This incomplete and in many ways unsatisfactory war was soon followed by an incomplete and difficult peace. Where in Bosnia some traditional forces were working toward pluralism, the forces at play in Kosovo were much more violent and far less likely to find any common ground. The hatreds there between the Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians went deeper—they were almost organic—and were completely mutual. Any peace that followed the fighting would probably not be a genuine peace. Whichever faction was stronger was sure to try to sabotage any peacekeeping effort and exploit its leverage against the momentarily weaker faction. A few months earlier, the villains, by Western consensus, had been the Serbs, trying to de-ethnicize the land by driving the Albanians off it. Now, based on the Serb defeat, and the use of awesome NATO airpower on behalf of the Albanian cause, it was the KLA and related groups that wanted to drive all Serbs out of Kosovo and parts of southern Serbia, which was triggering violent incidents. To the Western forces trying to bring some degree of stability to one of the most unstable pieces of real estate in the world, that meant their recent semi-allies were now potentially their adversaries. In a region where vengeance was a birthright, the great problem was once again deciding who the good guys and who the bad guys were, because they could so readily switch sides. Those who had so recently worn the white hats could wear the black hats, while the black hats could don the white hats.
The past year had greatly strengthened—and emboldened—the KLA and its allied nationalist groups, turning them into a considerable political and military force. Their goal was complete Albanian independence, yet the Western allies that had just fought to protect these same Albanians were pledged to nothing more than some kind of limited autonomy under what would still be overall Serb rule. Thus, the darkest parts of Balkan history—the raw feelings of the Kosovar Albanians and Serbs toward each other—had not been settled. They had been rekindled and were now likely to tear the region apart, with the Western forces that had defeated Milosevic charged with being the new, unsure referee, and largely resentful of being pulled in.
• • •
Bill Clinton, who had long minimized the importance of foreign affairs, was the beneficiary of the NATO victory in Kosovo, though there was little political capital to be gained from it. If the intervention had backfired, if the bombing had not worked and ground troops had been needed, there might well have been a political price to pay. It was a valuable lesson for any leader of America-the-superpower in dealing with these so-called teacup wars. If things worked out, if the most optimistic scenario was reasonably accurate, casualties were low (or almost nonexistent), and there was no damaging media coverage, it would nonetheless be of little domestic advantage. But there was always the potential for a downside, the televised capture of American troops, a repeat of Somalia, and a political disaster.
Peace in Kosovo momentarily and only partially accomplished, Clinton in the fall of 1999 was in an oddly ambiguous political position. He had survived impeachment, he had cleared the long-standing shadow of the Balkans from his presidency, the economy was still vibrant, and his standing in the polls was remarkably high, particularly for someone who had been in office for almost two terms. Yet his accomplishments were not necessarily that significant or at least significant in the ways that historians valued them. Much of his energy had gone into limiting the conservative assault upon a broad liberal agenda rather than creating an agenda of his own. After the victory in Kosovo, he had about a year and half remaining to try to define his own vision of the proper legacy of what had been a star-crossed presidency. Clinton was always campaigning, and in his last year he was campaigning all out for his place in history, his legacy very much in mind. That was true of most presidents, but for Clinton, a passionate reader and a thoughtful amateur historian himself, it was especially true; he wanted to be sure that historians took the full measure of his presidency—as he measured it himself, of course. There had been signs of this early on. In January 1997, after his reelection, he had sat at dinner next to Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was a member of the Society of American Historians, a group that had just rated the various American presidents, himself included, and had placed him somewhere in the middle. Much of the evening had been devoted to his protests over his mediocre rank and his lobbying for a higher one.
Yet a last-minute upgrade in the legacy business was not an easy accomplishment. His years in office were badly tainted by the Lewinsky affair and the failed impeachment process. Stalemated as he was on the domestic front by fierce, highly personal Republican opposition, it was not likely that he could claim any kind of groundbreaking domestic legislation as a part of his political bequest. Only in the world of foreign affairs could Clinton find some daylight. Thus, in his final year, foreign policy ascended to the top of his political agenda. Though as a candidate he had once criticized Bush for globe-trotting, Clinton had traveled more widely than any other American president, the first to set foot in Botswana, Bulgaria, Kuwait, Slovenia, Denmark, and South Africa. “If it’s Monday, this must be Turkey,” said a New York Times headline in November 1999.
