Nineteen ninety-four had not been a good year for Clinton and his advisers. The problem of Bosnia remained outside their reach, limiting everything else they did in foreign affairs. One extraordinary media moment had highlighted the administration’s frustration as if to remind them that, monopoly superpower or not, our rhetoric was mightier, if not than our sword, then certainly our deeds and will. In the spring of 1994, Christiane Amanpour appeared on a special CNN program and got a rare chance for a correspondent in a war zone to ask the president a question. That network was showcasing its new technological abilities by holding an international town hall meeting featuring Bill Clinton as the principal guest. The occasion was supposed to be ceremonial, and the White House assumed this was a good deed, a favor to CNN, and that Clinton would be asked slow-pitch, softball questions rather than the tough and gritty questions its correspondents normally asked. But when they cut to Amanpour in Sarajevo, she, the correspondent based in what was a living hell, reacted with the obsession that went with the territory. She asked the president why it was taking him so long to come up with a policy on Bosnia. Didn’t he think, she added, “that the constant flip-flops of your administration on the issue of Bosnia set a very dangerous precedent?”
Bingo: she had nailed him, live and in color and in front of the entire world. Clinton was not pleased, not expecting this kind of question. He was obviously angry—his face grew hard and his voice icy. “There have been no constant flip-flops, madam,” he said. But of course there had been, and well into their second year in office, the Clinton people were still searching for a policy.
With the administration effectively stalemated, the tensions showed on Tony Lake more than anyone else on the NSC team. Christopher was seeking his own measure of distance from the issue, and Sandy Berger, Lake’s deputy, was a pragmatist who, more than anything else, reflected Clinton’s politics. But these were Lake’s issues. He, after all, was the one committed to a new and more active policy in the Balkans, and he had become the most anguished as events remained outside their control. Lake sometimes thought that he and his colleagues in the administration had become what they had all campaigned against two years earlier. But he was caught between his personal beliefs on Bosnia and his loyalty to the president. From the spring of 1994, well into the spring of 1995, with the Serbs behaving even more aggressively in Bosnia, his frustration steadily mounted.
Issues like this, rather than the strategic Cold War struggle between the world’s great powers, were what had driven him for more than two decades. For that reason, Lake’s primary interest, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, separated him from most contemporary national security figures. Despite all the ongoing tensions, he believed our conflict with the Soviets had effectively been settled in a de facto stalemate in the sixties, and it was only a matter of how quickly or slowly the two great powers played out their hands. The important issues of the future, he thought, were more likely to arise in the third world and would concern the implosion of poor countries, the refugee crises thus created, and the ensuing crises of regional destabilization. That made his frustrations over Bosnia all the more painful.
By the fall of 1994, the Serbs had virtually completed carving up Bosnia and had taken nearly 70 percent of the country. Perhaps the worst moment for Lake came in the late fall of 1994, after the off-year election when the Republicans had dealt the Democrats a stunning blow and things were already at a low point in the White House. The Bihac pocket, a small area of Bosnia jutting into the northern part of the Croatian crescent that had already been conquered by Serbs, began to dominate the news from Bosnia. It was extremely vulnerable to the Serbs, its defenders were underarmed, and it was loaded with Muslim refugees from surrounding areas. It was land belonging to Bosnia, but close to Croatia, conquered by the Serbs, and coveted by the Croatians as well. Because of the inventiveness of maps handed down through the ages by everyone involved, it was claimed by all three sides.
The Bihac pocket had become a constant sore point in the war. In October 1994, the Bosnian Fifth Corps, the best unit in the Bosnian army, broke out of the pocket and launched a brief but surprisingly successful campaign against the Serb forces encircling it. Given the limited Bosnian logistical support and the difficulty in sustaining any kind of long-range campaign, the breakout had probably not been a good idea, and the Serbs struck back at the Muslims with a renewed tenacity. By November it appeared likely that Bihac might become the worst humanitarian disaster of the war, a tiny space about four miles by two miles with as many as two hundred thousand Muslims desperately seeking shelter there even as the Serbs pounded it systematically with their artillery.
