When I left the White House, some of the work followed me out, from ceremonies to missions tied to things I’d done and relationships I’d formed when I was president. Some of them were official, like commemorations of historic agreements, or state funerals, while others just came up.
In the summer of 2001, I flew to Buenos Aires to see Argentina’s president, Fernando de la Rúa, and then to Brazil to meet with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had a direct interest in seeing his neighbor succeed. Both wanted my help in convincing the Bush administration to support their plan to resolve Argentina’s sudden and severe financial crisis. In recession since 1998, Argentina feared the International Monetary Fund’s threat to withdraw pledged loan funds unless it sharply curtailed public spending and started paying down its debt immediately. De la Rúa knew the abrupt changes the IMF demanded would make life more difficult for ordinary citizens and destabilize the country’s politics. He wanted to turn things around, but he and Cardoso both thought the IMF demands were so tough they would be self-defeating.
Essentially, they wanted the United States to give Argentina a short-term loan that would enable them to make a substantial payment on the debt, and persuade the IMF to spread the repayment schedule over a longer period of time to reduce the severe impact on Argentine citizens. When I was in office, Brazil had similar troubles and we helped with much more money than Argentina needed. Cardoso was a respected economist, widely admired and corruption-free. He vouched for de la Rúa. I considered Cardoso a good and trusted friend. And Argentina had been America’s most loyal ally in South America, regardless of the party in the White House. It was the first to answer the call for troops to support the restoration of democracy in Haiti, always supported the United States on tough votes in the U.N., and pegged its currency to the dollar. I said I’d try to help.
When I got home I called President Bush’s secretary of the treasury, Paul O’Neill, whom I’d known since I was governor and he was chairman and CEO of Alcoa, which had a large plant in Arkansas. When I made my case for the loan, he responded, “Well, they’re in this mess because they screwed up!” I replied, “Of course they did, Paul. That’s often when people need help—when they screw up. Argentina has been a friend and ally of our country and they’ll be forever grateful if we do help them.”
I failed to sway him. The IMF soon put the hammer down. By December there were riots in the streets and President de la Rúa had to resign. Eventually, Argentina defaulted on some of its debts, leading to years of legal, political, and economic turmoil. Argentina is rich in human talent, with one of the most productive agricultural sectors in the world. But since their 2001 credit crisis, the country’s politics have held the country back, swinging back and forth from right to center to left, from more corruption to less of it. Regardless, I’m glad I met with Cardoso and de la Rúa and sorry I couldn’t persuade our government to help with my old “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” plea. It’s one of those “get caught trying” moments I’ve learned to live with.
Sometimes my efforts were more successful. Earlier in 2001, I had been invited to Hong Kong to speak to a Fortune Global Forum on the economy. It was an interesting and lucrative offer, but I wasn’t sure I could do it. The United States and China were engaged in a word war over the crash of an American spy plane on an island close to mainland China. So far, the Chinese hadn’t released the plane and President Bush hadn’t spoken to President Jiang Zemin. I called the national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, told her about the upcoming speech and the fact that the Chinese president would be there. I said, “I know him well. We spent a lot of time together, and if I go, I’ll have to meet with him.”
I had a lot of respect for Condi’s ability and dedication, which was reinforced by efforts she’d made in her previous job as chancellor at Stanford to protect Chelsea’s privacy and make her college years as normal as possible, so I was frank. I said, “You know your side bankrupted me when I was in office and I need this speech, but I’m an American first. If you don’t want me to go, just say so and I’ll cancel. The other choice is to have me deliver a message from the White House to President Jiang. I know we have just one president at a time. Just tell me what you want me to say and I’ll do it.”
Condi chuckled at the bankruptcy line because she knew it was true and I was clearly ready to can the speech. She said she’d talk to the president and get back to me. Soon she called back and said they wanted me to go and simply tell Jiang that if China would promptly release the plane, he and Bush could make a fresh start.
I scheduled a meeting with President Jiang before my speech. I wanted to get into the plane issue right away and I started to explain the U.S. position. He quickly cut me off, saying, “This is not nearly as serious as your bombing my embassy in Belgrade.” That had happened in 1999 during the seventy-seven-day bombing campaign to stop Slobodan Milošević from turning Kosovo into another Bosnia. We had done our best to hit strategic targets and the CIA maps had identified the embassy building as belonging to the Serbian intelligence service, although Serbia had sold it to China two years earlier.
Jiang continued. “But what did you do then? You immediately apologized and tried to call me. When I didn’t take the call, you knew I had a political problem to deal with, so you kept trying. I took the third call, the demonstrations against the U.S. stopped, and we went back to normal. President Bush didn’t call me and made a tough public statement instead. So I made one in response. This is simple. You spy on us, we spy on you. We didn’t shoot your plane down and you can’t blame us for taking a look at it. This isn’t a big deal. So tell me what you want.”
I said, “President Bush wants the plane back, and if you give it to him, I think you’ll have a good conversation with him and get back to normal business.” I called Condi and told her about the conversation. Soon the plane was returned, the two leaders talked, and that was that. I’ve learned that most leaders are more likely to respond to blunt talk when it is delivered in private. It makes the message more credible, while saving enough face to avoid a cycle of public bad-mouthing. Of course, that approach doesn’t garner as much press coverage, but it is more likely to be effective, and when you do have to take the gloves off in public, people are more apt to listen.
Anyway, it was the beginning of a fascinating relationship with George W. Bush, a man with sharp political instincts who’s determined to keep learning and growing, as his love of painting, continued involvement with men and women wounded in military service, and outspoken support for immigration reform demonstrate. He’s a good example of what I’ve often seen in political leaders and other famous people over the years—the public persona rarely captures the whole person.
