For the foreseeable future, the system would...
For the foreseeable future, the system would knock out only a few missiles even if it workedIf the United States and Russia were to erect such a system, China would probably build more missiles to overcome it in order to maintain its deterrent capabilityThen India would follow suit, as would PakistanThe Euro-peans were convinced it was a terrible ideaBut we didnt have to deal with all those issues until we had a system that worked, and so far, we didnt

Before I left Moscow, Putin hosted a small dinner in the Kremlin with a jazz concert afterward, featuring Russian musicians from teenagers to an octogenarianThe finale began on a dark stage, a haunting series of tunes by my favorite living tenor saxophonist, Igor ButmanJohn Podesta, who loved jazz as much as I did, agreed with me that we had never heard a finer live performance

I went to Ukraine to announce Americas financial support for President Leonid Kuchmas decision to close the final reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant by December 15It had taken a long time, and I was glad to know that at least the problem would be resolved before I leftMy last stop was an outdoor speech to a huge crowd of Ukrainians whom I urged to stay on the course of freedom and economic reformKiev was beautiful in the late spring sunshine, and I hoped its hermes birkin bags people could keep up the high spirits I had observed in the crowdThey still had many hurdles to clear

On June 8, I flew to Tokyo for the day to pay my respects at the memorial service of my friend Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who had died of a stroke a few days beforeThe service was held in the indoor section of a soccer stadium, with a few thousand seats on the floor divided by an aisle in the middle, and several hundred more people sitting in balconies aboveA stage had been constructed with a large ramp up the front and smaller ones on the sideBehind the stage was a wall covered in flowers twenty-five or thirty feet highThe flowers were beautifully arranged to show the Japanese rising sun against a pale blue skyAt the very top there was an indented space where at the beginning of the ceremony a military aide solemnly placed a box containing Obuchis ashesAfter his colleagues and friends had paid tribute to him, several young Japanese women appeared holding trays full of white flowersBeginning with Obuchis wife and children, members of the imperial family, and leaders of the government, the mourners all walked up the center ramp, bowed in respect before his ashes, and placed our flowers on a waist-high strip of wood that ran the entire length of the flowered wall

After I bowed to my friend and new prada replica handbags placed my flower, I returned to the Uembassy to see our ambassador, former House Speaker Tom FoleyI turned on the television to see the ceremony still in progressThousands of Obuchis fellow citizens were creating a cloud of sacred flowers against the rising sunIt was one of the most moving tributes I had ever witnessedI stopped briefly at the reception to pay my respects to MrsObuchi and Keizos children, one of whom was in politics her-selfObuchi thanked me for coming and gave me a beautiful enamel letter box that had belonged to her husbandObuchi had been a friend to me, and to AmericaOur alliance was important, and he had valued it even as a young manI wished he had had longer to serve

Several days later, while I was participating in the Carleton College commencement exercises in Minnesota, an aide passed me a note informing me that President Hafez al-Assad had just died in Damascus, only ten weeks after our last meeting in GenevaAlthough we had our disagreements, he had always been straightforward with me, and I had believed him when he said he had made a strategic choice for peaceCircumstances, miscommunication, and psychological barriers had kept it from happening, but at least we now knew what it would take for Israel and Syria to get there once both sides were ready

As spring turned to omega men watches summer, I hosted our largest state dinner ever, as more than four hundred people gathered under a tent on the South Lawn to honor King Mohammed VI of Morocco, one of whose ancestors was the first sovereign to recognize the United States shortly after our original thirteen states joined together

The next day I corrected an old injustice, awarding the Congressional Medal of Honor to twenty-two Japanese-Americans who had volunteered to serve in Europe during World War II after their families were interned in campsOne of them was my friend and ally Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who had lost an arm and very nearly his life in the warA week later I nominated the first Asian-American to the cabinet: former congressman Norm Mineta of California agreed to serve for the remainder of my term as commerce secretary, replacing Bill Daley, who was leaving to become the chairman of Al Gores campaign

In the last week of the month, I held a gathering in the East Room of the White House, where almost two hundred years earlier Thomas Jefferson had spread out the path-breaking map of the western United States that his aide Meriwether Lewis had made on his courageous expedition from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean in 1803The crowd of scientists and diplomats had gathered to celebrate a twenty-firstcentury chanel lookalike bags cheap map: more than a thousand researchers in the United States, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, and China had decoded the human genome, identifying nearly all of the three billion sequences of our genetic codeAfter battling each other for years, Francis Collins, head of the government-funded international human genome project, and Celera president Craig Venter had agreed to publish their genetic data together later in the yearCraig was an old friend, and I had done my best to bring them togetherTony Blair joined us on a satellite hookup, giving me a chance to joke that his infant sons life expectancy had just gone up by about twenty-five years

As the month drew to a close, I announced that our budget surplus would exceed $200 billion, with a ten-year projected surplus of over $4 trillionOnce again, I recommended that we lock away the Social Security surplus, about $2 trillion, and that we save about $550 billion for MedicareIt was beginning to look as if we could handle the baby boomers retirement after all

I also did a number of political events to support Democrats in Arizona and California and to help Terry McAuliffe raise the rest of the money we needed to put on our convention in Los Angeles in AugustWe were working closely with him and the Gore campaign through my political director Minyon louis vuitton travel bag Moo