All Too Human: A Political Education (24 page)

Our job that night was to help the president decide how to retaliate. All of the top guns were there: Colin Powell, Les Aspin, Warren Christopher, Tony Lake, and Sandy Berger (deputy national security adviser), the vice president and his national security adviser, Leon Feurth. Mack McLarty, David Gergen, and I rounded out the group, but we were there largely for Clinton's political comfort and to provide counsel on presenting the decision to the public. For now the meeting was top secret. We met in the residence because, unlike the West Wing, it had a side door that the cabinet secretaries could enter without being detected by the press.

As the president ambled over from his bedroom on the other end of the second floor, we arranged ourselves around the parlor's coffee table. We didn't sit until the president sat; our early pretensions of informality were gone now, overtaken by the task at hand. This would be Commander in Chief Clinton's first military strike.

Before then, our foreign policy had been more a matter of words than deeds. During the campaign, it amounted to little more than a couple of speeches and a series of press releases. But winning the White House added retroactive weight to everything we had said before. Poor Haitians heard that the new American president had promised not to turn them away, so they built hundreds of rickety wooden boats to head for the promised land. Besieged Bosnians heard that he had vowed to bomb the Serbs, and they hunkered down with heightened expectations, waiting for the American cavalry. Promises that were briefly considered and barely noticed during a presidential campaign, we had learned, could set entire worlds in motion, proving again the poet's words: “In dreams begin responsibilities.”

After the election, that lesson was hammered home every day. We had to reverse our Haitian refugee policy, cave on gays in the military, stall on Bosnia, and flip-flop on Iraq. In a pre-inaugural interview with the
Times
devoted largely to expressing support for President Bush's policy of “containing” Iraq, President-elect Clinton had refused to rule out the prospect of a more normal relationship with Saddam Hussein. “I'm a Baptist; I believe in deathbed conversions,” Clinton had said in the familiar surroundings of his Little Rock living room. “If he [Saddam] wants a different relationship with the United States and with the United Nations, all he has to do is change his behavior.”

Clinton wasn't trying to signal a shift in U.S. policy. In his own mind, he had already sent a tough message by publicly supporting his predecessor's approach. He was just being himself — the relaxed, reflective, and reasonable Bill Clinton who liked to shroud conflict in soft language and shape his thoughts by hearing how they sounded out loud. It had almost always worked for him in the past.

Not this time. Sitting on the couch across from Clinton, I winced when he raised the possibility that Saddam might be redeemed and hoped that it might escape attention.
Right
. Tom Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning diplomatic correspondent who'd just been shifted to the White House beat, was the lead questioner. He was accustomed to covering Bush secretary of state James Baker, a man of notorious verbal discipline who wouldn't utter a provocative sentence on the record unless he was deliberately trying to send a signal. Noting Clinton's colorful language, Friedman wrote a front-page story saying that Clinton was ready for a “fresh start” with Iraq.

Hours before most people would read the paper, Iraq's foreign minister was on
Nightline
welcoming the new American initiative. Middle Eastern leaders wondered aloud whether the tough-talking presidential candidate was really a dove, and I was desperately in search of the
Times
. Too impatient to wait for a fax from New York, I phoned Friedman. “All hell's breaking loose, Tom. What did you write?” No one likes being awakened near midnight, but Friedman's crankiness was quickly calmed by the pleasant realization that my call meant that his competitors were chasing his scoop. I was still hoping we could fix the story for the final edition, but though Friedman may have misinterpreted Clinton, he didn't misquote him. Once Friedman finished reading me the article off his computer screen, all I could say was, “Yeah, that's what he said. Good night.”

The next morning, Clinton knew he had to adamantly deny any normalization of relations with Iraq, but he wasn't happy about it. At a press conference announcing the appointment of the new White House staff, he responded to the inevitable question with a flash of temper: “Nobody asked me about normalization of relations,” he said, before reasserting his intention to pursue Bush's policy. Now I was in real trouble. The olive branch to Saddam had been retracted, but Clinton had just declared war on the
New York Times
.

