What took place in the next few months on Bosnia was probably Tony Lake’s best moment in government. It began when he was probably at the low point in his government service, completely unable to bring any kind of new direction to Bosnian policy. The worst thing about late 1994 to early 1995, Lake later told his closest associates, was that the critics of the policy were essentially right. What he wanted was often quite close to what they also wanted, but somehow he had always found himself blocked from articulating a better policy.
Bosnia had become an obsession for Lake, his staff members thought, the issue he could not let go of but still could find no daylight on. He would talk with them about how they needed to get the policy right, how he had been up late trying to think of something new. His job had become the hardest one in the government. The national security adviser had the smallest staff, had to deal with the most complicated problems, and was physically closest to the president. On occasion that could be an asset, but on an intractable issue like Bosnia it meant fewer filters between Lake and Clinton, and Lake inevitably ended up taking most of the heat from the president. His job was made considerably harder by Clinton’s irritability and his escalating level of personal frustration because Clinton knew he was tied to a big-time policy loser and might become one of its victims.
There was another voice warning Clinton that Bosnia was doing disproportionate damage to his presidency, Richard Morris, a most unusual White House adviser. Morris was a conservative political consultant, a former liberal Democrat who worked primarily with conservative Republicans, and his role in the Clinton White House was semicovert, which he seemed to love. He was, in effect, the purest incarnation of the survive-at-any-cost instinct that had always been part of Clinton’s political career. When Clinton sensed that his liberalism and populist beliefs were taking him too far from the political center and getting him into trouble, he would turn to Morris. That Morris, whose relationship with Clinton was complicated, volatile, and finally nothing less than weird, was once again welcome in the White House was a sure sign that the president knew he was in serious jeopardy as he headed toward the 1996 election.
Even close colleagues of the Clintons’ always found it difficult to assess how important an influence Morris was on the president. Morris was a shadowy figure who seemed almost pathologically secretive; he liked to use the code name Charley to communicate with the president—the messages he left would say only that Charley had called. He was rarely a part of larger meetings, and because his greatest single talent was probably self-promotion, he tended to inflate his influence and take credit for things in which he was at best a minor player, if a player at all. He was despised by almost all the other Clinton political advisers, seen as a kind of political Darth Vader, a hired gun who wandered into the White House on his way from his primary consultations with conservative Republicans like Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, for whom he continued to consult even after he had reentered Clinton’s world. “Having an affair with an intern, that’s a stupid, careless mistake but it’s not an impeachable offense,” one of Clinton’s closest advisers said later, “but letting someone like Dick Morris into the West Wing of the White House, that is an impeachable offense.” Morris was, wrote George Stephanopoulos in what may have been the most impassioned two sentences of his book, “a small sausage of a man encased in a green suit with wide lapels, a wide floral tie, and a wide-collared shirt. His blow-dried pompadour and shiny leather briefcase gave him the look of a B-movie mob lawyer, circa 1975.”1 Others in the Clinton White House disliked Morris because he always seemed to be searching for the lowest common denominator in modern politics. They believed he operated essentially without any moral or ethical restraints. Even more upsetting was what he might tell them about themselves and their role in working for Clinton. Were they, despite all their high-minded hopes and their belief in the value of public service, at their core too much like Morris? Despite the professed idealism that they liked to think drove their participation in politics with Clinton, was it less about issues and helping the vulnerable in society, and more about self-aggrandizement, and therefore their own place at the public trough? When they looked at Dick Morris, those were the questions they posed to themselves. They were not questions they liked to answer.
