Two days later

Two days later, still not knowing who my successor would be, I saw Arafat in the Oval Office. The violence was subsiding and I thought he might be serious about peace. I told him that I had only ten weeks left to make an agreement. In a private moment I held his arm, stared straight at him, and told him I also had a chance to make an agreement with North Korea to end its long-range missile production, but I would have to go there to do it. The whole trip would take a week or longer by the time I made the obligatory stops in South Korea, Japan, and China.
If we were going to make peace in the Middle East, I knew I would have to close the deal. I told Arafat I had done everything I could to get the Palestinians a state on the West Bank and Gaza while protecting the security of Israel. After all my efforts, if Arafat wasnt going to make peace, he owed it to me to tell me, so that I could go to North Korea to end another serious security threat. He pleaded with me to stay, saying that we had to finish the peace and that if we didnt do it before I left office, it would be at least five years before wed be this close to peace again.
That night, we had a dinner to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the White House. Lady Bird Johnson, President and Mrs. Ford, President and Mrs. Carter, and President and Mrs. Bush were all there to mark the birthday of the peoples house, which every President since John Adams had inhabited. It was a wonderful moment in American history, but a tense one for President and Mrs. Bush, who had to be on edge with their sons election hanging fire. I was glad they had come.
A few days later Chelsea and I went to Brunei for the annual APEC summit,cheap jeremy scott adidas wings. Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah hosted our meeting in a beautiful new hotel and convention center. We made some headway on the reforms necessary to avoid another Asian financial crisis, and Singapore prime minister Goh Chok Tong and I agreed to start negotiations on a bilateral free-trade agreement. I also enjoyed a round of golf with Prime Minister Goh on a night golf course designed to help golfers manage the intense heat. I had instituted the APEC leaders meeting back in 1993, and I was pleased with the expansion of the group and the work done since then. At my last APEC meeting I thought the effort had borne fruit, not simply in specific agreements, but also in building an institution that tied the United States to Asia in the new century.
After Brunei, Chelsea and I went to Vietnam for a historic visit to Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City (the old Saigon), and a site where Vietnamese were working with Americans to unearth the remains of our men still listed as missing in action. Hillary flew in to join us from Israel, where she had gone to attend the funeral of Leah Rabin.
I met with the Communist Party leader, the president, the prime minister, and the mayor of Ho Chi Minh City,fake rolex watches. The higher the position, the more likely the leader was to sound like an old-style Communist. The party leader,adidas shoes for girls, Le Kha Phieu, tried to use my opposition to the Vietnam War to condemn what the United States had done as an imperialist act. I was angry about it, especially since he said it in the presence of our ambassador,best replica rolex watches, Pete Peterson, who had been a prisoner of war. I told the leader in no uncertain terms that while I had disagreed with our Vietnam policy, those who had pursued it were not imperialists or colonialists, but good people who believed they were fighting communism. I pointed at Pete and said he hadnt spent six and a half years in the prison known as the Hanoi Hilton because he wanted to colonize Vietnam. We had turned a new page with normalized relations, the trade agreement, and two-way cooperation on MIA issues; now was not the time to reopen old wounds. The president, Tran Duc Luong, was only a little less dogmatic.