Clark was about to have serious problems not just with the Chiefs, but the new secretary of defense as well, Bill Cohen. When Cohen had interviewed him for the SACEUR job in early 1997, the secretary had spoken quite dovishly about the Balkans. The administration, he said, would never be able to get any kind of military commitment to Kosovo past the Congress. The signal was clear to Clark. Cohen, his boss, did not want the military to be engaged in the Balkans. What Clark now began to hear from Cohen and other senior military was a series of warnings, mostly about becoming too close to the high-ranking civilians. People subtly suggested that some of the civilians who seemed to be his friends and on his side might, in fact, be working in private against him. As the stakes were going up, the game was becoming uglier, and the senior people in the Pentagon, who did not entirely trust Clark, clearly wanted to cut off his access to the civilians.
Nor had things gone well even when, still new to his command, Clark had pushed to toughen the implementation of the Dayton Accords. As early as the summer of 1997 he had also begun to get warnings from Cohen—and in time from Shelton as well—that he ought not to talk to people, to use the Pentagon phrase, on the other side of the river; that is, the civilians at the White House and at State—or to be very specific, Berger, Albright, and eventually Holbrooke. That, Clark decided later, was one more sign of the growing conflict between the senior civilian and military people and of the fear that he was on the wrong side, too close to the civilians and advocating a policy the Pentagon did not want. Even more important, he was, in effect, the swing vote. If it all came to a head over what to do in Kosovo and the CINC lined up with the civilians, that would be a very different equation than if everyone in the military opposed action or gave an unacceptably high figure for what it would take. During one trip to Washington in July 1998, he had carried with him some of the plans for the air campaign. He was scheduled to see General Shelton, but Shelton was unable to see him. The next stop on his schedule was the White House, where he met with Bob Gelbhard, the special negotiator, and Jim Steinberg, a Berger deputy. Shelton, the chairman, he was told, was mightily pissed because the civilians had seen the plans first. The chairman, Clark was told, had said that Clark “had one foot on a banana peel and one foot in the grave.”1 Not long after that, Clark was asked by Cohen and Shelton to submit his itineraries in advance when he came to Washington so they would always know whom he was seeing. That had never happened before. It was, he thought, another warning. He, of course, was not going to play that game. He would continue, despite additional warnings, to keep on checking in with the people on the other side of the river. He did not intend to have so powerful a position and defer to the Pentagon on an issue about which he felt so passionately.
Clark’s support system was hardly enviable. His relationship with Denny Reimer, the army chief of staff, was dismal. Reimer was a much more conventional man than General Gordon Sullivan, who had preceded him. The feeling in the army was that Sullivan had been so hard-driving that when he retired, the system needed a break. The lower-key Reimer was ideal for that. He was a decent, honorable man but cautious and conservative as well, leading an institution that was under immense pressure to change, but where the internal culture, especially at the top, resisted change. His relationship with Clark, the army’s most important commander, was about as poor as it was possible to get. Reimer had not, after all, placed him on the list for either CINC slot, and on the second, SACEUR, Reimer had deliberately refused to sign on despite Shalikashvili’s personal plea.
Those watching Clark and Reimer together at close quarters thought the body language between them was simply dreadful. No one knew what had triggered it, least of all Clark. Had there been an incident long ago when Clark had in some way offended Reimer, had somehow shown that Clark did not think Reimer was quite bright enough? No one was quite sure. But Reimer simply did not like Clark, was decidedly uncomfortable with him, and, in the eyes of some of their peers, clearly threatened by him. To one knowledgeable insider it seemed as if a man of the system could not bear to deal with someone who consciously or unconsciously thought he was better than the system. Their byplay was fascinating: Reimer with his thinly disguised dislike of Clark, and Clark, like an innocent puppy dog, wondering what had caused it. Why, he would sometimes ask friends, does he dislike me? What did I do wrong? It was not the way to start what would eventually become the most delicate command relationship imaginable.
