Once again the Clinton administration found itself pulled by events toward a second unwanted confrontation in the Balkans, with almost none of the larger issues about what America’s role there would be, both political and military, as yet resolved. Moreover, the tensions between the administration and the military, most particularly the U.S. army, were not that different from the time almost six years earlier when Clinton had first arrived in office and Colin Powell dominated the play, slowing down the administration’s somewhat unfocused vision of a more flexible policy toward peacekeeping missions. The president was obviously somewhat in favor of a wider range of humanitarian missions, but it was hardly policy, and how large a price he would be willing to pay for his beliefs had not been determined. There was no Clinton doctrine, and if the administration had a larger view of what it wanted to do in the world, it had yet to sell it to the Congress or the country.
When the Clinton people spoke about using force in Kosovo, it once again evoked memories of Vietnam to many senior military men. After six years, the debate within the administration between civilians and the military had not really advanced that much, nor was it in truth that much of a debate. Because the issues were so thorny and difficult, both sides generally preferred to talk around what divided them, as if candor would only reveal how divided they really were. Thus the tensions between the senior military and the people in the administration remained substantial. On the surface things seemed to work smoothly. Colin Powell was no longer there to intimidate them. To some degree John Shalikashvili had eased the working relationship, but he had not really brought the two sides closer together. The one person who had helped close the chasm was Bill Perry, who was widely regarded in the Pentagon as one of the superior public servants of the time, a man who was tough but always straight and fair, and who always listened to the uniformed officers. He had been replaced in the second Clinton administration by Bill Cohen, a liberal Republican senator from Maine with maverick tendencies, and by 1998 the military jury was still out on him. Though he was likable and intelligent, the general feeling was that he lacked the passion and consuming interest for the job that Perry had shown. He was clearly every bit as bright as Perry, but he seemed neither as knowledgeable nor as involved in the running of the Pentagon as Perry had been. Someone who knew them both said that if Bill Perry wrote his autobiography, virtually all of it would be about his years as secretary of defense; if Bill Cohen wrote his autobiography, after a long and successful career in both the House and the Senate, his years at the Pentagon would get one brief chapter.
In the fall of 1997, Shalikashvili was to retire, and the choice for his successor became an immensely important decision, especially with the final chapter on the Balkans still to be written. Given the politics of the administration, the desire to have a more flexible military policy, and Clinton’s innate belief that the military was a hostile political constituency (which of course it was), it had not been an easy search. It was never going to be about pure talent, and there was no one sure choice for Shalikashvili’s replacement. One of the leading contenders was General Jack Sheehan of the marines. He was a formidable figure, intellectually superior, unusually confident, and just as outspoken, a man not likely to compromise on things he believed important. But he tended to make both civilians and military men nervous with his singular bluntness. He was prone to tell his peers that they were always preparing to fight the last war, not the next one. In strategic terms he agreed with some of the Clinton administration’s vision of what America might do in a turbulent and unsettled world to help stabilize it at a relatively low cost. In fact, probably no officer was more critical of the military’s failure to adjust and prepare for the new kind of assignments that faced the country—assignments that demanded force restructuring and reevaluation of American military strategy in order to fight smaller, lower intensity wars in the second and third world.1 Both Clinton and Berger were intrigued by Sheehan’s talent and brainpower, but he was by White House standards high-risk. Just a year earlier, at an Aspen Institute conference where many important national security people had gathered, Sheehan had startled his audience by his straightforward talk. Inexpensive military missions, free of casualties, were a pipe dream, he said. If the American military was going to go abroad, then you had better assume that it would cost a great deal of money “and put your sons and daughters in harm’s way.” Sheehan tended to impress high-level civilians and simultaneously make them quite uneasy. “We really like you and you can have the number two job [vice chairman],” Sandy Berger once told him, “but you won’t get the number one job.”
Of Sheehan’s intelligence, talent, and will there was no doubt. He came in the size the military liked. He was six feet five, a former basketball player at Boston College and a winner of the Silver Star in Vietnam. But the other chiefs were not always fond of him. He had once told an armored commander that his tanks were essentially useless given the technological changes in weaponry and their vulnerability to new, easily fired surface weapons. Shalikashvili had not recommended Sheehan for chairman, fearing resentment among the other chiefs. He was privately considered the brightest of the various candidates, with as good a combat record as anyone else available. In terms of strategy, his vision might parallel that of the Clinton civilians, and that was the rub. If a situation arose where they might have to use force, he would demand a strong commitment—what were the roles and missions, what was the exit strategy, how publicly would the administration back the military, and where was the Congress? Would the military go in and then find, if things got difficult, that it was out there alone? Sheehan, it was judged, would be the hardest of the senior men to control, and in a dispute over strategy, the most likely to resign in protest. That was the nightmare. This formidable, exceptionally impressive marine, who agreed with the Clinton administration’s theory of what we should be doing in foreign policy, might go public if it was unwilling to make the necessary commitment. Sheehan would not get the chairman’s job.
