The difference between the easy rhetoric of a campaign and the harsh realities of the outside world hit the Clinton administration even before it took office. Haiti brought it home. One of the countries Clinton had singled out when he criticized Bush’s foreign policy, Haiti was like an open sore, a nation that produced a constant flood of refugees who sailed off to the United States in a sad little armada of homemade boats under the most desperate circumstances. The Bush administration had been stopping them on the high seas and sending them back. That, Clinton as a candidate had said, was criminal, and he and his administration were not going to tolerate it. Probably in no other country in the world except perhaps Bosnia had his election been as welcome as in Haiti. Thousands and thousands of Haitians, many of them with family members already in the United States, were delighted by what they saw as a new, open-armed welcome from a friendlier administration.
But even as Clinton prepared to take office, he was given intelligence reports and photos that showed thousands of Haitians were tearing the roofs off their houses and trying to turn them into boats in order to sail to America. Very quickly, the president-elect decided it was time to back away from the campaign rhetoric. A new deal for Haiti would have to wait. For a lot of people with high hopes for the new administration it was a signature moment. Mort Abramowitz, a distinguished former foreign service officer who had been ambassador to both Turkey and Thailand and with his wife, Sheppie, had been active in humanitarian relief, heard the news that the president-elect had reversed his policy and was going to stop the boats. Clinton was not even in office, Abramowitz thought, and he had already gone back on his word. An administration that had broken its promises even before it took office was not off to an auspicious start.
But Haiti was to be a relatively minor issue compared with Bosnia. That was the stickler. There, every move produced a countermove. There, the good guys were not very good, the bad guys were very bad; moreover, the good guys could easily become the bad guys, and the bad guys the good guys. The uncertainty about what to do in Bosnia frustrated not just the Clinton administration, but the Congress and the military as well. Even relatively simple actions, the kinds of things Clinton had talked about during the campaign, such as lifting the arms embargo and using American airpower, could not be taken because of the opposition of our European allies who had troops on the ground. Perhaps Bosnia was important, but now in office Clinton quickly discovered a number of other issues—all of them connected to more pressing domestic concerns. Those priorities would shape much of his first term.
There was, in fact, no easy policy, no easy consensus, about what could or should be done in Bosnia. If the president had been passionate about it, if Bosnia had been at the top of his agenda, he could have forced a policy through the top of the bureaucracy and delivered it as a virtual ultimatum to the allies. During the campaign Clinton had spoken of a changed policy, and from time to time he gave the impression that he wanted to lift the arms embargo. But once in office he froze, set back by the intense hostility of the Europeans to any change as well as the cautiousness of his own military. After that, his interest in Bosnia became more distant, at best episodic. Secretary of State Christopher clearly had reservations about the use of force and was trying to read and reflect what the president wanted. National Security Adviser Tony Lake was proactive but prudent, feeling his way cautiously and also waiting to take his signal from the president. But Lake had told Clinton of the preeminence of the Balkans at the outset. Nothing else could be done in foreign policy until Bosnia was dealt with, he said, and the administration, in terms of foreign policy, would be judged first and foremost on Bosnia. It was said not as warning but as fact from a national security adviser who understood the limits of his leverage and knew that for a variety of political and economic reasons he had less muscle than his predecessors.
Apart from Lake, the person who strongly believed that the United States would have to do something in Bosnia was the vice president. Gore was something of a hawk, and if he did not actually force a change in policy, he kept Bosnia on the agenda. He had decided even as a senator that Yugoslavia, as it had once existed, was gone and could not be reconstituted. He thought that American efforts should go into recognizing the independence of the new states breaking away from the old and minimizing any bloodshed. From the moment he joined the ticket, Gore had made Bosnia a campaign issue. Now in office he continued to push for a tougher line against the Serbs. But he was caught in the classic limitations of being vice president. He always deferred to the president, but he worked to keep the issue alive at various meetings. Though much of his advice was private, rendered when no one else was around—he would not embarrass Clinton—his activism was indisputable. Still, he was extremely careful not to stake out a position that was different from the president’s, aware that in a place as rumor-driven as Washington it would be damaging. There was an additional problem of dealing with Clinton on an issue like this where the equities were so balanced. You would make your case to the president, and he would seem to agree and even to have said yes, Gore told close aides. And then Clinton would talk to other people and what had appeared to be his assent would soften, and he would be effectively on the other side. Getting him to agree to a policy was one thing—holding him to that agreement was another, very different one.
