William Perry Oral History

This is the William Perry Oral History interview. It is a part of the Clinton Presidential History Project. Thank you very much for agreeing to participate. We just talked before we got on tape about the ground rules for the interview, the most fundamental one being the pledge of confidentiality. Nobody around the table here is allowed to repeat anything that is said in the interview. You're the only person who will be allowed to report on this to anybody outside until such time as you agree that the cleared transcript can be made available to people.

The next thing that we do is make a voice identification so the person transcribing will have some sense about who is saying what. So I am going to ask everyone around the table to say just a couple of words, including your name so that the transcriber will know who is talking. I’m Russell Riley; I’m an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia and have been heading up the Clinton Presidential History Project. 

Darby Morrisroe, I’m an Assistant Professor at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.  

Andy Ross, Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico and Director of the Office for Policy, Security and Technology.

Bill Perry, Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford and Fellow at the Institute for International Studies. 

Usually what we would do in a single-day interview is to begin by asking you about your earliest associations with President Clinton. But I think that there’s something interesting that goes on before that, and that is that you were presumably involved with a network of people before taking the position in the Clinton administration, who become important once the administration comes in. So I wonder if we could talk a little bit, before we get to your association with Clinton, about the people you had worked with in an earlier capacity so that people will have a sense about how you fit into those existing networks. I’m thinking about people like Warren Christopher, John Deutch, Tony Lake, and folks of that nature.

The first point to be made is that I had never met President Clinton until I came back to Washington to assume the job as Deputy Secretary of Defense. I had no knowledge or acquaintance of him. I knew him only by information in the newspaper and the fact that he was running as a candidate for President. So I was not one of the FOBs, the Friends of Bill, whom he brought into the government. 

I had been the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the [Jimmy] Carter administration. Although I should preface that by saying, I’m not a political person; I’d not been involved with politics. Up until that time, I was the president of an electronics company that I had founded here in Silicon Valley, and I was quite happy running that company.

In 1977, after President Carter took office, he appointed Harold Brown as his Secretary of Defense. Harold and I had worked together for a number of years. I had been a consultant to him in his earlier job as the Under Secretary of Defense. 

Had you had Democratic leanings in your background?

I’d been a Democrat and voted Democratic, but I never have been involved in Democratic politics. My participation in politics was going to the polling booths and voting.

So Harold Brown reached out to me for that job because of my technical background, which he knew of because I’d served as consultant to him when he had worked as the Under Secretary of Defense. But I had never anticipated when I did that that I would end up with a job in government. I didn’t seek the job. In fact, when he first offered it to me, I turned it down. I had no interest in leaving California and going back to Washington to do that. I was running a company; it was a very successful company. My view was that I was going to stay on and become another David Packard, make my company larger and more important.

So without going into details, Harold and others persuaded me that the answer no was the wrong answer, and I did go back to take on that job, which I held for the entire period of the Carter administration. During that period I got slightly involved in political issues—although that particular job is about as apolitical as any job you could have in government. You’re expected to be a technical advisor and do technical programs not only for the President and the Secretary of Defense, but also to be a technical advisor to both parties in the Congress. 

But in any event, I did come to know many people involved—as you mentioned, Warren Christopher. Warren at that time had a senior position in the State Department. So I came to know him. John Deutch assumed my equivalent position, Under Secretary in the Energy Department, and we worked very closely together at that time. I came to know many of the military, who as junior officers in the late ’70s, would become senior officers in the ’80s and ’90s.

Was Colin Powell in that group?

Colin Powell was a colonel at that time. He had an office just two doors down the hall from me. I knew him very well. I was a good friend of Colin’s back in those days. Harold Brown’s deputy was Charles Duncan, who went on to become the Secretary of Energy. I knew him. I’ve known him since then as well. So yes, I established many important relationships. Most importantly, I think, I came to know a little bit about how Washington worked, about the relationship between the executive branch and Congress. I came to know many Congressional people. Most notably, I established a close relationship very early on with Sam Nunn, who played a key role later on when I became the Secretary of Defense. By that time he was chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He was the one who presided over my confirmation hearing as Deputy Secretary of Defense, and then Secretary of Defense.

Did you get to know Les Aspin at that time too?

I did, but my primary relationship with Les Aspin was later, which I’ll get to later on.

At the time I was the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, it was a very crucial period in the Cold War. It’s hard to take our minds back to that now, but then the major security issue of the day was that the Soviet Union was reaching our capability of nuclear weapons and would soon surpass them. People spoke darkly of a window of vulnerability for the United States. That was the big political issue as it related to national security. As we looked at the prospect that the Soviet Union would reach or even surpass us in nuclear weapons, then we became more and more concerned about the fact that the conventional military forces of the Soviet Union were about three times the size of ours. Up until that point, we thought that was not too important because it was offset by our nuclear advantage. Now that we saw we no longer had the advantage of nuclear weapons and missiles, then the question became, what should we do about our conventional forces?

So the conclusion that President Carter and Secretary Brown came to at that time was that we needed another offset strategy, that nuclear weapons were no longer going to be it. They posed to me, as the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, the task of developing a technological offset in our conventional forces that would offset the superior numbers that the Soviet forces had. So the principal job that I had at that time was defining and executing this new offset strategy.

As a result, we invented and developed the stealth program. We took the smart-weapons work, which had been in an embryonic stage then, and brought it to maturity. And we put a very great emphasis on developing a tactical intelligence capability using the technology that had previously been developed for the new generation of overhead satellite systems. So those were the three components of what came to be called the offset strategy, and I was responsible for implementing that strategy. 

Much of that work was done in great secrecy. The stealth program, for example, even the very existence of the program, was kept secret for many years. But all of that came out, fully in the open, about eight or nine years later when Desert Storm occurred. Then the F-117 airplane, which was the first product of the stealth program—the smart weapons and the smart intelligence—all had a very great payoff. 

During the time I was pursuing the offset strategy and in the years after I left, the early ’80s, after I left government, there was a very substantial pushback to that dependence on technology as it was seen. An entire subpolitical movement was formed, called the Defense Reform Caucus, whose thesis was we were becoming too dependent on technology. We could not offset the Soviet Union with technology; we had to go to increased numbers. So the quantity versus quality debate raged during the early ’80s.

Was there a partisan dimension to that?

There was not. There were both Republicans and Democrats joined—

People like Gary Hart were prominent, right?

Gary didn’t truly represent that point of view. I mean, Gary always had a more enlightened view than that. He was always open to technology. He was pushing for reform in other aspects of the Defense Department.

This was almost a Luddite movement, which is, technology is bad on its face. The argument, basically, was that this technology was wonderful in the laboratory but would not work in the field. It would not work under the fog of war. The opposing point of view, which I was espousing, was that this technology was necessary to lift the fog of war. So that battle raged all during the ’80s. That argument stopped abruptly after Desert Storm. All these systems were used in the field, in the fog of war, and worked remarkably well. 

Now, to get back to Les Aspin. By this time Les Aspin was the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He held, I guess, the definitive hearings, the after-action report on Desert Storm. The key part of it was bringing up to this hearing all these members of the Defense Reform Caucus and myself and saying, Let’s get this issue settled. It has been raging now for ten years—did it work or didn’t it work? And if not, why not? Well, the data was so overwhelmingly convincing, it was an easy discussion to have. That’s when I came to know Les Aspin very well. That’s when he became a very big fan, you might say, of what I’d done during the late ’80s as the Under Secretary of Defense. 

Then when President Clinton took office, he appointed Les Aspin as his Secretary of Defense. Les reached out and asked me to come back and be his Deputy Secretary of Defense. I was not a close personal friend of Les, although I knew him reasonably well. But he had become very deeply involved, by his position as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, in this whole aspect of defense capability, and he had become persuaded that this was the right way to move forward in defense. He wanted to keep that ball moving forward, and he thought the best way to do that was to get me in as deputy. He also took the job as Secretary from a position as a Congressman, with no management experience at all. I had spent most of my career running things, managing things. He thought he needed a management backup. 

At the time, he talked about it, and other people talked about it, like this would be like a Mel Laird–Dave Packard combination, where Mel came in as a Congressman to be Secretary of Defense and I would play the role of Dave Packard to try to manage the Defense Department. That was the theory. The theory didn’t work out.

Why did you accept the job? You had not campaigned for—

I turned it down too.

Tell us that story.

I was persuaded that I had to take the job. Without being too corny about it, in both cases what finally won the argument was, You can’t turn that down. You have a patriotic duty to do this job. You can’t turn the President down when he asks you to be the Deputy Secretary, and so on. I won’t dwell on that point, but suffice it to say that I found those arguments compelling, and I did go back and accept the job. 

In each case, one of the primary reasons for being reluctant to take the job was not being negative about the job, per se, but in each case I was very happily and firmly established. My home, my family was here. I had a very good and very profitable job. I had to give up all that. The opportunity cost of going back to Washington in each case was several millions of dollars. People think you go back to Washington to line your pockets, but in my case at least, it was a substantial hit on my estate to do that, given the options I had the second time around, given what I lost the first time around. Those were all financially painful, and on a personal basis, leaving my family behind here—my wife came with me in both cases, but the rest of our family was here.

One of the virtues of making a field trip like this to do the interview is that you actually can look out the windows and see how gorgeous it is.

You see why I was reluctant to leave.

Absolutely.

In any event it was the right decision in both cases, both of those jobs, the first one even more than the second one. It was a magnificent opportunity. For a technical person, being the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering is probably the best job in the world. It’s like being the chief engineer of the country. You’ve got all of it; all of the technology is out for you. I was like a kid in a candy store. It was all there, with enormous resources for deciding which was more important and then putting the energy behind that one. They were marvelous jobs, and I was foolish to say no in the first place, and I was ultimately right to say yes finally. But to emphasize the point, in both cases not only was I not campaigning for the job, I actually did not want to take the job.

Had you been comfortable with what you knew about Clinton from the campaign?

I didn’t know much about Clinton. I voted for him, but I’m a lifelong Democrat. I probably would have voted for him anyway, whoever the Democrat—I also voted for [Michael] Dukakis, which, in retrospect, didn’t seem like such a good vote. I voted for Clinton enthusiastically, but I didn’t know much about him in detail. I came to know him after I came to Washington.

So there wasn’t anything in particular about his approach to defense issues or foreign policy issues that you—

No, on the contrary. I knew enough to know he didn’t have much background in defense issues, and I was concerned about that. But Aspin explained to me that he and I could put together a strong-enough defense policy. The fact that Clinton was a blank slate on defense would be an advantage, not a disadvantage. We could put together a defense program and have Clinton go along with it. That was, again, his theory. 

Now, it turned out that Clinton was not such a blank slate. Actually, he turned out to be very knowledgeable in the field once he got into it. But certainly my decision to come back had nothing to do with my views of Clinton’s national security policy, because as far as I knew, he had none. 

Do you remember at what point that you were approached? Was it late in December of ’92, or was it early ’93?

It was early ’93. It was the first week in January.

So the core of the foreign policy team would have been in place, and you knew that Chris was destined to be the Secretary of State.

Yes, I knew that. Aspin had been selected; Christopher had been selected; I don’t remember whether Tony Lake had been selected. That’s not in my memory right now. At any event, I didn’t know Tony except by reputation. I didn’t know him personally, so that would not have meant much to me.

So it would be an overstatement to say that there was a high comfort level with the team, which was something that would have drawn you back. It was more the inherent value of the position itself.

In fact, let me be very explicit. I had a pretty high comfort level with the [George H.W.] Bush 1 national security team. I thought the President, Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft—I didn’t know [Richard] Cheney well, but I knew the other three, and I thought they were absolutely a first-class team. So I thought we had a big responsibility to follow up on what had been a good national security policy. I thought what they had done as the former Soviet Union broke up had been wise, and I thought their execution of Desert Storm had been competent. So I thought a good national security team was leaving. We had a responsibility to try to do as well. 

You mentioned discussions with Les Aspin about the opportunity of there being a blank slate with respect to defense policy, that you could have, perhaps, a more prominent role in outlining what that policy would be for a new administration. What were his thoughts, and yours, on what that policy should be or what the key elements of such a policy should be?

I don’t want to suggest to you that we had a crystal-clear philosophy when we started. But certainly we both believed that it was going to be very important to follow up and continue to build on the technological advantages that we had already achieved during the Carter administration, which had been matured during the [Ronald] Reagan administration.

Second, we recognized that Desert Storm might be the first of several regional conflicts, and we had to have a clear policy about how and when we would get involved in other regional conflicts—in general, the decision of how to use American military force in less than Cold War situations. We believed the Cold War was truly over by then. Now, how do you define how this magnificent machinery of the U.S. military is to be used? Under what regional circumstances will it be used? To what extent would you use it in peace enforcement or humanitarian operations? So that was an open book at that stage. Writing into that book, defining what it is we should do in that case, we both regarded as a very important issue.

The third very big issue, which from the beginning we were seized with, was the recognition that with the Soviet Union broken up, with those—whatever there were—30,000 nuclear weapons in four different countries, an uncertain ownership, and with the countries in economic and social turmoil, we thought that would be probably our primary security issue. It was called loosely the loose nukes problem. What do we do about the loose nukes problem?

Of course, that’s a broad national security issue, but in particular, Les and I agreed from the first day that that would be our primary concern. What can the Defense Department do to deal with the loose nukes problem? It meant making a major reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, not only in the former Soviet Union but in the United States as well, but also bringing under much tighter control the nuclear weapons that were left. I might add on to that to say that, in fact, both as the Deputy Secretary, which I first was, and later Secretary, that was my number-one, top-priority mission for the entire four years. I spent some significant percentage of my time personally working on that problem, as well as mustering teams to work on that problem. 

So those were three major problems that we saw from the beginning. The fourth was a management problem. It wasn’t a policy problem. We were undergoing a downsizing of the military forces. It had already been started under Bush 1. There had been about a 25 percent reduction of the size of the forces and the funding for the forces from the Cold War levels under the first Bush administration. It was clear there was going to be maybe another 10 percent or so. The big reductions had already been made, but another increment was still ahead of us. 

But the big question now was not how to effect another increment, but how to preside over the downsizing of the forces without shattering the morale or the cohesion of the forces, without ending up with what after the Vietnam War became known as the hollow force. So very high on our agenda there is a management issue, How do you effectively gain the peace dividend—that is, reduce the size of the forces—but still end up with a competent military force in the end? 

So I guess those pretty well summarize—now, there’s a little bit of retrospective judgment in what I’m giving you here, but not much of it. Certainly in the first couple of months I was in office, those were the issues I was seized with. In fact, in my confirmation testimony, I laid those out as issues I was much concerned with. The ones that I did not lay out in my confirmation as Deputy Secretary of Defense, I laid them out when I was Secretary of Defense, because by that time it was crystal clear that those were the top-priority items. 

Do you recall during the transition period any conversations that you or Aspin had with other members of the national security team?

No, very little. At this early stage, the first few months, it was Les and I and several of the more intellectual members of his team talking about it, thinking it over, debating these issues, almost in the form of a seminar. 

Besides the issues of the day, which were always seizing us, we found some time in the evenings and weekends to talk about what big policy issues we need to be doing. Those were the major things to talk about. But it was within the Defense Department discussion. While Les had some discussions and meetings with the President and other members of the National Security Council at that time, I don’t believe these issues dominated those discussions in those early days. They were thinking about other things. Remember, It’s the economy, stupid. And it really was. There was somewhere between a thought and a wishful thinking that the national security issues would just go away. It was only when national security issues thrust themselves upon us that the rest of the administration became more concerned with these issues.

You didn’t have a great deal of contact with people outside the Pentagon at this stage.

No. I knew Warren Christopher for many years, not only from the connection of the Carter administration, but he and I both have a Stanford connection. He was head of the Board of Trustees at Stanford for a number of years. I did not know Tony Lake well, didn’t have many discussions with him during that period. So it was mostly within the Defense Department, and in my case but not necessarily with Les Aspin’s case, with some of the senior military. I knew Colin Powell very well, as I say, going back to the days when he was a colonel, and I came to know General [John] Shalikashvili very well.

You earlier expressed admiration for at least members of the Bush administration—President Bush himself and Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell, obviously, whom you had ties with going way back. To what extent in your early discussions with Les Aspin about the kinds of issues that you felt you had to deal with in DoD [Department of Defense] did you see yourself building on the accomplishments of the Bush administration in bringing the Cold War to an end and beginning the adjustment process that you have referred to? And to what extent did you see yourself with putting in place departures?

I would put the emphasis on departures. This administration has been criticized, and I think rightly, for an ABC attitude, which is Anything But Clinton. If Clinton was doing it, they didn’t want to do it. In a sense it’s a facetious comment, but it’s also a very accurate comment about many things. We did not have that with Bush at any time. So there was not a negative reaction to anything Bush had done at all. 

But I mentioned earlier that I thought our top priority was dealing with the loose nukes problem. They had let that ball drop, basically. It wasn’t that they had done something we had to undo; it’s that they hadn’t done anything. So we were writing on a blank slate on that one. For example, Senator Nunn and Senator [Richard] Lugar had pushed through legislation to deal with this problem approximately in late ’91, ’92, I don’t remember the exact month.

But that was established before you came—

That was established at least a year before we came into office, to authorize the Defense Department, I think it was, to spend up to half a billion dollars a year to work on this problem, to lay out some things that needed to be done. I had been a consultant to Senator Nunn and Senator Lugar in suggesting that legislation, and with my Stanford University hat on, I went with them to Russia and Ukraine to survey the problem. So I was very knowledgeable about the program and very keen to see it done. I hadn’t followed it too closely after the legislation was passed. I thought, mission accomplished. 

It turned out nothing had been done on it, zero. There had not been a dollar spent on the Nunn-Lugar program from the time it was implemented to the time I discovered, to my horror, when I became the Deputy Secretary in February ’93—so it wasn’t, again, undoing something the Bush administration had done, but we had to pick up that Nunn-Lugar ball and run with it. Nothing had been started. There had been no dollars even appropriated for that amount by that time. My first job as the Deputy Secretary of Defense was getting the half-billion dollars of it appropriated, finding places in the budget for doing it, and then taking it away from other programs and putting it all into Nunn-Lugar. It was a very painful process.

So for Nunn-Lugar there had been budgetary authority but—

Budgetary authority but not budgeted appropriations. Nothing had been appropriated. Nothing had been spent. It’s a painful job to do that, and Cheney just chose not to do it. It hadn’t been done.

So you had to go in and—

Start from scratch—

Within the existing appropriations for Defense, you had to go take that money—

Appropriations to build this airplane or build that helicopter or do something for some community somewhere. We had to identify those sources, go to the Congress and say, We’d like to reprogram these into the Nunn-Lugar program. We had a lot of help, of course, from Senator Nunn and Senator Lugar in doing that, but they’re not appropriators. They’re in charge of authorizing things. So it was a difficult job.

And you had to—just to be clear on this—you had to actually go back to Congress to get the authorization to take it out of the existing programs?

Yes. It’s reprogramming money. We can reprogram it, but it has to be approved by the Congress. I think it’s just the Appropriations Committee; it doesn’t require another act of Congress. But I can assure you it was a painful process. So we got that done just in the first month or so. Then we started putting together the programs to actually do the thing. 

Then we had to get the Russians, of course, to agree on this, and Ukrainians and the Kazakhstanies. We had to put together a whole team to go over to those countries and start to get the legal agreements we needed that would allow us to do the things we had to do in Kazakhstan and Belarus and Ukraine and Russia. That was something that the Defense Department by this time had the money to do and the authority to do, but this is also a diplomatic action, so we had to go hand in glove with—there the other important association we had besides Warren Christopher, who of course was Secretary of State, was Strobe Talbott, who at that time, early in time, was not yet the Deputy Secretary of State. He became the deputy. He was our principal contact for working with the Russians, Ukrainians, and so on, first of all, to negotiate the agreement with the Russians and the Ukrainians. It was called the Tripartite Agreement.

