T here were three positive developments in foreign affairs in July: I normalized relations with Vietnam, with the strong support of most Vietnam veterans in Congress, including John McCain, Bob Kerrey, John Kerry, Chuck Robb, and Pete Peterson; Saddam Hussein released two Americans who had been held prisoner since March, after a strong plea from Congressman Bill Richardson; and South Korean President Kim Young-Sam, in Washington for the dedication of the Korean War Memorial, strongly endorsed the agreement we had made with North Korea to end its nuclear program. Because Jesse Helms and others had criticized the deal, Kims support was helpful, especially since he had been a political prisoner and advocate for democracy when South Korea was still an authoritarian state.
Unfortunately, the good news was dwarfed by what was happening in Bosnia. After being reasonably quiet for most of 1994, things had begun to go wrong at the end of November, when Serb warplanes attacked Croatian Muslims in western Bosnia. The attack was a violation of the no-fly zone, and in retaliation NATO bombed the Serb airfield, but didnt destroy it or all the planes that had flown.
In March, when the cease-fire President Carter had announced began to unravel, Dick Holbrooke, who had left his post as ambassador to Germany to become assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, sent our special envoy to the former Yugoslavia, Bob Frasure, to see Milosevic in the futile hope of ending the Bosnian Serb aggression and securing at least limited recognition for Bosnia in return for lifting the UN sanctions on Serbia.
By July, the fighting was in full swing again, with the Bosnian government forces making some gains in the middle of the country. Instead of trying to regain the lost territory, General Mladic decided to attack three isolated Muslim towns in eastern Bosnia, Srebrenica, Zepa, and Gorazde. The towns were filled with Muslim refugees from nearby areas, and though they had been declared UN safe areas, they were protected by only a small number of UN troops. Mladic wanted to take the three towns so that all of eastern Bosnia would be controlled by the Serbs, and he was convinced that, as long as he held UN peacekeepers hostage, the UN would not allow NATO to bomb in retaliation. He was right, and the consequences were devastating.
On July 10, the Serbs took Srebrenica. By the end of the month they had also taken Zepa, and refugees who escaped from Srebrenica had begun to tell the world of the horrifying slaughter of Muslims there by Mladics troops. Thousands of men and boys were gathered in a soccer field and murdered en masse. Thousands more were trying to escape through the heavily wooded hills.
After Srebrenica was overrun, I pressured the UN to authorize the rapid reaction force we had discussed at the G-7 meeting in Canada a few weeks earlier. Meanwhile, Bob Dole was pushing to lift the arms embargo. I asked him to postpone the vote and he agreed. I was still trying to find a way to save Bosnia that restored the effectiveness of the UN and NATO, but by the third week of July, Bosnian Serbs had made a mockery of the UN and, by extension, of the commitments of NATO and the United States. The safe areas were far from safe, and NATO action was severely limited because of the vulnerability of European troops who couldnt defend themselves, much less the Muslims. The Bosnian Serb practice of UN hostage-taking had exposed the fundamental flaw of the UNs strategy. Its arms embargo had kept the Bosnian government from achieving military parity with the Serbs. The peacekeepers could protect the Bosnian Muslims and Croatians only as long as the Serbs believed NATO would punish their aggression. Now the hostage-taking had erased that fear and given the Serbs a free hand in eastern Bosnia. The situation was slightly better in central and western Bosnia, because the Croatians and Muslims had been able to obtain some arms despite the UN embargo.
In an almost desperate attempt to regain the initiative, the foreign and defense ministers of NATO met in London. Warren Christopher, Bill Perry, and General Shalikashvili went to the conference determined to reverse the building momentum for a withdrawal of UN forces from Bosnia and, instead, to increase NATOs commitment and authority to act against the Serbs. Both the loss of Srebrenica and Zepa and the move in Congress to lift the arms embargo had strengthened our ability to push for more aggressive action. At the meeting, the ministers eventually accepted a proposal developed by Warren Christopher and his team to draw a line in the sand around Gorazde and to remove the dual key decision making that had given the UN veto authority over NATO action. The London conference was a turning point; from then on, NATO would be much more assertive. Not long afterward, the NATO commander, General George Joulwan, and our NATO ambassador, Robert Hunter, succeeded in extending the Gorazde rules to the Sarajevo safe area.
In August, the situation took a dramatic turn. The Croatians launched an offensive to retake the Krajina, a part of Croatia that the local Serbs had proclaimed their territory. European and some American military and intelligence officials had recommended against the action in the belief that Milosevic would intervene to save the Krajina Serbs, but I was rooting for the Croatians. So was Helmut Kohl, who knew, as I did, that diplomacy could not succeed until the Serbs had sustained some serious losses on the ground.
Because we knew Bosnias survival was at stake, we had not tightly enforced the arms embargo. As a result, both the Croatians and the Bosnians were able to get some arms, which helped them survive. We had also authorized a private company to use retired U.S. military personnel to improve and train the Croatian army.
