Christopher was appointed secretary of state partly because, of the various candidates, he had the fewest enemies. Of Dick Holbrooke, at best an outside possibility for the job during the 1992 transition, it could be said that he was the most talented candidate, but also the man with the most enemies. The antithesis of Christopher, Holbrooke had been an assistant secretary for East Asia in the Carter administration as a very young man, and now as the Clinton people prepared to enter office, he was fifty-one, perhaps a bit young, especially since the president himself was so young. But age was less a problem than personality. Holbrooke was high-talent, high-risk, and believed by almost all in the selection process to be high-maintenance. When the people picking the new team considered him, they thought first of his energy and intelligence, which were almost off the charts, and then, in the same instant, of his ego, which was also presumed to be off the charts. Keeping him tuned in as a team player and out of tribal and territorial struggles with colleagues would be a problem. He tended, some people in the new administration thought, to be too media-obsessed, taking credit for things that worked out and shying away from things that did not.
If named secretary of state, however, Holbrooke would first and foremost be a player. Not everyone who admired his abilities completely liked him. He could be bright and winning, but he was so forceful, so driven, not merely by sheer ambition but his belief in the rightness of the policies he advocated, that he often had little sense of the impact of his deeds on other people. There was no way in the world that he would be a minimalist secretary of state. Quite the reverse. He would be a full-fledged activist, pushing everyone around him on any number of issues, and if he got the job, given his considerable energy, intellect, and knowledge of how to work the bureaucracy, the State Department would not be a quiet or acquiescent place.
Issues that the new administration might want to keep relatively dormant might come hurtling to the fore under Holbrooke. That was not a recommendation as far as Clinton was concerned. Clinton himself was a formidable, quite dominating figure, and he would soon learn in the White House how to intimidate aides who brought him news he did not want to hear. But it would be hard to do that with Holbrooke. He was simply more of a force of nature. Holbrooke was also aware of his reputation for being too aggressive. Washington, he once said with some degree of melancholy, rewards people who are not passionate, who know how to play the game, and who do not make mistakes.1 With Holbrooke you got strengths, you got talent, and you got headaches—but at the very least it was guaranteed that you would not be bored.
He was already engaged on the issue of Bosnia, which would in time dominate all Clinton foreign policy decisions. Holbrooke had been one of the early first-tier foreign policy people to visit there and write about it. That was in the summer of 1992, when things were beginning to deteriorate. Now as he was being considered for a high-level administration position, it had gotten worse. Thus if Holbrooke were to be offered a job in this administration, he would be the rare high-level player who had seen the Bosnian horror at firsthand and had been moved by it. Nor was he likely, once in office, to let an issue like that slip away. Given the other priorities of the president, that might have worked against Holbrooke.
But he had another downside as well. He tended to roll over someone when it suited him, and he had crossed many powerful people in Washington, without always knowing that he had done so. Few were neutral about him. His admirers, who tended to be confident people, thought he was immensely gifted and well worth the considerable trouble he was bound to cause. His detractors, who were many, were extremely vocal in their opposition to him for that same reason. Among those whose enthusiasm was quite limited was Warren Christopher, who had clashed with Holbrooke over human rights issues in the Carter years and saw him as exceptionally hard to contain. Holbrooke was in all emotional ways almost the exact opposite of the cautious, careful Christopher, who kept much to himself yet would play an important role in choosing the national security team. He could take one look at Holbrooke and know that on something that truly mattered to him he would be like a hammer, driving the issue all the time, whether the people above him wanted it driven or not. His respect for the ideas of others did not always match the respect he had for his own ideas, unless, of course, they were the ideas and opinions of the president himself.
Thus, as the new team came together, Holbrooke, once considered a viable, albeit outside, candidate for secretary of state, began to slip in the ratings system and fall toward the second tier. That was painful. He had been a wunderkind in the Carter years, and though he was tempestuous, demanding, and often difficult, no one had doubted the totality of his bureaucratic skill. He was respected for the talented people he had picked for his team during the Carter years—a number of gifted subordinates were named as ambassadors by Holbrooke—his willingness to fight for ideas, and his tendency on many issues to be ahead of everyone else in seeing their dangers and consequences. His ambition had always been limitless; he still wanted to be secretary of state. But he had sat out the last twelve years and was now no longer a wunderkind. He was a man in his early fifties whose star, once so bright, might be in descent, even though the Democrats were back in power.
He would not get State, he would not become deputy secretary or an undersecretary, and he would not get the UN—that was marked for Madeleine Albright. Both Clintons liked the idea of a woman there. Japan was a possibility, a job in which Holbrooke was quite interested. Because of the complexity and importance of the American-Japanese relationship and the immense trade imbalance, the post was considered something of a plum. He was, after all, an expert on Asia, and Tokyo was the biggest ticket in the region, though how much of an impact an ambassador would have there was always problematical. Fritz Mondale, the former vice president, appeared ticketed for Moscow. But then Joan Mondale, who was interested in the arts, decided that the art scene in Japan was more interesting than in Moscow, a dubious judgment, and Mondale took Tokyo.
