Bill Clinton was the first true post–World War II, post–Cold War president. George Bush had served some three and a half years in office from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Clinton’s inaugural, but he was very much a man of the old order. Clinton represented a different political generation, driven by vastly different issues. The defining personal experience for Clinton was most assuredly racial change in the South. That seemed to be the issue to which more than any other he brought genuine commitment and passion and was what probably had motivated him to be a politician in the first place. Foreign policy remained distant to him. Yes, he had been a Rhodes Scholar, and certainly one of the assumptions of the people who gave out those cherished fellowships was that it was supposed to be a life-changing experience. Part of its purpose was to introduce talented young Americans (and others) to the rest of the world, especially England and the Continent. But once at Oxford, Clinton had performed academically in the most desultory manner imaginable. The brand name of the Rhodes Scholar was what he had wanted—and a two-year travel-o-rama.
He had not sought an Oxford degree. It would not in any way be a great career asset; he was not going to be an academic. He knew exactly where he was headed. He was going back home to law school and then run for office. He had gone to Oxford, Rolodex at the ready, eager to meet and check out the competition—the other brightest and most ambitious young men of his generation—and to decide whether a country boy from Hope, Arkansas, could take them on. If he could, all the better; he would sign them up for his future campaigns. He seemed to some of his peers to have arrived at Oxford already campaigning for national office, taking down names and addresses of anyone who might help him and, of course, trying to meet as many attractive young women as possible. He had not greatly interested himself in the study of postwar Europe, the effect of the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain, nor the validity of NATO. If any foreign policy issue weighed on him in those days—and most other young men of his generation—it was Vietnam.
Clinton was interested in domestic politics by instinct. That was his strength and his natural inclination. His defeat of Bush had only served to confirm the accuracy of his political instincts. Foreign policy issues subtracted from the limited power he had, which was to be used for domestic programs anyway. Foreign policy was to be minimized and, if at all possible, kept on the back burner. Besides, he was almost excessively confident himself as a quick study, someone who could make shrewd and highly effective political calls on any subject, even when he came in at the last moment. The one thing Clinton did not want was an activist secretary of state who would undertake new and potentially unpredictable initiatives. He also wanted a status quo national security team in what was most demonstrably no longer a status quo world.
His months on the campaign trail had convinced him that he was politically ahead of a new curve. Nothing indicated that so clearly as a meeting he had held with a group of leading Democrats—all House committee chairmen—during the transition period. He had gone around the room asking each chairman about the problems in his area until he finally got to Lee Hamilton, the veteran Indiana congressman who headed the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Hamilton talked about a number of issues: post-Soviet Russia, the complex problems of dealing with China—there was never, he said, going to be a policy that would satisfy everyone on China. Suddenly Clinton interrupted him, “Lee, I just went through the whole campaign and no one talked about foreign policy at all, except for a few members of the press.”
That set Hamilton back slightly, but then he responded, “You know, every president’s tenure is marked by foreign policy issues, whether they want it or not. It just happens that way. No American president can avoid it because he’s the leader of the free world. They think they can, but they can’t.” Then Hamilton mentioned Johnson and Vietnam, Carter and the hostages in Iran, Reagan and the Iran-contra scandal, and Bush and the Gulf War. It did not change Clinton, of course; he knew that his stand on domestic issues had elected him. Years later, Hamilton, who had by then left office, reflected on that meeting and thought that Clinton had been right. But he had also been very wrong.
The team assembling around Clinton during the transition was representative of, among other weaknesses within the Democratic Party, the lack of depth in foreign policy. The Democrats, after all, had been out of power for twelve years, and in power for only four of the last twenty-four years. They had not developed much in the way of bench strength. Nor were they a party with an easy consensus on political issues. There was still a considerable division between the old Kennedy-McCarthy-McGovern Democrats and the Hubert Humphrey–Scoop Jackson Democrats, some of whom had come back to the fold during the 1992 campaign and some of whom were still sitting on the fence. Old issues that had divided different wings of the party because of Vietnam had never entirely been resolved. In the one term in which the Democrats had managed to hold power during the prolonged Republican dominance—the Carter years—the split between the two Democratic factions had proved nearly fatal.