It took almost a year to get that agreement, I remember. It was January of ’94. From that agreement on, we could move forward in high gear. But from February ’93 until January ’94, it was getting the money appropriated, getting the plans put together, getting the team put together, getting the agreements between State and Defense Departments. Then with that agreement, which Strobe and I basically worked to achieve, we worked hand in glove, as if we were in the same department. We were just two people working on the job.

Once that was done—and here again now, this is an agreement that Ministers don’t sign; it’s an agreement that the President signed. So President Clinton, and in this case, President [Boris] Yeltsin had to be brought full-scale into it too. I would not say they were the prime movers in this, but they were very enthusiastic supporters of it. There was no problem selling them on it. President Clinton immediately saw the importance of doing this, and he put his full support and weight behind it. 

So that was when I began to understand that while the President had not come in the office with a national security background and needed to focus on the economy and other things, that when you presented to him a reasonably coherent picture of important action that needed to be done in national security, he soon became, in the discussion in the room, one of the most knowledgeable people in the room about the subject and an enthusiastic supporter of it. So that was my first serious engagement with the President on a big national security issue. While he was not the prime mover, he soon became the leader of what needed to be done on it. And that carried all the way through my working with him in the administration. He was always a strong supporter of everything we were doing in this field. 

Did you have any trouble with your confirmation hearing? Any wrinkles at all in the confirmation process?

No, it was 97–0 or something like that.

It was also very quick, if I remember correctly.

Yes. Both my deputy, and then a year later as Secretary, were unanimous. I’m trying to think back to that. There were questions that were buzzing around in those days of, Do you have a nanny? and so on. It’s hard to remember. That was the big issue in the confirmations in ’93, ’94. 

Loose nukes don’t matter, but if you’ve got a nanny problem—

I’m leaping ahead now to when I was nominated for Secretary. It was a year later, but he brought me forward. We had this press conference. The first question out of the box from the press was, Do you have a nanny problem? I said no. 

Incidentally, I had great sympathy with people who did have a nanny. I explained to the press the reason we didn’t have a nanny problem is that at the time we were raising our kids, we couldn’t afford nannies. Had we been able to afford them, we might have had a nanny problem.

I wanted to ask you about the atmosphere in the Pentagon when you first got there in those early days. The President had had some pretty high-profile problem areas with the military coming in—for instance, questions about his own past with the military. And then the issue of gays in the military crops up even during the transition, in the early stages. I’d like to get from you a picture of what you were picking up in the Pentagon when you arrived and the extent to which you perceived that this was going to be a serious problem that you’d have to deal with.

It was a big issue almost the whole first year. It went away after that time for reasons we can discuss later, but it was a big issue in the first year. The going-in problem, based on the President’s statement about—I forget the exact statement he made—the letter he wrote about how he did not like the military, associated with his trying to avoid the draft. That letter was a big problem with the military. He brought into the White House with him a lot of young, enthusiastic people from his campaign staff, some of whom were very negative about the military and were free to express it, including to the military people who came over to the White House. 

There was one infamous incident—I think it was Barry Carter. He was just making a pleasant statement to one of the young aides. She said she didn’t talk to the military, or something like that. A few really nasty little incidents like that which created a whole aura of the Clinton White House being not only negative, but hostile to the military. It was more of a legend than it was a fact. But nevertheless, legends can hurt you too. So that was problem number one, which was, as I said, the legend that the Clinton White House was hostile.

How does this get registered to you? I mean, were you having water-cooler conversations with people? 

The few little issues that did occur were amplified by a factor of 10 to 100 in the media. I mean, these are great stories, and they just played them over and over again. So no, I didn’t have to get them at the water cooler. It was in the Washington Post, the New York Times. It was the talk of the beltway at the time.

Was there a buzz inside the building about the negative attitude of the White House?

Initially no, but the second thing that happened—this was substantive; this wasn’t just an issue—was that the President wanted to make good on his pledge to remove the restriction on gays in the military—evidently not being aware of the fact that he didn’t really have that authority, that the Congress is the one that decides that. So he thought he could do it like [Harry] Truman had done it on integrating the services, which was by decree, but it doesn’t work that way. Congress rose up in rebellion and was busy passing new legislation that would enshrine in legislation the ban on gays in the military. So every action has a reaction. In this case his action to try to do what he thought was the right thing to do on the campaign pledge led to a reaction in the Congress, which as I look back on it, no doubt they would have been successful in doing what they said they were going to do. 

Now, this is where Les Aspin comes in. Les, of course, a former Congressman, a perfect person to mediate this problem, Clinton thought. And Aspin thought so as well. Aspin then got the job of mediating the problem, which was basically serving as an intermediary between the Congress on the one hand, which was dead set on passing this very restrictive legislation—and with the military on their side, I might say—and the White House that wanted to make good on the President’s pledge. For the next, it must have been six months, that consumed everything. That sucked up all the air. Everything we did was somehow revolving around that problem. Les spent hours and hours each week in meetings with the military, with his staff, and with the Congress trying to work out a solution. He finally came up with a solution. It was a haywire solution, but it worked, in a sense. 

It worked in the sense that it allowed the President to say he was doing something on his pledge, and it got the Congress to agree not to pass the restrictive legislation. And it was the infamous Don’t ask, don’t tell policy, which he crafted together after the six months or so with the help of Jamie Gorelick, who was his very able counsel. Her job was to be a good counsel, which was to try to help her boss come up with something. That’s what they came up with. The military was not happy with it, but was willing to accept it. The Congress was not happy with it, but was willing to accept it. The President was not happy with it, but was willing to accept it. The gay community was certainly not happy with it. But it ended, I said six months, almost close to a year—at least nine months—

It was a good part of the first year.

—of this acrimonious debate that, even more than the first issue I talked about, solidified the view that the Clinton administration was hostile to, and didn’t understand, the U.S. military.

One thing I’ve always been curious about is why that issue, gays in the military, was so prominent so quickly, given Clinton’s history of what seemed to be his attitude toward the military, avoiding the draft during Vietnam, why this kind of social issue was so prominent on the agenda so early.

I think, first of all, because there was a misunderstanding in the White House that he could just do this. It was a pledge he had made, and all he had to do to execute on that pledge was sign something. He didn’t understand how complicated it was and how much resistance there would be and how effective the resistance would be.

Second, once they had launched it, it took on a life of its own. Backing off it from that point would have had its own set of problems. So his solution to the problem, which in retrospect I suppose seemed reasonable at the time was, Here’s my new Secretary of Defense, who is a Congressman. Well known and respected in the Congress— and for good reason; I mean, Les was a very able chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He’ll fix this problem. Well, he did fix it, but the fix was, to put it mildly, not satisfactory to anybody. It ended up being the least-bad solution, I guess, but it was a solution nobody liked, nobody really supported. It did have one great benefit: it got the problem off the table for the next—it will come back again, but for the remaining seven years of the Clinton administration, that problem is now off the table.

Aspin is serving, as you describe, as an intermediary between Congress and the White House policy. How would you characterize Aspin’s, and your, leadership dealings with the White House on this issue? How were they to work with? With whom did you end up working most closely with? With whom did you have greater difficulty?

I cannot give you a firsthand answer to that question. Les did it himself. He spent a lot of time at the White House, and he was the kind who would put his arm around the shoulders of the staff, work with them, and talk with them. I’m sure he worked this problem very hard at the White House, probably had very limited meetings and discussion with the President on it because the President was busy doing other things at that time. 

But the White House staff at that time was the one he was working with, and was very inexperienced, very green. They were trying to find their way around too. Many of them were just people who had worked for Clinton in the campaign, no experience in managing a big institution like this. So Les did work with them. I’m just not sure it was very fruitful. 

I would imagine that there must have been some enormous frustrations on Aspin’s part being handed this right out of the gate.

I suppose there was, but it was never evident.

Is that right?

In a sense, Les saw this as a way of really serving his new President. He sensed correctly that this was a huge issue with the Congress. He could read exactly what was going on in Congress on this. He could see that the President was in a really deep hole on this problem, and it was very important for him to get results. So I think, in a sense, he welcomed the opportunity to really take the leadership right off the bat in solving a big, important problem, and he worked very hard at it. I still can remember weeks in which he would spend half of his time on that problem. He was holed up in meetings with the military, and with Jamie and the little kitchen cabinet he had working, trying to come up with this. It raises the question, of course, what else might he have been doing with that time?

Exactly. Was it time well spent?

No is the short answer. It led to the end of his tenure as Secretary. It can be argued whether it was direct or indirect, but certainly it was a major contributor to the fact. He can be criticized for having spent so much time on this problem, but it was clear that this was the big problem that the President asked him to resolve, and he was putting his all into trying to resolve it. And he did, in my judgment, the best job that could have been done, given the hand that he was dealt. So that was a dominant factor in the first year. 

There were a few other related issues, not as dominant, but of the same nature. There was a Chief of Naval Operations who had attended a meeting called the Tailhook meeting, which was a really bad scene of some Navy aviators acting in outrageous ways at one of the big conventions, including a lot of sexual harassment—not marginal sexual harassment; I mean real sexual harassment. That was a big issue. That happened in the previous administration. They spent a lot of time working on it in the last year of the Bush administration, but it was not truly resolved. So there were still a few lingering issues from it that we thought we could wrap up rather quickly. 

But the big complication was that the Chief of Naval Operations at the time had attended the Tailhook convention and was wandering through the halls. The question was, would he have known, or should he have known, what was going on? And if so, why didn’t he do something about it? So there was a big move to sack the CNO [Chief of Naval Operations] over what the military would consider to be a social issue. It had something of the gays-in-the-military overtones to it.

Was the pressure to—I think it was Admiral [Frank] Kelso—relieve him of command, was that pressure coming from the White House, or was the pressure coming from sources outside?

Again, I can’t answer that firsthand. I believe yes, but there was lots of pressure, I know that. Again, that problem was on Les’ plate, and it was in parallel with gays in the military, but it had several relevancies to it. 

His Secretary of the Navy, who was a Clinton appointee, John Dalton, took on the problem, studied it carefully, and decided he was going to sack Kelso. This didn’t ring true to Les. So he asked me to get involved with it. Without going into a lot of details on the problem, I told Les he should override Dalton, which he did, which was an unpopular move with the White House. So here was a case where he was trying to accommodate the White House, but the action he ended up taking was really leaning a little bit more toward the military and away from the White House. In a sense, that’s a sideshow to this bigger show I was talking about, but it was happening at the same time. As I think back to that first year, those were the kinds of issues that were occupying everybody’s attention during that first year. And then Somalia came along.

Including your time?

No.

Would gays in the military or you—

Les’ view was, He’ll solve these problems, and I’d manage the Pentagon.

And that’s basically the way it went.

No, it didn’t go that way. That was his view. It didn’t go that way. 

Because he wasn’t solving the problems, or because you weren’t running the Pentagon?

Because he didn’t know what was involved in running the Pentagon and how to release his authority, how to give me authority. So he kept wanting to have it both ways, both having me do it and him do it also. But he wasn’t available to do it. 

So there are a certain number of things and actions that the Secretary himself has to take, and he was involved in all these other things. He would be in meetings, literally four or five hours at a time on this gays-in-the-military thing, and operational issues were just coming and going, and I wouldn’t be aware that they were coming and going. Nobody would be aware of it. So it was a turbulent period, to put it mildly. 

The big operational issue that was coming up in the midst of all this was our deployment of forces in Somalia. Deployment dated back to the Bush administration, but something had to be done about them. The situation was changing, and it wasn’t getting the attention it needed to get. This was a problem that Aspin could have delegated to me but didn’t. He decided to handle that one himself too. So along with these meetings on the gays in the military, they then strung a whole series of meetings about what to do about Somalia. It was also at about the same time period that riots were going on in Haiti. What should the United States be doing about the riots in Haiti?

And you inherited a problem in Bosnia that’s—

The Bosnia problem was next year. We inherited the problem, but nobody was focusing on that the first year. It was the Haiti and the Somalia problem that was sucking up all the oxygen. 

A minor matter of northern and southern watch in Iraq.

Yes, the military was running that, and they were running it reasonably well. That did not involve much management attention. But the situation in Somalia was changing. What had started off as a humanitarian operation was turning out to be an insurgency operation. We had a UN [United Nations] force there, but it was really dominated by the United States. So it was up to the U.S. to decide what to do and how to do it. 

Les made a number of decisions, which I assumed he discussed with the President, but I don’t think it engaged him. My estimate is he probably did not engage the President much on this. I think the President was blindsided by what happened in Somalia. Les was trying to handle it, and his view was that the way to handle the problem with the insurgents was to capture the man who was leading the insurgency. He authorized some special operations forces to do that, and the rest is history. Their helicopter was shot down. It was a terrible scene in Somalia, and America seemed to be humiliated in front of the world by this. Everybody looked to Les and said, Why didn’t you authorize more support for those forces? 

There was all sorts of second-guessing about why he did it the way he did it. But the fundamental question was why he had decided to escalate this humanitarian operation into an insurgency one in the first place, and why he executed that insurgency war by sending in commando teams to try to capture the man. In retrospect, all the Monday-morning quarterbacks came in after the Somalia debacle saying, That was the wrong way to do that.

Do you have an answer for that?

My only point, relative to the White House question, is that I do not believe the White House was involved or engaged to any great extent in that. I think it was Les and Colin Powell, basically, managing the issue. Colin managed to distance himself from it. But my observation is that it was Les and Colin Powell who were making the decisions about what to do, informing the White House, which hadn’t quite stumbled on the fact that this might become a big issue. Then when it blew up, Colin somehow became magically uninvolved with it, and it all focused on Les having made all these bad decisions.

Powell practically had one foot out the door when he—

Practically one foot out the door. He had a couple of months to go. But my observation at the time was that he was not really as fully engaged in this process as he might have been, and it came down to Les. 

Now, the big decision, for which Les got most of the criticism, was the request from Somalia to send reinforcements over before they conducted this mission, which Les turned down. I don’t know the full details on that, but I do know at the time the request came in he was on vacation, and he was answering—I mean, it was a phone call to him while he was on vacation. I would be doubtful that he really gave it serious consideration. Second, I believe it’s also true that Colin and/or his military were advising that it wasn’t necessary. But again, that never came out. It ended up being Les’ decision, probably with, if not the recommendation, at least the assent of his senior military. And it was certainly done without much thought, because it was a phone call while he was on vacation. It didn’t have the attention it should have had. That was a big decision, and that was the one he was most criticized for. So it became a debacle. 

Then he was called over to Congress to basically justify the actions the administration had taken—meaning the ones he had taken—and defend them. It turned out to be a joint hearing of Congress. They must have had a couple of hundred Congressmen in this big room, and Les was put up in front of them to talk. Everybody said, Well, this is Les’ forte. He’s a Congressman. He’s talking to one of his own. It was an absolute disaster. For reasons that are not clear to me, he decided, instead of going over and making the case, he went over and said, We’ve got some tough problems in Somalia. What do you think we ought to do? I’m here to learn from you. 

After that meeting, several of the Congressmen, who shall go nameless but who were longtime friends of Les, went to the President and said, This guy has got to go. And the President said okay. I don’t know what the dynamics of those discussions were, but it was a very short time between the recommendations from the Congressmen to the President to the time the President told Les he was going to have to go.

Had the White House and the President, in your opinion, been sufficiently supportive of Aspin?

I don’t think they would have thought that was a relevant question. Did he ask for support? I think they weren’t fully engaged in the problem. Whether that’s their fault, or Les’ fault for not explaining to them how important this problem was, is something I don’t know because I wasn’t in on those discussions.

It was treated as a lot of incremental operational changes rather than anyone at any point intervening—

It was a political decision to escalate the mission?

You can make a case as to why Les didn’t bother bringing the White House in more, or you can make the case that the White House wasn’t interested in being brought in. And probably there’s some truth in both of those. But I’m only guessing now. I was not a firsthand witness to those discussions. I just saw the results of them from the Pentagon’s point of view. 

So your impression is that certainly the President himself wasn’t involved in Somalia. 

I’m quite sure the President was not engaged or involved in a serious way on those operational issues.

How about Tony Lake? 

I don’t know.

You would think that there would be—

You would think so, but I don’t know. I would have to believe that Tony was closely involved in those discussions. 

To what extent did that experience, that very early formative experience in Somalia, color the administration’s approach to subsequent contingencies?

Every extent. It was a dominant factor for a year or so after that.

Just for a year?

Eventually we did send 25,000 troops into Bosnia. That was two years later, but the move in that direction occurred sooner than the actual deployment. 

For example, it absolutely foreclosed the possibility of sending any troops to Rwanda. I don’t know whether you’ve seen the movie Rwanda Hotel, which I think is a pretty accurate description of what happened there, but basically the UN, Europe, and the United States just said, That’s not our problem. I can say for a fact that there was no serious consideration at that time of sending American troops to Rwanda. This is just several months after we had pulled them out of Somalia. There would have been an explosion in Congress had the President decided he was going to send a battalion of troops to Rwanda, I’m quite confident. President Clinton has said in retrospect, now out of office, that one of his great regrets of the Presidency was not taking some action to try to stop the Rwanda massacre. But I can tell you there was no consideration.

So there was virtually no pressure from any corner of the administration to do something?

On the contrary, had anybody proposed it to them, they would have been summarily dismissed as smoking dope or something, to think that you can do it. Now, I do not believe it was possible for the President to have done it even if he had wanted to do it. The feeling in Congress was so strong on this issue that they would have found ways of blocking it. But that’s a gratuitous statement. The fact is, the President made no move in that respect. 

Now, two weeks later in Rwanda, after the massacre, there was a different kind of disaster occurring, which was a humanitarian disaster. There were about a million people in refugee camps right over the border in Zaire, and a cholera epidemic broke out. Cholera comes, as you may know, from drinking impure water. They were all drinking the water from a nearby lake, which was infected with the cholera. So the report that I got at the time was that they were dying at the rate of about 5,000 a day, which is really a major disaster. 

It would go on for quite a long time because there was no way of solving the problem. The only people who had the resources to stop that epidemic was the United States. We were the only one who had the airlift. We could airlift in the water purification equipment, transportation equipment to get the water to the camps, and the battalion of engineers needed to do this. So with that information at hand, about the second day or so of the epidemic, I went to the President and said, I’d like to do this. He said, Of course. There was no controversy. He immediately approved that. I said, You should be aware, Mr. President, there’s going to be some kickback in Congress on this. He said, I think we can handle it. In fact, there was some kickback in Congress, but it was the kind of thing we could do without getting permission if we were willing to take the heat for having done it afterwards. 

So that’s the way we did it: we just did it. Even though the mission was pulled off entirely successfully—no American casualties of any kind, and they stopped the epidemic literally within a day or two; obviously, it was a good thing to do—even then, there were quite a lot of complaints from Congress that we shouldn’t have done it, that we were putting American troops at risk for an adventure like Somalia. The Somalia image, the specter of Somalia was very powerful for at least, as I said, a year after that. 

Given the level of casualties, 18 people killed, was the reaction to Somalia exaggerated? 

It was not so much the casualties as two other facts: The casualties highlighted the failure, first of all, that we were in there without a mission—the usual mission-creep argument—and second, the mission of trying to save Somalia. The people who were killing our soldiers were Somalians, and the question was, why are we trying to save them when there’s no gratitude on their part for it? So it was a combination of events. If the number had been 8 or 18 or 28, I think the reaction would have been pretty much the same.

Any bad pictures?

It was the pictures of the Somalian kids celebrating, desecrating the Americans who had been killed and celebrating the death—the kinds of things that we saw when they were hanging the Americans from the bridge in Iraq more recently and the gleeful people jumping, a carnival atmosphere. It was that kind of effect which raised the question, why are we doing this? In any event, we don’t have a sound mission.