My beeper was already vibrating. It was Tom Friedman, and he was as angry as Clinton. “George, was I dreaming or did we have a conversation last night where you acknowledged that my reporting was right?” Friedman began. “I have won not one, but two Pulitzer Prizes, and I won't stand for being called a liar by the next president.” But Friedman didn't have only his reputation to rely on; he also had the transcript. So did everyone else who had seen the
Times
. There was no denying that a question on normalization had been asked and answered.

A quick apology was our only out. For the foreseeable future, Tom Friedman would be one of the relatively few people filtering Clinton to the rest of the world; we couldn't afford to antagonize him and his newspaper any more than we already had. Convinced that Friedman had deliberately twisted his words to distort their meaning, Clinton refused to issue a personal apology. But he said I could do it for him — if, that is, I did it right. So my first job as White House communications director-designate was to publicly contradict the president-elect without making him look like a liar or a fool. The best I could do was a statement saying that President-elect Clinton “inadvertently forgot that he had been asked that specific question about normalization and he regrets denying that it was asked.”

Five months later, as Clinton opened the Lincoln Bedroom meeting, we were all determined to send an unambiguous, unapologetic message to Saddam — but with weapons, not words. Even the new members of our team were acutely aware of the president's tendency to overexplain himself in streams of sentences. When Clinton was “on” (the first State of the Union), he was dazzling. But when he was exhausted or embarrassed (“I didn't inhale”), he courted political disaster.

“Don't oversell and don't undersell,” advised Colin Powell — the only man in the room who'd actually commanded a battalion or directly counseled a president in wartime. David Gergen reminded Clinton that the Reagan administration had rushed to judgment after the shooting down of KAL 007. Warren Christopher, whose taciturn North Dakota nature appeared to restrain his loquacious Arkansas boss, offered a one-sentence conclusion: “You'll be judged on whether you hit the target.”

Wise counsel. But that night, President Clinton didn't need to be coached. He wasn't ill informed, insecure, or itching for a fight. As Tony Lake reviewed the evidence and asked Aspin and Powell to outline the military options, Clinton silently jotted notes on a small pad. When he spoke, the questions revealed a man determined to make his decisions in the right way for the right reasons: “Are we sure the evidence is compelling?” “Is this a truly proportionate response?” “How can we minimize harm to innocent civilians?” The president pressed Powell on the best time to strike. A predawn raid, Clinton reasoned, would kill fewer people, but those most likely to be killed would be the least culpable, security guards and janitors. An attack later in the day would create more casualties but also increase the odds of killing the real culprits.

I sat by the president's right shoulder, taking it all in from an armless chair pulled a few inches back from the tight circle. But I couldn't catch every word because I had another job: keeping tabs on the president's budget, which was facing its first vote on the Senate floor. Every few minutes a waiter would hand me a note from a senator calling from the cloakroom for the president. I would take the call in the Queen's Bedroom and try to handle it myself, but a couple of the senators demanded to speak to the president.
Don't you know he's got better things to do right now than beg for your vote?

Of course I didn't say everything on my mind, either on the phone or in the room. While I was impressed with the president's cautious deliberations that night — and more convinced than ever that he wouldn't prosecute a war to prove his manhood or improve his political standing — I also wondered if the worthiest option was the one we weren't allowed to discuss: assassination.
Sure Saddam is difficult to target, but why not go for it? What could be more moral than killing the man most responsible?
But while I believed assassination was justifiable, I understood it wasn't practical: Hussein slept in a different bed every night and was surrounded by Republican Guards. Assassination is also prohibited by American law. Although I hadn't yet been hauled before my first grand jury, I knew that you shouldn't discuss what you know you can't do.

As the meeting wound down, the president polled the room. One by one, each of the principals voted for a cruise-missile strike. I was last in line, but I fully expected, and half wanted, the president to pretend I was part of the furniture. I was honored to be there and engrossed by the serious deliberations after weeks of defending half-brothers and haircuts, but I didn't want any attention called to my presence. Something about my age and my ignorance of war made me feel as if I didn't quite belong. I knew I didn't know all I needed to know. Maybe no one ever does. The president asked me what I thought.
OK, George, don't blow it. Say something memorable and mature. But don't try too hard. Keep it simple. No one ever got in trouble for something they didn't say
. “I don't think there's a choice, Mr. President.”