The man the administration wanted to choose—Bill Cohen’s obvious favorite—was an air force general, Joe Ralston. Considered by the Clinton people to be the most subtle of the senior officers, Ralston was comfortable with his colleagues in the military and yet much admired in Washington by many different groups, including the top people in the Clinton NSC and some of the senior people on the Hill. Because of his considerable political skills, he had managed to make both the Clinton civilians and the senior military feel that he was their sympathetic partner. He was intelligent, low-key, knew how the bureaucracy worked, got on with almost everyone, and seemed able to remove obstacles to consensus, rather than create them. Wes Clark, who had his own difficulties with Ralston and the chiefs, later wrote of him, “He was the kind of officer you didn’t forget. I remembered thinking at the time [the first time they met] that he certainly knew how to round the edges off an issue.”2 When the Clinton people spoke about Ralston, they invariably said he was helpful. Ralston was tapped by Bill Cohen to replace Shalikashvili, but then Ralston had been forced to move aside because—it was a new age in the military—he acknowledged having committed adultery some ten years earlier at a time when he had been separated from his wife. Given the issues of sexism in the military, that posed a serious problem, particularly at that exact moment. Almost simultaneously, another sex scandal threatened the military. First Lieutenant Kelly Flinn, a graduate of the Air Force Academy, the first woman to fly a B-52 and thus something of a poster girl for the new air force, had had an affair with the husband of an enlisted woman and was threatened with a court-martial, not merely for adultery, but for lying fairly systematically to her superiors about it. That raised the issue of a double standard for a senior officer; and given the cloud that perpetually hovered over the Clinton White House about extramarital sex, it was enough to block Ralston as head of the JCS.
With Ralston out of the picture, the qualities required for the new chairman began to change. He would have to have a squeaky-clean personal life. “Do you have a Ralston problem?” one of the Pentagon’s lawyers asked General Hugh Shelton, an army four-star and one of the top candidates for the job. No, he answered. He had known his wife since he was thirteen and she was the only woman he loved. Shelton, the Clinton people thereupon decided, was perfect for the job. He was old-fashioned, not especially verbal but good with the troops, known as a soldier’s soldier, apparently crusty, and significantly more laconic, for example, than Wes Clark. Shelton had a worthy combat record and was not likely to break any crockery.
Other military men generally liked Shelton. He was simple, no pomp, no frills, and in no way did they feel threatened by him. Rather they revered what he represented. He was six feet five, his chest was covered with ribbons, and he made a considerable impression on civilians, especially, in the nineties, among the many who had never been in the service. It would be hard to imagine his being as successful in many civilian enterprises as he was in the army—perhaps as a professional football coach, where the physical ambience that a man generates is also important. Moreover, Shelton fit the traditional culture of the military far more readily (and comfortably) than someone like Clark. He knew when to talk and when not to talk, a talent that had proved somewhat elusive for Clark. When Cohen named Shelton chairman, he interestingly enough compared him not to other generals but to two movie stars, Gary Cooper and John Wayne: “tall, straight to the point, not a lot of words.”3
Shelton had served two tours in Vietnam, the first as a Special Forces A team leader in 1967, and the second as the commander of an infantry company. His record was spotless. He was assistant commander of the elite 101st Airborne during Desert Storm, and later commanded the 82nd Airborne. In 1993 as a commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, he was designated to lead the task force that was to invade Haiti and remove General Raoul Cedras, an invasion that was just about to take place when Cedras, knowing it was all over, stepped down. Shelton had given Cedras and the junta twenty-four hours to get out of the presidential palace. His last message to Cedras was marvelously brief and blunt: “We want you to take everything that belongs to you, and nothing else.”4
Shelton was, thought his peers, a good man, not brilliant but fair and steady, who represented the virtues, the strengths, the limitations, and the conservatism of the service that had produced him. If some army people were uneasy about Clark’s loyalties—were they inside the Pentagon or outside it?—there was no such question about Shelton. He was a man of the institution. He was intelligent, but in civilian-military matters unassertive and obviously often quite uncomfortable in dealing with some of the infinitely complex issues a chairman had to face. His new job was not a natural fit nor one that he would necessarily have sought out. The political responsibilities that went with the job were a constant, yet always seemed alien to Shelton. He had a natural sense of what was good for the army, but many of the other issues he would find troublesome.
