Everything changed for the Rice-Cameron family one evening in November 2008, as I was reading my five-year-old daughter, Maris, a bedtime story.
Not many nights earlier, together with millions of Americans, we had watched history being written with the election of Barack Obama. Early on in our pre-transition process, I had been asked to fill out the voluminous paperwork required for a senior administration position. Apparently, I had been the first potential appointee to be fully vetted for nomination, even though no one had indicated what position I was being vetted for. Whatever it was, days passed after the election before I heard anything.
Then, just as Maris and I had finished getting snuggled up in her bed and I’d begun to read, the phone rang. I excused myself and got up to answer in the adjacent study.
Picking up, I was surprised to hear President-elect Obama on the line. He said, “Hi. It’s Barack. I hope I’m not interrupting anything important.”
“No, I was just reading Maris a bedtime story.”
“That’s important,” he said. “Call me back when you are done.”
When I called back, with Maris in the next room in not quite certain slumber, President-elect Obama said, “I would like you to serve as my U.N. ambassador.”
I thanked him profusely, before adding, “That’s a great job, but I was very much hoping that you might also consider me for your national security advisor.”
Obama demurred, explaining he planned to give that job to someone who would be widely perceived on Day One as an experienced, steady hand at a time when he would be consumed by saving the economy. He said he intended to appoint retired four-star-general Jim Jones as national security advisor but would be prepared to consider me for that position down the road. In the meantime, he thought the best place for me was in New York, at the U.N.
“Do you intend for your U.N. ambassador to be a member of the cabinet and participate fully in the NSC Principals Committee?” I asked. That had been the tradition in many prior administrations, but not during the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney years, and I believed it was important that the U.N. ambassador participate in the policymaking process at the highest levels. While Obama didn’t acknowledge as much, he sounded as if he were not aware of that history. But he promptly said yes, that was his conception of the job. And, later, he made his decision stick, even when some White House advisors tried to walk it back. The president-elect concluded our discussion by recommending that I talk to Madeleine Albright, who he knew was my longtime mentor, as well as a former U.N. ambassador before she became secretary of state in the Clinton Administration. After you talk to Madeleine, he said, “Call me back tomorrow.”
Before he hung up, Obama asked one final question: “What do you think of the idea of Hillary as secretary of state?” Given their hard-fought campaign, I was a bit taken aback, but replied, “If you are prepared to do that, I think it’s a very good idea.”
The next morning, I called Madeleine. As I had done many times before, I asked for her unvarnished advice. “Obama suggested I call you,” I opened, “though I would have anyway. He has offered me the U.N. job. He’s not ready to make me national security advisor. I suppose I could ask for deputy NSA. What do you think?”
Direct as always, Madeleine responded, “U.N. ambassador is a great job. You should take it without hesitation. You’ll learn a lot, have a great deal of autonomy, and it often leads to higher places.”
Enough said.
When I called Obama back to thank him again and say I would be honored to serve as his U.N. ambassador and a member of his cabinet, he seemed pleased. To myself, I noted with satisfaction that Obama appeared unfazed by my directness the night before in asking for the NSA job. We had a candid enough relationship for me to do so, and I had learned along the way that sometimes you need to be willing to advocate for yourself. Though I’d frequently seen my white male peers do the same without hesitation, often women tend to hang back. I was gratified but not surprised that Obama would expect no less from me.
I have not always so readily accepted the jobs that have been offered me—even very good ones. Long before Obama asked me to become U.N. ambassador in the fall of 2008, I began my journey in government following a very different phone call and a decision that would define my career.
In December 1992, I was contacted by the Clinton transition team and asked to interview for two prospective positions on the new White House staff. At that time, I’d been at McKinsey for almost two years and wasn’t in a rush to leave; I still had much to learn from consulting.
The month prior, Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush for the presidency and, although I had sat out this election season working at McKinsey in Toronto, several of my colleagues from the Dukakis team had worked on the Clinton campaign and were tasked with helping staff the new administration. Nancy Soderberg, a former Hill aide who had been my immediate boss on the Dukakis foreign policy team, was the first to find me and ask, “Susan, any interest in interviewing for the National Security Council staff?”
I didn’t hesitate in answering, “Absolutely.”
Shortly thereafter, Gene Sperling, my brilliant and sometimes disheveled economic policy colleague from the Dukakis campaign, called to inquire about my interest in joining the newly constituted National Economic Council (NEC), the economic policy analogue to the NSC. Surprised, I was delighted to be remembered by both Gene and Nancy and deemed worthy of their consideration.
On a weekend before Christmas, I flew down to D.C. from Toronto for two interviews. One was with Robert Rubin, who would chair the National Economic Council, and the second was with Tony Lake and Sandy Berger, who would run the National Security Council.
Rubin, a piercingly smart, wiry former cochairman of Goldman Sachs, met with me first, one-on-one. He tried to assess my interest in and suitability for some sort of role at the NEC. It was not clear to him (or me) where exactly I might fit, but he seemed interested in utilizing me somewhere in domestic economic policy.
My next interview marked my first encounter with Tony Lake, the national security advisor–designate, and his deputy, Sandy Berger. Lake was relaxed and loquacious, expounding on his interest in Africa and asking about my dissertation on Zimbabwe. Mindful of time and the need to conduct these interviews efficiently, Berger was all business and clearly impatient with Tony’s digressions. Sandy tried to steer us back to the subject at hand, explaining that they were considering me for the role of one of two special assistants (or right hands) to the national security advisor and deputy national security advisor. This was not a policy role but a staff support job, where organizational skills, writing capacity, discretion, and judgment were key. I would have a bird’s-eye view of all the issues with which the national security team grappled—but no line responsibility.