To someone like Marlin Fitzwater, the former Bush press secretary, this was ironic for a man who, Fitzwater noted, had once attacked George Bush in New Hampshire for seeming to care more about Liechtenstein than Littletown and Micronesia than Manchester. Other less partisan critics obviously looked at this development somewhat skeptically, as if Clinton was engaged now in first and foremost a legacy hunt. Another headline in the New York Times in January 2000 read, “Clinton’s Final Chapter: Singled-Minded Full Steam Run at a Global Agenda.” Suddenly Clinton was always on the move, traveling constantly to foreign capitals, where, as analysts pointed out, people cared nothing about the Lewinsky matter and thought the impeachment process (as Clinton himself did) a political travesty. If foreign policy was his only hope to make a mark on history, then that was where he would place his energies.
The change in priorities was dramatic for a man who had a few days before taking office told Lee Hamilton of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that no one in America cared about foreign policy except for a handful of journalists. The old Clinton might have been cautious in midpresidency in moving toward official recognition of Hanoi and had had to be pushed forward by Vietnam veterans serving in the Senate in both parties, but now he was eager to visit the country. He did, and the trip was considered a triumph; old wounds could now be healed just a little faster. There was also in the final months of his second term a good chance that he might visit North Korea, which would have been a first. It would not exactly have been the equal in groundbreaking presidential trips to visiting Moscow or Beijing or even Hanoi, but a first was a first, and in a post–Cold War world with fewer and fewer forbidden cities, you had to take your firsts where you could get them.
Most of Clinton’s efforts in his last year went into a highly public, all-out attempt to advance the peace process in the Middle East to a new and final settlement. Clearly this one objective was closer to his heart than anything else on his agenda during the late summer and early fall of 2000. Along with the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, he worked relentlessly toward the next level of a peace accord in a series of nonstop meetings with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat at Camp David, which ran well into the morning hours. It was obviously the kind of foreign policy role Clinton enjoyed the most. Working to bring peace in the Middle East at Camp David was a more natural part for him to play than sitting around the White House weighing whether to bomb targets in downtown Belgrade. Barak, his partner, seemed equally eager to push forward.
For a brief time, the negotiations appeared to be on the verge of a breakthrough. Arafat was offered a deal that exceeded anything the Israelis had ever before tendered. But because so much of Arafat’s position was premised on expected Israeli intransigence, the Palestinian leader seemed totally unprepared by Barak’s flexibility. In the end, it was Arafat who blocked the proceedings and the negotiations ended in failure. With the breakup of the Middle East peace process, the last best hope for Clinton to stake his legacy on foreign policy accomplishments collapsed as well.
Clinton liked to tell friends, only partially tongue in cheek, that after the talks failed he received a call from Arafat praising him. “I’m a colossal failure because of you,” he answered.1 Yet what Clinton had done, however reluctantly, in the Balkans was not to be underestimated. The questions facing a president in the post–Cold War years were more difficult to deal with than in the previous, simpler era. This time the enemy was genocide, not Communism. Because there was no direct, immediate threat to the United States during the Balkan crisis, Clinton had received few positive notices for finally using American force in both Bosnia and Kosovo. But quite possibly, with few in the government and even fewer outside realizing it, his administration—and the generation it represented that had come to power after the Cold War—had finally faced a critically important test for the uses of American might, and in answering the question of whether America stood for anything beyond the defense of its own land. Clearly there were no easy answers—or necessarily even right answers—in cases like this, and just as clearly there was little political upside to the intervention. Clinton and his administration had moved slowly at first, perplexed by the equation in front of them and the lack of political support at home. They had frequently stumbled but they had, however awkwardly, and belatedly, met a vital early test of post–Cold War peacekeeping.