For a time it appeared that Holbrooke might not get any job at all and he was falling without a parachute. Christopher did not want him at any high-level job at State. Nor did Tony Lake, soon to be the national security adviser and once one of his closest friends, want him to have a major appointment. But Holbrooke had one influential advocate, Strobe Talbott, who had been close to Clinton for almost twenty-five years, since the time they were roommates at Oxford. Talbott was a huge Holbrooke fan; he knew the downside but he thought this administration desperately needed his talent and energy. In one of the rare occasions when he used his personal connection with Clinton, Talbott pleaded that they find a place for Holbrooke. It was, he told the president, simply wrong to have someone of his ability off the team. Talbott was aided in this instance by Sandy Berger, who was also high on the NSC team, marked to be Lake’s deputy. Holbrooke, mutual friends thought, might drive Berger nuts, but Berger knew his value, and he, too, made the case for Holbrooke with Clinton.
Germany was open, and Germany it would be. Holbrooke got it as a kind of consolation prize. He was deeply disappointed at first. He did not see the upside of it, and for a time he thought of turning it down. But friends helped convince him to do otherwise, reminding him that it would not necessarily be the last position he would get and that his talents would inevitably bring him to the fore. So he reversed himself and decided to take it. But a considerable bitterness lingered from the transition period. Holbrooke was convinced that he had been shot down by old friends, in particular Tony Lake, who had blocked him. It was true that Lake had been largely negative about a number of high-level positions for Holbrooke. It slipped out that when Holbrooke’s name had come up during one of the transition meetings, Lake had referred to him as high-maintenance. Even Holbrooke’s most fervent admirers would agree with the description—high-maintenance, surely, but high-value as well, they believed.
Lake, however, whatever doubts he had about Holbrooke, had not tried to block him as ambassador to Germany. His slippage in the pecking order in the world of foreign policy was especially painful for Holbrooke, friends thought, because Lake ended up with one of the two prized jobs, national security adviser. Their friendship had always had an unstated competitive quality, and now Lake seemed to be the clear winner and had, in Holbrooke’s eyes, worked against his place in the administration. As a result, a simmering tension now existed between the two old friends, turning them into genuine enemies.
Holbrooke and Lake were the oldest of professional colleagues. But despite parallels in their careers, they had very different interests and ambitions and modus operandi. That showed clearly in the way they had spent their years after leaving Washington when Reagan replaced Carter. Lake headed to the relative seclusion of a dairy farm in western Massachusetts and taught political science, almost as quietly as he could. Holbrooke was pulled to the excitement and energy of the literary-journalistic-political world of New York City, where he worked successfully for a major financial house and was often seen with the well-known television figure Diane Sawyer.
By the summer of 1992, Holbrooke was passionate not just about Bosnia but about his own career. He had not, however, forged an especially close connection to Clinton as the candidate neared the nomination. Holbrooke had been a foreign policy adviser to Al Gore four years earlier when Gore had made his abortive presidential race, and Holbrooke was obviously anxious to get closer to this new Democratic star. There had been one meeting early in the primary campaign between Holbrooke and Clinton, and, Clinton’s advisers believed, it had not gone particularly well, in part because Clinton was already overloaded in terms of meeting new people and was more interested in impressing the people he met than in being impressed by them. Clinton, it was thought, had sensed how bright Holbrooke was, but was a little guarded about him as well, perhaps aware of his reputation for being talented but extremely ego-driven.
It was obvious to Holbrooke’s friends that summer that he was obviously not getting much traction with the Clinton team. Though careful not to say anything critical about Lake, who was the chief foreign policy adviser and ostensibly one of his oldest friends, Holbrooke was frustrated and, for someone normally so outspoken and exuberant, oddly muffled when the subject of the campaign came up. He was certainly not about to let others in the tight, gossipy world of national security know that things were not as they had once been with Lake. It would be a sign of weakness for him, but not for Lake, since he now had the inside track with Clinton. But Holbrooke was, as one friend said, “suffering quietly—which was unusual. It was not very much in character for Dick to do anything quietly, especially suffer.” Whatever else, Lake was clearly not encouraging Holbrooke’s attentions. What those operating in the Clinton foreign policy shop needed during the campaign, they believed, was not more foreign policy expertise, but more political leverage with the candidate and time, after the election, to impress upon him how vital foreign policy was. Otherwise, it could eventually overwhelm you.
The story of both Lake and Holbrooke, perhaps the two most talented young foreign policy figures in the Democratic Party at that moment, was instructive for a number of reasons. It told a good deal about the party itself, and the damage Vietnam had done to the talent base in the world of national security. It would be hard to imagine a more complicated relationship than the one between Holbrooke and Lake. They had arrived at the foreign service training school in Washington together in 1962, where they were among a group of bright young men and women—though it was almost all men in those days—who immediately started to hang out together. Those were glorious days, the last carefree hours of a boyhood now about to end with assignment to Vietnam and a still-small war just over the horizon. After classes they went out drinking together and played a fierce game of softball on the weekends. The first tip-off, one classmate said, that the admirable, well-bred, always polite Tony Lake was every bit as ambitious as the much more raw and unfinished Dick Holbrooke was that when they played softball, Lake was the only one who showed up wearing spikes. On brutally hot evenings, along with another contemporary, Vlad Lehovich, they played a game called fan ball, which demanded quick reflexes. You threw a tennis ball into a ceiling fan and then had to scramble to retrieve it because the fan drove it off in wildly different directions.
