With the White House under constant pressure, both domestic and foreign, the key foreign policy player in Washington, the linchpin in a divided government, as one colleague described him, the most important person other than the president himself, was Sandy Berger. He was also the only one of the original principals still operating in the administration in its sixth and soon to be seventh year. Lake was gone, Christopher was gone, Powell and Shalikashvili were both gone, and Cohen was the administration’s third secretary of defense, following Aspin and Perry. The president and his advisers paid more attention to Albright as secretary of state than they had when she was at the UN, but even now there was resistance to her pressure for activism. Moreover, something else was missing: she was just not one of the boys. At the start of the Clinton presidency Berger had been Lake’s deputy by his own choice, but because of his close personal ties to the president, he had always been a senior player, even before he got the top job.
Berger was the quiet man of the administration, the figure about whom the least was known. He was also both politically and emotionally the closest to the president, with a sure sense of his attitudes, needs, and vulnerabilities at all times. What presidents of the United States require at that level is a combination of undivided loyalty and a very practical kind of intelligence, and Berger offered both. Many of those alleged to be Clinton’s close friends, the famed FOB list, were in fact rather casual relationships of mutual self-advantage, some of them long-standing, some of them instant, very few of them deeply rooted and sealed with real trust. Berger’s relationship with Clinton was special. In an atmosphere supercharged with ambition and vainglory, it was unusually selfless. Their friendship was mutually solid, had never been tainted, and was distinct from almost any other Clinton working friendship, except perhaps that with Strobe Talbott. But unlike Talbott, Berger had daily access to the president, and anyone who tried to undermine their connection would always lose. Berger’s strength was that he did not seek greater power or title, he never let his ego get in the way, and he read Clinton perfectly. Their attitudes on most issues—and the politics of these issues—were almost identical.
They had first met during the McGovern campaign in the fall of 1972 at, of all unlikely places, the Alamo. The youthful Berger was writing speeches for McGovern, driven into politics by the Vietnam War, and Clinton was helping to run the Texas campaign for the South Dakota senator, not the most enviable of assignments. Years later Berger’s view of that campaign remained quite enthusiastic. He had realized early on, he said, that its chances of success were limited, but because it had been based on so powerful an idea, ending what was to many in his generation an unacceptable war, and because it had rallied people behind so thoroughly decent a man, it had brought a large number of talented and idealistic young people into the political process for the first time—the next step after their earlier participation in college protests against the war. Berger’s first glimpse of the president-to-be was of a quite tall, effusive young man in a white suit—shades of Colonel Sanders—talking incessantly about Arkansas and Southern politics. He was filled with energy, intelligence, and ambition, and in no way depressed about the unlikelihood of his candidate carrying the state to which he had been assigned. Berger remembered one other thing in addition to Clinton’s size and energy: he seemed more grounded in his home territory—more rooted, so much a man of Arkansas—than almost anyone else Berger had met at that time. Many of the young would-be political people he knew in Washington, then all in their midtwenties, were ambitious but in some way already partially disconnected from their roots. They had left their hometowns to come to Washington to be part of the larger game working for someone else. Unlike them, Clinton’s roots and his political future were entwined. He would run for office at home. He was not looking to exercise power without leaving Washington.
In the eighties their friendship flourished. Berger might be Eastern and Jewish, but he was small-town upstate New York with a boyhood not that different from Clinton’s. His father had died when he was eight, and his mother had raised him in difficult economic circumstances. By the eighties Berger had located in Washington, Harvard Law School was behind him, and he was obviously bright and very political so he made an immediate appearance on Clinton’s Rolodex, a kindred soul in the nation’s capital who was worth staying in touch with. Not long after they had met in Texas, Clinton ran for office and was elected governor of Arkansas. Since he was always looking to connect, and Washington more than Little Rock was a place where you could connect with other bright young men and women, the kingmakers and queen-makers of the future, he visited there frequently, meeting with a small but ever expanding coterie of friends: Carl Wagner, another old friend who also went back to the McGovern campaign when he had run Michigan for the Dakotan; Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s old Oxford roommate, a rising star in Washington journalism; Derek Shearer, Talbott’s brother-in-law; and of course Berger, who was beginning to make a reputation as a trade lawyer with a Washington firm, but whose primary passion was politics.
