IN 2009, A synergy I had never experienced in the Senate finally materialized: a partnership with a president and vice president whom I knew well and, in Joe Biden’s case, had worked with closely for years; the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, a critical committee with impact; and a role and relationships in my caucus and across the aisle that allowed me to engage meaningfully on a whole set of issues that had long animated me.
I had reason to doubt whether I’d ever experience the Senate in that way. Basic math predicted otherwise. I loved the Foreign Relations Committee, but ahead of me in seniority were two friends and contemporaries: Chris Dodd, a year younger than I was, who had been elected in 1980 to take Abe Ribicoff’s seat, and Joe Biden, sixty-seven, who had been elected at twenty-nine in 1972 (sworn in only after he turned thirty, per the constitutional requirement) and would always outpace any of us in seniority. The three of us enjoyed and respected the committee, its history and its potential impact. I never imagined the Senate without Joe or Chris, and I certainly never dreamed either of them would give up the committee’s gavel voluntarily. Meanwhile, I was behind Max Baucus—with whom I shared a birthday—and Jay Rockefeller on the Senate Finance Committee, and Jay was ahead of me on the Commerce Committee as well. In other words, I had phenomenal committee assignments for me and for Massachusetts, but I had zero expectation of being a chairman of any one of them. It would take an act of God for me to chair any committee besides the Small Business Committee.
God may well have intervened. Suddenly, Joe was Barack Obama’s vice president. Chris, who was next in line for the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, felt that at least for the 111th Congress, with Connecticut’s economy reeling from the financial meltdown, he had to take the helm of the Banking Committee to oversee financial regulatory reform and focus on the economic recovery.
So there I was, against a lot of odds: chairman of the same committee before which I had testified at the invitation of Chairman William Fulbright in 1971. This was a committee rich in history—a committee where future presidents, from Jack Kennedy to Barack Obama; future vice presidents, from Hubert Humphrey to Joe Biden; and legends of the Senate, from Henry Clay to Arthur Vandenberg, had all served.
My chairmanship meant a lot to me. I had invested years to get there. Most of all, I was excited for what we might be able to accomplish. I knew from my own experience in 1971, admittedly in a very different era, that the committee could make a difference and its chairman had a responsibility to try.
I knew that the new administration, by necessity, would be focused first on rescuing the U.S. economy. That meant there would be ample opportunity for our committee to take on some off-the-grid challenges. I started out with a solid relationship with the president, who had been a member of the committee, and especially with his then deputy national security advisor Tom Donilon, who was as clear-eyed about the challenges as he was competent in harnessing the bureaucratic process.
I knew there might be opportunities, if not for collaboration, at least for cross-pollination with the new administration, but I was nevertheless determined to protect the committee as its own independent entity, with prerogatives separate from any administration, something Dick Lugar had tried to do during Republican administrations. I also wanted to restore the committee’s investigative capacity, which had atrophied over the years. Remembering how important that work had been in the 1980s and ’90s, I recruited Doug Frantz, the lead investigative journalist for the Los Angeles Times, to come to the committee and build his own cell of investigators. Indeed, there was a lot to do, and I was eager to put my shoulder to the wheel.
• • •
EVEN A BRIEF glance at the world beyond our borders indicated that Afghanistan was especially critical for many reasons. As the administration was getting its sea legs, it was clear a new chapter with Iraq was in the offing. The unwillingness of the Iraqi government to provide a workable status of forces agreement to keep a substantial number of American troops in the country seemed to force the administration’s hand. The last American troops would be leaving Iraq.
As a result, all eyes were shifting from Baghdad to Kabul—back to the war in Afghanistan, which many of us argued had lost its focus the minute the United States, voluntarily and unilaterally, plunged into what I had called the “grand diversion” of the war in Iraq. The Iraq War came at enormous cost to our interests and influence, and Afghanistan in particular paid a huge price for this misadventure in the Middle East.
As I took on the chairmanship, I remained especially anxious about Afghanistan for a number of reasons. Its history as the “graveyard of empires” was instructive. Afghanistan was the country where Great Britain and Russia had suffered enormous losses. Even knowing that historical background, I still believed that history is not destiny. However, there were some (if not many) people—including some of my staff on the committee—who argued that Afghanistan was destined to be a quagmire because it had been a quagmire for other countries. I thought we owed ourselves a more rigorous intellectual examination. I wanted to know if we had clear goals, with clear limitations and understanding about what we were there to do. I wanted Afghans to understand that we were not there to stay or conquer, with hopes we could avoid the traps that had befallen others. Could discipline and clarity of purpose make a difference for us? I was always mindful that unlike the British and the Russians, we didn’t go into Afghanistan with imperial aims.
But there were many key questions: Did we have a clear plan and a coherent strategy? Did we know why we were there and when the country would be stable enough to leave?
When I chaired Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state, I tried to probe these questions, not so much for the benefit of the nominee, who was smart and capable and didn’t need a lecture, but for the entire committee, for all of us involved in foreign policy making. Where were we going in Afghanistan?
The rationale that had earned one hundred votes to go to Afghanistan was a direct response to an act of war—the most egregious, spontaneous attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. We went in to get Osama bin Laden, and we kicked the Taliban out of Afghanistan because they had harbored al-Qaeda and provided it a platform for terror. Most critically, they refused to retract their support when given ample opportunity to do so.
Now, in 2009, almost eight years after 9/11, the impunity with which drug traffickers operated, coupled with stories of rampant corruption undermining the faith of Afghans in their new government and ours, had become significant problems. It seemed we were assuming full responsibility for solving them. I reminded the committee that we had not intended for Afghanistan to become our fifty-first state, a statement that rankled some of the neoconservative media outlets, who thought I was dumbing down our goals in Afghanistan. I was simply stating what I thought was obvious and in this case important: our goal there was stability, an Afghanistan that could hold together on its own, even if it wasn’t going to be a model of Jeffersonian democracy. Looking back, it is amazing to think that was a controversial statement at all. To the contrary, almost a decade later it looks more like an optimistic one.
The administration was wrestling with this issue as well. There was no consensus. My friend Richard Holbrooke, whom Secretary Clinton had brought on to lead the State Department’s diplomatic effort, ran into a dual buzz saw. He didn’t click with President Obama, and more problematically for Richard, Hamid Karzai decided that Holbrooke was plotting against him, which limited his room to maneuver diplomatically. I’d heard from Vice President Biden that the Pentagon—General David Petraeus and General Stanley McChrystal both—seemed to be pushing the president into a corner about an additional surge of troops, after he had already begun his term by sending thirty thousand more troops than had been promised initially. The president worried that the military’s requests for more troops would be infinite, no matter what the actual conditions on the ground.
I worried that the debate in Congress and the public seemed to focus almost exclusively on absolute numbers—how many U.S. and allied troops were required, how many Afghan soldiers and police we needed to train, how many more billions we needed to invest at a moment of enormous need at home.
What we weren’t talking about nearly enough was whether any amount of money, any rise in troop levels or any clever metrics would make a difference if the basic mission was ill-conceived. We needed to expand the discussion to wrestle with fundamental questions and examine core assumptions. We had to agree on a clear definition of the mission and decide what was an achievable and acceptable goal for Afghanistan and for the United States. We also needed to know the size of the footprint that goal demanded and to weigh the probabilities and costs of getting there.
At the same time, we had to assess and evaluate some intangibles, including whether we were looking at Afghanistan and our presence there through the same set of eyes as the Afghans themselves. On my first trip to Afghanistan as chairman, I looked out the window of the armored Humvee as we drove through the dusty streets of Kabul. A little girl was playing with some toys on the side of the road. My mind immediately flashed back to Vietnam and the kids who often lined the canals or streets, staring at us with a “what are you doing here?” look. Right away I thought, What do we look like to that young girl? I might as well be from another planet. I was driving around in a massive armored vehicle with General Petraeus, a brilliant military leader who literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. We both knew that winning hearts and minds was the centerpiece of any counterinsurgency effort and operations, but one look in that girl’s eyes told me that we faced an uphill battle. I had strong misgivings that even with the best of efforts, we wouldn’t be able to persuade many ordinary Afghans that any foreign military presence on their soil represented a force that could possibly be on their side. We did have vital national security interests at stake and couldn’t walk away precipitously, but I wanted to make sure we weren’t setting ourselves up to wear out our welcome either.
Afghanistan’s disastrous elections in August 2009 almost left the United States with no choice but to reconsider staying at all. It pulled me into the country’s challenging politics and personalities in ways I wouldn’t have predicted.
I had long planned to go to Afghanistan and Pakistan over the Senate’s Columbus Day break. It made sense to take five or six days, get out and see for myself what was happening in the country. I managed to get to Helmand Province, the region in Afghanistan they call the “snake’s head”—lush with vegetation—where the surge of new U.S. troops was helping turn Taliban territory back into the hands of the central government and allied troops.
As it turned out, the real combat I witnessed was political and right in Kabul.
The tension was palpable. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a retired general and former commander of our forces in Afghanistan, briefed me and was candid about his level of concern. The August 20 first round of elections had been denounced by many—from the way Karzai had announced the date in the spring (leaving the opposition little time to organize), to the lack of security and turnout, to wide allegations of fraud. After votes were thrown out as fraudulent, neither Karzai nor his leading opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, was over the 50 percent needed to avoid a second-round runoff. Karzai refused to accept that he hadn’t been reelected outright, and he refused to agree to a runoff. Governance was gridlocked with the prospect of the entire government collapsing.
From the outside, after the disputed election of the late summer, the dysfunction was evident to the entire country. But on the inside, Eikenberry told me it was even worse. Karzai was clashing with Americans and believed that the United States had conspired against him and that the international election observers had disenfranchised his Pashtun voters. He saw the UN monitors’ disqualification of around 250,000 votes from Pashtun areas as an international conspiracy.
It seemed entirely possible that a constitutional crisis was unfolding, and if some way forward wasn’t devised, then Karzai was going to risk having the NATO coalition fall apart. Clearly, European countries suffering from Afghanistan fatigue weren’t going to stick it out on the ground if the country’s government was imploding. I got the strong sense that the United States wouldn’t be long for the battle either if Karzai transformed himself into an autocrat dismissing the political will of perhaps half of his own population.