As it turned out, Milosevic didnt come to the aid of the Krajina Serbs, and Croatian forces took Krajina with little resistance. It was the first defeat for the Serbs in four years, and it changed both the balance of power on the ground and the psychology of all the parties. One Western diplomat in Croatia was quoted as saying, There was almost a signal of support from Washington. The Americans have been spoiling for a chance to hit the Serbs, and they are using Croatia as their proxy to do the deed for them. On August 4, in a visit with veteran ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson at the National Institutes of Health, where he was recovering from cancer surgery, I acknowledged that the Croatian offensive could prove helpful in resolving the conflict. Ever the good journalist, Donaldson filed a report on my comments from his hospital bed.
In an effort to capitalize on the shift in momentum, I sent Tony Lake and Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff to Europe (including Russia) to present a framework for peace that Lake had developed and to have Dick Holbrooke lead a team to begin a last-ditch effort to negotiate an end to the conflict with the Bosnians and Milosevic, who claimed not to control the Bosnian Serbs, though everyone knew they could not prevail without his support. Just before we launched the diplomatic mission, the Senate followed the House in voting to lift the arms embargo and I vetoed the bill to give our effort a chance. Lake and Tarnoff immediately took off to make the case for our plan, then met with Holbrooke on August 14 to report that the allies and Russians were supportive, and that Holbrooke could begin his mission at once.
On August 15, after a briefing from Tony Lake on Bosnia, Hillary, Chelsea, and I left for a vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where we had been invited to spend a few days at the home of Senator Jay and Sharon Rockefeller. We all needed the time off, and I was really looking forward to the prospect of hiking and horseback riding in the Grand Tetons; rafting the Snake River; visiting Yellowstone National Park to see Old Faithful, the buffalo and moose, and the wolves we had brought back to the wild; and playing golf at the high altitude, where the ball goes a lot farther. Hillary was working on a book about families and children, and she was looking forward to making headway on it at the Rockefellers spacious, light-filled ranch house. We did all those things and more, but the enduring memory of our vacation was about Bosnia, and heartbreak.
On the day my family went to Wyoming, Dick Holbrooke left for Bosnia with an impressive team, including Bob Frasure; Joe Kruzel; Air Force Colonel Nelson Drew; and Lieutenant General Wesley Clark, director of strategic policy for the Joint Chiefs and a fellow Arkansan I had first met at Georgetown in 1965.
Holbrooke and his team landed in the Croatian coastal city of Split, where they briefed the Bosnian foreign minister, Muhamed Sacirbey, on our plans. Sacirbey was the eloquent public face of Bosnia on American television, a handsome, fit man who, as a student in the United States, had been a starting football player at Tulane University. He had long sought greater American involvement in his beleaguered nation and was glad the hour had finally come.
After Split, the U.S. team went to Zagreb, Croatias capital, to see President Tudjman, then flew to Belgrade to meet with Slobodan Milosevic. This inconclusive meeting was remarkable only for the fact that Milosevic refused to guarantee the safety of our teams plane from Bosnian Serb artillery if they flew from Belgrade into the airport at Sarajevo, their next stop. That meant they had to fly back to Split, from which they would helicopter to a landing spot, then take off for a two-hour drive to Sarajevo over the Mount Igman road, a narrow, unpaved route with no guardrails at the edges of its steep slopes and great vulnerability to nearby Serb machine gunners who regularly shot at UN vehicles. The EU negotiator, Carl Bildt, had been shot at when he traveled the road a few weeks earlier, and there were many wrecked vehicles in the ravines between Spilt and Sarajevo, some of which had simply slid off the road.
On August 19, my forty-ninth birthday, I started the day by playing golf with Vernon Jordan, Erskine Bowles, and Jim Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank. It was a perfect morning until I heard about what had happened on the Mount Igman road. First from a news report, and later in an emotional phone call with Dick Holbrooke and Wes Clark, I learned that our team had set out for Sarajevo with Holbrooke and Clark riding in a U.S. Army Humvee, and Frasure, Kruzel, and Drew following behind in a French armored personnel carrier (APC) painted UN white. About an hour into the trip, at the top of a steep incline, the road gave way on the APC, and it somersaulted down the mountain and exploded into flames. Besides the three members of our team, there were two other Americans and four French soldiers in the vehicle. The APC had caught fire when the live ammunition it was carrying exploded. In a brave attempt to help, Wes Clark rappelled down the mountain with a rope tied to a tree trunk and tried to get into the burning vehicle to rescue the men still trapped inside, but it was too damaged and scalding hot.
It was also too late. Bob Frasure and Nelson Drew had been killed in the tumbling fall down the mountain. The others all got out, but Joe Kruzel soon died of his injuries, and one French soldier also perished. Frasure was fifty-three, Kruzel fifty, Drew forty-seven; all were patriotic public servants and good family men who died too young trying to save the lives of innocent people a long way from home.