Berger was very much taken with Clinton. Though Clinton had no family wealth, he was willing to put himself on the line by running for political office. That meant his views, unlike theirs, could not be abstract: they had to reflect the hard realities of liberalism in the eighties, especially in the South. That impressed Berger greatly. In his view, no other young politician he knew had the rare combination of high intelligence and genuine compassion that Clinton possessed. His range of interests was enormous; there was no book on public policy or history that he had not read, no one he met that he did not try to learn from and, of course, to win over. For Clinton the central issue of American life was race, and the job of any successful American politician, beyond the day-to-day burden of making the state or the country function a little better, was to work toward the immense ongoing task of racial reconciliation. Berger readily agreed with him about the primacy of that task.
It was very much a downtime for Democrats in Washington, and Berger had forged a strong link with Pamela Harriman, who had become a focal point of Democratic Party energy in the capital, having founded a group called Democrats for the Eighties (known privately as PAMPAC). Berger wrote some speeches for her while at the same time introducing her to the bright young aspirants of the party. He not only connected Clinton to her, but also managed to get him on her board, which gave the Arkansas governor reason to come to Washington regularly to meet and be met. Berger wanted to display him as much as he could, sure that every time Clinton met the doyens and doyennes of Washington, he would make a favorable impression. Often he did, using that immense intelligence and charm to convert people who had not intended to be charmed by so young a man from so obscure a place. As early as 1988, Berger thought that Clinton should run for the presidency, especially after Gary Hart self-destructed.
At one point Clinton seemed ready to make the race. An exploratory committee for his candidacy was going to be named and a press conference was scheduled for the announcement in Little Rock. Berger and Mickey Kantor, two of the principal architects of such a run, flew to Arkansas, only to find that Clinton and his wife had been up all night discussing his candidacy and had decided that it was not the right time. There had been enough tension in their marriage—some of the problems that afflicted Hart had also afflicted Clinton—their daughter was still young, and the sum of the negatives was too great. The most lasting image that Berger had of that trip was of walking around the back of the governor’s mansion and by chance looking in the window just as Clinton went into the kitchen and told the news to Chelsea, then about eight. She was so thrilled by his declaration of noncandidacy that she jumped into his arms.
Berger was with Clinton in 1988 when he gave his endlessly long speech nominating Michael Dukakis for the presidency. Expectations were high. Everyone connected to Clinton knew how talented and articulate he was, and his coterie was sure that this was his moment and he would hit it out of the park. Perhaps not unlike the young Jack Kennedy, who had seized on his razor-thin defeat for the vice-presidential nomination at the 1956 convention to open his candidacy for 1960, Clinton would open the door for the future with his speech. Instead he went on and on. And on. CBS showed its viewers a red light flashing on the podium, a signal for Clinton to end it. On NBC, Tom Brokaw said, “We have to be here, too,” a sign to his audience that he shared its pain. Only when Clinton ad-libbed, “In closing . . . ,” was there spontaneous applause.1 It was, Berger would later say, one of the most painful experiences of his life. The man he had been selling for a decade to others as the brightest young hope of the party had finally gotten his golden moment and had melted down in front of the entire nation, unable to stop, failing to do something that he probably did better than anyone else in the country, read an audience. Berger felt physically ill and had to get away from the convention floor. Just as he was leaving, he ran into the governor and his wife. “That was pretty bad, wasn’t it?” Clinton said. Berger agreed that it was.