They started investigating the things that Les had said about the Somalian mission, and they started tearing them apart as being inconsistent and thereby tearing apart the administration. So the administration took a big black eye for this, and that black eye was, partly rightly and partly not rightly, pinned on Les, and that ended up with Les being excused from the job. It is conceivable, even with the Somalia debacle, that he might have been able to pull it out if he had handled the Congress better, if he had followed up. But in any event, this turned out to be such a bad scene that the President decided to dump him.

You were dispatched to go meet with the soldiers when they came back from Somalia, I want to say at Fort Benning but I may have it—

I wasn’t dispatched. I just went. I learned a lesson. I was planning to go, and the Chief of Staff of the Army was going, so I just went to the Chief of Staff and said, I’ll go with you.

But you would have been the senior-most person there, and you spoke there.

Yes.

Do you remember anything about that occasion?

Yes, we did two things. This is Gordon Sullivan; he was Chief of Staff of the Army. He was really the one who set the tone for the meeting, and I think quite appropriately. But there were two tones for the meeting. I was there to say, It’s not just the Army that cares about this; the administration and the Secretary care as well.

There were two aspects to that meeting with the troops: One was telling them they had performed heroically, which they had, and in very difficult circumstances. Second was thanking them for their sacrifice. It seems, in a sense, pointless, but it made a difference. You could almost see the difference, the reaction to the fact that we came and were willing to do that. 

Later on some of the survivors were invited to the White House, and the President got an earful from them. Some of them wouldn’t shake hands with him or speak with him. They came, but they wouldn’t shake hands with him and told him why. He was stunned and shocked. His reaction to that meeting, as was reported to me by some of the people who were there, was that he had no idea what we were doing in Somalia, though he had had no idea they would ask for reinforcements and hadn’t sent them—basically detaching himself, probably correctly, from the operational decisions that were made. In his mind, I’m sure, he was building up the fact that Les had let him down on this. Although, as I go back in my own mind, I say there’s a little bit of letting down on both sides. That was probably the defining event in the administration the first year. 

Now, as I described a little grace note to the gays-in-the-military issue being the Admiral Kelso, there’s a grace note also to the Somalia, which was that the Haiti riots were going on at about the same time. Les sent down a contingent of American forces to land in a show of force. Again, I was not in the White House discussion. I was a deputy at the time. But I believe that he was not only requested, but urged to do this by the White House and the Department of State, that we should have a show of force down there by having American troops, that that would calm the situation down just having the American troops there. It was a relatively small group. I don’t remember the number now, but we weren’t sending thousands of troops. It was a couple hundred troops. 

Anyway, the troops got down to Port-au-Prince, the harbor there, and there were riots right at the port there, threatening the soldiers if they landed. This was radioed back to Les, who was busy doing something else at the time again. He wasn’t on vacation, but he was off on something. In any event, his decision, a telephonic decision, based on limited information was, Well, we’ve got to pull the forces back. So the ship turned around. So the image there was an unruly mob at the port, shouting slogans and shaking their fists, caused the mighty U.S. military to turn around and go back home. So Les took a lot of—

And directly linked in the media, by commentators, with what had just, about ten days before, happened in Somalia. 

So I called it a grace note to Somalia really. That had happened also before he went over to Congress for that meeting. All of these things came piling down on him—some of them, as I say, appropriately so. But others were bad luck or other people passing the buck to him. But he took the heat for all of that, and that led to the President asking him to leave the job.

In the popular mind, I think, and probably in the scholarship, Aspin doesn’t come out too well because of these things. I wonder if you could tell us, from your perspective, what were his accomplishments? What did he get done as Secretary?

First, his accomplishments as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, he was a splendid chairman. Everybody, including myself, had high hopes for his being a great Secretary. One will never know whether he might have been had it not been for these extraneous circumstances that intervened. I mean, the issues that we had during the first year were not really the bread-and-butter issues of the Department of Defense. They were odd things dumping on him. 

But in any event, I would say, in short, the answer was none. He was so absorbed and so distracted and so busy defending himself on all these other issues, that of all of the other objectives that he had, he had no time to implement. On top of that, his heart problems developed during that first year, and he didn’t make it to work every day. When he did, he would sometimes be lying on the cot in his office. He was off to the hospital a couple of times. 

The first NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] meeting he would have attended, he wasn’t able to go to, and I went to the NATO meeting in his place. He would have loved to go to that. The fact that he didn’t go to that NATO meeting meant that he was really—he had been looking forward to that as being the one positive thing he could do in his first year, but he wasn’t able to because of his health. So all of those problems combined to make it a miserable year for him. 

It’s hard to point to anything positive that was accomplished that year. It was just a sense of embattlement, a sense of fighting the problems that were coming in on that day, and no time left to advance an agenda forward. In my position as deputy, I couldn’t see much of a way of helping him with the big issues he was working on then, but I’m sure I could have. So I thought I would do what I could to try to keep other balls moving forward. So we moved the proliferation, the Nunn-Lugar thing. All of the groundwork for that, which took a lot of time and energy, was done during that first year when all these other things were going on. Les was highly approving and highly supportive of it but not involved in it. 

But he had the good sense to put you in the situation.

He just let me do that. Basically, I acted with his authority in doing those things, and that part of it worked well. He also not only let me, but encouraged me, to move forward on another agenda I had, which was getting defense acquisition reform, which I had some considerable background on. So we made a major move forward in that area at that time. So those were two big things we did that Les was highly supportive of, and in a different environment, would have been in there working right with me but was simply distracted from being able to do anything about them.

Does the Bottom-Up Review fall in that category also?

That was a mixture. While, in a sense, I was carrying the Bottom-Up Review, Les did also find time—

That was something near and dear to his heart.

Near and dear to his heart. He and his key staff members, Rudy de Leon and Larry Smith, all worked very hard on the Bottom-Up Review. So what came out of the Bottom-Up Review had a lot of his time and energy into it, but I wouldn’t say he was the prime mover on it. But it was something he cared a lot about and certainly had his imprint on it.

There was one other thing that we did during that first year, which again, Les was involved with but not a prime mover of, and that was recognizing that the budget not only was down 25 percent from what it had been four years earlier, but it was going to go down another 10 percent or so. I asked Les to call a meeting of the senior defense industry officials where we had a simple message to them: The first was that the budget was not only down, it was going to go down further. They should not look at it as a little dip here but as a new low plateau and adjust their plans accordingly, and in particular, if that meant they had too much capacity for the amount of business they were going to have, they should understand that we were not going to support that unused overhead. They had to do a scaling down and a consolidation to do that. That dinner has become known infamously as the Last Supper by the defense officials who attended it. But that precipitated a whole series of consolidations of the Defense Department. 

I would say that was a positive accomplishment. Les was very much involved with that meeting. He was the one who called the meeting. I was the one who actually organized it and presided over it, but Les played a very important role in that. But I can’t overemphasize the fact that he was so distracted by these other issues that it was very hard for him to get involved in anything. He would have loved to have been involved in issues like the Bottom-Up Review, like the defense industry work, like the NATO meeting. These were mother’s milk for him. That’s why, I sure, when he took the job, he was envisioning that was what he was going to be doing. 

There would seem to be a predisposition in the Department to be cautious, and maybe pessimistic, given the global trends at the time. I mean, you’re in a post-Cold War retrenchment. So on top of the gays-in-the-military thing and so forth, you’ve got an underlying level of anxiety, I would think, within the Pentagon and the military about what’s going to happen, or is that overstating the case?

No, I think it was. This whole uncertainty in leadership, and lack of confidence in the leadership, both in the Pentagon and in the White House, only added to that uncertainty.

There was some criticism that Aspin and his decision-making process was perceived by service Secretaries and other military leadership as being insulated with political appointees and perhaps top-heavy. What was your view of that decision-making process? And if you could, tell us a little about his relationships and your own relationships with some of the senior military.

They did have that view, and I shared that view. When I became Secretary, I immediately changed the structure, not to please the military, but because I thought it was the wrong structure, and it did have the effect of making the relationship with the military a lot better. But that was a big problem, both in terms of the civilians with whom he had worked as a Congressman that he surrounded himself with and in terms of his political appointees, the most egregious of which was the policy department in the Pentagon. We had a bevy of assistants. He had created new Assistant Secretaries who were just getting in each other’s way, as I saw it. 

So when I became Secretary, I removed about 25 or 30 of those civilians who were doing I knew not what. They came over with Les from the Congress, and he nominated, I think, two or three of the Assistant Secretaries in the policy department and restructured that. The first week I was in office it was an urgent problem.

Was Aspin ever aware how big a problem this was, or did you just become aware too late?

I don’t think he was aware. These are smart people, people he liked, people he liked to talk with. He’d sit around in the evening and have bull sessions with them. He liked to discuss politics as well as the defense issues. Now, of those people, two of them were outstanding and stayed on. One was Larry Smith, and the other was Rudy de Leon, but they were two out of, say, thirty. There were a lot of people there who were probably appropriate support for him as a Congressman but who didn’t have a clear and defined role in the Defense Department. Quite aside from whatever I might have thought of them, the point was that they really made the military uneasy. It just caused a lot of psychological concern. It was a distraction of the Secretary’s time as well. So yes, that was a big problem. 

And this was a period of time when the White House was confronting some press accounts that it was also running inefficiently.

It was a mirror image of what I’m talking about, I think. I didn’t have as close-in a view of it. I saw close at hand the problem in the Pentagon. But I heard and got some glimpses of the White House, which struck me as being a very similar situation. They had a shakedown period in the White House as well. 

In the first year, when you were deputy, what percentage of your time was spent on these reactive-crisis things as opposed to the assigned bits that were designated on your plate?

For better or worse, in that first year as deputy, I spent the first month or two just going with Les to meetings and trying to help him. I decided that was a waste of time. I then simply shifted over to doing things I could figure out how to do myself. So I started working on the Nunn-Lugar program; I started working on the defense acquisition reform; I started working with the defense industry; I started working on the Bottom-Up Review—those kinds of things, definable tasks, which I could see needed to be done and which I could do and which Les was really too busy, too distracted to do. So he handled one set of problems, and I handled another set, and we moved forward that way. Just attending the meetings he was attending on these other subjects would have taken almost my full day. And I would have just sat there listening. So I decided I would spend my time better doing things. 

I want to get your take on Sam Nunn during this first year. He’s somebody that you get the impression from the outside of Capitol Hill is a key figure, but he becomes a problem for the administration in a lot of ways, doesn’t he?

Not to me.

Not for you?

No. I have a bias here. I’m a great admirer and supporter of Sam Nunn. He always, to me, was a tower of strength in the Congress. He would help me get things done. Certainly the Nunn-Lugar program I couldn’t have gotten anything done without his support. The defense reform acquisition, he was a tower of strength. The Bottom-Up Review, he helped us carry that through. But he and the President did not have a good working relationship, and I don’t think he and Les did either. My relationship with him was very positive. 

On those other two relationships, do you have any idea why he and the President didn’t click or why he and Les didn’t click? Was it just competition?

First, to be clear, I would distinguish between the two relationships. With the President, I think there was some negative aspect to it, which I don’t fully understand. With Les, I don’t think there was anything negative about it. I just think they were very different personalities. They didn’t work together very well, but I have no reason to believe there was anything negative about how they feel about each other.

But the characteristic of a negative valance between the President and Nunn, that shows up in what ways?

I’m probably not a good source on that one. I saw it only very indirectly, and I heard about it from other people. So I’m not even sure that it’s right, but I believe it is. It’s second hand, mostly, in my case.

But it does comport with what I’ve picked up. That was the reason that I phrased the question the way I did originally.

That’s a good question to which I’m not a good source for the answer.

He took part of the lead on the gays in the military, which, as we’ve already explored, had a very negative effect on the first year. What I was trying to do was see if there may have been some other areas where that negativism—

I’m not aware, because what I was working with Nunn on was all positive. 

And he was very helpful—

And it was things that the President wanted done too. But I’m perfectly willing to believe that there was a lot of tension on the gays issue.

The successor to Aspin. They don’t come directly to you and ask you if you want the job?

No, they went to a couple of other people, I’m not sure who. I know for sure Bobby Inman, because they actually offered him the job, and he accepted and then later backed out. Between the time he accepted and the time he changed his mind, I went down to Texas to meet with him to lay out the plans for how we would move forward. I would say I was positive about Inman’s appointment. I knew him well. I thought we would work together well. So I went down and spent a day just laying out how we would work together, how we would move forward, what the problems were, and how we were going to get in high gear again—because he knew and I knew that the Pentagon was dead in the water at that point. We were going to get quickly moving. Then, a week later, he announced he’s withdrawing.

Did you have any indication?

No indication. I heard the television broadcast and was stunned. Now, when I talked with him, he did refer darkly to some of the concerns he had about coming up to Washington and taking the job, but very indirectly.

What were those concerns?

As I said, very indirectly, and people in Washington who would be opposed to him, who would give him a bad time. I had the impression that there were media people who he thought would be on his case. He felt he had a thin skin and might not be able to take that too well. This is all secondhand. My firsthand discussion with him was only that I knew in my meeting with him in Texas that he had some reservations relative to how he would be accepted or received by the media in Washington. In his announcement he, again darkly, referred to that but was not very explicit about it. So it’s still a mystery to me. I was his friend before; I’m his friend now. I served on a board with him a few years after I left Washington. I’ve known him probably for 30 years or so. But that’s still a mystery to me. 

In any event, besides Inman, I think, I have heard—and I have no reason to disbelieve—that the President certainly considered, maybe even talked with other people, maybe with Sam Nunn, although again, I can’t say that with confidence.

Sam Nunn and I think Warren Rudman were—

I think those were the two people that I’ve heard. All I’m doing is repeating the same gossip you’ve heard. I don’t have firsthand information on it. 

Would Inman have made a good Secretary?

I don’t know. It’s so hard to come to a judgment on it.

You thought Aspin would be a great Secretary.

Who am I to say? He’s a very smart guy, very knowledgeable on defense issues, but so much has to do with leadership style and personalities and ability to work with Congress, and having the sensitivity to do the job but not being so sensitive that you’re always overreacting to the criticism that you continually get in jobs like that. I don’t think I can predict with confidence who would be a good Secretary of Defense and who wouldn’t be, but I thought Inman was a reasonably good bet—a better bet than Aspin. I would have said Nunn would have been a good bet. I would gladly have gone back to serve with Nunn. From the beginning I thought he was a better bet for the job than Aspin just because of his personality, I guess—although none of them had any management responsibilities ever in their life. Inman did, which made a difference. 

So somebody knocks on your door one day, or gives you a phone call.

Yes, the President. He called me to come and see him. He said, You won the lottery. 

You call this winning?

I told him I wasn’t so sure I wanted the job. I was about ready to leave Washington by that time. I was so frustrated with the year I spent back there. I had already turned in my options, but still, I was finally so frustrated that I was ready to head back to California.

Physically, were you okay?

Yes, I was fine.

It’s a difficult life, isn’t it?

It never bothered me. That was not a factor in my consideration.

To what do you attribute the President’s selection of you ultimately for that position?

Last man standing, I guess. [laughter]

Endurance.

I know that people like Nunn and others had been recommending from the first place that they should have selected me. But again, I had no background with Clinton. The President liked to appoint people he knew a little bit and had worked with and had some personal relationship with. He had none with me. Even after a year as deputy, I’d been in meetings with him and I’d been on trips with him once or twice, but I really had not developed any personal relationship with the President. 

My understanding was that Al Gore [Jr.] was a strong supporter.

He was. The sequence, roughly, is that the President made me the offer. I guess it was on a Friday. I told him a couple of things: I said if I took the job, I would commit to him to stay through the term, but I would not intend to stay a second term. I had a lot of reasons for not believing a second term would be a good idea, but I would not take it and, as some people do, do a job for a year or two and then head off. I’d stay through the term, but I said that I wasn’t sure I would take it, and I needed to think about it and talk about it with my wife. I did. We had a long discussion Friday evening and decided no. 

This was not an idle decision. As I said, I’d already done the hard things about going back there. So those were not issues anymore. It was just whether I wanted to take on that job. I’d seen what it had done to Les Aspin. I liked Les a lot, and while I think he was culpable in some of the problems, I could still see a very good, very bright, very good man being destroyed, basically, by the process—seeing his friends in the Congress and his friends in the media jumping all over him whenever things went the wrong way.

Most important, I had been in that job long enough that I saw that when you became the Secretary of Defense, you and your family lost everything that you ever had relative to privacy. You were public property. Everything, not just your public life but your private life, was fair game for discussion and debate. There’s an upside to that if you like the publicity, but I did not like the publicity, and all I could see was the downside. All my wife could see was the downside. 

So after a long, agonizing discussion, we said no. On Saturday morning I called the President and said, Thank you, Mr. President. I’ve decided not to accept the offer.

Were you willing to stay on as Deputy Secretary?

I said I would be willing to stay on as deputy long enough to bring a new Secretary on board, then I’m going back to California. We didn’t specify a time. The President was a little surprised at this. 

Then about an hour or two later, I started getting phone calls. The first was from Al Gore. He said he was disappointed to hear that I decided to turn down the job, but he would like to talk to me about it. Would I come over to the Naval Observatory, which is his house. So I did. I went over there, and I spent a couple of hours talking with him.

You had known Gore better than Clinton?

Yes, I’d known him slightly before I went into office as deputy, but I worked with him very closely as deputy.

You traveled to Russia with him just the preceding month, as I recall.

He had put together something called the Gore-[Viktor] Chernomyrdin Commission, which was very much along the lines of what I was trying to do, which was to work constructively with Russia. I’d been with him just a month before in Russia, but I’d been there on earlier occasions too. He had a big thing of working on government reform [National Partnership for Reinventing Government], and my acquisition reform was actually the centerpiece of that. So I had worked very closely with him, much more closely than with the President. It wasn’t a personal relationship, but we had developed a very good professional relationship. So he put full-court press on, basically, when we talked. I got numerous other phone calls, and people dropped in to see me as well. 

In the meantime—this was Saturday morning when I decided this—I went into the office as I usually did, and I told Les and my deputy, John Deutch, who later became my deputy, that I had decided to turn it down. The only people I told were Les and John Deutch and the President. The President told Al Gore and a few other people. So we had these long discussions Saturday evening. Finally, Sunday evening I said, Oh, the hell with it. I’ll do it. So I called the President and said, Okay, I changed my mind. I’ll do it.

So was it a matter of simply wearing you down, or what was it that convinced you to stay?

I think Al was very smart. He knew me well enough to know how to appeal to me, what kind of support that I would need to be able to do these things. He knew what I was trying to accomplish in government. He said, You can do these things now. You can do them even better from the position of Secretary than you were trying to do them as deputy. He promised me I could pick my own deputy. You’d think that would be automatic, but it was by no means automatic. And I’d be able to restructure the staff as I wanted to. I’d be able to dump a lot of the political appointees who were there.

So he promised me a lot of power and authority, which I felt I needed. I was not negotiating. I really had decided no. But he knew enough about what I wanted to do that he was able to do that. So that was how that discussion went.

Are these things that were promised to you more than what Aspin was promised?

I never had such a discussion with Aspin. I was basically doing the things I was doing just on my own initiative. Gore knew about those things. His point was, Those things that you were doing which were successful in the first year, we can do five times or ten times as well from the position of Secretary. We’ll give you the following authority where you can pick your own deputy. You can restructure the staff and the policy department. You can do all these things you want to do without interference from the White House. Basically he said, I will serve as interference for you on the political people in the White House who will not want that to happen. 

For example, I was very keen on defense acquisition, and to do that I had to implement, and I had to have Assistant Secretaries of Acquisition in each of the services. The people I wanted to do that, unfortunately for the White House, happened to be Republicans. I mean, they weren’t political people, but they were people whose voting record was Republican. I explained to Al that I wanted to do this and I need his support to get that done. All of those things happened just as he said they would. He made good on his promises. So that’s what turned me around. 

