308 a short history of the united states
1789 , but it was one of two amendments proposed that was not ratifi ed
when the first ten amendments were adopted.
As President, Clinton got off to a bad start, foolishly assum-
ing that the electorate wanted a program of liberal reform. On taking
office he announced his opposition to the ban on gay and lesbian per-
sonnel in the armed services. A firestorm of protest resulted, and he
was forced to accept a policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” namely that gays
and lesbians could enter the military if they remained quiet about their
sexual preferences.
Clinton followed that mistake with a major blunder. He appointed
his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to head a task force to plan a com-
prehensive health-care system for the country. That plan was an-
nounced by the President in a nationally televised speech before a joint
session of Congress. It proved to be unbelievably complicated. The bill
itself ran to over thirteen hundred pages and was assigned to three
committees of the House. Not one of these committees could come up
with an acceptable measure, while Republicans took pleasure in con-
demning this needlessly complex plan. By the end of the year the
health-care bill was beyond resuscitation, and declared dead.
President Clinton had better luck in persuading Congress to enact
the Brady Bill, a gun control law, named for James Brady, an aide who
had been severely wounded in the attempted assassination of President
Reagan in 1981. This measure imposed a fi ve- day waiting period for
handgun purchases and was later augmented to prevent the sale of
guns to convicted felons. And in July 1994 Congress passed an anti-
crime bill that outlawed several kinds of assault weapons.
These anticrime measures reflected the genuine concern of many
Americans about the level of violence that had enveloped the country
over the past de cade, a level that matched that of the 1960 s. In 1993 a
radical Muslim group bombed the World Trade Center in New York
City, killing half a dozen people and wounding many others. That
same year in Waco, Texas, a fundamentalist religious group known as
the Branch Davidians held off federal officers from searching their
compound in a gun battle that resulted in the deaths of many of the
residents. Presumably in retribution for this killing, a terrorist attack in