It began almost as a cultural problem. Bill Clinton was ill at ease with the military. Even his salute—as commander in chief—on those occasions when he met with the military was so sloppy that it was a cause for concern among his aides. “The tips of his fingers would furtively touch his slightly bowed head, as if he were being caught at something he wasn’t supposed to do,” wrote George Stephanopoulos.1 After a good deal of discussion about who would tell him that he had to change his salute, Tony Lake was finally designated. After all, Lake had spent a lot of time in Vietnam.
The jump from Little Rock to the White House had been harder and more costly than Clinton, so sure of his political gifts, had expected. Clearly the area in which he had the least experience was foreign policy. There the Clinton people intended to deal with a variety of issues in an ad hoc way. The world might be changing, the emerging crises in foreign lands might be driven more by nationalism, tribalism, and the breakdown of an existing order, but no one attempted to adopt a larger conceptual view of how to handle these crises and deal with what foreign policy analyst Les Gelb called “teacup wars.” Instead, pragmatic at heart, the Clinton people would handle foreign policy issue by issue, with no guidelines—save the constancy of their awareness of the president’s domestic political fortunes. They would do this erratically and episodically throughout his first term.
Part of the reason was the naïveté of a new administration, and part of it was a comparable arrogance. The president was so talented, so politically skillful, he and the others around him believed, that he could come to a meeting at the last minute, well briefed by his staff, and make the right calls on issues of foreign policy. The exasperating thing, thought some of the national security people who dealt with him, was that it was at least partially true. He was so smart, so good at cutting to the essence of any question, that he did, in fact, often respond with exceptional insight, and his involvement greatly aided all discussions. His sense of the politics of every foreign policy issue—both overseas and at home—was usually impeccable. But by the time he entered the discussion, it was often late in the game and the choices had already narrowed.
His foreign policy advisers, in the view of friends and associates who had held similar jobs in previous administrations, were not by any means a strong team. Quite possibly, their greatest weakness was that they were not thought of as prime-time players by the most important person of all, the president they served. Foreign policy was obviously being downgraded—or at least traditional political-military foreign policy. Trade policy, which connected foreign economic policy more directly to domestic policy, was being upgraded, and Mickey Kantor had all the access he wanted to the president. Kantor, a genuine insider, a close personal friend and the key figure on an issue that went to the heart of Clinton’s agenda, would soon be seen by some people as another secretary of state, far more influential in policy than Christopher himself, in part because of his greater access.
During much of the Cold War, when America was rich in a world that was poor, trade had always taken a backseat to political concerns. The United States had constantly given up its economic leverage with certain countries to keep them on our side in the great struggle with the Soviets and the Chinese. Nowhere had that been more obvious than in America’s relationship with Japan. The Japanese assault upon American industry, exporting freely to us, but keeping their domestic market closed, had taken place largely from 1965 to 1975. American companies operating in Japan had protested bitterly to the ambassadors in Tokyo about the unfairness of that one-way relationship. They pointed out that Japan was no longer a weak and vulnerable economic power rising out of the ashes of World War II. It was well on its way to becoming a major industrial giant. But their complaints had all been ignored because of the primacy of keeping Japan on board as a verbal ally during the Vietnam War. Trade had been unimportant when Cold War politics was the dominant, all-encompassing American concern. But in an infinitely more competitive international economy, the Cold War over, and with American economic hegemony over as well, trade was taking center stage. Now the job of the American ambassador in Tokyo was to squeeze the Japanese to open their markets, not to get them to back us in foreign military ventures.
A sure sign of this change in emphasis rested in access to the president. His top NSC people did not see him much. David Gergen, who had worked in a number of White Houses of different ideological and political bents, thought that under normal circumstances a president spent 60 percent of his time on foreign policy matters. Bush because of his passion for it, and because of the historic events taking place during his administration, had upgraded that to about 75 percent, and perhaps even a bit higher. But Clinton, Gergen believed, because of his uninterest, brought it down in the early years of his administration to 25 percent.
Christopher accepted his minimalist walking papers more readily than some of the others in the Clinton foreign policy team. Tony Lake, his old friends thought, was having an unusually difficult time and appeared edgy because the issues he most cared about were being shortchanged. His access was more limited than what his predecessors had enjoyed. Kissinger, operating out of the White House, had inhaled poor Bill Rogers, the secretary of state under Nixon, a man who was allegedly one of his oldest friends. Brzezinski had charmed Carter from the start and conquered the more proper Cy Vance, who was playing by old-fashioned rules. Scowcroft, more careful and straightforward than Kissinger and Brzezinski, had never challenged James Baker, but he had virtually lived in Bush’s office, an obvious alter ego for a trusting president.
Clinton and Lake had no personal ease, which was important, particularly in dealing with someone like Clinton. Lake had always been quite reserved, but over the years he had become much more difficult to talk to, a man who had, it appeared, learned to keep much of what he thought and felt to himself. That was not necessarily an asset. One of the skills necessary for a senior person in the bureaucracy is the ability to create a comfortable ambience where peers and colleagues can talk freely. Scowcroft had been a master of that. But Lake, instead of making people feel more comfortable, tended to make them feel more ill at ease.