Both the NEC and NSC offered me jobs. Finding both options attractive, I wrestled with the decision. I liked the idea of having policy responsibility but felt that, even after McKinsey, my readiness to take on an economic job was questionable. My academic foundation in international relations—combined with my foreign policy work on the Dukakis campaign—better prepared me for the NSC role. Then again, at only twenty-eight years old, with no prior executive branch experience, I would be starting from behind most of my colleagues in either capacity. However, since my role at the NSC would be to support the national security advisor and not directly make policy, I thought my preparation was probably sufficient.
Additionally, on a gut level, I found the high-stakes, sometimes life-and-death nature of national security policymaking more stimulating. As a pragmatist, I also calculated (perhaps inaccurately) that if, later on, I wanted to make the leap back to economic or domestic policy, there would be more opportunities to do so than if I tried to jump from the domestic to the international side, where the established experts would more likely doubt the applicability of my experience.
After deliberating, I accepted the job as special assistant to the national security advisor, turned down Bob Rubin, and gave notice to McKinsey. My bosses at McKinsey were supportive and understanding, as was Ian. I would be moving home to D.C. just months after our wedding, and he would remain in Toronto at the CBC until he could find an attractive journalism job in Washington. Long-distance, again!
In my last weeks at McKinsey, I continued to commute to a small town in rural Quebec where I worked for a manufacturing client. On Monday mornings, I would awaken early for the flight and drive, returning Thursday or Friday evening. At about 1:30 on a Monday morning in early January 1993, my phone rang, rousing me from sleep. Picking up, still groggy, I heard Sandy Berger identify himself. Without any niceties, he announced that I no longer had an offer to be his and Tony Lake’s special assistant. They had determined that they only needed one, not two assistants, and they were going to keep the guy who had worked with them on the campaign. Jolted, I was now properly awake. Sandy then said that I could still come to the NSC, if I wanted to be a director for Africa on the NSC staff.
Offered a real policy job that should have been quite appealing, I nonetheless took no time before giving him my reply. “No, thank you,” I said, “I’m not interested in working on Africa. I would prefer another portfolio.” No doubt put off by the arrogance of a twenty-eight-year-old neophyte, Sandy abruptly ended the conversation without clarity as to whether or not it would be our last.
It wasn’t that I was uninterested in Africa, but as an African American woman in a very white male field, if my first job in government were focused solely on Africa, I feared I could get pigeonholed and never be viewed as someone who could work on wider issues. In retrospect, I marvel at my own chutzpah but am glad I refused to be typecast. Even though I understood that Tony and Sandy had no such intention, I recognized that other people’s perceptions could become my reality. I was comforted by knowing that McKinsey would welcome me staying and Bob Rubin might still have me at the NEC.
About ten days later, after hearing only vaguely from Nancy Soderberg that they might be able to work something else out at the NSC, I got another call. This one, equally abrupt, was from some guy I had never heard of: Richard Clarke.
Clarke was the senior director for global issues and multilateral affairs at the NSC and a former assistant secretary of state. Clarke barreled ahead, “Lake and Berger told me to interview you for a role as a junior director in my office. I told them I don’t want any junior directors. Either you are good enough to be a director, or I don’t want you. So they told me to consider you for director for international organizations and peacekeeping. When are you coming down?”
“I’m very grateful for your interest,” I replied and let him know I could be back in Washington by early February. Quickly, I added, “Thank you, and I look forward to meeting you.”
“Thank Tony and Sandy, not me.” With that, he hung up.
Later, I learned that Dick Clarke is legendary for his unforgiving demeanor and his skills as a “bureaucratic Samurai,” or interagency knife-fighter.
The interview went well, and I was hired. As it turned out, I could not have asked for a better first boss in government. Dick’s office covered everything from counterterrorism to counter-narcotics, humanitarian relief to U.N. affairs, peacekeeping to refugees. My portfolio, the United Nations and peacekeeping, was a busy one, and it meant I would work closely with my mentor Madeleine Albright and her team, since she was to be ambassador to the U.N. Even though Dick didn’t want any baby directors, he also didn’t want any screwups. He had brought back his very good friend and longtime partner at the State Department, Rand Beers, to be his deputy. Among Randy’s responsibilities were to mentor me until I could safely fly solo.
Randy is a redheaded, ruggedly handsome former Marine, whose hearing was diminished while fighting in Vietnam. A devoted father and husband, avid runner, and gentle soul, Randy had served for decades at the State Department and the National Security Council. Like Dick, he was highly regarded in both Republican and Democratic administrations; but, unlike Dick, he always managed to play nicely with colleagues. Randy would go on to serve in various higher offices in subsequent years, including as acting secretary of homeland security under President Obama.
For about six months, Randy taught me the ropes—everything from how to write coherent, persuasive memos to the president and national security advisor, to how to run an effective interagency policy meeting. One of his most valuable pieces of advice, understood by too few foreign policy experts, was, “Follow the money.” By that, Randy meant learn the national security budget inside and out; he explained: “Where there is money, there is real potential policy impact. If you can grasp the budget and figure out where to vacuum up underutilized funds, you will run circles around your interagency colleagues.” This lesson served me well for the next twenty-five years.
Randy also taught me how to deal with Dick Clarke when he was being difficult. His advice was to be firm and clear in response to any stray voltage Dick directed at me—in other words, “Don’t take crap.” Before long, Randy concluded I had earned my wings, and I was soon treated like the other more experienced directors and advanced to reporting directly to Dick.
Dick is a hard-ass—gruff, sarcastic, whip-smart, someone who pulls no punches—but also a generous, endearing, loyal man, who would become a lasting friend to me and my family. He is beloved by the legions of younger people he has mentored and trained. Though highly respected by his bosses in the Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton administrations for his exceptional competence and candor, many of his peers at the White House and in the agencies disliked him, some intensely. Dick didn’t suffer fools. While chairing interagency meetings, he could shut people down with a dismissive retort designed to highlight their stupidity, and he would mow over obstacles to accomplish his aims. Following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Dick ran afoul of the Bush 43 administration after he publicly criticized them for paying insufficient attention to the Al Qaeda threat.