Bihac again threatened to split the Western alliance because it triggered the elemental divisions that were so basic to allied policy. The Americans wanted to use airpower, but unlike their allies, they still had no troops on the ground. The Serbs kept shelling Bihac despite previous agreements to back off and had used napalm as part of their more recent attacks. Their planes had taken off from a base in Croatia, and American pilots flying NATO warplanes had struck back in retaliation against that airfield. Now the Serbs played their best card. They not only took a number of UNPROFOR troops hostage and encircled other groups of UN soldiers, they threatened to take even more hostages. If the NATO air attacks continued, warned Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, the UNPROFOR troops would be treated not as peacekeepers but as enemies. It was no idle threat. The UN troops were dispersed in too many small units throughout the country to be able to defend themselves.
Rarely in the entire forty-nine-year postwar history of the Western alliance had relations been so raw nor exchanges between high-level officials so sharp. To the British and the French, the Americans were brilliant kibitzers who were expert on everything that was going wrong, but would not commit their own ground troops. Instead they wanted to be warriors from seventeen thousand or thirty thousand feet, choose your height. One of the most stinging criticisms of American policy in years by a ranking British official had come from Malcolm Rifkind, the British defense minister, who said, “Those who call for action by the world must match words [by] deeds and that doesn’t include just a few aircraft.”1 It might become, thought some analysts, the worst division in the Western alliance since the Americans had stopped British, French, and Israeli paratroopers from their sudden assault on the Suez Canal in October 1956.
Lake was caught in a bind. He thought the UNPROFOR troops were a joke, a card we had mistakenly but generously provided Milosevic to use against us and a great impediment to any eventual success there. Little progress could be made unless UNPROFOR was folded up or its troops consolidated into larger units able to defend themselves. But he did not want to shatter the alliance. Moreover, he would be virtually alone in the government if he argued for greater action. Christopher would not be with him, nor would Perry and General John Shalikashvili at the Pentagon. The president, after being deeply embarrassed by the off-year election, was not likely to be in any mood for a greater American commitment in Bosnia. The last thing he wanted was a media crisis if the United States went forward unilaterally and broke with its two most trusted allies.
That placed Lake in an untenable position. He convinced the president to call both François Mitterrand and John Major, but they were immovable. They were not going to jeopardize their troops; they had their own political problems, as Clinton had his. The choice was extremely difficult for Lake. Realpolitik demanded staying with the alliance, but in his heart he wanted to go with an air assault on the Serb forces. He remembered that period well. Thanksgiving, he often said, was his least favorite time of the year because the autumn leaves had already fallen in New England, it was gray and dark, and winter, a season that he did like, had not yet arrived.
Lake thought seriously of resigning that Thanksgiving weekend. He wondered if he was becoming the kind of public official he had often privately criticized in the past, a person who believes deeply in something, finds again and again that he is powerless, and yet stays on in his job, seizing on various rationales to justify not following his conscience. He had pondered resigning before, aware of the contradiction between the proud words he had written for the candidate and the administration’s subsequent inglorious actions. Now he assigned an aide to do a study of how long the tour of the average national security adviser had lasted in the past, and the answer came back a year and a half, which meant that he had already served the requisite time. His close friend and aide Sandy Vershbow, who had come over from the State Department to be his top deputy on Balkan policy, was one of the most vocal hawks in the upper bureaucracy. Vershbow argued with him not to quit. Whoever succeeded him would not care as much about the Balkans, Vershbow said. The problem was not going to go away. Stay and fight for another day.
Lake also knew that a resignation now, coupled with his frustrations during Vietnam, would mark the second time he had served at a reasonably high level in government and had failed to bring home the policy he advocated on a transcending issue about which he felt passionately. Given the frustrations he had also felt during the Carter administration about Iran, it would add up to an unusually bleak career, zero for three on the big ones spanning nearly thirty-two years. So he decided to stay and wrote a memo for the president saying that they had to go with the alliance and discontinue the air strikes. “To use NATO air strikes to prevent the fall of Bihac has only intensified transAtlantic friction. . . . Bihac’s fall has exposed the inherent contradictions in trying to use NATO airpower coercively against the Bosnian Serbs when our allies have troops on the ground attempting to maintain impartiality in performing a humanitarian mission.” Therefore they had to pull back on the idea of airpower. “The stick of military pressure is no longer viable,” he added.2
If among the top people in the administration Lake was the most conflicted, he was also, as one colleague said, the least cynical: “And you must remember that given all the different relentless pressures on the NSC adviser, that is not necessarily an advantage—it is a job where a very tough exterior shell, a certain cynicism about human behavior, and the ability to let go of an issue are almost mandatory. To succeed in that job you have to be able to immunize yourself against some terrible pressures. I don’t think Tony was very good about letting go of Bosnia—it was probably to his credit as a human being and to his disadvantage as an NSC adviser.”
