President, its hard to find a joke you can tell in publicHere it is: Being President with this Congress is like standing in the middle of a cemeteryThere are a lot of people under you, but nobody is listening

At the end of the month, as I was preparing to leave for Lyon, France, for the annual G-7 conference, which would primarily be devoted to terrorism, nineteen air force personnel were killed and almost three hundred Americans and others were injured when terrorists drove a truck containing a powerful bomb to a security barrier just outside Khobar Towers, a military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi ArabiaWhen an American patrol approached the truck, two of its occupants fled and the bomb explodedI sent an FBI team of more than forty investigators and forensic experts to work with Saudi authoritiesKing Fahd called me to express his condolences and solidarity, and to pledge the commitment of his government to apprehend and punish the men who had killed our airmenEventually, Saudi Arabia would execute the people it determined to be responsible for the attack

The Saudis had allowed us to establish the base after the Gulf War in the hope that having Uforces pre-positioned in the Gulf would deter further aggression by Saddam Hussein and allow us to respond quickly if deterrence was replica chanel bags australia unsuccessfu