My wife and I had a long talk about how we would deal with the problem of being public figures in Washington. So I called the President and said okay. That was Sunday night. Monday morning headline in the New York Times was that Perry Turns Down the Job. The article was written by [R.W.] Johnny Apple, who was Les Aspin’s closest friend.

Gee, you wonder how that got there. One thing we were talking about was your relationship with Al Gore and how important that was in your decision to accept the offer as Secretary. I was wondering about how your relationship with the President and the Vice President developed. Was it a situation in which you continued to deal primarily with the Vice President? What kind of relationship did you develop with the President? Obviously, as Secretary you were dealing with him much more directly than before.

In each case it developed over specific issues or activities. In the case of Al Gore, as I mentioned, it was the fact he had formed this Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, and I played a key role in that. The Defense Department played a key role, and I was representing the Defense Department. He had this big government reform program. It was a big thing of his, and I played a key role in that. The consequence of that was that I not only was doing things, we were doing things together. But we were often in small meetings working on these projects, so we got to know each other pretty well. I emphasize it was a professional relationship, not a personal relationship, but it developed out of the work we were doing together, and we had a lot of work together during that first year, whereas I had very little work together with the President during that time. So I had no opportunity to develop that kind of relationship with him at first.

I was with him on a couple of trips to defense plants and to defense ceremonies, but the principal thing that I did with the President, again, was on another specific issue or project. At the time he took over the Presidency, the Defense Department had inherited something called BRAC [Base Realignment and Closure]. We had to execute some of the BRAC decisions made by the earlier administration, and there was a new BRAC coming out. I ended up doing most of the work on BRAC. When I mentioned things I picked up to do specifically, I should have mentioned that that was important. It was a very appropriate role for the deputy to do. It wasn’t necessarily the fact that Les was busy doing other things. It would have been an appropriate job for the deputy in any event. So I ended up being the BRAC go-to guy, and I took that very seriously. I made a lot of visits and trips for BRAC. I had a lot of meetings and organizations involved in what we should do there. I tried to get it organized to work effectively. 

That was something the President was interested in. We went on a few trips together executing BRAC. It had a high political component to it as well. My interest in it was getting it done right so that not only would the Defense Department get the benefits from the BRAC, but there would be minimal impact on the communities. On that latter goal, minimal impact on the communities, the President had a big interest in that. So we went to a couple of communities together where that was a problem, and we made the BRAC case.

Do you have any idea about what it was about BRAC that made him consider this a special Presidential issue? Did he have experience in Arkansas with base closures, or was it looking at the electoral map and realizing that California was important, or was it—

I don’t know, but he clearly saw it as an important political issue and therefore put a lot of attention to it. When we went to Oakland, for example, which is an obvious—where we had three or four candidates, some that had been closed and other candidates for closure—he had a big concern about the base in San Antonio, which employed a lot of minority people. It wasn’t just a community issue in that case, it was the whole question of the Hispanic community. So all these things had clear political manifestations, even to me. He saw them very clearly from that respect. I was trying to not only implement them from the Defense Department’s point of view, but I was working hard to develop a program that would minimize the impact on the community. That was something that he attached himself to and was very supportive of.

One thing I was wondering about earlier when we were talking about your becoming Deputy Secretary, and then more recently talking about your becoming Secretary and the kinds of issues that you emphasized during this first year—basically trying to get several things done that were high on your agenda—what kind of worldview, or perspective, did you bring to your position, first as deputy and then as Secretary? What matters in the world? What doesn’t? What’s important? What’s not? For instance, how influential was the work on cooperative security that you did with Ash [Ashton] Carter and John Steinbruner?

Well, as I indicated, I viewed as my top priority the loose nukes problem. And a closely related issue to that was doing what we could to facilitate Russia becoming an active and constructive nation among the world nations rather than being an outlier or being a basket case, being a failed nation. So this was related to my concern for dealing with the loose nukes problems in Russia. But there were also reasons beyond the loose nukes problem to want to see Russia have a soft landing after the breakup of the Soviet Union. 

The cooperative security work that we’d done earlier, in the interim period between my two appointments as Under Secretary, and then deputy, and then Secretary, I was doing national security work here from Stanford, working with Ash Carter at Harvard and John Steinbruner at Brookings. It was all focused on cooperative security. It was focused on the things you could do to make a successful transition from the Cold War to the new era, whatever it was going to be, and most importantly related to that, to deal with the loose nukes problem that was attendant to the ending of the Cold War. So I had spent a lot of time and energies, before I went into the government, focused on how we should deal with the post-Cold War problems in the former Soviet Union. 

Besides the loose nukes problem, I had spent a lot of time working with Russia and several other Eastern European countries on what to do with their defense industries. One, for example, in St. Petersburg—then Leningrad—60 percent of the industry in that region was defense. So 60 percent of the workers in that area were working on defense projects, which as of 1992, 1993, there were basically no contracts for. So it was a huge social and political problem. It was going to cause great turmoil, and it could lead very well—we refer to it as the Weimar Russia, Russia going the way of the Weimar Republic. 

So one of my worldviews, to answer your question specifically, was that we should do everything we could to keep Russia from going that way. We did not want Russia to become a failing state. That was related to, but also had a standing of its own, the loose nukes problem. So as a scholar working in this field, those were two of my very big issues. I carried those views with me when I went into the Defense Department. I would say that, in the interim, between the time I was Under Secretary and worked on defense technology, and when I became deputy and Secretary where I had a broader policy responsibility, the time I’d spent at Stanford in between, that time had been spent in the field of national security working on policy issues, not on technology issues. By the last four or five years of that period, I focused mainly on the problems of a failed state in Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union.

Incidentally I articulate those fairly clearly in my opening statements, both in my confirmation hearing at some length, and more succinctly when I was sworn in as Secretary and laid out, Here’s what I plan to do as Secretary. I laid out that worldview. Here are the things I want to accomplish: One, two, three, four, five. They all stemmed from that worldview that I brought into the job. So I did not come into the job with a blank slate on this issue. I had a very clear agenda of things I wanted to do. And that agenda clearly influenced, as you mentioned, some of the work you mentioned, including the work I’d done with Ash and John Steinbruner on cooperative security, but not limited to that—a lot of work in this defense conversion area, for example, which is not tied to that but I was doing independently. 

Incidentally, that first meeting at St. Petersburg where we were dealing with the Russians, the intended host of that meeting was Mayor [Anatoly] Sobchak, who was the mayor of St. Petersburg—Leningrad at the time. He was called at the last minute to Moscow for a meeting. His deputy was asked to take over the meeting, and that was where I first met Vladimir Putin. Putin was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg at the time. He was then given the job of working with us on this field of defense conversion. He turned out to be, by the way, much more able in this field than Sobchak had been. In the beginning I never imagined he was going to be the President of Russia, but I could see from the beginning that he was a much more able administrator than most of the other Russians with whom I had worked. 

In a Washington Quarterly piece that was published in 1992, I think it was, you called for staking out a middle ground between isolationism and what you termed indiscriminate internationalism. That latter term is something that some analysts not all that friendly to Clinton and the administration have used to characterize the Clinton administration. What did that middle ground look like to you coming in? I’m asking this because you emerged, relatively quickly I think, as a major foreign policy, not just defense, but foreign policy spokesman for the administration. You clearly were bringing something with you here. 

Well, I believed then and believe now that none of the problems which are really security problems, which are really important to this country, can be solved independently. They have to be solved with the cooperation of other major nations, and beyond that they require the support of major international institutions to solve them. So I’m an internationalist in the sense of believing we have to compromise some of our views in order to get that international support, and we have to compromise some of our independence in order to work with the international institutions. 

Having said that, when I looked at a problem like Bosnia and saw the international institutions failing, I thought it was important for the United States to take a leadership role, not moving unilaterally toward a solution in Bosnia, but leading the international community in what we thought the right direction was. It took us a year or two to accomplish that in Bosnia, but we finally were able to. I’m very satisfied with the solution which we finally came up with in Bosnia. I’m very dissatisfied with how long it took us to get there and how many people were killed in the meantime while we were getting that position. That required internationalism, but it also required the United States to take a very strong leadership position. So I don’t know whether I would call that intermediate between those two positions, but it starts off from the base that you have to have an international posture to succeed. 

But then you say, how do you make that effective? You don’t make it effective just by handing a problem to the UN, as Bosnia was handed over to the UN, who did not have—and it was self-evident they did not have—an adequate military force to enforce the peace in Bosnia. The ultimate solution in Bosnia required a NATO force. The difference between a UN force and a NATO force is the UN force is a pickup team—a battalion here, a battalion there—then they all come together, and hopefully they’ll be able to work together. It doesn’t work that way very well. NATO has rehearsed and practiced and trained for decades learning how to bring these military forces together. So when we went in with NATO, we went in with a professional, competent force. 

But it was still a distinctly multilateral force.

It was absolutely a multilateral force. Somewhat less than half of the forces were Americans. Even in the American force, we had a brigade that was a Russian brigade. We had a Scandinavian battalion. And the NATO force was divided into an American division, a British division, and a French division. So it was multinational in that sense. But even within the American division, we had a multinational effort.

I think one of my major achievements as Secretary of Defense was carrying out President Clinton’s orders to get Russia involved in that Bosnian operation. It was hugely difficult to do that. The Russians wanted to be a part of the Bosnia operation, but they would not put their forces under NATO command. Our view was that it was going to be a NATO operation, and we did not want independent commands in Bosnia. So it took me four meetings with the Russian Minister of Defense, at four different places in the world, in a period of about four months, to try to resolve that issue. Given that President Clinton and President Yeltsin said they wanted to resolve it, it still took that many meetings and that many months to get a solution which would be satisfactory both to the Russian military and the American military. 

Ironically, it ended up that the solution of that problem—it took me a little while to stumble on it—was to have the Russian brigade report not to NATO but to report to an American general. They were willing to have an American division and an American general, but not willing to have them be part of the NATO command. NATO was a four-letter word in Russia, but America was not. We ended up with the Russian Brigadier General working for Major General Bill Nash, commanding the first armored division, and it was a happy arrangement. It worked very well. So it was very much multinational, very much international. But it was done within a NATO framework, and it was done with a lot of American leadership, both in the making of the peace agreement, where Dick Holbrooke and Chris Hill led the charge in Dayton, and in implementing it, which we led in NATO. 

You see that picture up there? That’s Christopher and Perry and Shalikashvili. That meeting we called the turning point. That was a meeting in London about seven months before we moved to Bosnia where, again with American leadership, we got the Europeans to agree that we were going to put a NATO force into Bosnia. That was absolutely the turning point, which was facilitated by an outrageous action taken by the Bosnian Serbs in the massacre at Srebrenica. That happened right after the Srebrenica massacre. We gathered together in outrage at that meeting, but we were able to transform that outrage into a very effective ongoing action.

I promise this will be the last time I quote something that you wrote, or refer to something you wrote, but this was actually while you were Secretary of Defense. In your well-known piece on [Managing Danger:] Prevent, Deter, Defeat, which appeared in ’96, you wrote that we were living in an age of revolution, and you argued that there has to be a revolution in how we think about security. In what ways do you feel you were able to bring about that revolution during your time in office in a lasting or enduring manner?

I think the word revolution is probably not an overstatement. Often it is a term that’s used in hyperbolic ways, but I think it is not an overstatement. We had come out of a world in which our view of national security was us against them, the West against the East. Everything was subordinated to that competition, and the stakes could not have been higher as both sides built up these enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons to fire at each other.

When [Mikhail] Gorbachev came into office, that started to change. Of course, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that changed absolutely and totally. But even before then, I think the Reagan and Gorbachev Reykjavik meeting was the clearest signal, to me at least, that major changes were underway here. They would have happened even without the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But in any event, the dissolution of the Soviet Union added the additional problem of trying to deal with a failed state, which we talked about earlier. 

So we needed a defense policy strategy to deal with an entirely different situation. It was not just a matter of doing it on a blank slate; we had to do it with a legacy of the policy and the weapons that had been developed for this earlier program, which in many ways was an inhibition to doing it properly. We had 30,000 or so nuclear weapons, which were essential—at least some number of them were essential—to executing the Cold War strategy. Now they were an absolute liability. 

As I said, maybe a third of my energy as Secretary of Defense was trying to get those under control in some way and eliminating them. During the time I was Secretary, we dismantled, in the U.S. and former Soviet Union, probably 10,000 nuclear weapons. It was as difficult and painful—and not as expensive, but still quite expensive—to eliminate them as it was to build them. But the danger of having them out there, especially if they’re not under firm control, was evident to all of us. So it was a very different set of problems, and the solution of those problems was greatly inhibited by the legacy we had with us, of the strategies and programs carried over from the Cold War. It required a new way of thinking about security. I don’t think we fully made that leap during the time that I was Secretary, but we were trying all the time. We recognized from the beginning that this was very different world. 

Now, with the advent of 9/11, we now have President Bush claiming a whole new revolution in thinking is good, focus on a new problem. Whether or not that is a correct way of thinking of things, it is certainly correct to say that there are new problems that require new thinking. Remember [Albert] Einstein’s famous statement about the nuclear bomb? Everything has changed except the way we think. That was true during the Cold War. It was true with a different twist in the period after the Cold War, where now the nuclear weapons that had dominated our thinking during the Cold War had became a liability, and we had to find a way of dealing with them. We had no way of knowing at that time what the major problems were going to be. Were they going to be regional wars? Were they going to be humanitarian operations? Were they going to be international peacekeeping? 

If you read the Bottom-Up Review, which we came out with in 1993, it was an imperfect statement that defined the security problems as being oriented around two regional conflicts. That was not really a very good description then; it is a totally inadequate description today. It didn’t focus adequately on the questions of how you deal with problems. I mean, Desert Storm was considered a regional conflict, but the war in Iraq today is not a regional conflict. Somalia was not a regional conflict. A whole set of new issues was bubbling up, most of them associated with Islamic extremism or with nuclear proliferation, which were not tied to regional wars. So the regional war paradigm, which was spelled out in the Bottom-Up Review, was a very incomplete articulation of what our security needs are. So the revolution I was talking about in that statement was underway but not yet realized. Certainly the Bottom-Up Review started in that direction, but in no way fully manifested what needed to be done or how we needed to change our thinking.

The Bottom-Up Review is something that we can talk about. Obviously that was done during your first year, when you were deputy. You brought up the MRC [Major Regional Conflict] construct. My sense is that it was something that was very much inherited from the base force that the Bush administration had put together, because there too the focus was on regional contingency.

Yes, absolutely.

As much as anything, it was a way to help structure and size U.S. forces. Some folks actually viewed it as a force-protection device to justify the kind of force structure that we had in place even at a small, lower level. Do you share that? Was the two-MRC requirement more than a force-structuring device for you, or force-sizing device?

No, I did not regard it as a force-protection device. But it is true that it largely determined the size of the force that we had and the size of the budget. But it was quite incomplete.

But to go back to the Cold War, during the Cold War, the issue, of course, was nuclear deterrence and the superpower competition. The forces which we structured—all of our predecessors as Secretary of Defense had developed structures to deal with that problem, primary. Every other problem they considered, like regional conflicts, were considered lesser included cases. They figured if they had a defense structure capable of dealing with the Cold War-superpower confrontation, that would be sufficient to deal with all other problems. Now, that argument had its flaws in it, but at least that was the argument that was used in those days. 

Now, moving forward to the two major regional conflicts, as defined both by the first Bush administration and by the Bottom-Up Review, we now de-emphasized the nuclear force. The Bottom-Up Review made a major move toward de-emphasizing it. In fact, that has been manifested since then by the successive administrations—certainly by the two Clinton terms and by the first term of the Bush administration. There’s some question about the second term. 

We considered then, first of all, a major de-emphasis on nuclear forces, and second, that it provided the forces for the two major regional conflicts, and that the other things—the insurgency operations, the peacekeeping operations—were lesser included cases. That is, we dismissed them in a sense by saying, Yes, they may be important, but the forces we have should cover them. That was, I think you can appreciate, a bit of intellectual laziness. That is, it’s not that simple, even as it wasn’t that simple in the Cold War to talk about the lesser included cases. But that’s the way we thought about it and treated it, not because we were fully satisfied with that answer, but because we had to get on to doing other things. We had to get that Bottom-Up Review done. That answered the mail. When people had questions about lesser included cases, that was the answer to the question. It was a way of thinking about it anyway. 

At the time we were saying that, I think most of us realized that that was an inadequate answer to the problem and that more work had to be done on that point. So the Bottom-Up Review was an imperfect document in that it was successful in putting a major de-emphasis on the nuclear affair, but it was not successful in seriously considering the other things, the peace-enforcement operation, that we were doing. Most of what we did in the Clinton administration was other things. We did no regional conflicts.

The term that was used was SSC, small-scale contingency, or smaller scale contingency. 

So there was a lot of thinking and a lot of talk and some writing in the Defense Department after the Bottom-Up Review about how you really should be thinking about these other cases and how they should influence the way you put your budget together. But that thinking is not articulated in the Bottom-Up Review. So in my judgment, I’ve always regarded it as an incomplete document. Beyond that, it had one other failing: we did not have the forces for two major regional conflicts. I articulated that at the time, and I was told to sit down and shut up, basically.

Told by whom?

By the Secretary, politely. He was told, I think, by the White House, politely. In any event the point at the time was that we had sufficient forces for one regional conflict, and if a second one developed, we didn’t, but we could send enough forces to that area to hold in that area.

Win-win, win-hold-win, which could be interpreted as win-lose-win.

I said, This is a win-hold-win strategy, which I called one-and-a-half regional conflict. Nobody wanted to hear that. So we never used it until we ended up still talking about two major regional conflicts. I think it was a political solution, not a substantive solution. It probably reflected the fact that the previous Bush had seemed to think we could do two major regional conflicts, and we would be wimps if were not able to do that as well. But the fact was, we did not have enough forces to do that, and we had no plans for getting the forces to do that. So I thought it was a dishonest description of what we had. I spoke that out clearly and forcefully until I was told to cease and desist on that. 

So you basically agree with the criticism that was made at the time, not just when the Bottom-Up Review was completed but in subsequent years, that we had a gap between our across-strategy forces and resources.

Yes, I believed that and said it. To summarize the two failings of the Bottom-Up Review: One was it really wasn’t a two-MRC, and today we don’t have two-MRC, capability. It was saying it was something that it wasn’t. That was one failing with it. And second, the failing was that it did not take seriously enough the other conflicts, which we all understood at the time were going to be important but which we just didn’t take the time to address in the Bottom-Up Review.

Was there any White House involvement in the deliberation process?

In the Bottom-Up Review?

Yes.

Not that I could discern. There was an approval process. Once we had the Bottom-Up Review done, we had a meeting with basically the whole national security establishment of the government, and then, finally, government signoff by the President. 

Was there any meaningful disagreement in the National Security Council ever?

No, I don’t remember any. I mean, there was lots of spirited discussion, but I don’t remember any changes being made to the Bottom-Up Review as a result of that process. Basically, they accepted what we presented.

I don’t mean to be downplaying the Bottom-Up Review. I think it was a very worthwhile process. It helped organize our thinking in ways that I think were very useful. It helped organize the debate and discussion that followed. It referred back to the Bottom-Up Review. Even if it was deficient, at least it was a starting point in the discussion.

And it was arguably much more systematic and explicit about some of the assumptions that were being made. The linkage, from the outside at least, looks like there was a distinct process by which we went from Les Aspin’s set of white papers when he was chairman of the HASC [House Armed Services Committee] to the Bottom-Up Review.

I think that’s exactly right. So while I am critical in two respects of the Bottom-Up Review, I am very respectful of the process that was put together. I think it was an excellent process. I think it served us well doing it together, and it served us well in defending what we were doing later on. Even if it was wrong, at least it was the base point for discussion.

