This book began with a conversation at a party with Les Gelb, the head of the Council of Foreign Relations, in the spring of 1999, when the NATO-American bombing of Kosovo was in full force. At the party I asked him a couple of questions about who within the Clinton administration was driving the bombing campaign, and his answers were so clear, and so different from what I had expected (a critical, forceful, but somewhat covert player, he said, was the vice president, Al Gore) that I thought it might make an interesting magazine piece. Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair, immediately and enthusiastically agreed and told me to go ahead. That was very much in character; he has always been a reporter’s editor. But after about six weeks of research, I decided it was a book, not a magazine piece. (The same thing had happened to me exactly thirty years earlier when I had begun a magazine article on McGeorge Bundy, which turned into a book about how and why we went to war in Vietnam.) For me this marked the first time I would return to the area of national security reporting since I had finished that book in 1972. The book had done exceptionally well, and I received numerous immediate and handsome offers to do successor books on the same general subject. But since I like to take on questions to which I do not know the answers and to use the four or five years I spend on one of my longer books as a kind of graduate school, I had preferred to go in other directions.
This time, however, I was delighted to return to a venue that I had once known and that had changed so dramatically in recent years. The Cold War was over, and the fear of being called soft on communism, something that had covertly played a large role in the Kennedy and Johnson decision-making, was no longer important. But other things were fascinating to me: for example, the shadow that Vietnam still cast over civilian-military relations, and the question of how truly internationalist this country was, now that the Soviet threat had receded. A number of contemporary issues also intrigued me. The technology of politics was different, the players were different, the political constituencies were quite different, and yet shadows from the past were still there, ghosts that still loitered in the hallways and meeting rooms.
I wanted the book to be a way of looking at America through our decisions in foreign policy; the focal points were places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Rwanda, and Somalia, all of them extremely tough calls, especially for President Clinton, who had so confidently criticized his predecessor’s foreign policies during the 1992 campaign. How did Clinton’s national security apparatus respond to humanitarian crises and, in some instances, to genocide in distant places where America’s national security was not directly involved? How much would they factor in for a president who, despite his campaign speeches, was obsessed first and foremost with domestic politics? How did senior military men, still wary after the civilian architects of Vietnam had given them such a bastardized assignment (and had, in their opinion, helped co-opt a number of their own senior figures), react? And what did the response of, and the divisions within, the foreign policy apparatus tell us about the country itself?
The national security world I was looking at had greatly changed from the one I had encountered so long ago. I first went to Vietnam in 1962, as a correspondent for the New York Times, and I was accused of being too young to report or to understand the issues at stake. In those days my contemporaries in the military were mere captains. Now I was older than almost all the players. One chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, was three years younger than I, and he had retired six years before I began the book. The president of the United States was twelve years younger than I, and the commander of the NATO forces waging war in the Balkans, General Wes Clark, had graduated from West Point eleven years after I graduated from college. At one point I found myself interviewing an army three-star who was seventeen years younger than I was. But significantly, some young foreign service officers whom I had known as a reporter in Saigon in 1963 when they were barely a year out of college, such as Tony Lake and Dick Holbrooke, were now the senior figures of the Democratic Party’s national security team.
In writing about America I wanted to capture some of the new forces at work and the important political changes being wrought by a number of nonpolitical factors: the country’s remarkable affluence; the advent of the modern media and the rise, post–Cold War, of norms of entertainment at the expense of more serious traditional journalistic standards in much of network television; a change in generational attitudes, post–Cold War, among younger Americans coming of age in a less anxious country in which foreign policy hardly mattered in our national elections; the quantum changes that have evolved in the technology, of war; and, of course, the resulting dramatically changed political structure of the country.
In going back to this world after so long an absence, I was, ironically enough, helped by having spent much of the intervening time writing about subjects that proved quite important in understanding a dramatically altered political landscape. I wrote about the changing technology of communications and what it has done to politics in The Powers That Be, and the changing nature of the American economy and its effect on American politics in The Reckoning. A third book, The Fifties, had taught me the importance of technological developments in effecting social and political change; and in no small part because of that, I was fascinated by the dramatic change in the nature of modern high-technology weaponry and what effect that had on the geopolitics of war.
During Vietnam, high-tech weaponry was in its infancy. In the ensuing three decades that technology advanced exponentially, well beyond the expectations and knowledge of most serious laymen, and, in fact, well beyond the expectations and comprehension of many active senior military men, who still retain great suspicions about the air force’s ability to do what it said it could do—win a war with high-tech weaponry alone. Like many correspondents who had covered Vietnam, I had spent much more time with army men in the field than I had with air force officers, and I shared derivatively the doubts reflected by the army men of that era (General Powell would be a good example) of what the air force could accomplish, except in close air support. Like a great many senior army men whose views were fashioned in that earlier era, I now turned out to be quite wrong.
This book was always premised to be about America, not about the Balkans or any other foreign country. I had what was at best a layman’s knowledge of the Balkans, and one of the hardest parts of this assignment was getting up to speed on that complicated part of the world where the history is so dark and convoluted.
I should note finally that I did not go looking for the ghosts of Vietnam, but they were often there, and they found me, most notably in the damage done to two institutions critical to general public health and disproportionately affected by that war, the U.S. army and the Democratic Party.