Ambassador Eikenberry hoped I could at least engage Karzai a bit more and see if he was willing to listen to the American perspective. I was happy to try, and certainly I could convey just how much the Congress was watching and listening carefully to the standoff in his country. I suspected that half the value I could bring wouldn’t be in what I said but in what I heard. Listening is critical coin in diplomacy, too often devalued and dismissed. I liked President Karzai. I had a good rapport with him in part because I respected his patriotism and the courage of his journey to get where he was. He seemed to know that intuitively. He knew that I listened to him, and frankly, I had a pretty high tolerance for his rants, something I’d learned in the Senate dealing with some colleagues who often needed to vent before you could have a productive conversation with them.
I came to the table with Karzai able to relate to him on a level that was important: a political level. Most diplomatic issues for the United States were also someone else’s domestic political problem. I’m always a little bit surprised how, in the Senate or in the media, we often chalk up a colleague’s actions to the politics of their base or their complicated standing with voters, but we forget that political leaders of other countries answer to a constituency as well. I was mindful that I could relate to Karzai as one politician to another. I hoped this common ground might help open up avenues for solving problems that otherwise were not apparent.
Clearly, though, nothing was going to be easy.
At the time, there was a popular book out about Afghanistan and Pakistan titled Three Cups of Tea, a reference to the old saying that “the first time you share tea, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time, you become family.” I’d soon be joking that my marathon sessions with Karzai were more like three thousand cups of tea. Hours went by, sometimes four, five or six hours at a time. I tried to listen to all his concerns about his country, not just those that were on my agenda. But when we got into the nitty-gritty of the election, the intensity picked up palpably.
We were sitting in a palace with giant rooms and dark oak paneling straight out of The Addams Family. At one point Karzai looked me dead in the eye and said, “John, I cannot disenfranchise 250,000 Pashtun voters. I will not survive.” He walked out of the room to take a phone call, but I think he intended to let his words sink in and collect himself for his next volley.
I turned to our deputy ambassador to Afghanistan at the time, Frank Ricciardone, a terrific Foreign Service officer from Medford, Massachusetts. He was always a straight shooter. “Frank, were there actually 250,000 Pashtun voters who were disenfranchised?” I asked. Frank smiled as he replied, “No, it’s more like 25 Pashtun voters, each of them filling out 10,000 ballots.”
We took breaks over two days to let the tension recede a bit. We spoke about our families and Afghanistan’s history, about his father’s assassination and his own journey home from Pakistan, his aspirations for his country and his concerns about the U.S.-Afghan relationship. He voiced his worry that Afghan Pashtuns were being treated unfairly and complained how no one appreciated the weight of the decisions being foisted upon him. I told Karzai that I thought I had some idea of what he was going through and took him back to the 2004 election, to the years I’d spent building a presidential campaign, the debates with President Bush, the Swift boat smears, and the feeling of elation on election night when I believed we had won. I also talked about the debate I’d had over whether to concede or whether to take Bush to court over Ohio’s provisional ballots and the voter suppression allegations and irregularities with the voting machines. I ended this digression by saying that in the cold light of morning, I had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t good for my country to see two consecutive presidential elections litigated in the Supreme Court when the legitimacy of our democracy was so important. Karzai opened up in a way that he hadn’t before, and I believed he was getting close to accepting that he had to embrace a second-round runoff.
I now began to feel some pressure on our travel clock. I had to get to Pakistan for a preplanned stop that I simply couldn’t cancel. I was reasonably confident that President Karzai was moving to a more reasonable position. Unfortunately, by the time I was wrapping up my stop in Islamabad and aiming to get back to Washington in time for votes, I got a call from Ambassador Eikenberry to the effect that all hell was breaking loose. Karzai had told him there would be no runoff. Eikenberry asked if I could return.
I called Washington to find out the vote schedule. I asked Leader Harry Reid if there was any way he could delay the votes by one more day. Let’s just say that Harry doesn’t pull punches or waste his time with small talk, and on the best of days, he never ends a phone call even by saying goodbye. Harry was not pleased, to say the least. Before I could explain the details of just how tenuous things were in Kabul, he said, “Absolutely not,” and click, that call was over. I told Eikenberry I didn’t see a way for this to work. He had Secretary Clinton call me. She had been terrific throughout the trip, both in welcoming me as an ad hoc additional member of the team and never making me feel as if I were treading on Richard Holbrooke’s turf. She put the arm on me to give Kabul one more shot. I agreed on one condition: she had to call Harry Reid. She laughed.
I got back to Kabul around dinnertime, and by the end of what was now my third night with Karzai, I thought we had a deal. When we got to the palace the next morning, it was clear something had changed—and not in the right direction. That’s the nature of diplomacy. You’re dealing with human beings. Sometimes when they sleep on things and talk to different people, they wake up with a different point of view. In this case, I felt as if the political considerations we’d spent so much time working through with Karzai had reasserted themselves. I really was out of time. I had to go back to Washington, and it wasn’t clear if I would be able to return to Kabul anytime soon given the Senate schedule.
I decided to try to separate Karzai from his advisors, to make it a one-on-one Hail Mary conversation. In my experience over the years, I’ve learned that sometimes it’s essential to isolate the decision-maker from any external influence so that, in effect, you can have the last word. As the day wound down, I still couldn’t get Karzai over the hump. Finally, when we were two or three hours away from my wheels-up time, I decided we needed a little fresh air. Atmospherics matter. I wanted to shift his focus. The grounds around the palace ensured that I could be alone with him. We walked down a long path. I put my arm around him and said, “Mr. President, we’re going to find a way to make this work for both of our countries.”
As we walked, we went back over the ground we’d covered the past four days. Most leaders like to think of themselves in a historical context. I talked to President Karzai about the historical context of this moment. He could go down in history as the founding father of the new Afghanistan, or he could be a failed petty politician. I painted a picture for him of two different paths—one in which he was respected as a statesman and the first democratic leader of Afghanistan, and another where he undermined the democratic process and helped lead his country down a dark path toward war and dictatorship. I told him that I hoped he would pick the right path, but that I needed to know his answer. Karzai said simply, “Okay, I’ll do it, but I cannot accept the invalidation of 250,000 Pashtun voters.” I told him that as long as he was on board with the runoff, we were heading in the right direction.
As Karzai and I took the stage to announce that he had agreed to a runoff, one of his aides passed my team a note: Karzai’s final vote tally. I opened it and read: “The final number—49.7 percent.” I flashed my palms very subtly toward the sky and shot my team a look. Sometimes diplomacy isn’t pretty, but in the end, we achieved the right outcome.
Secretary Clinton was a person of her word. She did call Reid and thanked him for allowing me to screw up the best-laid Senate plans for votes. Harry—whom I really liked as a colleague for many reasons but most of all because he was a straight shooter, although you never wanted him mad at you—made one of the most gracious and entirely unnecessary gestures I’d seen in twenty-five years as a senator. In a speech on the floor of the Senate, he described our uncomfortable phone conversation and acknowledged he had been angry, but he said that he was proud to see that a member of the Senate—a chairman of one of his committees—had made a difference in solving an international crisis. It was vintage Harry Reid, totally unexpected, and the moment smacked of the old Senate, the Senate of 1985 that I’d known and revered and, sadly, seen fade away—sure, a place where tempers might flare, but where, in the end, a strong sense of shared purpose prevailed.
For me, it was back to the work of democracy at home—and a sense of satisfaction knowing that at least in Kabul, a democracy that the sacrifice of American troops and our diplomats had helped create had dodged yet another bullet. President Karzai and Dr. Abdullah’s decision to agree to a runoff election showed that both men were willing to put their country ahead of politics. It wasn’t our mission to determine the political realities of Afghanistan, and it shouldn’t be. That job belongs to the Afghans themselves. Now at least we knew that they still had a democracy to hold on to and that they’d live to fight another day.
• • •
NONE OF THE work we were doing in Afghanistan during the Obama years had much of a shot at long-term success if we couldn’t improve cooperation with Pakistan. The odds against us were long and complicated. In 2008, Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel and I had sat in Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf’s office the morning after the vote tally showed he had lost an election. We’d visited some polling stations with election monitors the day before, which is an interesting proposition in Pakistan. I think the number of armed Pakistani escorts along with the three of us outnumbered actual voters by about a hundred to one. The security situation was challenging, but the elections turned out to be free and fair. As we were sitting in Musharraf’s office the next morning, the only question was whether he’d accept the results. He had been a military man in a country that had a long history of military coups, which was famously how he had arrived on the scene. We were concerned that he’d find a pretext to invalidate the election and continue as a military ruler.
None of us knew what would happen. There was a palpable sense of uncertainty in the air. The second Musharraf walked into the room, I tried to read his facial expression. He lingered for a moment, then sat down and barely said any of the customary diplomatic pleasantries, but cut straight to the chase: “I know why you all are here. I’m going to respect the results of the election because it’s the right thing to do for my country, but I’m not going to do the other things you want.” He had incarcerated a supreme court justice and we’d made clear our interest in seeing him released from prison. Musharraf turned toward us again. “Let me say to you very clearly, be careful what you wish for. Pakistan is an incredibly difficult country to govern. If we’re not careful, it could be overrun by extremists.” It was a chilling reminder that while we had made it over one hurdle in Pakistan, there were always more to follow—and Pakistan’s direction would matter enormously to Afghanistan.
Now, more than a year after that trip, I was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and the new administration was trying to think of its Afghanistan strategy in a broader context that included Pakistan. We wanted to make a big move to secure greater coordination and cooperation from Pakistan. Everyone, administration and Congress, understood that our relationship with Pakistan was messy. There’s a long history in Pakistan and the region of these governments hedging their bets. We were concerned they were playing a double game with us, supporting the United States on the one hand and the Taliban and the Haqqani Network, an Afghan guerrilla group, on the other. I still remembered Daniel Patrick Moynihan describing to me what he saw as the difference between Pakistan and Afghanistan: “Pakistan is a government without a country, Afghanistan is a country without a government.” It was a sad statement but a wry insight: Pakistan’s security apparatus had endured and thrived in a very tough neighborhood for a very long time precisely through shifting allegiances. Its survival was our confusion. As a result, we were never certain how much we could trust the Pakistani government. One thing we were certain of was that we needed to change our relationship with the Pakistani people. If the people of Pakistan had a better sense of the United States as their partner, then regional cooperation and reconciliation could be made easier.