The next day I met with Hong Kong chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, who was close to President Jiang yet seemed proud of Hong Kong’s more democratic open culture. I liked Tung and hoped his positive approach to dealing with the U.S. and with Hong Kong’s vibrant, often contentious democracy would prevail. I briefed him on my meeting with Jiang and asked him to support the resolution of the plane issue.
Unfortunately, our relationship with China has deteriorated, with President Xi Jinping’s embrace of divisive nationalism and his decision to stay in office indefinitely. Strains have also been increased by China’s abandonment of its commitment to maintain Hong Kong’s distinctive role in “One China, Two Systems”; by the internment of a million Uighur Chinese citizens; by aggressive efforts to militarize more of the South China Sea islands and intimidate China’s neighbors in Southeast Asia and the Philippines; by Xi’s public declaration of his desire to “solve the Taiwan problem” on his watch; by China’s less than candid sharing of information on COVID-19; and by Xi’s 2021 warning that foreign powers will “get their heads bashed” if they attempt to bully or influence the country.
We still need to work with the Chinese on climate change, our economic relationship, North Korea, and a host of other issues. Divorce is not an option. Today it looks like our relationship is stabilizing, but, as always, we need to prepare for the worst while we work for the best. President Biden’s 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, already bringing chip manufacturing back to the U.S., is a big step in the right direction.
Over the years, there have been more opportunities to encourage the continuation of hard-won peace agreements, and urge still estranged former adversaries to find common ground. I always cleared the foreign speeches with the current administration and asked for talking points for meetings that were approved.
In May of 2001, I flew to Ireland to deliver a lecture at Trinity College Dublin and be the honoree at a star-studded dinner at Dublin Castle to raise funds for the Northern Ireland Reconciliation Fund. It was the beginning of a twenty-plus-year labor of love to do whatever I could to keep the letter and spirit of the Good Friday Agreement alive. It was vital, and still is, to the future of all the Irish people, and to the dream of a Europe united in peace, prosperity, democracy, and security. I also thought the pillars of the agreement could be applied to other trouble spots in the world: majority rule, minority rights, individual rights, the rule of law, and shared decision-making in government. But first, we had to keep the peace process on track. As always, the devil was in the details of sensitive matters, including policing and accountability for the bloody past, and in the shifting ground that was an inevitable consequence of the changes in political leadership in Northern Ireland and the U.K., the global financial crash, which hit Ireland especially hard, and later, the narrow victory of Brexit in the U.K., which threatened both Northern Ireland’s economic future and the Good Friday Agreement itself.
The Dublin dinner raised a lot of money to facilitate the positive changes Northern Ireland needed in the years before Brexit reared its head. It was a memorable night. Both Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, who worked with Tony Blair to finish the agreement, and George Mitchell, who chaired the successful peace talks with a brilliant balance of patience, persistence, and problem-solving, were there. The great actor Richard Harris read a poem, the Three Irish Tenors and The Corrs sang, and many others prominent in all walks of Irish life attended. So did former senator Gary Hart, for whom I’d worked in the McGovern campaign in 1972. Bob Geldof, famed Irish singer-songwriter and AIDS activist, was master of ceremonies. It was all wonderful, a “home game,” with the climax a tribute delivered by my friend Bono, the lead singer of U2, who showed up with his wife, Ali, less than twenty-four hours after she gave birth to their fourth child!
All told, I’ve been to Ireland and Northern Ireland fourteen times since 2001. The latest trip, in May 2023, was a five-day visit to Belfast to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which, despite political and power-sharing setbacks, has kept the peace.
In June 2002, I was invited by Colombian president Andrés Pastrana and his newly elected successor, Álvaro Uribe, to come to their nation during the transition period to speak at a corporate responsibility conference. The real purpose of the conference was to convince the foreign companies operating in Colombia not to give up in the face of violent conflicts between Colombian law enforcement and military forces on one side and the drug cartels and powerful militia groups that supported them on the other.
They wanted me to come and make the case because I had strongly supported and signed the bill to fund Plan Colombia, an ambitious billion-dollar effort to defeat the guerrillas, dismantle the cartels, and support alternatives to coca production. The initiative had strong bipartisan support in Congress and President Bush had pledged to continue it, but we were in the early stages, and Pastrana and Uribe knew that after 9/11 Bush had to concentrate on Afghanistan and terrorism. The Colombian presidents felt that if the international companies believed the United States had lost interest in Colombia, they might conclude the country was a risk no longer worth taking and begin closing their operations there.
The White House quickly approved the trip for the same reason the two presidents had made the request: Colombia is important to America. It is the oldest democracy in South America, an ally and important trading partner, but also the center of the continent’s cocaine trade in a region already unsettled by the rhetoric and actions of then-President Hugo Chávez in next-door Venezuela.
At the time President Pastrana proposed Plan Colombia in 1999, about a third of the population was under the effective control of guerrilla groups and the narcotraffickers who paid them a lot of money for protection. Honest police, prosecutors, and judges were targets for assassination and politicians were ripe for corruption by the rich cartels. When the military was unable to defeat the guerrillas protecting the cartels, several wealthy landowners had formed their own militia groups in response, which increased violence and didn’t solve the problem. At the bottom of the food chain were the coca farmers, who raised the crop that the cartels turned into cocaine. They felt they had no choice but to keep growing the coca, since they couldn’t raise anything else that would make them nearly as much money.
The strategy of Plan Colombia was to defeat the militias, take down the already weakened cartels, and drastically reduce coca production by giving the coca farmers other ways to make a decent living. We also worked hard to cut the demand in the U.S. and reduce access to the American market. In the summer of 2000, I had gone to Colombia with a congressional delegation that included Speaker Dennis Hastert and then-Senator Joe Biden. We met with people who were implementing the plan, then went to a dinner with Colombian officials. Chelsea was with me, and after the dinner President Pastrana took us on a stroll through the beautiful old section of Cartagena.