The next week, after the Bosnian Serbs lobbed a mortar shell into the heart of Sarajevo, killing thirty-eight people, NATO began three days of air strikes on Serb positions. On September 1, Holbrooke announced that all the parties would meet in Geneva for talks. When the Bosnian Serbs did not comply with all of NATOs conditions, the air strikes resumed and continued until the fourteenth, when Holbrooke succeeded in getting an agreement signed by Kradzic and Mladic to end the siege of Sarajevo. Soon the final peace talks would begin in Dayton, Ohio. Ultimately they would bring an end to the bloody Bosnian war. When they did, their success would be in no small measure a tribute to three quiet American heroes who did not live to see the fruits of their labors.
While the August news was dominated by Bosnia, I continued to argue with the Republicans on the budget; noted that a million Americans had lost their health insurance in the year since the failure of health-care reform; and took executive action to limit the advertising, promotion, distribution, and marketing of cigarettes to teenagers. The Food and Drug Administration had just completed a fourteen-month study confirming that cigarettes were addictive, harmful, and aggressively marketed to teenagers, whose smoking rates were on the rise.
The teen smoking problem was a tough nut to crack. Tobacco is Americas legal addictive drug; it kills people and adds untold billions to the cost of health care. But the tobacco companies are politically influential, and the farmers who raise the tobacco crop are an important part of the economic, political, and cultural life of Kentucky and North Carolina. The farmers were the sympathetic face of the tobacco companies effort to increase their profits by hooking younger and younger people on cigarettes. I thought we had to do something to push them back. So did Al Gore, who had lost his beloved sister, Nancy, to lung cancer.
On August 8, we got a break in our efforts to eliminate the vestiges of Iraqs weapons of mass destruction program when two of Saddam Husseins daughters and their husbands defected to Jordan and were given asylum by King Hussein. One of the men, Hussein Kamel Hassan al-Majid, had headed Saddams secret effort to develop weapons of mass destruction and would supply valuable information on Iraqs remaining WMD stocks, the size and significance of which contradicted what the UN inspectors had been told by Iraqi officials. When confronted with the evidence, the Iraqis simply acknowledged that Saddams son-in-law was telling the truth and took the inspectors to the sites he had identified. After six months in exile, Saddams relatives were induced to return to Iraq. Within a couple of days, both sons-in-law were killed. Their brief journey to freedom had provided the UN inspectors with so much information that more chemical and biological stocks and laboratory equipment were destroyed during the inspections process than during the Gulf War.
August was also a big month in Whitewater World. Kenneth Starr indicted Jim and Susan McDougal and Governor Jim Guy Tucker on charges unrelated to Whitewater, and the Senate and House Republicans held hearings all month. In the Senate, Al DAmato was still trying to prove there was something more to Vince Fosters death than a depression-induced suicide. He hauled Hillarys staff and friends before the committee for bullying questioning and ad hominem attacks. DAmato was especially unpleasant to Maggie Williams and his fellow New Yorker Susan Thomases. Senator Lauch Faircloth was even worse, scoffing at the notion that Williams and Thomases could have had so many phone conversations about Vince Foster just to share their grief. At the time, I thought that if Faircloth really didnt understand their feelings, his own life must have been lived in an emotional wilderness. The fact that Maggie had passed two lie detector tests about her actions in the aftermath of Vinces death didnt temper DAmatos and Faircloths accusatory questioning.
In the House Banking Committee, Chairman Jim Leach was behaving much like DAmato. From the beginning, he trumpeted every bogus charge against Hillary and me, alleging that we had made, not lost, money on Whitewater, had used Madison Guaranty funds for personal and political expenses, and had engineered David Hales SBA fraud. He kept promising blockbuster revelations, but they never materialized.
In August, Leach held a hearing starring L. Jean Lewis, the Resolution Trust Corporation investigator who had named Hillary and me as witnesses in a criminal referral shortly before the 1992 election. At the time, the Bush Justice Department inquired about Lewiss referral and the Republican U.S. attorney in Arkansas, Charles Banks, told them that there was no case against us, that it was an attempt to influence the election, and that to launch an investigation at that time would amount to prosecutorial misconduct.
Nevertheless, Leach referred to Lewis as a heroic public servant whose investigation had been thwarted after my election. Before the hearings began, documents were released that supported our position, including Bankss letter refusing to pursue Lewiss allegations because of lack of evidence, and internal FBI cables and Justice Department evaluations saying that no facts can be identified to support the designation of Hillary and me as material witnesses. Although there was almost no press coverage of the documents refuting Lewis, the hearings fizzled.
By the time of the August hearings and Starrs latest round of indictments, I had settled into a routine of handling press questions about Whitewater with as little public comment as possible. I had learned from the press coverage over the gays-in-the-military issue that if I gave a meaty answer to a question on whatever the press was obsessing about, it would be on the evening news, blocking out whatever else I was doing in the public interest that day, and the American people would think I was spending all my time defending myself instead of working for them, when in fact Whitewater took up very little of my own time. On............