He was National Security Advisor during Clinton's first term. The president nominated him to be CIA Director in December 1996, but he withdrew his nomination in the face of opposition from Republican senators. Interview conducted September, 2000 by Chris Bury I covered the Clinton campaign in '92, and it was very clear that the emphasis was not foreign policy. There were a couple foreign policy speeches and some press releases, but foreign policy was not a focus of the campaign. What implications did that have in the earliest days of the administration? First let me argue a bit about the campaign. In fact, then Governor Clinton was the only one of the Democratic candidates who went out of his way to talk about foreign policy in one of his Georgetown speeches in December of 1991. And then during the campaign itself in '92, he did speak on just about every issue. One reason why foreign policy was not at the top of the agenda was because the governor cared passionately about domestic issues, as he should. And secondly, because President Bush was backing away from the charge of being the foreign policy president, so he wasn't talking about foreign policy much either. However, yes, domestic policy was at the top of the agenda. One of the implications was not so much that the president didn't want to talk about foreign policy when he came in, or work on foreign policy, there was never a single time when I wanted to see him about any foreign policy issue that he wasn't available right away. It wasn't a problem with the president. Frankly, a lot of the people who came in with him on the political side of the house still saw foreign policy as something you don't talk about, and a decent subject. It was very hard to fight through a lot of the opposition from the schedulers and others when trying to set up meetings with foreign leaders, phone calls, et cetera. They saw it as a diversion from the main agenda. But the president himself was always good about it. Was that your job, to keep foreign policy from distracting the president from his domestic agenda? Certainly not. No. It was my job to get all the attention we needed on foreign policy issues from the president, but not to take up his time overly when he had a very busy schedule. The most precious commodity in the White House is the president's time, and I always tried not to take any more of it than I needed to. You say you didn't have trouble seeing the president, but other members of the foreign policy team sometimes did. The CIA Director, James Woolsey, had trouble getting on the president's schedule at times. The truth is that almost every morning, the president had a briefing from the CIA briefer, and the Director of Central Intelligence was always welcome to come to those meetings. So he had almost unparalleled access when he chose to exercise it. But, yes, it was often hard to schedule larger foreign policy meetings when you were not only dealing with the president's schedule, but dealing with the schedules of the cabinet officers as well. That was hard. But again, the problem was more with the schedulers than the president. After about a year and a half, the schedulers decided that we, on the national security side of the house, were being too successful in scheduling these diversionary meetings about war and peace abroad. So they asked somebody or other to do a computer run on the president's schedule over the past year plus, and see whether he was spending as much time on foreign policy as president Bush had in his first year plus. And the startling result was that in fact he had almost identically the same number of meetings, phone calls, et cetera, with foreign leaders as had President Bush. The schedulers used this as evidence that we were getting it wrong. I found it interesting, because at the same time we were coming under assault by reporters and others for spending not enough time on foreign policy. The fact is, that American interests are the same for both Republicans and Democrats, for both presidents who are foreign policy presidents and presidents who are domestic policy presidents. And you have to act on those interests and in defense of those interests. And presidents, whoever the next president is, will spend about the same amount of time as the past president has. The reason I ask you about the access... David Gergen tells us that when the plane crashed into the White House, the joke going around the White House was that it was Woolsey trying to get in to see the president. I think that was a reference to a particular case, not to a general problem. Woolsey, I thought was a good DCI, and I was always interested in his getting whatever access he needed. The general notion that this administration in its early days wasn't focused heavily on foreign policy, is that an inaccurate impression? God knows for me it was inaccurate. We were working 18-hour days, including Sundays, with a large number of very difficult issues that were very hot that January and February. There was Bosnia, Haiti with refugees streaming out, Somalia where we had inherited a mission that we had to figure out what to do with it, and we didn't do a good job on it, et cetera, et cetera. So it was very busy, and the president spent a good bit of time