A year later, the two men arrived in Vietnam at virtually the same time. If you were bright and young and talented, then Vietnam in 1963 was a perfect place to exhibit your abilities. There, because they were obvious comers, both Lake and Holbrooke held a series of influential jobs, serving in time as aides to ambassadors Henry Cabot Lodge and Maxwell Taylor and, eventually, when they got back to Washington, Nick Katzenbach, the undersecretary of state. In those early days, it was Lake who got the prized special assignments first and who would do exceptionally well in the job—he was, after all, smart and disciplined and always, in both little and big things, ahead of the curve—and then, as he was leaving, point to Holbrooke as his logical successor. From the start, their career ladders differed. Older men, in search of the right kind of protégé, often came looking for Lake, who was born to a certain class, whereas Holbrooke, who was decidedly not born to that class, had to search for his mentors, his ambition always a bit more obvious in the process.
The two men had been uncommonly close at that time, brought together by their intelligence and their shared twenty-four-hour-a-day passion for this difficult war they found themselves in the middle of. It was Tony Lake who had signed Dick and Liddy Holbrooke’s wedding certificate in Saigon, and Anthony Holbrooke, who as a young man working for a nongovernmental organization would urge his father to go to Bosnia, was named, in part, after Tony Lake. Holbrooke, in turn, was the godfather to one of Tony Lake’s children. Both men were among the most intriguing figures produced in the national security world by the Vietnam War. They had wrestled with it as a moral and political issue during the war years and long after it was over. It still cast a considerable shadow over not only American foreign policy decisions, but over the domestic political arena as well, where a man’s wartime decisions, often reluctantly made and absolutely right at the time, might later be seen through a very different domestic political prism. In addition, the war had affected the psyche of the two men themselves, because Vietnam in some way or another changed everyone who went there.
When Holbrooke was a young man, his ambition seemed more naked because he, the son of an immigrant Jewish family, had started at a lower level than the WASPier Lake, and because he wore his hunger for success so openly. One could not be with him for even the briefest period without knowing how badly he wanted to succeed, not merely to hold higher office one day, but to be a star as well. He was always brash. As a young foreign service officer stationed in the Mekong Delta, he had openly argued one day with General William Westmoreland.
“How old are you?” Westmoreland, somewhat exasperated, had finally asked.
“Twenty-four,” Holbrooke answered.
“What makes you think you know so much?”
“I don’t know,” Holbrooke replied, “but I’ve been here two years and I’ve spent all of the time in the field.”
Then and later, Holbrooke’s ambition was matched only by his intelligence, and the awesome quality of both, plus his raw charm, made him likable sometimes in spite of himself.
But some who knew both men well thought that Lake in his quiet, poised, far more controlled way (he had, after all, been captain of the Harvard squash team, which was a perennial powerhouse in the semiclosed world of racquet sports) was covertly every bit as ambitious as Holbrooke, and every bit as demanding of himself. In Vietnam, they had gone through the full range of experiences—optimism, apprehension, disappointment, disillusionment, and finally considerable alienation—and it was, for both of them as they reached their fifties, the defining experience of their life. They had witnessed not just the tragedy of Vietnam but also what it had done to the political careers of some of the civilians who were its principal advocates, and to the party then in power, the Democrats, a party that would in time claim their political allegiance.
Much later in the Clinton years, watching the intensity of the byplay among the two of them and of Peter Tarnoff, a third colleague who was also one of the boys of Vietnam, Tom Donilon and Mike McCurry, both high-ranking State Department officials, used to wonder what had been in the water in Saigon back in those days that had made them so driven. If both Lake and Holbrooke were bright and hungry, of the two men Lake seemed to be marked for stardom more clearly and earlier on than Holbrooke, sure, it appeared, to be first in his class in achieving every level of success; whereas Holbrooke, slightly younger and somewhat devoid of the social graces that Lake exuded, seemed destined to be, at best, second in his class. It was said of Lake that when U. Alexis Johnson, then the number two man in the State Department, had looked at Lake’s first personnel report, he had been a bit irritated. “No foreign service officer that young,” he allegedly said, “is that good.”
Lake’s ascent in the foreign service was dramatic, and it came in part, at first, because of family connections and, in time, because of his own considerable energies and skill. While working in the consular office in Saigon when he first arrived, he dealt with a Vietnamese general named Ngyen Phu Duc. Near the end of World War II, responding to an American leaflet that promised medals and money for the return of American pilots, the general had helped one to safety, but had in the interim received neither medal nor money. He eventually came to the consular office, where he met with Lake and asked for his money and his medal. There was no doubt of the legitimacy of his request, but the air force, some eighteen years after this promise had been made, refused to honor it. The paperwork was simply too complicated, and the people who had made the promise so long ago were all gone. The money could not be arranged, but the old general still wanted the medal and it was clear he deserved one. So Lake, on his own, went to a metalworker in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon, had a fancy silver medal with a great deal of ribbon created and carefully inscribed as the “Anthony Lake Consular Medal Awarded for Distinguished Service to the United States of America.” When Henry Cabot Lodge, who was the ambassador at the time, heard of it, he greatly approved of that kind of initiative. He knew Lake’s mother back home, had already checked Lake out, and now made him his personal assistant. When Maxwell Taylor replaced Lodge, Lake was transferred to him before eventually becoming the consul in Hue.