Soon we came to a square where a crowd had gathered around a group of young musicians in their traditional native dress, singing and dancing for peace. Los Niños del Vallenato were from the northeastern state of Cesar, a place of beautiful valleys running through deeply forested mountains. They were already famous. Their first CD, full of songs urging an end to violence, quickly rose to the top of the charts in Colombia. Soon, President Pastrana, Chelsea, and I were dancing with them. I was so moved by their music and their message of peace and resilience that I invited them to the White House for our last Christmas party and four years later to perform at the dedication of my presidential library.
They were accompanied by their sponsor, Colombian culture minister Consuelo Araújo, who was from the same area as the children and was a big promoter of the annual Vallenato music festival and competition held in the soccer stadium in Valledupar. It drew 30,000 musicians and fans a year. It was also the home of the most revered teacher of Vallenato music, Andrés Gil. Children came from miles away to learn from him, often walking through dangerous areas when bullets were flying. Consuelo was so well known she was referred to only by her first name. Not many cabinet ministers anywhere can say that.
The guerrillas hated these kids and their music, but they knew better than to go after them. They did, however, manage to kidnap Consuelo in September 2001. She was a “two-fer” for them—the woman whose children had galvanized popular opinion against the violence and the wife of the lawyer who had just become attorney general of Colombia.
About two weeks after 9/11, Los Niños del Vallenato were on a long-scheduled trip to the United States to sing at the Kennedy Center. They performed a song pleading for Consuelo’s release. It was not to be. A couple of days later, her body was found. She had been shot in the back of the head. Consuelo’s funeral was held in the soccer stadium at Valledupar, site of her beloved festival. I was unable to attend, but President Pastrana and her family asked that I deliver a message over the jumbotron. A hundred thousand people came to say goodbye to a brave woman who wanted Colombia’s children to grow up in a peaceful, lawful country, where children are free to sing their songs and find their way.
When I called Pastrana to accept his invitation to the conference in 2002, I made just one request: please bring the children to greet me. On the night of June 28, I landed at the Cartagena airport. When the flight crew opened the door, I walked out on the top step to see the children singing a song of welcome. By their side were two adults: one was the new culture minister, the other a representative of Indigenous people. The culture minister was María Consuelo Araújo, Consuelo’s twenty-nine-year-old niece. The Indigenous Colombian was there to give me a traditional welcome bracelet woven from red, blue, and yellow strands, the colors of their flag. Although almost no one does it anymore, tradition holds that it should be worn until it falls off. I followed tradition—to honor Consuelo and her brave family, and to remind myself that compared to what so many others face, I never have a bad day. In the spring of 2022, the bracelet finally fell off my right wrist after almost twenty years. It was badly frayed and the colors were no longer bright, but the memories it held never faded.
I’ve been back to Colombia often over the years, to speak at a conference on Spanish heritage, to support the work of my foundation there, and to see my friend Gabriel García Márquez not long before his passing. He’s the only person I know who bragged that he counted both me and Fidel Castro as friends.
In June 2017, I attended the first World Coffee Producers Forum in Medellín and took the opportunity to visit one of the first infrastructure projects to come out of Plan Colombia, an amazing cascade of escalators going all the way up and down the mountain that dominates the Comuna 13 neighborhood, once the home of cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. Before the escalators, poor women had to walk down the equivalent of a thirty-story building to fill their water jugs, then put them on their heads for the long trek back up. Now the escalators carry them down and up, along with tourists from all over. They stop along the way to view the famous graffiti art on the walls and roofs of tightly packed buildings, or have a meal or a cup of coffee in a cozy café. The coffee conference brought together people from more than forty countries as part of Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos’s plan to reduce coca production by shifting more land to coffee growing and increasing the growers’ incomes.
Colombia has made progress through Plan Colombia, but the road has not been an easy one. The main guerrilla group officially disbanded, and overall violence went down, but the peace agreement Santos signed was controversial, with former president Uribe heading the opposition from his Senate seat to a deal he thought was too easy on the rebel groups. After Santos ended his term, he was succeeded by Uribe’s favored candidate, Iván Duque, a dedicated young leader who promised not to cancel the peace agreement but to make it tougher. Instead, he had to deal with two new problems: the tremendous influx of economic and political refugees fleeing the turmoil in neighboring Venezuela, nearly two million of them, and the ravages of COVID-19. Soon crime, violence, and general discontent were on the rise.
Duque granted the vast majority of the Venezuelan refugees legal status for ten years, provided they register with the government. About two decades earlier, when Venezuela was more stable and Colombia was struggling, more than a million Colombians fleeing the violence at home had found refuge in Venezuela. At first, most Colombians supported the chance to return the favor, but the international community has given them nowhere near the support they need and proved unwilling or unable to resolve the Venezuelan crisis in the face of President Nicolás Maduro’s unwillingness to cede or share power.
In the 2022 election, Colombians voted for their first leftist government. They elected President Gustavo Petro, once a guerrilla fighter who had renounced violence long ago, and who, as mayor of Bogotá in 2013, proudly showed me one of his city’s electric taxis; and Vice President Francia Márquez, a social activist who is the nation’s first Afro-Colombian to hold such a high office. There was a peaceful transfer of power. Around the same time, a citizens’ group issued a report sharply critical of Plan Colombia, essentially saying it placed too much emphasis on defeating the cartels and their supporters and too little on finding better ways for the coca farmers to make a living.
That’s an understandable but not entirely accurate criticism. Investors have become more wary as the government, with little outside assistance, has been forced to divert funds needed for development, including alternatives to coca production, to deal with the economic burdens of Covid and the massive influx of refugees, creating new opportunities for the cartels and the violence they bring. I’m still glad we helped them get their country back and hope they can build on that.
In mid-2001, Nelson Mandela called and asked me to come speak at a civil society conference he was hosting with Roelf Meyer, the dedicated public servant who had handled President F. W. de Klerk’s side of the transfer of power to Mandela after his landslide victory in the first postapartheid election. Mandela said they were trying to build up the nongovernmental sector to help meet pressing needs and strengthen the legitimacy of their new democracy, and asked me to help make the case.