At the same time that the Bottom-Up Review was being conducted in ’93, were you also deeply involved in the budget work for the department for that first year?

No, but I got deeply involved in it for the second year. You know how the budget cycle goes. You’re really doing that toward the end of the first year. By the end of the first year, it had begun to dawn on me that I might have a more important role to play in the budget for next year, so I started to take it more seriously and was intensely involved during the month of January for what came to be our presentation to the Congress and to the media in early February.

Was there anything substantial in that second-year budget? Let me back up and tell you why I’m interested in the first-year budget. That was the point at which a lot of the external constraints on force structures and so forth are becoming known, right?

Yes.

One of the President’s campaign goals was to get the budget more closely into balance. They find out during the transitional period that the deficit is in worse shape than it was before.

Yes.

So a great deal of energy is invested in ’93 in trying to find additional cuts across the board.

I would emphasize, though, that the first real budget that we put forward was the one we put forward in February ’94, by which time I was Secretary. There was a lot of bottom-up work that went into the preparation of that budget. The budget, what you’re calling the first budget, though, was really put together by Cheney. We were incrementing on that. Do more of this; do less of that. But it was not a bottom-up budget.

Exactly.

It was making incremental changes in the budget, and thereby change.

But the incremental changes were almost universally in the form of cuts. 

No. In the case of the Nunn-Lugar program, for example, it was adding a half-a-billion dollars in. Now, it wasn’t added to the top line. We had to do it at the expense of other things. But other than that, it was. Yes, you’re right. 

I was trying to get a sense of how acute the awareness was of the budgetary constraints for what you were—

It was acute. We were clear from the beginning. And I think the Bottom-Up Review articulated pretty clearly that, while the force—what Cheney had called the force; I forget what they called their program—the one that led to the 25 percent cut in the force and the budget, that another 10 percent needed to be done on top of that. We were aware of that from the first. The budget they left us for ’93 didn’t really reflect that. It was a little bit of gamesmanship in that last project. They left us with a few problems that, had they been staying on, they would have had to fix themselves. 

But the first serious budget was the one we put together in ’94. That was done bottom up. Essentially we did it from ground up, but it related to the Bottom-Up Review too. We tied everything we did to the Bottom-Up Review. That one we presented very seriously to the Congress and to the media as, This is a thought-out budget, and it’s leading us in this direction, and it’s going to lead to another 10 percent cut in the force structure and in the overall defense budget. That’s where we’re going to go, and we should plateau at that point. That had all been thought through by that time. 

Were there spending programs there that might be considered your signature programs, or the administration’s signature programs, places where you were reallocating limited resources in ways that are noticeable, or was it pretty much just managing the pain across all the—

There was a lot of pain management, but we did, as I mentioned, bring in a half-billion dollars for the Nunn-Lugar. We kept alive the ballistic missile defense program, but we shifted from national missile defense to theater defense. All during the time I was a Secretary, the emphasis was on theater, not on—and we really put them down at very low levels—the national missile defense.

Are the base closures included in any of this?

The base closure was an explicit budget consideration because, in the early years, they were costs, not savings. So when we put BRAC together, we had to allocate the funds for the expenses of implementing the first few years of the shutdowns. Not that first year, but the second year we had a major increase in funds for the military, what we called quality-of-life initiatives. This was a very big thing. As I remember them now, it was $15 billion, which in those days was a lot of money in the defense budget.

It still is.

It took me a year of being Secretary to understand what needed to be done and how to do it. But that was a major initiative, which the President, by the way, not only fully supported but held a press conference in the Rose Garden to try to bring about.

So those were issues then that were oriented around trying to deal with the worldview we had of failed states and loose nukes problems, believing that the national missile defense was not needed for our security, and aside from the technical problems of trying to achieve it, believing that the quality of our military force was of primary importance. We do that by focusing on quality-of-life initiatives and by believing that there was no great hurry to building up another generation of hardware. We were, so far, the dominant military force in the world. We could take a bit of a respite in spending money on building new hardware.

If you look at the budget in those years, it did not do much in the area of buying new weapons systems, which has been criticized, that point of view, but I can tell you it was a very conscious decision. Not that it could be put off forever, but there was no hurry in doing those things for several reasons: First of all, we had no peer competitor, and there was none in sight at that stage. Second, because we were cutting down the forces, we had lots of leftover hardware. So we could retire the older stuff and keep the newer stuff, and that helped deal with the aging problem for some number of years. Finally, these new systems were very expensive, and we were trying to keep the budget constrained. 

It was that latter point, which I said was criticized by [Donald] Rumsfeld and Bush, accurately pointing out that we were taking a vacation in procurement. It was accurate, but it was done, I will tell you, quite consciously. It was done believing that it was the right thing to do, not just a way of saving money. 

I’ve got a couple of follow-ups there. One was on the submarine that you decided not to take a holiday on that you received criticism about. Can you tell us about the decisions on that?

That goes back to defense industrial-base issues that you were concerned about. 

There are two different issues on the Seawolf: One of them was the defense industrial issue, which is, if you’re going to be building any nuclear submarines, you maintain the industrial base in more than one builder or you're going to find yourself depending on one. That was a raging issue at the time which had both objective and subjective issues involved with it. 

The second was, do we need a new generation of nuclear attack submarines at all? I spent most of my energies trying to deal with that second issue—and being very skeptical in the second issue—before we finally decided to go ahead with the Seawolf. The ultimate argument was that there was no hurry about getting a new generation of attack submarines, but sooner or later we were going to need one, simply because submarines wear out. If you need a fleet of attack submarines at all, you're not going to get them by life-sustaining measures on the existing class, the Los Angeles class of submarines. You're going to need a new class. 

So the conclusion we finally came to on that issue was that yes, ultimately we would need a new class of submarines. There was no hurry about getting there, but we should start the R and D [research and development] process of defining it and starting to build the submarine now. And we could delay for a long time the procurement process, which clearly is where the really big money came. That, as I remember it, is the overarching argument that led us forward on the Seawolf.

Did you get much pushback from the White House on that? That’s an expensive piece of equipment.

Well, not really, because the program we laid out didn’t have that big expense. There was a big expense ten years hence not affecting their budgets. I mean, there was an implied expense, but there was not a big expense in the budget we were actually putting forward. They also had to contend with the political heat they were taking about shutting down the bases. So I would say, if anything, the pressure from the White House, as I precisely remember, was probably in the latter.

How important was it to you to maintain two firms capable of building nuclear submarines—Electric Boat and Newport News—as opposed to just one? We’re paying a lot to maintain two capabilities.

Sure. I listened extensively, even ad nauseum, to arguments on both sides of that issue, and I was never really persuaded by either one of them. I thought we could have gone either way. I was perfectly prepared to go to one base. The political arguments for keeping two bases open eventually ruled, not the industrial-engineering arguments, I would say. 

One of the most painful things the Secretary of Defense has to deal with are the constituent pressures to keep bases open. I got exposed to that big-time with the BRAC considerations. But it is even more intense when it came to the companies that build the equipment—the Pascagoula [Mississippi] shipyard. The shipyards seem to be the biggest problems of all. They seemed to develop constituencies and political support, which are very hard to contend with. So the problem was trying to craft together a defense program that didn’t invite an explosion in that area but still was moderately efficient and made good use of the taxpayers’ money. It was very difficult to do that in the area of the nuclear submarines where there was continual pressure to keep the two bases open.

It was also difficult in the shipyard down in Pascagoula and the Bath shipyard up in Maine where we were building many ships. The DDEs [Escort Destroyer] were the primary, the guided-missile destroyer was the big issue there. There was no question that we were all agreed that we needed guided-missile destroyers in the fleet. But, as in the question of the nuclear submarines, how many shipyards do we need to build the quantity that we expect to be able to build? The answer was that one would do it just fine, thank you. 

But the countervailing argument was that maybe five years from now or ten years from now, you’ll need to build more, and once you disestablish the base, it will never be able to get back up again. So isn’t it better, went the argument, to keep two shipyards running at less than optimum efficiency? The price you're paying for that is basically the price you’re keeping to maintain the industrial base so that if you need to expand some day, you can do it. But there was no question we could have built more efficiently the ships and submarines we needed with fewer facilities. 

But you indicated you weren’t really convinced by that argument about the need to maintain the defense industrial base.

That’s because I wasn’t convinced that we were ever going to need to expand, to go that way. It was a worldview of what you think your future security threat is. I did not see our future security threat as being a World War III, where we needed to build huge forces together—

Whether it be a peer or near-peer competitor—

Yes, I saw it instead as being either regional conflicts or insurgency operations where the quantities were not crucial but the quality was very important, and where it was going to be important to keep the expenses down on what you’re doing so you could do the things you needed to do. So I had a different view on what needed to be done. On that basis I would have been willing to have foregone our ability to mobilize quickly. I came to that decision after having worked in my first year in office as Deputy Secretary, when I worked on the BRAC. 

Of course, that was the issue in BRAC too. The argument against closing down the bases was, what if you needed to mobilize the bases? You’ll never get them back. The bases are gone. We’ll never get Fort Ord back. It was a great infantry base at one time. Basically, by my personal intervention, it was turned over to the University of California, and they have a campus down there. We’ll never get back that base. 

But my view then and my view now is that every security contingency I could think of that had a reasonable chance of facing the United States is not going to require building a five-million- or ten-million-man army again. We’re not going to need the kind of base structure we had during World War II. So it’s a perfectly reasonable approach to close the bases down. And it’s a very important component of the so-called peace dividend, which President Clinton was committed to get. I fully shared his view on that, and I wanted to get it as well. 

We did indeed get the peace dividend by the time I left office. It was about $100 billion a year relative to the Cold War. In other words, correcting for inflation, we were spending $100 billion a year less in 1997 for defense than we had spent during the peak of the Cold War. Ironically we’re now spending $100 billion more than we spent during the peak of the Cold War, but that’s another issue. But we did get the peace dividend at that time. We got it at some expense. One expense was that we lost, and were losing, the capability to mobilize in a contingency where we need to build up forces. 

As I said, I had that view about the shipyards, as well as about the bases we were closing down. But we were not able to prevail on the shipyards. So that was a very important factor then in this consideration. We have to be able to bring up forces—in order to get the efficiency of forces today, we have to be prepared to give up the ability to mobilize to the large armed forces at some time in the future. You had to believe that your security contingency you were going to face was not going to include those World War III-type activities.

One other thing that you mentioned in relation to these budgets was strategic defense. I’d like to get you to elaborate on that a little bit further. This is clearly one of those cases where the Clinton administration’s position was different from what they had inherited from the Republican predecessors. You're somebody who, by virtue of your professional expertise, probably has a better understanding of this than anybody we’ll ever talk with. So I’d like to get your sense about what it was you were inheriting and what you decided to do on strategic defense.

I have both a policy view and a technical view, national missile defense. 

Are the two different?

In my case they lead to the same conclusion. The policy view is that that’s not a threat that we face today or are likely to face in the future. If that threat evolves in the future, it’s a threat which can be deterred just as it was in the Cold War. 

The technical view is that even if we wanted to build a defense against it, we don’t know how to do it. We didn’t know how to do it at the time I was Secretary; we still don’t know how to do it. By yet, I mean a reasonably leakproof defense against a nuclear missile attack. That’s a different question altogether than saying, Do we need to provide defense against ballistic missile attacks on our troops in the field, in the theater? which would presumably be nonnuclear. There I supported, and would continue to support, robust, tactical missile defense. The technical problem is easier, and the problem you’re trying to solve is easier.

Explain why the technical problem is easier. To a novice it’s not clear why that would be the case.

Because if somebody fires 20 tactical missiles at you with thousand-pound warheads on them and you can stop 15 of them, you have probably paid for the system. If somebody fires 20 nuclear missiles at you and you stop 15 of them, it’s not worth the defense. One nuclear missile is enough to—

Okay.

So the level of effectiveness that is needed to make a defense against nuclear missiles useful, we’re now talking about 95–99 percent—very high percentage accuracy—which, technically, we have never been able to come close to achieving. It’s not that we haven’t built air-defense systems before. We’ve been building them since World War II, and we have a long history of knowing how effective we can be, and the numbers range like 5–10 percent, not like 95–99 percent. 

During World War II, a really good air-defense system was one that could shoot down 5 percent of the incoming airplanes. Well, in World War II those airplanes would make their raids, they’d lose 5 percent, they’d go back, and then the next day they’d come back and make another raid. If you shot down 5 percent of the incoming raids, after 20–25 missions, that attacking force was done. And 5 percent was considered unacceptable levels of attrition when you had the problem of delivering thousands and thousands of loads of bombs. But the attack from nuclear weapons is entirely different. A few missiles, one of which or two of which land, is all that is needed, and you don’t have repeat operations. 

The other technical problem is that every reactive defense system—that is, a system which reacts to something the opposing forces do—there’s a learning process on how you deal with that. You’re not bringing in inanimate objects; you’re dealing with an intelligent adversary who is figuring out how to defeat you. You learn how to do that in the first half-a-dozen, or dozen, operations. And you get better and better at your defense operations. That was our history in World War II, our history in the Vietnam War, and so on. 

In nuclear weapons it’s not waves of attack; it’s one attack. So you don’t have the chance to learn what you’re doing. You have to be prepared to succeed the first time, the first operation. That’s virtually a hopeless undertaking against an intelligent adversary. So the learning convergence process never happens in nuclear warfare, whereas it does happen in conventional. 

Did you get much in the way of budget savings from not following the Republicans’ lead?

It seemed like a lot to me, a couple of billion dollars a year. A couple of billion here, and a couple of billion there—

Pretty soon you’ve got real money.

In terms of the money we’re spending today, of $400- or $500-billion budgets, it seems like a small amount, but against the budgets we were working then, that was a big item. We could divert that into things we would much rather do. One of the things we wanted to do was decrease the overall spending. That was one of the increments. It was very useful in that.

Your policy and technological take on ballistic missile defense and the difficulties involved obviously, or seemingly at least, won the day within the administration.

Well, I was telling them what they wanted to hear. I gave them the conclusion they wanted anyway. I had a different reason. 

So it was a pretty easy sell in the Clinton administration. Clearly the Bush administration before you hadn’t bought it, and there were plenty of folks on the Hill who didn’t buy it, especially after the ’94 midterm elections. There was increasing pressure on the Hill.

Right.

Probably more in the second half of the Clinton administration—

The second half is right.

—after you were gone. But how did you deal with folks, Republicans especially, on the Hill who continued to push for not just theater—

Because they liked that.

It wasn’t that they didn’t want to do theater; they wanted national as well as theater. Of course, now we just call it missile defense. We don’t distinguish between the two.

With difficulty. In the first two years, before the Republicans really started to control the Congress, I would get beat up on the issue, but we prevailed. In the second term now, when the Republicans particularly had firm control of the House of Representatives, it was tough. We won because it’s very hard for the Congress to put money into a program. It’s easier for them to stop a problem, but it’s harder for them to build up a program. They can do that with an earmarked program and special things, but actually increasing the expenditure on national missile defense when we’re not proposing it and we don’t have a program to do it, it is very hard for them to do.

So it became harder to prevail, but we still prevailed all through the first four years. We had the program basically we wanted to do, although that’s not quite right. There was a little more that we wanted to do, but it was easiest to defend and still didn’t spend a lot of money. So we still had some token efforts in national missile defense. We described it as a program that was putting us in readiness to move to a national missile defense program if we ever needed such a program. That gave us a rationale for spending a very little amount of money, but we had to spend some in order to be at readiness level. So we kept the technology going. But the whole time I was there, we were totally successful in refusing to be pressured into starting a program to build a national missile defense system. 

I want to go back to the period of time right after you became Secretary. You said earlier when the offer had come to you, part of the reason that you had been reluctant to take the job was a fear of the national press and concerns over loss of privacy. Yet, in the briefing book, we’ve got a couple of articles that show up toward the end of March and early April, which are fabulously positive articles, discussing the unexpected emergence of an important figure in the Clinton administration’s foreign policy-making network. How did this happen? What were you doing in this interval between the point at which you accepted the job and March or April that caused this glowing assessment?

I suppose it’s a certain amount of a honeymoon aspect to it, for one thing. But I think mostly the fact that the people who were skeptical in the first place didn’t understand I spent a good many of my years working on policy issues. That whole time between when I was Under Secretary for Technology and becoming deputy, I’d been here at Stanford working with people at Harvard and Brookings on basically the security strategy. So I had far more experience and far more background in the field than many of them realized. 

Second point was that I immediately restructured our policy department. Within probably three or four weeks, we had an entirely new policy department. And I had a very direct role in overseeing and developing that policy department. 

I guess the third factor was that one of the problems with the old policy group was that they were not interfacing reasonably with the military. The new policy group, one of the things to do was to get buddy systems, have each Assistant Secretary tied to somebody on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the two of them would work together in developing new policy, just as I was developing a working relationship with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I got the word very clearly to all of the people who worked for me that I expected an effective, close-working, harmonious, military-civilian team in the Pentagon. Not just in general, but in specifics. So Ash Carter had somebody he worked with on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and each of the Assistant Secretaries had their counterpart there, and they had developed a working relationship. And each of them would report to Shali and me together on what they were doing. So within a month or two, we had the military and civilians working effectively—I want to say, as a team—together. 

After I became Secretary, each morning after my intelligence briefing, I’d meet for an hour with the Chairman. Each of us would plan that day based on the intelligence briefing we’d gotten. What were the issues, the problems we were going to be working on that day so we would have a common approach to what needed to be done? We would agree on what needed to be done and then work out a plan of action on how to do it. Now, it could be something very minor, just administrative issues—not did we need to deploy another two divisions to Iraq?—depending on what the input we had on that particular morning was. I think it’s fair to say that I took over the direction of the policy effort myself. I worked with the policy people very closely, but I was very hands-on in trying to manage the policy effort. 

The other thing that surprised the people, they expected me to be spending most of my time on technology when coming on as Secretary. I had a very good Under Secretary for Technology. I just let him run that part of it, and I spent all of my time building on the policy. People who knew me were not surprised about that, but the Washington community didn’t know me, so they were surprised. 

How were your relations with the other members of the foreign policy team at this point? 

With Christopher? He and I were old friends. I’d known him in the Carter administration. I’d known him through the years in between at Stanford. We liked each other. That picture reflects that. I think it says, To Bill Perry, No Secretary of State has ever had a better partner than you have been to me. There’s a little bit of mush in that, but it was sincere, and I had a comparable view toward Christopher. So we worked very closely together.

Not so well with Lake. Didn’t know him, first of all, to begin with. He didn’t know me. I never really was comfortable with his view of what a National Security Advisor should do, as opposed to Sandy [Samuel] Berger, who was a deputy with whom I’d worked when I was a deputy and I had a very comfortable relationship with. So it wasn’t just rejecting a National Security Advisor; I just interfaced very well with Berger. I did not interface nearly as well with Lake.

Why?

Personality. And what the concept of what the job was, I think. 

What was it about his concept of the job that didn’t work for you?

That’s a good question. I don’t have a good answer to it. I can just attest to the fact that neither Christopher nor I really interfaced all that well with Lake. We interfaced well with each other. So we would have a meeting, the two of us, and try to work out the coordination that would affect the National Security Advisor. 

So he wasn’t serving as an honest broker, essentially, in your opinion, to the President. Did you see him more as an advocate of his own policy or—

It’s hard to tell the difference, actually, because you don’t know when he’s speaking for the President or when he’s not. I’m not talking about him personally. I’m talking about anybody in that job.

So for whatever reasons, Christopher and I worked very harmoniously, and there was a more difficult relationship that each of us had with Tony, although Christopher has to speak for himself on that.

What difference did that make in practical terms, having DoD and State work together? That’s a good thing, because we’ve often seen where it hasn’t happened. Did it impede access to the President—putting issues on the agenda for him—the inability to work with Tony Lake?