Morris was an intriguing and bizarre figure, “the dark Buddha whose belly Clinton rubbed in desperate times,” Stephanopoulos wrote. For more than a decade Morris had been the adviser Clinton summoned in difficult moments, and only then to represent the hard, dirty underside of the political equation, the side that went contrary to the expressed idealism of the Clintons and their closest advisers. Morris gloried in his semi-outlaw status. In his mind that made him someone from the real world, while the others around the president were the dreamers. “Bill only wants me around when his dark political side is coming out,” Morris once said. “He doesn’t want anything to do with me when he’s in his good-government, Boy Scout mode.”2
If Clinton was, at his core, the great survivalist, Morris’s arrival on the scene signaled more than anything else that Clinton was going into his fulltime survive-at-any-cost mode. His entrance into the White House, infuriating as it was to men like Stephanopoulos, Begala, and John Podesta, was a clear sign that Clinton was desperate. He did not need Morris to know that he was in trouble or why. Clinton’s own reading of the country and its mood swings was so acute that he could probably learn very little from him. But surrounded by a political staff that was in general younger, more idealistic, and more liberal than he was, he was tired of being pulled one way when his political instincts told him to go another. He wanted Morris as a counterbalance to his other advisors, to reaffirm his own impulse about when to change and tack on a policy. Much to the consternation of some of the White House staff, and Tony Lake in particular, Morris made some tentative moves on foreign policy. Stan Greenberg had not polled on foreign policy because it might imply that the president was making decisions based on polls, and he was replaced by another pollster brought in by Morris, who, in Greenberg’s words, “seemed to have no such scruples.” Clinton apparently warned Morris against involving himself in foreign policy meetings, and Lake quickly made it clear to the president that Morris was to keep his distance from all foreign policy issues. (Morris later wrote in his memoir of an angry Lake giving him “the evil rodent look he bestowed on me whenever we met in the hallway.”3)
Tony Lake was aware that, as he had predicted from the start, Bosnia had the capacity to hold the administration captive if no one dealt with it. His dilemma was how to jump-start a new Bosnian policy and make sure that the president was truly committed to it. Lake had been getting little help from the top people in the State Department. There was, Lake’s aides thought, putting it charitably, a notable absence of energy from State. Christopher and those around him were not eager to take command of an issue from which the secretary obviously wanted to distance himself, and about which the president was also ambivalent. State seemed without answers; our present policy may not be effective, but any new course of action would entail unwanted risks, and Christopher, by nature cautious and getting no clear signal from the president, was nervous about taking risks. If what we were doing did not work, at least it was relatively low cost; anything else we tried might not work either and might become a higher-priced and more visible failure.
Dick Holbrooke, newly returned to Washington from Bonn and just beginning to make his moves as assistant secretary for European and Canadian affairs, might prove to be an important force in seeking a resolution to the Bosnian crisis, but he was not under Lake’s jurisdiction—perhaps not under anyone’s jurisdiction. Their personal friendship, once so close, had long ago been shattered, and they worked in an atmosphere of barely disguised rivalry and distrust. The Pentagon was still watching events apprehensively. Bill Perry and John Shalikashvili had replaced Les Aspin and Colin Powell, and they might yet prove more accommodating, but for the time being there was no green light for action from the Pentagon. The people there were waiting for the civilians to give a clear signal about what they wanted and how much they were willing to pay.
In this amorphous situation, Lake came up with the beginning of a policy for Bosnia that would help end the White House’s drift. He had talked at length with the president earlier in the year about whether they should just let UNPROFOR fold, take the heat, use the requisite American military muscle to pull the various European troops out, and then start anew with a clear field to use American airpower. Clinton was interested, it was a fresh start, but he was worried about the impact on the future of the Western alliance and was not yet ready for that big a jump. To let UNPROFOR collapse on the ground—even if it was done deliberately and a new, stronger policy was in mind—might expose him to additional criticism; it would be seen as a defeat, one that might not lead to a subsequent victory.
Lake had begun by creating a task force to start thinking strategically about this new policy, using two aides who worked extensively on Bosnia, Sandy Vershbow and Nelson Drew, to put it together. Lake was also working for the first time in close alliance with Madeleine Albright, who had always been hawkish, and who like him saw the British, French, and other UN troops on the ground as the single greatest impediment to resolving the conflict. She believed that nothing would expedite policy there better than collapsing UNPROFOR. Lake and Albright’s relationship had not been easy in the beginning, but by the spring of 1995, they had come together as allies with a single purpose on this most pressing issue. In late June, Lake’s task force was working around the clock. Convinced that the administration’s present policy was a product of day-to-day decision-making, reactive rather than creative, Lake was urging the people on his staff to think more strategically. Imagine, he suggested, that they were six months down the road, figure out what they wanted to have taken place by that time, then try to work backward to see how it could be made to happen. What were their goals? Were the UN soldiers an asset or a detriment, and if they were a detriment, how could we overcome that vulnerability?