For decades, the United States had sought the cooperation of Pakistani decision-makers through military aid, while paying scant attention to the aspirations of the broader population. This arrangement was rapidly disintegrating: we were paying too much and getting too little, although most Pakistanis believed exactly the opposite. As a result, an alarming percentage of the Pakistani population saw America as a greater threat than al-Qaeda. Until that changed, I knew there was little chance of ending tolerance for terrorist groups or persuading any Pakistani government to devote the political capital necessary to deny such groups sanctuary and covert material support.
During our trip to monitor the elections, Chairman Biden, Senator Hagel and I joined in promoting a major aid program to Pakistan to try to change the relationship for the better. Now, as the new chairman, I continued to shape this concept. The theory was simple: a major commitment of civilian aid might change the nature of our relationship. We wanted to empower those Pakistanis who were trying to steer the world’s second-largest Muslim country onto a path of moderation, stability and regional cooperation. That was the goal of the bill I introduced with the critical partnership and support of Senator Dick Lugar.
By then, Dick’s Nunn-Lugar efforts on nonproliferation had become shorthand for bipartisanship in foreign policy. We’d worked closely together in the 1980s to help bring about free and fair elections in the Philippines. He was the right partner for this effort to jam major foreign aid funding through a Senate still reeling from the way issues such as foreign aid had been demagogued to death and turned into surefire negative applause lines. With our economy and a whole lot of people still hurting from the Great Recession, it was not the ideal time to ask Americans to send money to a country where we weren’t popular.
I believed in this new approach to Pakistan because I’d seen it work firsthand. Following the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, the United States had spent nearly $1 billion on relief efforts. Having visited places like Mansehra and Muzaffarabad in the earthquake’s aftermath, I knew the awesome power of the operation we launched. I’ll never forget flying by helicopter to the northwestern part of Pakistan, not far from the big Himalayas, and landing in a small spot by the river. I met kids in a tent city. It was the first time they had ever come out of the mountains and the first time they had ever gone to school. It was extraordinary to see American servicemen and -women saving the lives of Pakistani citizens. Frankly, it was invaluable in changing the perceptions of America in Pakistan.
In the wake of natural disaster, we weren’t the only ones to recognize the need for public diplomacy based in deeds rather than words: the front group for the terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Good) had set up a string of professional relief camps throughout the region. Our effort, however, was far more effective, and the permanent gift of the U.S. Army’s last mobile Army surgical hospital helped seal the deal. For a brief period, America was going toe-to-toe with extremists in a true battle of hearts and minds and actually winning.
I knew it was up to us to re-create this success on a broader scale, without waiting for a natural or even a man-made disaster. The question was: How could we most effectively demonstrate the true friendship of the American people for the Pakistani people?
The aid bill was an important first step. It was a prime example of “smart power,” because it used both economic and military aid to achieve an overall effect greater than the sum of its parts. Nonmilitary aid was increased—both in actual dollars and for a longer time frame. These funds would build schools, roads and clinics. In other words, they aimed to do on a regular basis what we briefly achieved with our earthquake relief, but this money would do a great deal more than good deeds. It would empower the fledgling civilian government to show that it could deliver the citizens of Pakistan a better life. It might embolden the moderates, giving them something concrete to put forward as evidence that friendship with America brings rewards as well as perils. It could also encourage the vast majority of Pakistanis who rejected the terrifying vision of al-Qaeda and the Taliban but were angered and frustrated by the perception that their own leaders and America’s leaders didn’t care about their daily struggle.
To do this right, I knew that we needed to make a long-term commitment. Most Pakistanis felt that America had used and abandoned their country in the past—most notably, after the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. They feared we would desert them again the moment that the threat from al-Qaeda subsided. It was this history and this fear that caused Pakistan to hedge its bets. If we ever expected the country to break decisively with the Taliban and other extremist groups, I knew we would have to provide firm assurance that we were not merely foul-weather friends. This bill offered just such an assurance.
On the security side, the bill placed conditions on military aid that would ensure that the money was used for the intended purposes. For Pakistan to receive any military assistance, it had to meet an annual certification that its army and spy services were genuine partners. Just as important as the economic and military components of the bill were how those elements fit and worked together. Making this unequivocal commitment to the Pakistani people enabled us to calibrate our military assistance more effectively. In any given year, we could choose to increase or decrease it, or leave it unchanged. For too long, the Pakistani military had felt we were bluffing when we threatened to cut funding for a particular weapons system or expensive piece of hardware. If our economic aid was tripled to $1.5 billion, we could afford to end this game. We’d finally be able to make this choice on the basis of our national interests, rather than the institutional interests of the Pakistani security forces.
When the bill passed on October 16, 2009, we were confident that the Pakistanis would be appreciative. Instead, I got a real-life reminder of the danger of what can happen inadvertently when certain compromises are necessitated in order to get a bill passed. Dick Lugar and I had passed a straightforward bill through the Senate. The House, on the other hand, had larded up their near-identical bill with a lot of language that the activist community had recommended, most of it boilerplate about civilian control of the military, conditioning the money on reform inside Pakistan, and insisting on a rather cumbersome process of showing how the money was being spent. Most of it was perfectly reasonable thinking from the American policy perspective, but I worried how it would play in Pakistan. Still, because my priority was getting a bill passed into law, and this bill didn’t actually change anything in practice, we swallowed the House’s language. The bills were combined and the final act was titled the Enhanced Partnership of Pakistan Act, but became known as the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act.
Unfortunately, in Pakistan, the bill was initially reported not as a new day in the relationship between our people, but as an infringement on their sovereignty, an act of neocolonialism. It was obvious it was necessary for me to return to Pakistan. I had envisioned my trip as a rollout in-country of our bill, an opportunity to talk about its benefits and make clear that the United States cared about the Pakistani people. Instead, I wound up spending most of my time just trying to keep Pakistani stakeholders on board and explaining to them that we respected their sovereignty. The whole trip had a no-good-deed-goes-unpunished quality about it. Any politician who thinks a town hall meeting in the United States is confrontational ought to try one in Pakistan. We’d worked hard to get support for the Pakistani people, despite real misgivings in the Congress and among the American public. Now here I was in Pakistan, trying to convince the leaders and the public that the United States was not violating their sovereignty. Why didn’t I just pack up and say, “To hell with all of you”? Because like it or not, it was in the United States’ interests to help enable success in Afghanistan and stronger regional security, and you couldn’t do that if you weren’t willing to endure a frustrating exercise in public diplomacy in Pakistan.
The trip and this entire period was a big reminder that so much of what we try to do here at home depends on how things are messaged and framed overseas. No matter what we do, we have a responsibility to explain it properly, taking into full account how the effort will be seen by a public that can’t possibly be expected to understand and isn’t much interested in our domestic politics. At the same time, we have a right to hold a country accountable for its politicians playing politics with the generous intentions of American taxpayers. I made a mental note to myself of a lesson learned, that when we decide that doing something is in our country’s interests, we have to overcome the instinct in Congress to act in a way that scores points and makes people feel good but might contribute to undermining our goals along the way. All the extra language in that bill did nothing to advance our actual goals, but it sure got in the way of communicating our intentions to the people we aimed to help.
Then the floods came. Weeks after the legislation was signed into law and the initial media firestorm had dissipated, in the summer of 2010 raging floodwaters killed more than 1,600 people and left great swaths of Pakistan devastated. I detoured from another trip to return there to observe the American aid effort. I had to helicopter out to the hardest-hit areas. It was important to show how the dollars from the act just passed by our Congress would be used to address immediate humanitarian needs. As we were choosing our landing sites, it dawned on me that it was all well and good for me to go there to make the case that the United States was on the side of the Pakistani people, but what about the president of Pakistan? I called President Asif Zardari and asked him to tour with me. He was out of the country at the time, so I suggested he get back to Pakistan right away and join me. He agreed, but once he was added to the mix, the number of places we could visit diminished by orders of magnitude. There were few areas in the country where President Zardari was welcome. When we cross-referenced those places with the areas where our security detail could land, we were down to two or three.
When we finally landed at our first site, we were shepherded over to a corner of a soccer field, where we were briefed on relief efforts by President Zardari’s military people. Thousands of Pakistanis had gathered around the soccer field, but none of them could see what we were doing. The entire purpose of the visit was defeated. We had wanted to share the visual of a president actively working to help his people in distress, accompanied by my speaking directly to Pakistanis about America’s efforts to address their humanitarian needs. Instead, the event turned into a briefing on a soccer field with a security perimeter of a hundred yards in every direction. The Pakistani people were blocked from seeing what we were doing. It was a microcosm of the frustrations I experienced when we passed the bill in the first place, only to be forced to convince the Pakistanis that we weren’t violating their sovereignty. I was concerned that this recent episode would only increase the sense of alienation that the Pakistani people felt for the United States. Watching from hundreds of yards away as military helicopters landed in a soccer field seemed to exacerbate rather than alleviate the problems. I wondered whether there would ever be a way to truly communicate the good we were doing in a country where mistrust and paranoia had clouded our relationship for a long, long time.
On a personal level, my extracurricular efforts resulted in my becoming a trusted interlocutor with the Pakistani government. I was known to be fair and legitimately concerned about U.S.-Pakistan relations. However, there would soon be another crisis requiring some quiet intervention, a crisis that fell squarely into the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished category that was much in evidence throughout this entire effort. It became known as a four-word phrase that made it all seem more mysterious than it really was—“the Ray Davis affair.”
At the end of January 2011, on the streets of Lahore, which is a pretty tough area and the world’s largest Punjabi city, there was a shoot-out that had left two Pakistani civilians dead. The shooter was an American citizen working for a private security firm, an Army veteran named Ray Davis who was a federal contractor. It quickly became what in diplomatic terms is most unartfully referred to as a shit sandwich. Davis said he was the victim of an attempted robbery, but with two dead Pakistanis and crowds growing apoplectic, police threw him in jail and charged him with murder. Our consulate’s appropriate efforts to secure his release based on diplomatic immunity weren’t working.
There was plenty of public attention in Pakistan, along with a lot of conspiracy theory–type rumors about the CIA that inflamed suspicions about the too many armed Americans to begin with in a country sensitive to our presence—and the streets of Lahore had been seething. Worry abounded on both sides, but we Americans were constantly concerned about how much anyone was really in control in Pakistan—something we all had reason to question again later that spring after Osama bin Laden was found and killed in Abbottabad. We were all aware too of how quickly any spark could set off a powder keg. Sometimes, of course, members of the government in Pakistan played off that dynamic as an excuse not to do things we asked for, but other times it was real. This was one of those times when the complications were real. The local government in Lahore was led by the political opposition to the central government, and it saw a chance to thumb its nose at Islamabad. The crisis metastasized when a local court ruled that Davis didn’t have diplomatic immunity. The Taliban leaped into the fray, promising retribution against any lawyer or judge who set Davis free.
