Between December 11 and 18, I moved closer to my goal of naming the most diverse administration in history. On the eleventh, I named University of Wisconsin chancellor Donna Shalala as secretary of health and human services and Carole Browner, the state of Florida’s environmental director, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Hillary and I had known Shalala, a four-foot eleven-inch dynamo of Lebanese ancestry, for years. I didn’t know Browner before I interviewed her, but was impressed with her; my friend Governor Lawton Chiles thought highly of her; and Al Gore wanted her to have the job. Both women would serve my entire eight years, building long lists of important achievements. On the fifteenth, the story broke that I would ask Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the Arkansas Health Department director, the second black woman to graduate from the University of Arkansas Medical School and a national authority on pediatric diabetes, to be U.S. surgeon general, America’s top public-health official. On the seventeenth, I announced the selection of Henry Cisneros to be secretary of housing and urban development. With his unusual combination of great political gifts and a caring heart, Henry had become the most popular Hispanic politician in America. He was well qualified for the job, with a brilliant record as mayor in revitalizing San Antonio. I also named Jesse Brown, an African-American ex-marine and Vietnam veteran, who was the executive director of the Disabled American Veterans, to be secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
On December 21, I named Hazel O’Leary, an African-American utility executive from Northern States Power Company in Minnesota, to be secretary of energy, and Dick Riley, to be secretary of education. Hazel was an expert on natural gas, and I wanted to support its development because it was cleaner than oil and coal, and in ample supply. Dick and I had been friends for years. His modest manner was deceptive. He had long endured an agonizing spinal condition, despite which he had built a successful legal and political career and a fine family. And he had been a great education governor. In the campaign, I had often cited an article saying Arkansas had made more progress in education in the last ten years than any other state except South Carolina.
On Tuesday, December 22, I announced my entire national security team: Warren Christopher as secretary of state, Les Aspin as secretary of defense, Madeleine Albright as ambassador to the United Nations, Tony Lake as national security advisor, Jim Woolsey as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Admiral Bill Crowe as head of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Christopher had been President Carter’s deputy secretary of state and had played a major role in negotiating the release of American hostages from Iran. He had served me well in the vice-presidential and cabinet selection processes and shared my basic foreign policy objectives. Some people thought his personality was too restrained for him to be effective, but I knew he could get things done. I asked Les Aspin to be secretary of defense after it became clear that Sam Nunn wouldn’t accept the appointment. As chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Aspin probably knew more about defense than anyone else in the House of Representatives, understood the security challenges of the post–Cold War world, and was committed to modernizing our military to meet them. I had been impressed with Madeleine Albright, a popular professor at Georgetown University, since I first met her during the Dukakis campaign. A native of Czechoslovakia and friend of Václav Havel, she was a passionate and articulate advocate of democracy and freedom. I thought she would be an ideal spokesperson for us at the United Nations in the post–Cold War era. Because I also wanted her counsel on national security matters, I elevated the UN ambassador’s job to cabinet rank. The national security advisor decision was difficult for me, because both Tony Lake and Sandy Berger had done a great job educating and advising me on foreign policy throughout the campaign. Tony was a little older and Sandy had worked for him in the Carter State Department, but I had known Sandy longer and better. In the end, the matter was resolved when Sandy came to me and suggested that I appoint Tony national security advisor and make him the deputy.
The CIA job was filled last. I wanted to appoint Congressman Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, but much to my disappointment, he declined. I had met Jim Woolsey, a longtime figure in the Washington foreign policy establishment, in late 1991 at a national security discussion Sandy Berger organized with a diverse group of Democrats and independents with more robust views on national security and defense than our party typically projected. Woolsey was clearly intelligent and interested in the job. After one interview, I offered it to him. After the national security announcements, I was close to meeting my self-imposed deadline of appointing the cabinet by Christmas. On Christmas Eve day we made it: in addition to officially announcing Mickey Kantor’s appointment, I nominated Congressman Mike Espy of Mississippi to be secretary of agriculture; Federico Peña, the former mayor of Denver, as secretary of transportation; former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt as secretary of the interior; and Zoë Baird, the general counsel for Aetna Life and Casualty, to be the first female attorney general. Espy was active in the DLC, understood agricultural issues, and, along with Congressmen Bill Jefferson of New Orleans and John Lewis of Atlanta, was one of the first prominent black leaders outside Arkansas to endorse me. I didn’t know Peña well, but he had been a fine mayor and had spearheaded the building of Denver’s massive new airport. The airline industry was in trouble and needed a transportation secretary who understood its problems. Bruce Babbitt had been one of my favorite fellow governors. Brilliant, iconoclastic, and witty, he had won election in traditionally Republican Arizona and had succeeded as an activist, progressive governor. I hoped he could pursue our environmental agenda with less fallout in the western states than President Carter had suffered. Originally, I had hoped to make Vernon Jordan attorney general. He had been a distinguished civil rights lawyer and was well thought of in corporate America. But Vernon, like James Carville, was determined not to come into government. When he bowed out in early December, during a talk on the back porch of the Governor’s Mansion, I considered several people before ultimately choosing Zoë Baird. I didn’t know Zoë until I interviewed her. In addition to her work as Aetna’s counsel, she had served in the Carter White House, had been an advocate for the poor, and, though she was only forty, seemed to have an unusually mature understanding of the attorney general’s role and the challenges she would face. Though I would later elevate some other positions to cabinet level, including those of drug czar, director of the Small Business Administration, and director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I had made the Christmas deadline with a cabinet of unquestionable competence and unprecedented diversity.
It was a good story, but not the main one of the day. President Bush gave a big Christmas present to some former associates, and potentially to himself, when he pardoned Caspar Weinberger and five others who had been indicted in the Iran-Contra scandal by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. Weinberger’s trial was about to get under way, and President Bush was likely to be called as a witness. Walsh angrily denounced the pardons as completing a six-year cover-up, saying it “undermines the principle that no man is above the law. It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office—deliberately abusing the public trust—without consequence.”