Chapter Twelve

FLOOD LEADS TO FORTUNE

Unlike the lunatic regime in North Korea, the strongmen who ruled Haiti could not threaten a sea of fire. It was well within their power, however, to create a sea of despair. And so they were doing still in 1994, as desperate Haitians continued to flee poverty and torture in rickety homemade boats, and continued to be turned back by U.S. ships patrolling the Caribbean. This was the policy that Clinton had approved in January 1993, after retreating from his campaign promise of asylum for political refugees. This reversal, combined with the USS Harlan County debacle the previous autumn, meant that for Clinton, Haiti had become synonymous with humiliation.

“This is the same shit we’ve been talking about for a year!” he interrupted in exasperation in the spring of 1994, in the middle of a dispirited national security meeting about Haiti options. The ultimate solution to the Haiti crisis had been growing obvious for months. U.S. forces would need to forcibly evict the military regime and restore democracy. This was a modest military challenge, but a formidable political one. Haiti’s dictatorship, however odious, posed no threat to U.S. national security. There was no clear exit strategy. How long might U.S. forces have to stay to ensure a good result? Most of all, domestic public opinion was solidly against intervention and would be intolerant of any military casualties. Under an invasion, there almost surely would be some: Even a ragtag army can fire machine guns on its way to defeat. Haiti was a prototypical example of how liberals and conservatives had reverted to their traditional pre–Cold War roles—gone “back to the womb,” in historian Arthur Schlesinger’s piquant phrase. Those agitating to use force in Haiti were mostly liberals, represented especially by the Congressional Black Caucus. This time it was conservatives, as in Bosnia and Rwanda, who recoiled from the assertion of American power. Among the larger electorate, polls showed considerable skepticism that the United States had any good reason to intervene in Haiti. Eager to act in Haiti, but not eager to defy such opinion, Clinton hoped for circumstances that might build public pressure to enable him to act.

This desire led to one of the oddest remarks he ever uttered as president. Randall Robinson, who had been promoting the Haitian cause as president of TransAfrica Forum, had begun a hunger strike to protest what he deemed the bankruptcy of Clinton’s policy of turning away refugees. Far from taking offense, Clinton was supportive. “We ought to change our policy. It hasn’t worked,” the president said in April. “For the last ten days . . . I’ve done almost nothing but work on Bosnia and Haiti and one or two other foreign policy issues. He ought to stay out there.”

Robinson, his body wasting, was incredulous. “To have the president suggest that the policy should change and I should stay out there on a hunger strike while he abdicates his responsibility is deeply disturbing,” he complained to the press. “The president can make the policy effective and humane with a stroke of a pen, and he has not changed a thing. It’s sad to say, but he appears to be without a moral compass.”

This was a misreading. Clinton had a compass. But he had other factors to weigh. His rather transparent calculation of these factors conveyed an unfair but understandable impression of aimlessness. Robinson was confronting the paradox of the Clinton leadership style, in which his activist intentions were coiled around a curiously passive streak. This style could be maddening, no doubt, but it could also be quite useful for a politician who preferred—and needed—to preserve his options.

Perhaps the most vexing dimension of the Haiti problem was Jean Bertrand-Aristide. The radical priest and the elected president of Haiti was a democratic hero to many in the Haitian populace, and to many on the American left. The right viewed him as a fraud—a mentally unstable man whose movement specialized in necklacing (placing gasoline-soaked tires around the necks of opponents and setting them aflame) and other liberation horrors. In speech, he favored Creole proverbs and riddles. There was a 1991 CIA report, whose contents were widely publicized, suggesting Aristide had gone off the deep end, in the grip of wild and panicky mood swings. Amid these conflicting interpretations of the central character in Haiti’s drama, the Clinton administration was awkwardly aligned. The president and other officials were publicly committed to Aristide; privately they harbored deep doubts about him, and discussions of his reliability occupied many Oval Office hours in 1993 and 1994.

An example of the misgivings Aristide stirred came one afternoon that spring, April 21, 1994, when Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Tony Lake were scheduled to meet with the deposed president and Robinson. The administration emissaries were planning to share with the exiled leader what they presumed he would regard as welcome news—that the United States would tighten economic sanctions against Haiti to put new pressure on the regime to step down from power.