There were high-powered jobs available for Tony Lake on his return to Washington. Yet in his own emotional ambivalence, he always longed to do something else, to escape Vietnam perhaps and distance himself from the eye of the storm. A post in a faraway African embassy, which would allow him to move around the country at ease and learn about another world while making some kind of humanitarian contribution, appeared preferable to him. Instead he was being offered jobs at the feet of the mighty in Washington, in the midst of the heightening Vietnam tensions, jobs that he did not seek because more and more he disagreed with the mighty. On his return from Vietnam, he worked for Leonard Unger, who was Bill Bundy’s deputy. Bundy was the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs and Unger was running the Vietnam Working Group. It was not the easiest of assignments. Lake was dovish, surrounded in his professional life by hawks and in his personal life by doves. At one meeting, he spoke quite pessimistically about the war and was quickly upbraided in an angry letter by a navy captain who mocked him for thinking he knew more about Vietnam than Lyndon Johnson. You sound just like Bill Fulbright, the captain added. A few days later, Lake went to dinner with his very dovish wife and his equally dovish father. They both brutally assaulted the Vietnam policy. But Lake, ever the professional, tried gamely to defend it. Finally his father turned to him and said, with considerable scorn, “God, Tony, you sound just like Dean Rusk.”
He had been spared further time in the Vietnam Working Group when he was pulled away by Nick Katzenbach, the undersecretary of state, who was struggling to find a more rational, more dovish policy, though he, too, was surrounded by hawks above him in most of the key jobs. Once again Lake found himself a staff assistant. Katzenbach was a good boss and, in Lake’s mind, pointed in the right direction, but the war weighed on Lake ever more heavily and he found his own views diverging from official policy at an alarming rate. He finally went to Katzenbach and said he thought it was time for him to leave the foreign service. Lake was obviously both exhausted and frustrated, Katzenbach believed, sure he was no longer doing anyone any good. Lake was also sure that his dissent on so important a policy was inevitably going to damage his career—that sooner or later a senior officer would use an efficiency report as a means of punishment for Lake’s lack of enthusiasm. Katzenbach thought Lake was probably right and suggested an alternative move: take a leave of absence for a year and go to Princeton. Lake did that, spending two years there and getting his master’s degree in international relations. The person who replaced him as Katzenbach’s assistant, at Lake’s suggestion, was Dick Holbrooke. Soon after, Holbrooke would follow him to Princeton.
By the time Lake finished his two years at Princeton, Richard Nixon had been elected president and Henry Kissinger wanted Lake on his staff. Lake had dealt with Kissinger when he was a consultant for the Democrats in the terminal days of the Johnson years. Lake again thought longingly of a small, quiet post in Africa, but accepted Kissinger’s offer. Kissinger had checked him out with Bill Bundy, who was one of the previous administration’s leading hawks, and Bundy had given Lake a good report card. Lake, Bundy told Kissinger, had had serious doubts about the Vietnam policy but was always a good soldier. Kissinger had also asked Katzenbach for the names of the ablest people in the department, and Katzenbach had shortlisted, among others, Tony Lake, Dick Holbrooke, and Larry Eagleburger. “I felt badly that I might be giving away too much of State’s talent, so I sent the same list to Bill Rogers, but knowing Rogers, I doubt he even read it,” Katzenbach said later.
Lake talked at length with Kissinger and was convinced that even though he was in a difficult position with a volatile president, he wanted to end the war. That more than anything else was what Tony Lake wanted, too. He was certain they had all been arguing on the margin for too long about the right way and the wrong way to do it, and about finding the right, clean-cut young Vietnamese colonel who could rally and lead our forces to victory. The truth was that it could not be done because history was by now against us. The Kissinger experience meant that Lake had spent the first seven years of what was supposed to be a brilliant career totally engaged in the most exhausting, heartbreaking issue of that political era, often fighting the direction of the policy, where answers, other than the eventual acceptance of some form of defeat for America, had always proved elusive. Vietnam was a graveyard of good intentions and false hopes and artificially distilled optimism. Moreover, other than for a handful of journalists who went there, it was likely to destroy rather than enhance careers. Years later when a friend asked Lake whether working on Bosnian policy under the difficult restraints imposed by a passive presidency was the worst thing he had ever been through in government, Lake laughed and said no way. Vietnam was the worst, dealing with a terrible war that went on endlessly without possible resolution while 100 to 150 American kids were being killed each week. It was so bad, he added, not just because the original policy was so flawed, but because it was so hard to set it right.
During most of the time he served Kissinger, Lake worked on downsizing the American commitment in Vietnam, though under the unlikely Nixonian banner of peace with honor, as if the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, which had already been defeated in 1964 by the Vietcong, would now, despite the withdrawal of half a million Americans troops and a major cutback in American airpower, be able to win the war. Though peace with honor struck Lake as a dubious possibility, the idea of disengagement was a good one. Though he was not always in sync with the White House, he was working toward a goal they probably all shared—somehow getting out—and that made losing any number of arguments along the way bearable. It was a worthy course, if not a perfect one. But then in April 1970, Nixon and Kissinger okayed the invasion of what was called the Parrot’s Beak in Cambodia. Kissinger sold it to his staff at first as if it were going to be carried out primarily by South Vietnamese troops, supported by American artillery, though in fact it was to be a full-scale American mission.