Two things then happened that impressed Berger. Instead of ducking the media, Clinton immediately went upstairs, in the heat of this calamity, to deal with the national press corps, and a few days later, he called Berger and said, “They want me on Johnny Carson. What do you think?” “It’s a terrible idea,” Berger said, sure that it was some late-night-television producer’s dream of the perfect evening: Carson, the great comedian, would take a man who was drowning and hold his head underwater for the final count, upping his own ratings while at the same time presiding over the end of Clinton’s national career. But Clinton took that risk. He went on the show, played the saxophone, made fun of himself, and began lancing the boil.
The political twinning of Berger and Clinton, the mix of both idealism and pragmatism, was almost pure. The two men were originally linked by the Vietnam War. Berger, like Clinton, had been a dove. At Cornell, he had taken a course on Southeast Asia taught by the well-known professor George Kahin, one of the war’s early critics, and Berger had become convinced that the American involvement in Vietnam was bound to fail. He graduated from Cornell in 1967, just as the protests on the war were obscuring every other issue on the political agenda. Already something of a political junkie, he went to work for Democratic congressman Joe Resnick, who had been elected in a traditionally Republican district in upstate New York—Franklin Roosevelt’s own home district, which he himself had never carried. Resnick was young, idealistic, and a self-made millionaire. He had never finished high school and had made his money after World War II producing television antennas. He was one of the more than forty Democrats carried along on Lyndon Johnson’s coattails in the 1964 landslide, people elected from what been Republican districts, and Johnson had marked them from the start for special care. He wanted them reelected in 1966 and threw all kinds of favors at them; more than thirty post offices in Resnick’s district, Berger remembered, were delivered by the White House.
There is no such thing as a free lunch or a free post office, and of no politician was that more true than Johnson. Resnick was Jewish, and as the Vietnam War escalated, Johnson (incorrectly) decided that Resnick could be helpful with an important Democratic Party constituency with which the president was already having trouble, liberal Jews. He also started sending Resnick to Vietnam, which he would visit some ten times, getting VIP treatment from all the top people there and becoming quite hawkish. That helped endear him to Johnson, as did his dislike of Bobby Kennedy, but it led to a series of heated discussions between Berger and Resnick, even as Resnick decided to run for the Senate in 1968 as the Hubert Humphrey stand-in. It was also the year Berger began to look elsewhere for work before eventually entering Harvard Law School. By 1972, he was out of law school and had landed a job with the McGovern campaign as a speechwriter.
Berger was a dove, but Vietnam had not been the dominating part of his life as it had been for Lake and Holbrooke. Berger would later talk in private about how Clinton and he were different from men like Lake and Holbrooke, for whom Vietnam was an obsessive issue from which so many other things flowed. On reflection Berger felt that the war had had too great an effect on the wing of the party he was part of, the liberal-left McGovern wing. It had happened, he thought, as a natural outgrowth of the anger over Vietnam, but that wing had become too critical of the uniformed military (or at least too distanced from it and not respectful enough), and too critical of American foreign policy engagements elsewhere. The first Democratic politician to try to lead the party back to some semblance of balance in these matters and to figure out a rational and thoughtful defense policy that fit the needs of the changing world, he believed, was Gary Hart, McGovern’s old campaign manager, with whom Berger had also become close.
Berger’s years in office had solidified his relationship with Clinton. There was a certain modesty to him which helped, though late in his tour, when he had been operating either as the NSC deputy or the NSC adviser for eight years, some friends thought he had become a bit grandiose and began to refer to him privately as Sandy Kissinger. He had an almost perfect sense of pitch for the job, and above all, something critical for any assistant, a sense of how much additional pressure Clinton could absorb at any given time. Berger was not a strategist and made no pretense to be. When asked about that by the New York Times, Henry Kissinger, never especially generous with Democratic colleagues, had said somewhat disdainfully, “You can’t expect a trade lawyer to be a global strategist.”2 In contrast with Lake, who had been considered a difficult colleague and kept too much to himself, Berger worked well with the others on the NSC team. He was, not unlike the man he served, exceptionally pragmatic, but he resented it bitterly when critics in the media spoke of him as tilting too much toward an ad hoc policy—as if he and Clinton in the end did not believe in anything larger. The opposite was true, he believed.