• • •
Of all the people who had joined the Clinton administration in 1993, Dick Holbrooke ended the eight years, by the consensus of his peers—or at least among those who still intended to serve in a future Democratic administration—as the most successful member of the foreign policy team. Madeleine Albright might be, in terms of celebrity star power, at least momentarily a larger figure because of the nature of her personal story; and because she was the first woman secretary of state, her memoirs would probably sell for a larger sum than those of anyone else who had worked in foreign policy. But it was Holbrooke who had truly impressed his peers, even many who had been dubious of him earlier on.
Probably from the moment he had visited Banja Luka in 1992, Holbrooke had understood not just the evil taking place, but the test it represented for his generation of policy makers and the administration he hoped to join. He had been weaned on one definition of evil in the world, and had been essentially a dove in the earlier construct that was so critical to him as a young man in the beginning of his career in Vietnam. Yet he had adjusted and managed to deal with the very different challenge that the Balkans represented to American policy makers late in his career.
It was not just his successful tour in Germany, the desperately needed energy he had brought to a badly unfocused State Department, and his skillful leadership at the Dayton peace conference. He had finished his tour at the United Nations with a stunning and quite unlikely victory. Through backbreaking work, he had come up with a solution that allowed America to pay its UN dues, long disputed, much of the money targeted for peacekeeping missions. Remarkably the settlement satisfied both the UN leadership and the leadership of the Congress, most notably Jesse Helms. Helms had publicly congratulated Holbrooke—a sure sign, in this case, of a tour de force. Old Holbrooke watchers noticed something else about him. He had always wanted, they thought, to be a celebrity. Because of his successes and his high visibility in the past few years, he had finally emerged as something of a star, and the role was becoming to him. He appeared more confident and centered, and those lesser qualities that had bothered people about him in the past had gone sharply into decline. He was finally first in his class.
On the military side, the dominant figure had been Wes Clark. To no small degree, he had broken ranks with the Pentagon because of his belief—effectively taught to him on location by Slobodan Milosevic—that America had to act at certain moments to be the nation it believed it was. Clark had never been popular with his peers; his Balkan activism had made him even less so, and, in the end, he paid dearly for it. But he had handled the most difficult kind of command with skill and intelligence, had lost no troops in actual combat, and had shown future administrations and officers that under certain conditions peacekeeping could be militarily successful at a relatively low cost. He had ended his tour not merely committed to the use of force in such instances, but as a caustic critic of his own branch of service for its conservatism.
• • •
At first, the NATO victory did not seem to affect Slobodan Milosevic’s hold on power in Belgrade. Yes, his forces had been defeated and his latest military moves had backfired. Yes, he had over more than a decade savaged the Yugoslav economy, and the sanctions levied against Yugoslavia had brought the economy to the edge of ruin while neighboring countries were enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Yes, almost everything he had touched while exploiting the cruelest kind of nationalism had been paid for dearly by his fellow Serbs.
There was one great unanswered question in the months after the Kosovo war came to its unsuccessful (for Serbs) end: In the period right after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, when all their neighbors were enjoying vast improvements in their political and economic status, were there any serious domestic consequences for depriving fellow citizens of their rightful chance for a better, more democratic life? Certainly Milosevic’s control over the national media was used to blur any news of the greatly improved lives of those in the surrounding nations, but people in Eastern Europe, accustomed to state-controlled media, had always known when to listen and when not to listen and had traditionally distrusted official sources of information. Still, could Milosevic’s ability to manipulate and orchestrate the ugliest aspects of Serb nationalism continue to serve as an acceptable smoke screen for his failure to permit the liberalization of the society that most Serbs hoped for?
Milosevic’s hold over the crucial sources of power seemed as complete as ever. His control over the media, especially state television, made any opposition to him on the eve of a presidential election seem frail. The opposition had no real way to make its case, and therefore neither Serbs nor foreigners could gauge how strong it was. If the damage he had inflicted on his own people was palpable, no one was eager to bet against him; he had inhaled all domestic opposition in the past.