I loved being with Mandela and thought he was onto something. He knew that after he left office, it would be harder to maintain national unity, and a strong network of NGOs supported by diverse groups could help a lot. I asked him if I could bring an example of what they might want to do to his meeting. When he laughed and said, “Please do,” I called Eli Segal. A longtime friend of Hillary’s and mine, Eli was chief of staff of my ’92 campaign, a successful entrepreneur, and the first leader of AmeriCorps, which I sponsored and Congress enacted in 1993. The program provides a modest stipend for mostly young men and women to live and work in rural and urban communities across America for a year or two on locally chosen projects. They also earn the equivalent of G.I. Bill benefits for college aid for each year they work. Every volunteer takes a simple pledge to “get things done.” By 2001, more people had served in AmeriCorps than in the forty-year history of the Peace Corps. In 2024, that number has grown to almost 1.3 million and every year 200,000 AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteer in more than 40,000 locations.
Eli agreed to come with me and bring a group of alums from City Year, the widely praised Boston-based group that was AmeriCorps’ largest affiliate. At the conference, Eli and the young people from City Year enthusiastically described what they had accomplished by doing what local people wanted in a way that gained their support and generated more volunteers to help. I said we would help start a City Year South Africa if they wanted it. They did and it became a rousing success. After that, on all my trips to South Africa I’ve tried to meet with the City Year volunteers, often where they’re working. I’ve enjoyed our talks and sharing a couple of hours of cleanup duty, fence painting, and answering their students’ questions on school playgrounds. Over the years they’ve given me a bound book of letters and a beautiful basket full of notes. I reread them every now and then when I need to get my hopes back up.
In late September of 2002, I returned to Africa, stopping first in Ghana to refuel, rest for a day, and see President John Kufuor and former president Jerry Rawlings and his wife, Nana. I liked Jerry and Nana a lot and was impressed that he’d left office on schedule, giving a boost for democracy, something that couldn’t be taken for granted in many aspiring democracies across the world, then and certainly not now.
On the way to the airport, we stopped so our group could buy kente cloth in a big barn where the stalls had been turned into a market. When we got there, there were about fifty people. Within a few minutes there were hundreds more. We could barely move for all the well-wishers and the Secret Service was on edge. I told the head of my detail to relax, that I was probably safer here than I was back home in Chappaqua. Ghanaians love to gather. When I went there as president, President Rawlings hosted a rally in the vast open square in the heart of Accra, then placed speakers for several blocks down the streets leading to it. The square holds 700,000 and was full and there were a few hundred thousand more in the arteries leading to it, the largest crowd I’ve ever addressed.
The crowd in the barn calmed down a bit; we made our purchases and went to the airport. As I was walking across the tarmac to our plane, a woman came running to catch me, waving a package and yelling at me to stop. She smiled and said, “Because of you and the African Growth and Opportunity Act [a bill I signed in 2000 to help sub-Saharan countries expand their exports to the U.S.] I am one of three hundred women who have good jobs making shirts. Now we can support our families and all our kids go to school. We are very grateful. So here’s your shirt.”
I took the shirt and thanked her. When I got home, I placed that shirt on a shelf in my small walk-in closet where I’d see it every day. We were barely a year beyond 9/11 and it reminded me that that woman and her coworkers weren’t mad at America. They were pulling for us because we were pulling for them. The shirt is still there. When I wake up doubting our ability to pull back from the “us vs. them” world, I look at it and smile. It’s proved to be a more valuable gift than that working mother could have imagined.
In the fall of 2003, I flew to Tel Aviv for the celebration of Shimon Peres’s eightieth birthday. The main event was a theater production highlighting the major events in Peres’s life, from being a top aide to the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, while in his early twenties, to helping create and organize the Israel Defense Forces, to his work to assure the integration of Jewish immigrants, especially those from Ethiopia, to his championing of the Oslo Peace Accords as foreign minister, then becoming prime minister after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.
Peres was defeated by Bibi Netanyahu in 1996 by less than a one percent margin after Netanyahu aired the first negative TV ads ever run in an Israeli campaign and Shimon failed to respond quickly or vigorously enough. Three years later, Ehud Barak, Israel’s most decorated soldier, ousted Netanyahu in a campaign calling for a return to the peace process with security. In 2001, after he and his cabinet accepted my proposal for a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in East Jerusalem, but failing, as I had, to get Yasser Arafat to agree, Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon. The voters thought if Arafat wouldn’t take the deal I offered and Barak accepted, he wouldn’t take anything they could accept, so they voted for the candidate they thought would be toughest on security.
So on this night, Peres sat in the front row of the theater with Prime Minister Sharon on his left and me on his right. We three were a picture of Israel’s predicament. Peres had often been at odds with Sharon over the decades, but they preserved their personal relationship. And Shimon, who never gave up on anyone, kept trying to convert him.
Amazingly, two years later, Sharon did change his mind, ordering a withdrawal from Gaza, which included the relocation of about 8,000 settlers back within Israel’s original borders, a highly controversial move. He formed a new political party, Kadima, and built a coalition for peace. Then, in 2006, he suffered a stroke from which he never recovered. His deputy, Ehud Olmert, succeeded him and pledged to continue the withdrawal until a full peace agreement could be completed. His plans were also derailed by the victory of Hamas in elections in Gaza, effectively splitting Palestinian politics in two, with Fatah, the former Palestinian Liberation Organization, in charge of the West Bank. Then Olmert was forced to resign under corruption charges in 2008. Netanyahu was again elected prime minister in 2009, with a coalition that included many hard-core opponents of any compromise that gave the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaza.