Soon their objective was clear: a division of Bosnia that would redraw the current boundaries, then with more than 70 percent of the country in Serb hands, to a 51–49 ratio. The map would not be easy to create; it would need a degree of skill as well as logic to keep the divisions relatively secure and as consolidated as possible. The fate of the alleged safe areas in eastern Bosnia—Srebrenica, Zepa, and Gorazde, which were still surrounded by Serb forces—was particularly perplexing. Even as Lake’s group began to work on the problem in late June, the Serbs were tightening the noose around these enclaves, above all Srebrenica. The 51–49 map gave the group a goal; the idea of consolidating the UNPROFOR units gave them a substrategy. Lake assigned Sandy Vershbow, who had been his principal staff man on Bosnia, to write up a strategy that offered both carrots and sticks to those who cooperated, for example, the gradual end of economic sanctions as a carrot for the Serbs if they moved toward compliance. The plan was called the Endgame strategy. That was step one. Slowly, almost without anyone else noticing it, Lake was taking over the initiative for a new policy and trying to shape the Washington bureaucracy to his vision. If the raw outline of Endgame was step one, then step two was to bring the president in from the start—to get the hook into him with a certain finality. Clinton wanted to do the right thing on Bosnia, but he wanted to do it with minimal risk to himself, his presidency, and the European alliance. Lake understood those limitations. But for any new policy to work, it had to seem to come from Clinton and have his imprimatur. That was the most important part, to commit a president whose humanitarian instincts had, in the past, put him on one side, but whose political caution had then brought him back to the other. There was a need, once and for all, to get him to commit.
Lake in the next few weeks did something new in his NSC operation: he began to make the bureaucracy work for him. He went to the president and explained what he was working on: a complete and comprehensive new strategy on Bosnia that would work toward a diplomatic settlement. But first more pressure had to be applied on the Serbs on the ground, which could only be exerted by the threat of American military force; that is, airpower, since the use of ground troops was still being ruled out. The Europeans must not be able to block American policy because of the threat posed to their ground troops. Lake intended to move the bureaucracy ahead by at first circumventing it. He was going to go directly to the president, commit him if he could to a course of action without Lake’s peers knowing it, and once the president was committed, they would have to follow along. Otherwise, Clinton’s top advisers would continue to be as divided as they currently were—without the most important element to end the internal deadlock, presidential leadership. So Lake outlined his plan to the president before he shared it with anyone else in the bureaucracy—that is, Perry, Christopher, or Shalikashvili. In late June Lake met with Clinton to explain how serious a departure this new plan was, and that it might require a significantly greater commitment of American military resources on the eve of an election year. “Mr. President, tell me if you don’t want to do this, stop me now because the risks are very clear,” Lake told the president, according to Bob Woodward’s authoritative notes from their meetings.4
The risks were considerable. It would be another major embarrassment if the Endgame strategy failed and caused a rupture with the allies, and it might sink the Clinton administration. The strategy was probably going to necessitate the use of American ground troops in some form to help keep the peace in Bosnia, and that was not a commitment any president would want to make at the beginning of an election year. Clinton immediately gave his permission to develop the strategy. But Lake wanted to be absolutely sure Clinton understood that if they moved forward, it could easily lead to a wider war with greater American involvement. Yes, he understood that his presidency was on the line, Clinton told Lake. It was an important moment. Lake had begun to make the president his partner in this new strategy, and it would be harder for him to pull back. Lake was to some degree turning the tables on Clinton. After months of presidential complaints about the lack of a new policy, Lake was, in effect, saying, well, I will give you a new policy and it will entail risk, but if I develop it for you, I expect you to be for it.
Now, having loaded the dice with the president, Lake asked for comparable strategic papers from his top colleagues, Perry, Shalikashvili, Christopher, and Albright. Though much of the Endgame strategy was aimed at making the Serbs more amenable to a settlement, one warning was thrown in for the Bosnians. If they did not go along with the new policy, the Americans might pull out completely and leave them even more at the mercy of the Serbs than before. The Europeans, in particular, would like that part—our being tough on the Muslims, too—for up until then the Europeans thought the Americans tilted too much in the Muslims’ favor.
There would be carrots and sticks for everyone, economic incentives and military deterrents, the most important of which would be the use of American airpower if need be. Finally the United States would do what it had shirked doing for so long, exert its leadership. Once the policy was agreed upon in Washington and the president was fully committed to it, Lake intended to visit the allies and bring them in. He would say in the most polite way possible that the president of the United States has decided that we are going to pursue this policy and we would certainly like you to be part of it, but we are going to proceed without your help if necessary. He would say that we hoped all Balkan parties involved would prefer to negotiate, but we were prepared to use massive American airpower to cajole them into accepting the redrawn map of Bosnia we had in mind. Yes, it would be the same kind of trip that Christopher had made, but with a very different message.