An hour or so before the meeting was to begin, Talbott and Lake were aghast to read a story that had just moved on the Associated Press wire. Clinton’s policy on Haiti, Aristide had hours earlier averred at a news conference, was both a “cynical joke” and “racist.” Both exasperated and genuinely offended, Talbott and Lake recommended to Clinton that they call off that afternoon’s meeting. Clinton was gnawing on an unlit cigar—a habit that gave him an outlet for nervous energy, while not running afoul of Hillary Clinton’s no-smoking policy at the White House—as Talbott read him the wire. He grew redder in the face the more he heard, then began to vent—not so much at Aristide’s rude comments as for the bind they put Clinton in. This kind of thing, Clinton said, just gives more proof to “those who say he’s a whacko.” He agreed that they should postpone their meeting.

Just as Talbott and Lake were filing out the door, however, Clinton summoned them back. “Wait a minute,” he mused. “Let’s think this through.”

What he wanted to think through was how the episode would play out in the media. The press corps was rarely far from his thoughts, and concern about how stories would echo often weighed heavily on his domestic and diplomatic decisions alike. “If you postpone the meeting for twenty-four hours, people will think you’ve cobbled the new policy together ‘cause of what he said today,” Clinton mused. “If you see him today, nobody will think we did this in thirty minutes.” Clinton ordered Talbott and Lake to carry on with their plans. And he said they should take a message directly from the president to Aristide: “Tell him I’m the best friend he’s got in this country.”

For the next several months, Clinton gradually sought to make his Haitian refugee policy more humane and prepare for the crisis such a policy would inevitably yield. First, he modified the policy of immediate “direct return” to those Haitians plucked from the sea by the Coast Guard. Now refugees would be able to have on-board asylum hearings, to see if they qualified for protection as political refugees. Soon enough, this change prompted a human flood of would-be émigrés—the same problem that caused Clinton to waver back in January 1993. By late June, the deluge forced the administration to begin housing the refugees inside fenced camps at the nearby U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. This was a short-term fix—and a dangerous one. Thousands of people sweltering inside the camps was a virtual invitation for rioting. But sending the people back to an undemocratic Haiti, where many would doubtless be tortured or killed, would be a humanitarian outrage.

On July 1, the crisis mounting, Clinton cleared his schedule to deal with the Haitian problem. He was meeting with his national security team when an aide walked in with a note. Bill Gray, a former congressman who had been recruited by Clinton to help coordinate Haiti policy, read it first, then slid it across the table to the president. It read: “Coast Guard has just picked up 800 Haitians and they expect to pick up a total of 1600 by the end of the day.” Clinton had been previously told that the Coast Guard and military forces in the Caribbean could deal with a maximum of 1,000 refugees a day, and even at that rate Guantánamo would be over capacity in a couple of weeks. Clinton read the note with a woeful look and sighed, “I guess this is what we are up against.” Events were overtaking him.

Clinton mused that perhaps he would have to discourage the migration by reversing course yet again and going back to a direct-return policy. Strobe Talbott, who was taking a lead role on Haiti, warned that such a move would be devastating to Clinton’s foreign policy generally. Flip-flopping on a policy that was already the result of an earlier flip-flop would be the new metaphor for those who regarded Clinton as indecisive and incompetent in foreign affairs.

David Gergen, then winding down his turbulent administration tour, spoke for the other side. A Haitian intervention would be unpopular enough. If Clinton was perceived to have been forced into an invasion because his own policies let the refugee problem get out of control, he warned, “there would be political hell to pay.”

At this, Clinton piped up loudly, “I know what I’d say if I were attacking me: You got yourself into this mess by letting Randall Robinson’s hunger strike dictate U.S. policy. You should have let the sucker die rather than let yourself get pushed around by him this way.”

This outburst illustrated an odd tic of Clinton’s mind. He was never more incisive in argument than when he was critiquing his own positions. It often happened before news conferences, when he would summon his aides to practice questions and answers. To any proposed answer, Clinton would instantly seize on its vulnerabilities, jumping ahead to the two or three logical follow-up questions faster than any reporter would have managed.

He noted that the 1983 invasion of Grenada was against “a pissant country. . . . We took too many casualties because the military screwed up the operation, but there was no press there to know how bad it was.” The 1986 bombing of Libya “was an in and out deal,” and when the occupation of Libya went awry “he [Reagan] had enough sense to get out.” Apparently no modern president had dealt with a problem quite as vexing as Haiti.

The balance of the summer was a season of not entirely artful improvisation. Refugees kept flowing. The administration was forced to double capacity at Guantánamo Bay, to 23,000 refugees, and had persuaded the Caribbean nations of Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, Suriname, and St. Lucia to house refugees. Finding ever more places to house refugees was plainly not a long-term answer. The logic supporting an invasion was more obvious than ever. The political undesirability of that course remained equally obvious.