The last performance of the evening was the best, as a choral group of young Jewish and Palestinian Israelis sang the perfect metaphor for Shimon Peres’s life, John Lennon’s “Imagine.” When the audience started singing along, the kids coaxed Shimon and me into joining them on the stage. In spite of everything, we all wanted to imagine a peaceful tomorrow, no one more than the brilliant, vigorous octogenarian we had come to cheer.
In the years ahead, I went back to Israel several more times, speaking at large rallies to honor Yitzhak Rabin on the anniversary of his assassination, supporting the forum my friend Haim Saban held every year to keep people who wanted both peace and security updated on the latest developments, attending Shimon Peres’s ninetieth birthday celebration, and speaking at his funeral two years later. But over those years Israel drifted away from peace and grew more divided, with its governments headed by Bibi Netanyahu more determined to hang on to the West Bank, and Arab governments more interested in the economic benefits of cooperation with Israel and less concerned about Palestinian statehood after they took a pass on the peace deal I offered and the Israeli government accepted in 1998.
In 2024, peace looks more distant than ever, after the vicious assault on Israel by Hamas the previous October claimed 1,200 lives, the largest one-day loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust, and Netanyahu’s counterattack, which has claimed many more Palestinian lives. I’ll say more on all this later. It’s complicated, heartbreaking, and dangerous.
In 2015, I had the privilege of leading the U.S. delegation to Bosnia and Herzegovina to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica. That group included Senators Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, New York congressman Peter King, and Secretary Madeleine Albright, who had been my U.N. ambassador during the war. Madeleine was a strong voice for our intervention to stop the Bosnian war and later, as secretary of state, for our early aggressive intervention in Kosovo. It was good to have her with us and to see the bipartisan congressional support for peace in the Balkans.
The Dayton Accords, which ended the Bosnian war, set up a power-sharing coalition government in Bosnia that has always been challenging. The nation contains the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, which have their own constitutions, as well as the Brčko District, which is jointly administered. A three-member presidency includes a Serb, a Croat, and a Bosniak, with the chairmanship rotating among the three. There is also a prime minister and a bicameral parliamentary assembly. The power-sharing politics, difficult under the best of circumstances, are heavily influenced by neighbors, especially Serbia. Bosnian Serbs in the government have too often used their veto power to block all change, hoping to win their release to become part of neighboring Serbia, and costing all Bosnians, including their own people, precious economic and reconciliation opportunities.
In 2015, a young Serbian prime minister, Aleksandar Vučić, accepted an invitation to the commemoration of the genocide by the Muslim mayor of Srebrenica, Ćamil Duraković, the only member of his school class to have survived the slaughter. The first part of the ceremony took place inside the factory where many of the Bosnian Muslims had been killed. There were a few hundred local citizens and foreign dignitaries who gave him a respectful reception, impressed by his decision to turn the page on the past and by their own mayor’s plea for them to do the same. In my remarks, I did my part to support him and the other Bosnian citizens I had worked to save through NATO’s brief bombing campaign and the peacekeeping efforts which followed. I hoped the two young leaders could spark a change.
After the program, we all walked out to the adjoining Potočari Cemetery for the formal interment of the recently found remains of about 100 victims, adding to the 6,000 who were already buried there. After twenty years, many victims were still unaccounted for.
The crowd outside was different. The older Bosnians gave me a good reception, still grateful we stopped the killing, but the younger Bosnians were not so welcoming, many clearly angry because so little economic and political progress had been made. Unfortunately, they also hadn’t heard the speeches in the factory. When the crowd recognized the Serbian prime minister, there was muted murmuring that quickly grew to angry shouts. Soon the crowd was throwing stones at Prime Minister Vučić as he was chased up a hill with his bodyguards. Too many in the crowd were unwilling to share the painful ceremony with someone they saw as representing those responsible for the genocide.
Mayor Duraković was in many ways a symbol of the progress his city, and the new nation, had made since the war. He was only sixteen in July 1995 when he fled into the mountains as Bosnian Serb troops poured into the city after holding it in a crippling siege for three years. He eventually made his way to the United States, where he spent ten years getting an education. His election as mayor in 2012 was quite a feat for a Bosniak Muslim, because Srebrenica had become mostly Serbian after the massacre and remains so, even though many Bosniaks returned after the Dayton Accords.
Though Duraković was a popular mayor, he lost reelection in 2016 to a Bosnian Serb but was later elected vice president of Republika Srpska. As of the writing of this book, there is peace and some progress. All Srebrenica’s mosques have been rebuilt and children of once warring parties go to school and play soccer together. Like many such places in the world, they are looking for outside investment to boost the economy and hoping for the best while making the most of the fragile peace.
Nobody involved in the Dayton peace talks, including our negotiating team brilliantly led by the late Richard Holbrooke, thought the agreement that ended the war would be easy to maintain. They all took an imperfect deal to stop the killing. Yet the peace, while often under great strain, is still alive, in spite of the fact that neither the European Union nor the international community has done enough to bring the kind of prosperity to Bosnia that keeps Northern Ireland moving forward. Of course, history and geography make Bosnian success harder, but ignoring it makes things worse. I still believe we did the right thing to end the war and make the imperfect peace. But as we see in the United States and in post-Brexit Northern Ireland, polarized politics can make any union less perfect.
Possibly my most memorable mission took place several years earlier, in August 2009, a few months after President Obama took office. North Korean soldiers had seized two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, along the Chinese–North Korea border. They were filming a story about desperate North Koreans fleeing their homeland to escape extreme poverty and oppression by going into China, which considered them undocumented immigrants, not refugees, and often sent them back or kept them in various forms of indentured servitude, from forced marriages to prostitution to the growing internet sex trade.