At the start of my four and a half years on the NSC staff, Dick taught me how to “get shit done,” which became my mantra. From watching Dick I also learned the pitfalls of behaving with unnecessary aggressiveness, while mastering the nuts and bolts of making policy and moving the interagency bureaucracy.
Intimacy and collegiality were the hallmarks of what was then a relatively small NSC staff, consisting of some 150 policy experts. We all knew each other, and when we needed to hunt down a colleague—to talk through a problem or air a policy dispute—we just walked down the long, high-ceiled, marble corridors of the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House and rang their bell. Email was not yet the main mode of communication among NSC staffers; we spoke face-to-face. Moms and dads brought their kids to the office on weekends where they played with makeshift toys or paper clips as their parents toiled long and unpredictable hours. National Security Advisor Lake and his deputy Sandy Berger were accessible, and we would go directly to their office or occasionally they to ours when we needed to hash out a pressing matter.
The NSC sat at the nexus of the national security agencies, coordinating policy formulation and implementation, cajoling the State and Defense Departments to embrace or at least acquiesce to President Clinton’s agenda. In the early years, it was difficult having to follow the well-liked and highly experienced George H. W. Bush with a young president who had no federal government or military experience. The agencies tested and resisted us, as is normal in any new administration, but with time and after our share of missteps, the bureaucracy came along.
My U.N. portfolio meant that, along with my regional colleagues who had direct policy responsibility, I tracked the hot conflict issues of the day, including Bosnia, Haiti, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Somalia, and Rwanda. This was an era when peacekeeping was growing rapidly as a tool of conflict prevention and resolution and when, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, civil wars seemed to be proliferating. With Clarke, I also coordinated the interagency process on peacekeeping issues, multilateral sanctions policy, development, and human rights issues that involved the United Nations.
At the very outset of the Clinton administration, I was thrown into the deep end of the crisis pool. President Bush had decided in December 1992, as he was leaving office, to send 28,000 U.S. forces to Somalia to help restore order and enable the delivery of food and relief supplies to victims of the war-induced famine then ravaging the country. This massive humanitarian intervention, known as Operation Restore Hope, was laudable in its initial aims but left the incoming Clinton administration with the complex challenge of managing a large military mission in a remote, poorly understood corner of the world. Just days before Clinton took office, the U.S. suffered its first combat death in Somalia. Thus began a cycle of increasingly deadly confrontations pitting U.S. and U.N. forces against the notorious warlord Mohammed Aidid’s clan militia.
America’s strategy, as inherited from the Bush administration, was to hand off responsibility for the U.S. military operation as soon as possible to the United Nations. After some delays, in May 1993 the U.N. finally established its largest peacekeeping force to date (28,000), taking over from the U.S.-led multinational force. There were roughly 4,000 American troops attached to the initial U.N. force, including 1,300 who remained outside of U.N. command and formed a helicopter-mobile Quick Reaction Force. The U.N. mandate was to provide security sufficient to enable the delivery of humanitarian relief; but in practice, given the running armed conflicts between warlords and their clans, the mission required trying to disarm and disable recalcitrant militia, most prominently Aidid’s. In other words: combat.
One Saturday morning in early June 1993, I received an urgent call at home from the White House Situation Room. Wearing weekend casual clothes, I dashed to my office at the Old Executive Office Building—a ten-minute drive from our house in the Adams Morgan neighborhood—to deal with my first major policy crisis: twenty-four Pakistani U.N. peacekeepers had been killed by Aidid’s forces in several attacks across the Somali capital, Mogadishu. It was the second worst loss of peacekeepers’ lives in U.N. history, a major blow to the nascent U.N. force and to the perceived ability of the U.S. to provide sufficient backup to U.N. forces under attack. In Dick Clarke’s office, we scrambled to issue press statements, ensure the right people in the agencies called the Pakistanis, and coordinate the dispatch of instructions to the U.S. Mission to the U.N.
The U.N. Security Council was set to meet in emergency session, and Ambassador Albright and her team needed swift guidance on the pending Security Council resolution condemning the attack and threatening justice against the perpetrators. The final resolution, which was unanimously adopted, called for the arrest and punishment of the perpetrators. It was widely perceived as a declaration of war against Aidid.
Despite being unfamiliar with Somalia, my bosses remained convinced of the righteousness of America’s humanitarian mission. Instinctively, they refused to get punked by some two-bit warlord; so they decided the U.S. should double down on the mission to eliminate the threat from Aidid. This seemed like the obvious policy choice, and I had no misgivings when President Clinton first ordered Marines and Army Rangers to hunt down Aidid and his henchmen, and to raid his home, weapons depots, and radio station. The population of Mogadishu, which had initially supported the U.S. mission, however, largely turned against us and the U.N. Aidid’s supporters chanted “Down with America!,” and Aidid vowed to remain on a “collision course” with the U.N. and U.S.
While the mission’s objective remained humanitarian, the U.N. and the Clinton administration concluded we needed to use whatever force necessary to restore order. Over the summer and early fall of 1993, the U.N. suffered further casualties, and U.S. losses mounted as well. Our European allies opposed the intensified U.N. combat role, and Congress passed nonbinding resolutions aimed at curtailing the U.S. military mission, calling for it to be authorized by Congress if it were to be extended beyond its November 15 mandate.