Everyone on Clinton’s team was sympathetic to the reasons for his indecision, but everyone was growing increasingly impatient with it. This was especially true of the vice president.

Among Gore’s roles in internal deliberations was to play the cutup. During that summer, he and Talbott could sometimes lighten the mood by engaging Clinton in parlor games about which states would be the best options if the administration was forced to start housing refugees in the United States. “Utah,” Clinton responded, naming one state he was not about to carry in 1996. Gore indulged his gift for mimicry. The vice president did a devastating impersonation of Aristide, as well as of President Jimmy Carter, who by late summer was agitating with increasing persistence for a role in negotiating a settlement to the crisis that would avoid a U.S. invasion.

The bantering humor that Gore maintained with Clinton served as a tension breaker. It also helped grease the friction that might otherwise be caused by his most important role—as the person who could end debates and push the president toward closure. At an August 26 meeting, he argued that Congress would never come around to actually supporting a Haiti intervention on the merits. Congress was almost by definition feckless—ready to criticize a president but not itself able to lead. The president’s role, he lectured, was to be bold and take the right action. Public support, and the necessary congressional funding for a major foreign operation, would follow in due course. The vice president, though a rather cautious politician, had a romantic view about leadership and power. “There is a tide in the affairs of men,” he said, invoking the line from Julius Caesar, “which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Gore urged setting a precise date for invasion. “We need a pivot point” around which to plan. The vice president had recently torn his tendon while playing basketball with his former congressional colleagues in the House gymnasium. To soften the bluntness of his lecture, which stopped just a hair shy of hectoring, Gore pointed to his crutches and added ruefully, “Not that I am anyone to be talking about pivot points.”

Gore had carried the day. The invasion was set for no later than September 20.

On the morning of Tuesday, September 13, Clinton went into the Oval Office after a night spent talking on the phone to congressmen dead set against invasion. “After those fucking phone calls, I guess we’ll have something to show those people who say I never do anything unpopular,” he groaned to his assembled aides. Indeed, a Time magazine poll showed nearly 60 percent of the public opposed to invasion, and nearly 70 percent opposed to military action without the consent of Congress.

That Thursday, on national television, Clinton made his best case yet for why American force would be needed to intervene in Haiti. The effort was somewhat belated in the eyes of critics who believed he should have begun weeks or months earlier to build public support for the mission. Even so, he was effective in instructing Americans to the brutality of the regime; he cited a young Haitian boy who said, “I do not care if the police kill me, because it only brings an end to my suffering.” The president warned the junta: “Leave now, or we will force you from power.”

It appeared a forcible entry was inevitable.

But even as Clinton spoke, another avenue was opening. It was Jimmy Carter, who once again was involved, whether Clinton wanted him or not. In the previous weeks, Carter had had several phone conversations with Raoul Cédras, the chief of the military junta that denied Aristide his elected office. Carter was proposing to the administration that he travel to Haiti to find a settlement that would have Cédras and his regime leave power voluntarily and avert an invasion he thought would be a grievous error. Hanging over this proposal, Carter made clear, was the possibility (or was it actually a threat?) that he would go to Haiti on his own if Clinton did not authorize an official mission. Clinton was supposed to call Carter after the 9 p.m. Oval Office speech. Instead, he brooded over the idea for the rest of the evening. In Georgia, Carter stewed. Try as both men might to keep appearances tidy, the reality was that they neither understood nor liked each other. Finally, around midnight, Clinton called Carter and gave the go-ahead for the mission. At Carter’s suggestion, he was accompanied by former Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell, and Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. It was an astonishing trio. Clinton had complicated relationships of resentment and admiration with all three; each of them, in turn, had in various ways private and public previously made plain their misgivings about Clinton. That the president would approve such a mission, by such a delegation, reflected equal measures of desperation and self-restraint. Clinton genuinely felt it was in his personal interest, as well as the public interest, to exhaust every alternative to invasion. Even so, it was a considerable gamble. All three negotiators were publicly opposed to an armed intervention in Haiti. Clinton was putting his fate in the hands of the most prominent opponents of his own policy. What if Carter announced he had a deal that made an invasion unnecessary? Even if Clinton thought the deal was bad, it would be that much harder to send troops in on an unpopular mission.

News of the delegation’s trip did not break until Saturday, by which time Carter, Powell, and Nunn were already in Port-au-Prince. The three men were under instructions to conclude their talks by midday Sunday. The president was in the Oval Office that morning, joined by his secretaries of state and defense, and several others on his national security team. Would the day before them bring a last-minute peace or the first major military conflict of Clinton’s presidency? Noon, the deadline, arrived—and with it a reminder of why the skeptics on his team had been right about the hazards of the Carter mission.

