Clinton Administration

Washington. -- The Clinton administration's post-Cold War defense scheme was announced appropriately in the same week that hurricane Emily roared along the Atlantic coast. In likening the two, a longtime Pentagon official remarked privately that both had high velocity winds but far less drastic results than expected.Guided by a 13-page "public affairs plan" -- adequate for something on the scale of the Normandy invasion -- Defense Secretary Les Aspin, Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and sundry other top officials engaged in two days of television interviews, marathon press conferences, background briefings and speeches to hail the product.

WASHINGTON -- When Haiti was gripped by crisis in 1994, President Bill Clinton sent troops to restore its exiled president to power, organized a $2.6 billion international rescue program and declared the island a top priority of his administration. Yet by the end of his term, the Clinton administration's interest in Haiti had waned and its patience had worn out. Clinton ordered a halt to most direct U.S. aid, a step some experts say inflicted lasting damage on the hemisphere's poorest country.

WASHINGTON -- The chairman of the Rouse Co., Mathias J. DeVito, is among several prominent Marylanders being considered for posts in the Clinton administration, according to congressional sources.Lynne Battaglia, 46, a former chief of the state attorney general's criminal investigations division and now chief of staff to Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., appears to be the front-runner to become the next U.S. attorney for Maryland.And Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has made it known that she is interested in becoming director of the Peace Corps, which was founded by her uncle, President John F. Kennedy.

KENNETH BACON, 64 Noted Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon, a Pentagon spokesman in the Clinton administration who became a voice for millions of refugees uprooted by violence and conflict, died Saturday of skin cancer that had spread to his brain. He was 64. His death at his vacation home in Block Island, R.I., was announced by Refugees International, a Washington-based advocacy group that Bacon had led since 2001. "Most Americans remember Ken as the unflappable civilian voice of the Department of Defense," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement.

CA-IRA, Haiti -- Under the skeleton of a half-buil mangrove-wood boat hull, a cluster of lanky young men gathered on this village beach last week. They spoke of their hopes for deliverance from oppression and poverty by the incoming government in Washington and of their plans for escape if it fails to come."

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration, disturbed by what it considers sloppy supervision and runaway spending at the Resolution Trust Corp., has imposed an unprecedented 30-day freeze on new contracts at the thrift cleanup agency.Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, acting chief executive of the RTC, has ordered a full-scale review of the contracting process, a Treasury Department spokeswoman said yesterday.Interviews indicate that lower-level employees of the cleanup agency have routinely violated the RTC's system of internal controls and authorized the expenditure of large sums of taxpayer money without the proper approvals.

WASHINGTON -- Four days ago, when the entire White House travel office was fired, top Clinton administration officials turned to a 25-year-old Arkansas travel agent to come in and take charge.White House officials asserted that the seven-member travel office was guilty of shoddy bookkeeping and gross financial mismanagement. The fired employees responded that they had been moved out so the Clintonites could consolidate control with one of their own.What no one disputes is that the young woman brought in to head the office is a distant relative of President Clinton.

DALLAS -- Ross Perot plans a major effort to influenc legislation on Capitol Hill during the early years of the Clinton administration, starting with the May 1 special election in Texas to replace Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, President-elect Bill Clinton's choice as treasury secretary.Mr. Perot said in an interview that in the first 24 hours after he announced his intention to resume political activity Jan. 11, 500,000 people called his phone banks, and 400,000 joined United We Stand, America, the organization that grew out of his independent presidential campaign in 1992.

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Les Aspin's serious illness has complicated the problems facing a Clinton administration military establishment that is short on civilian leadership and long on a need for critical decisions.When he was hospitalized Sunday with a heart ailment, Mr. Aspin was the only administration appointee to the Pentagon so far who had received Senate approval and moved in to run the world's largest enterprise.Sen. Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who chairs the Armed Services Committee, had jested that Mr. Aspin was "home alone" and called for a speedup in appointments.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration has filed a legal )) brief supporting a race-based scholarship program at the University of Maryland, a departure from the Reagan and Bush administrations' caution about such aid.The case was brought in 1990 by a student who was told he could not apply for a full, four-year scholarship under the university's Banneker Program because he is not black.The student, Daniel Podberesky, who is Hispanic, argued that he qualified in every way but color and that the restrictive policy was unconstitutional.