Still, elections were elections, and Yugoslavia remained a political hybrid, blending together, in a most unlikely mixture, some elements of nascent democracy with remnants of the old communist apparatus. For Milosevic, the fiction that he was a freely elected president was important when he spoke to the Western world. Vojislav Kostunica, a constitutional lawyer and a Serb nationalist, was chosen to run against him by a group of eighteen opposition parties. At first not many people took Kostunica seriously, but by mid-September, he had clearly become a rallying point for deep-rooted and surprisingly powerful anti-Milosevic feelings, and he was posing a serious challenge to the Serb president. Kostunica was, in the true sense, a more intense nationalist than Milosevic—as one Serb journalist noted, Milosevic’s politics were always those of self, with nationalism more a convenience than a genuine passion. With Kostunica, it was a deadly serious business.
On September 24, when the election was held, despite the efforts of the Milosevic camp to jiggle the results, Kostunica obviously won; he had received more than 51 percent of the vote. Milosevic and his people then pressed for a runoff election, deliberately underreporting Kostunica’s vote to keep it below 50 percent. But Kostunica would have none of it. He would not participate in a runoff; there was no need to, he said. Suddenly, long-suppressed passions began to come to the surface, and democratic forces rose up to challenge Milosevic. For almost two weeks, he tried to hold the line, and for the first time, the fact that he ran a soft dictatorship, not a harsh one of the old order, and that some form of democratic veneer was important to him, came to the fore. In the past, Milosevic had held power by using inflammatory rhetoric against different ethnic groups and sending his troops against Bosnians, Croats, and Albanians. Now it was Serbs who were rallying against him. If he was going to hold on to power, he would have to use his troops against fellow Serbs. Soon the protest spread to the country’s miners, angry about both the lack of democracy and the collapse of their earning power in the bankrupt economy. It was a sure sign that the regime was falling apart and Milosevic was no longer able to listen, for when you lose the miners or other critical blue-collar workers in what had for so long been a dictatorship of the proletariat, you are in deep trouble. Milosevic tried to use the army to force the miners back to work, but by then things had gotten away from him. If it came to Serb soldiers firing on Serb miners, he had lost. In the end, the rebellion spread into the army, which refused to fire on fellow citizens.
As the protest increased and became a mass movement, the media, almost as if someone had thrown a giant switch, suddenly gave voice to the pluralism of Serbia’s changed politics, and journalists who had so recently been the purest of toadies began to write like free men and women. The isolation from Europe that Milosevic had inflicted on his own people became an issue. “Come home to Europe,” Tony Blair told the Serb people, shorthand, as Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times, “for human dignity, democracy, and the rule of law.” For Milosevic it was over before it was over: his control of the army and the media was gone, and his secret police could no longer save his regime. By early October, both the regular police and the army were on the side of the demonstrators as hundreds of thousands of Serbs crowded around the Parliament building, a symbol of Milosevic’s false democracy, and set it on fire. His thirteen-year regime, based on postcommunist totalitarian rule and dependent on the most violent kind of nationalism, was over. The protest that had destroyed him was, at its core, nonviolent. When the protesters took over the Parliament, they stood on the upper floors and hurled down captured propaganda pamphlets they had liberated, countless posters of Milosevic, and thousands of ballots that were supposed to have been used in the September election, already premarked for him.
The United States stayed in the background as all this took place, glad to see Kostunica come to power, but aware that its imprimatur was, after the Bosnian and Kosovo bombings, not exactly an advantage for anyone succeeding Milosevic. The NATO powers had accomplished their goal, but there were those who wondered what would have happened if they had from the start undertaken a much harsher bombing campaign aimed at downtown Belgrade and Milosevic’s instruments of power. Would that also have led to his downfall, or, by its very violence, strengthened Serb resolve and made it harder to drive him from office? In the United States, advocates of a more intense air campaign such as Lieutenant General Mike Short believed that it would have brought the same result much sooner. Others disagreed and believed it might have polarized the Serbs against the West.