Instead of an answer, the negotiating team in Port-au-Prince sent a fax filled with questions. Did all three of Haiti’s military rulers need to leave the country or just the leader, Raoul Cédras? Did the military triumvirate need to formally invite a U.S.-led military force into Haiti, or could this be left for their successors? Why was Philippe Biamby, who had not been the focus of the previous summer’s aborted agreement at Governors Island, now being identified as someone who had to go? The question alone betrayed a certain naÏveté; Biamby had a reputation for singular brutality against Haiti’s own citizens.

“Apparently,” said Defense Secretary Perry, after he had read the fax, “Biamby managed to convince them that he’s Bambi.”

Shortly after sending the fax, Carter himself called Clinton on an unsecured cell phone with a spotty connection. “He keeps beeping out on me,” Clinton fumed. Carter was reporting that he was on the brink of a deal, but the details were not anything Clinton would be happy to learn. Indeed, later, when the team in Port-au-Prince faxed in a proposed settlement, there was a chorus of groans and curses in the Oval Office. “No, no, no,” Clinton kept repeating, as he read through the passages.

The proposed deal was defective on multiple counts. It did not provide a specific date by which the military triumvirate would leave power, and indeed left the departure contingent on the Haitian parliament conferring amnesty on them for potential political crimes. It said nothing about the military leaders going into exile, as Clinton administration officials previously had said they needed to do. Before leaving for Haiti, Carter and his delegation had made three commitments: to discuss only the junta’s departure and not enter into a negotiation about a Haitian political solution, to finish talks by noon on Sunday at the latest, and to do nothing to undercut Clinton and his options. All three commitments had been cast aside.

Clinton believed that Carter, Powell, and Nunn had been snookered, accepting Cédras’s view that he was honorably trying to save Haiti from further instability and chaos. “They have been listening to nonstop shit about Aristide,” Clinton said. “These guys have not seen the body parts.”

But Carter, and Powell and Nunn, too, were arguing that the agreement was a good one, and it would be very hard for Clinton not to accept it. The lack of a precise exit date was the only sticking point. Clinton insisted on October 1. After hours of negotiation, the team in Port-au-Prince came back with a final offer of October 15.

Meanwhile, time was more precious than anyone in Port-au-Prince was aware. Everyone sitting around the negotiating table knew a U.S. military invasion was imminent if a deal was not struck. They did not know it had been scheduled for that very night. All Sunday afternoon, as the talks dragged on, U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen were in the countdown for an attack. In the Oval Office, as Clinton simultaneously worked two crossword puzzles in mid-afternoon, General Shalikashvili told Clinton that if he wished to preserve the possibility of an invasion that night, army paratroopers would have to start preparing their chutes now.

“Pack ’em,” Clinton said.

Hours later, after 6 p.m., talks were still going on, even as planes were taking off from Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, only a couple of hours from their destination. On the phone with Carter, Clinton finally made clear there was no more time for talking. Sharply, he told Carter and the delegation they needed to leave immediately.

At just this moment, there was a fortuitous breach in security. Biamby had somehow gotten word about the departing airplanes. He barged in on the talks. “The invasion is coming!” This did tend to focus the mind. At the last moment, the Haitian triumvirate agreed to voluntarily leave power on October 15. Left unstated was whether they would leave the country. The planes did a U-turn in the sky back to North Carolina. At 10 p.m., Clinton announced to the nation that a crisis had been resolved. The U.S. military was indeed arriving in Haiti the next morning, but it would be a peaceful occupation to help restore Aristide to power—a vastly safer mission.

The White House’s story line depicted the Haiti intervention as a portrait of resolve, a diplomatic coup that had been won only by the president’s steely resolve to back diplomacy by military force. The reality was that Clinton had essentially blinked in negotiations with his own negotiators. Talbott, who as a journalist had written books chronicling negotiations, remarked to Berger that he hoped no one ever chronicled this one—it would be just too embarrassing for Clinton.

Still, the Haiti episode marked an important milestone in Clinton’s presidency. He had used military force in a significant way, and indeed had defied public opinion in doing so. This was an act of statesmanship. There were no U.S. military casualties, and Aristide was returned to power. As an exercise in nation building, the Haiti intervention was a modest and incomplete project; the island nation’s future, like its past, continued to be marked by violence and poverty. But Clinton had at least given the Haitians a chance to govern themselves, and he had chased away the ghosts of the previous October: Somalia and the Harlan County. In a halting and clumsy way, he had grown.