Of all the figures who emerged from the prolonged struggle over the Balkans, no one would reflect the contradictions inherent in his country’s policies more clearly than Wes Clark. The fault line in American geopolitical life ran right through him. Nor in the end was anyone else treated as badly by his own institution precisely because of those very same contradictions, America’s desire to exercise great power throughout the world, but to do it in a way that caused no (or at least few) American casualties and no larger political problems. It was Clark’s fate to run the military side of this unwanted war, fought by an essentially uninterested country, orchestrated by a divided government where the consensus was, at best, extremely flimsy, and where, once the war started, there would be a complex multinational, political command to which he reported. As he went forward with the most limited mandate to achieve what was supposed to be an unlimited victory, he inevitably pressed for more—more bombing targets and, in time, the use of ground troops. But he was carrying out an assignment about which those in charge, both civilian and military, had very different views. In time he would become the combat commander as partial political-military orphan.
His principal adversary was Bill Cohen, who was being pulled in one direction by his own skepticism and the skepticism of the senior military about greater involvement in the Balkans, and in the other by the senior civilians, who wanted to finish an unwanted job. The civilians in the administration might have little enthusiasm for the war, but the alternatives, given the administration’s rhetoric, its purpose, and its own role at Dayton, were considered worse. Cohen’s position was extremely delicate. He was a Republican moderate from Maine, something of a maverick centrist, the perfect combination for the crusty New England state he represented as it tilted more and more toward the Democratic Party. His positions were never quite predictable. As a young congressman he had first come to national prominence as a House Judiciary Committee member who cast an important vote for Nixon’s impeachment.
His maverick side had come all too naturally. He had grown up in Maine, the son of a Jewish father and an Irish mother in a small New England city at a time when mixed marriages of that kind were relatively rare and there was still a good deal of anti-Semitism. Years later, in his memoir, Roll Call, Cohen would write poignantly of the divided nature of his childhood. He was torn between wanting to play sports at the YMCA on Saturday and having to attend Hebrew school on the same day. He solved that dilemma by giving two Saturdays to Hebrew school and two to the Y. To carry the name Cohen in playground sports was not easy in those days, he wrote, and when he was pitching in schoolboy baseball and someone yelled, “Send the Jewboy home,” he wanted to protest that he was not really Jewish. Tired of being pulled back and forth, he decided not to be bar mitzvahed when he reached thirteen and celebrated by throwing the medal he had received at Hebrew school for scholastic excellence into the Penobscot River, thus declaring himself, for the moment at least, no longer Jewish.2 (His background was in some ways so similar to that of Wes Clark that Janet Langhart, Cohen’s wife, was greatly amused by it; others who worked with both men wondered if the similarities weren’t the source of the tensions between two such headstrong, driven men.)
Being different, however, had given Cohen an extra drive, a passion to excel; he had been a very good student and college athlete, and at Bowdoin he thought for a time of becoming a pro basketball player. That was not in the cards; scoring easily against Bates and Middlebury was not the same as playing in the NBA, and he went to law school instead. After graduation, he returned to Maine, entered politics, was elected mayor of Bangor, and eventually arrived in the House in time for the Nixon impeachment proceedings. There, his independence, his good looks, and his intelligence gave him the beginning of a national constituency and helped catapult him in 1978 to a successful Senate run in a state that liked its politicians to be both unpredictable and independent. In the Senate, where Cohen had served three terms, he had emerged as a centrist in a party that was moving away from the center. He earned a reputation for being bright and talented but never entirely engaged. He was interested in military affairs, and he was a quick study and had a good innate feel for the issues. But he was, thought one senior officer who watched him on the Hill, like a bright student who audits the course but never takes the final exam. He would question a military representative carefully and respectfully, sometimes note that the officer’s testimony had been unusually illuminating and suggest they have lunch sometime, and then rarely follow up on the invitation.
In the midnineties as he reached what should have been the apex of his political career, Cohen appeared to be somewhat frustrated by the political process and caught in a dilemma that had ensnared many a bright, ambitious young politician before him. There was a ceiling on his possibilities and his head was already touching it. He was a winning, attractive senator whose own party was less than interested in his ideas or his future. He had no chance, given the power of the fundamentalists in the party (and the memories of his vote against Nixon), of a place on the national ticket, and the idea of entering the primaries was quixotic. His sensibilities were slightly different from those of many politicians; he had been a classics major at Bowdoin, knew poetry, could quote it, and liked to write it. He had also written an engaging and thoughtful memoir of his first year in the Senate and had followed it up with several spy novels, and though he wrote reasonably well, his fiction was not distinguished.
