Foreign policy had remained a relatively minor issue in the Democratic primaries. Even before the 1992 campaign, it was obviously not a burning concern among the different Democratic Party constituencies. Rather, it was something that most of the party’s principal candidates had distanced themselves from. In 1988 when the early signs of profound upheaval in Eastern Europe were already in evidence, the party’s primary campaigns were even then noticeable for the lack of energy and substance on the subject. Of the younger Democratic candidates ascending in the eighties, only Gary Hart had a genuine passion for foreign policy and defense issues. He had sensed even before the Berlin Wall came down that the end of the Cold War would have profound consequences for both superpowers. Gorbachev had kept him at a distance at first but, increasingly intrigued by Hart’s evident seriousness on issues, began to warm to him. Then Hart self-destructed, an early victim of the media’s preoccupation with the personal lives of candidates, and the possibility of a meaningful debate about foreign policy died. (Gorbachev later tipped his hat to Hart, when the latter was out of presidential politics and practicing as a lawyer in Denver, by throwing an immense telecommunications contract to one of his Denver clients.)
That disengagement on foreign policy was largely still true in 1992. Gradually as Clinton escaped New Hampshire in surprisingly good shape, it became clear that he would be the Democratic nominee. In New York, where the Clinton team had all gathered for the convention, Tony Lake and Sandy Berger were standing around in Lake’s hotel room, and Berger, who was about to go to Madison Square Garden for the nomination, glanced at Lake and saw a look of considerable sadness on his face.
“What’s the matter?”
“I think it’s going to work,” Lake said. “I think he’s going to get elected, and I’m going to have to make a choice about going back into government.” Would he go back? he wondered. He was momentarily ambivalent about it. He knew how destructive working at that level in the government was to a marriage. It had damaged his once before and would eventually help destroy it. But he also knew he would say yes.
Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore, had capitalized in 1992 on the harsh rhetoric of the Republican convention by going out on their famed bus tour, and it had captured the imagination of the country, these two young men with their attractive young wives who apparently represented a new and dynamic post–Cold War America finally getting back to the business of America being America and not so involved in distant places. Clearly the country wanted some kind of reward for having soldiered through the hard years of the Cold War, an economic and psychological, if you will, peace dividend. To emphasize that point, there was Clinton, out on the hustings, attacking Bush again and again for paying too much attention to the rest of the world and not enough to his own country.
Having Al Gore on the ticket was a plus from the start, a serious political figure picked for what was, in volatile modern times, an increasingly important job. Whatever else about Gore—to some he appeared too straight, too stiff—no one ever doubted his ability and the degree of his preparation. If Clinton was serious about politics, Gore was just as serious about government. One could not imagine a teacher calling on Gore and young Al not having all his homework done. He tended to give long answers to short questions; and his problem on any essay exam would be never having enough time to make all the points he wanted.
In an earlier America, a ticket like this would never have been nominated. Tickets were supposed to be balanced, older men with younger, North with South or East with West, preferably New York with California, someone to the right of center with someone to the left of center, most certainly not Arkansas with Tennessee with both men of the same generation. But this was a new age and Gore’s strengths had outweighed the demographic-geographic construct. Unlike most of the other talented young Democratic senators, he had not been standoffish or snobbish when he was interviewed by Warren Christopher during the preliminary search for vice-presidential candidates. When he subsequently met with Clinton, their session had gone very well.
Though no clear delineation of responsibilities emerged between Gore and Clinton, from the start they were reasonably comfortable with each other, with Gore having considerably more experience in foreign policy, in which Clinton was a neophyte. Gore had served on the Senate Armed Services Committee and was more hawkish than most members of his party. He had run as a hard-liner on the Middle East in his ill-conceived and abortive 1988 race, and he had voted for the Gulf War authorization. He was also very concerned about the Balkans. He was a sharp critic of American policy there, which he considered impotent, and was eager to lift the arms embargo. Almost from the beginning he had urged Clinton to take a stand against Slobodan Milosevic and to speak out on the Balkans.