Now we had a real mess on our hands. Tom Donilon, then the national security advisor, thought that a third-party mediator might be helpful—someone who wasn’t part of the administration, someone who knew the Pakistanis and, unlike our capable ambassador, someone who wouldn’t have to operate on a daily basis with the Pakistani government.
Back in Washington, I asked the Pakistani ambassador to come over to my house so we could talk and try to see if we could defuse the situation. We needed a release valve in Pakistan, some expression of remorse. On the Pakistani street, there was speculation about who Ray Davis was, what he was really doing and why, and how many more people like him were in their country. With a situation like this, the public dialogue is never about just one issue. Rather, issues get conflated. This was fast becoming a debate about armed Americans on the streets of a Muslim country, a debate about the CIA, a controversy about everything including drone attacks that were reported on the front pages of newspapers around the world.
Ambassador Husain Haqqani thought that I could help. We wondered if I should meet with the families of the men who had been killed, but that seemed likely to inflame the situation. We discussed whether, by making some kind of statement of remorse in Pakistan, I might defuse some of the public tension. Haqqani had an interesting if unconventional proposal to deploy Islamic tradition that allowed for the payment of “blood money” in return for a life lost—a way to settle a dispute that had resulted in death, a settlement of sorts. First, though, someone had to calm the waters.
My staff wasn’t pleased, but I was headed back to Pakistan to play the good cop in a bad situation. The Obama administration’s public statements were calibrated to emphasize why the international, well-enshrined legal concept of diplomatic immunity is so important and just how much was at risk—including American support for Pakistan—if an American diplomat was left languishing in a Lahore prison cell. Beneath the surface, we all knew that this wasn’t going to get settled through interpretations of international law. It was going to get done through politics.
I met first with some officials in the central government in Islamabad. Prime Minister Gilani and I shared a public message about the importance of all the issues between our two countries, including economic aid and cooperation on counterterrorism. Then, without much announcement to minimize the security risk, I traveled to the eastern part of the country—into Lahore, the belly of the beast. I wanted to make a public statement that would hopefully be heard differently by the public: as a friend of Pakistan, as the author of legislation that aimed to begin a new era of mutual cooperation with the people of Pakistan, I wanted to see this tragic situation resolved. I emphasized that the United States would have our Justice Department investigate what had happened, just as Pakistani justice would be appropriate for Pakistani citizens. It was a tense visit. I went back home, however, confident in our belief that the situation was successfully on a glide path to resolution. A little steam had been let out of the system, hopefully creating enough room for the Pakistani government to work with the families on an agreement for blood money so the whole episode could be put behind us.
When I got back to Washington, jet-lagged but glad the trip was behind me, a staffer had printed out a photo from the wires in Pakistan: a charming image of street protests in Lahore, crowds surrounding a stuffed dummy hanged in effigy with a sign pinned to it that read “John Kerry and Obama.” Lovely. “That’s a keeper,” joked my communications director.
I knew the protest and photo were part of the necessary stagecraft for local politics. A couple of weeks later, the gambit bore fruit: the blood money was agreed to, the families let the local courts know, and Ray Davis was released and whisked home efficiently and quietly. What a process. . . .
Six weeks later, Hillary Clinton called to let me know that American Special Forces had killed Osama bin Laden—not in a cave in Afghanistan or hidden in the mountains of the ungoverned tribal areas of Pakistan but living quite comfortably in a gated compound not far from the Military Academy in picturesque Abbottabad. I congratulated her and the administration. The news was quickly made public.
No one should underestimate how gutsy it was for the president to decide to go into Pakistani territory without advance warning to get Osama bin Laden, not knowing with certainty whether the mission would succeed, whether Americans would be killed or it was certain bin Laden was even there. The what-ifs were almost too many to count: What if Pakistan had shot down an American helicopter? What if bin Laden hadn’t been there? What if our members of Special Forces had been killed? What if it turned out we’d entered a compound of alarmed innocent civilians and in the fog of the moment had to shoot? I thought of President Carter’s downed helicopters in the desert in 1980 in a failed mission to free American hostages in Iran and how it may have cost him the presidency. President Obama put his presidency on the line to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Thank God this had worked, I thought, and thank God for the great training and extraordinary capacity of our military and especially our Special Forces—all of them.
After we hung up and I processed it all, another thought crossed my mind—another what-if. What if Ray Davis had still been in jail? When I made my uncomfortable trip to Islamabad and Lahore, little did I know that the intelligence community and the military were already working to plan and execute the raid that killed bin Laden. No wonder there had been so much urgency to get Davis home. All our arguments about diplomatic immunity and sovereignty and the relationship between the two countries would have been out the window if the United States had had to execute the bin Laden raid with Davis sitting there in a jail cell. It hit me just how much Tom Donilon and Hillary, let alone the president, had on their collective desks at once, just how many complicated and interconnected equities were at stake affecting one decision, one deadline, one issue—and how little latitude they had to explain or even discuss these problems.
Later that month, the administration asked me to take one more trip to Pakistan. It came at a moment of enormous and understandable tension on both sides of the relationship. The Pakistanis were furious that their sovereignty had been violated without any advance warning by the United States. Their feelings were inflamed by the explanations given by American officials that they feared coordination could have tipped off bin Laden and doomed the mission. It was one of those cases where saying what was true and obvious was far from helpful diplomatically.
There were voices in Congress calling for an end to American aid for Pakistan. There was also a detail important to the American military: one of the Black Hawk helicopters from the bin Laden raid had been disabled on the grounds of the compound, blown up by our forces as they pulled out, but the wreckage, including its intact tail, remained in the Abbottabad compound. The Pakistanis had threatened to share it with China. It was a distraction that served no one’s real interests, but at the time the Pakistanis were not thinking about the long term. I hoped that with so much unresolved in Afghanistan, let alone across another border with India, I could secure a promise from Pakistan to return the remains of the helicopter and see if, once again, there was any way to return this bilateral discussion to real strategic interests.
After stopping in Afghanistan, I flew back to Islamabad. I was traveling with two of my Foreign Relations Committee staff members, Doug Frantz and Fatema Sumar. As a reporter, Doug had covered a large part of the Afghan war, and we talked on the flight about a great what-if that fascinated us both: What if the United States had killed bin Laden at the Battle of Tora Bora at the start of the war?
We could have and we should have. I’d argued since 2002 that it had been an enormous mistake to rely on Afghan warlords at Tora Bora—people who had previously fought on the other side instead of sending in Special Forces to go up the mountain and kill bin Laden.
Now, almost ten years after the 9/11 attacks, we were deeply entangled in a complicated but necessary set of relationships with Pakistan and its security services, with mercurial leaders across the border in Afghanistan, and with the Shia government in Iraq. How different, Doug asked, would it have been had the United States put an end to bin Laden in the first days of Afghanistan?
Then Doug asked another question. If bin Laden had been apprehended at Tora Bora, there would have been no bin Laden tape on the eve of the 2004 presidential election, no last-minute boost in the polls for Bush-Cheney: Would I be the president now? My reply: “If I were, Doug, trust me we’d have a nicer plane.” It was an intriguing historical question, but after conceding the race I have never allowed myself to get lost in hypothetical mazes. It’s a waste of time and energy, especially when there’s so much to do to keep me pointed forward. At two in the morning on a runway in Islamabad, we just put one foot in front of the other and moved forward. We had marathon meetings to undertake that would no doubt exhaust our collective patience.
We went directly to the army enclave in Rawalpindi, where we met for two hours in a smoke-filled room with the Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani and General Ahmad Pasha, the head of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence.
The military leaders are very powerful in Pakistan, far more powerful than those in the United States. Civilian control of the military is sacrosanct for us, so I was always mindful of the optics, but reality dictated that I talk with the people who had the authority to give us what we wanted, and that wasn’t going to be Pakistan’s elected leadership, not on this issue. When it came time for the public press conference, I would insist that it be with Pakistan’s civilian leadership so as not to create a problematic public misimpression, but the hardest conversation had to be with Kayani and Pasha.
It was a tough slog, which didn’t surprise me but certainly tested my patience. We had found bin Laden living it up in the backyard of the Pakistan Military Academy, and yet we were the ones on the defensive? Nonetheless, the generals were outraged. The raid had occurred and they hadn’t known anything about it beforehand. They considered it a violation of their sovereign territory, and I had to work hard to convince them that total secrecy had been imperative. I emphasized that it wasn’t mistrust but operational security so tight that even I was not aware of the raid until after it happened. I think that opened their eyes. I asked them what they would have done if they’d been in our shoes. What if they had located their number one most wanted terrorist enemy in Afghanistan? Would they have called Karzai ahead of time? They smiled. I let them vent, but I always came back to core interests. Both sides had a lot at stake.
At the end of the meeting, we drafted a statement. I had Doug look it over and he said, “If you want to say nothing, this is perfect.” That was precisely what we wanted. What I said publicly mattered far less than what was committed to privately—in fact, at this stage any public statement might only have erased the progress made privately.
The next day, I met with President Asif Zardari, Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani and Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani. They wanted a written statement to assure the Pakistani people that the United States was not going to invade their country and grab their nuclear weapons. It was a curious concern at a moment like this. We negotiated the statement word by word. At one point, someone from the Pakistani side tried to insert a line that read, “I, John Kerry, swear on a blood oath.” That was never going to fly, but it did reveal two things: first, how urgent this issue was to them; and second, that my relationships with Pakistan’s leaders had become personal. I gathered from their suggested language that they judged that I had a reservoir of credibility to help put the relationship on a stronger footing.
The Pakistanis announced that they would be returning our helicopter tail and would renew engagement in other areas of cooperation. The internal challenges of Pakistan, coupled with their own complicated domestic politics, preordained that this was never going to be an easy relationship. As it had been for decades, it would continue to be marked by mistrust, highs and lows, moments of confrontation and openings for occasional breakthroughs. For every member of Congress back home who thought we should just write off the relationship, I always thought, What’s your alternative? Walk away from Afghanistan? We did that in 1979 and we know how well that worked. Cede a relationship with Pakistan to China or Saudi Arabia? Lose our leverage to get involved as a broker on both sides when India’s tensions with Pakistan would inevitably flare up? Shut down our channels of communication with a nuclear power in the world’s most dangerous region, surrounded by pockets of extremists? Good luck with all that.