Like many of his more moderate peers from both sides of the aisle, Cohen bemoaned the harsher, more partisan, and less collegial tone of contemporary politics, the change it had wrought in the Senate, and the brutality of modern fund-raising. The effect of television on that body, he thought, was powerful, palpable and negative—ever greater posturing and harsher partisanship. In 1996 after three terms, he decided to leave elective politics and not seek a fourth term, which he would probably have won easily. He had become a high-visibility figure in the Washington of the nineties, a politician who had a broad range of friendships. His second wife was a strikingly beautiful woman, the black television personality Janet Langhart, and they were a desirable couple on the Georgetown social circuit, where people with some degree of celebrity were always in demand. Though unlike other senators he was not burdened by fund-raising demands—he was almost unbeatable in Maine and raising money was never a problem—Cohen decided to leave the Senate to start the Cohen Group, a consulting firm in Washington with a primary connection to countries in Asia. Bill Perry, the outgoing secretary of defense, was the first to suggest him to the president as a possible successor, placing Cohen on his own personal short list. Cohen and Clinton talked a few times and Clinton made the offer, which Cohen accepted. He might have been a three-term senator and a prominent and visible one at that, but when Cohen went to the Pentagon no one really knew who he was and what he wanted—what was at the center of him. He was obviously bright, spoke well in the Senate, and made quick, subtle political reads, but he was unpredictable on a number of issues. He had, with some doubts, supported the Gulf War. People were said to know more about what he didn’t want—what he rejected—than what he wanted and aspired to.
It was not an easy career switch: he was going from the Congress to the executive branch, and the skills required are very different. Dick Cheney had gone from the executive branch, where his skills—and his emotionally disengaged personality, the lack of a need to be popular—had suited him perfectly, to the legislative branch, which was a much easier exchange, especially for a conservative from Wyoming. In addition to the switch, Cohen was supposed to run an institution deeply suspicious of the administration he served, and he was going from a Republican world to a Democratic one at a time when the level of partisanship in Washington was probably higher than it had ever been. Finally, he was replacing a man who was not merely respected but almost revered within the building. Even as intense a figure as General Barry McCaffrey had spoken of Bill Perry as the very model of a civilian leader in the national security world, “on a par with General George C. Marshall.”3
At the Pentagon, however, Cohen remained very much a man of the Senate, and when he spoke in White House meetings, he often seemed to be speaking on behalf of the Congress (and the Republican Party), not the administration (and the Democratic Party). The doubts he expressed on many issues were not merely his own doubts, but the doubts of a rather distrustful Congress. In his mind he was warning his new teammates about the opposition they might face on the Hill; but to many in the administration, his words sounded more like those of someone who was in the opposition. Some of the Clinton people wondered if Cohen really was on their team, an issue not helped by his tendency to refer to the Congress as us and the Clinton administration as you. Finally Sandy Berger took him aside and told him quite gently, “I will regard this administration as a success when you refer to the administration as we, and not you.” Furthermore, Cohen had been a relatively tough critic of the administration’s Bosnia policies in the past, suspicious of greater activism there, and his questioning of John Shalikashvili when he had come before the Senate with the Dayton agreement had been tough, surprising both Shalikashvili and the administration he represented.
In addition, Cohen had to deal with the long-standing resistance within the Pentagon to any policy of activism in the Balkans. Like many of his contemporaries, he had not served in Vietnam, having gotten a graduate school deferment, and that inevitably handed additional leverage to those in the military in any dealings with him. They had been there, and he had not. Moreover, Cohen’s instincts in trying to run the Pentagon were more those of a politician than a CEO. He would let the military people understand that he was fair and judicious, as sympathetic as they were going to get from this administration. He made the day-to-day decisions with skill and nuance, but he backed off from the long-range force restructuring decisions that might have torn the Pentagon apart. That bitter struggle would have to wait for someone else. In general, Cohen’s political instincts were quite good. But he was obviously very dependent on Ralston, the vice chair, who knew the building and its interior politics better than most and would let Cohen know what decisions he had to make and when to make them.