• • •
The question of Milosevic’s legal status became the next dilemma for a country trying to find its way on a new, untried democratic path, and there was also the question of the degree of collective guilt for Serb crimes in Bosnia and Kosovo. Would Milosevic be arrested and turned over to international authorities for trial at The Hague (where he had already been indicted)? Or would he be tried locally for crimes against the Serb people? In late March 2000, local authorities moved to arrest Milosevic. For several days a bizarre scenario played out at his home, which police agents had entered, ready to bring him in. With the police inside his house Milosevic at one point had a pistol and aimed it at his head, threatening to commit suicide. “Do it, Daddy!” shouted his daughter, Maria. “Don’t surrender, Daddy!” But finally he did surrender, believing he had worked out a deal whereby he would not be turned over to The Hague. As the police took him off to prison, in the climax of this little melodrama, Maria fired several shots at the departing car.2
• • •
In the fall of 2000, Al Gore got his chance to run for the presidency and escape the somewhat neutered role of sitting vice president. He had quietly been the leading hawk in the administration, but because the vice president’s duty was never to be seen in any disagreement with the president, a great deal of what he believed and had wanted to do in the Balkans had been kept completely private. Some insiders in the Clinton administration spoke of the Kosovo campaign as Gore’s War, instead of Madeleine’s War. Still, he received no bonus points from that, and there was a danger, given the essential indifference of the American populace to foreign policy issues, that if he campaigned too openly and spoke too candidly about his support for the successful use of force there, it might backfire and he would have to defend himself from accusations of being too much of an interventionist.
Gore was an old-fashioned internationalist, a more committed interventionist than the president he had served. But in the spring and summer of 2000, when he needed to clarify the consistency and independence of his views, neither he nor the people immediately around him did a very good job of it. His chief national security operative, Leon Fuerth, himself a Balkan hawk, was by nature so secretive that, when talking to reporters about the vice president’s role during Bosnia and Kosovo, he seemed determined to keep Gore’s views as much of a mystery as possible. He treated inquiring reporters as if they were representatives of the KGB, thus, however involuntarily, diminishing Gore’s role during the Clinton years. Gore was, in fact, experienced and exceptionally well apprenticed, an uncommonly substantive (sometimes too substantive) political figure, but curiously clumsy when it came to making the case for himself with the facility requisite in an age of modern communications.
He seemed to be better at governance than campaigning, and during his presidential run he often came across as not merely awkward and stiff, but also prone to saying things that were self-defeating. It was as if his exceptional résumé, obviously better than anyone else’s in Washington, was not quite good enough and he had to juice it up just a bit. To those who had studied both Clinton and Gore, the outgoing president was clearly the more skilled politician, his loyalty always calibrated to the needs of the moment, his allegiances, like his thoughts, always inner-directed. Gore, not by any means as gifted a politician, was by contrast the better human being, a man of greater and more consistent beliefs and personal loyalties.
As a presidential candidate, however, he ran an oddly awkward, almost clunky race, a man never entirely in sync with himself, unsure of which Al Gore he really was. Despite his considerable and active involvement in the critical issues of a largely successful and generally popular two-term presidency, he was never able to exploit his superior background or expertise. He had, for example, cast the deciding vote for the economic policies at the start of the Clinton administration, policies, aimed at limiting the deficit, that had helped lead, in time, to unparalleled prosperity. But it was nearly impossible to tell that from listening to him on the campaign trail. He was judged in his three debates with George W. Bush to have done poorly, too aggressive and condescending in the first, then too amenable and almost lobotomized in the second. Rarely had greater knowledge of the issues and a superior curriculum vitae been of less value in a series of presidential debates. Gore, in the end, was generally judged by network pundits to be less likable than George W. Bush, as if they were assessing a college fraternity election, which it often seemed they were.
Despite the economic prosperity the country enjoyed, no small part of Gore’s problem was the dilemma of coming to the campaign from the political house of Bill Clinton, and his quite personal (rather than political) need to separate himself from Clinton over the Lewinsky-impeachment scandal. Perhaps a more deft and nimble politician could have done it readily, managing at once to take some credit for the successes of the Clinton years, while avoiding the taint of the administration’s lesser aspects. One can easily imagine, if the roles had been reversed and there had been a Gore scandal, that the new candidate, Bill Clinton, finally released from his long years of servitude as vice president, would have embraced the positive in the Gore record while neatly dodging the shadow of the scandal. But Gore was never able to find the proper degree of separation, and his animus toward Clinton appeared very personal for the world of high-level politicians, more like a son who felt betrayed by a parent than a vice president who had learned to be extremely cautious about a talented but careless president.