During the campaign, Gore was far ahead of Clinton not merely in his knowledge of foreign policy, but in his confidence about his knowledge of foreign policy. At first Clinton tended to defer to his running mate on the matter, as if Gore were the professor and he the student. When Gore had pushed for a tougher line on the Balkans, Clinton seemed responsive. One memorable conference call early in the campaign included the Clinton foreign policy team: Tony Lake, Sandy Berger and Nancy Soderberg, Leon Fuerth, who was Gore’s foreign policy staffer, as well as Gore, Clinton, and George Stephanopoulos. Gore strongly advocated arming the Bosnians, there seemed to be an agreement, and they appeared ready to go ahead with that policy, the candidate not merely on board, but surprisingly eager to take a harder line. Yes, that’s what we should be doing, he said with a new vigor and confidence in his voice as if relieved from the indecision that had burdened his own attitude toward the region. But then they gradually decided that the new policy was, if not exactly precipitous, a little too specific. It put the Clinton people too far out on a limb and might make them vulnerable to criticism not just from Bush, but from the Europeans and the Pentagon, and so they backed down and made it a bit more general. Instead of presenting a clear-cut policy of their own, they would continue to nick away at the Bush people for their failings.
The race for the Democratic nomination was the hard part. After the nomination, Clinton could sense things beginning to turn in his direction. His feel for the way the campaign was going was eerie. His antennae were so good that he could tell from the reaction of the crowds that his issues were the ones that had resonance, that what he stood for was what the country wanted—the economy, stupid. He knew that, despite all the empirical arguments against him and in favor of Bush, all the conventional wisdom that said Bush should win, the issues were his. In Washington, taking a brief break from the campaign early in September, Clinton had turned to Stephanopoulos and said, “You think we’re going to win, don’t you?” “Yes, I do,” Stephanopoulos answered. “I do, too,” Clinton said, and Stephanopoulos was impressed. For Clinton to say something like that was new; he was usually much more cautious in talking about which way it was all going.1 After that, Stephanopoulos noted, Clinton began to change. Because he sensed that his wildest dream was close to becoming a reality, he tempered his rhetoric, aware that he might actually become president and have to act on his words. Indeed, he might be a prisoner of them, and therefore it wasn’t the wisest thing in the world to exaggerate.
The generational change taking place in American politics was also taking place in the larger culture as well, particularly in the media and national network television. Network television, always so sensitive to public opinion, much more so than elite print, picked up on changes in popular attitudes with astonishing rapidity, lest its ratings spiral downward with millions of dollars lost. Even as the American people were deciding in 1992 that domestic rather than foreign policy issues were paramount, the same thing had been happening in less dramatic form for more than a decade in network news, which was a remarkably faithful thermometer of the national psyche.
Nothing reflected the changes in American attitudes toward foreign policy more clearly than the way the three main television networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—had gradually been moving away from serious foreign coverage in the eighties. They might, it was said with only a certain amount of exaggeration, be the only places where polling was as addictive as it was soon to become in the Clinton White House. In that decade the networks had largely turned away from the generation of distinguished correspondents who had built their reputations the old way, by covering the most difficult and important foreign stories, to a new, more telegenic kind of correspondent, both male and female, who worked for what were now called magazine shows and covered stories that were in general more tabloid or fluffier and were indicative of America’s preoccupation with itself. It was a major professional shift. Some fifty years earlier, the networks—then in the radio, not the television, business—had made their reputations as a critical part of the fabric that bound the nation together with shared concerns by their foreign coverage during World War II. They had at that historic juncture helped the nation bridge the two oceans, a first step in America’s coming of age as a world power.
That tradition, born of need and circumstance, had continued into the television age, and foreign correspondents had been the stars of the networks. The first generation of high-ranking, high-visibility television journalists had made their bones as foreign correspondents. Some of them, like Ed Murrow and Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood, had begun as radio broadcasters and then in midcareer had been reincarnated as the leading figures of television news. That remained the case through the Vietnam War, which had been, in the writer Michael Arlen’s apt phrase, not merely the first television war, but the first living room war.
By the eighties all of that was changing. Foreign correspondents began to encounter an increasingly difficult time getting on air. Many once-cherished foreign assignments lay open because bright young men and women were no longer eager to go to dangerous but interesting places where events were not sufficiently exciting to make the twenty-two-minute news shows. By the midnineties, places like Moscow, which offered great stories and where young print reporters from the Times and the Washington Post could still make their reputations, went unoccupied for extended periods because back home the young television reporters who wanted to be stars—to make your name in print, it was enough to be a good reporter; in television you had to be a star—knew they would end up with a tough, messy, difficult assignment that would only rarely make the evening news.