It was unanimous. The first missile strike of the Clinton presidency was set for Saturday night.

Our secret held through Friday as we drafted the speech the president would deliver from the Oval once the missiles landed in Baghdad. On Saturday, Clinton maintained the illusion of business as usual with jogging and a round of golf. On a smaller scale, I did the same, running errands I never had time for during the week but returning to the White House as zero hour approached.

At 4:22
P.M.
(EDT), cruise missiles were launched toward Baghdad from the USS
Peterson
, a destroyer, and the USS
Chancellorsville
, an AEGIS cruiser. Simultaneously, President Clinton sat in the Oval at a desk fashioned from the timbers of the British warship HMS
Resolute
(a gift to the U.S. from Queen Victoria) and began to consult with his counterparts. I sat in a maple chair by the president's phone, taking notes for the “tick-tock” accounts of the decision-making process that all the major newspapers would be writing that night.

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was first on the line: “Hello, Mr. President,” Clinton said. “Can you hear me? Thank you for taking my call. I'd like you to see my ambassador right away. I know what time it is. We need to maintain secrecy. But I'd like your support on this. Sorry for calling you this late.” I heard only Clinton's end of the conversations, but the calls were short and to the point. Yeltsin, true to form, was indisposed; his people couldn't find him. Yitzhak Rabin was already the foreign leader Clinton most admired: “He's a tough son of a bitch!” Clinton said after putting down the phone. The Kuwaitis and Saudis were enthusiastic, and Prime Minister Major offered his full support.

Ironically, the president who seemed most reluctant was the one whose life and honor Clinton was defending. Yes, as Clinton would later tell the world, the plot against Bush was “an attack against our country and an attack against all Americans.” But it was also an attack against one man. I can only imagine what President Bush was thinking at 4:40
P.M.
that Saturday afternoon when Clinton gave him the news: “We completed our investigation. Both the CIA and FBI did an excellent job. It's clear it was directed against you. I've ordered a cruise-missile attack.”

“It's clear it was directed against you. I've ordered a cruise-missile attack
.” The paradox of presidential power distilled into two sentences. Few people live as precarious a life as an American president. Every day, someone, somewhere, is plotting an assassination scheme — and the scary truth is that even the most effective Secret Service is no guarantee against a killer willing to die. But along with the vulnerability comes awesome power: the ability to move global markets with a single statement, to obliterate an entire country by ordering the turn of two keys, to avenge an attack on his predecessor by firing cruise missiles under his command.

Clinton closed the conversation by assuring Bush that he had done everything he could to minimize the loss of life. Maybe that's what Bush needed to hear most; maybe his bred-in-the-bone patrician modesty made him a little embarrassed by all the trouble everyone was going to for him, or maybe a tiny thought he wasn't proud of whispered that if he'd only ordered our military to march on Baghdad in 1991, Saddam would be gone, he'd still be president, and this wouldn't be happening today. All I know is that when Clinton put down the phone, he seemed to be convincing himself that Bush was behind him, instead of the other way around. “I think he thinks we did the right thing,” he told me. “Thought it was a tough call.”

Clinton wanted and needed Bush's approval as much as Bush needed — although he may not have wanted — Clinton's protection. Bush may have been the only man in the country, with the possible exception of Colin Powell, who could have singlehandedly stopped the attack. All it would take was a well-placed leak to the press, or a sotto voce call from Brent Scowcroft to Tony Lake. The message would suggest, perhaps, that Bush would publicly criticize Clinton for a hollow, opportunistic gesture — a hasty retaliation, based on shaky evidence, that was more about propping up Clinton's political fortunes than punishing Saddam Hussein. But that wasn't Bush's style. Whatever made him diffident at the prospect of having a military strike ordered in his defense, he kept it to himself. Presidents, especially gentleman presidents, didn't do that to each other.