Besides, in 1998 as things heated up in Kosovo, the larger question of trust between the Clinton administration—now entering its sixth year—and the senior military remained a problem. There had always been a huge difference of interests and values separating the politicians and the generals, an inevitable suspicion of each side by the other. But now the normal tensions between the two were made considerably more severe by the changing nature of the foreign conflicts potentially being faced, conflicts where the military saw our involvement as being driven by political or moral, rather than national security, concerns. Perhaps even more damaging, the gap between the politicians and the military was greater in this administration and even more difficult to bridge because of the nature of politics in the nineties. The senior military had always been more conservative than the general body politic. For a variety of reasons, not the least of them the issue of gay rights in the military, it was also becoming more identified with the Republican Party than ever before. Gays and people who believed in gay rights tended to identify with the Democratic Party; people who opposed gay rights, such as the senior military, identified with the Republicans, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly. That meant that in all the struggles between the civilians and the military, the military always knew it had a formidable ally on the Hill with the Republican leadership. Not only did the military know it, but the Clinton administration’s senior people knew it as well. The military had stronger philosophical ties with the Republicans and, ironically, greater leverage over the Democrats and a Democratic president, leverage that was a great card as long as it was never really played. It was the threat of it which gave the military power.
The military also had problems with Clinton himself, some of which went back to the way he had handled his draft call. But it went much deeper than that. After all, few of the other senior Republicans (Lott, Gingrich, Quayle, Cheney, George W. Bush) had availed themselves of the chance to go to Vietnam. Phil Gramm, a leading Republican senator who once ran for the presidency, had not gone, but quickly noted that his brother had served. Of that, the columnist Murray Kempton had written memorably, “Thus contentedly and unblushingly does Phil Gramm pronounce his duty done. He is not his brother’s keeper, but his brother is conscripted to be his.”5 In the 2000 election the Democrats would nominate a candidate, Gore, who had gone quite voluntarily, and the Republicans would nominate two who had not, but it would not help Gore at all with the military.
Some of the divisions could be traced to the very different nature of politicians and military men. Stated simply, the qualities that made Bill Clinton a superb end-of-the century operator in the fragmented, volatile world of American politics—his skill with words, his immense subtlety, his ability to bridge and tantalize all different kinds of opposing constituencies, his knowledge of what to say to each group at every moment and, above all, whom he might be able to bend just a bit—all of this made the more senior people at the Pentagon singularly distrustful of him. It was cultural. The more naturally gifted a politician was, the more uneasy a high-level officer became, aware that he might be operating out of his league and could have his pocket picked. Politicians used words as ambiguously as possible. Military men often hated ambiguity. What for a politician might be a skill was for a military man quite possibly deception. In the military certain qualities were valued, and you judged your peers in the most elemental way: Would they help carry their wounded off the battlefield under fire? The military people had their doubts that, even in the political sense, Bill Clinton passed that test.
What military men asked about a political leader was whether in a grave military crisis he would be steadfast. (When Wes Clark eventually emerged during Kosovo as an activist, moving closer to the top civilians and away from the senior military, one of his colleagues asked him where his civilian pals were going to be if things went sour. Would they, like the civilians behind the Vietnam debacle, go off to write their books and take their big jobs, the way Mac Bundy and Bob McNamara had done at the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, leaving him to hold the bag?) In the military, someone who was too nimble, too supple with words, too facile, someone who was able to go to different meetings and seem to please opposing constituencies, was not regarded with admiration; he was regarded with distrust. Military men liked their words straight. General David Shoup, who had headed the marines during the Kennedy years, once said that a senior officer’s job was not to worry about what the politics of an administration were, but to wait until the president told him to saddle up and go, and then to saddle up and go.6
What the military in its codes valued more than anything else was honor; serious military men always knew which of their colleagues had served their time in combat and could be counted on. That was why in private, when they were in uniform among each other, army men often did not display all their ribbons but instead wore the Combat Infantry Badge. It was the army’s true badge of honor, and wearing the CIB without other ribbons—even the Silver or Bronze Star—was part of the culture’s secret language, the way real army men spoke to each other, deliberately understated. It said in effect that the recipient had been there and done it, and for anyone else who had also been there, that was all you needed to know. And if you hadn’t been there, it didn’t matter what you thought.
If the military had reservations about the civilians, there were just as many civilian reservations about the military. The most basic frustration—it went back to Madeleine Albright’s challenge to Colin Powell about what use he was going to put his fine army to—was that the military always seemed to want too large a force, hundreds of thousands of soldiers to perform any mission—a force level so great that all missions became undoable. Or, as Wes Clark wrote later in his book, the army had gradually become corporatized, “part of the Vietnam hangover.” The standard reply (when asked to undertake a mission) was “We’ll do it if you direct us, sir, but here are the risks, and we always manage to convey that if you direct us to do this, then you’ll be responsible for the losses.” To the civilians the military remained too cautious. The second complaint was that though the military men liked to think they were above politics, they were, in fact, very political. They knew how to exploit their leverage with the Republican leadership, and they used a double standard. They were hard on the Democrats who had not gone to Vietnam but paid little attention if it was a friendly Republican politician who had somehow avoided the draft.