On Sunday, October 3, 1993, I received another unexpected call from the Situation Room: two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters had been shot down by Aidid militia. Several U.S. servicemen were dead, captured, or missing. Reaching the office, I was disgusted and horrified to see on television the bodies of U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. As we watched the on-screen desecration of our own Special Forces, I knew, as I had learned from Dick Clarke, that when crisis hits, there is no time for emotion. We needed to steel ourselves, focus, remain unflustered, execute, and deliver.
By the time that nightmare was over, eighteen American servicemen had been killed and seventy-three wounded. Suddenly, everything changed for the new administration, as it confronted its first major national security crisis and accompanying political trauma.
Even with both houses of Congress under Democratic control, in the wake of these shocking losses, President Clinton faced extraordinary congressional pressure to immediately withdraw U.S. forces from Somalia. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin tried valiantly to argue with Congress for time and space to finish the mission with dignity. I vividly recall the stunned realization in the White House that their efforts had backfired spectacularly. It must have been one of the most brutal spankings of cabinet officials before members of a Congress led by their own party. Congressional Democrats and Republicans then turned their ire on President Clinton and the rest of his senior national security team. On the verge of mandating the near immediate return of U.S. forces, Congress was set to force a sudden and humiliating retreat that would have set back security in Somalia, eroded the credibility of America’s military commitments globally, and undermined the authority of the commander-in-chief.
To avert such legislation, President Clinton pledged that all U.S. military would leave Somalia within six months. He also announced interim plans to reinforce the U.S. military presence in Somalia and offshore by inserting a total of twenty thousand troops to protect U.S. personnel. Congress then voted to bind the president to his stated timeline by setting March 31, 1994, as the cut-off date for funding military operations in Somalia—an extraordinary, rare rebuke of executive authority. I have never forgotten this harsh reality: Congress can effectively constrain the commander-in-chief when its will is sufficient.
On March 26, 1994, the last U.S. forces left the shores of Somalia in amphibious vehicles. It was a low-key, even ignominious departure that, thankfully, occurred without incident. Back at an anticlimactic ceremony on the White House Lawn, President Clinton thanked our military for their service and sacrifice, closing the book on one of the most ill-fated military missions in recent U.S. history.
This first major crisis I faced in government was searing, and Somalia would shape my own perspective as well as U.S. policy for decades to come.
While the U.S. and U.N. operations definitely helped ameliorate the dire humanitarian situation in Somalia, saving an estimated one million lives, by almost all other measures U.S. involvement there was a failure. Thirty U.S. servicemen were killed in action and 175 were wounded as the mission crept well beyond its original humanitarian parameters.
From my vantage point, the U.S. had underestimated the complexity and dangers of humanitarian intervention and overestimated the capacity of the U.N. to conduct complex peace enforcement missions. The U.N. suffered from an unachievable mandate, insufficient forces, lack of coordination, and ineffective command and control. Individual peacekeeping units, including the Americans’, took orders from their national capitals rather than from the U.N. commander on the ground or headquarters in New York. To exacerbate matters, the U.S. under-resourced its own contingent within the U.N. force and got sucked into “nation building.”
As many of my more senior colleagues would later admit, the Clinton administration failed to prioritize a political solution over an elusive military outcome—before it was too late. In targeting Aidid, the U.S. and U.N. personalized the mission and turned large segments of the Somali population against us. Neither the U.S. nor the U.N. developed the capacity nor had the humility to try to comprehend the extraordinary political complexities of Somalia’s clan structure and fiercely independent culture. We also failed to engage Somalia’s neighbors early enough to learn from their far greater knowledge of the country.
Without relevant doctrine or experience, the U.S. found itself enmeshed in what was effectively a sectarian civil war, bogged down in urban counterinsurgency operations against a smaller but more agile enemy—a challenge we would face again years later in Iraq. U.S. policy ran far afield of public and congressional sentiment, leaving the president with little support when things went badly wrong. I also observed that the NSC Principals, the cabinet-level committee that sets U.S. national security policy, were insufficiently involved in decision making, leaving too much to their deputies; moreover, for too long, there was no senior point person clearly accountable for driving policy formulation and implementation. Somalia provided me an early, real-world case study of what not to do.
At the peak of my youthful outrage after Black Hawk Down, as the events came to be known, I confessed to some good friends at a dinner party, “If I had my way, we would turn Mogadishu into a parking lot.” At the time, the notion that we could send U.S. forces to a faraway land to save innocent lives only to have our own lives taken was infuriating and bewildering. Only with greater experience and maturity would I come to understand that, despite my occasional inclination to flatten our opponents (especially two-bit warlords), escalation and the use of overwhelming force against locals, particularly when it entails high civilian casualties, will almost always boomerang and undermine the mission—whether humanitarian, counterinsurgency, or counterterrorism.
The Somalia crisis also taught me to be skeptical of Congress’s capacity to play any constructive role in addressing real-time national security crises. While bipartisan sanity prevailed to prevent a vote to force Clinton to withdraw U.S. forces immediately, politicization instincts ran deep, especially among Republicans like Senators John McCain and Phil Gramm, who seemingly wished to undermine President Clinton by arguing (uncharacteristically) that the U.S. ought to cut and run as soon as we accounted for our POWs and MIAs. Likewise, I discovered the serious political and operational limitations of the U.N., especially to succeed in real combat missions, even with strong U.S. backing.
Personally, I never fully got over my own frustration with Somalia; for the next two decades, I maintained a studied ambivalence to conflict resolution there. Knowing well the costs of failure, I would struggle with whether the potential benefits of reengaging in the thankless task of trying to help Somalis reconcile and rebuild were worth the enduring risks. The greatest cautionary tale for me was how essential it is for the cabinet-level officials to remain hands-on in decision making whenever U.S. forces are engaged in combat. Their deputies, however skilled and effective, need full support when crises occur. These hard-learned lessons from Somalia stuck with me through the following twenty-five years, as I rose through the ranks of national security policymaking.