Lake was a Wilsonian figure in an era that was less and less Wilsonian, which made him the direct opposite of his onetime superior Henry Kissinger. The singular strength of Kissinger was not just his skill at dissembling when necessary, his unusual ability to tell ten different people ten completely different stories about what he was doing on a given issue—and remember which version of the story he had told to which person. Rather it was an inner emotional toughness, the capacity to immunize himself from the protests on all sides, the right-wingers who felt betrayed by his policies on China, and the liberals and old friends from academe who felt betrayed by his policies in Vietnam. Kissinger was a man of the Old World, of Europe, where morality in foreign policy was generally considered a weakness, and he sometimes seemed to envy the policy makers from authoritarian nations because of the freer hand they could play in negotiations and the lack of competing democratic forces to deal with—not the least, the controlled media in their countries.
Kissinger thought of himself as a realist first and foremost, which meant some curious contradictions existed between his personal odyssey and the policies he sometimes favored. He was the child of refugees who had fled the Holocaust and had benefited greatly from American freedoms and innate political idealism, but he could nonetheless take a cold look at Bosnia and the terrible genocidal crimes committed there and remain immune to them. (Would Henry Kissinger, the power maven, had he been operating in the midthirties at a high level, have pushed for policies that would have allowed Henry Kissinger as a young immigrant boy to come to America? some of his critics sometimes wondered during the Balkan crisis.) Kissinger was the principal non-Wilsonian figure of modern American foreign policy, offending those on both left and right who were driven not only by a sense of the final outcome of events, but by moral and ideological beliefs as well.
Lake was the opposite. He was ambivalent about the use of power; he both liked it and was apprehensive about using it. His view of foreign policy had always had a certain moral rectitude. His grandfather Kirsopp Lake had been a prominent Protestant theologian who taught at Harvard, an almost sure sign that there would be significant Wilsonian traces in the gene pool. Many people who admired Lake and felt they knew him well—such as Nick Katzenbach and others—worried that he was too much a moralist in foreign policy and debated whether he was tough enough for the NSC job. But a part of him also bent over backward periodically to show that, yes, he was plenty tough and pragmatic. During the Clinton years he could and would astonish, if not his critics, then some of his old friends with his ability to be a hard-liner. Yet if he was ambivalent about power and self-deprecatory about his relationship to it—coming aboard and working with the Clinton campaign in 1992 was something to do, he once said, between baseball seasons—he had nonetheless risen, twenty-three years after he had resigned from Kissinger’s staff over Cambodia, to become a foreign policy star.
Lake was in his own way a world-class survivor. He might be a shrinking violet in terms of his ambition, but he knew when to shrink and when not to shrink. Whatever doubts he had about power, whatever ambivalence he felt about its uses, a strong part of him still sought it, was comfortable with it, and he gave off the scent to his politically active peers that he wanted to hold and exercise it. He was a skillful infighter during the Clinton years, protecting himself against potential enemies, but he was considered difficult to work with. Critical information did not circulate well in the Lake NSC. His way of operating often frustrated the top people at State, Defense, and Commerce. The senior people at State were furious at the way he had taken over negotiations about Northern Ireland, and their irritation was nothing compared with that of the British, who regarded him as an out-and-out enemy of their policy. He was also the most visible high-level dove from the Vietnam era in the administration, save for the president himself. Vietnam was the prism through which he saw many other issues, and that put him in danger from the political right. Washington had become much more conservative in the dozen years since he had last served in office. Fewer people in high places were able to understand the subtleties of Lake’s Vietnam dissent, and his past could now be used to attack him. If he became a target for the right, then it limited his ability and damaged the president he served.
It may have been for that reason that he sometimes tried to distance himself from his past. In the summer of 1995, when some members of the administration were recommending recognition of Hanoi, they found Lake, much to their surprise, to be of little help on an issue they had thought would be close to his heart. Perhaps he was nervous about letting political ghosts into the room. Or perhaps he was reacting to the president’s reluctance to reopen an old sore. But as one advocate for recognition said later, dealing with the North Vietnamese was a lot easier than dealing with the White House. That the recognition of Hanoi finally took place was due more to the uncommon generosity of spirit of a number of Vietnam veterans in the Senate—John Kerry, Bob Kerrey, and John McCain, who offered to give the president cover with the Republican Party—than to anything Clinton or Lake did.