Cordell Hull was a veteran lawmaker with a worldwide reputation when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him secretary of state in 1933, in part to win needed support from Hull's army of Democratic admirers. But the dignified Tennessean was never close to FDR. As time passed he was "muscled out by others in the administration," said Michael Hunt, a diplomatic historian at the University of North Carolina. Barack Obama's election as president has drawn other comparisons with Roosevelt, especially for the economic crisis he inherits.

The most enjoyable aspect of watching the HMS Hillary take on water is the prospect that Bill - and his cult of personality - will go down with the ship, too. Bill Clinton has been stumping for his wife on the Iowa hustings, framing the election as a referendum on his tenure as president. Last month in Muscatine (during the same speech in which he falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning), he told the assembled Democrats that HMS Hillary could transport America "back to the future."

WASHINGTON -- The new international nuclear agreement with North Korea marks a fundamental change in direction for the Bush administration after years of frustration in its hard-line campaign to force Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program without immediate rewards. In his first term, President Bush rejected Clinton administration attempts to win North Korean cooperation with aid. He declared that only after "complete, verified, irreversible dismantlement" of its nuclear program could the regime receive U.S. help.

Repudiate insults to city officials In what way, exactly, does Baltimore attorney William H. "Billy" Murphy Jr. think that Adolf Hitler was "effective," and how dare he equate the Baltimore police or Mayor Martin O'Malley with Hitler ("Murphy is denounced for linking Nazis, police," Sept. 30)? Shamefully, when given the opportunity to apologize or withdraw his statement, Mr. Murphy instead chose to congratulate himself for making his point, and Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s campaign spokeswoman denounced Mr. Murphy's critics instead of renouncing his remarks.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- Former President Bill Clinton shook his left index finger at Chris Wallace during an interview on Fox News Sunday, denying charges he and his administration did too little to catch Osama bin Laden and ward off the 9/11 terror attacks. Leaning forward and appearing angry, Mr. Clinton said, "At least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They [the Bush administration] had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

WASHINGTON -- Here are five words that I never expected to put together in the same sentence: Bill Clinton owes Rush Limbaugh. Yes, it was El Rushbo, hero of the right, who leaked word via his national radio show that the Clinton administration, target of the right, was about to be trashed in ABC's docudrama The Path to 9/11. Actually, Mr. Limbaugh's leak was more of a gusher. Boasting that the screenwriter, Cyrus Nowrasteh, is a friend of his, Mr. Limbaugh said the movie "indicts the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration has decided to wage a vigorous fight against legislation that would drastically reshape the nation's civil law system, White House officials said yesterday.In a letter to be delivered on today to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., the administration will warn that central provisions in the landmark legislation are too extreme and would "tilt the legal playing field dramatically to the disadvantage of consumers and middle-class citizens" by making it more difficult for them to bring lawsuits for damages when they are injured.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration wants to revamp the bonus system for federal workers, joining critics who say the awards often are tossed out like candy."

Fact or fiction? That question is at the heart of a heated controversy over the miniseries The Path to 9/11, which traces the events leading to the Sept. 11 attacks and is set to air on ABC on Sunday and Monday. Members of the Clinton administration, including former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, have protested vociferously in recent days that the miniseries inaccurately blames Clinton officials for not going after Osama bin Laden when they had the chance. "It asserts as fact things that are not fact," Albright wrote Tuesday in a letter to Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of ABC's parent, the Walt Disney Co. Albright, Samuel R. Berger, who was Clinton's national security adviser, and former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke have taken particular exception to a sequence in which American military officers in Afghanistan appear to allow bin Laden to escape after the mission to capture him fails to get a go-ahead from Clinton officials in Washington.