on it. Was it his first priority? No. Was it the first priority of the whole White House? No. He was elected largely to deal with some very pressing domestic issues, and that's proper. One of those early issues was gays in the military. As it turned out, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were opposed to the position that the president had taken in the campaign. And within the White House there was considerable debate, the vice president on one side, you on another. Can you tell us a little bit about that debate, about how far the White House should go in pushing the Joint Chiefs? It was never the kind of debate in which you have a lot of people on one side and a lot of people on the other side and they were clashing. That happened on some environmental issues and some other difficult issues. On this issue it was more everybody looking for a compromise, something that would work to serve both what the president had said and believed in the campaign, and the justifiable concerns of the Joint Chiefs about military discipline. The meetings that I can recall between the resident and the JCS--and there were a number of them--were never really contentious so much as trying to work this through. And they were always respectful. I know they weren't happy with it. This was not an issue that we were asking to address right away. People sometimes ask me, "How come you chose that, of all issues, to address first?" Well, we didn't choose it first. We were wanting to work mostly on Bosnia, Haiti, these other issues, and to set an agenda for the next four years. But it was very clear that, especially on the Hill, they were not going to let go of this issue, and if we didn't come up with some formula, then it was going to be jammed up our noses from the Hill. What compromise did you offer? I don't remember offering a compromise myself. This was not the central issue I was working on. I was much more interested in Bosnia and other issues, so I don't recall that there was an... Stephanopolous writes in his book that you were arguing on the side of compromise, that Gore was essentially saying, "No, we have to stick with what we said in the campaign", and you were basically arguing a middle ground. I was arguing in support of a middle ground. I think George was designing middle grounds, and others, more than I was. But I certainly felt we needed to find some compromise way to move on and get this issue out of the way so that we could get back to the substance of all these other issues. Frankly, I don't remember that the vice president was taking that hard a position on it. Maybe he was. Maybe my memory is just soft, but the meetings I recall were mostly meetings trying to find a way to resolve this so that we could move on consistent with the principles that the president had laid out. Is that issue one of the reasons the president had a rough start with the military? I think it's one reason. Vietnam service, of course, was another reason. Another was that many didn't see him as somebody who was deeply interested in national security issues, again something that was wrong. My impression was that he developed very good relationships with the very senior members of the military, who he was working with on a day-to-day basis, especially as we went through a number of these difficult issues over the next two years. And he had a great relationship with the enlisted personnel. I saw it when we went to the DMZ in Korea and he met with a number of groups of enlisted folks, they were great. His same abilities that we see in relating to people generally, they were in play there. A lot of the middle-level officers were and remained quite hostile to him for personal reasons. One of the stories that's told in the early days is that some people in the military didn't like the way the president was saluting, and you had to go in and teach the president how to salute. No, that's not quite right. He had never been in the military. In fact, I wasn't in the military, but in Vietnam I had lived with the military often. And before his first ceremony, he was going to have to salute, and so we went through how to salute. This is not unnatural if you've never been in the military. I don't recall this coming because somebody had complained about the way he was saluting previously. But George Stephanopolous writes in his book that the president's early salutes looked different, and his fingers drooped, and there was a concern that it wasn't snappy enough, and that they had a discussion about who would teach him how to salute. And George hadn't been in the military. They thought it would be inappropriate for the vice president. And so you were chosen. I think it was less formal than that. I do not recall any documents entitled "Presidential Salutes, Who Will Do It, Making a Decision, Scheduling an Appointment." I think it was far more informal. I think it came earlier than George remembers, and I don't recall thinking at the time it was a big deal. How did it go? What did you do in that meeting? Just saluted, and then we moved on. I never talked to the president about this, and I think we're already making more of this than I would, but I think if you've never been commander-in-chief before, it's hard at first to feel