Part of the reason was Lake’s natural reserve, and part of it was something new, produced by the difficult, unresolved tensions with the president, a belief that if he spoke candidly to others, his words would circulate rapidly around Washington and be used against him. He had become exceptionally secretive, even with his peers, and seemed to be wound very tight. He did not encourage his colleagues to talk, did not return phone calls himself, even to old friends and those who were at a relatively high level in the administration, and in general he made it appear, unless you were one of his own people, that what you thought was of little value. The atmosphere he created was viewed by those outside his immediate circle as quite constipated. He had, one friend thought, an almost pathological fear about leaks, and he was seen so little around Washington that one nickname for him was “the submarine.” Rarely had an NSC official been so hard to approach.
The lack of access of James Woolsey, the head of the CIA, became legendary. He simply could not get near the president. Somehow the relationship never worked. Clinton was just not that interested in foreign intelligence, and to the Clinton people, Woolsey, who had been added to the team at the last minute as a necessary concession to the Reagan Democrats, was always a bad fit. Woolsey, they believed, was not really one of them in style and viewpoint, which would turn out to be true. He did not hold the job long and in 1996 endorsed Bob Dole for president. Because the CIA sent over a briefing officer every morning to update the president on what the Agency believed had happened during the last twenty-four hours, Woolsey began to show up with the briefer, hoping to accompany the more junior officer into the meetings with Clinton. Bush, after all, both as vice president and president, had loved the Agency’s briefings and had even read the intelligence cables himself.
But Woolsey could not get across the moat. For one thing, Clinton, a speed reader, preferred to read the papers rather than to be briefed. For another, he was indifferent to much of the material. The world had changed, the CIA was less important, and often the stuff in the briefing papers had already been on CNN. At about that time, a psychopath crashed his plane into the White House. Soon, because it was choice Washington gossip that Clinton was cutting off his foreign policy people, particularly the CIA director, the joke spread that the plane had been piloted by Woolsey, who was trying to get in to see the president. At first the DCI was irritated when he heard the story, but then he began to enjoy it—it sounded all too accurate.
Nor was Clinton’s relationship with his first secretary of defense, Les Aspin, much better. Aspin, too, was surprised by the distance between himself and the White House. “Wools,” Aspin once asked Woolsey, “when you took this job, didn’t you think you’d spend a lot of time with the president going over stuff that seemed quite important?” Woolsey said he had. “And have you found that you can’t get to him nearly enough on stuff that really matters?” Woolsey said that was also true. “Same with me,” Aspin said. He later told friends that he had had two meetings with the president during his entire tour.
If Aspin was frustrated by Clinton, then Clinton was equally frustrated by him. The selection, thought Colin Powell, was probably a mistake from the start. At Powell’s first meeting with Clinton, the president-elect had mentioned several of his candidates for the job—Senator Sam Nunn, Congressman Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, and Congressman Les Aspin—and asked the general for his suggestions. Powell was cautious. It was possible that his endorsement of any candidate—he was, after all, a Bush-Reagan man—might be the kiss of death. Nunn would be good, he replied, but perhaps a bit independent for Clinton and he might be unwilling to give up his senior defense position on the Hill. McCurdy, Powell said, was talented but possibly erratic. Aspin—here Powell had been more openly dubious. Aspin had supported the Gulf War, but Powell and Aspin had fought constantly about a number of issues, and Aspin had often seemed in the past like a man going around with a butcher knife to cut force levels. But they were both big boys and could get past the adversarial roles into which they had been cast institutionally and politically. At a personal level, however, Powell believed it was more complicated. Les was likable, but he was also somewhat erratic. Les is real smart, Clinton ventured. Smart, the general answered, was not necessarily the single most important quality for running the Pentagon. Still, as Powell later noted, he had sensed that Aspin was going to be his new boss.
Aspin had earned his stripes as a congressman, and as a Young Turk on the Hill, he had been one of the leaders in the internal struggle to remove seniority as the only yardstick for chairmanship of a committee. But later he had, as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, grown careless in tending to his own garden and had just barely beaten off a challenge from dissidents on his committee before he went over to the Defense Department. He had, some thought, begun to lose one of his great strengths, his political skill, the ability to schmooze with all kinds of people who might otherwise disagree with him. Disciplined he was not. Even those who loved Aspin and were charmed by him, and there were many, for he was one of the most likable men in the national security world, thought him chaotic. He was a rumpled hedgehog of a man, overweight, always late to meetings. His shirts were wrinkled and hung out at his waist, and his tie, if not untied, was loosened at the collar, with his collar button open, if it existed at all. These personal habits were not necessarily assets for a man assigned to run a giant institution where the most important inhabitants all wore uniforms that were pressed and starched, ties tied, shirts tucked in, and where meetings always started on time. Even Aspin’s close friends held their breath when they learned of the appointment. The question was not one of intelligence, but of discipline and the ability to run a place that was a bureaucratic nightmare.