As we flew home, Doug joked to me, “Senator, will you swear a blood oath that we never have to go back to Pakistan?”
• • •
DESPITE THE OBAMA administration’s early interest in a pivot to Asia, which to many in the Middle East sounded like a receding of interest in their region, there was a full plate of issues that would inevitably draw any administration back into what some derisively called “the sandbox”—Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and other Middle East countries where there were myriad issues to be addressed, each of which had a common thread running through the tapestry: Syria. A new round of peace negotiations was being started by the president’s special envoy, George Mitchell.
In the years preceding the Obama administration, Syria had been engaged in peace talks with Israel brokered by Turkey. The country had also been a key transit point for weapons and fighters into Iraq. It remained Iran’s last ally in the region, played a destabilizing role in Lebanon, and was a chief sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah—a series of actions and behaviors that quite appropriately kept Syria on a list of the state sponsors of terror.
The Bush administration’s approach had been a policy of nonengagement. They saw meetings and diplomacy as a reward. President Obama viewed diplomacy as a means to an end and believed that a meeting was a tool, not a gift. This was common sense and Diplomacy 101. You would always be careful about how you choreograph engagement. Sometimes it’s smart to start with a quiet back channel that doesn’t raise public expectations or complicate existing relationships, and certainly you don’t roll out the red carpet and lavish public praise on a bad actor. In my mind, however, meeting, talking, listening and exchanging arguments and ideas are the only ways you can test whether there’s a potential avenue for progress.
You can’t be afraid to have a conversation, and my experience has always been that even if the conversation goes nowhere, there has at least been a signal or demonstration that you’ve tried. This can help bring allies and partners to your side in the event that you have to build support for sanctions or military force. Of course, when it came to Syria, it made sense to try to engage diplomatically to change Syrian behavior on any number of issues, because the alternatives were always imperfect. The country—75 percent Sunni, 12 percent Shia—was a demographic powder keg that would be hard ever to put back together again if it broke apart, and that process could be very ugly for Syria, for its neighbors and for the world.
It was worth an attempt to see if engagement could lead somewhere. Many regional issues ran through Damascus, as mentioned, and there was a case to be made that Syria’s actual interests were not advanced by being entirely aligned with Iran. Bashar al-Assad, the relatively new head of state, had demographic pressure to deliver something resembling economic opportunity for his population. On the surface, it didn’t seem unfathomable that the regime might soften its approach in some areas in return for relief from sanctions and a new relationship with the West and with Israel. After all, that kind of reconciliation has been known to happen in the Middle East from time to time: Jordan and Egypt were once Israel’s leading enemies, before, with American backing, they negotiated peace agreements that have endured for a long time now. The entire story of the region is marked by shifting allegiances—alliances always in transition—and ongoing assessments of interests. With Syria, there had even been what looked like occasional instructive moments: after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, President George H. W. Bush did the improbable and convinced then Syrian president Hafez al-Assad to join an American-led coalition against a fellow Baathist regime. Secretary of State James Baker made more than a dozen trips to Syria before Operation Desert Storm, and the first President Assad’s price was simple: U.S. support for Syrian dialogue with Israel. The ultimate challenge—moving Syria away from its marriage of convenience with Iran and into a different relationship with Israel—wouldn’t be easy, but why shouldn’t we at least try?
I was intrigued by the prospect and knew that the Obama administration was interested in exploring the possibilities, so I thought the committee could dip a toe into those waters. The president encouraged me to reach out to the regime. I did so without knowing Bashar al-Assad well. I’d met his father, who was brutal and devious, but I didn’t have much of a relationship or history with Assad the younger beyond a short stop I had made in Damascus in 2005. Nobody in the White House, and certainly not I, placed any trust in him, but I believed that if he had his own self-interest at heart, then he would be interested in a frank conversation.
In 2009, I had my first long meetings with Assad, which left me with two important takeaways: the strange predicament he faced in managing his country and that I couldn’t take anything he said at face value: it all had to be tested.
In our first meeting, I confronted him about a Syrian nuclear power plant that Israel had famously bombed and that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) now wanted to inspect. The fact that this was a nuclear facility had been well established publicly. It was beyond dispute. “If you want to show the world that you’re prepared to move in a new direction, let the IAEA in,” I argued to him. Assad looked me in the eye and told me it wasn’t a nuclear facility, with exactly the same affect and intonation with which he said everything else. It was a stupid lie, utterly disprovable, but he lied without any hesitation. The next time we met, I had been briefed by the White House on the smuggling of weapons across the border to arm Hezbollah. Again, the evidence was incontrovertible. Again, when confronted, Assad denied it. I asked for everyone to leave the room besides the two of us. “Mr. President, this isn’t a debate. I’ve seen the evidence. It is happening and we know it’s happening,” I said, and let the words hang in the air to gauge his reaction. “Everything is to be negotiated,” he replied, and stared ahead. It was a purposeful non sequitur from an immature autocrat caught in a bald-faced lie. It was a revealing moment that would come in handy years later when I was secretary of state and had to face the Syria conundrum from a different perch. A man who can lie to your face four feet away from you can just as easily lie to the world after he has gassed his own people to death.
Assad’s interest in a three-way peace negotiation with Israel and the United States was an area where he leaned forward. Israel and Syria had had several negotiations over the years, dating back to the Clinton era. Most recently, the Turks, under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had engaged with Assad and then prime minister Ehud Olmert of Israel to see if they could agree on the baseline for resuming negotiations. That effort was interrupted by the Gaza War in 2009, which was the beginning of the deterioration of Israel’s relationship with Turkey. The Obama administration was interested in renewing the Israel-Syria negotiations.
Assad asked me what it would take to enter into serious peace negotiations, in the hope of securing return of the Golan Heights, which Syria had lost to Israel in 1967. I told him that if he were serious, he should make a private proposal. He asked what it would look like. I shared my thoughts. He instructed his top aide to draft a letter from Assad to President Obama asking for American support of peace talks with Israel, stating Syria’s willingness to take a number of steps in exchange for the return of the Golan from Israel. His father had tried and failed to get the Golan back, so he was willing to do a lot in return. The next day, I flew to Israel, where I sat down with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and showed him Assad’s letter. He was surprised that Assad was willing to go that far, significantly further than he’d been willing to go with the Turks. I took the letter back to Washington. I gave it to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and also to Dennis Ross at the National Security Council. Subsequently it became part of the State Department’s effort on the Israel-Syria negotiations.
I continued to work with Assad to test him on what would have been small confidence-building measures—areas where he could demonstrate some good faith—and made clear that anything the United States could ever consider doing for him would be contingent on verification that he had followed through on his end. In coordination with the White House, I made several requests, ranging from easy ones, such as working on the transfer of land for the American embassy in Damascus and the opening of an American cultural center, to difficult and trickier issues, like border assistance with respect to Iraq and a visit to Iraq by the foreign minister, reconciliation with Bahrain, and dispatching an ambassador to Lebanon to send a message before the elections that Syria would stay out of Lebanon’s election process. All of these were largely done and delivered.
Everything Assad did always had to be verified. He would tighten up on some misdeeds for a couple weeks or so by limiting the transit of weapons or saying the right things about engaging with Israel, but words were easy, while sustained actions told a different story. A few weeks later, I remember hearing that Assad was continuing with exactly the kind of behavior on Hezbollah that we told him needed to stop. It was disappointing but unsurprising. I once asked a leader of one of our close allies in the Middle East why Assad chose Iran over a different kind of future for his country. He told me, “When Assad goes to Iran, they offer him a sumptuous feast with a buffet stretching as far as the eye can see. When you guys see him, you offer him some raisins and dates.” I answered bluntly, “Well, we aren’t going to offer him anything if he continues to behave like this.”
For all his lies, there were times when Assad could seemingly acknowledge his predicament and lay out a candid rationale for moving in a different direction. He made clear that he was most concerned about providing jobs for a young population beginning to enter the workforce. He told me he had hundreds of thousands of people joining the workforce every year, and that he needed to loosen the economic restrictions and spur private sector investment. I made very clear that if there was any chance that that was going to happen, we had a long list of things he would have to do, none of which was going to be easy. Assad said he was interested in having that conversation because the pressure grew every year: the promise of a secular state, even the authoritarian police state his father had built, demanded a population believing that their quality of life was better than it would be with the alternative.
The alternative he feared was the Islamist movements his father had crushed decades ago. As the oil dried up and Syria became a net oil importer and as the youth population boomed, it was more apparent than ever that in an overwhelmingly Sunni country, Assad was a leader from an Alawite sect, in effect a minority within a minority. He talked with nostalgia about a different, more secular time in Syria and once showed me a picture of his mother going to the Umayyad Mosque in a midlength skirt, her head uncovered. At one point, his foreign minister said, “If we don’t find a way to get more jobs for our people, you’ll come back in ten years and he’ll be Mullah Assad!” Assad laughed. “I will be Bashar with a beard.” His message was unmistakable: one way or another, he was bent on regime survival, even if it meant posing as a theocrat, but the easiest path was by moving his country in a new direction.
Assad wasn’t alone in that challenge. King Abdullah had faced similar demographic challenges in Jordan, but Abdullah was strong and smart, the son of a brilliant, revered military icon turned peacemaker. By contrast, Assad had always been underestimated. His ruthless father had never envisioned him leading the country, so he’d been buried in the line of succession behind his uncle and brother, but fate and a funeral had placed him at the front of the line. He was long and lanky with a head that sat atop a very long neck out of proportion to his body. He had a quality that sometimes made you wonder if he wished he’d still been an ophthalmologist living out of the political limelight in London, enjoying the regime’s ill-gotten wealth and chasing his glamorous, cosmopolitan wife all over Europe. I wondered how he would react if he faced a real crisis at home. Would this young, unlikely head of state cut an independent, modern path, or would he try to one-up his father and turn even more brutal to try to hold on to power?
We were at a standstill when the Arab Spring came to Syria in the form of protests in Deir al-Zour and then spread around the country. I made very clear to the Syrian ambassador that if Assad killed innocent civilians, it would be the end of direct engagement with me. Period. He told me that Assad intended to address the country soon and engage in a reconciliation process for a reform agenda. I told him the United States would be listening very carefully. The next Friday, after prayers, more protesters were killed. I never spoke to the ambassador or Assad again.