Madeleine Albright was a champion of the use of force, but her influence was also limited. Indeed at first she was considered something of a showpiece by her peers, a very public manifestation of changes in domestic politics. Appointing a woman to the UN was a form of recognition comparable to the ethnic calculations made in an earlier era in putting Americans of Italian, Polish, or Jewish ancestry in relatively minor cabinet posts. Whether the limits imposed on Albright came from the innate sexism of the men around Clinton or whether, as some of them liked to say off the record, they did not think she was up to their level intellectually, they acted as if she had been inflicted on them by an unannounced but nonetheless very real government affirmative action committee. In the early weeks Lake, who seemed barely able to contain his irritation, was the hardest on her. He tended to look away when she was talking, as if he were terribly bored, on occasion drumming his fingers impatiently on the desk. In time, though it was not as satisfactory as being present at high-level meetings, Albright would participate electronically from her New York office, in part, she told friends, because of the hostile environment in Washington.
The situation on the ground in Bosnia had deteriorated significantly when Clinton came into power in January 1993. Slowly dawning on Western consciences was that the Serbs in Bosnia were committing the worst crimes in Europe since the era of the Nazis. There might have been comparable crimes in the Soviet Union under Stalin, but they had been committed far beyond the view and the range of the West in the most inaccessible parts of the country. In Yugoslavia, because of the work of the journalists covering the story, the West, like it or not, was becoming a witness.
On the table at the time the Clinton people took office was what was called the Vance-Owen plan for Bosnia, which was probably the best that could be produced given the vulnerabilities of the various players, the de facto military acquisitions of the Serbs, and the lack of enthusiasm in the West for displacing them from the territories they had taken by force. The plan had been negotiated by two senior diplomats, David Owen, the former British foreign secretary, and Cy Vance, the former U.S. secretary of state. (The possibilities of a real peace in the Balkans were so slim that when Owen had accepted the assignment, Private Eye, the British satirical magazine, ran a cover showing him and Prime Minister John Major, nominally a political opponent, with words coming out of their mouths in bubbles, Major saying, “I’m afraid it’s a lost cause,” and Owen answering, “Then I’m your man.”) The Vance-Owen plan was hardly perfect, but its imperfections matched the imperfections of Bosnia—and Yugoslavia—as countries. It called in effect for the cantonization of Bosnia. There would be ten cantons, three with a Serb majority, two with a Croat majority, three with a Muslim majority, and one mixed Croat-Muslim, with Sarajevo as a separate canton. The Bush people had quietly given their approval to the plan. Larry Eagleburger told both Vance and Owen in the final frustrating days of the Bush administration that they would not formally endorse it, but they would not attack it either. It was likely to end the bloodshed and was the best possible solution for nations unwilling to take stronger measures. If Vance-Owen worked, fine.
The Clinton people were not so accommodating. They were uncomfortable with a settlement that seemed to legitimize Serbian gains made at gunpoint. To do so would not jibe with their campaign rhetoric. They did not want to look as if they were appeasing Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs. Vance and his aides met with the Clinton team, and despite surface assurances that the new administration would back the settlement, Vance and Owen began to suspect a growing resistance to the agreement. Were they too much the appeasers? Was their settlement too much of an accommodation with genocide? That was what the Clinton people seemed to be asking. Vance and Owen heard from journalist friends in Washington that the Clinton people were bad-mouthing the agreement in private, saying it was soft, as if it were the work of Carter people like Vance, and they, the realistic new breed, were tougher. Richard Boucher, who was acting as Warren Christopher’s press spokesman, was asked by State Department reporters about the Vance-Owen plan, and he expressed doubts that it could realistically be achieved. A reporter at the press briefing went one step further, having picked up the back-channel Clinton position. Did the administration believe that Vance-Owen ratified ethnic cleansing? he asked. Boucher declined to answer. That, Owen wrote later, was like “rub[bing] salt in the wound.”1
So the Vance-Owen plan, undercut in Washington, soon faded from view, and the killing continued. Vance, finding it one of the most bitter moments in his professional career, was livid, particularly angry at his former deputy Warren Christopher. It ended what was already a complicated personal and professional relationship. Christopher had been Vance’s deputy when Vance was secretary of state in 1980. At the height of the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter, Brzezinski, and people in the Pentagon planned the bizarre helicopter rescue attempt, a mission unlikely to succeed given the cantankerous nature of helicopters even in the best of circumstances. At the time, an exhausted Vance was in Florida on vacation, very much out of the loop. Carter brought Christopher into the plan and told him not to tell Vance.
Vance returned to Washington to find the operation ready to be launched. He was appalled by the idea of the mission and the fact that the secretary of state had been cut out of the action. He immediately wrote a letter of resignation. Whether or not the rescue mission succeeded, the procedural violation was unacceptable. His letter was the rarest of State Department documents, a resignation on principle.
Vance had, nonetheless, recommended Christopher as his successor; the job went to Ed Muskie. Again, in 1992, when the Clinton people came to him to ask who should get the job, Vance recommended Christopher. But this, the torpedoing of his peace plan by his former deputy, was the final blow. If they had a better plan, it would have been one thing, he said; if they were willing to use American power, that was another. But he and Owen had drawn up this plan precisely because the Europeans and the Americans were unwilling to make a serious commitment in the Balkans. Yes, it was an imperfect plan, but it was the only one possible without military intervention. That the two men who played a key role in shooting it down were his protégés, Christopher and Lake, was particularly painful to Vance. (Some Carter loyalists thereupon decided that Christopher was an uncommonly able lawyer but a man who could serve only one client at a time, being completely and unwaveringly loyal first to Carter, and later to Clinton, but never able to be loyal to both.)