The Carter administration was instructive. Carter had named as his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, and as his secretary of state Cyrus Vance. The twain never met. Brzezinski, of Polish origin, was not merely a hard-liner in general, but was considered more Russophobic than the top people in State, who had been in many cases personally affected by Vietnam. He tended to believe that the smaller conflicts throughout the world were, in fact, areas where the Soviet Union was contesting the United States, whereas some of the Carter people believed that indigenous nationalist forces, arguing out age-old political and ethnic divisions, were at the core of the contention. In addition, they thought the stakes were not that high because these countries were only marginally developed, and therefore no matter which side won, it would not make much difference in realpolitik. Those arguments had their roots in the Vietnam experience; many of the early and most outspoken doves believed the decisive issue at stake there had been nationalism, and that any American commitment was doomed because we were bound to come in on the wrong side of history, reinforcing in the minds of the Vietnamese the French colonial experience. Under Carter the two warring wings of the party had come to Washington, each had held one of the two top foreign policy positions, and they had kept right on warring. That the last Democratic president had permitted a bitter internal struggle to go on so long and so openly, and that a Democratic president had allowed his national security adviser to cut his secretary of state out on critical issues, were sure signs of the party’s lack of leadership in foreign policy.
The Clinton transition period did not begin well. Almost from the start there were major conflicts between the domestic political people like Stephanopoulos and Carville—the men who thought they had elected Bill Clinton—and Mickey Kantor, who was also a good friend of the president-elect’s and was supposed to be an unofficial chief of staff and, at least in his own mind, in charge of the transition. The question seemed to be about whose victory this was. The degree of squabbling in the early days of the transition—how poisonous it was and how far apart were the people who should have been on the same side—quite startled the president-elect. For a time it appeared likely to force him to make an unwanted and perhaps fateful choice between close and trusted aides even before he was in office. In desperation, he called Warren Christopher and asked for his help. Christopher, who was supposed to be a relatively minor figure during the transition, flew immediately to Little Rock, thinking he might stay for a day or two. Instead he stayed on for more than a month and became, along with Vernon Jordan, the leading figure in the transition.
Christopher was sixty-seven years old, twenty-one years older than the president-elect, old enough to be his father. He was, in fact, virtually the exact same age that William Jefferson Blythe, the president’s birth father, would have been had he not been killed in an auto accident as a young man. That was not unimportant because close aides would describe Christopher’s early relationship to Clinton as almost paternal. Christopher was at the time the most senior figure in the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment, but not too old to serve in the new administration. Though he had been a Vance man, he had never been contaminated by the bitter divisions of the Carter years. He was the acceptable man. Not many people were excited by him or his view of the world (which by and large they didn’t know since he never went around discussing whatever it was). He elicited few strong feelings—either among people who favored him or who were opposed to him. Almost everyone who knew him had some esteem for him. Ed Muskie, briefly secretary of state under Carter, was too old, and Zbig Brzezinski, national security adviser under Carter, was perhaps the perfect age, three years younger than Christopher. But Brzezinski had been a leader in the internal battles with the somewhat more dovish wing of the Democratic Party during the Carter years and was virtually persona non grata to many of the young men now returning to power who had been on the Vance side of the old factional divide.
Christopher represented the neutral center of the party. He did not know Clinton well, but he was a good friend of Mickey Kantor’s, through mutual service in Los Angeles Democratic politics. Kantor had originally brought him into the Clinton campaign. Christopher had been of distinct service to Clinton on two previous political occasions. The first was during the New Hampshire primary at the height of the Gennifer Flowers crisis, a time when most of the senior figures of the Democratic Party were still extremely leery of the Arkansas governor, keeping more than the requisite distance from him. Christopher had come to Clinton’s aid in one of his darkest hours, the night after he had been badly pounded at a meeting in Seattle. At a fund-raiser for Clinton in Los Angeles, Christopher, a leading figure in local Democratic circles, not only spoke, which was valuable of itself, but he, nominally the most emotionally buttoned up of men, gave a surprisingly impassioned speech. Clinton was touched that this lion of the Los Angeles Democratic establishment had come to his aid during a moment of travail, and he spoke of it often afterward to friends.