Not long after, Assad delivered the first of what would become a running series of increasingly surreal addresses on Syrian state-run television. He announced that the opposition were terrorists trying to destroy the state and stop his experiment in reform to benefit the Syrian people. Some speculated that Assad had ceded control to his mother’s family, while others suggested that he had simply fallen back on his father’s old playbook. What became increasingly clear as he twisted the screws tighter and tighter was that he was transforming himself into the very magnet for religious extremism and jihadi intervention he had professed to fear the most. His actions were making Syria a beacon for regional conflagration. I soon argued that he would never be able to lead a united Syria and, like many other autocrats of the Arab Awakening, he should go. Not long afterward, in August 2011, President Obama also said he should give up power. After that, the president drew a famous red line about the potential use of chemical weapons.
About two years later, all these issues would find me again at the State Department, and they haunt all of us to this day. We’ll never know what would have happened if the Arab Spring hadn’t intervened and if we could have fully put to the test what Assad said he was willing to do to change his economy. It’s impossible to go back and replay the many directions history might have taken. In the end, all you can do is make your best judgment at the time. Assad’s horrific, sadistic series of judgments have brought ruin to his country and infamy to his reputation.
If diplomatic overtures overseas were an interesting study in mercurial personalities, broken and byzantine politics, and dysfunctional democracy punctuated by occasional breakthroughs, it turned out I didn’t have to travel far to find similar challenges. All I needed was to get on the US Air shuttle from Boston to Washington.
Foreign policy in the Senate could be riveting and at times deeply frustrating. When I talk about it, I hope I don’t sound as if I’m channeling Everett Dirksen or Mike Mansfield, guardians of a bygone era. The Senate I knew was never perfectly functional or efficient. It rarely behaved as imagined in the Federalist Papers. In 1985, I had arrived in a Washington on the cusp of sweeping, disruptive change. I witnessed a big shift in the first ten years that I was in national office, and then my presidential campaign unfolded at the dawn of an even bigger change in how America communicates. It’s gotten only more complicated since then.
I point this out because when I became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, I wasn’t an idealist nostalgic for a time long gone. I never expected everyone to sing “Kumbaya,” nor did I expect the seas to part in Congress allowing the entire Obama foreign policy to advance unimpeded, but I couldn’t have predicted just how corrosive the atmosphere would be and how broken the Senate would become, all of it standing in the way of doing things that in previous Congresses would have been automatic. Inside the Senate during the first four years of the Obama administration, even on foreign policy issues which not long ago had been the least partisan, the level of dysfunction, terror about primaries, raw politics, rancor and excuses for inaction became a way of life.
The fate of three treaties are as good an illustration as any of the way the Senate, sadly, became compromised. By 2009, I’d debated enough treaties to know both the Senate’s traditions and its travails. Even across the five terms I’d been there, for the most part the Senate had largely kept intact a bipartisan tradition when it came to nuclear nonproliferation treaties. From John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, nuclear treaties worked their way through the Senate typically with eye-popping margins that affirmed the national security community’s commitment to reduce the nuclear threat. Votes that tallied 99–0 or 93–1 were more common than not.
Still, I knew that “treaty” had become a dirty word that the conservative think tanks criticized in every voting scorecard and endorsement questionnaire. There were Republican colleagues who handed me examples of the direct-mail letters that were sent to their constituents soliciting ten-, fifteen- and twenty-dollar contributions to stop a “one world government,” inveighing against treaties that were supposedly designed to strip America of its sovereignty and put average citizens in jeopardy of being told what they could and couldn’t do by the United Nations. These were fact-free scare tactics, but they worked.
One Republican brought me an example of the way the language of these appeals would permeate the letters his office received from his constituents, parroting the conspiracy theories word for word. Facts didn’t matter. The pressure on my Republican colleagues was real, although that didn’t excuse them from doing the right thing, but it put an onus on me as chairman to try to be mindful of their politics at home. It was important to run a process that would, I hoped, help them disprove the false statements point by point so that they could go back home and credibly demonstrate that they’d taken their base’s concerns seriously and voted yes only after getting the needed answers. One of my early lessons learned in the Senate is never tell other senators that you know their politics better than they do. Instead, where possible, just help them see how they can overcome those challenges.
I thought that getting over that hurdle would be most surmountable on a modest nuclear nonproliferation treaty. I wish I could say I’d been right. Our nuclear treaty with Russia expired in December 2009. That meant the United States was losing its day-to-day visibility into the Russian nuclear arsenal. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have created a sense of urgency to quickly put in place a new accord. The administration sent one to the Hill—the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, called New START, which cut by nearly a third the maximum number of deployed strategic warheads, instituted a verification regime and kept us on the path toward reducing our reliance on nuclear weapons. At the time, a number of former secretaries of defense and state had made a splash arguing that the United States should be moving toward an aggressive goal of zero nuclear weapons. By that measure this modest Obama approach seemed almost incremental.
Enter Sarah Palin.
The half-term governor whose expertise on Russia seemed to begin and end with its proximity to Alaska had become a Tea Party heroine before many even knew what the Tea Party was. She appeared on Facebook and Fox News to attack the treaty in a fact-free frenzy. I knew the committee would hear differences of opinion on treaty specifics, from missile defense to telemetry, but I didn’t think anyone would have predicted we’d be sitting in the ornate committee meeting room in the Senate parsing Palin’s open letter to Republican freshmen on FoxNews.com.
It was never too early for presidential politics, so former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney joined her in a footrace to the right, attacking the treaty as possibly “Obama’s worst foreign policy mistake.” The early 2012 presidential field joined in, from Gingrich down the line.
On the Foreign Relations Committee, we had our own version of the Tea Party on the committee’s roster, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina—the “Palmetto Palin,” as David McKean called him. Jim was a freshman senator of outsized influence. He had won my friend Fritz Hollings’s seat in 2004, an example of the transition happening to the Senate in many ways and coming from the South in particular. Fritz had been a groundbreaking governor before he came to the Senate, a liberal who prided himself on working across the aisle and partnering with his senior senator, Strom Thurmond, on issues affecting South Carolina. By contrast, DeMint was an ideologue, a proponent of term limits who had been elected president of his freshman class in the House before he moved to the Senate a few years later.
Jim set out to break a lot of china—and he did. While other freshman senators were dutifully learning the institution, he penned a book titled Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide into Socialism. Most unusual was Jim’s approach to his Republican colleagues. He took the extraordinary step of founding a political action committee of his own dedicated to electing Tea Party–style candidates, including those running against his Republican Senate colleagues. For example, he backed Lisa Murkowski’s primary opponent, helped a self-described former witch win the Republican nod for the Senate seat previously held by Joe Biden, and defied his own leader, Mitch McConnell, by endorsing Rand Paul in the Kentucky primary for Senate after Mitch had convinced the popular Republican secretary of state Trey Grayson to get into the race. (Grayson lost in the primary.)
Jim was hard to get to know because he didn’t have a lot of interest in getting to know anyone on the other side of the aisle. He’d slip into a hearing, ask a question that was a polemic thinly disguised as an inquiry, and then he’d leave. His arrival on our committee was punctuated by his vote—one of just two in the entire Senate—against Hillary Clinton’s nomination for secretary of state.
Not surprisingly, Jim DeMint was hell-bent on defeating anything with the word “treaty” attached to it. Indeed, he was out to paint treaties of any stripe as an assault on American sovereignty, something that had been a rallying cry when DeMint’s endorsed primary challenger to Utah Republican Robert Bennett shocked the country in early 2010 with a convention victory against a conservative who had been an icon of Utah’s Mormon political establishment.
We had a steeper hill to climb than logic would have predicted. The right-wing strategy was clear: those in DeMint’s camp were opposed to all treaties and dead set against anything that had Obama’s name associated with it—Obama, Obama, Obama!
Above all else, we had to take the rhetoric out of the debate if we were to have a chance to win, and in particular I needed to help change the dialogue about the nuclear treaty. It couldn’t be about the president, otherwise we would never win enough Republicans to our side. I worked very closely with Secretary Clinton on a validator strategy: to put front and center as many trusted Republican names endorsing the treaty as possible. Hillary was terrific, really digging in to help. She called on her predecessors at State and helped draw out each Republican to weigh in on a treaty some assumed would be an easy lay-up. It made a difference to have former Republican secretaries of state Kissinger, Rice, Baker, Shultz and Powell publicly counterbalancing Palin and Romney, but I wondered why that was even a close fight. On the one side were people who had advised Republican commanders in chief from Nixon to Reagan and both Bushes, and yet Sarah Palin’s voice was the one ringing the clearest (and loudest) in the conservative echo chamber.
Still, I knew guiding this treaty over the line was going to take time and tenacity. I made it a point to meet with Republicans even though they might never be in play as votes for the treaty, because any approach to their party could demonstrate to their caucus that our side was taking the process seriously.
If they asked for more time to review the treaty, I tried to give it to them, even if they gave me nothing in return. If they asked for another hearing or to include a particular witness, I tried to accommodate them, again because it would demonstrate good faith in the process.
The whole effort was tedious, but I wanted at the end of the trail to be sure that no one could credibly claim a question hadn’t been vetted or they hadn’t been given time to consider their position. After months of both open and classified hearings and hundreds of questions for the record, it was time to vote in committee.
Dick Lugar was with us from the start, but the Republican caucus had moved far right and almost marginalized him in a way that pained me to watch. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee was the key vote for us. If we won over Corker, then we had a conservative Republican on board, which might give us a shot at another conservative, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, a kind, gentle man who taught Sunday school and had been in both the House and Senate of the Georgia legislature before he’d come to Washington.
I got along well with Bob Corker when we were colleagues on the committee, in part because Bob was eager to make a contribution and, especially in 2009 and 2010, he wasn’t afraid of being in the fray. Having Bob interested in the treaty was worth an investment of time, even if it delayed getting the treaty to the Senate floor.
Bob wanted the White House to agree on a commitment to spend billions on nuclear modernization, which was important to Tennessee, where the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was based. I suspect that he figured it would help him demonstrate that he had persuaded the administration to move on an issue. I thought Bob was critical to the vote so I backed him up. But Bob and Johnny made a difficult ask of me as well. They suggested that Republicans felt rushed and opposed having the vote in committee in the summer before they headed home to campaign. They said I could have a more successful committee vote if I waited until after recess.