So the Clinton people, taking over, found themselves trapped in a self-defeating, hopelessly incomplete policy put in play by the Europeans and the Bush administration, and by their own reluctance to use force. The tangle apparently offered no way out. A primary impulse, again and again, was to use NATO airpower, but every time it was suggested, the idea was blocked by the Europeans, who said they would be delighted to go along with it, but only if we put troops on the ground along with theirs. Years later Tony Lake would talk about the frustrations of that time. The Clinton people had been so confident of their talents and so disrespectful of their predecessors (as all new administrations are—because they believe their own rhetoric) that they were sure, when they took a fresh look at Yugoslavia, they would be able to come up with a new policy to replace the failed one they had so roundly criticized in the campaign. But everywhere they turned, Lake would later note, there was some kind of blockage. “We kept looking for something—reading and rereading everything there was about the area—and it just wasn’t there,” he said. “So we would go back and try again, looking for some as yet undiscovered opening, for something new that we could do, and it wasn’t there.” With frustration mounting, the administration was inclined to blame others, the allies, and, of course, the fates.
Even before the new administration took office, Dick Holbrooke, who had visited Bosnia in the summer of 1992 and witnessed the ethnic cleansing and was committed to a dramatically changed course, warned his colleagues of the long-range dangers for American policy if we were not willing to use military power to back up our threats. At the start of the administration, he sent a memo, calling for a more aggressive policy in the Balkans designed to stop Serb aggression, to both Lake and Christopher. It began: “Bosnia will be the key test of American policy in Europe. We must therefore succeed in whatever we attempt. The Administration cannot afford to begin with either an international disaster or a quagmire.”2 Holbrooke did not hear back from either man, and when he called Lake a few weeks later, the national security adviser said that the memo had been useful, but there were certain problems with the decisive kind of action that Holbrooke wanted. That was about as far as it went.
Holbrooke was not yet ticketed for Germany and had volunteered for some kind of role in the Balkans as a special representative of the president. But that was precisely what his superiors did not want. They sensed that with his drive, intensity, and singularity of purpose—that is, his instinct, as they saw it, to freelance—it would be hard to keep him in line with the more cautious approach the administration was about to take. The job of special negotiator eventually went to Reggie Batholomew.
A few weeks later, Holbrooke, still waiting to hear what job he would get, dropped by the White House to have lunch with Lake and recommended immediate action in Bosnia. Lake countered by saying that they were working on the problem and he was sure they were beginning to make a difference. A clear division now existed between the two former friends, who both thought of themselves as proactive on Bosnia. Holbrooke was still the activist, free, because he had not yet taken a job, to talk about Bosnia in idealistic terms, while Lake was the high-powered official saddled with dealing with the problem in an administration where its priority was relatively low. Holbrooke reminded Lake of the activist rhetoric of the campaign, which Lake had authored, a reminder not necessarily guaranteed to strengthen an already fragile relationship. “The meeting,” Holbrooke later wrote with considerable understatement, “ended coolly and inconclusively.”3
The younger men and women in the State Department who had been pushing for greater activism in Bosnia were quite hopeful when the Clinton administration first took over. Christopher’s early words had stirred them. “A dark period of terror and brutality,” he had called it in February 1993 in his first public words on the subject. “Our conscience revolts at the idea of passively accepting such brutality.” But then the Clinton people began to back off at the top, and memos that demanded action were being stopped by Christopher’s deputies lest they hand him a piece of paper he would have to reject. Soon a sense of disappointment enveloped those who thought a new administrator meant a new policy.
When the Clinton people first took office, February, March, and even April were given over to a review on Bosnia. But events in Bosnia were not quiescent; they did not wait for policy reviews. If most of the Serb assault had gone according to schedule, a number of Muslim enclaves in eastern Bosnia had managed to hold out and were enduring a special kind of hell raining down on them from heavy Serb weapons. The most notable of those was a town called Srebrenica, where the Serbs had encircled the Bosnian Muslims and where there were continuing reports of a mounting human disaster which, it was believed, might become even worse. Srebrenica, as much as any one town, acted as a kind of goad, mocking this new president, who had promised to represent a more humane America, not just domestically but in foreign policy as well.
In early 1993, much of whatever of the world’s attention was on events in the Balkans was focused on Sarajevo. Though the quality of suffering in a time of genocide is hard to measure, people who knew and cared about what was happening there believed that the suffering in the eastern Bosnian enclaves was far greater than in Sarajevo. With no Western scrutiny that far east, fewer convoys, less food, and less in the way of medical supplies could reach the people there. Sarajevo, terrible though conditions were, was more closely monitored in the West, and the Serbs had periodically been forced to make some accommodations to world opinion. That was significantly less true of Srebrenica, an example of the real horror of Bosnia.