Kissinger summoned what he called his bleeding hearts, those dovish young men on his staff who, he was sure, were certain to oppose the invasion, and asked them what they thought. Predictably they were against it. It would not work, they said. There was no North Vietnamese command post to be captured—which turned out to be true—and it would simply extend the war to Cambodia, a small nation that up until then had managed to stay out of the war. That also turned out to be true, with horrendous—genocidal—consequences for everyone involved. When Lake outlined his reservations, Kissinger remarked that he had known what Lake was going to say before he even said it. With that Lake resigned. Not only did he oppose the invasion, but what Kissinger had said was doubly troubling. If Lake was so predictable, he decided, he had lost the most important thing of all in a bureaucracy, true effectiveness. That meant he was nothing but window dressing for the outside world, as if his tenure there would show to Kissinger’s increasingly critical colleagues, both in academe and in the peace movement, that he was still listening to their proxies. Lake was one of three Kissinger staff members who quit. “Your view represents the cowardice of the Eastern establishment,” Kissinger told one of the three, a man named Bill Watts, who thereupon jumped out of his seat and tried to take a swing at his boss. But by then Kissinger had wisely retreated behind his desk.2
Both Lake and Holbrooke had ended up in Democratic politics in the seventies, and when Jimmy Carter took over, they were at the top of the list of the young men coming of age in the foreign policy apparatus, tempered by the Vietnam experience, but not emotionally burned out by it. Lake was still first in his class; he got a coveted position as head of Policy Planning at the State Department, a hallowed job for a State Department intellectual once held by George Kennan himself, the most cerebral man in the Washington of his day. Holbrooke, still something of a boy wonder, thirty-six that year, still brasher than Lake, was not far behind. He got the job at State as assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs. It was a plum, but he remained second in his class. He had, some of his close friends thought, hungered for something even grander, perhaps the national security adviser job, but he knew he was too young for it and Zbig Brzezinski was likely to get the nod.
Among those who had helped propel Holbrooke upward at the start of the Carter years was Averell Harriman, the grand old man of Democratic Party foreign policy, whom Holbrooke had gotten to know quite well during the Paris peace talks. Holbrooke was clearly a young man on the rise, always looking for sponsors, and the Harriman connection had helped him greatly. By then well into his eighties and finally realizing that he would not become secretary of state himself, Harriman had begun to counsel and push a new group of acolytes, Holbrooke among them. In the Carter years, Holbrooke was on Cyrus Vance’s team at State in the fierce struggles with Brzezinski at NSC. Given Vance’s passivity and his instinct to avoid confrontation, it was the more aggressive Holbrooke who often took Zbig’s hits on China policy. Holbrooke fought to keep the State Department’s hold over China policy when Brzezinski, playing the China card to trump the Russian card, tried to preempt it.
There was a new dimension of realpolitik to the Holbrooke who completed his tour under Carter. He had fought hard and successfully to limit the human rights activists in State from examining too closely the regime of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Holbrooke was, he once told a colleague, particularly proud of marginalizing the role of Pat Derian, the assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, a newly established branch of the department, in the Philippines during his tour. Their battles over policy—human rights versus primal realpolitik—were serious ones and reflected the growing divisions in the Democratic Party after Vietnam. One reason for continuing to support Marcos, in Holbrooke’s view, was that in the years after the defeat in Vietnam, the Philippines offered the United States an important naval and air base in the region. Another reason was old-fashioned domestic politics. If Marcos fell from power during a Democratic administration and was replaced by a Marxist regime, Holbrooke was aware of the political consequences, not just for the party but for himself. A few years later when Washington finally realized that the corrupt, incompetent Marcos regime had become more of a burden than an asset and was helping a growing communist insurgency, it moved against Marcos, ironically during the Reagan years, though Reagan had once been a huge Marcos fan. Holbrooke, by then working in the world of finance in New York, told Johnny Apple of the New York Times, “Thank goodness it happened on a Republican watch. . . . If a Democrat had tried to do this, it would have split the country.”3
During the Carter years at State, the differences between Lake and Holbrooke still seemed quite distinctive. Lake was quieter, more reflective, more openly anguished by the terrible Vietnam experience, and more in conflict with himself. On the surface at least, he appeared to be a man of ideas, not of action. He was at heart Wilsonian rather than Kissingerian. Holbrooke, on the other hand, was an activist first and foremost. He was for realpolitik, but not quite of the Kissingerian variety. His was a tempered, liberal realpolitik that took into consideration the importance of America’s moral position in the world, but also factored in the realities of the underdeveloped world and the vagaries of American domestic politics. Vietnam had probably toughened him. You made your decisions as best you could and then got on with it. His ambition would probably not let him have it any other way. Vietnam might have been a mistake, but he had studied a mistake in action and learned from some of the top people in the department how to profit from a mistake as well as how to minimize the effect of a mistake on his career. He also learned how to be a skilled and fierce bureaucratic infighter. No one was more territorial. If you were working for him, things might be fine; but if you were challenging him for turf, you were effectively at war with him, no matter the legitimacy of your viewpoint. If Vietnam had made Lake more ambivalent about the uses of American power, it had made Holbrooke tougher and more combative. Any anguish associated with him was likely to be the anguish he caused potential bureaucratic competitors.
Holbrooke was, said one old friend in both admiration and exhaustion, the kind of person who could go in a revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you. His father, who was born in Russia and came to America as a teenager, was a doctor, and Holbrooke had grown up in Scarsdale, one of New York’s more affluent suburbs. He was the sports editor of his high school paper, The Maroon, whose editor in chief and his best friend was young David Rusk, the son of a then Ford Foundation executive Dean Rusk. Holbrooke always dreamed of being a foreign correspondent—trench-coat-clad, surrounded by attractive but slightly mysterious women. When he went to college at Brown, he spent much of his time on the college newspaper. In his sophomore year, the paper’s editor, in what he presumed would be a major journalistic coup, assigned Holbrooke, who allegedly spoke French and knew a good deal about Paris, to cover the 1960 Paris summit. There, the Western leaders led by Dwight Eisenhower were to meet with Nikita Khrushchev during what appeared to be something of a relaxation in East-West tensions.