Wrestling with the explosion of complex U.N. missions globally, the new Clinton administration sought to define and codify a rational and sustainable basis for U.S. support to U.N. peacekeeping operations. We believed in the value of the U.N. and wanted peacekeeping to endure as a vital tool of conflict resolution. We recognized the need to do our part but refused to become the world’s policeman and bear a disproportionate share of global costs and risks. Congress was deeply skeptical of U.N. peacekeeping and, after Somalia, any remaining public tolerance of perceived U.S. overreach had evaporated.
Early in the administration, President Clinton signed a directive mandating that we develop a new U.S. policy on U.N. peace operations—defining how and when we should decide to vote for, support, fund, and terminate them. As the NSC director responsible for U.N. affairs, I played a central role in crafting that policy along with Dick Clarke and Randy Beers. It was a complex bureaucratic “goat-rope,” a term Dick used to describe the challenge of corralling and reconciling the competing views of the various government agencies with much at stake in the outcome.
The Pentagon wanted as little to do with the U.N. as possible and viewed peacekeeping as an unworthy sissy mission. The State Department and U.S. Mission to the U.N. favored more robust U.S. support for the U.N. and saw peacekeeping as a comparatively low-cost way to share the global burden of preventing and resolving regional conflicts. My personal instincts aligned largely with State’s but, as an NSC director, my role was to be the honest broker, to try to find common ground and forge compromise.
It took months to develop the policy and months more to build interagency support for its key elements. As we did, we were constantly buffeted by unfolding world events—the U.N.’s challenges in Bosnia, Haiti, Cambodia, Somalia, and eventually Rwanda. From each, we learned different yet valuable, and sometimes competing, lessons. We worked to refine the impending peacekeeping policy, incorporating our learning in real time. The result was Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25): “U.S. Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations,” issued May 3, 1994, almost a year and a half after the policy review process began. It was a comprehensive, thoughtful, and well-conceived document, of which I remain proud. It has endured as standing U.S. policy through at least three administrations—Clinton, Bush 43, Obama—and remains, at the time of this writing, on the books.
PDD-25 recognized the strengths and limitations of U.N. peacekeeping and mandated increased U.S. support to improve the U.N.’s capacities, while placing wise and appropriate constraints on U.S. involvement. Yet in many ways, it was a conservative, cautious document, tempered in its initial enthusiasm by the weight of hard-won experience. It was meant to ensure we did not allow the U.N. or ourselves to overreach or misalign U.N. mandates with resources. In that, it was largely successful. Inadvertently, it also served to constrain our imagination and hinder our ability to react swiftly to the unforeseen. In a tale of unintended consequences, PDD-25 may have contributed to one of the Clinton administration’s most difficult and controversial decisions. Or, more precisely, lack of decision.
To this day, I am haunted.
When I stepped off the helicopter, I had no idea what I was about to see. It was December 1994, and I was among a small party of Washington officials who accompanied National Security Advisor Anthony Lake to a church and adjoining school in rural eastern Rwanda. A few yards from the landing site, the ground became thick with decomposed corpses. They were jammed so tight that it was treacherous to walk without stepping on one. Grown bodies. Children’s bodies. Babies in mothers’ arms. Shot up. Hacked up. Decaying faces. Frozen in the position they fell. All over the churchyard. In the church. Across the school grounds. Dead bodies everywhere. Hundreds, if not thousands. And the putrid smell, though ebbing, remained.
This was one of countless massacre sites across this verdant, hilly, densely populated Central African country the size of Vermont. Ground zero of the Rwandan genocide. Up to one million killed in a preplanned slaughter of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus at the hands of their fellow citizens—extremist Hutus and those they forced into violence. The primary killing machine was the simple but lethal machete. They murdered each other by hand with long knives at close range. It was unspeakable cruelty that left me without words or even tears for many, many hours after we left the church site.
This brutal question still loops in my brain: How did we, the U.S. and the international community, let the genocide happen?
I remember the news flash, April 6, 1994, just one week after the U.S. military withdrawal from Somalia, another report from the White House Situation Room: the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down near the airport in Kigali, Rwanda. As the U.N. director on the NSC staff, I knew this was ominous. Rwanda was already on a knife’s edge, and neighboring Burundi had endured its latest spasm of Hutu-Tutsi violence just months earlier in October 1993, when an estimated fifty thousand Tutsis were killed after Tutsi soldiers had murdered Burundi’s Hutu president.
Still, few predicted precisely what happened next.
Immediately after the plane went down, the Hutu-dominated Rwandan army carefully targeted their first victims. The next day, April 7, the rampant killing began. Radio Mille Collines—a hate radio outlet with government links—bombarded the airwaves, inciting Hutu to massacre Tutsi (“exterminate the cockroaches”), even identifying locations where those hiding could be found. The army went house to house, slaughtering. Hutu extremists murdered Rwanda’s acting prime minister in cold blood and then mutilated ten Belgian U.N. peacekeepers who were assigned to protect her. Kigali was a massive killing field. Within days, the entire country became a bloodbath.
The U.S. government’s first priority in such a crisis is always to evacuate American embassy personnel and other U.S. citizens. The French and Belgian militaries flew in to rescue their nationals. The U.S. military, which had pulled its last personnel out of Somalia barely a week earlier, was nowhere near in position to mount a swift airlift or NEO, noncombatant evacuation operation. U.S. Marines would have to come from ships in the Indian Ocean and could not arrive in time to make an immediate airlift feasible. Our embassy personnel would have to try to escape overland by convoy to Burundi, without dependable security.