Srebrenica, a small former mining town, was unusually defenseless in the face of the Serb attacks, located as it was near the Drina River, perhaps only three or four miles from the Serbian border. Because the spring of 1992 had seen such cruel and bitter ethnic cleansing, various NGOs estimated that, by early 1993, as many as two hundred thousand Muslims had been driven from their land. As village after village in eastern Bosnia fell, a large number of them found their way to Srebrenica, which was soon to be placed under siege itself. By the time of Clinton’s inauguration, Srebrenica was already swarming with thousands of Muslim refugees and was being subjected to constant Serb artillery bombardment. Its story, already tragic, was only going to become worse in the next two years. When the Serb assault on Bosnia had begun a year earlier in March 1992, Srebrenica had proved a critical target for the Serbs, and their anger toward its defenders had grown in ever greater increments. Though the first part of the Serb offensive had generally gone according to schedule—after a six-week campaign they held something like 60 percent of Bosnian territory—Srebrenica continued to frustrate them.
There the local military leadership had proved unusually strong and able. When the Serbs surrounded the town and demanded that the Muslim men surrender their weapons, the local defenders knew all too well what had happened to the men in other towns. So they resisted. Serb forces, primarily paramilitaries led by Arkan’s Tigers, entered Srebrenica and began to loot and murder the elderly Muslim men they found in their way. Then two days later, Muslim soldiers counterattacked. One of their leaders was Nasir Oric, then twenty-five, a former policeman and bodyguard to Milosevic, who was as rough and tough as any Serb paramilitary leader. His irregular band, significantly underarmed but very determined, drove the Tigers from the town on April 20, 1992. Because of his success in that assault, Oric immediately became the leader of all the local resistance. Srebrenica now remained a Muslim enclave, an inedible bone in the Serb craw.
Oric became the ablest and most violent of the Muslim field officers. Under his command the Muslims, though desperately underarmed, launched a series of attacks on neighboring Serb-controlled villages, always searching for weapons and ammunition. His raids were every bit as brutal as the Serb raids on the Muslims. If his men hit a village controlled by Serbs, they massacred them. His counterattacks had taken place two weeks before Bill Clinton’s inauguration. With Oric in Srebrenica and using it as a base camp from which to attack the surrounding area, Srebrenica became a marked town. The Serbs assaulted the smaller Muslim villages, cleansing them, and more and more Muslim refugees fled to Srebrenica, which had no room for them. The town was already badly overcrowded, and most of the new arrivals had to sleep in the open air. The Serbs moved heavy artillery and armored vehicles into their positions and shelled the town at will. Nor would they let any UN convoys enter.
In the spring of 1993, Simon Mardell, a World Health Organization doctor, managed to sneak into the town—an extremely dangerous fifteen-mile walk during which he hoped he would not trigger any land mines. Mardell then contacted his superiors by radio and warned that the people of Srebrenica were in desperate condition and life there was inhumane. Thousands were living in the streets with no cover. There was no food or medicine. He estimated that twenty to thirty people a day were dying from cold and starvation, and that some eighteen thousand women and children should be evacuated immediately.4 After hearing from Mardell, General Philippe Morillon, a French officer serving in the UN force who was already aware of the catastrophic conditions in Srebrenica, audaciously forced his way into the encircled town on March 11, 1993. He did not intend to stay long. He wanted to see how bad it was, talk with the local leadership about what he could do, then leave. Certainly conditions were even worse than he had expected. But he was a prize for the Muslim leaders back in Sarajevo, and they cabled Oric not to let him leave town. Women and children started throwing themselves on his car. The Serb shelling stopped while he was in town, and the Muslims believed that as long as they kept him hostage, they would be safe. Morillon’s was one of the grandest gestures ever performed by someone in the UN force. “You are now under the protection of the United Nations forces . . . I will never abandon you,” he had boldly but somewhat inaccurately announced. In fact, his superiors back in New York were absolutely appalled by what he had done and the greater dangers he might impose on other UN troops stationed throughout Bosnia. He had begun, in their opinion, to be partisan and take sides.
Having made his bold promise, Morillon then tried to slip out early the next morning, but was caught by the Muslims. From then on he was busy negotiating between the Serbs and the Muslims, trying to turn Srebrenica into a demilitarized zone. He finally convinced the Serbs to let some relief convoys in. When the first few trucks arrived, a terrible riot erupted as women and children rushed to get aboard the now empty trucks and leave Srebrenica for neighboring Tuzla. The crush aboard the handful of trucks was brutal, and during the night, six women and children died of asphyxiation and exposure. A few days later another convoy made it in. Some 750 people, chosen because they were in particularly desperate condition, were supposed to be evacuated, but another riot ensued and as many as 2,400 women and children crowded onto the nineteen trucks. Young women pulled older women off and took their place. Some women threw their children aboard if they could not make it themselves.5
General Morillon kept negotiating with the Serbs, but always from a position of weakness, and every agreement he made collapsed. He had no real leverage. The Serbs knew that his superiors in New York were already unhappy with him for being so aggressive. Opposing him was General Ratko Mladic, who wanted nothing less than the surrender of Srebrenica. Clearly, the fig leaf of UN integrity in Bosnia, such as it was, was shrinking quickly, and the pummeling of the town continued.