In effect, the networks had become essentially isolationist, or neo-isolationist, both reflecting and at the same time increasing the nation’s self-absorption. America was only interested in itself. The rest of the world had become far more distant, less important, indeed more foreign, than it had been a decade earlier. Foreign news aired on the network news shows only when the connection to American concerns was unusually direct, or when the footage was so good and violent—lots of carnage—that it made for exceptional television. Or as the saying about many television news shows went, if it bleeds, it leads. Where once the daily news budget for the networks had closely paralleled that for the front pages of the great national newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, there was now a marked divergence. The national newspapers still carried a variety of foreign stories on their front pages, while the networks rarely reported on the same events unless they could air great footage. (Though one of the principal results of World War II was a powerful postwar generational commitment to internationalism, by the end of the century, Tom Brokaw, a network anchorman who had never been based overseas, was writing a series of encomiums to the World War II generation while presiding over the essential dissolution of its foreign correspondents.)
The impulses that the television news shows executives were responding to were exactly the same ones that Bill Clinton had responded to as he set off on his presidential campaign. It was a different America, one with a narrower focus. As the worst of the confrontations with the Soviets slipped into the past, the American people no longer felt threatened or scared. The interest in foreign news had been high in the years right after World War II, when the coming of nuclear warheads, attached as they were to intercontinental missiles, had shrunk the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and it had ended when America felt safe from the rest of the world. Probably the most surprising aspect of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War was the effect it had on the American media executives; they seemed released from being serious not just about foreign news, but in domestic reporting as well.
The entire economic structure of the networks had also changed. The proprietorial generation of Paley, Sarnoff, and Goldenson was gone; the new owners were giant corporations run by the new managerial class. To members of that class the only thing that mattered was increasing the value of the stock; foreign reporting was perceived as expensive and bad for ratings, which was bad for the stock. The new managerial class cared little about the iconic stature of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite. In addition, cable television had profoundly affected the networks. By the mideighties, cable had begun to come into its own, and the large audience that the three networks had always shared so comfortably—no one ever lost—began to fragment under the competition from cable.
The world of cable, with its desperate need for even the smallest rating point, brought a different value system, one more like tabloid newspapers, emphasizing sex and scandal and celebrity and violence and, with luck, perhaps all four at the same time as memorably with the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Their share of the audience in decline, the networks began to emulate not those who had gone before them in the world of serious journalism, but those who were now challenging them from the land of cable. Their magazine shows—which often gathered surprisingly good ratings and were inexpensive to produce—became increasingly tabloid. In the old days, the way to earn a position as a prominent and above all successful journalist who got a lot of airtime was to take on the most serious stories of the day—civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate. The new track was different. The big money was in magazine shows, and young reporters wanted to get on them because the seven-figure salaries were made there. What emerged in the world of the networks in the eighties and nineties was not great reporters, but television personalities. “Ours has become,” John Chancellor, the former NBC anchor and one of the most distinguished men of broadcasting, said shortly before his death, “a world I no longer recognize and a world I do not very much like.”2
Nothing indicated the changes taking place in the world of network news more vividly than the career of Garrick Utley, one of the most gifted foreign correspondents of two eras. Covering international news was literally in his blood. His father, Clifton Utley, who had headed the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, was an early radio correspondent for an NBC-owned station. In fact, Clifton Utley had hired the young John Chancellor back in the forties. When Garrick Utley came along in 1963, just out of Carleton College in Minnesota, he was hired as an office boy by Chancellor in Brussels about a month before the network went from a fifteen-minute to a thirty-minute news show. Chancellor, one of the most admired men in the profession, gave Utley simple instructions on how to write and report for television: keep your sentences short and your voice low.
That was the beginning of a truly distinguished thirty-five-year career for Utley, during which he covered every major story all over the world, and where his very appearance on the screen signaled that a story of considerable substance was being reported. But that, as he liked to say, was yesterday, and this was today, and Utley understood by the early eighties that the profession he belonged to and loved was changing. Great, irreversible economic pressures were gathering against it, and the people charged with defending the traditional values were either weaker in their positions or not necessarily on the same side as he was. The open conflicts generated by the Cold War had essentially died down, undercutting the profession. Journalists love conflict; they might be fascinated by the ideas that drive the conflict, but on television the collision itself (because it produces great images) is what matters, and as the tensions of the Cold War abated, so did the pictures and the fears that it had generated. As there was less immediate threat, there was less story.