Growing up in the Vietnam era, Cohen had long been somewhat suspicious of any military intervention. Once during a debate on the Senate floor, he had spoken cautiously of any policy that lightly sends young Americans to die in distant places: “And the hearts that beat so loudly and enthusiastically to do something, to intervene in areas where there is not an immediate threat to our vital interests, when those hearts that had beaten so loudly see the coffins, then they switch, and they say, ‘What are we doing there?’ ”4 At one high-level meeting as secretary of defense, he had bluntly reminded Clinton, “I voted against your Bosnia policy,” not that such a reminder was needed. If Cohen had still been sitting in the Senate, he might well have opposed some of the steps the administration was now taking on Kosovo. The Balkans had always struck him as a notorious geopolitical cemetery, a place, he once said, where people “would rather dig fresh graves than heal old wounds.”5 Mostly he saw pitfalls, things that could go wrong: allies who were dubious about going forward and slow to rally around a policy of activism, difficult terrain that favored the indigenous defender, not the neophyte Western invader. Moreover, a majority in the Congress appeared to share his doubts, and the administration had not yet reached a consensus. It was also extremely cautious about tipping its hand to the Congress about its Balkan policy, and by 1999, some senior people on the Hill, such as John McCain, thought the administration out-and-out disingenuous about what it intended to do.
As secretary of defense Cohen, like most of the senior military, was openly unhappy with most of the military scenarios that were being considered. He did not want NATO to become, as he said, “the air force of the KLA.” Eventually, very late in the game, he did come around, and when he did, the rationale was both to stop Milosevic’s obscene actions and to save NATO. But he had always questioned the use of the U.S. military on peacekeeping missions. He also believed that the administration should not move ahead without public and congressional support. That was the old congressman and senator in him, and when he voiced his former colleagues’ doubts in high-level administration meetings, some thought he was speaking as much for himself as for his former peers.
Those reservations went back to the failure in Somalia and how poorly the administration had been prepared for that disaster. When Les Aspin and Warren Christopher had come to the Congress in the immediate aftermath, Aspin had done most of the talking for the administration, and he had done it very poorly, Cohen remembered. It was one of the worst sessions he had ever been a part of and he was amazed that a former congressman of Aspin’s skill and intellect, one of the most senior people from his branch of government, had performed so ineptly. Aspin had asked the attendant members of the Congress—many of them already like hornets whose nest had been attacked—what they thought the administration should do. It was the worst possible phrasing imaginable, Cohen thought. It was one thing to go to the Congress and solicit its input, but quite another to speak the way Aspin had, to imply that the administration had no plan and to ask the Congress what to do. Because of that, the meeting had quickly become ugly, and the Congress remained extremely apprehensive about any future peacekeeping ventures. There was no way to overestimate the damage Somalia had done to the Clinton administration, Cohen believed. When he went to the Hill in the fall of 1998 to ask for seventy-five hundred peacekeepers for Kosovo to support the negotiations that Dick Holbrooke was working on, Cohen was abruptly and coldly turned down by his old colleagues. Part of the reason was that a great many troops were still in Bosnia. They were doing well, with no hemorrhaging, and the American force had already been cut in half. But the original deadline for withdrawal had been extended more than once, and what had happened in Somalia was still in the back of people’s minds. Somalia was, Cohen decided, the indelible stain on so many other comparable missions for this administration.
Whatever his own doubts, he was now surrounded by senior military men who were even more dubious of action, especially the use of ground troops. Cohen’s views, and the views of most of the senior military, put him in constant and sharp conflict with Madeleine Albright. She spoke on behalf of all the activists in the executive branch who had already been through a long, agonizing first run with Milosevic over Bosnia during Balkans One, and who wanted to jump-start what they thought would be Balkans Two in order to minimize the potential for human suffering they had all witnessed. Cohen, on the other hand, spoke not merely for the military, which did not really want to go ahead, but for the Congress, which the activists essentially intended to bypass, if at all possible. Cohen and Albright’s arguments were memorable. She was fierce, sure of her vision, and very much on the attack. He could, in turn, match her readily in argument, if not in passion. Sometimes, when it got heated and the tone almost too personal, he would hold back slightly, but his face would turn quite red.
Watching the intense byplay between those two, Berger thought that one of the differences between Cohen and the activists in the administration like Albright, Clark, and Holbrooke, who was making occasional appearances at the principals’ meetings, was that Cohen had not experienced the terrible human wrenching of Balkans One, in which they had stumbled, failed, and agonized over three years before finally patching together a policy that worked. None of the more senior principals ever wanted to go through that again.