Originally the journalists had intended only to film on the Chinese side of the still frozen Tumen River, which North Koreans used to cross into China. Then their guide urged them and their colleague, Mitchell Koss, to cross the river and take a few steps inside North Korea, where he said they might be able to talk with North Korean officials who sometimes allowed their citizens to cross the river unhindered. Instead they were confronted by two soldiers who chased them back across the river and caught both Euna and Laura. Mitch Koss escaped into China and told their families and their employer, Current TV, a cable company then owned by former vice president Al Gore, what happened.
The story of their arrest broke in the South Korean press two days later. Meanwhile Al and Lisa Ling, Laura’s sister and herself a well-known journalist, had swung into action. At the State Department, Hillary had assigned two people to stay in daily touch with the families and Al worked with his friends in the Obama administration and contacts in the Chinese government, hoping to get Chinese help in persuading the North Koreans, with whom the United States had no formal diplomatic relations, to release our citizens. Lisa also contacted Bill Richardson, who served as U.N. ambassador when I was president and had traveled to North Korea a few years earlier to secure the release of an American. He told her that in the end, North Korea would want to deal directly with the United States and would resist Chinese intervention.
At that point, I was unaware of the back-and-forth, but if I had been, I would have agreed with Richardson. This was going to be a big story and North Korea was not about to pass up the political gift of direct contact with the United States on such a highly publicized matter. I also thought that, in the end, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, would be reluctant to send two young American women to prison and squander the chance to leverage the situation to his benefit.
For the next few months, events unfolded in ways that left open the possibility of either freedom or prison for them. Laura and Euna were brought to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, confined separately, and subjected to almost daily interrogations about what they did, why, and whether they were genuinely remorseful for their efforts to damage the Hermit Kingdom.
In May, Hillary hosted a meeting at the State Department for the families, Al Gore, and the people she had assigned to work on the case. The White House was also involved through the National Security Council, then headed by General Jim Jones. Hillary reported that while so far there had been no response to their diplomatic efforts, there had been some positive signs. The Swedish ambassador to North Korea had been allowed to see Laura and Euna, and they were allowed to send and receive letters from their families and even to make a couple of phone calls. On the other hand, North Korea had just violated a U.N. resolution by conducting a belowground nuclear test following a missile test the month before, and the U.N. Security Council had voted for, but had not yet imposed, additional sanctions. On June 4, North Korea proceeded to try the two journalists, the first trial of American citizens in a North Korean court. They were quickly convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison.
The best possible outcome was through a humanitarian mission by someone not in the government to provide positive coverage to North Korea, while avoiding the impression of legitimizing the trial or accepting the missile and bomb tests. Al Gore volunteered to go. Hillary thought it was a good idea and I did, too. He was well respected around the world, had won the Nobel Peace Prize, and had been part of our administration’s successful efforts to prevent North Korea from producing plutonium before it could be weaponized and to secure a moratorium on the testing of long-range missiles. He was clearly qualified to execute the mission and avoid all the political and diplomatic land mines it would entail.
After the trial and sentencing, the families were understandably worried but were getting signals that the North Korean government wanted the matter resolved if our government responded in what they considered a suitable way. Soon Al called me and said they didn’t want him to come because Laura and Euna worked for him and they didn’t want to legitimize Current TV. He said the signals were that they would release them to me. Apparently Lisa Ling had gotten the same message from her sister and relayed it to the White House.
I told him I would do it, but only if President Obama approved. He was already dealing with the largest economic crisis since the Depression. I didn’t want to add to his burdens.
To anyone who’d followed the back-and-forth between our nations since 1993, the North Korean behavior made sense. The nation was highly secretive, tightly controlled, and so antagonistic to dissent that it kept tens of thousands of its citizens locked up in prison camps in conditions so bad that many of them died every year. They couldn’t grow enough food in their mountainous country to feed themselves, but they had an enormous army and a remarkable capacity to build bombs and missiles. The Chinese helped them, but they were still often short of food and fuel. Most people in the world paid attention to them only when they caused trouble.
In pursuit of greater recognition, North Korea always wanted direct contact with the United States, and in 1993 and 1994, my administration, in close cooperation with South Korea, had given it to them on security matters, in tough negotiations to stop their production of plutonium and long-range missiles. Our negotiators made it clear that if North Korea forced me, I was prepared to attack their nuclear facilities, but I wanted a peaceful resolution and more normal relations between North Korea and their neighbors, especially South Korea. I also went out of my way to avoid embarrassing them in public.
The agreement we reached required North Korea to permanently stop producing plutonium and put the spent fuel rods under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In return, the United States, South Korea, and Japan would fund two light-water nuclear reactors whose fuel couldn’t be used to make bombs. By the time I left office, it was estimated that the agreement had prevented the production of up to a hundred bombs.
By 2009, with President Obama in office, the North Koreans wanted to get back to direct official contacts with the U.S., while the administration, preoccupied with pressing domestic issues, had decided to stick with the multilateral six-party format established during President George W. Bush’s administration. It was probably the only available option after President Bush, following 9/11, included North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, in the “Axis of Evil.” The North Koreans had also started producing enriched uranium, and in 2005 resumed missile testing, violating the spirit if not the letter of the agreement my administration had made with them.
Giving the American journalists to me probably seemed as close as they could get to direct contact, because of my record and the fact that I was married to the secretary of state. That contact was exactly what the White House was concerned about. Still, this was an easy call. The trip would make the problem go away and give Laura Ling and Euna Lee their lives back.
President Obama approved the mission and invited me to the White House to discuss it and get a briefing. The president asked John Podesta to go with me, which was a good idea. John had been my White House chief of staff and was helping the Obama White House formulate climate policy, but was still head of the Center for American Progress, an NGO he founded, so the delegation would be “unofficial.” The White House beefed up my staff with two welcome additions: David Straub, a professor of Korean Studies at Stanford, who made sure we were up-to-date on events and the people we’d be meeting, and Minji Kwon, an interpreter with our embassy in South Korea. They joined my regular traveling staff, one of whom had been in touch with Lisa Ling, and the doctor who often accompanied me on international trips. Before I left, I also talked with Leon Panetta, who had been my second chief of staff and was now CIA director.