By 1982 Utley was chief foreign correspondent for NBC, heir to a great if somewhat brief tradition, based in New York and traveling the world without budgetary restrictions, still able to do longer pieces on serious foreign policy issues. But he soon began to realize that what he did and what he represented were coming to an end. NBC was bought by General Electric, the managerial class took hold, and that was immediately felt in the newsroom. Foreign bureaus—the exact same thing was to happen soon at CBS and in time at ABC—were considered unduly expensive. The idea of a talented, highly paid reporter waiting around until a story came his or her way was not something modern corporate financial officers liked. Bureaus at all three networks began to close and foreign correspondents were told to find other work.
In 1993, after thirty years with NBC, aware that the people he worked for cared little or nothing about the things that mattered most to him, knowing that it was pointless to be chief foreign correspondent for a network that did not believe in foreign reporting, Utley left NBC and went to work for ABC, which had under the leadership of Roone Arledge emerged for a time as the most serious of the three networks, until Disney merged with Capitol Cities. Utley’s tour with ABC would be brief, three years, just long enough to witness, with the arrival of the Disney people, the same change in values that had already taken place at NBC.
In 1993, Utley was in London when the Balkans began to blow up, sharing his stories of woe with another ABC foreign correspondent, Jim Laurie. They had both discovered that it was increasingly difficult to get stories on the air—unless there was combat footage—and now even with that, the market was shrinking. Bosnia, they decided, was an important story, but it was also a nightmare, harder and harder to get access to, and more and more dangerous. In New York there was little enthusiasm for the story, which was becoming a tough sell to the news desks because no one thought it really connected to America. The stories they were able to file, Laurie and Utley agreed, were becoming shorter and shorter because of New York’s essential lack of interest. That meant the context of their stories, which was at the core of good reporting, was being cut out, and they had less and less significance for ordinary Americans because they were devoid of the mandatory explanations. It was a kind of journalistic self-fulfilling prophecy. New York did not think the stories had much meaning and thereupon created a format that presented them with little meaning.
Laurie had a feeling that a vicious cycle was at work. The people who ran World News Tonight were, in ways they did not entirely understand, keying in on what first the Bush and then the Clinton administrations thought was important on the theory that what the president and his people thought was important was, in fact, important. But in this case, the relationship was intriguing. As the Clinton administration evolved, the president, for political reasons, did not want to deal with Bosnia and was deliberately downplaying it, while the failure of the network news shows to run Bosnian reports aggressively allowed him to keep minimizing the story. It was, Laurie thought, the blind leading the blind—a kind of journalistic Catch-22.
In 1992, Laurie reported one story from Belgrade that became a fifty-second spot, the first time that had ever happened. At one time his stories had been longer, two or two and a half minutes, but that was in another age, and he and Utley commiserated about that. They and many of the other American television correspondents who were covering Bosnia knew the difficulties of the story. This nasty assignment, filled with constant dangers, did not seem to excite New York. For the first time in his career, Laurie began to question his own news judgment. Here were Serb soldiers on a rampage in Bosnia, leaving terrible carnage in their wake, and yet New York did not seem to care.
Laurie and Utley were a little luckier than most, they decided, because Peter Jennings, alone among the three network anchors, had made his reputation as a foreign correspondent and still had a passion for foreign news. But after a time, a malaise overtook Laurie. He had covered many of the most dangerous stories for ABC over two decades, but the risk in Bosnia—where journalists wore helmets, flak jackets, and sometimes traveled around in armored cars—was not necessarily worth taking if nobody cared. He found himself shying away from the story, leaving it to the stringers, young men and women who were not American nationals and were willing to take appalling risks to get on the air and perhaps make their reputations. Both Utley and Laurie thought some kind of test was being failed not merely by their network, but in some way by their country. Here was America, at the zenith of its power and influence, paying so little attention to the world around it.
Rarely had there been such a sharp division between those who worked in the field (until they were almost all gone) and their superiors in New York, the anchors and the executive producers of the news shows. The roots of these senior figures were in journalism, and they had risen through the ranks when people like Ed Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and John Chancellor were giants—no one threw Murrow’s name around more than Dan Rather of CBS. But the process now had a dynamic of its own, and the senior network anchors had become, like it or not, a central part of it. There were fewer and fewer real reporters, less and less real reporting, and most certainly fewer foreign correspondents. And more stars. That was the system. The anchors themselves, like the stars of the frothier magazine shows, were stars, too, and drew the salaries of stars, about $7 million or $8 million each. They did the best they could against a current running ever faster against them, but they had been made accessories to a process they did not believe in.