On July 11, Srebrenica fell, and when the Serbs took the town, they did not do it shyly. They swaggered in, fully equipped with their own propaganda units at the ready and their own cameramen to record this historic occasion and great victory. “On to Potocari!” shouted Mladic as he turned toward a Serb television crew, referring to the nearby village where the Dutch battalion was headquartered and where thousands of Muslims had taken refuge.5 “Finally after the rebellion of the Dahijas,” Mladic said, “the time has come to take revenge on the Turks in this region.” The reference was to a Serb rebellion against the Turks during the Ottoman Empire, which the Turks had crushed with great brutality in 1804, a mere 191 years earlier. Time clearly stood still in Bosnia. Mladic then said he was presenting this town to the Serbian people as a gift, a new Serbian Srebrenica. To make the gift more perfect, he proposed to rid it of all Muslims.
Because the Serbs gloried in what they were doing, there were many records of that tragic surrender and of Colonel Karremans, defeated, confused, and humiliated by the exuberant Mladic. People knowledgeable about the politics of Europe thought that the Serb leadership had deliberately singled out the Dutch battalion for humiliation because the Dutch had so passionately committed themselves to the concept of a peacekeeping, humanitarian force and the feeling in Amsterdam was particularly hostile to Serb aggression. On Serb television, as in a scripted play, Colonel Karremans was deftly portrayed as an accomplice to the fall of Srebrenica. He appeared to be celebrating the Serb victory—with a glass of champagne perhaps? In reality, it was a glass of water for an exhausted man.
The footage of that surrender was heartbreaking: the sheer swagger of Mladic as conqueror and the humbling of Karremans, a decent man now powerless, sent out on what had appeared to be the most honorable of missions, which had turned into a betrayal of everything he and the people of his proud nation believed in. The terror of the trapped Muslims, when the Srebrenica pocket collapsed and the hated and feared Chetniks arrived, was palpable as they realized that their so-called protectors were now bargaining for their own lives. All the weaknesses, all the failures to act, that had bedeviled the West for the last four years were now being paid for. The Dutch soldiers, impotent, mocked and humiliated by these aggressors, were perfect stand-ins for the Western powers. Now having taken charge of the village, the Serbs started to rid the area of all Muslims. The Serbs might not be good fighters, but they did pogroms very well indeed. They were familiar with the drill, and the entire process had a macabre efficiency.
While the UN forces were still small and numb from the defeat, the Serbs swiftly separated women and children from the men and moved them on buses to other Muslim areas already crowded with refugees. They tried to ease tensions by promising the women that everyone was going to be all right. The men went on buses, too, but they would never be seen again. They were executed and buried in mass graves. Watching the process, the men being separated from the women, a Serb television cameraman asked one of the Dutch doctors, Colonel Gerry Kremer, what was going on. Appalled by the scene, appalled by the question and the source of it, Kremer said, “You know what’s going on.”6 Indeed they did. In the next few days, the Serbs under Mladic systematically executed an estimated seven thousand Muslim men.
A handful of men survived and told of the mass executions. Serb soldiers, often fortified with alcohol and armed with Kalashnikovs, an exceptionally murderous weapon (better for use in situations like this, it was said, than machine guns, which were often erratic and jammed), would line up the Muslims and open fire. The Muslims would shout for mercy, one Serb executioner later testified at the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague: “They begged us, ‘Don’t shoot us! Our families in Austria will send you money.’ One of my comrades yelled at the Muslims, ‘Whoever possesses deutschemarks will be spared.’ But Branko [the commanding sergeant] said, ‘Don’t bother, they’ve [already] taken everything from them in Zvornik.’ ”7
When Srebrenica fell, Clinton and Chirac spoke on the phone. Chirac was enraged. It was, he said, just like the worst of World War II. “We must do something,” he said, according to the official notes of their conversation. “Yes, we must act,” Clinton agreed.8 Chirac wanted to use French troops (with American choppers flying them in) to retake the town. The plan was rich in its aura of past French gallantry, full of risk and glory, but did not thrill either the president or the people at the Pentagon. What would happen once Srebrenica was retaken? Clinton asked. Would it really make that great a difference? There was no good answer to that question.