it. Especially as he made hard decisions, which is much more important than how you salute or not, and as he dealt more and more with the military, I think we saw as he became increasingly comfortable with it. But at the beginning, if you've never done it, and if you've never saluted, I suspect that he didn't want to look too snappy in how he did it, lest he look hooky. You know what I'm saying? Because it would look as if he was pretending somehow. So he eased his way into it. He should have made it more crisp right at the start. Your first crisis is in March when Yeltsin dissolves the Parliament. Is that an accurate description? Is that your first big... No. I would have said our first crises were Iraq, where Saddam was pushing the edge of the envelope right during January, so Bush acted before we did. We had to make clear what we were going to do there. And Bosnia, which was a very large crisis, and the one that we concentrated most on right away. When was Srebrenica? When was the... In the summer of 1995. So that was two years later. Yeah. We'll get to that. But Sarajevo was being hit by mortar fire, et cetera. The problem with the administration was that the president has promised to be much more vigorous in his defense of Bosnia than George Bush. He had, and we all believed that we should be, the president, and especially the vice president. I certainly did. Madeleine Albright felt strongly about it as well. So the first thing we did was to spend a month or so going back over the records, trying to understand how we had gotten to where we were, holding a series of principals meetings to devise a new strategy. That new strategy was the so-called lift and strike, in which we would lift the arms embargo, strike against the Serbs if they tried to take advantage of the situation before we could build up the Muslims--the Bosnians to oppose the Serbs in the meantime, during the period when we armed them). We took that to the Europeans. We didn't make the sale, and the Europeans didn't go along. You didn't make the sale in Congress either, that there was a lot of opposition. I think that Congress would have gone along with that, with a lift and strike. It was after all very similar to what Senator Dole was calling for at the time. But we couldn't sell it to the Europeans. This was central to what happened in Bosnia, in which we finally more or less fixed it, but it took longer than any of us wanted. The Europeans had troops on the ground with the UN, and kept saying to us, "Why don't you send some ground troops as well and share the risks with us", which was not thinkable, given the congressional view and the public view. The dilemma was that if we did not sell a policy to the Europeans but simply went ahead and lifted the arms embargo, or simply went ahead and greatly accelerated the bombing--and we did get some more bombing with the agreement of our allies....If we had done what some of us had wanted to do and been much more vigorous still, the Europeans would say to us, "If you do that, if you lift and strike, or if you conduct a lot more in the way of bombing operations, you're going to get a Serb reaction that is going to get our people killed. And if you get our people killed, then there's going to be a crisis in NATO and a crisis in the Alliance." That was very hard to overcome. It took almost two years, and the horror of Srebrenica helped convince the Europeans that their approach wasn't working and to move to the approach that we were laying out, which succeeded in getting Dayton. However if you turn it around, and suppose in a different case we had American troops on the ground, and the Europeans didn't. If they started taking military actions that were getting our people killed, you can see the strength of their view; and this was a dilemma that was very agonizing for us. On the one hand, if we did do what we wanted to do on Bosnia flat out, and blow apart the Alliance--and I think it would have done that--it would have been a worse crisis in the Alliance than the 1956 Suez invasion. Or on the other hand, to do what we did, which was to keep trying to push the edge of the envelope with the Europeans until we could get a breakthrough as we did in '95, and got them to come along with us on a more rigorous policy. The president, according to the books of this time, was personally conflicted on this, because his political advisors were telling him that it was a no-win situation. Absolutely. Every morning when I walked into the Oval Office--I was the first person he would see in the morning--he would be very polite, and maybe we'd tell a joke or two, and then we'd get to Topic A, and Topic A was always Bosnia. In fact, I felt sometimes as if I had a "B" written on my forehead, and as soon as he saw it, his whole day would get cloudy as he realized he had to deal with this damn issue. What was his confliction? What was his difficult for him? The first part of it was the substantive dilemma that I've laid out. Secondly, Bosnia was increasingly becoming synonymous with American foreign policy as a whole, and our inability to fix Bosnia for the first two and a half years was badly damaging not only our ability to conduct our foreign policy, but I think was damaging politically as well.