Moreover, his strengths on the Hill—where he often ran his committee as if it were an ongoing political science seminar and he could choose the issues that interested him and ignore those that did not—might not qualify him to oversee a giant, bone-crushing, man-eating institution like the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, meetings had to run on time, and high officials rarely had the luxury of choosing which issues interested them, ignoring those that did not. Merely exercising control over the complicated maze of warring factions was exhausting. The credentials Aspin brought to the table did not quite fit the job, but Aspin it would be. Powell remained skeptical.
Aspin, regrettably, came to the Pentagon much as he had gone to work at the House. No one knew quite what time he would arrive. Meetings did not start on time and often ran late. All sorts of peripheral people flocked to meetings that were ostensibly for senior officials. His management style could not have been more different from that of the coldly efficient Dick Cheney, a man who, like Aspin, came from the Hill, but whose personality—distant, stand-offish—made him right for the job. Whatever else Cheney sought, it was not popularity; and during the Bush administration when congressional issues were raised, he was unimpressed if not openly contemptuous of his former colleagues. Dick Cheney’s emotional needs suited him perfectly to handle the brutal job of secretary of defense.
For thirty years Aspin had steeped himself in strategy and weapons systems as if training for the job; few if any in Washington knew more about the intricacies of the military and its weapon systems. But by the time he got to the Pentagon, a new kind of politics dominated the building—a kind of politics he was ill-prepared to deal with. It was about gays in the military, women in the military, and sexual misconduct in the military, subjects of which he wanted no part, and which pulled him away from the things he loved. “Lee,” he once told his friend Lee Hamilton, the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “you can’t believe the amount of time I spend on gays and women in the military. Sometimes it seems like it’s all I do.” Social-cultural issues had changed the nature of the job for him, Hamilton thought. Instead of playing offense and dealing with the things he knew best, Aspin was working on issues that he knew least, and where he was always going to be on the defensive.
He could not run the Pentagon because he could not run himself. Stories of Aspin’s lack of discipline flooded the building from the first day—of his exploding in a rage at a subordinate over some minor infraction, of his eating in a grotesque way—lunch, as one friend said, served too late, potato chips with mayonnaise on them. Powell would tell in his own memoir of a meeting with King Hussein of Jordan in which the king labored mightily to sustain the conversation, while Aspin labored equally mightily to devour the plate of hors d’oeuvres set in front of them, eating thirteen by Powell’s count.2 His health was also a concern to his friends. He had constant heart problems and while in office got a pacemaker. He was a man taunting his own physiological weaknesses in one of the two or three most demanding jobs in America. His tour at the Pentagon was a disaster for the administration, damaging for the country, and absolutely destructive to himself. He was replaced in late 1993, after the catastrophic events in Somalia, and a year and a half later, in May 1995, much mourned by a wide variety of people who had enjoyed his friendship, his intellect, and his service to his country, he died of a stroke.
With less than a year to serve to complete his second two-year tour as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell was both impressed by but more than a little wary of the new president. He was young, smart, and brought with him an innate confidence in his own ability, and he was, on the surface, a good listener. But his foreign policy team was not up to the job. Powell told one close aide that Lake at the NSC, when he was dealing with the other senior people, was like someone driving a team of horses that just weren’t there. Meetings at the White House, run by Lake, went on interminably, much like foreign policy seminars. Too many people attended and too many subjects were brought up. One day Powell was shocked to hear one of Lake’s subordinates openly contradict him at a meeting. The Professor, Powell sometimes called Lake in private. In his opinion, Lake did not run the meetings like Scowcroft and others had run them, and they often lacked focus. Powell thought of the Clinton team, said one of his friends, as being too much like refugees from academe.
More important, Powell did not believe that on those issues where the military power of the United States might be employed, Clinton’s people had thought things out carefully. They were almost vague in their attitudes toward the use of force and its consequences, and they were too quick to posture. They, in turn, sensed his disdain for them, as much from his body language as anything else. “You could feel it in the way he looked at us. We were doves, people who had sat out the war while he had fought it, people who had never really paid a price for what we had attained,” one senior member of the Clinton administration said. How Powell felt about Clinton and his people could most accurately be gleaned from what he said publicly to George Bush at the latter’s final ceremony at the Pentagon. “Mr. President, you have sent us in harm’s way when you had to, but never lightly, never hesitantly, never with our hands tied, never without giving us what we needed to do the job.”
But that was then and this was now. When he saw old friends from the Bush days, Powell told them they were lucky to be out of it all. The Clinton people, he said, did not seem to understand fully the consequences of their deeds, as if they wanted to try something to see how things turned out, then respond to whatever happened. On one occasion when they had been talking about Bosnia, Aspin said something rather casually to the effect that the United States ought to hit the Serbs hard and see if it worked. “And if it doesn’t work?” Powell asked him. “Then we’ll try something else,” Aspin said. So Powell quoted to Aspin what he believed was a paraphrase of a remark made by General George Patton Jr.: “When you put your hand to the thing, make sure that the thing works.”3