At the fund-raiser Christopher had praised Clinton’s amazing resilience and his ability to keep coming despite taking hit after hit. “And he doesn’t whine about the hits,” Christopher added. (“Christopher found out soon enough he was wrong about that particular part of it,” one of his close friends later noted. “Clinton can take a lot of hits but he always whines—it’s a very important part of his makeup.”)
On the second occasion, Christopher was placed in charge of the vice-presidential search, and done carefully and discreetly, it was widely regarded as the single most successful part of the entire campaign. Nothing had leaked out, and they not only got the man they wanted, but no one else’s feelings were hurt. At the time they announced the choice of Al Gore, it should be remembered, Clinton was running poorly against both Bush and Perot, but the campaign took off almost immediately and the bus tour of the two young Democratic nominees was considered an exceptional plus. Christopher had twice proved himself effective, low-key, and undemanding. He was what every politician dreams of finding at a time like that—a thorough professional with lots of connections who knows the terrain and has complete control of his ego.
Working with Christopher on the foreign policy transition team was Vernon Jordan, who had been brought in somewhat earlier as a kind of tiebreaker when the Stephanopoulos-Kantor tensions had heightened. Jordan and Christopher constituted a most unlikely pair. Jordan was young, black, earthy, exuberant, the strikingly handsome son of an Atlanta country-club waiter, a man who exulted in the pleasures and perks that his newfound success had brought him. If anyone personified the victories of the civil rights movement in the thirty-eight years since Brown v. Board of Education, it was Jordan, an immensely winning man, who appeared to be on the threshold of a brand-new role for any descendant of slavery in America. For the first time in the country’s history, the principal friend and fixer of a president-to-be of the United States was black, an unofficial position to be sure, but a most desirable one, and one always reserved for white political power brokers in the past. Jordan would become a ubiquitous figure in the Clinton years, perhaps the one person the president trusted on high-level appointments and on a wide range of other subjects.
Where Jordan was exuberant and energetic, Christopher was the most reserved and disciplined of men, tightly wound and completely driven, going through life as if displaying any emotion was the last thing you ever did. It was hard to imagine him with his jacket off or his tie loosened. The two men, naturally, got on perfectly from the start. Neither wanted the same thing. Jordan had long ago spent more than his share of time in public service doing pro bono work. For more than twenty years he had headed various civil rights organizations such as the United Negro College Fund and the Urban League. He had received something like fifty honorary degrees. That was the first part of his career. In the second, having already done his share of good, he wanted to do well, and instead of collecting honorary degrees, he collected memberships on America’s corporate boards. As an influential lawyer-lobbyist in Washington, he had no interest in working for the president, a relationship, he knew, that would inevitably diminish him, especially with this president, whom it was possible to serve loyally, skillfully, and yet somehow manage to fail. Jordan was shrewd enough to know that he could remain a close friend only if he did not work for Clinton.
Jordan was perfectly positioned. The city, the nation, and the world knew how close he was to Clinton, the president-elect’s chosen golf partner, the man he liked around him for locker room talk. What better advertising was there for both him and his law firm than that? Who else could sit in a Washington law office and be as great a rainmaker? On the first day they got together, Jordan, dropping by the hotel to pick up Christopher, drove a red Allante Cadillac convertible, a sporty car made in Italy. He had heard that Christopher—it seemed out of character to most people who knew him—loved hot cars. “We had a two-man dinner and we got on well from the start. By the end of the evening,” Jordan liked to say, “we were going steady.”
Warren Christopher was an old-fashioned man of another generation, his expectations always tempered by his having survived a difficult childhood in the Dakotas during the Depression. He was a ferociously ambitious man, a good deal of whose energy went into concealing how ambitious he really was. He wanted more than anything else to be secretary of state of the United States. One of his greatest disappointments had come in 1980 after Cyrus Vance resigned as secretary of state and Jimmy Carter chose, instead of Christopher, who had served both Vance and Carter so loyally for so long, Ed Muskie as the secretary. Christopher, engaged in backbreaking private negotiations to free the American hostages in Iran, was devastated by the news and thought seriously of resigning. Because he was so disciplined, he was loath to say how badly he felt at the time. Instead, in Christopher-speak, it came out simply as “that was a low point in my career.”