Foreign policy, an area where Gore held a significant edge in knowledge, experience, and interest over Bush, remained a marginal part of the campaign, and Gore was never able to exploit his vastly greater expertise. To the degree that the Clinton administration was considered a success, it was because of the improvement in the economy; to the degree that it was considered a failure, it was over the scandals that his personal behavior had precipitated. Clinton’s foreign policy decisions—most particularly in the Balkans—were barely an issue. The nation’s interest still remained inner-directed. To much of the rest of the world, America was immensely powerful, but for a nation that powerful, it was shockingly self-absorbed. George W. Bush, the son of the former president, for whom foreign policy had been his primary political passion, appeared to have little interest in the rest of the world. He had apparently never traveled to Europe, though he had visited Mexico and had stayed with his father when he was the American diplomatic representative to China. George W. Bush’s campaign autobiography, as the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd noted, devoted all of one paragraph to his six-week visit to China. The trip, she wrote, “made him applaud free markets and long for Midland [Texas].” In his campaign rhetoric, his foreign policy was limited to the belief that we should spend more money on the military, which he claimed was in bad shape because of Clinton’s budget cuts.
In general, when the subject of foreign policy came up, Bush was uneasy and tentative, as if he had walked into the wrong classroom and was being asked to take an exam for a course he had never signed up for. In an obvious difference with Gore in their respective views of the world around them, Bush did say he wanted to pull back from any use of the military in peacekeeping or humanitarian missions. He referred to the Clinton policy in the Balkans as nation-building, which it was not, and Condoleezza Rice, one of his top foreign policy advisers, implied during the campaign that if Bush were elected, he would quickly bring American troops back from the Balkans. That statement enraged people like retired general John Shalikashvili, who had been one of the principal architects of the small American force that was actually helping to keep the peace at a relatively low cost. In all, the debate over the use of the military, such as it was, fit the shrewd assessment of Bruce Herschensohn, the conservative commentator, filmmaker, and political activist who had once run for the Senate in California. The Democrats, he said, always want a small army, but want to send it everywhere, while the Republicans want a very big army and don’t want to use it at all.
• • •
George W. Bush was considered a more authentic Texan than his father, and the key to his campaign was said to be his likability, as if he were the successor to the much-revered Ronald Reagan rather than to Reagan’s more awkward vice president. From the start of the primaries, he had been the candidate of the smart (and big) Republican money, the agreeable young man bearing a famous name who had done so well in Texas that he had been reelected virtually without opposition. The Republicans, believing they were a majority party (they were most certainly a majority white American party), and still smarting from two Clinton election victories (they seemed to think that the victories were illegal, that Clinton had somehow stolen the presidency from them), were determined not to stumble on the issue of abortion again. For that purpose, a great deal of money—some $60 million—had been raised for Bush early in the game, the idea being that he would be able to get by the early ambushes the question of abortion might trigger and thus easily outdistance otherwise minor candidates who might have superior connections to the fundamentalists on the one issue they cared so passionately about. That strategy almost worked, but Senator John McCain, the former POW, ran what was by far the most zestful campaign of all the candidates in both parties, choosing to speak out on what were for many centrist, independent Americans two hot-button issues: the sleaziness of contemporary campaign financing and the power of the fundamentalists in the Republican Party. The McCain campaign eventually forced Bush into a more passionate embrace of the fundamentalists than he wanted during the South Carolina primary. To the degree that any candidate fired the imagination of ordinary centrist Americans in what was generally a grim political year, it was McCain, and his campaign was a reminder that on occasion presidential candidates should have in their curriculum vitae something besides running for office. It was McCain’s larger life experience, his ability to survive six years in a North Vietnamese prison camp and come out a richer, more tolerant, more complex human being who appealed to millions of ordinary people. He had created a serious challenge to Bush until he simply ran out of money in midcampaign.