Just as clearly, the American response was neutered as well. The Clinton administration was still without a real policy. Finally it was decided to drop food and medical supplies on the Muslim enclaves. The food was the kind used by soldiers in the field, MRE, that is, meals ready to eat. Fittingly enough—it seemed almost to be a symbol of the early Clinton policy—the Serb lines had changed during the night, and on the first drop most of the meals went to Serb soldiers.
In mid-April, a Serb artillery attack on Srebrenica killed fifty-six people, many of them children playing soccer. Larry Hollingsworth, a British official working with the UN, normally known for his quiet, dispassionate view of events, told reporters that day, in words he chose quite deliberately, “My first thought was for the commander who gave the order to attack. I hope he burns in the hottest corner of hell. My second thought was for the soldiers who loaded the breeches and fired the guns. I hope their sleep is forever punctured by the screams of the children and the cries of their mothers. My third thought was for Doctor of Medicine Karadzic [and other Bosnian Serb officials]. And I wonder, will they condemn this atrocity? Or will they betray their education and condone it? And I thought of the many Serbs I know around this country, and I wondered, do they want the history of the Serb nation to include this chapter in which their army drove innocent people from village to village until finally they are cornered in Srebrenica, a place from which there is no escape, and where their fate is to be transported out like cattle, or slaughtered like sheep?”6
When the Serbs demanded the surrender of Srebrenica, the UN Security Council quickly met and designated it and five other Bosnian towns as safe areas, which it said it would protect, even though as everyone knew, it lacked the means to protect anything. So the tragedy played on. More and more refugees poured in, conditions became more desperate, and the UN was pledged to protect the people there, a pledge it could not honor. Act One in Srebrenica was coming to an end and Act Two would take place two years later.
Srebrenica, unlike Sarajevo, was beyond the scrutiny of most journalists. Sometimes Muslims in Srebrenica would radio their colleagues in Sarajevo, who could contact Western journalists and give reports. One amazing breakthrough came in April 1993, when British journalist Tony Birtley, a freelancer working for ABC, did the most daring thing imaginable. He smuggled himself aboard a Bosnian army helicopter, slipped into Srebrenica under the Serb guns, and filed a series of stories from there by radio, which alerted the world to the disaster taking place. For his pains Birtley was immediately expelled from all Serb territory.
Sometimes in the early months of the new administration, there would be a swirl of presidential irritation. Clinton would seem momentarily energized by Bosnia, angry at the lack of a policy, furious that because of the arms embargo, we were not even able to let decent people defend themselves. That went against the American grain, he believed. Hell, he said at one meeting, if Americans were fighting against brutal oppressors, and the most powerful countries in the world kept them from getting arms, he’d have been damned pissed off. Much of his anger, in the opinion of those listening to him, was aimed at the Europeans who were blocking the easiest response: lift and strike. It did not lead to policy changes, however. Clinton would explode momentarily, curse both the fates and the allies, and then, aware of the military price, the potential for political damage, and the drain it would be on his domestic agenda, he would back off.
For Bosnia was just one of many early frustrations; the Clinton administration had not begun auspiciously. He had had trouble with the military and the Congress almost from the start. During the campaign, Clinton had promised the nation that he would end discrimination against gays in the military. He had made the promise to an important new, still-developing constituency on the political landscape: gay Americans (and, he hoped, their families and friends). But the promise was easier to make than to keep and could backfire once he was in office. It reflected the greater volatility of the American political scene, which was increasingly composed of one-issue pressure groups that sometimes worked for Clinton and the Democrats. Whenever he dealt with the equally explosive issue of abortion, one that had the support of upper-middle-class women, many of them nominally Republican (for middle-class women constituted a great new swing vote in America), he picked up in the polls. But if he spoke out on the subject of gays in the military—not gay rights in the abstract, which was not necessarily that damaging, but gays quite specifically in the military—the equation quickly changed. For this issue pitted a nascent political force against a powerful, well-connected institution, where the question of personal lifestyle represented something unusually complicated, affecting strong, deeply ingrained personal feelings.
It was an issue that could easily blow up in Clinton’s face and it was bound to cause him trouble on the Hill, where conservatives in Congress could team up with conservatives in the military. Clinton’s problem was not just the senior military; it included some senior members of his own party, notably Senator Sam Nunn, who was greatly respected by other centrist Democrats and had been a leading candidate for a cabinet position. Nunn was the ranking Democratic Party authority on defense policy and effectively on the other side.