I think so. Probably one specific is that I felt that more of the issues that we were talking about with Tony, we should be talking about with the President. I think the President was probably happy with not being more involved in these things, but I would rather have seen him be dragged into them, even if he wasn’t seeking to be.

So do you feel you didn’t have the access to the President you thought you should?

For the first year, that’s right.

As Secretary of Defense.

Did you ever talk with the Vice President about this, since he was somebody who had offered to run interference for you?

No, I never discussed the issue as, Here’s a general problem we need to resolve. I dealt with it on specific cases. I might go to the Vice President on a specific problem I wanted to resolve, but I never said to him, Let’s arrange to get more access to the President.

I think Tony was representing what he viewed the President wanted him to do. This is not a criticism of Tony. I think he sensed that the President did not want to get involved in some of these issues, so he would handle them. That isn’t the way Christopher and I believed it should have been done.

Well, foreign policy had not exactly been a good field for President Clinton to deal with in the first—

But when he got involved, even in those early years, he was very good at it. 

I wasn’t commenting on his competence. I was commenting more that the kinds of issues that managed to get to the President were Somalia and Haiti and those things that were—

Sure. But I guess my point about Tony at the time was he sensed the President had not shown an interest, and therefore he was going to shield him from it. But I saw that when the President was involved, he did very well, so I wanted to see him more. That was a basic difference, I guess.

Can you tell us about, as examples, some of the incidents when you would interact with the President and you felt that he was very good when he became involved? What made him good? What were the attributes that led you to that conclusion?

When we actually got down to a decision, which basically had to be a Presidential decision—were we going to send troops into Haiti? When were we going to embark? and so on—by the time we started approaching that decision, he would have read every position paper put to him. And at a National Security Council meeting, he would usually, very often, be the most knowledgeable person in the room about what we were discussing. He always had very astute views on it. So he was a very effective Commander in Chief when it got to that point. He was not much involved in the process of getting to that point, at least in those early years. So my view was, I’d like to see him get involved earlier in the situation because he was very good at it. Moreover, it seemed to me that he enjoyed being involved with it, that he took to that process very well.

You’ll see probably a different picture in the second term, where I think he was much more involved in the second term. I think by then he had sensed that this was something he was good at and liked to do, and so he got involved much more with it. Also, probably, Sandy facilitated that more, prompted it more. 

Did you continue to work with Sandy? You said you had a good relationship with him when you were deputy. Were the conventions of principals working with deputies so strong that he was no longer available to you as a channel? 

Generally that’s true, yes.

I’m trying to remember who the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] was at the time that you were—Deutch was later.

Yes. It was Jim Woolsey. 

Woolsey’s name hasn’t come up before.

Jim was DCI, I think, for two years. I don’t remember the exact time—into the second year anyway. Very unhappy, I would say bitter, departure from the job. But I had known Jim for years before this. I was a good friend of Jim’s. He and I had gone to Aspen Strategy Group for many years together. 

Incidentally, the Aspen Strategy Group was one means by which people in the government would keep current in big issues. It was formed in 1981, right after I got out of being Under Secretary. It was always on a bipartisan basis, and the cochairmen were myself and Brent Scowcroft. Every year that group would meet and talk about the big security issues of the day. So that was a very useful way of keeping in touch with what was going on and keeping abreast of strategic issues. It was also a very useful way of keeping in touch with bipartisan elements of things.

Was Woolsey an odd man out?

Woolsey was in the strategy group. I did not think of him as an odd man out. He was a natural choice to come into the administration. I knew him in the Carter administration. He had been the Under Secretary of the Navy. 

He left the Carter administration in an unhappy situation too, because when he was the Under Secretary, the Secretary was Graham Claytor, and when Charles Duncan was moved over to the Department of Energy to be head of the Department of Energy, Claytor was moved up to be deputy. So that left the Secretary of the Navy job open, with Jim sitting as the Under Secretary. President Carter decided to move an Assistant Secretary up to that job who was Hispanic. So Jim deduced, probably correctly, that this was a political move, passing him over for the job that he should have gotten, and he left in a huff, very unhappy with the Carter administration.

Then he came back in, finally, twelve years later in the Clinton administration, now as the DCI. For reasons that I can’t really put my finger on, that didn’t work out well, and he left under very unhappy circumstances that time.

Did you know it was not working out well before he left?

Yes. He told me.

Can you report what the source of his frustrations was?

No access to the President. In fact, he has spoken publicly, I think, about his unhappiness in leaving. He went over to the White House for his exit interview, and the President got called off to something else. He never had one. He saw that it was not happening, and he finally left.

But that comports with your own—you were just saying yourself that there was some concern about access to the President from your—

Yes. He has also said publicly—you may recall, at the time there was an airplane that flew into the White House—that was him trying to get access to the President. 

You talk about your frustration—that might be overstating it—but your lack of access directly to the President and the difficulties of working through Tony Lake. Did Warren Christopher have better access?

I don’t know. You’d have to ask him that. If he did, I wasn’t aware of it.

This leads to a natural question about your perceptions of the differences with various White House Chiefs of Staff. You’ve got [Thomas] Mack McLarty there for a period when you're Secretary, and then I guess just a few months after you become Secretary—I think I’m right; was it early ’94 when Leon Panetta becomes Chief of Staff, or it may be later; maybe it’s ’95—when Panetta comes in.

It was a major transformation, because Panetta had a real talent, flair for the job. He effected quite a few changes in how the White House worked—in my observation, for the better. Mack, I thought he was a wonderful person. We all loved him, but he didn’t do the things you would expect a Chief of Staff to be doing. I’m sure you can lay some of that on the President, some of it on Mack, but whatever the reasons were, it didn’t work out very well in terms of a well-organized, well-run White House. 

Panetta, dealing with the same, you might say, problems with the President, was able to work out a much better resolution. The President was notorious for not being conscious of time. When you're on the receiving end of his time, it’s a wonderful thing, and when he decides the discussion is so interesting he’s going to extend it for another hour, that’s fine. But to the person who is out there waiting, it doesn’t seem so fine. And it’s not just a person; it’s a whole contingent of people—and, of course, the domino effect. 

One specific incident with the President I remember very well: I had been down to the naval base at Norfolk where he spoke to a group of sailors on the aircraft carrier, a couple of thousand of them. This was back in the time when the Washington buzz was that the President was not liked by the military. So this speech was designed to project himself forward to the military. He got a very warm reception, actually. Then after it was over, they all clustered around him and wanted to talk to him. He decided to do that. I bet he shook hands and chatted briefly with every one of those thousand or two thousand sailors around there. 

The schedulers were just tearing their hair out. I can only imagine what consequences there were to other appointments and commitments he had during that day. After all, it took another hour to do that beyond what was scheduled. But he enjoyed doing it, and he did it very well, and it helped overcome this buzz, namely that the military didn’t like him. They swarmed around him, wanted to talk with him, touch him, get his comments. That was just one of several such experiences where I would take the President to military bases. But it was always very positive. 

The funniest story of that, though, was we took him to an army base. This was, again, early in his tenure. I think it was Fort Bragg. Several times during his speech he’d say something the soldiers really liked. Their way of applause is to say, Hoo-ah! I don’t know if you're familiar with that, but it’s hoo-ah! So there would be these big hoo-ahs! coming up. The media reported that as booing. I’ve never seen a more complete distortion of what actually happened. Now, hoo-ah does sound a little bit like a boo, I guess.

The reporters didn’t know the culture of the Army.

It wasn’t all of them. A few of them had the story right, but that was the report which stuck for that meeting down in Fort Bragg. 

Did you feel like generally you had good press relations or not?

I personally? You mean as the Secretary?

Yes.

Yes. 

Was it something you made a special effort to work at?

Oh sure. It doesn’t come naturally. What comes naturally for me is answering the question that people ask me as completely, as honestly as I can.

Well, you’re very good at that, obviously. 

That could also get you in trouble.

And it certainly did. Many times it did. The press would love that, of course. But the White House would just go crazy. That happened all too often when I was Secretary. Ultimately, I think the White House came to think, well, maybe in the long run it’s going to work out okay. But on an event-by-event basis it was sometimes disheartening to them. 

Mike McCurry was your press officer?

No, Mike was Christopher’s, a very able person. I had a very able person too in Ken Bacon. Ken was a very competent public-affairs man and a wonderful person too. But he wasn’t able to protect me too well from these tendencies to blurt out the truth. From the White House point of view, that was probably my greatest weakness as the Secretary of Defense. I had a tendency to be too open sometimes with the media—often without fully realizing the consequences, the way the story would be spun, let’s say.

There was one particular instance, with Korea—

More than one. But I’m sure there was. If you have one in mind, I’ll be happy to—

I threw it out there wondering if you would remember which one it was, but—

According to the Times, we were, in June of 1994—I’d only been Secretary for five months by that time—we had a major crisis with Korea. They were in the process of getting ready to build nuclear weapons, and I concluded that was unacceptable for our security. The President seemed to agree with me on that, so I spoke out very forcefully on that issue and said what we were going to do if they went ahead with this. I basically drew the red line, which ordinarily the Secretary of State would have drawn. You do this and you’re going to be in military conflict with the United States. That got the White House very nervous. They didn’t disagree fundamentally with what I was saying. They just would rather I had cleared it through them before I said it and did it. 

Now Sandy, as I said, was the Deputy National Security Advisor. This got Tony very nervous, but Sandy liked it. His view was that I was saying the things that the President should have been saying, whereas Tony was saying, Well, if the President wants to say it, let him say it. Don’t have the Secretary of Defense say it. Sandy’s view, though, was that it’s better for the Secretary of Defense to say it because if the President wants to back down, he can always distance himself from it. So there was a little bit of disagreement there, a little bit of dynamic tension in the White House over that issue. But I would just go ahead and say what I thought needed to be said. I didn’t exactly get told to stop doing that, but I could tell I was making them very nervous. There was a comment later on, I think, in both Tony’s and the President’s comments—

Sandy you had known? Tony Lake—

No, I didn’t know either one of them well. I knew them slightly. 

So you got to know him while you were both deputies?

Yes, I got close to him when I was deputy. 

So ’94 was a very busy year for you. We talked a little bit about Bosnia already. I don’t know whether you want to pick that up and track through any of the particulars.

Ninety-four was a frustrating year in Bosnia because atrocities continued to happen there. The UN forces were incapable of dealing with them, and we couldn’t get the Europeans to do anything about that, and the Republicans mostly—not just Republicans, but mostly Republicans—were pushing for arming the Bosnians. They wanted a cheap way out of the problem. They didn’t want to send our forces. They wanted to lift the embargo. I was intellectually convinced that that would be disastrous. 

They had on their side Margaret Thatcher, who was not on the opposite side, but was still an eloquent spokeswoman. I remember at Aspen, the summer of ’94, we were both on the same platform. She got up and made this stirring speech. She ended up talking about Bosnia and quoting back to World War II where [Franklin D.] Roosevelt had asked what the United States could do to help in the war. [Winston] Churchill said, Send us the arms, and we will finish the job. So Margaret quoted that to great applause, that that is what we should be doing with the Bosnians—send them the arms, and they would finish the job.

Then my turn to speak, I got up. I said, Well, we sent England the arms, and it took another ten million American troops, though, to really finish the job. That will be the problem in Bosnia as well. We’ll send them arms. That won’t finish the job. It will just create more bloodshed. We’ll ultimately have to go in to finish the job as we did in World War II.

What was Clinton’s thinking during this early period?

You might say he felt the pain of the Bosnian people. There was shelling in Sarajevo then. It was a humanitarian disaster, and he felt that very deeply. But he also didn’t see a solution. He agreed with me that lifting the embargo and sending the arms wasn’t going to help and could backfire, and he didn’t see any way of sending American forces. Adding American forces to the UN would just be throwing good money after bad, he thought, and I thought too. So we agonized. We did not have a good solution as long as the Europeans, through the UN, really had the whip hand on what to do in Bosnia.

Was there anyone else on the President’s foreign policy team taking the other side, arguing that the U.S. should be more involved?

Well, everybody wanted actions that were token actions. They were in favor of limited bombing attacks, in which we’d send a few airplanes over and drop a few bombs as a show of force, but not in any way changing the facts on the ground. Yes, they were arguing for that. I was arguing against that. I said, I’m willing to use force but not as a show of force. I want it to be meaningful force. 

Do you recall who was making those arguments?

Almost everybody else. Everybody wanted to do something. I mean, the impulse was to do something. The question was, Could we get the Europeans to agree to pull back the UN forces and let NATO go in? in which case we would go with them; we’d lead the force. We had, certainly, an agreement. We would do that if we could get the Europeans interested in doing that.

So that’s what you meant when you talked about doing something more meaningful, not just a token show of force—NATO going in and the U.S. part of that. 

Yes, replace the UNPROFOR [United Nations Protection Force], the UN force, which was totally ineffective there, with a meaningful military force.

This is before Dayton then.

This is before Dayton. Now, the President’s position, as I remember it then, was that he would support that, but he wanted to get some sort of an agreement from the Bosnians to accept that force. There should be some sort of ground rules under which the NATO force would go in, and if they got the ground rules, maybe the Europeans would go along with it. It was that thinking which led to the Dayton Agreement. But to get to the Dayton Agreement, there was an intermediate step: to get the Bosnian Serbs to agree to come to Dayton required a very substantial bombing attack, and that was what we decided to do at that meeting. 

We were getting nowhere on just the intellectual discussions. What broke the impasse was that the Bosnian Serbs, you might say in poker terminology, overplayed their hand. When they committed this atrocity at Srebrenica, they finally galvanized the Europeans, who had to do something. At the turning point meeting, we decided we were going to take meaningful military action that was going to start off with very substantial NATO bombing attacks on the Bosnian Serbs, and we would keep that up until they agreed to sit down to what became the Dayton meeting to work out terms by which we would send NATO ground forces in there. So that was the meeting where we agreed to do that. Then we looked forward not to so-called pinprick raids, but to really a very substantial raid that was directed at the Bosnian Serbs’ military ground forces. They were quite meaningful, quite effective. 

That led then to the decision of the Serbs, which influenced the Bosnian Serbs, to agree to see if we could get some sort of resolution to the problem. That led to the Dayton Agreement. Warren Christopher led the charge in the Dayton Agreement with the very able assistance of Dick Holbrooke and Chris Hill. That meeting turned out, I think, an historic document, well documented in Holbrooke’s book. Once we had that agreement— 

Did you go to Dayton?

Yes. Once we had that agreement, then it was an issue of mobilizing forces to do that. Then that was my job to get both NATO agreeing to do this, get the U.S. forces mobilized, and most importantly, to get the Russians to agree to participate in a constructive way. I’ve already mentioned to you what a time-consuming effort that was to get that agreement.

How confident were you that the bombing campaign would bring the Serbs to the table?

Pretty confident. We were confident at the beginning that if we were willing to take really substantial action—Serb forces were not that strong. They had their forces massed in a way to perform these artillery—they were easy targets. So all we had to do was get the Europeans to agree to do that. We could have done that a year earlier if we had gotten them to agree to do that. 

So getting the Europeans to agree was harder than taking action against the Serbs?

Yes. Once we got the Europeans to agree, the American position came together very quickly. There was no debate among the national security team in the United States about what to do once we got the European agreement. Then it was simply a matter of mobilizing to do it. 

Was there, conversely, debate within the services themselves about whether this was an advisable things to do?

I don’t recall there being any. Let me put it in a more positive way. Once we had determined to go ahead through NATO, I felt nothing but very strong support from all the military people I worked with—even a little enthusiasm, I think, for going about this.

I guess that gets to my fundamental question, which was, you get the perception—and I guess this probably goes back to Colin Powell’s time and his doctrine—that there was, during this period, some reservation on the part of the services to get actively engaged in some of the issues that they had to get actively engaged in. I guess I’m trying to get your sense as Secretary about the level of reservations or enthusiasm.

Well, Colin’s view, as I remember it in those days, and also reading what he said about it in other contexts, was that he did not like the idea of sending in token shows of force. He said, If you use the U.S. military, you ought to be prepared to use them to accomplish a defined goal, and send in enough forces to do that.

Now, to the extent that’s his point of view, which I think I’ve represented reasonably well, that’s what we did in Bosnia. We didn’t go into Bosnia until we had NATO behind us. We had a UN mandate to do it. And then when we went in, we went in with probably more forces than we needed to do the job. We went into Bosnia with, all told, maybe 60,000 NATO troops, of which a little less than half were American. 

You look at the size of Bosnia and the kind of forces we were dealing with in Bosnia and compare that with Iraq today, that would seem like we were being very conservative. On the other hand, we had the 1^st Armored Division there for a solid year, and they had fewer casualties that year in Bosnia than they had the preceding year in the base operations in Germany. So it was a very effective operation too. It did what we needed to do, and it did it without any real danger to American forces. So I think it turned out to be a very successful operation. 

The whole problem was getting the Europeans to agree to do it, and to get that to happen, the Srebrenica was the triggering event. The bombing followed the triggering event, the Dayton Agreement followed the bombing, and then the NATO force came in right after that. 

Very good. Why don’t we take a break.

We want to go back and ask you one more question about ’93. Were you involved in the ’93 transition on the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

Yes, I was.

Can you tell us your take on that?

How Shali got to be chosen?

First of all, I should say that Shali was chosen by President Clinton, and this is the prerogative the President has. Some Presidents basically defer to the Secretary of Defense. Others lean heavily on deciding themselves. President Clinton wanted to decide for himself, but he wanted recommendations from the Secretary of Defense, but he did not want a single recommendation from the Secretary of Defense. Les, of course, was Secretary of Defense then. 

I worked with Les as he was thinking through, meeting, and talking. I did some of the interviewing of the half a dozen four-stars who were candidates for that job. The two of us decided, without any real dissent, as I can remember—we were of a common mind on it—that the two strongest contenders for the job were General Shali and General [Joseph] Hoar, who was a four-star Marine who had come from central command.

What do you look for in a candidate?

Of course you look for leadership abilities. You look for somebody who respects the concept of civilian control and can work with a civilian. The Secretary of Defense has to make the judgment this is someone I can work with. Both Les and I checked positive on both those boxes for those two generals. 

There was a third point I was particularly interested in, which was something called the [Barry] Goldwater-[William] Nichols Act, which had passed some years earlier. It was intended to bring about, finally, the integration of the Defense Department into a functioning unit, instead of the different services. It was basically trying to make good on Truman’s creation of the Defense Department many decades earlier. The legislation had passed, but not much had happened. 

The first that started happening on that was when Colin became the chairman. He worked hard to really implement Goldwater-Nichols, but it was still unfinished business. In my mind, additional criteria I looked at, of course, somebody I thought believed in it and would work hard to try to implement. I couldn’t be sure of General Hoar’s view on that, but I was sure of Shali’s. I talked to him about that. So I tended to lean a little bit in favor of Shali, but I liked General Hoar a lot too. I would have been quite happy with that too. 

So Les, as I remember now, presented to President Clinton that there are two candidates, either one of whom he would be happy with, General Shali and General Hoar. I was not present at the actual conversation he had with the President. He might have inclined a little toward General Shali—I know I was inclined toward General Shali—but I think he probably was clear to the President that he could live with either of these two alternatives. 

It was about that time that there was a meeting of all the CINCs [Commanders in Chief] in Washington, and President Clinton invited them and Les and myself over to a small dinner in the White House. From his point of view, it was getting to know some of these people. After that meeting he took the opportunity to interview, discuss both General Hoar and General Shali. So then he finally decided on General Shali, which I was pleased with.

Were you at those interviews? Were they one-on-one? Were there other people?