Though the conference blew up at the start because the Russians shot down a U-2 spy plane, Holbrooke forged a connection with the New York Times reporters working in Paris. He made $10 a day as a de facto copyboy, and his principal job was saving seven seats each day for the seven all-star Times reporters covering the conference. He later served as a news clerk for the paper in New York, and when he graduated from Brown in 1962, his one dream was to work for the Times. He wrote James Reston in Washington asking for a job, but Reston only hired young men who had five or six years in the field, and he answered that there were no vacancies. Though he desperately wanted to be a foreign correspondent, Holbrooke tried no other newspaper, and since his friend David Rusk’s father, Dean Rusk, had always spoken of the uncommon value of a career in the foreign service, he took the foreign service exam. He passed and entered a class where a number of bright young men were gearing up for exciting new careers, among them Tony Lake.
Because he was ambitious, eager to serve and both do good and do well, Holbrooke, like Lake, chose Vietnam, where in 1962 things were just heating up. Both went to Vietnamese language school. But Lake, because he was married, went to Vietnam as a traditional foreign service officer to work in the embassy, while Holbrooke, because he was single, was trained for a new program, part of AID, where he would work in the field in the rural pacification program. He was making $5,500 a year, plus another $1,375 for hazardous duty. He arrived in Saigon with a letter in his pocket from Clifton Daniel, the managing editor of the Times, introducing him with considerable enthusiasm to the resident Times reporter.4 Holbrooke from the start was connected to journalists. To his credit, though, he also had the Rusk connection but never mentioned it to his peers.
Given the nature of the institution he had joined, where social graces were then supposed to be important, Holbrooke was an unlikely candidate for a successful career in the foreign service. He had a better understanding of the political world around him than he had about himself and his effect on people. No one would accuse him of being raffiné. “He’s not entirely housebroken,” Pamela Harriman, another of his sponsors, and by then Averell’s widow and the American ambassador to Paris, said of him in the midnineties. Holbrooke would always remain both endearing and off-putting, raw and unfinished, as likely to be disliked as admired, and often for the exact same qualities. Nick Katzenbach, who had been one of his early sponsors when Holbrooke returned to Washington from Vietnam, remembered with both admiration and amusement how Holbrooke had worked endlessly to get himself on the American team that went to Paris for the 1968 Paris peace talks, wheeling and dealing simultaneously with both Katzenbach and Averell Harriman, the leader of the team, to make certain he made the traveling squad. “He was absolutely sure,” Katzenbach said, “that it would be a historic time, that he could learn a lot, be of value to others because of his knowledge of the war, and that he could meet some people who would one day be of value.”
Holbrooke’s was a triumph of talent, energy, ambition, and hubris over more peripheral social graces, the absence of which in another age might have worked against him. What was a weakness became his strength: his occasional insensitivity to others in the singular pursuit of his goals. He did not seem as reflective as Lake, perhaps because the fire of his ambition burned so brightly, but there was no doubt about the first-rate quality of his intellect. He was as smart as any foreign service officer of his generation. He remembered everything that was ever said to him (or at least everything he wanted to remember), going back if need be thirty-five years. He also remembered everything that he had read—and he read voraciously. He was an amateur diplomatic historian, the editor for a time of the quarterly magazine Foreign Policy, and later the coauthor of Clark Clifford’s memoirs. “The best memo I ever wrote on Vietnam,” Katzenbach said years later, “was one telling President Johnson that we could not win, that it was the problem of the tortoise and the hare—that the tortoise of progress was well behind the hare of public opinion and it was going to stay that way. It was written by Dick Holbrooke.” (Years later, by then the hero of the Dayton negotiations to end the war in Bosnia and ambassador to the United Nations, Holbrooke gave a speech to a group that included Katzenbach, whom he generously called “the best boss I ever had.” “Thanks, Dick,” Katzenbach told him later. “I’ll be sure to tell Bill Clinton what you said.”)
Above all, Holbrooke was a total political animal. That would later—the friendship and relationship did not blossom at first—draw him closer to Bill Clinton. They would make the same reads about people and, without a word necessarily being said, the importance of events in foreign countries to Clinton’s political future. Holbrooke understood the political implications of all foreign policy situations—even the politics of some distant, unimportant African nation, tribe against tribe. Holbrooke, said a friend, would know which tribe had the greater moral cause, but he would also know which tribe had the oil. As a world-class political junky, a connoisseur of political events both foreign and American, his skills greatly exceeded those of most foreign service officers. He not only had an acute feel for the politics in the countries to which he was assigned, but equally important, and unlike so many colleagues who understood the politics of foreign nations but not of their own, his political skills extended to the United States.
Vietnam had taught Holbrooke a lesson that he never forgot, that foreign policy was almost always an extension of domestic politics, reflecting the moods, the changes, even the tremors, of American life. No one was better at projecting the connection between foreign policy and domestic politics. Had he left the foreign service and decided to write a column, he might have been one of the best foreign policy commentators of a generation.