When Christopher joined the transition team, he immediately took himself out of the running for the secretary of state’s job. Still, as the search for that secretary progressed, two things became clear. First, no other candidate loomed large on the landscape. “There was,” Jordan would later say, “a huge gap in age between those who had done it in the past and those who were not yet ready but wanted to.” The lack of Democratic bench strength, they quickly discovered, was quite stunning. The damage done by Vietnam had effectively wounded some in the ascending generation. Some of the men coming of age, in their late fifties to early sixties, were in general too close to the now contaminated policy makers of that era, and the next generation was, as Jordan suggested, still too young. Any possible candidate of Clinton’s own age would have to come from the Senate, and the most obvious Democratic senators of that generation, their reputations already assured before Clinton ever announced, had tended to look down on him as an upstart, a man whose credentials fell far short of their own.
Sam Nunn, the Georgia senator, was a possibility. The senior level of the Washington Democratic establishment was promoting him enthusiastically, but the traditional liberals in the party were dubious. His innate cultural conservatism tended to work against him, and there was something of an ideological gap between him and the president-elect. They might both be what were called New Democrats, but on a number of social-cultural issues Clinton’s national constituencies were different from Nunn’s Georgia ones, and their personal relationship was, at best, uncomfortable. Nunn could surely have Defense, but not State. Bill Bradley might have been another possibility, but he had alienated the Clinton people during the vice-presidential screening process. Christopher had met with him as he had met with Gore and others. But Bradley had made it abundantly clear that the only job he wanted was the presidency. The word the Clinton people used to describe him was haughty. Nor was he perceived as having helped greatly during the campaign itself.
The second thing that became apparent was that Warren Christopher badly wanted the job. In a polite, genteel, and unemotional way, he hungered for it. He might be a minimalist in words and in emotions, but he made clear in any number of little ways that he coveted the job. He also made clear that he thought he was the right man for it, but the initiative would have to come from someone else. Later during the transition, Jordan, by then extremely gifted at interpreting what Christopher said and did not say, understood how desperately his colleague—and now good friend—wanted the job. He got Christopher alone and said they needed to talk. He then told Christopher that he was going to see Clinton that day and turn down once and for all the job of attorney general, for which he was being recommended. But he wanted to raise Christopher’s name for secretary of state. It was speak now or forever hold your ambition. “Do you want the fucking job?” Jordan asked. Yes, Christopher answered, but it would be a conflict of interest because as head of the transition team he had taken himself out of the running for any key job. Jordan told him that was not exactly a conflict of interest and went to the governor’s mansion that night to talk to Clinton.
There Jordan told Clinton that under no circumstance would he take the job of attorney general, but he knew that Christopher badly wanted to be secretary of state. “He wants it, he deserves it, but he won’t raise it, so I’m raising it for him,” Jordan said. Clinton asked if Jordan thought Christopher was the right man and Jordan said yes. So they talked a bit more, Clinton seemed agreeable, and Jordan asked if he could tell Christopher that the deed was done. Clinton said yes. The next morning Jordan telephoned Christopher at his hotel and said, “Good morning, Mr. Secretary.” (A few months later, on his first trip to the Middle East, Christopher met in Damascus with Hafiz al-Assad, the president of Syria. “How did you get to be secretary of state?” Assad asked him. “When I sat there watching CNN one day, I saw you take yourself out of the running. So how did you get the job?”)
Not everyone who knew Christopher well and regarded his abilities highly thought it an inspired appointment. They agreed that he was honorable and decent, intelligent, uncommonly careful and meticulous. Above all, he was a workhorse of the first order. He had great control of his ego, which meant that he would neither be a leaker nor a glory seeker, someone likely to trumpet his own achievements at the expense of the White House. When things went well in foreign policy, the light would shine on the White House; when they went badly, Christopher was the kind of man—and there fewer of those left in the aspirant pool—who would shine the light on himself.