Those who questioned Bush’s preparation and readiness for the presidency, his right to lead the world’s only superpower, and who were also bothered by what appeared to be glaring deficits in his attention span and curiosity, were reassured by their friends that if he was not exactly a big boy himself, he was surrounded by all the big boys from his father’s administration. Just to encourage those people who thought the ticket might be a little short on gravitas, Dick Cheney, good at governance but short on natural charm, and the victim of several heart attacks at a very young age, was made the vice-presidential nominee. Other former top figures from Bush One, such as Colin Powell, often appeared with Bush during the campaign. Even James Baker, in partial exile from the inner Bush circle since the disastrous 1992 campaign, which he had helped manage, was resurrected to be the signature figure in charge of spin during the prolonged struggle over the Florida votes.
The election was extremely close. Gore won the popular vote and might have won the electoral vote as well if the governor of Florida had been a Democrat and not the brother of the Republican candidate. The divisions that had first appeared on the American political landscape starting in the late sixties after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were still apparent, and the map that the television anchors put up on election night reflected two Americas, a red one and a blue one, which existed uneasily side by side. One America, the smaller, less populated states, with a decided white majority, where what were considered traditional cultural values still dominated, and where the women’s movement was not especially powerful, went Republican, often by margins close to 60–40 and sometimes even larger. That particular political-cultural breakdown also placed the senior military on the Republican side of the ledger, for more and more it tended to align itself with the Republicans over issues of values.
In the other America, much stronger in the more populous states, those with larger cities and dramatically different demographics and changed values, the Democrats did well because there were far larger black and Hispanic populations, the women’s movement was more powerful, and gays represented a more defined and well-organized political force. In the end some 105 million Americans had voted, 539,897 more for Gore than Bush on the certified results. But on the most important vote of all, that of the Supreme Court of the United States, Bush won a cliff-hanger, 5–4.
• • •
Bill Clinton, whose political sense had always been so sure, departed the White House as ingloriously as any president in recent years, save only Richard Nixon. Buoyed in his last months by surprisingly high approval ratings that reached into the midsixties, he had been the omnipresent American figure, flying everywhere and appearing on every television news show to thank people. He clearly enjoyed the final few weeks of his presidency, letting the people of the country know—especially after the grimness of the Bush-Gore campaign—how much they were going to miss him. It was as if he was not merely an outgoing president, but the popular culture’s reigning master of ceremonies. Some critics (and friends) might have been left wondering if it was an entirely good thing for a president to exit office so popular. Did that mean he had squirreled away too much of his own political power for too long and not taken enough risks?
Not to worry. Bill Clinton never wore too much success too well for too long, and disaster, as it always did with him, lurked just around the corner. Almost as soon as he left the White House, a firestorm arose over a number of inexplicable pardons he had granted in the last minutes of his presidency, most particularly the one to a fugitive financier named Marc Rich, whose financial and political dealings were one giant mountain of sleaze and corruption. Rich was one of those remarkable refugees who rewards a country that takes him in by seeking to circumvent all its financial laws, and believes as well that his earnings should not go to anything as mundane as paying taxes. Rich had shown not the slightest element of remorse about his thievery, but had devoted himself in his years as a fugitive in Europe to buying access to powerful people through allegedly good works that were the very embodiment of me-first charity. In the Rich case, as in a number of other pardons, Clinton had clearly not checked with the prosecutors, and what he had done was brazen, ugly, and careless, the handiwork of a man who thought he could always get away with whatever he did and would always be forgiven because he was so talented. The pardon to Rich, and a number of other equally improbable and undeserving pardons, stunned even the most loyal of Clinton’s inner circle and were devastating to the Democratic Party’s leadership.