Given the killing that engulfed the countryside, this was an extremely dangerous evacuation. Back in Washington, we were all gripped by the fear that we would lose our colleagues. The State Department, which had the lead in ensuring the safe departure of its personnel, set up a round-the-clock crisis task force within its Operations Center. Working long hours from the low-ceiling, bottom section of our double-decker office in the Old Executive Office Building, which had been vertically subdivided by a previous occupant (the notorious, if industrious, Oliver North), I pestered the task force and the Africa Bureau frequently for the latest updates. President Clinton drove over from the White House to State to show solidarity and buck up the duty officers on vigil. When, after two long days, all American embassy personnel were safely evacuated, the collective sigh of relief we emitted in Washington was deep but short lived. Unfortunately, U.S. personnel were not able to evacuate our Rwandan embassy employees, and we later learned many of our local staff were killed in the ongoing massacres.
With no official Americans on the ground, we lost our primary eyes and ears. There was little real-time, formal information on what was happening, just anecdotal reporting mainly from nongovernmental organizations, the NGOs, and limited flows from the U.N. force (the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, or UNAMIR), which was hunkered down in defensive positions after the Belgian peacekeepers were killed. Within a week, countries began withdrawing their contingents from the U.N. force, greatly reducing its size and efficacy and turning it into a bystander as the killing raged. It was not until a couple of weeks later, when the international press corps arrived, that American officials gained a fuller appreciation of the extent of the horror. As the nightly news carried nauseating footage of masses of bodies rushing down choked Rwandan rivers, it became increasingly clear that we were in the midst of a full-blown genocide, and neither the U.S., Rwanda’s neighbors, the U.N., nor its member states were prepared to halt it.
In Washington, after the very proximate trauma of Somalia, neither senior U.S. officials, nor I, ever contemplated sending U.S. forces back to an even more remote and unknown part of Africa for another humanitarian intervention. No one in the Clinton administration argued for direct U.S. military involvement. No one in Congress did. No major U.S. editorial board did either. This was a case when the most obvious option was beyond the realm of the conceivable. In addition, the utility of the greatest military on earth in stopping thousands of people from killing their neighbors with knives was questionable. We had just failed to stop a warlord equipped with machine guns mounted on SUVs—unsophisticated “technicals,” as they were called—from killing U.S. servicemen in Somalia.
In hindsight, what still strikes me most is the lack of discussion or debate. In those early weeks, we were reeling and did not have the customary policy meetings to decide what to do next. I, we, never proposed what seemed unthinkable—U.S. military intervention. It wasn’t that President Clinton decided not to intervene. As the genocide unfolded, the president never asked for, nor did his senior advisors present him with any decision to make on the matter.
Four years later, on his first visit to Rwanda, in 1998, President Clinton apologized for the international community’s failure to respond swiftly enough to the genocide. In subsequent years, Clinton called Rwanda his “personal failure” and his “biggest regret” as president. In 2013, on one of many subsequent visits to Rwanda, where his foundation is active, President Clinton mused that, if he had deployed even ten thousand U.S. troops, the U.S. might have “saved at least a third of the lives that were lost.” I don’t know on what basis he came to this assessment, but perhaps with a sizable U.S. military intervention joined by an even greater complement of American-led international forces, we could have made a difference, even if at great risk and cost.
Yet, in reality, so soon after eighteen American service members were killed in Somalia while assisting U.N. peacekeepers, Congress would likely have refused to support another U.S. military intervention in an African country that most Americans had never heard of. Had President Clinton actually deployed U.S. forces into Rwanda, Congress might have terminated funding for the U.S. intervention and perhaps all U.S. financial support for U.N. peacekeeping.
In the moment, as events unfolded, many of the policy choices that the U.S. government did actually make seemed logical. But in hindsight, they were unacceptable in the aggregate.
The first major choice came roughly two weeks after the genocide began. Once their peacekeepers were slaughtered, the Belgians decided to withdraw their battalion from the 2,500-person U.N. force. They appealed to the U.S. as a NATO ally to back their decision at the U.N. by giving their withdrawal some diplomatic cover. This meant agreeing that the U.N. mission, with its limited size and mandate, was incapable of addressing the killing and should withdraw for its own safety and credibility. The U.N. secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, gave the Security Council three options: a) substantially augment the U.N. force and strengthen its mandate; b) reduce the force to 270 and limit its mandate to brokering a cease-fire and assisting as it could with humanitarian relief, while trying still to provide some meager measure of protection to civilians who had taken refuge with the U.N.; or c) withdraw UNAMIR entirely, recognizing that it was unsuited to the dramatically worsened context.
In deference to the Belgians, and consistent with the rigorous criteria of PDD-25, Washington instructed the U.S. Mission to the U.N. (USUN) to go with Option C: insist that UNAMIR withdraw. Meanwhile, African members at the U.N. and others argued to increase the force dramatically but offered no capable or ready troops to do so. In addition to the Belgians, the Bangladeshi and Ghanaian battalions were also withdrawing, leaving a minimal presence. Thus, Option A was a pipe dream in practice and, after the Somalia debacle, unimaginable to many even in principle.
The Security Council coalesced around the middle option of reducing the force, leaving the veto-wielding U.S. alone in supporting full withdrawal. I recall listening on the line when Ambassador Albright called Dick Clarke. She was as livid as I have ever heard her. Albright told Dick, in effect: “I have just stepped out of the Security Council. We are totally isolated. No one else agrees we should completely withdraw the force. Plus, my instructions from Washington are just plain wrong. The U.S. can’t be responsible for completely abandoning Rwanda. I need new instructions. Now.” As a result of her willingness to fight a bruising internal battle, Ambassador Albright ultimately received authority to join the consensus in the Council on the U.N. drawing down to 270 troops. Human rights groups and many others criticized this action as cowardly and deadly, given that the small, remaining U.N. presence was powerless to stop the killing or even to protect those whose had taken refuge among U.N. personnel. But the only option that could have made a difference—augmenting the force—was not feasible, because no country had both the will and the capacity to provide the necessary troops swiftly enough.