Still, the president was once more enraged; it was as if these small-time Serb leaders were personally taunting him, and on July 14, Clinton blew. Lake might be putting the finishing touches on his Endgame strategy, but it was not quite done and Clinton was furious. Srebrenica was a disaster, the allies remained divided, the demand for action was strengthening in the Congress, and Chirac was taking center stage. Earlier that day in Paris at a Bastille Day celebration and press conference, Chirac had spoken of his eagerness to confront the Serbs, but had noted that regrettably France stood alone in wanting to take action. He talked about the weakness of the West and compared it with the time in 1938 when the West had appeased Hitler as he moved into the Sudetenland. Perhaps in the end, Chirac hinted, France would have to pull out of UNPROFOR. “We can’t imagine that the UN force will remain only to observe, and to be, in a way, accomplices in the situation,” he said. “If that is the case, it is better to withdraw.”9 It was the ultimate insult to the president, another Western leader speaking of the impotence of Clinton’s leadership and accusing the allies of being appeasers.
Clinton’s reaction would become known within the White House as the Putting Green Day. Those who had been watching him for the last few weeks had sensed that the presidential temperature was rising and something volcanic was about to happen. He had made more and more exasperated late-night phone calls to aides with the same theme: they had to do something, they were stuck and they needed a new plan. So Clinton’s explosion, in the early evening, around 7 P.M., was not entirely a surprise. The president, practicing his golf game in the little area known as the Eisenhower Putting Green, was in a rage. Lake was not there, so Clinton inflicted his anger on members of Lake’s staff—Berger, Lake’s chief deputy, Nancy Soderberg, plus Mike McCurry, the press officer.
They had come to speak to the president about Bosnia and the powerful words coming out of Paris. That McCurry was there with two NSC deputies was a sure sign that they were concerned about questions being asked in the press. They found Clinton in the place where he liked to go late in the afternoon or early evening when he wanted to take a break from the pressures of the office. He would take a bunch of golf balls, scatter them a certain distance from the cup, then practice first chipping and then putting. Clinton kept chipping and putting, and McCurry and the NSC people kept retrieving the balls so he could chip and putt again. Finally, Clinton exploded. He was the president of the United States and he was being checkmated on the most important issue he faced by people who should not be able to checkmate a president.
“This can’t continue,” he fumed between putts. “I’m getting creamed.” They had to have ideas for a new policy, he demanded, then chipped a shot. “This has got to stop. We’ve got to find some kind of policy and move ahead.” Another chip shot. Berger said that Lake was working on the Endgame strategy. That did not seem to ease the presidential pain. He complained about the pressure on him from Chirac. He was being squeezed from all sides. “Why aren’t my people doing more for me?” he kept repeating. “Why can’t I have a new policy?” Eventually Soderberg, who was scheduled to have dinner with some Nigerian diplomats, excused herself. “Good luck,” she quietly mouthed to the less fortunate Berger as she left him behind for the rest of the tirade. Around seven forty-five, after more than three-quarters of an hour of presidential anger, McCurry also left. The last thing he remembered seeing was Berger picking up a club to play, too, and trying to explain to the president various possibilities for action.10
The putting green explosion was perfect leverage for Lake. The president wanted a new policy, and that was exactly what Lake was working on. The following Monday, he presented his Endgame strategy to his peers, Christopher, Perry, Shalikashvili, Albright, and Berger. Lake had previously suggested to Clinton that he drop by the meeting. Lake went through his game plan, then, at just the right moment on a prearranged signal, Clinton walked in and expressed his frustration with the status quo. Bosnia was doing immense damage to the United States all over the world, he said. America was being made to look weak. The Serbs had played us skillfully for years. “The only time we make any progress there is when we threaten to use force or use force,” he said. The Europeans were no help—all they did was whine, though Chirac’s energy was a plus. “We have a war by CNN,” Clinton said, meaning that the world was watching. “Our position is unsustainable—it’s killing the U.S. position of strength in the world.” Then he left the meeting. The last words from Lake were critical: “This is larger than Bosnia. Bosnia . . . is the symbol of U.S. foreign policy.”11 Before the meeting ended, Lake asked the others for their suggestions for a change in policy. These were not as proactive as his Endgame strategy. Essentially both State and the Pentagon still believed in containment, even as it became more and more clear that containment was a formula for humiliation—political and military.
But attitudes were changing, and Srebrenica had helped change them. After the town fell, Clinton dispatched both John Shalikashvili and Bill Perry to London to meet with their counterparts to see if they could unsnarl the existing mess and find some mutually acceptable formula that would allow the use of American airpower and end the ability of the Serbs to assault the Bosnians on the ground. In the past, whatever their private feelings, both Perry and Shalikashvili had shared the general reluctance of the Pentagon to embark upon a more proactive policy. Before when Shalikashvili had been sent by the administration to propose upgrading the present policy, he had always known what the response would be: “Shali, until you put your own troops on the ground and share the risks, you can’t play.” This time it was going to be different.