I believe he did, though I can’t say that for positive, and I don’t know whether he might have interviewed other people as well. But I’m pretty confident he did interview those two, and probably one-on-one. He had met with all of them at the CINCs meeting. He had a chance to meet all of them. So he could have branched out and gone to a third choice, but he, as nearly as I can determine, took Les’ recommendation seriously and thought that his job was to choose between the two of them, and he came up with General Shali, which as far as I was concerned was the right choice. As I indicated, both Les and I also believed General Hoar would have been quite an acceptable choice, so it was a no-lose situation at that point.

There was a perception that one of the virtues of General Shali was that he was multilingual, that there was much going on in Eastern and Central Europe at the time and that he would be an asset in that region.

That’s true, but you see there was a tradeoff here, because it’s a question of whether you thought your security problems were going to be in Europe or the Mideast. General Hoar had developed a background in the Mideast, and Shali in Europe. So looking at that and thinking that the problems were as apt to be in the Mideast, which is in the Central Command, it was a toss-up from that point of view. If they were going to be in Europe, Shali, not only because of his experience as the commander of the European forces, but also because of his European background, multilingual, would be a stronger candidate, to be sure. 

What was on President Clinton’s mind when he made this decision, I cannot say. He might have been influenced by the points you made. He might have been influenced by the fact that it would be neat to have someone with that foreign-born background and rising from his hardscrabble days as a refugee in Europe after World War II. That was quite a dramatic story. So it’s hard to say what impressed him. But in any event, from my point of view, he made the right decision. Indeed, one of the main factors I had in favor of General Shali was the belief that he would implement and really carry to fruition the Goldwater-Nichols—and that turned out to be exactly right. In my judgment, by the time his term was over, that job was done.

To what extent is it fair to look at this appointment as a reaction to what Colin Powell had been in that position?

I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s any reason to think of Shali as in any way a contrast to Colin. He had worked for Colin. He had a great admiration for Colin. They liked each other. He supported strongly Colin’s view—what came to be known as the Powell Doctrine—about how you use military force. So I think both of them were quite compatible. You would not say that this was deferring to Colin in any sense, but it certainly was not in contrast. I didn’t think of it, and I don’t think the President thought of it, as being somebody in contrast with Colin.

Were there any differences in their leadership style?

Oh, yes.

Can you give us some thoughts on that?

Shali was much more low-key than Colin. They were both quite articulate, but Colin is a great public speaker. In fact, he now makes his living giving his inspirational public speeches. He had a celebrity status then, even more now. You never would imagine Shali being in that kind of a position. He’s very solid and very articulate, and very clear in his thinking, very logical in his thinking. He was more of a soldier’s soldier, I would say—very well regarded, very well respected, not only by the immediate leadership in the military but by the rank and file as well. He turned out to be a superb choice for the job. 

In terms of the things I had most on my mind—implementing Goldwater-Nichols, he did it superbly; and in terms of being a good military part of the military-civilian team in the Pentagon, he did that superbly. I could not have asked for more.

In terms of implementing Goldwater-Nichols, what specifically are you thinking about when you say that Shali did a good job implementing it?

It’s making a reality of the concept that the job of the services is to equip and train the force, and the job of the CINCs is to conduct military operations. It seems simple, but that’s the basic concept of Goldwater-Nichols. It was a great departure from the way the services in fact operated during the ’60s and the ’70s. That started changing in the late ’80s with Colin—the Chairman’s responsibility, among other things, is to be the principal military advisor, not just to the Secretary of Defense, but to the President. He’s not only enabled to, he has statutory authority to offer advice to the President, which may be independent of the advice that the Secretary of Defense offers to the President—obviously setting up a touchy situation. But it was never a problem at the time I was Secretary. 

What kind of relationship did you see develop between the President and Shali?

I thought it was a warm relationship, one of mutual trust and respect. In fact, we never went to a National Security Council meeting at which Shali and I presented different recommendations. Not because we always had the same points of view every time, but before we went over to the National Security Council meeting, we would sit down and work it out. Either he would persuade me or I would persuade him. He was a great respecter of civilian control of the military, but he also took seriously his responsibilities for being an independent advisor to the President. So we needed to work those things out before we went over to give a recommendation to the President, and did.

That sounds like a contrast between Shali and Powell, because Powell did sometimes speak out publicly, on gays in the military, for instance. 

If I may speculate here, I’d say it was not so much because of Powell’s basic view of the job of chairman, and I think he did not do that when he was chairman under Cheney and Bush. I think he reached his last year and he was a little disenchanted with the Clinton administration, and so the speaking out and taking an independent voice was, I think, an anomaly of Powell’s. If you look at Powell’s whole range of service, he was one who was very loyal. He was typically very loyal to the person for whom he works, almost to a fault in some cases, I would say. 

My own view, not related to this discussion we’re having now, is that he manifested that to a fault as Secretary of State for George W. Bush. But that loyalty was there, and I would regard that last year of his service as an anomaly, not as characteristic.

Is it fair to say that there was some relief within the administration when Powell left?

I think so. He was, by then, clearly an independent voice, an independent actor, not in full agreement. He was willing to take exception. Yes.

Did you continue to consult with Powell informally on things after he left?

Yes, on occasions.

Any times that you recall in particular? 

Oh, a couple of times on Bosnia, certainly on Haiti. You may recall, on Haiti, he was one of the three-person team that went down to negotiate with General [Raoul] Cedras before we finally sent our forces in there. So yes.

I think, for some, he had been contemplated as coming back into the Cabinet, maybe as—

There were rumors.

He statutorily could not have come back as Secretary of Defense even if President Clinton—

Secretary of State for the Clinton second term.

I would have been greatly surprised if the President had either offered to him or he had accepted. I’ve heard that talk, but I never paid any attention to it. 

Fair enough. There were a couple of other people, since we’re dealing with personalities and where they fit. One was John Deutch, who was your deputy for a while.

When I was the Deputy Secretary of Defense, he was the Under Secretary for Acquisition, which is the third-highest position in the Defense Department. It is also a level two, just as the Deputy Secretary of Defense is. So it’s a very key position. It’s a job I had held in the Carter administration, so I was very familiar with the job. When I agreed to become deputy, one of the agreements I had with Les was that I would pick the acquisition team, including the Under Secretary and including the Assistant Secretaries for each of the services. I picked Deutch for the Under Secretary, and he did, in my judgment then and now, a marvelous job as the Under Secretary. I was so impressed with the job he did that when I became the Secretary, when I was first offered the job, I told him that if I took the job, it would be on the condition that I could pick my deputy and that he would be that choice.

I mentioned, dropping back to when I said of that Saturday morning when I went to the Pentagon and told Les and John that I decided not to take the job, John was a little crestfallen. I had known John for maybe 20 years. We’d gone to Defense Science Boards together. He had been, as I mentioned before, the Under Secretary in the Energy Department when I was the Under Secretary of Defense during the Carter administration. We’d worked much more closely together than two Under Secretaries usually do. We were busy trying to incorporate some of the energy conservation schemes that Energy was working on into the Defense Department. I worked very closely with John in those days. So we were close personally, close professionally. I had great respect for him. So he was my first choice, both for the Under Secretary’s job, and then when I became the Secretary, he was my first choice for the deputy’s job—my first and only choice. I was disappointed and he was, I think, reluctant to go on to the job as the Director of the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]. That’s another story, but it is part of this overall story. 

When Jim Woolsey exited stage left as the Director of the CIA, the President asked me if I could recommend somebody to replace him. John and I had long discussions about this, and we concluded it was important for us doing our job to get a really good candidate to replace him. We knew an Air Force general who had just retired, just left the active service, very competent, very capable general—and we proposed him for the job. We both agreed it was good. I went to President Clinton, he agreed that it was a good idea, and they made the offer to this general, who turned out to have a nanny problem—a pretty severe one actually—which we didn’t find out until we were pretty far into the process. So that went away.

That keeps coming up. I think Stephen Breyer missed an earlier appointment on the Supreme Court for a nanny problem.

He had a little more than a nanny problem, but it was that kind of a problem. It had nothing to do with his professional work. It was something more personal. 

So we were a couple of months into the process, thinking about it, recommending it, taking action. He was all set to accept the offer, and then the background investigations came up very quickly. So at that point, we’d been a couple of months without a Director of the CIA because, as I told you, Jim Woolsey left precipitously. Once he left, he left. That was it. So the President was getting a lot of heat for not having a Director of CIA At that point he put the pressure on me and John for John to take the job. In my opinion, John did not want the job.

So that was the President’s idea?

Yes. That’s the way I read it. John wanted my job. He wanted the job as Secretary of Defense. He knew that I was planning to stay only one term. I’d been very unequivocal about that. He was the Deputy Secretary, was very well positioned to take that over. So he preferred to stay as deputy and then move into Secretary. He said—and I was not present at this meeting when the President offered him—that he explained this to the President and the President said, Well, you can take this job, and then you can move over to Secretary of Defense. I talked later with President Clinton, who said he never made that offer. So I don’t know what the facts are there. I know that John resisted going to the CIA because he thought it would take him off the track of being Secretary, but then decided he would go. But he went thinking that it was going to facilitate the job of Secretary rather than detract from it, which in the event, did not happen. 

During the time he was Director of CIA, he and I worked very closely together because of the many areas of interface, which are usually areas of contention between the Secretary and the CIA. Because we had such a close working relationship, they became areas of cooperation instead of areas of contention—probably the only two years in the history of those two jobs where the Director and the Secretary worked closely together on even such bureaucratic issues as budget on joint programs. We had a good relationship while it lasted.

How had you worked with Woolsey?

I liked Woolsey. Worked well with him too, but it was not the unusually close relationship I had with Deutch. Actually, Woolsey had the same idea, and so several times during budget deliberations he proposed, and I agreed with him, that we would both sit at the head of the table and cochair the meeting with both CIA and Defense and resolve all of these issues on the spot. So that had already started really with Woolsey. But Jim wasn’t in the job long enough, through enough budget cycles, for that to really get under way. Deutch picked that up, and we extended it and deepened it when John was the CIA director. 

I don’t recall whether Wes Clark had much of a profile during the time you were there. Can you tell us about your—?

Wes had been on the Joint Staff, a very able officer, which was not just my view; it was the view of everybody who was working with him. I mentioned earlier that I had tried to connect the Assistant Secretaries with their counterparts. He was one of those counterparts, and he worked very effectively with the policy people. So we had a good synergism working there. It gave me an opportunity to observe Wes in action and to get glowing accounts of Wes from the civilians in the Defense Department who were working with him. 

So I developed a very positive and very strong opinion of Wes. He was on the Joint Staff, so Shali also, of course, had an opportunity to work directly with him. In fact, he worked for Shali. So Shali ended up with a very positive view of Wes. He was, at the time, a three-star. Of course, the jump from three-star to four-star is a big jump that not many generals make. There are only a few positions for which the four-star is open. The one most obvious for Wes would have been what’s called a CINC, commander of one of the regional commands. 

The first one that came open, which was, as I recall, the last year of my tenure as Secretary was SOUTHCOM [United States Southern Command]. Barry McCaffrey had been doing that job, and he had been tapped by the President to be the new drug czar. So the SOUTHCOM position was open. It traditionally had been an Army appointment. Nothing in writing says it has to be Army, but traditionally it had been, and it made sense because military commands down in those nations were mostly ground-force military. 

So because of that we looked at the Army for the recommendation for the replacement. We got recommendation from the Army; it came to Shali; Shali and I looked at it. We said, This is a very able man, but not as able as Wes Clark—with the full knowledge that if Wes didn’t get that fourth star, it was probably his last shot the way the system works. So instead of accepting the recommendation and forwarding it on to the President, we said no. We went back to the Army and said, What about Wes Clark? Without going into detail on that, they were not happy with that appointment. You can get many different points of view about why the Army was not enthusiastic about it, but the fact is, they were not. 

David Halberstam has written, I don’t know whether you encountered it or not—

I can’t add to or subtract from Halberstam’s view of it, but I can say without equivocation that the Army was not in favor of Wes until finally Shali and I talked to them and said, We’re going to overrule the Army, and did. 

So the recommendation we sent to the President was not, Here are four alternatives. Take your pick. But the recommendation was, Let’s go for Wes Clark. The President had already been exposed enough to Wes Clark that it was an easy recommendation for him to accept. Although, being very clear, there was no push or pressure from the White House in that direction. It was our view, which we sent over to the President. So Wes was appointed at that time. He got his fourth star only because Shali and I believed he ought to have it and because the President was happy to affirm that decision. But we did not make the Army happy with that appointment. It sometimes happens.

It came back to haunt him later, perhaps?

Perhaps. What came back to haunt him probably was the reason that they were not anxious to make the appointment in the first place. They did not consider him a team player. Whatever the rationale and background behind that, that attitude existed before the issue of the four-star came up, and it lasted through the four-star appointment and on into his later career.

We have several of issue areas we’d like to get through. I thought I would just throw these issues out and see if we could get your account of the high points or the low points, as it were, of what happened—the first one being North Korea. That heats up very quickly after you become Secretary.

You bet it did.

Can you tell us a bit about how that unfolded?

It was unfolding already in late ’93, but it wasn’t on my high radar visibility at that point. It was a State Department problem in dealing with this issue.

What put it on your radar?

Sometime in the spring of ’94—I forget the exact month when North Korea announced they were going to reprocess the spent fuel from the reactor and make plutonium out of it—from that moment on, it was number one on my list of priorities. This is not a diplomatic issue we’re looking at here. This is a major national security issue from that point on.

Did that come completely out of the blue?

No, there had been problems and threats that way right along. It was always known that there was a danger of North Korea being a proliferator. But this really put it in very stark relief. It was a unique, singular action they could take that would put them in the position of having the plutonium to make six or seven nuclear bombs. The hard part of making nuclear bombs is getting the plutonium, not making the bomb. So on that basis, I thought this was a major national security issue. I so told the President.

I told him I thought this ought to be an issue on which we drew the red line, not in any general terms, but very specifically on reprocessing the fuel to make plutonium. That was the point. I explained to him that if they ever got the plutonium, they could move it anywhere, and we would never know where it is and what they had done with it, and we’d have no way of stopping it. But if we could stop them before they made the plutonium, then the leverage was still on our side for doing that. He agreed with me on that. It was a National Security Council discussion. There was no disagreement on that point. 

State is following along.

Yes. At that point, either in response to Congressional questions or media questions, I forget which, I made some very direct statements to that effect, and that’s what we talked about earlier. The White House was a little exercised. It was not really different from what we’d agreed to, but we hadn’t agreed that we were going to be so clear and explicit about saying it. My view then, and my view now, was that if you were clear and unambiguous that you really planned to use military force, then you reduce the probability of ever having to use it. So I thought it was a judicious thing to do. It wasn’t saber rattling. It was just trying to set the stage so the North Koreans would not miscalculate and think that we would do nothing. My judgment was, we would do something if they made plutonium, and therefore we wanted to deter them from doing it by making the maximum possible statement to that effect. So I did say that.

Now, at the same timeframe, maybe a month or so after that, we got an unintended assist in Brent Scowcroft, not in office at the time, who wrote an op-ed piece saying we ought to bomb the nuclear facility of Pyongyang, if necessary, to stop this. He also agreed it was a red line. He said, And moreover, if they don’t back off, we ought to bomb the facility. I never said that publicly. I did have on my desk a contingency plan for doing that, but I never recommended it to the President. 

So that was not part of the discussion in the White House, that option?

The White House was aware of it, but I never presented this as something we ought to consider, or said, I’ve looked at this plan. Here’s what it involves. It was a plan that I asked for, I reviewed. It was on the shelf available to be done, but my judgment was that while it could be successfully done, just as Brent had suggested, that the unintended consequence of that action could be very severe. In my judgment, it was the last action we would consider taking and not one we should be talking about at that time. So I had it on the table, but way in the back of the table and not up for discussion. 

I felt we should be very clear to the North Koreans that we were prepared to take military action, but we should not be ventilating about what kind of action it would be. But Brent Scowcroft did, and his statement, in conjunction with my statements about the red line, probably got the point across to the North Koreans without the U.S. Government needing to say it. In retrospect, I think it was probably a positive development. 

The President then believed, and Christopher also—Christopher was recommending that the next step ought to be sanctions and that we would take it to the United Nations, and if they agreed, fine. If they did not, we had South Korea and Japan that were ready to join us in what would be pretty substantial and very severe sanctions. That became part of the public discussion. I wasn’t discussing that, but somebody was discussing it. So it was known to the North that we were considering sanctions. That was when they made their famous statements that they would consider sanctions an act of war, and if that would happen, they would turn Seoul into a sea of flames—pretty graphic language. These were very dangerous days, and I regarded them as such at the time. I thought we were on the brink of war.

This was the closest during your time?

Absolutely. I then went to the President and said, I agree that the first step should be sanctions, but I do not think we should make those sanctions until we’ve taken some preliminary military precautions, because the North Koreans might precipitate a war on the basis of the sanctions or on the basis of going to the United Nations requesting sanctions. Before we do this, I want to reinforce our forces in South Korea.

We had undergone a very detailed—I spent a couple of days reviewing the war plan, and the war plan said we would defeat the North Koreans under any circumstances, but they had so many soldiers so close to Seoul, we probably couldn’t keep them out of Seoul until there would be hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilian casualties in Seoul before we could push them back up. So I said, If we can get another 20- or 30,000 troops in there, up to the DMZ [Demilitarized Zone], then we could probably stop them from getting into Seoul. So before we announce the sanctions, let’s get these reinforcements.

The President said, Fine. Give me a proposal. So I put together a proposal with three different options, different levels of reinforcements. They all involved substantial reinforcements, but different levels and different ways of doing it. The President called a National Security Council meeting to hear those proposals, and Shali and I were just laying them out when the call came in from Pyongyang, literally, while we were in the Cabinet Room doing the briefing. Probably 15 minutes away from a decision, and the decision would have been yes, I’m quite confident.

Do you know which of the three the President was leaning toward?

No, I don’t. Nothing he said during the meeting gave a clue as to which of the three he was favoring, but that he was favoring one of them was very clear.

Again, just to be clear, the differentiation between the three proposals was in the—

Number of troops. And different types of equipment as well. But they were all pretty robust reinforcements.

But not any more provocative objectively than—

Before this meeting, I had the President’s authority to do the reinforcements that could be done without provocation—that is, the ones we could do basically without calling attention to ourselves—and we had done that. We had sent some Patriot batteries over; we’d sent some more intelligence systems over. So we had maybe a few thousand troops and specialized equipment already sent over there. But any next step beyond that would have been very visible and therefore, by definition, would have been provocative. So that’s why I thought it was very important to get the President’s explicit approval for the troops. 

Now, in that meeting, harkening back to a point I made earlier, we had the whole National Security Council there. It was a very detailed discussion on a very serious issue. There was nobody in that room who was more knowledgeable about the issues in detail and in concept than President Clinton. It was that meeting more than anything that formed my view of him as somebody who, when it came down to an issue that he was going to be responsible for making a big decision on, he was there. So the view that he did not have the national security background and therefore would be weak in that area—the premise was correct, but the conclusion was not correct. I was very impressed with his grasp of the issues and his insight as to what the risks and dangers were and how they could be dealt with.

How good was the intelligence that we were getting out of North Korea, especially with respect to its leadership?

I felt very comfortable with that because of the special circumstances. In general, our intelligence on North Korea was weak. It was weak then, it is today. 

But the issue that we were focusing on, which is the reactor and the plutonium at Yongbyon, there had been IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspectors on site, including American inspectors there around the clock, along with electronic monitoring for years before that. So we knew exactly what they had at Yongbyon, which is where the nuclear facility was. Now what was going on in the rest of the country we had very weak information, but what was going on in this facility, which was the object of our meeting, we had precise information, very precise—not at all like the Iraq situation, not at all like the situation we’re facing today with North Korea on the so-called uranium program. But in the case of the plutonium activity at Yongbyon, we had very precise information. There was no misunderstanding on that.

I interrupted your story. You had a phone call coming in.