Moreover, Lake began to separate himself from some of his oldest friends from previous terms in government who were, like Lake himself, Bosnian activists. He believed that if he spent time with them, he would reveal his frustration with the president and his policy, which would show that he lacked leverage. In a city like Washington, that would mean his blood was in the water, a temptation for all the circling sharks. Old friends began to disappear from his inner circle to be replaced by new people, most of whom worked for him and were about fifteen years younger than he was. When colleagues in the bureaucracy who thought of themselves as trusted confidants, perhaps even peers, called him, often with what they considered important policy suggestions, their calls went unanswered or were returned by junior members of his staff. The first time it happened they might be irritated, thinking it just the sign of someone who was momentarily overloaded; when it happened again and again, it was nothing less than a message.
Lake had always had a Hamlet-like quality, an ambivalence about both power and morality and the intersection of the two. More than the president he served, and far more than some of the others at his level in the Clinton foreign policy team, he personified the contradictions and the doubts about power in the Democratic Party as it had evolved post-Vietnam, the tempered sense of activism and the interest in third world struggles and refugee problems at the expense of larger strategic concerns. These attitudes did not, after all, find much resonance with either the American electorate or the Congress in the nineties. Lake was on many occasions quite ready to exercise power on behalf of the proper cause, but was critical of power nonetheless. The two parts of him, the writer Jason DeParle once shrewdly noted, were like “twin brothers separated at birth.”
What made things more difficult was that Lake and Clinton’s working relationship remained quite stiff. Lake had no early history with the president and each was unconsciously a bit awkward with the other. Clinton, some observing them thought, began to see Lake as a talented briefer, but not someone he could talk easily to or share his real political feelings with. Lake, with his own considerable reserve, did not seem to know how to get beyond the somewhat stilted connection the two men had forged. Lake wanted to minimize the impact of domestic politics on foreign policy decision-making; but domestic political considerations were rarely far from Clinton’s thoughts. The president’s greater ease with Sandy Berger, Lake’s deputy, was apparent to everyone. Because Berger went back further with the president, they had a personal as well as a professional relationship, and Clinton knew that Berger always understood the essential importance of domestic politics in whatever topic they were discussing.
Lake and Clinton were, in fact, opposite personalities, each something of an alien species to the other. Lake, in contrast to the president, was private and reserved, slow to make new friends, resistant to any kind of intimacy or easy camaraderie, and reluctant to cross social with professional lines. Clinton, always the seducer, was eager to know people a little too quickly and convert them into his admirers, always ready to win over newcomers and thus help his career. Their personal relationship had begun with the most tentative human connection, and both, whether by design or not, succeeded in keeping it that way. Almost everyone else at that level would try to get closer in personal terms to the president. But Lake made a point of keeping his distance. He did not even want to pretend to be the president’s pal; he did not want to play hearts with the president on Air Force One. If he got too close, he was sure, it would change the nature of his job. He would be reacting more to the personal needs of a friend than to the delicate task of representing complicated choices in a difficult world to its most powerful leader. Lake would become aware of another problem, something that Warren Christopher had warned him about during the transition. “The president,” Christopher said with a small smile, “is not a morning person and you get to brief him every morning. Good luck.” Clinton was often impatient when Bosnia and other foreign policy issues with no apparent solution pressed in on him. Lake often had to brief him on those issues early in the day when he had not yet emerged from his irritable mood.
Lake seemed to shrink from all the public manifestations into which the NSC job had evolved. Kissinger had helped transform what had once been the almost invisible NSC position into a highly visible one, first making the rounds of Georgetown dinner parties and working the print media gathered there, thereby allowing his star to shine in semiprivate circumstances, then appearing on network-television Sunday talk shows. But Lake largely disdained public appearances. The Sunday talk shows and other comparable forums had become an increasingly important part of the national security adviser’s job, but Lake wanted nothing to do with them. He believed that others should speak for the policy. He also held the old-fashioned view that the major decisions on foreign policy should be private, and the more you were seen on television, the more you signaled that you were outside the loop. As a result, he remained almost anonymous. Early in the Clinton administration, a photo of the top NSC officials appeared on the front page of the New York Times; Lake was described in the caption as an “unidentified staffer.”