As the Clinton foreign policy team assembled during the transition, it soon become clear that Holbrooke was very much on the outside trying to get in and somewhat frustrated by his lack of access. He had been working on Wall Street as an investment banker, where he had done extremely well. The secret to his success, his colleagues at Lehman Brothers thought, was how politically adept he was. He immediately understood the interior political hierarchy of the house, who had talent and, more important, who had power. He liked the financial game; it might not be as meaningful as top-level foreign policy, where the stakes were in his mind real, but it was a high-stakes game nevertheless, even if the money did not interest him greatly. About that he remained oddly innocent. When he was asked by a friend what he would do with all his money—now that he could sometimes make more in a day than he had once made in a year—he seemed puzzled for a moment, then answered that for the first time in his life he could buy all the books he wanted. “And every time I play tennis,” he quickly added, “I can use a new can of balls.” If he was disappointed by the job he got in the Clinton administration, he was smart enough to keep it to himself, aware that there would be another day.
By contrast, Lake, his onetime friend, was starting at the top, as national security adviser. Sandy Berger would be his assistant, though he could easily have had the job himself. Berger had been there first and had enough pull with the president to be the senior man in the office, but to his credit Berger suggested that Lake take the post. Berger not only understood how others in the foreign policy establishment perceived him—as a relatively minor Washington trade lawyer with strong Democratic Party connections—but he also felt that Lake was better prepared for the job because he had worked in the White House and at the NSC before, albeit under Kissinger. Berger’s decision had a certain nobility—not many ambitious Washington lawyers would do that—and in the long run it helped cement his relationship with the president.
For Lake it meant he was still first in his class, the first member of his generation to get one of the top-of-the-line appointments. He had passed a crucial test during the campaign as an architect of the policy that helped neutralize Bush’s greater national security experience. Lake’s interest in foreign policy also paralleled that of the new president and his quite influential wife, who thought of it in humanitarian and moral terms rather than in old-fashioned strategic geopolitical ones. Not only were both Clintons the products of the anti–Vietnam War movement, but this shared humanitarian viewpoint seemed far more legitimate now that the Cold War was over and a new kind of issue, often driven by refugee problems, was about to surface.
For a brief time during the transition, Clinton apparently toyed with the idea of appointing Colin Powell, then approaching the final months of his second term as head of the Joint Chiefs, to one of the top national security jobs. Whether it would have been State or Defense, no one was ever quite sure. But aides were assigned to check out the constitutionality of such an appointment. Could a man move from being in the uniformed military and heading the Joint Chiefs directly to a high-level cabinet post? The answer was no; there were rules about that. So nothing came of it at the time, and no approach, not even a tentative one, was made to Powell. The Clinton people wanted, once in office, to honor him and yet neutralize his influence. Thus, eventually, when it was time for Powell to retire, they discussed whether they should give him, as a farewell tip of the hat, another star. They checked it out and found that the last general to get a fifth star was Omar Bradley forty-three years earlier. Powell, they decided, was not Bradley. Besides, as George Stephanopoulos noted, if they gave him one more star, it might help him one day politically.5 These were the first glimmers of Clinton’s fascination with—and wariness of—Powell as both a potential figure in his cabinet and, equally important, as a potential opposition candidate in a future election. Later as Clinton underwent an unusually stormy first year with a series of defeats in foreign policy, he often wondered aloud if he should have pushed harder for Powell. Two years into what was an increasingly troubled presidency, Clinton would try the Powell gambit with far greater energy.
The secretary of defense would be Les Aspin, the longtime Democratic congressman from Wisconsin. Aspin, who had begun his career as a McNamara Whiz Kid in the Pentagon, had as a young man gone back to Wisconsin to run for office and had been a leading Democratic Party defense expert for some three decades. He had had two ambitions as a young man, becoming head of the House Armed Services Committee and, in time, secretary of defense. Now he had achieved both goals, but he would be notably more successful at the former than the latter. He was a bright, gregarious, immensely likable figure, but the appointment was in many ways to be a disaster, unacceptable for the country and the administration, and literally and figuratively heartbreaking for Aspin. He was in person the least disciplined of men, and he was now being sent to ride herd over the most contentious and divisive of institutions.
Perhaps even more puzzling to others, and to himself, was the person chosen to head the CIA—the director of central intelligence, or DCI, in Washington terms—James Woolsey. His was a last-minute selection. At first the Clinton people had intended to put Dave McCurdy, the Oklahoma congressman, there. But McCurdy, a runner-up for secretary of defense, did not want the job. Then it appeared likely to go to Tom Pickering, a career foreign service officer, at the time ambassador to India and a man of exceptional abilities and experience—former ambassador to Jordan, Israel, El Salvador, and former U.S. representative to the United Nations. He was widely regarded in high Washington circles as the professional’s professional. Within the State Department it was said that he had been dispatched from the UN to India because he had performed with such skill in New York during the Gulf War and had attracted such media attention that James Baker decided he was ready for a more distant and far less visible post. Pickering had had a flawless career, admired by almost everyone who had worked for him as the absolute best in the profession, which meant he was very good indeed.
Aware that he was about to be tapped for a high-level job on the Clinton team, Pickering had made the requisite pilgrimage to Little Rock for his one-on-one meeting with the president-elect. Things went well and the deal seemed to be sealed. He had even been told by Christopher that the job was his. But at the last minute, a number of the more conservative Democrats on the Hill, as well as Admiral Bill Crowe, the former head of the Joint Chiefs whose endorsement of Clinton had been so important during the campaign, urged Clinton to broaden his team politically and suggested he name a neoconservative. Pickering, it was said, was on his way back to New Delhi when he was paged at the Frankfurt airport and told that what he thought was a deal was no longer a deal. He eventually got Moscow, which was an important post, although the first choice for Russia had been Walter Mondale.