Clearly the twain between the military and the Clinton administration had barely met. Clinton had been aware from the start of the doubts about him among the military. Before he could function effectively as president, he knew he would have to overcome at least some of those doubts, and he had worked hard to do that. He had upgraded his personal behavior in dealing with them and had used all of his considerable talents and charm in personal meetings to diminish whatever lingering stereotypes they might have of him. He was not some peacenik left over from the sixties, unwilling to use force when necessary. He could be just as tough and hard-nosed as necessary. He constantly reached out to them, and at times he had tried to end the distrust by offering different leaders of different services more weapons systems than they might have been ready to ask for—an extra aircraft carrier, say, for the navy, are you sure you don’t want one? But it had not really taken. They looked for other things. They believed that the White House wanted, as much as it could, to limit the power of the Joint Chiefs, and that given a choice in naming a chief, the Clinton people would always go for the less aggressive officer with the lower visibility on the public landscape.
Many of the top people in the Pentagon had monitored Clinton’s behavior from the start. For the military men had their own intelligence systems, unofficial but very good. A military representative was at virtually every important meeting, and he reported back to the Pentagon not merely about the decision that had been made, but about the forces that had driven it, the texture of the meeting, what had been left unsaid, and the subterranean signals the White House was giving out. The military did not like Clinton’s decision at the very start of his administration to allow gays to serve openly in the military, but they liked it even less when, facing considerable opposition, he had backed off almost immediately. Nor, when Somalia turned into a disaster, had they been pleased. What had happened there was like a terrible death in the family for the military, but they had been equally disturbed by the interior White House response. First came the preoccupation with spin, about which they were aware, and second, as the White House people prepared to go before the Congress to explain what had happened, they made it clear to the military people who came over to help brief them that the White House wanted to minimize its own culpability in the decision to upgrade the mission and go for nation-building. The Pentagon people believed that decision had been as much Tony Lake’s as Jonathan Howe’s, but the perception was that the White House wanted to get Lake’s fingerprints off it. It was possible that this was wrong, but that was how they saw the administration. To them it showed that what was for them a matter of life and death, of young men dying, could become for the White House all too easily a matter of images.
To many military men the president was charming and talented and seductive. But in their view the primary concern at the White House was not necessarily reality, or at least reality as the military men perceived it. Rather it was the appearance of reality—spin. What the people at the White House wanted to do, many military men believed, was to keep certain issues off CNN, or if that was not possible, if they finally exploded out in the world of instant media coverage, to deal with what was going on CNN with an acceptable amount of counterspin—to show they were doing something, even if what they were doing was largely inadequate. Thus, if they could not do anything about the genocide in Rwanda, they would at least use C-130s to drop food, though that was not necessarily the most pressing problem in the region.
By 1998 the senior military men still did not really trust Clinton and the people around him, and he, in turn, still did not trust them. Their purposes were more often than not different, their codes were different, their journeys to the top were different, their Americas were different, and their worlds were different. At the very top it took an unusually skillful man like Shalikashvili or Ralston to satisfy both cultures. Even in the normal byplay between the military and the politicians, both sides tended to speak guardedly, elliptically, and cautiously to each other, editing out or toning down what they really felt, trying to accommodate and find middle ground, and by doing that, ending up not being quite as candid as they should have been. That lack of candor was more exaggerated in the Clinton years, and there was even a certain reluctance, post-Somalia, to put anything about force levels in a combat area down on paper. This was not always obvious to outsiders watching the two cultures trying to blend, or watching Clinton as he tried hard to reach out to the senior military. Nor was it entirely clear to some of the senior civilians themselves.
For the military, especially at the highest levels, was a rare surviving part of America where manners and civility were still important, and by comparison with the rest of the culture, they were almost self-consciously old-fashioned. That, too, was part of the code; all senior civilians were to be treated with respect and courtesy. Thus it was quite possible to mistake the fact that the perfectly groomed three-star whose manners were so exceptional in dealing with you in fact disliked and quite possibly despised much of what you stood for. So if the military and civilians did not exactly talk past each other, they were not straight with each other.
But late in his presidency, Clinton appeared to have an epiphany. It was hopeless to try to turn around the attitudes of much of the upper- and midlevel military; the grievances against him were too deep. The enlisted men, however, were another thing. They were much younger, half his age, they had little or no memory of Vietnam, he was their commander in chief, and when he came to visit them, they were thrilled. The enthusiastic receptions they gave him were especially valuable on the network news shows in trying to erase an old stain. Clinton became in those moments like Harry Truman in 1948. If the owners at countless Midwestern factories did not like him, he would go over their heads and campaign with their workers.