Colin Powell had tried to warn Clinton and his secretary of defense designate, Les Aspin, about the gay issue. It was exceptionally explosive, Powell believed, and he said as much to Clinton in their first meeting during the transition. Powell himself was very conservative on this issue, and friends remember him becoming quite irate when the argument was made that integrating gays into the military was a step not unlike integrating blacks some forty-five years earlier. It was by no means the same, he said quite vehemently. Powell was also speaking for many of his colleagues who were decidedly unenthusiastic about the idea. Opposition on the part of the Joint Chiefs and within the entire military cadre would be very, very strong, he said, because it touched on issues of human sexuality, opening up questions far more divisive than those raised by racial integration. Powell advocated a “don’t ask, don’t tell policy,” which would not satisfy everyone—indeed, it would probably not satisfy anyone on either side—but it would almost surely work. The military, he believed, with its inherent codes of justice and fairness, would do the rest. Put the gay issue on the back burner, he had urged.
Powell had suggested that when Clinton officially announced his nomination for secretary of defense, he announce as well that the secretary designate was going to look into the issue and come back with a recommendation in six months. At the least it would buy Clinton some time and some cover. “Don’t make the gay issue the first horse out of the gate with the armed forces,” Powell added. He thought Clinton agreed with him. He was wrong.7 Clinton dove right into it, got his nose bloodied, backed off, and placed himself even more on the defensive against the powerful military faction already opposed to him.
Later the top Clinton NSC people were puzzled about why the president had gone ahead on the issue despite the obvious dangers. It was bound to cause him all kinds of trouble with the military. It was, they discovered, a decision made entirely by Clinton and his political advisers. There had been no input from his NSC people. The political people wanted a campaign promise validated and saw gays in the military solely as a broad national political issue, not one that might set off a difficult struggle with the top of the bureaucracy. That it would make the Clinton team even more vulnerable to its critics and weaken him in his overall relationship with the military, an area where he was already on thin ice, was never fed into the equation.
Gays in the military was a major stumble, but it was merely the first of several political trip wires the new administration hit. Almost everything possible that could go wrong went wrong in those first few months. Inevitably, the Clinton dilemma in governance was affected by the volatility of American politics and the fragmented Democratic Party constituencies. It said something as well about the difference between the talent required to run for the presidency and the talent required to govern. In the most elemental sense, the Clinton people were not up to speed. The president himself, despite his immense ability, had operated in a much smaller arena where his skill level was unchallengeable. In Arkansas he had known more about the issues and the people confronting the issues than anyone else; he needed little advice, save his own and perhaps that of his wife. By and large, his own political reads were faster and more acute than those of many would-be advisers. But now as president he was running on a much faster track in areas where he did not know many of the players personally, and where many of the issues remained alien and moved at warp speed.
Thirty-two years before Bill Clinton assumed the presidency, John Kennedy had swept into office, promising to represent a new generation. The Clinton people, including the president and first lady, also promised, as the Kennedys had before them, generational change and more modern leadership in the new post–Cold War era. They represented in their own minds, as well as in the minds of the American public, a generation less burdened by the tensions that had divided the world for so long. They thought of themselves as more in touch with the country than those who had gone before. In the campaign they had challenged the conventional wisdom—most notably on Clinton’s Vietnam history—and had won. Not surprisingly, they looked down on traditionalist Washington and did not want too many people with old-boy ties on board.
Reagan and his colleagues on the far right had run against Washington as a city that burdened the American people with too much government and too many rules. Clinton and his wife regarded Washington differently, with a somewhat liberal-populist outlook, as a city with too many well-entrenched, wealthy fixers who represented archaic or negative interests, a city that needed a cleansing. Theirs had been a most unlikely insurgency, and it was not by surprise that, when they finally won, they brought with them to the White House an arrogance about the correctness of their views, the incorrectness of those opposed to them, and their sense that they were closer to the heartbeat of the country than their critics. Sometimes they were right and sometimes they were not. But the difference between the theory and the practice of being president was immense. Some fourteen months after Clinton took office, David Owen, his peace plan effectively scuttled, met the president at the ceremony in Washington creating the Croat-Bosnian Federation and recalled for him the time back in July 1992 when they had both favored the use of airpower in the Balkans. His was a pointed comment. “It’s a lot harder in government,” Clinton remarked.8
In the beginning no one could keep Clinton on schedule. He was always behind. He seemed determined at each meeting to show how much he knew about every issue. His talent was matched only by his lack of discipline. Meetings went on interminably, largely because the president was always talking. Mack McLarty, as old a friend as Clinton had, was uniformly regarded by those who knew him as a decent man, but in no way up to the killing job as White House chief of staff, whose most important requisite was the ability to tell people they could not see the president. Day after day the administration fell behind its own projected schedule as more things went wrong. If the first stumble had been on gays in the military, then the next was on the choice for a highly visible woman in the cabinet. An unofficial deal with the various women’s groups that had been so influential in Clinton’s election was that one of the major cabinet jobs would go to a woman. That major breakthrough would probably occur at the Justice Department; women were more advanced on the career track in the law than they were in a number of parallel professions. But the first nominee for attorney general, Zoe Baird, a young woman with an excellent résumé, was shot down over a brand-new issue. She had, along with her husband, not only employed illegal immigrants, but had also not paid social security taxes on them until the last minute. Baird, sure nonetheless of her qualifications and unaware of how handsome a target she presented to the president’s enemies, went before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she misread the courtesy of its members for their support. As the controversy mounted, she was reluctant to withdraw her name. The administration finally had to shove her offstage. The next potential Clinton nominee, Kimba Wood, had something of a similar problem. She and her husband, Michael Kramer, a writer, had employed an illegal alien as a baby-sitter, back when that was not actually against the law, and they had paid her social security taxes. But it was all too messy and the smell of blood was now in the air. Wood wanted no part of a bitter confirmation process, and she quickly withdrew her name.