But something important was missing. No one really knew whether he had ideas or a vision of his own on foreign policy. It was partly why he had so few enemies, but it was also why many people who knew and rather liked him had a fair amount of doubt about his selection. He remained, thought some of the doubters, exactly what he had been under Vance, the perfect deputy, a man whose own personality and thoughts were always in the shadows. But while his abilities were considerable, his critics thought, they fell short, particularly for a job that had become extremely important now that the Cold War was over and a new, thoughtful, and wise vision of how to deal with a more turbulent world was mandatory. Christopher, they thought, was too much the functionary, a capable and highly competent bureaucrat, but probably a limited one, a man lacking originality and beliefs of his own. More than anyone else in the administration other than the president, the secretary of state at this moment in time needed the vision thing.
Some people with knowledge of the Democratic Party talent bank suggested that Christopher might be perfect for attorney general, and years later the consensus was that if he had been attorney general, it might have improved the administration in two key slots. State might have been stronger from the start under someone with a more focused sense of direction, and the administration would not have stumbled as badly as it did when its first two candidates for Justice withdrew because of nanny problems. Christopher, it was believed, would have run a clean Justice Department with just the right measure of deference to the politics of the president. But that was not to be. With Vernon Jordan passing on the job at Justice, the Clinton administration was soon publicly committed to choosing a woman to be the nation’s top lawyer.
Oddly, the warnings that Clinton received about Christopher probably helped validate him for the job. Not a forceful, independent figure with strong ideas of his own about the world? The last thing Bill Clinton wanted at State was a man who might, even on some relatively minor issue, if not wander off the reservation, at least create internal tension by the force and drive of his personality and his desire to act when the president might not want to act. When people told Clinton that Christopher was immensely hardworking, but not necessarily imaginative, and finally quite lawyerlike, a man likely to be a functionary rather than a leader, that, too, was precisely what the president wanted—a deputy to run State and cause no problems. What did Clinton like most about Christopher? a top administration aide was once asked. “That he did not give off any heat” came the answer. He was smart, thorough, and he knew not only his own limitations, but the limitations of what the new president wanted in the job. One of the reasons he had always been so successful was because he read the needs of his clients with singular accuracy.
So Christopher would be the secretary of state. He would never cause the administration problems the way an activist like Dick Holbrooke might. Christopher, said one colleague, would always make the safe call. But that meant, the colleague added, that he would end up not being safe, because everything he did would be premised on conventional choices and this was a world where decisions could no longer be conventional. Christopher was better at looking back on issues and tidying up other people’s messes than he was at looking ahead and anticipating where a difficult crisis might arise. He was one of those men who had moved deftly through a bureaucracy, rarely standing out, rarely creating waves, knowing when to take cover, yet always moving ahead until, to the surprise of many people who had denigrated his skills and his talents, they ended up being the boss. Many of his colleagues would later remember him for the absence of actions rather than actions. “Dean Rusk without the charisma” went the phrase used in Democratic circles among those not impressed by the choice. His selection was believed to symbolize how little Clinton was really interested in foreign policy.
One of the first things that Christopher had to do was dilute his connection to Carter. He might have been one of Carter’s personal favorites, and the previous Democratic president had given him the Medal of Freedom at the end of his one term, but there were limits to loyalty, and a new Southern governor was entering the presidency, and he was hardly anxious to be linked to his predecessor. The distance between Washington and Plains, Georgia, was to be maximized. Carter, to Clinton, was a symbol of Democratic incompetence past, and Clinton would be the symbol of Democratic success in the present. The problem was that Carter was ready, willing, and able to get back in government as a special representative of the president of the United States. In flooded the calls from him announcing his availability, indeed his eagerness, to take on assignments. Yet such was the wariness on the part of Clinton and his political people about the possibility of the Carter shadow falling on them that, during the transition, when Carter, full of ideas about foreign policy, called to talk to the president-elect—not an unimportant call, the last Democratic president telephoning his younger successor, both of them Southerners—Clinton pointedly did not take his calls. He passed them on to Christopher, his foreign policy transition man, who had come to prominence in the Carter years. Christopher, in turn, tried to pass the job of handling Carter on to his deputy, Peter Tarnoff. It would have been hard to make a cleaner break from the recent past; Jimmy Carter watched the new team arrive in Washington, deeply wounded by its treatment of him.