Another dilemma was whether to employ U.S. military assets to jam Radio Mille Collines. National Security Advisor Tony Lake rightly pressed the Pentagon to develop this option, but in a May 5 memo from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Frank Wisner to Deputy NSA Sandy Berger, DOD concluded that, in the Rwandan context, “jamming is an ineffective and expensive mechanism that will not accomplish the objective the NSC Advisor seeks.” That memo effectively ended internal discussion over the utility of shutting down the hate radio broadcasts.
The horror of the killing sparked another active debate in May and early June—whether to label what was transpiring in Rwanda a “genocide.” For many weeks, major press outlets, including The New York Times, referred to events generically as a “civil war,” which in part it was. Along with the press and many analysts outside the human rights community, U.S. policymakers were slow to recognize the organized, systematic, ethnic-based nature of the killing. The U.S. government crept up to the designation, as State Department officials were eventually allowed to acknowledge gingerly that “acts of genocide may have occurred.” Typically, the secretary of state is responsible for making formal genocide determinations. The issue ultimately fell to the elder statesman Warren Christopher, a venerable and exceedingly cautious lawyer. He and some of his staff worried about the implications of the genocide designation, fearing that saying the word would create political pressure on the administration, if not a legal obligation, to intervene.
National Security Advisor Lake repeatedly characterized events in Rwanda as “genocide” in meetings with human rights groups, a judgment with which I agreed, given the scale and intent of the killing. Still, it was not until June 10 that Secretary Christopher publicly and reluctantly conceded: “If there’s any particular magic in calling it genocide, I’ve no hesitancy in saying that.”
As the extraordinary scope of the killing in Rwanda grew more obvious by early May 1994, pressure mounted at the U.N. and in Washington to do more—and fast. The U.N. secretary-general proposed to assemble an all-African force to fly into Kigali and move outward into the countryside to protect civilians. U.S. military planners thought this concept was madness, given the dangers of inserting any sizable force by air into a hot war zone, much less a U.N. force of limited capacity. Along with others in the administration, I supported a counterproposal for a different concept of operations wherein U.N. personnel would enter Rwanda from the neighboring countries and establish safe zones along the border where civilians could be protected. For weeks, U.S. and U.N. planners argued over the right course. Eventually, lacking support for our concept, the U.S. relented, and Boutros-Ghali won agreement gradually to establish UNAMIR II, which would base itself in Kigali and work its way out of the capital.
Several African governments committed to participate, but their contingents were very slow to arrive, in part because the U.S. insisted on a phased approach tied to conditions on the ground, and in part because they were unable to deploy without external assistance and lacked basic equipment from radios to armored personnel carriers (APCs). To try to expedite their deployment, Dick Clarke and I pressed the Pentagon to lease forty-six APCs to the U.N. to enable the Ghanaian battalion to become operational. As one of the most capable contingents and a friendly nation, Ghana was a prime candidate for U.S. assistance. We pleaded with colleagues on the Joint Staff, “You can spare less than fifty APCs. It’s not going to affect military readiness.”
Still, the Pentagon hated the idea of relinquishing its vehicles and transporting them to Rwanda; above all, strangely, the Department of Defense balked at painting their APCs white, as was necessary to identify them as neutral U.N. vehicles. Dick and I spent countless hours battling with DOD, insisting, “You can easily repaint the APCs back to Army green when the lease is over.” Eventually we wore them down, and they agreed to send the APCs. Some months later, my NSC colleagues and I were deeply chagrined (but also mildly amused) to learn that at least some of our American APCs were being used as chicken coops!
After the establishment of UNAMIR II, it took months for sufficient U.N. forces to arrive. In the meantime, the killing raged on, and hundreds of thousands of refugees spilled into Rwanda’s neighboring states. Frustrated by the lack of international response, and keen to protect their Rwandan government Hutu allies from Tutsi rebels led by Paul Kagame, the French government decided to send its own troops to Rwanda. France’s defense minister, François Léotard, in seeking U.N. support for what they dubbed “Opération Turquoise,” maintained that their mission would be to “protect threatened civilians, not for war operations or military assistance.”
I, among others, doubted that claim. France had long armed and supported the Rwandan army, which included the Hutu extremists who orchestrated and conducted the genocide. Therefore, the French government’s impartiality was dubious, and its objectives in this instance were highly suspect. Secretary Christopher argued strenuously however that we should vote at the U.N. to endorse the French mission, in part out of loyalty to an ally.
As an NSC director, my status was equivalent to that of a State Department deputy assistant secretary, four ranks below the secretary of state. Nonetheless, convinced that supporting the French mission would compound our strategic mistakes, I argued passionately to Sandy Berger that we should oppose the French force. Given France’s ignoble history in Central Africa of propping up friendly, if unsavory governments and picking sides in ethnic conflicts, I smelled a rat in their motives. Still, for all my opposition, I had no viable alternative to offer. Indeed, it would have been very difficult politically and diplomatically for us to block the French deployment without ourselves being willing to intervene. In the end, we went along with the French.
Over the next two months, French forces not only set up a safe haven in southern Rwanda to protect civilians but also gave military cover and tacit support to enable the Hutu ringleaders of the genocide to escape unscathed into neighboring Zaire, disappearing amidst the hundreds of thousands of refugees. For years to come, long after Kagame’s rebels ended the genocide by routing the Rwandan government forces in July 1994, and took power, those refugee camps and ringleaders continued to threaten Rwanda.
The final consequential decision U.S. policymakers faced came as the genocide was ending and hundreds of thousands of mainly Hutu refugees poured into Zaire, creating massive cholera colonies and the greatest humanitarian relief requirement in decades. What would the U.S. and international community do to address this mass suffering? Having failed even to consider trying to halt the genocide, feeling guilty for the human costs of that failure, and facing on average well over one thousand additional refugee deaths a day, the Clinton administration finally decided to deploy the U.S. military.