Because the mission was classified humanitarian and not official, we couldn’t fly on a military aircraft. The chairman of Dow Chemical Company, Andrew Liveris, a foundation supporter, furnished a plane to fly to California. There we picked up Straub and flew to Korea on a plane provided by Steve Bing, a longtime friend and foundation supporter who, among his other good deeds, had built the world’s first hangar, at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, that produced no greenhouse gas emissions and provided enough extra solar power to electrify about twenty nearby homes.
Originally, the White House wanted me to be on the ground for only a few hours, just enough time for a quiet meeting and picking up Laura and Euna. I was not surprised that the North Koreans insisted I spend the night. It was their show now, and we had to follow their carefully orchestrated plan, which, with one exception, I was willing to do.
When we landed, I was taken directly to the official guesthouse, a handsome building with a large, well-designed garden. Meanwhile John and others in the delegation had to endure Act One of the drama, an intense rehash of the women’s violations of North Korean law by the chief prosecutor. Then the group joined me at the guesthouse for Act Two. We were driven to the North Korean parliament building, where I sat with the president of the body, who wanted to talk about reviving the six-party talks, which had been on hold since the North Korean nuclear test and the passage of U.N. sanctions. With the preliminaries over, we were driven to the Koryo Hotel and put in a conference room.
I stood at the closed doors waiting for about fifteen minutes, until they opened to the beautiful sight of Laura and Euna rushing in. I embraced them as they cried with relief and Laura said, “I knew you’d come for us.” It was the first time Euna and Laura had seen each other since their imprisonment began. I knew we were still on North Korea’s schedule, so I told them that our doctor had to check them to make sure they were well enough to travel. I said I hoped we’d be taking them home the next morning but we all had to be careful.
Soon they were taken back to their confinement and I returned to the guesthouse for my bilateral meeting with Chairman Kim. He was rumored to be gravely ill, and he looked frail, but he seemed full of energy and determined to have a productive meeting devoid of the usual stilted talking points, which he brushed aside every time his subordinates tried to interject them.
Right off the bat, he said that as soon as the United States had confirmed that I would come, the National Defense Commission decided to grant special amnesty to the journalists. Now, he added, we needed to improve relations and eliminate mistrust so that something like this wouldn’t happen again.
I asked why he wanted me to come. He replied that he was impressed when I was the first world leader to send my condolences after his father died in July of 1994, and that his father had complimented our negotiations leading to the joint Agreed Framework, which halted plutonium production and put the spent fuel rods, which could produce material for bombs, under international supervision to make sure no bombs were built. He said his father told him I was tough in private but not disrespectful in public. Kim then mentioned our communications while I was in office, and that late in my second term, I had received his special envoy, Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok, in the White House, then sent Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to North Korea, who invited him to the U.S. and said I’d like to come to North Korea if we could agree to end North Korea’s long-range missile program.
Kim said he clearly recalled that I had written him a letter saying I couldn’t come to North Korea because of the recount in the close presidential election of 2000 and that I hoped such an exchange could occur even after I left office. He said he was surprised by the negative attitude of the Bush administration toward North Korea, especially after 9/11, which he had nothing to do with, and said that the nuclear issue worsened only after they were included with Iraq and Iran in the “Axis of Evil.” He said he believed if the Democrats had won in 2000, the nuclear and missile agreements would have been implemented, North Korea would have had light-water reactors, which produced electricity without producing fuel for nuclear weapons, and the U.S. would have had a new friend in Northeast Asia. I wasn’t so sure, but as Hemingway wrote at the end of The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Turning to the Obama administration, Kim said he was pleased that the president had said while campaigning that he would talk even with hostile countries, but upset that he was still blocking North Korea’s right to send satellites into orbit. He reminded me that he and I had agreed to a missile launch moratorium and that he had unilaterally observed it for seven years after I left office (though he did resume nuclear tests), in spite of the fact that the Bush administration ended bilateral talks in favor of the six-party framework. He said if the Obama administration took a more constructive attitude we could reach similar agreements again.
Kim continued, saying it was a mistake to see North Korea’s military-first policy as one of permanent hostility to the West. It wasn’t a strategy to attack others but one to prevent others from attacking North Korea. Japanese occupation had left a lasting impact, he said, and as a small country surrounded by giants, North Korea’s policy was necessary for survival. He reiterated that he did not see the United States as a sworn eternal enemy, and that in a rapidly changing world, the U.S. should see better relations with North Korea as in our strategic interest. Beyond my coming on this trip, he hoped I would pay attention to Korean issues again. Kim closed by saying, “These are personal views that I had on my mind.”
I was impressed that Kim had been so open and undogmatic. It was clear to me that he was pushing for a new start with the U.S., but when the conversation moved from the past and our mission to future relations, I knew that I had to be careful. This was the red line the White House didn’t want me to cross. I was a private citizen, not authorized to conduct diplomacy. Even before dinner, Chairman Kim had set an inviting table to do just that. Tempting though it was, I couldn’t take him up on it.
Instead, I thanked him for granting amnesty to the journalists, for his comments on our time in office, and for the seven years of genuine progress toward peace and security for both North and South Korea and the region. I reminded him that former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung had played a large role with his Sunshine Policy, including the first cross-border family visits since the Korean War and the then-open Kaesong Industrial Complex, near the border, in which South Korean companies employed tens of thousands of North Korean workers, an indication of the opportunities reconciliation could bring.
I also thanked him for his seven-year missile moratorium and his understanding of my inability to visit North Korea and close the deal during the uncertain recount period after the election. And I told him of another, more important reason that had prevented my coming back in 2000 that involved Yasser Arafat. I’ll talk more about Arafat’s role later, but for now I’ll just say that the consequences of agreeing to Arafat’s request and canceling my North Korea trip may have fatally damaged two different peace plans.