Lake had been sensitive to Colin Powell’s reservations about the use of airpower in Bosnia. He might, in general, agree with Madeleine Albright about the need for a more aggressive policy, but when she challenged Powell about what use he actually planned for his wonderful army (“I thought I was going to have an aneurysm,” Powell later wrote),3 Lake visibly bristled, and his sympathies had appeared to be more with Powell than with the UN ambassador. Powell had talked to Lake about the danger of airpower: “You’re putting a young kid in a fighter bomber which is going about five hundred miles an hour and asking him to take out something which looks to him like a tiny little tube.” At one point in early 1994, the air force chief of staff suggested that Lake take a ride in an F-15, and he had done it. They put him through a short training course, sat him in a cockpit, and the pilot explained which lever to pull in case he needed to eject. The technician told him not to worry: “Either way, sir, you’re going to end up in a hospital.”
Nineteen ninety-four to 1995 was exhausting for Lake. His marriage to Antonia Plehn had long been in jeopardy. They had married right out of college, a perfect couple, one seemingly favored by the gods, who would surely have wanted two such talented, attractive, idealistic, and graceful young people to find each other. Toni Lake, lovely and gentle, had been even more of a doubter than her husband about Vietnam. She had picketed in protest of Nixon’s policies while her husband was still working in the White House. They had gradually drawn apart under the pressure of differing sensibilities and ambitions, not the least of which was the requisite workaholism that went with a career like his. After he had accepted the NSC job under Clinton, she stayed in western Massachusetts when he went Washington. Then they decided to give it one last try and she moved to Washington. But the final attempt to work things out had not been a success. Frustrated by events in Bosnia, Lake had become more driven by work than ever.
Many of his old friends, such as Les Gelb, the New York Times foreign policy columnist, were pushing hard for a more active policy in Bosnia, and theoretically Lake agreed with them, but he felt himself limited by his role. His friendship with Gelb was old and cherished, and some people felt that Gelb had used his Times column to push Lake for the NSC job. They had collaborated on a book a decade earlier that warned about a national security adviser who became too involved in putting forward his own view of policy as Kissinger and Brzezinski had done. Now their friendship was badly damaged, and sharp words had been exchanged over the phone. Once in 1994, Gelb was invited to a dinner at the White House, and Clinton, knowing that Gelb was close to Lake and that this was an unusually stressful time for his national security adviser, suggested that Gelb pay some personal attention to Lake because he badly needed Gelb’s friendship. Quoting Seneca, the Roman philosopher, Gelb said that a friend in power was a friend lost.
In the end, the problem was political. Lake was essentially not just an internationalist but a humanitarian one as well. The president he served, however, apart from his campaign rhetoric, was much more cautious. When the crisis in Somalia arose, Clinton had told Stephanopoulos that the American people were essentially isolationist and would back off at the first sight of body bags—unless America’s vital interests were engaged. They were, Clinton added, at a gut level on Henry Kissinger’s side.4
The people who worked for Lake thought the job was taking a considerable toll and they worried about his health. In his first year as national security adviser, he had been testifying before Congress when he collapsed. Aides took him to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where doctors were shocked to find him exhausted and dehydrated. In addition, death threats were made against him from terrorist groups in exile that were taken seriously, and for a time he was moved to Blair House for his safety. The more the administration stumbled, the more defensive Lake became. His dealings with the media were nothing less than a disaster. He gave out little information, and when he did, it was often perceived as being of marginal value. He was querulous—and condescending—with journalists who did not accept a rosy view of the Clinton foreign policy. The dinner parties he did attend with media friends, which were specifically arranged to smooth over tensions and renew old friendships, often deteriorated into confrontational discussions. He, who had once been so friendly with a large number of reporters as a young man in Vietnam, was now astonished by the changes in the media, and the coming of a generation of reporters who went on television and readily gave out their opinions. “When I was young in Saigon and you wanted to know what reporters thought,” he said, “you went out to a bar and had a drink. Now all you have to do is turn on a television set and listen to them.” Lake was, thought old friends, quite visibly showing the pain and frustration of working as a foreign policy adviser in an administration that was stalemated on a central issue, Bosnia, even as atrocities were still taking place every day.