Like the president he served, Berger’s analytical powers were considerable. He could break issues down to their finer points, he understood the different constituencies affected by each issue overseas, and he was very much aware of the domestic political side of any foreign policy decision. He knew all of Clinton’s political priorities. If he was not Clinton’s political twin in his outlook toward foreign policy and what the administration might be able to do at any given moment, then no one had ever been able to tell what the perceptible differences between the two of them were. Berger stood at the exact point where the pressures of the outside world and the domestic political pressures on the president intersected. To know what Clinton felt, you only needed to know what Berger felt, and if Berger was not yet ready to take a position on a complicated and pressing issue like Kosovo, it meant that the president wasn’t ready either.
On January 15, 1999, shortly after the president’s personal vindication in the off-year election, Madeleine Albright stood alone at an NSC principals meeting again pushing for action against Milosevic. She pointed out what was by then common knowledge. The deal that Holbrooke had pulled off in October was falling apart, and she argued strongly for the use of force. But neither the uniformed chiefs nor Bill Cohen wanted to be pulled into the Balkans. Sandy Berger again reflected the White House’s doubts. Clinton, still besieged domestically, was hardly eager for a new military adventure. Albright was immensely frustrated by the meeting. “We’re just gerbils running on a wheel,” she said on her way back to her office.3
That was a fateful day. If she could not move the machinery, Albright was sure that sooner or later events would. She did not have long to wait. The last time, in Bosnia, it was Srebrenica that had moved the West to take action. This time, in Kosovo, it was a village called Racak. Events there occurred at almost exactly the same time as the we’re-just-gerbils meeting in Washington, though it would be some time before the complete reports reached the principals. What happened at Racak changed everyone, and its political import was obvious: Kosovo, like Bosnia, could no longer be ignored.
Racak was another of those small towns that would come to symbolize something larger than themselves. By the late fall of 1998, the KLA had moved into Racak and used it as a base from which to strike at the Serbs. After a small KLA unit had apparently attacked local Serbs, killing four policemen, a significantly larger, heavily armed Serb unit entered the town. A group of about thirty Albanian men were hiding in a cellar, where the Serbs found them. Young male children were separated from the grown men, and Human Rights Watch, a humanitarian monitoring group, later reported that a conscious decision had clearly been made to execute all the male adults in the town. Twenty-three men were taken from the cellar and marched away. Other men were also apparently taken from different houses in the village.
Soon there were reports of a major massacre at Racak. William Walker, the American who headed the Kosovo Verification Mission, immediately led a convoy to the town. There he found what appeared to be a body lying under a blanket. He lifted the blanket and saw a headless corpse, the beginning of a trail of gore and brutality. Every fifteen or twenty yards Walker and his party discovered another body—all of them riddled with bullets, many of them shot through the head or the eyes. The hill where the first body was found was littered with forty-four other corpses. Walker had served in El Salvador as a diplomat and was no stranger to violence, but this was the worst scene he had ever visited. A few survivors reported that the men had been rounded up, brought to the hill, told to kneel, and then executed.
The massacre at Racak became the critical lever for those in the American government and in allied Western governments to move for military action against the Serbs, a sure sign that the worst of Bosnia would be repeated. Walker, viewed in the State Department as a freelancer whose sympathies were clearly with the Kosovars, did not even check with Washington for instructions. He immediately held an emotional press conference and described what had happened at Racak as a crime against humanity. Albright knew the value of what had happened as well. If there were some people in the administration who thought that Walker had gone too far, she was not one of them. She picked up the phone and called him: “Bill, you’re doing a great job. You were right on as far as Racak was concerned.”4
At NATO headquarters, General Wes Clark felt much the same way. He, too, had been waiting for this. One of his aides remembered hearing him say, when he learned of the Racak massacre, “I have them [the Serbs] where I want them now.” Racak finally mobilized the West, greatly lessening the divisions not just between the different countries but within the Clinton administration itself, and made it much harder for the doves to oppose action. Almost certainly there would be a military reckoning.