Oddly enough, another incident was just as revealing about the contradictions within this immensely gifted and equally flawed man. Quietly, in the final hours of his presidency, Clinton worked out a deal with Robert Ray, Ken Starr’s successor as independent counsel. Ray would drop the grand jury investigation against Clinton, and as part of the quid pro quo, Clinton agreed to forfeit his Arkansas law license for five years, pay a $25,000 fine to cover legal fees, and not to seek reimbursement for his own attorneys’ fees. His had been a long, unpleasant struggle with the independent counsel’s office, and though much of it was Clinton’s own fault, the righteousness of Starr’s pursuit was unbecoming, and one could hardly blame Clinton for seeking on his last day in office what was, in effect, his own pardon. But, in the opinion of some people watching, the deal was distasteful because of Clinton’s failure, once it had been agreed upon, to come forward and explain it to the country. Up until then, he who had been everywhere at once, holding impromptu news conferences wherever he went, suddenly disappeared from public view. Instead he sent the White House lawyer and John Podesta, one of his top staff people, to face the country in his place. This, the unwillingness to deal with something so messy, had echoes of the young Clinton who had not merely managed to avoid service in Vietnam, but had played so skillfully with Colonel Holmes, the Arkansas ROTC officer.
• • •
Clinton’s disastrous farewell allowed George W. Bush a lengthy honeymoon in his early weeks in the White House because so much of the nation’s attention was focused—malevolently—on the bizarre final acts of his predecessor. When Bush emerged from the transition period, he was surrounded by those who had been the leading figures in Desert Storm, arguably his father’s most dramatic accomplishment. There was Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, now the vice president, who quickly became the driving force within the White House, and Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was now secretary of state. Donald Rumsfeld had been a political opponent of the senior Bush and had often spoken caustically in private of what he considered Bush senior’s intellectual limitations. But Rumsfeld was the original sponsor of some of the key Bush people—he had discovered Cheney and had promoted Frank Carlucci, who had, in turn, reached down for Colin Powell. Rumsfeld was named secretary of defense. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, was a Brent Scowcroft protégé. Thus, in terms of foreign policy Bush Two was like something of a reunion of Bush One. Most of the senior people appeared to be cautious about any use of the military for the kind of humanitarian missions that the Clinton people, tentatively and on occasion erratically, had been moving toward. Bush Two was composed of men—and now women—who had dealt well with the final months and weeks of the Cold War, but had not been particularly deft in adapting to the very different circumstances in a changed post–Cold War world.
If anything symbolized that, it was Rumsfeld’s passion for a missile shield, something he had been involved with in the past and that loomed as an exceptionally expensive piece of hardware, which might not ever work, and which, if we went after it, would surely siphon immense amounts of money from other very demanding military projects. To many nonpartisan analysts in the world of national security and intelligence, the shield was a kind of hightech Maginot Line, the wrong idea at the wrong time. America’s lead in traditional weaponry was vast and growing greater because of the staggering expense of the technology involved. Thus, rogue states would probably see the gap in aerospace power widen rather than narrow in the years to come. That was one reason not to invest in a missile shield. The other was more basic—a belief among many senior intelligence analysts that the greatest threat to an open society like America came from terrorists, rather than the military power of rogue states, which offered exceptional targets themselves. The real danger to an open society like America was the ability of a terrorist, not connected to any sitting government, to walk into an American city with a crude atomic weapon, delivered, as it were, by hand in a cardboard suitcase.
Early in the new Bush administration, during the inevitable struggle for territory and power, something of a fault line appeared within the national security world, with Rumsfeld and a few people in the White House taking in general a harder line, and Powell at State taking a more moderate one. Of the two factions, the hard-liners appeared to be more influential with this young, neophyte president. On humanitarian issues, the attitude of the new Bush team, said one Washington analyst who had watched them deal with these questions, was more and more like that reflected in the old Jim Baker line, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” A dozen years after the end of the Cold War, tensions between the United States and Russia were on the rise, though in no way resembling the continual bipolar crisis that had dominated so much of the second half of the twentieth century. Most Americans did not care very much about Russia as long as it was not a threat, and the ongoing struggle within Russia to keep some form of democracy alive, a great and important story of the new century, did not interest many Americans, especially the executive producers and the anchors of the evening news shows. The role of America in the post–Cold War world, which had not been clearly articulated or defined during the Clinton years, was still murky in January 2001 when the presidential guard changed. Foreign policy was not high on the political agenda, primarily because whatever the forces that might threaten the future of this country were, they were not yet visible.