| Butheina was an articulate, impressive woman who had always served as Assads interpreter when we metShe had been with Assad for years, and I was sure she was in Shepherdstown to guarantee the president an unvarnished version of what was happening
On Friday, the fifth day, we presented a draft peace agreement with the two sides differences in bracketsThe Syrians responded positively on Saturday night, and we began meetings on border and security issuesAgain, the Syrians showed flexibility on both matters, saying they would accept an adjustment of the strip of land bordering Galilee to as much as 50 meters (164 feet), provided that Israel accepted the June 4 line as the basis of discussionThere was some practical validity to this; apparently the lake had shrunk in size in the last thirty yearsI was encouraged, but it quickly became apparent that Barak still had not authorized anyone on his team to accept June 4, no matter what the Syrians offered
On Sunday, at a lunch for Ehud and Nava Barak at Madeleine Albrights farm, Madeleine and Dennis made a last pitch to BarakSyria had shown flexibility on what Israel wanted, providing its needs were met; Israel had not responded in kindWhat would it take? Barak said he wanted to resume the Lebanese negotiationsAnd if not, he wanted to break for several days and come back
Shara was in no mood to hear thisHe said that Shepherdstown chanel j10 watch knockoff was a failure, that Barak was not sincere, and that he would have to say as much to President AssadAt the last dinner, I tried again to get Barak to say something positive that Shara could take back to SyriaHe declined, instead telling me privately that I could call Assad after we left Shepherdstown and say he would accept the June 4 line once the Lebanese negotiations resumed or were about to startThat meant Shara would go home empty-handed from negotiations he had been led to believe would be decisive, so much so that the Syrians had been willing to stay through the end of Ramadan and the Eid
To make matters worse, the latest bracketed text of our treaty leaked in the Israeli press, showing the concessions that Syria had offered without getting anything in returnShara was subjected to intense criticism at homeIt was understandably embarrassing to him, and to AssadEven authoritarian governments are not immune to popular opinion and powerful interest groups
When I called Assad with Baraks offer to affirm the Rabin commitment and demarcate the border on the basis of it as long as the Lebanese negotiations also started, he listened without commentA few days later, Shara called Madeleine Albright and rejected Baraks offer, saying the Syrians would open negotiations on Lebanon only after the border demarcation was agreed uponThey had been burned once by being flexible and black balenciaga bag forthcoming, and they werent about to make the same mistake again
For the time being we were stumped, but I thought we should keep tryingBarak still seemed to want the Syrian peace, and it was true that the Israeli public had not been prepared for the compromises that peace requiredIt was also still in Syrias interest to make peace, and soonAssad was in ill health and had to pave the way for his sons successionMeanwhile, there was more than enough still to do on the Palestinian trackI asked Sandy, Madeleine, and Dennis to figure out what we should do next, and turned my attention to other things
On January 10, after a White House celebration with Muslims marking the end of Ramadan, Hillary and I went to the UNaval Academy Chapel in Annapolis, Maryland, for the funeral of former chief of naval operations Bud Zumwalt, who had become our friend through Renaissance WeekendAfter I took office, Bud had worked with us to provide aid to the families of servicemen who, like his late son, had become ill as a result of their exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam WarHe had also lobbied the Senate to ratify the Chemical Weapons ConventionHis personal support to our family during and after the House impeachment proceedings was a gift of kindness we would never forgetAs I was dressing for the funeral, one of my valets, Lito Bautista, a Filipino-American who had been in the navy for thirty ladies omega watches years, said he was glad I was going to the service because Bud Zumwalt was the best we ever had
That night I flew to the Grand Canyon, staying at the El Tovar Hotel in a room with a balcony right on the canyons edgeNearly thirty years earlier, I had seen the sun set over the Grand Canyon; now I wanted to watch it rise, lighting the layers of differently colored rocks from the top downThe next morning, after a sunrise just as beautiful as I had hoped it would be, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and I designated three new national monuments and expanded a fourth in Arizona and California, including one million acres around the Grand Canyon and a stretch of thousands of small islands and exposed reefs along the California coast
It was ninety-two years to the day since President Theodore Roosevelt had set aside the Grand Canyon itself as a national monumentBruce Babbitt, Al Gore, and I had done our best to be faithful to Roosevelts conservation ethic and to his admonition that we should always be taking what he called the long look ahead
On the fifteenth I commemorated Martin Luther King Jr birth-day in my Saturday morning radio address by marking the economic and social progress of African-Americans and Hispanics in the last seven years and pointing out how far we had to go: Though minor-ity unemployment and poverty rates were at historically low levels, they were gucci fabric still far above the national averageWe had also suffered a recent spate of hate crimes against victims because of their race or ethnicityJames Byrd, a black man dragged from the back of a pickup truck and killed by white racists in Texas; bullets fired at a Jewish school in Los Angeles; a Korean-American student, an African-American basketball coach, and a Filipino postal worker all killed because of their race
A few months earlier, at one of Hillarys millennium evenings at the White House, DrEric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research at MIT, and high-tech executive Vinton Cerf, who is known as the Father of the Internet, discussed how digital chip technology had enabled the human genome project to succeedThe thing I remembered most clearly about the evening was Landers statement that all human beings are more than 99 percent alike geneticallyEver since he said that, I had thought of all the blood that had been shed, all the energy wasted, by people obsessed with keeping us divided over that one-tenth of a percent
In the radio address, I again asked the Congress to pass the hate-crimes bill, and asked the Senate to confirm a distinguished Chinese-American lawyer, Bill Lann Lee, as the new assistant attorney general for civil rightsThe Republican majority had been holding him up; they seemed to have an aversion to many of my non-Caucasian chanel metallic gilt leather bag nomin |