Woolsey’s appointment did not turn out to be a happy one, either for Woolsey or for the administration. Though he was given a job of considerable potential influence, it was soon decided, in the unofficial way that these things were decided, that he was somehow not quite the right person for the administration, and his tour would be frustrating. He had served at a relatively low level in the Carter administration but was thought of as a Reagan Democrat. In late December 1992, Christopher called Woolsey and asked him to fly to Little Rock to talk to the president-elect. Woolsey had arrived thinking that the Clinton team would run its short list of would-be CIA directors by him and he would advise them which candidate was likely to be the most efficient and work best with conservative Democrats. Perhaps there might even be some kind of job offer. He knew Clinton only in the most marginal way. As a candidate Clinton had appeared before an informal group of which Woolsey was a member, men who had worked under Harold Brown in the Carter Defense Department, and he had rather liked the Arkansas governor at their one meeting.
Clinton, appearing before the group and aware of his limitations in the field of defense, where these men were said to have considerable expertise, knew that he was the new boy in a demanding classroom. In addition, New Democrat or not, a potential ideological gulf was between them, and he had shrewdly devoted the entire evening to asking questions, a vintage Clinton performance, playing to his strength as a quick study. The group liked that: no one expected a young Southern politician to flash back names, numbers, and price tags on weapons systems, but he seemed open and in no way dogmatic.
When Woolsey arrived in Little Rock in the early evening of December 21, he was told that Clinton would see him about 11:30 P.M. that night. Sometime after midnight, the two men finally got together. Clinton talked casually to Woolsey, but it was hard to ascertain his exact purpose. A few rather vague references were made to the CIA job, but Woolsey’s sense of the state of the world was barely discussed. The next day Woolsey was asked to stop by the Rose Law Firm to talk to Wes Hubbell about any potential conflicts of interest, a visit not without its subsequent irony. Woolsey was beginning to suspect that a job offer would be made, and in time Christopher confirmed it. Woolsey was to proceed to a press conference for the announcement that he, Berger, Lake, Aspin, and Madeleine Albright would all be joining the administration.
Before the press conference began, Stephanopoulos and Dee Dee Myers, two of Clinton’s top people who handled the media, held a quick game-planning session about what questions might be asked and what answers should be given.
“What do we say if someone suggests that this is just a bunch of Carter administration retreads?” Myers asked.
“Well, I served in the Bush administration,” Woolsey said, mentioning a relatively minor job he had held dealing with the reduction of conventional forces in Europe.
“Admiral Woolsey, I didn’t know you served in the Bush administration,” Ms. Myers said.
“I’m afraid I’m not an admiral, Ms. Myers. I never rose above the rank of captain in the army.”
“In that case I better take the word admiral out of the press release,” Myers answered.
A few minutes later the press conference began and Clinton said that to some people out there this might look like a bunch of Carter administration retreads, but Jim Woolsey had served in the Bush administration. Clearly the Democrats lacked depth in their personnel and the old divisions in the party still existed.
But the key change among the main figures in national security was the president himself. For Bush, foreign policy had been his raison d’être. For Clinton, it was an inconvenience, something that might pull him away from his primary job at hand—domestic issues, above all the economy. Newly elected and newly installed, he demonstrated that priority from the very beginning. He had little interest in meeting foreign leaders. When he received congratulatory phone messages from them, it was Warren Christopher’s job to return the calls. Democratic pols offering their congratulations had their calls answered quickly; foreign heads of state had to wait. Thus were priorities established. It was not necessarily a good way to start. Some world leaders, who had found Bush accessible, began to see Clinton as the embodiment of something they disliked greatly about America, the smug, remote superpower whose attitude on most things was don’t call us, we’ll call you, and by the way, we’ll make all the important decisions. But that attitude was very much in tune with the mood of the country. Clinton and the country were, after all, rarely out of sync. Characteristically, when Clinton gave a major speech, say a State of the Union address, and came to the part devoted to foreign policy, his voice changed, his confidence dropped, and he spoke in a stilted and rather perfunctory manner. It was as if it had been written for someone else and he had been handed it at the last minute, something he had to get through. Only when he spoke about domestic affairs did emotion and confidence and even empathy return to his voice.
To the people in the national security world, his lack of interest in their field was dispiriting. Les Gelb, who had served in the Johnson Defense Department and the Carter State Department and had in midcareer become a foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, had spotted this earlier than most. He had listened to candidate Clinton’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention and had written a prescient column entitled “A Mere 141 Words,” which was the number of words about foreign policy in an otherwise long and detailed 4,200-word speech. From then on Sandy Berger was detailed by Clinton to count the number of words about foreign policy in his speeches. Though the word count on occasion went up slightly, it hardly concealed the president’s essential lack of interest in the subject.
But the problem with concentrating on domestic America politics to the exclusion of the world late in this century, thought Robert Kagan, a talented, conservative foreign policy commentator and writer, was that “if you are the president of the United States, you do not find trouble, trouble finds you.”6 Or as Dick Holbrooke said, talking of the president’s desire to pursue a domestic rather than an international agenda, “What Clinton did not yet understand was that foreign policy never lets an American president go.” Already in Iraq, an ongoing battle, if not of strength then most certainly of wills, was taking place with Saddam Hussein. If that was not enough, three other trouble spots in the world were finding the president: Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia, the first two of which Clinton had pledged himself to take care of during the campaign. They were not geopolitical crises, though Bosnia was on the borderline, but each represented a humanitarian crisis that would be a challenge in an area where the Clinton administration had pledged to be different from its predecessors.