At its peak, Operation Support Hope involved over 2,350 U.S. military personnel spread across Central Africa to airlift and supply enormous quantities of food, medical supplies, tents, and water purification equipment to assist the roughly two million refugees who flooded Goma, Zaire. The U.S. military has extraordinary capacities and talents, including its lesser known ability to mobilize massive resources quickly to respond to disasters, however remote, whether natural or man-made. Operation Support Hope saved thousands of lives. It also enabled policymakers to feel like we had at least done something. However, that post-facto humanitarian relief operation, while appropriate, hardly mitigated my enduring anguish over the U.S.’s and international community’s collective failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide.
How could humans do that to one another? How can you hate any group that much? How can one live with such culpability? How can a nation recover from such insanity?
These questions endure. Rwanda has recovered remarkably, if imperfectly. No one there speaks anymore of ethnic groups. There are no Hutus and Tutsis, out loud. In public, there are only Rwandans. Paul Kagame, whose rebel forces ended the genocide, still rules Rwanda today, having taken effective power shortly after the violence ended. Kagame governs both with laudable vision and an iron fist. In Rwanda, political opponents often disappear or die. The press is muted. Political parties are stifled. Rwanda invaded neighboring Congo (as Zaire was renamed) multiple times, ostensibly to free refugees and combat the perpetrators of genocide. But its forces slaughtered thousands of innocent Congolese, especially ethnic Hutu, toppled the government, and exploited Congo’s considerable mineral wealth. Kagame has extended his term repeatedly under the theory that he is uniquely capable of leading his fragile country.
By contrast, Kagame has also kept the country together, substantially healed its wounds, grown its economy rapidly, and made Rwanda a leader in Africa. He has brought health care, internet connectivity, and agricultural innovation to every corner of the country. Women comprise over 60 percent of the legislature. Rwanda pioneered local reconciliation and forgiveness courts, known as gacaca. Kagame banned plastic bags, and you will hardly find garbage anywhere. Rwanda is now akin to the Singapore of Africa, a far cry from that churchyard and the hundreds like it across the country.
It’s hard to convey the myriad ways in which the Rwandan genocide affected me. It was a personal trauma, a source of nightmares and deep regret. Though I was not a senior decision maker, I was still a working-level participant in a massive policy failure. I carry the guilt with me to this day. It made me perhaps overly sympathetic to Rwanda, its people and leaders. It also rendered me hyper-vigilant in our efforts to try to prevent and resolve recurrent conflict and ethnic violence in Central Africa, not just in Rwanda, but also Burundi and Congo.
The Rwandan genocide left me hungry for mechanisms that could help prevent or mitigate the consequences of such a policy failure again. Later, as assistant secretary of state for African affairs, I championed the creation of the African Crisis Response Initiative, through which the U.S. trained and equipped six thousand African peacekeepers to be ready to respond more quickly when a future need arose. I strongly supported the Great Lakes Justice Initiative, a Clinton second-term effort to build regional capacity for the rule of law and reconciliation, which could help torn societies prevent conflict and heal their differences. At the same time, the administration fully backed the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and similar justice mechanisms in West Africa.
Several months after I left the Clinton administration, I picked up my home phone and was surprised to receive a cold call from a young journalist I had never heard of before: Samantha Power. She was writing a book on genocide, including Rwanda, and wanted my reaction to what she was planning to report. She said she was told that I had worried aloud in an interagency meeting about the domestic political implications of using the term “genocide.” I told Samantha emphatically that what she heard was not true. Samantha insisted she had it from two separate sources. I reiterated that I did not (and would not) inject political considerations into a policy decision, particularly as a junior NSC staffer.
Nonetheless, in her 2002 book, A Problem from Hell, Samantha wrote: “Susan Rice, a rising star on the NSC who worked under Richard Clarke, stunned a few officials present when she asked, ‘If we use the word “genocide” and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?’ ” To my dismay, Samantha had completely ignored my protestations.
The words she attributed to me did not reflect how I thought or how I spoke in interagency meetings. The question she alleged I posed would have been wildly out of left field and fundamentally off-topic. Moreover, it would have been ridiculous for a working-level staffer entirely disconnected from the White House’s political operation to ask midlevel, career civil servants and military officers to offer a complex political judgment well outside their realm of competence.
Despite telling Samantha that I had no recollection of any such discussion and was confident I had never said such a thing, I decided not to deny it on the record, fearing my denial would not be deemed credible. Rather, I chose to dismiss (and try to defuse) the accusation by commenting for attribution: “If I said it, it was completely inappropriate, as well as irrelevant.” That was my mistake. In subsequent years, this urban legend gained traction, becoming an enduring stain on my public record and my first real taste of being grossly mis-portrayed in the press. Despite my lasting frustration and outrage, this dispute did not ultimately impede my ability later to work well with Samantha and become friends.
Of course, it was the human cost of the Rwandan genocide that has haunted me ever since. It left me determined to go down fighting, if ever I saw an instance where I believed U.S. military intervention could be at once feasible, effective, and make a critical difference in saving large numbers of human lives at an acceptable risk to U.S. interests. However, as I rose to more senior roles, I came to realize that such conditions are rarely fulfilled.
During the Obama administration, I assessed they pertained in Libya, but not in Syria, despite the extreme human toll. In both instances, I may have been wrong. Such calls are never black and white; in actuality, they are fraught with uncertainty and prone to miscalculation. Failure, as I discovered early, is an inevitable result of policymaking. We did fail; we will fail. Our aim must be to minimize the frequency and the price of failure, while learning from our mistakes—and hopefully not the wrong lessons.