Frankly, I thought timing could be argued either way. If we voted in July, Republican senators might get beat up at home in August during recess. On the other hand, postponing didn’t necessarily avoid that outcome—and might make them less likely to vote yes in September. I came down on the side of giving Bob the benefit of the doubt and, in my mind, building up a balance in the bank of political goodwill with a key Republican ally. I postponed the committee vote. The White House wasn’t so sure I was making the right decision.
In September, when we held the vote, the gamble paid off. Our committee approved the treaty 14–4, with three Republican supporters. The Senate was headed into recess before the November elections, and we had to finish the job when we returned in November. A committee staffer popped a bottle of champagne in the conference room, wishful thinking or youthful optimism.
That vote turned out to be only a momentary victory. When Republicans crushed Democrats in the midterm elections, Sarah Palin and the hard right wing of the party piled on. Their message was clear and simple: no lame-duck votes on treaties.
Never mind that we had taken the entirety of the 111th Congress to do the deliberation the right way under immense public scrutiny—we had held twenty hearings. Never mind that the Joint Chiefs had briefed the Senate. Never mind that we had not yet brought the treaty up for a floor vote precisely because senators had asked for extra time to do their homework.
Now, Palin, the neocon former UN ambassador John Bolton, the conservative machine and the fringe were arguing that dealing with a treaty like this one was the job of a brand-new Congress, including freshmen who had never even once been briefed on the details.
I could envision Groundhog Day if we caved to their requests. In January, we’d be right where we had started, with senators demanding a new year and a half of briefings and hearings to get up to speed. I dug in and said no. Republicans who had been leaning toward voting yes started coming up to me and saying, “I can’t be with you because of lame duck.” Alternatively, I also got a lot of “John, I hear Obama’s going to force us to repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ in lame duck, so I can’t be for New START.” The non sequiturs piled up, one thrown on top of another. I wondered what possible connection there was between voting on letting gay people serve openly in the military and whether you could vote that same month to reduce the number of nuclear weapons pointed at the United States. The excuses were astounding.
I remembered the lesson I’d learned in law school: if you don’t have the law on your side, argue the facts; if you don’t have the facts on your side, argue the law; if you don’t have either, just argue. In this case, with the merits pushed to the side, Republicans were arguing and inventing all kinds of process reasons for why they couldn’t do something now even after they’d asked me for additional time so they could do it now.
To say the least, this was all very frustrating. I sat down in the Democratic cloakroom with my team and laid out the options. We could go forward and lose, which would mean the first Senate defeat of a treaty since the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty went down in 1999 (itself the first time a security-related treaty fell since the Treaty of Versailles). That had been an ugly moment that had cost the United States globally. For years afterward as I traveled, I’d heard complaints from foreign ministers. Other countries began to wonder then whether the United States could be a dependable partner at the negotiating table if the Senate could just quash the work of multiple administrations. I didn’t want to repeat that kind of sorry, sad episode.
At the same time, I didn’t want to lose the investment of so many months of work and careful analysis to bring the treaty this far. It deserved a vote. Dick Lugar and his team were uncertain whether it was a good idea to go forward. Dick’s argument was that a poor vote would “damage” the treaty irreparably. I didn’t disagree about that risk, but I also asked whether the treaty wasn’t damaged already if after a year and a half of effort we couldn’t even bring it up for a vote. How feckless is that?
A lot hung in the balance. What worried me was the underlying political dynamic: thoughtful, serious members of the Senate Republican caucus were all running scared of the Tea Party. They were desperate to duck “tough votes.” Others couldn’t see past any opportunity to stick their finger in President Obama’s eye. It wasn’t exactly an atmosphere that summoned statesmanship.
In the end, it was the math that I found most persuasive—cold, hard numbers. We had fifty-nine Democratic votes for the treaty, and I knew I could count on Lugar. Corker was committed; the two moderate Republicans from Maine were going to vote yes. I could see my way clearly to about sixty-five of the sixty-seven votes we needed for victory. I thought, Waiting on the next Congress means never. It wasn’t just that we’d have to start fresh in a new Congress, but that the Democratic margin had shrunk by seven in the Senate. The year 2011 would mark the start of an election cycle where Democrats would have some tough seats to defend, and every time that happens, the demand from those senators to the Senate leadership is for plenty of time at home to campaign and fund-raise and for plenty of bread-and-butter issues on the Senate floor, especially those that matter most to their constituents.
In my own caucus there would be little appetite for legislating on foreign policy unless it could be done quickly, easily and with certain victory. On the other side, in addition to the promise of more Tea Party primaries to scare the hell out of Republican incumbents, we would be into a presidential election cycle. If 2010 had been a year when many wanted to deny a Democratic president victories, heading into 2012 that sentiment would be nearly unanimous. I was not optimistic about our odds in the next Congress. In fact, I hated them.
I called Pete Rouse, President Obama’s right-hand man, who had been Tom Daschle’s chief of staff and was as smart a Senate whisperer as anyone in Washington. There were risks here for the president too—a loss in the lame-duck session on a critical treaty a month after what the president himself had called a “shellacking” in the midterm elections wouldn’t just be a bad story, it could hurt him in foreign policy making going forward. Pete was famously steady. Like Obama, he never gets too high or too low. He didn’t like our chances now, but he liked them better now than in January. Secretary Clinton agreed and reiterated her willingness to do anything required to win. She was indefatigable. It was fourth down, and we decided to go for it.
If Jim DeMint represented the bomb-throwing agitator extraordinaire in opposition to all treaties, then Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona was both his twin and his opposite. Jon was an insider’s insider, the son of a congressman, and was the Republican whip. He was competitive, smart and ideological about issues like this one. He did his homework on the minutiae of New START, which made him a very agile debater. We had often squared off against each other on television. He was a wily opponent, respected and feared even inside his caucus. Just as it was on our side, where people like Bob Byrd and Harry Reid rode the whip position all the way to majority leader, Jon had enormous influence in his caucus. He took the position that he opposed the treaty but wished the administration was willing to wait and work with him to answer his questions and address his concerns. The White House and my staff saw that as a cynical ploy. Surely any legitimate concerns about this treaty should have been taken care of in the course of the past year.
My reaction was that it didn’t matter what we thought. Because Jon was important in his caucus, how we played our hand in response to him would matter. We had to demonstrate that we were exhausting the process of trying to get Jon to yes, even if it was impossible. At least then other Republicans would see we were operating in good faith and they would feel permitted to vote their conscience. I started going over to the Republican cloakroom to meet with Jon one-on-one. The bonus of meeting that way was that every one of our Republican colleagues saw us talking respectfully.
After some time, it became clear that Jon Kyl’s strategy was to play for time and move the goalposts with no intention of ever supporting the treaty. I hate to admit this, but it was a compliment to Jon’s mastery of the Senate and his knowledge of the secret Bob Byrd and Ted Kennedy had shared with me in 1985: time matters. Jon was very cagily using the clock to achieve his objective. Nothing can make senators want to get out of Washington more than the clarion call of the Christmas holiday break. He knew that in a December when senators were already tired from a busy legislative session, when many had just gone through a dispiriting election, when there was a lot already on the agenda, he could just stall the bill into the next Congress.
I think it is safe to say that Jon figured we Democrats might fold when his side made it clear that they were going to use the entire ten days of floor time that had been allotted under the rules to consider New START. If they were going to try to wear us out, I’d accommodate them. I sat at my desk on the Senate floor for many of those days while little happened. A few times, when the Senate looked especially like a ghost town, I would turn to the cameras and say, “I know some of our colleagues have said repeatedly that they have questions about this treaty, and I want to answer them. I’d urge them to come on down.” A few hours later, I’d say again, “Colleagues, we are here, we will stay here, we are ready to debate anytime.” Then we would repeat the arguments over and over. Occasionally, a Republican would come down and read a short statement, and we’d have a brief exchange. Then he would leave and I’d spend the next hour responding to the arguments he and many others made.
If we lost, it would have meant that I had misread the Senate tea leaves. But at that point, I was willing to take the risk. The alternative was just walking away from the certain death of the treaty. I heartily endorsed John McCain’s favorite expression, “a fight not joined is a fight not enjoyed.”
It was time to vote.
All fifty-nine Democrats voted yes—including Oregon’s Ron Wyden, who got out of his sickbed just a few days after prostate cancer surgery to register his vote. I knew those early days weren’t pleasant, particularly when just walking the steps to the Senate floor is painful. But that’s Ron Wyden, a stand-up guy. I watched the tally in the well of the Senate like a scoreboard, counting down the final minutes of a tight game: Corker, Lugar, Collins, Snowe. . . .
Scott Brown, my new colleague from Massachusetts whose surprise election had signaled the rise of the Tea Party, voted in step with Massachusetts. We were up to sixty-four votes and needed three more.
That’s when the dam broke. Republicans whom I had met with for hours and hours came to the floor of the Senate and voted aye, including a former governor of Nebraska, Mike Johanns, who had come to the Senate in 2009. Former governors seemed to have less tolerance for the antics of the ideologues because they knew they could never have run a state that way. Neither Judd Gregg from New Hampshire nor George Voinovich of Ohio (both were retiring that year) was going to go out playing a political game. Lamar Alexander, whom I’d spent hours with going through the treaty, was a serious person who had been a successful governor. He was going to vote his conscience and at the same time stick by Bob Corker, his colleague from Tennessee.
We hit the magic number, and then something wonderful happened. Robert Bennett and Lisa Murkowski, both of whom had lost Tea Party primaries to Jim DeMint’s ideologues, put up their thumbs and voted aye, but it was a different digit they were really signaling with to DeMint and company.
Three days before Christmas, and we’d won.
On the way home, I talked with Vice President Biden. It had been an intense first year and a half for the administration, and on the personal front, Joe’s son Beau, Delaware’s attorney general, had come home safely from a yearlong deployment in Iraq and made the decision not to run for the seat Joe had held for thirty-seven years. Joe and I had shared a lot of history in the Senate, and at least on this night the outcome suggested that there was a little bit left in the tank for the institution we revered.
However, we both saw the storm clouds on the horizon. Treaties used to pass 99–0. If 71 was the new 99, then what would be the fate of bills that used to pass with 51 votes? Gridlock was predestined.