Kim was interested in the part of the story he didn’t know. Now I wanted to use it to convince him to give the Obama administration a chance to develop an approach he could support. I explained that I was not there to speak for the United States but to offer some personal observations. First, President Obama had inherited the six-party talks and needed the support of South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia to improve relations with North Korea. Second, Secretary of State Clinton, with the president’s support, had appointed Ambassador Stephen Bosworth as a special envoy and asked him to visit North Korea. North Korea hadn’t yet said yes or no. I urged Kim to say yes, assuring him that Bosworth was respected, trustworthy, and able to help rebuild the relationship with the U.S.
Finally, I said I had been asked to raise the possibility of the release of detained South Koreans and the resumption of the investigation of Japanese abductees (Kim had already released five of them during the recent visit of the Japanese prime minister). I told him he would see the positive response in the U.S. to the journalists’ release and the same thing would happen in the neighboring countries if he released their citizens. I painted the best picture I could without crossing the line into direct negotiations.
Finally I said if North Korea denuclearized, it could insist that its security worries be put to rest, but it was important not to ask President Obama to abandon the six-party talks and instead to work with the United States to have both strong bilateral and regional relationships. Kim said he would think about how to do both and implied he would follow up either with Ambassador Bosworth or with Senator John Kerry, then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who was thinking about coming to North Korea in the spring.
After the meeting we went to a dinner with Chairman Kim and members of the cabinet. We had all the business out of the way so Kim and I talked about goings-on in the rest of the world. I had been told he watched CNN International for several hours every day and it showed in his knowledge of wide-ranging topics.
The meal was extravagant, with lots of fish, beef, vegetables, and dessert, all well prepared. I tried a little of everything, torn between showing respect for my host’s hospitality and knowing that millions of North Koreans were hungry and malnourished.
During the dinner, Chairman Kim said he wanted us to accompany him to a nearby stadium to watch either a gymnastics competition or an exhibition of traditional Korean dancing. He said the stadium was full of North Korean citizens who wanted to greet us properly. That was the one thing on his agenda the White House had stipulated, rightly, that I could not do. We had already told them we couldn’t do public events so my team deflected and pushed back until Kim told his staff to stop pushing.
The only thing we agreed to do for public consumption was pose for an official photo of both delegations. The White House had specifically asked us not to smile, or to frown, just to be as expressionless as possible. It’s not as easy as you think. We actually practiced doing it and I think we did pretty well.
We went to bed and got a decent night’s sleep. The next morning after a quick breakfast and walk around the garden, we picked up Laura and Euna, and were soon on our way.
We didn’t see many people on the street coming into or leaving Pyongyang, but outside the city we saw some beautiful scenery, mostly forest land and well-tended farms. They could be even more productive with better seed and fertilizer, but the country is so mountainous there may not be enough arable land to meet all North Korea’s food needs.
As we were taking off, I thought about the missile-ending deal we left on the table as I left office, my offer to finish it after President Bush took office, which was not accepted, and the turmoil since. (After years in failing health, Chairman Kim would die in 2011 and be succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-un, who seems determined to make his father look like a softheaded liberal, authorizing almost ten times as many short-, medium-, and long-range missile tests as his father conducted. But that was in the future.)
The flight home was wonderful. Once we left North Korean airspace, Euna and Laura called their families and were excited about seeing them when we landed. We got them talking about how they coped with their confinement and what life would be like now. They were bright young women, with their idealism, and in Euna’s case, strong religious convictions, still intact. And they were eager to get on with their lives. We stopped at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage to refuel and give our charges the first good American breakfast they’d had in months.
On the last leg home, I told our group that I had decided not to say anything when we arrived in order to keep the focus on Laura and Euna and to reinforce the humanitarian nature of the mission. I thought it was better just to get off the plane and smile while Al Gore made brief remarks and Laura and Euna said whatever they wanted. The homecoming was perfect. Al did a good job, Laura and Euna spoke beautifully, and their families were radiant.
After briefing the president, the secretary of state, and the National Security Council about my talks with Chairman Kim, I headed home, exhausted but grateful for the chance to be helpful.
Over the years I’ve had several more of these kinds of opportunities. I went to Vietnam in 2010 and 2015 to celebrate the fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries of normalization with the nation that has become a strong ally in Southeast Asia; represented the United States, at the request of the Obama administration, at the state funeral for the founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, its revered leader who’d built an astonishingly successful Asian Tiger in a tough neighborhood and whose wise counsel had been a great benefit to me; and attended the inauguration of the first new nation of the twenty-first century, Timor-Leste, whose independence I’d supported.
I was pulling for the Timorese. The U.N. effort, led by the Australians and supported by the United States and Thailand, demonstrated how much a coalition of nations sharing a manageable burden could do. The country had real potential in tourism, offshore energy, and agriculture, which Thailand had promised to help them revitalize. I liked and admired the political leaders: José Ramos-Horta, who had been the voice of the Timorese to the outside world, and Xanana Gusmão, the leader of the resistance, whose imprisonment intensified support for independence. Gusmão became the first president, followed a few years later by Ramos-Horta. It’s still tough for Timor-Leste, but they’ve survived. I left more grateful the U.S. had helped them gain the freedom to chart their own course.
Other visits were briefer but nonetheless significant. In 2002, I spoke at the unveiling of Berlin’s renovated Brandenburg Gate, under which I had been the first American president to walk after the wall fell. In 2013 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I was honored to take part in a small private ceremony at the American embassy there to commemorate the lives lost in the terrorist bombing in 1998, where I thanked the embassy staff, and reminded them their sacrifice would not be forgotten.
I’ve been out of the White House so long now there will be fewer opportunities to help in countries where I was active as president, but if they come up, I’ll show up if I can.