So Clinton’s political foundation was proving shaky from the start. Image was driving politics, and the political sands shifted more quickly than ever before. In the pretelevision era, when the country was less affluent, politics had been driven primarily by economic impulse, and the various politically active groups were much more broadly based and therefore reflected a certain old-fashioned solidity. Their responses to a new set of political circumstances had been largely predictable, and pollsters were rarely needed to determine changing equations day by day. By the nineties that was no longer true. Other issues, primarily social-cultural, were becoming every bit as important as the economy, and they were often keyed to events on the evening news.
The fragility all this posed to a modern politician was palpable, and never more evident than in the first months of the Clinton administration. Fickle constituencies create fickle politicians; fickle politicians, in turn, make their constituencies distrustful and perhaps more fickle. Clinton would soon start complaining about the ephemeral moods of the electorate. Political energy created by a quick flash of an image on the evening news could readily be changed by an entirely different image on a subsequent news program. The electorate, like the nation, had become more mercurial. Loyalties had less adhesion, particularly the kind of loyalties that connected Clinton to these new constituencies. He had been the beneficiary of this during the campaign—the quick collapse of Bush’s post–Gulf War popularity—now he was paying for it as president.
The cycle seemed to build on itself. Because of modern technology, the two most important developments in American politics were the use of polling and television advertising, both of them joined together in zeroing in on and then manipulating what the voting public thought at a given moment. But did the voting public really feel that way, how deep were those feelings, and did the public always want to be catered to so instantaneously? If the public seemed to want its politicians to bend, a month or two later it might be skeptical of any politician who was so readily bent. Politicians had to be nimble and more poll-driven, and because they were nimble, they seemed less grounded. It was a dynamic that at the core created little in the way of traction between politician and voter and held a great potential for cynicism and mutual distrust.
It was the realization of the volatility of the issues and the almost whimsical nature of the electorate which made the Clinton administration so uniquely dependent upon media advisers, consultants, and pollsters. Other administrations had been image-driven—that was the nature of the television age—but no other administration had ever been as poll-driven. It was an admission of its vulnerability, the weakness (and the lack of roots) of its various constituencies, and a de facto recognition that the structure of American politics had irrevocably changed. The Clinton administration believed that the electorate was now a reflection of the media and of constantly shifting political winds, driven by the latest incidents portrayed on network television. In time the electorate, and certainly the media, believed that the administration was altogether too tuned in to these whims, and that the president would do nothing and go nowhere without pollsters at his side.
It was known politically as the CNN factor, in reference to the all-news television network that both captured and reflected the immediacy of the changing pulse of American politics. CNN could, with the presentation of a single unflattering image, begin a major news cycle as other news outlets would soon follow, and overnight a policy that had seemed effective would begin to look like a disaster. Clinton, so aware of all the new forces in American political life, was, not surprisingly, extremely sensitive to even the slightest flicker of change reported on CNN or the networks.
In the early days of his administration, Clinton sometimes raged about the narrowness of choices that had been forced on him. One thing that bothered him, and where he seemed to have a legitimate case, was that he, unlike other presidents, had never been given either a honeymoon or a grace period at the start of his presidency. The partisanship had been virulent from the very beginning. Part of it was due to negative television advertising, which had elevated hostile sound bites to an art form. Part of it came from the power of talk radio, which had become a powerful new national political force. If the traditional media—elite print and national networks, generally politically centrist—had always been seen by those on the right as too liberal, talk radio was undoubtedly something quite different ideologically. It was right-wing, populist right-wing, and it was angry.