I thought about what the Tea Party and the hyperpartisanship were doing to the institution. Of those twelve Republican senators who supported the treaty, three were retiring either by choice, from fatigue or in defeat. Senator Murkowski would be back, but to earn her next term, she had to overcome a primary defeat and win as a write-in candidate. Scott Brown was worried about biting the Tea Party hand that had first fed him, so he wouldn’t cast many more votes in line with Massachusetts. The others? Most would either soon retire in frustration or face brutal primaries. The years 2011 and 2012 weren’t going to be easy, and the Republican ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, Dick Lugar, would soon succumb to the Tea Party’s ammunition.
I didn’t want to give in automatically to the pessimism that says “don’t try, it can’t happen.” It seemed premature to think that the Senate was shut down for any further foreign policy debates, and I hoped that perhaps the Tea Party wave had crested and there might be a return to some degree of normalcy.
Ted Kennedy always said that good issues and good ideas find their moment, and you want to have laid the groundwork to be able to seize that moment when it comes. There were two good ideas sitting in front of us that the Foreign Relations Committee had a responsibility to try to put into action. Unfortunately, they both had the words “United Nations” attached to them: the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. There was certainly a case to be made that both were reasonably achievable. The Law of the Sea Treaty was being urged on us by the U.S. Navy because freedom of navigation was gospel to them. They wanted the United States to be a party to the treaty because we lived by its rules anyway, and joining gave us a seat at the table.
Hillary Clinton and I were both huge believers in the treaty for geostrategic reasons. While we sat on the sidelines, Russia and other countries were carving up the Arctic and laying claim to the oil and gas riches in that region, but we couldn’t take them to task because we were outside the treaty body that provided international legitimacy for Arctic claims. China controlled the production of rare earth minerals—90 percent of the world’s supply—and the world relied on that supply for cell phones, computers and weapons systems. Yet we weren’t a party to the treaty vital to determining the rules to secure these minerals from the deep ocean seabed.
I wanted to make an effort to move the treaty forward. Dick Lugar supported the treaty, but he was facing a primary from an extremist who had made Dick’s residency in Indiana an explosive issue. Dick asked me to wait until his primary was over to push full throttle and not to force a vote. I agreed. Dick had earned that much and more over his thirty-six years in the Senate, and I’d never forgotten his collegiality with me when I was a freshman senator partnering with him on the Philippines.
Hillary and I became a tag team gently pushing the issue. She helped me pull off a public hearing in the committee that brought together America’s top diplomat, top defense official and top military officer. Secretary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Michael Mullen all testified in support of the Law of the Sea. I took the campaign in another direction to try to persuade Republicans to give the treaty a look. Reasoning that many Republicans might not want to believe John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, but couldn’t ignore the oil industry and the single biggest, most powerful interest group of the conservative movement, I brought in the head of the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce to testify in favor.
But write it off is exactly what the Republicans did. The Tea Party froze the Senate. Dick Lugar lost his primary. The message to the Republicans was clear: work with Democrats and you’re toast. After an extensive round of hearings and debate, two swing senators—Kelly Ayotte and Rob Portman—apropos of nothing, signed on to a letter drafted with the rhetoric of the Heritage Foundation: “No international organization owns the seas.”
The treaty was dead in the water before it ever had a chance to sail. Thirty-four senators announced “no” votes, so we didn’t even bring it up for a vote. I liked Rob Portman a lot. He was a substantive guy, but he saw the writing on the wall. He was enough of a moderate to be a Tea Party target, and in Ohio he wasn’t going to risk his job for a treaty covering the oceans. He and Senator Ayotte together sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid, citing what they called “significant concerns” with the treaty and expressing opposition to ratification. Portman’s press release on the letter was proudly headlined “Senators Portman and Ayotte Sink Law of the Sea Treaty.” Rob knew better than this. It was just all part of the spectacle and circus the Senate was becoming.
I asked John McCain what had happened. John was unhappy, which might have contributed to his candid response. Jim DeMint was torturing John’s wingman, Lindsey Graham, on a daily basis. John told me about the discussion in his caucus about the Law of the Sea Treaty. He told me that DeMint had passed a letter around for signatures opposing it. John had argued against that gamesmanship. He said DeMint had asserted loudly—and John said the words with a roll of his eyes—“we had to be a warrior party, this was war.” “A warrior party,” John grumbled, adding something to the effect of “most of these guys who want to be warriors have never had a single shot fired at them in their lives.”
It wasn’t John’s caucus anymore, and that was a tragedy. John McCain could be stubborn, ideological and cantankerous as hell. He was no moderate. Admittedly against his own better judgment, to try to win his party’s nomination, John had filled out those same silly special interest group questionnaires, but he thought they were bullshit and told me so. He was in public life to do things, not to bow to the false populism of the Tea Party. John was made for the Senate, but made for a Senate that actually worked. Now he saw a Republican caucus that he barely recognized. He and I were determined to make one last fight of the Congress together, as partners once again. We were going to try to force the Senate to pass the Disabilities Treaty.
For John, it was very personal. Bob Dole was one of John’s heroes. Bob was minority leader when John and I were freshman senators. Bob had worked every day to stand and walk and use his arms after his injuries in World War II. In the 1970s, as the Vietnam War raged, Senator Dole wore a bracelet with the name of POW John McCain etched on it. When John came to the Senate in 1986, his bond with Bob Dole was unbreakable. When Bob was the Republican nominee for president in 1996, John traveled with him across the country. Now Bob was in a wheelchair, in and out of Walter Reed hospital, in his late eighties. His proudest legislative achievement had been passing the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now Bob asked his protégé John McCain to pass the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and make America’s legacy on disability rights universal. John and I were a team again, trying to make it happen.
To me, there was nothing controversial about the Disabilities Treaty. It just says you can’t discriminate against the disabled. It asks other countries to do what we did twenty-two years ago when we set the example for the world and passed the Americans with Disabilities Act. In four simple words, it says to other countries that don’t respect the rights of the disabled, “Be more like us.” It didn’t require any changes to American law, but it would require other countries to improve their record on disability rights—in effect, taking our gold standard here at home and extending it to the rest of the world.
The Tea Party, however, had a bucket of excuses and conspiracy theories. In 2006, Rick Santorum had been drubbed out of the Senate by eighteen points. Unfortunately, Rick became a lobbyist. Now he was working against the Disabilities Treaty, whipping the grass roots into a frenzy by promising that the treaty would replace parents of disabled children with UN bureaucrats. It was absurd, but it seemed to be working.
We needed sixty-seven votes. We had on our side two former presidential nominees of the Republican Party, Dole and McCain. America’s veterans’ groups endorsed the treaty, and dozens of veterans in wheelchairs went door-to-door in the Senate for weeks, pleading with Republican senators to do the right thing.
The veterans made a powerful statement, but no statement was more powerful than what I witnessed the day of the vote. In the nearly thirty years that I’d been there, I had never once seen a former majority leader come to the Senate floor for a vote, but eighty-nine-year-old Bob Dole was wheeled into the chamber by his wife, former senator Elizabeth Dole from North Carolina. Bob Dole wasn’t on the Senate floor that day to support the United Nations, under whose auspices and convention this human rights treaty had been written, and certainly not to undermine the sovereignty he’d nearly given his life for in World War II. He was there because he wanted other countries to treat people with disabilities the way we do. He was there because he wanted to ensure that when American veterans with disabilities—our wounded warriors—traveled overseas, they would be treated with the same dignity and respect that they received at home.
In the end, only sixty-one senators had the guts to agree with him, that the rest of the world should live by the standard of decency the United States had set in 1990 with its Americans with Disabilities Act.
In 2012, however, this was one of those votes that leaves an indelible mark. Senators who told John McCain and me in private that they wanted to vote for the treaty had folded when it mattered. Fear was driving the Senate, so much so that senators could shake Bob Dole’s hand and then send his dream to die. It was a disgrace.
Something is deeply wrong with politics in America when the Senate can’t do the things it was created to do. I wondered why some of my colleagues even wanted to be there if they couldn’t vote the way their hearts and minds told them. I headed back to my office. The staff had opened a bottle of Scotch that Teddy had given me in 2007, two years before he passed away, with a note: “For use after good votes and bad votes, too.” Today marked a little of both. We’d fought a very good fight with a very bad outcome.
• • •
A COUPLE OF days after the Disabilities Treaty met its demise on the floor of the Senate, the White House called to say President Obama needed to reach me. I sat behind my desk in the Russell Building, looking out on Constitution Avenue, which was almost pitch dark, illuminated only by the occasional headlights of cars, the glowing lampposts and, there in the distance, the lights on the Capitol dome. God, the days were growing shorter, and I wondered whether my time in the Senate was growing shorter as well. My frustration was building with a Senate that seemed to be a shell of its former self, an institution unable to step up even when the same tried-and-true tactics that had worked for previous generations were applied and appropriate. That gnawed at me: I had learned the lessons of how to unlock the Senate, but the institution had changed. Three tokens of that celebrated Senate history sat on my desk: the framed photo from Teddy on our first day together as colleagues in 1985, with its promise of a “beautiful relationship”; John Glenn’s carved wooden Buddha, the lacquer on its well-worn belly rubbed off from so many entreaties for good luck; and the sailor’s compass that John Warner left me the day I moved into his old office.
My internal compass left me no doubt whatsoever that I needed to find new ways of working on and fighting for the issues that had defined my life ever since I’d come home from Vietnam, and possibly find a new place for that fight if the Senate wasn’t going to be the Senate anymore. I expected the president’s phone call might give me some clarity about where my own compass would soon be pointing. I leaned forward in my chair as I waited for President Obama to come on the line. I waited and waited until the now familiar voice said my name emphatically: “John!” Barack Obama doesn’t beat around the bush. He’s not fond of small talk and gets to the point quickly. The White House would have to complete their intensive vetting of me, but he asked me to serve as his secretary of state.
Two months later, John McCain and Hillary Clinton would join together with Elizabeth Warren to introduce me on an unfamiliar side of the dais at the Foreign Relations Committee for my confirmation hearing—a place I hadn’t sat in since 1971. Two days later, I’d be confirmed by the Senate 94–3. Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan, my friend since the days she had served in the White House in the 1990s, came across the street to the Capitol to swear me in right where so much of my public service had occurred—in the historic Foreign Relations Committee room in the U.S. Capitol.
I made a bittersweet peace with leaving the Senate and was ready for my new chapter.