An issue of New York that gave out the salaries of the anchors also noted what the New York Times paid Joseph Lelyveld, its talented executive editor—some $500,000. No one who knew anything about journalism thought for a moment that any of the anchors was fourteen times the journalist Lelyveld was. But it would not have occurred to the owners of the Times to pay their editor at the expense of their foot soldiers or to close down foreign bureaus in order to afford gargantuan salaries. Salaries at the Times were representative of journalism the way it used to be; those at the networks were representative of journalism as it had transmogrified itself in an age of entertainment and self-absorption.
The one television correspondent who was making a considerable professional reputation in the Balkans was a talented young woman named Christiane Amanpour, who worked for the fledgling cable network CNN and who had the good fortune, in a profession where cosmetics were so important, to be as attractive as she was talented. She was absolutely fearless, and almost from the start staked the story out as her own. For CNN to cover it while other networks stood aside was not surprising. Its franchise was international, and this story, if it did not yet excite Americans, did have significant international implications. It was important in the Balkans and throughout the rest of Europe, it was important in Russia because of the Slavic interest in anything that happened to the Serbs, and it was important in the Muslim world because of the fate of the Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Amanpour had arrived in the Balkans in June 1991, knowing little about the region, but getting there in time to cover the breakaway of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia and the Serbian assault upon the Muslims of Bosnia that followed. “I did not,” she noted, “know a Croat from a Serb when I first arrived.” Child of an upper-middle-class Iranian family uprooted when the Shah fell in 1979, she grew up in England and was educated in the United States at the University of Rhode Island. Determined to be a war correspondent, she was one of the early CNN employees and had covered the Gulf War. That was a big CNN story, but one in which the technology was so dominant and the actual time of armed combat so brief that few correspondents in the field had distinguished themselves.
In Bosnia that would be different. Amanpour was thirty-four when she got there, lucky, she decided, to be a part of the changing of the guard from the generation of journalists who had come of age during the Vietnam War and had covered some of the smaller conflicts in the intervening years, most notably in Central America, and who were now in their late fifties and early sixties. She remembered believing that this was her generation’s Vietnam, a war that was not only a serious ongoing military struggle, but one with a huge moral component. Amanpour brought an unusual intensity to her work. Perhaps because her own family had been devastated by events outside their control, she had exceptional sensitivity to the plight of ordinary people caught in the pull of cruel historical forces. But what was happening in Bosnia was different from anything she had seen in the Gulf War. There, armies had fought other armies. Here the Serb army was attacking civilians. She was amazed by the brazen cruelty of what she witnessed, beginning with the siege of Dubrovnik.
When that was over and Milosevic started to move on Bosnia, Amanpour had no trouble convincing her superiors that she should stay on top of the story. Some European television networks were taking it seriously, but she was surprised by the lack of interest among the other American networks. Their correspondents covered the story episodically, staying for three or four days, complaining bitterly about their inability to get anything on the air, then going back to their bases in London or Paris. It was primarily the print journalists, Amanpour believed, who brought Bosnia to the world’s attention, not the diplomats from the great nations who were supposed to watch out for barbarisms like this, not the UN people who were there to keep the peace, not even the representatives of the NGOs who were trying to deal with the tragic situation. It was Blaine Harden of the Washington Post, Roy Gutman of Newsday, and John Burns of the Times who were keeping a record of the terrible atrocities. Amanpour became their peer, the one reporter on American television every day. She thought from the start that she was witnessing a moral catastrophe, one that brought back memories of Hitler’s Germany. Perhaps the scale was not the same, but the cruelty of the genocidal impulse was, and thousands and thousands of people were being killed and raped or forced to flee only because of their ethnicity while the West was simply standing by.
Amanpour was appalled, and her emotions not only drove her reporting and made her work ever harder, they were also obvious in her voice. She did not even attempt impartiality or journalism’s beloved artificial balance, the equating of forces that were not equal. She did not believe that being a good reporter in a time of genocide meant neutrality, or that she should distort what she saw and learned in order to appear to be more fair. Fairness had nothing to do with what was happening. Hers was a powerful voice, even though it was confined to the smallest of the networks, one which had on average perhaps only a million viewers a day. But her work spoke volumes about the other networks and what they were not doing. Nor did it please the Clinton administration, newly arrived in power and reluctant to get involved in Bosnia.