It represented a new kind of disenchanted American, more often than not white male, and middle to lower-middle class, who thought he (or on occasion she) was disenfranchised by both the current culture, which flouted what the right wing called family values, and the current economy, which favored those who had a certain kind of education (including women) over those who did not (often blue-collar and some middle-class whites). It hated much of the agenda of the urban and suburban middle and upper-middle class; it was often rural and small town and nativist. It was also antifeminist, antigay, antiliberal, and as such vehemently anti-Clinton. Its constituents had not always been to Vietnam, although they sometimes sounded as if they had, often referring to it as Nam. Many were a little young for that war, and some who had been of age had not deigned to go (because it was so badly run, they would later explain). Talk radio spoke to people who believed they were the forgotten men and women of America, white people who were God-fearing, tax-paying citizens still trying to hold on to the simple, small-town values of the past, values passed on by their fathers (and mothers).
Clinton, at a time when the culture was changing and the economic and political power of women was dramatically surging, became the perfect target for the progenitors of talk radio, most notably Rush Limbaugh, who clearly thought of himself as a repository of all the best of American patriotic virtues (but had not, of course, quite managed to make it to Vietnam because, he said, of a bad knee, which came from playing football). His popularity seemed to increase with Clinton’s ascent to the White House. The constancy and ferocity with which both Clintons were attacked on talk radio, and the intensely personal quality of the attacks, was something relatively new in American politics. If Limbaugh stood at the head of the class in national popularity, almost every single major broadcast market had local talk jocks who, when they read the daily paper or watched the nightly news, reacted angrily, aware that their anger had immediate resonance with their listeners.
Why it was all becoming so ugly was difficult to determine. Part of it was modern politics, driven by attack commercials, in which traditional party-driven restraints had disappeared, and which was simply meaner of spirit than it had been fifteen or twenty years earlier. Part of it was the changing nature of the issues. As the nation became more involved with cultural and social concerns, American politics became edgier and more personal, as if these were not abstract arguments about better pay for blue-collar workers or about foreign policy, but disagreements within a family, which, in fact, they often were. Finally, part of it was the nature of Clinton himself. Because he was a white, Southern liberal, and because the rising tide of cultural opposition more often than not came from white, Southern conservatives, people whose backgrounds were much like his, they expected him to be on their side in the battles they fought; if he opposed them, he was a sellout, nothing less than a traitor. To them he was known from the start as Slick Willie. He might pretend to be a centrist Democrat, but for them the proof that he was covertly allied with the radical wing of the party was his marriage to Hillary Rodham Clinton of Wellesley College and Yale Law School. She, in their view, was the exemplar of all that was wrong in American politics.
When Clinton took office, the political atmosphere was harsher than anyone had expected, and it affected both the president and the first lady, who under pressure began to cut themselves off from much of what was around them and think of themselves as victims. There was a certain form to the dynamic: It started, some White House people believed, with Mrs. Clinton, who was being subjected to an unusually brutal welcome to Washington, and who was considered by her critics, given the issues that bothered people the most—abortion, feminism, and gay rights—to be a polarizing influence. Some of the people who dealt with the president daily in that period thought there was a dynamic at work, and part of their job was to jolly him out of certain moods. The president was always prone to a kind of light self-pity, which was made worse in a regular byplay with his wife, who was suffering many frustrations of her own, both political and, as it would turn out, personal as well. The president and the first lady, it was said, often began the day having breakfast together, and she would pick up a story or a column in the Times or the Washington Post and go at him about the injustice of it all—how unfairly the press was treating him (read them). She was pushing the president’s buttons about things that went with the territory and that he would do well to ignore.
To some of the more senior staff, anxious to shake him out of a bad mood so early in the day, this represented a waste of time and energy. All administrations had to accept as a given that they were going to be critiqued in unsympathetic, unknowing, or hostile newspaper reports, particularly in the short haul. For a presidency like Clinton’s, already so attuned to every drop or rise in the national political temperature or the polls, to pay too much attention to the daily responses to presidential actions was catastrophic. One of the first laws of politics was never to get in a fight with people who bought ink by the barrel.
The early firefights and defeats of his administration—the backfire and retreat on gays in the military, the reversals on both Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood—only served to underscore how thin Clinton’s margin of victory was, how fragile his support was in general, and how explosive American politics could be now that cultural and domestic issues were taking center stage. It raised the question of what the true center of American politics was, and how close the Clinton administration was to it. He obviously wanted to be the her-alder of the new forces in American politics and to gain as many benefits from them as he could, without being precipitous about it or paying too high a political price. But those forces were still somewhat unformed. To use them to advantage required not so much a devoted, steadfast politician of undying commitment, willing to stay the course whatever the cost, but a wondrous politician, part juggler, part tap dancer.
Clinton was most certainly that. He had been elected with only 43 percent of the vote. He was the perfect example of a leader who got to the White House before his army was fully massed. The early defeats and stumbles and his tendency to back down had not enhanced his presidency. He had, in fact, given off a most unfortunate political odor: the impression that not only were he and his administration not quite up to the job, but perhaps worse, that under pressure and opposition, he might quickly fold.