The phone call came in. It was from President Carter. I think Tony went out to take the call, if I remember right. He came back and reported to us what the phone call was. Basically, President Carter said that Kim Il-Sung was ready to deal. Why he was ready to deal was an interesting question. I will always believe he was ready to deal because he knew we were very serious. The timing was also interesting because there was no secret that we were having the meeting and what the subject of the meeting was. So I think there was some urgency in Kim Il-Sung to get the message back to us before we actually announced what that decision was.

Carter had been recruited to make this trip?

No. that’s another interesting story. I think it was either the White House or Christopher, I’m not sure which, had asked Sam Nunn to make the trip. Sam agreed to do that. About a day or two before he was to leave, he was disinvited. Kim Il-Sung invited President Carter instead. I do not know the background as to what was going on in Kim Il-Sung’s mind and why he backed away from Senator Nunn’s trip. I suspect it was because when he found out he could get President Carter, he thought it would be better to deal with an ex-President than with a Senator.

There were mixed feelings in the administration about President Carter going over. It’s clear that he, as an ex-President, might be a little hard to control—

Independent.

—which turned out to be true—and that he might look for an independent source of reporting his findings there, which also turned out to be true. Some people in the administration had those concerns about him before he left. Some were very negative about him going. The President ultimately made that decision. I must say, I was positive about him going. I was so concerned with the danger of the situation and the recognition that we had no dialogue at all with the North in the face of what looked like we were just drifting into a war. So I thought having somebody over there talking to him had to be a positive development, which turned out to be right. But also it turned out the people who didn’t want him to go, the reasons why they didn’t want him to go also turned out to be right. On balance, it was a positive outcome, I believe.

So Carter came back with this phone call. He said, Kim Il-Sung’s ready to shut down this whole facility at Yongbyon if we agree to supply him light water reactors, which had been the concept of what might be done to deflect this issue. Carter thought he had the deal. He told the negotiators, It’s all settled. We’re ready to do this. We had a very short meeting. Everybody was there, of course—we were all sitting there anyway—and we decided we would not do that deal. We would only accept going into negotiations on what had to be done, because you couldn’t just decide over the phone. You had to have negotiations. We would only do it if Kim Il-Sung agreed to freeze his activities at Yongbyon while we talked. So that was the counter-offer that went back. We arrived at that in about 15 minutes of discussion. It did not take long to say that has to be in the deal. Carter was appalled. He said, No, he’ll never agree to that. We said, That’s our deal. Yes or no? If you want a deal, it has to include that. Carter did go back to Kim Il-Sung. Kim Il-Sung accepted it. 

So we had a deal in principle, and then that led a few months later to the so-called Agreed Framework, which Bob Gallucci negotiated. But the essence of the Agreed Framework was already laid out in that 15-minute discussion of the National Security Council, which is a shutdown, a complete dismantling of Yongbyon for two light water reactors—if he freezes while we’re negotiating the terms. That was the deal, and that’s what Gallucci was able to actually negotiate. That was a pretty scary situation, which had a reasonably happy outcome, I thought.

So you were satisfied with the—

Yes, absolutely. I was satisfied with the counter-proposal we made. I was not satisfied with the Carter offer. I was satisfied with the counter-offer that was made. And about four or five months later, when Gallucci actually had a deal, I was satisfied with the details of what he was able to come up with. Gallucci did an excellent job of negotiating that. We consulted with him a number of times during his negotiation, but by and large, he was the negotiator, and he did, I think, an excellent job with it.

Were there any substantive changes in defense policy related to North Korea as a result of this episode? Did you revisit plans or reallocate resources on the potential, or on the theory that we may have to go through this again at some point?

Yes, we put in very high gear the systems and programs necessary to counter the long-range artillery that North Korea had massed along the border, which is capable of reaching Seoul. They had these artillery in caves all along the border, and their concept was that they would pull them out of the caves, line them up, aim, shoot, and then go back into the caves so they could not be—so we needed a counter-measure to that strategy or Seoul would just sit there and be bombarded by them. We needed some way of dealing with that. So our first priority was developing and deploying a counter-measure to those long-range artillery caves, and we did that. We already had that started, at least conceptually, before that time, but we put it in very high gear and actually built it and deployed it. 

The second action we took was developing a plan to counter their special operations forces, which were designed to skirt the DMZ and come down and attack us from the rear. They had, I don’t know, 60- or 70,000 special operations forces. So we had to have a plan for dealing with that. 

The third concern was the plan that they would fire chemical weapons at our airfields in North Korea and therefore render them unusable for the defense. So in the course of the two-day review I had of our war plan in Korea, aside from saying we needed to have more troops on the front line, those were the three weaknesses in the general posture there. So after we did it, we breathed a huge sigh of relief and said, The immediate danger is gone. Then the entire focus was on fixing those three parts of the problem that had been revealed by our review of the war plan, and we did that. 

I should conclude on that by saying, even as we got the agreement over the telephone and even as we eventually went to the Agreed Framework, we never believed that was resolving the North Korea nuclear problem. We believed that it was at least delaying it for some number of years. But that, as far as we could see, North Korea had had an aspiration of nuclear weapons for a decade or two. They might still continue to have those aspirations. So we were still concerned about providing for the defense against a conventional attack, and using all resources we had, to keep an eye open for what they might be doing to evade the Agreed Framework. 

When I went to Pyongyang in 1999, I guess it was—I’m now out of office—

You’ve been invited to come back to do a review? Is this associated with that?

Yes, I’m now out of office, but just before I went over there, we had sent a team over to look at a cave that had been detected by our intelligence, which we thought might be holding a covert nuclear facility. 

I make that point to say, in our minds, there was also a danger of the North Koreans evading the Agreed Framework. We knew we could control what was going on at Yongbyon because of the inspectors we had there. There was always a danger they might try the program somewhere else. And this imperfect intelligence I referred to was looking for that all the time. It wasn’t very good, but it was probably good enough to alert us to the fact that something was happening, although the details of what was happening wouldn’t be so clear. In this case it alerted us to the fact that a very unusual and large cave was being built at some remote place. We suspected it might be nuclear, and so we said, We’ve got an agreement. Send some inspectors over there. It turned out not to be nuclear. But it was a perfectly reasonable suspicion on our part.

If we look at the Korea situation in a little bit larger context, one of the concerns expressed at the time, though, was that while we were focusing on North Korea, the Iraqis might take advantage of the situation. Or if things flared up in Iraq because Saddam Hussein was moving forces to the south at roughly the same time, North Korea might take advantage of the situation. How much of a concern was that for you?

That was a very great concern for me. We took the danger of two major regional conflicts very seriously. As I told you, my own belief, which is a well-validated belief, was that we did not have the capability of dealing with two at once. So we took that very seriously. It manifested itself not at that particular time but later in that year. 

If I remember right, it was September or October when our intelligence discovered two armored divisions moving out of Baghdad down to the Kuwait border. The evidence was pretty much unambiguous that that was happening. Why it was happening, we didn’t know, of course. I vividly remember the intelligence briefing information laid out in front of me, and the data looked pretty unequivocal. I met with Shali within minutes after getting this data, and we worked out a response plan. The response plan was that we would immediately declare to Iraq that this was unacceptable, that those armored divisions had to get back to barracks within 24 hours and that we were making major and immediate reinforcements of our troops in Kuwait to deal with this problem and increasing our airborne overflights we were already conducting.

Prior to that time, we had made, in anticipation of contingencies like that—this was part of the fear that we had only 1½ instead of two—the big deficiency to deal with two major regional conflicts was transport, getting the stuff there. So with that in mind, and in the way of trying to overcome some of the problems with it, 1½ major regional conflicts, we had gotten permission to deploy all the equipment for armored brigades in Kuwait, in Saudi Arabia, and the Diego Garcia island so that we would not have to move all the armored equipment over. All we had to do was move our soldiers, which we could do very quickly. 

So the proposal that Shali and I made to the President was that he immediately announce that this is unacceptable, that he also announce that he has authorized me to deploy the 24^th Division from Fort Stewart, Georgia to Kuwait to join up with their armored equipment there. They would be on the ground, ready to act in about 24 hours, and that we were, in addition, mobilizing other divisions which we’d sent over by regular transport. Between what we had in Saudi Arabia and what we had in the Gulf and what we had with this rapid reinforcement, we would have a very formidable force on the ground within maybe 48 hours. 

So the President authorized me to do all these things, and we started doing them. As we were doing them, we were also announcing, loud and clear, what we were doing. It was like the North Korean problem where an unexpected development helped our case. North Korea was Brent Scowcroft’s op-ed, which I swear I had nothing to do with. But in the announcement that we made to the press—I usually speak pretty clearly, but somebody misunderstood what I was saying—I announced the troops we were sending over—and indeed, we sent those troops over—and that we were mobilizing two other divisions. The stories come out in the paper that we’re sending all three of those divisions over. It was muddled a little bit, but that was the impression you’d get from reading the paper. That was the impression the Iraqis got, I’m sure, which was not all bad. Again, I did not deliberately do that. It just came out that way. 

So that crisis ended very quickly. Within 24 hours, the next day the intelligence report was, the troops were turning around and going back. The Iraqi troops were heading back to barracks, and within 48 hours they were back in barracks. So we assumed it was a cause and effect and that, again, a robust, rapid, very muscular response had the effect of avoiding the military confrontation. Both Shali and I, both in Korea and in Iraq, believed that if you are very clear in your intentions and you manifest your intentions by actually acting in a visible way and announcing what you're doing, then you can head off the need to have the confrontation. In both of those cases, it seemed to me that it turned out that way. That’s the most dramatic example I can give you of the two major regional conflict issue. 

While we were actually preparing to put in North Korean reinforcements—we had, as you can imagine, the reinforcement plans to send the troops over there—I had called in all the necessary CINCs to go over the war plan for sending in all these forces to North Korea. While we were going through that planning, we were participating in the meeting, the CENTCOM [United States Central Command] CINC, whose job it was to say, Wait a minute. You can’t send this unit. I need it as my part of the two MRCs. Indeed, when it came down to facing up—that was in May when we actually did that—when we got to September, October and we had the CENTCOM crisis, indeed, the forces that he had said had to be reserved for him were the forces which would be pulled out and we were using. So it was a delicate balancing act, but it was a balancing act with limited resources, and in each case the main limit was the ability to transport forces quickly.

So lift was the problem.

Yes.

Did you get the sense after the problem in 1994 that North Korea remained something that was on the President’s radar? I mean, did you get unprompted questions from him periodically?

I did not. He may very well have believed that we had resolved the problem with North Korea, but I must say I never believed that. So it was very much on my radar from there on in. But no, I was not getting umprompted questions. That happened in the second term because of some action the North Koreans had taken over the missiles, but not during the first term.

Were you involved in any debriefing of President Carter when he returned from North Korea?

The answer is yes, but not immediately. The immediate debriefing was done by Tony Lake—maybe others, but Tony for sure. A lot of it had to do with the critique of the way he handled the information dissemination. Without going into a lot of detail on that, when he called to report he had the deal, he also said, By the way, I’m going on CNN [Cable News Network] in another hour to report that I’ve got this deal, which put a gun to the head of the President. 

That was exactly the thing they were concerned about. It turned out okay, but that was not a good tactic on President Carter’s part, I think. His mission did turn out to be very beneficial. But the way that he handled the press could have caused a problem. We were able to work our way out of it, but it could have caused a problem. He certainly had some people on the National Security Council very uptight about his approach, even though the net of it was very positive. 

Is it also correct to assume that intelligence debriefers are talking with the President about his perceptions of the thought process of the—

I’m sure that happened. I did not sit in on those briefings, but I’m confident that would have happened. 

His response, as I understand it, to the criticism as to why he went on CNN right away, with Tony and others saying, Look, you put a gun to our President’s head, he said, No, I was trying to put a gun to Kim Il-Sung’s head. I wanted to get him committed and nailed down. It may very well be why he was thinking of it.

This happens in June, and Haiti flares up again in October, I guess, some time in the fall. 

Yes. 

Let’s shift gears and move on to Haiti and your involvement in planning for that and how that unfolded.

There must have been a whole series of meetings in the White House and the State Department about what our mission and stake was in Haiti. Out of those meetings—the Defense Department was not necessarily involved—but out of those meetings came the strongly held view of the President that we should take the responsibility for getting the duly elected President of Haiti reinstated. But it’s doubtful anything would have been done about that except the new regime in Haiti was so brutal and so inefficient that thousands of people started leaving the island in boats. We’ll never know how many hundreds died in the waters between Haiti and Florida, but that’s very treacherous water. Some of them were making it. These were very improvised boats. Literally, some people were in lashed-together inner tubes. I’ve seen that with my own eyes. It was a very sad situation. 

In any event, that, of course, caused a great public stir—what are we going to do about these thousands and thousands of boat people, refugees, that were about to wash up on the shores of Florida? Again, the decision, probably made by the President with State and the Attorney General advising, was that we could not let them land in Florida. We had to deflect them from landing in Florida. Once they landed in Florida, they became refugees. So we decided that we would pick them up at sea and hold them somewhere in a safe area, then try to get the situation resolved in Haiti.

So we had two problems in sequence: First of all was dealing with the boat people, and second was changing the government in Haiti so the boat people could go back. The plan for dealing with the boat people was to hold them—as it turned out, in Guantanamo for some time—bring President [Jean-Bertrand] Aristide back into power, and then send the boat people back. And that, in fact, was what we did. That was the plan from the beginning. But as I remember, the numbers were over 25,000 boat people, including some boat people from Cuba who were coming in then. All of those people the Navy and the Coast Guard scooped up, except for the ones that drowned on the way, and transported them to Guantanamo. 

The Defense Department’s job was twofold: One was to provide the naval forces to work with and supplement the Coast Guard—and it was very much a joint operation; the Coast Guard didn’t have enough resources to do it. And the second was to build from scratch a facility for detaining 25- to 50,000 people. We had to build a city, basically. So we did. We built that in a matter of a couple of weeks. We sent people down there to man it, and that operation was successfully done. We did that in cooperation with the cooperation of the Secretary of Transportation, to whom the Coast Guard reported. The Coast Guard reports to the Secretary of Defense in wartime, but this wasn’t wartime, so we had to work it out in coordination with the Coast Guard at that time and in close cooperation with the Attorney General, Janet Reno at the time. 

We had many meetings trying to decide what to do there. What I’ve described to you may seem like the obvious solution, but it was painful—many weeks of debate and discussion and much pain before we finally got to that solution. That’s what we finally decided to do, and it worked, against all odds. It turned out that of all the catastrophes that could have happened over that thing, none of them did.

Were the services receptive to taking on this role? I can imagine that that’s not what the people are trained to do.

I never got any kickback on that. That seemed to me to be going pretty well. The Navy, it’s the sort of thing they do; they had no problem doing it. The Army came through. They had all these, basically, tent cities they had for contingency operations. They dipped in, pulled them out, took them down, set them up, sent the MPs [military police] down to do that. It was a very smooth-running operation. I never discerned any substantial kickback on doing that. So that was phase one. 

Phase two was to get General Cedras out of Haiti and President Aristide back in. That’s when Carter, Powell, and Nunn went down to tell Cedras, The jig’s up.

Whose idea was it to send them?

I don’t know, but I think the President agreed they could go down.

So Carter was still on good enough standing at that point—

I don’t have the background. It might have been that Carter decided to go down, and the President said, Why don’t you take Senator Nunn and Colin Powell with you? So that was the good news. They were down there talking with Cedras but not making very much headway. 

In the meantime, my job was to prepare for an invasion in case this failed. So we were doing that again—20,000-or-so people involved in an invasion. And two or three days before we actually went into Haiti, I went down to the invasion fleet, which was forming off Haiti. It was being run by Admiral Paul David Miller, who was one of the most innovative military people I knew. 

The resources he had were the aircraft carriers, which, of course, were for launching fighter aircraft. But, of course, Haiti didn’t have any aircraft to shoot down. Fighter aircraft were useless. So he conned the Navy into accepting Army helicopters on these aircraft carriers. So I went down there a couple of days before this invasion plan and landed on this carrier, and all I could see were Army helicopters. The Navy was just being used as a platform for an Army operation. Of course, the whole thing was conceived by a four-star Navy admiral, and so the Navy had to like it, I guess. 

In any event, it was going smoothly, and the people who were involved in that operation, all of them covered themselves with glory and ended up moving up the Navy. The latest CNO, Jay Johnson, was one of the principal, at that time, two- or three-stars running the Navy operation down there. So I went down. It was really an amazing sight to visit those aircraft carriers and see all the Army helicopters and review the war plans with Admiral Miller. We were all ready to go. It involved coming in with helicopters and then having paratroopers from Fort Bragg coming in and landing. Those were the two main elements of our operation. We were going to have a lot of troops in Haiti in a very short time. It was going to be overwhelming force to bring the situation under immediate and complete control—a good plan that Miller put together. So I figured the whole thing was all set.

In the meantime, because the word we were getting back from Carter and so on was that the mission there was not succeeding. So D-Day was going to be—I forget the date—a Sunday, sometime in October. When D-Day arrived, to my horror, Nunn and Powell and Carter were still there. Carter didn’t want to leave. He said, We’re on the verge of something. We’re about ready to get an agreement.

So I went over to the White House. We were in the Oval Office. The war plans were all laid out. The troops were ready to go. The aircraft carriers and the helicopters were lined up outside of Haiti, and the paratroopers were boarding their airplanes at Fort Bragg. I went over to the President and said, Mr. President, Sir, please call President Carter and tell him to get the hell out of there. They’re going to have paratroopers landing on their heads in about another two hours. So the President understood the wisdom of that recommendation and said, Sure, I’ll do that. 

So he called up Carter. And Carter is nothing if not stubborn. He said, I understand your concern, President Clinton, but we’re really very close to an agreement here, and I want to bring this to a head. I said, Tell him— he’s talking over an open line; I didn’t want to say too much, but—Tell him that time is very short, and they’re in danger staying there much longer. The President said that as well as he could say that, but Carter wasn’t hearing that. He was just determined that they were going to get it resolved. I was beside myself. I said, Mr. President, should I call off the operation? He said no. Can you get Carter out of there? He said, Well, yes, I’ll get him out of there. But he didn’t. 

So to telescope the story, our forces took off from Fort Bragg. Carter, Nunn, Powell were still talking with General Cedras in his office when the forces took off. I was pleading with the President to get them out of there because I could just imagine a situation in which those three would be held as hostage down there—ex-President, Senator Nunn, ex-Chairman of the Staff—God almighty. So I was very concerned. While I’m usually very respectful and speak when I’m spoken to, to the President this time, I was not. I kept pushing myself forward. Mr. President, get them out of there. Get them out of there, please, right away.

Well, at that stage, we learned later, our three were talking with General Cedras when another Haitian general came rushing into the room very excitedly and said, General, the paratroopers have just taken off from Fort Bragg, which was true. They had. So he had, apparently, somebody watching the airfield. According to Colin Powell, within ten minutes of that point, Cedras had come to an agreement. That’s not the way I would have chosen to conduct the meeting, but that’s the way it happened. And it all worked out. 

Then, finally, we got the agreement, and the President said to me, Bill, can you call off the invasion? I said, I hope so. Then we were frantically getting in touch with all of the airplanes. You know, they’re in the air, halfway to Haiti. Happily we were able to communicate to all of them, got them all turned around, and got them back. Usually in a deal like that, there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the word. We did get through to all of them, got them all turned back. I called up Admiral Miller and said, That’s a wonderful idea about having the Army helicopters on the aircraft carriers, but you can send them back to port now. So all of that ended with a happy ending, but it was probably one of the most harrowing experiences of my life, having gone through that. That’s not an embellished story. That’s just the way it happened.

Actually, there were forces that did go in, right?

The next day we went in, but we went in at the invitation—one of the decisions that they got from General Cedras was that they would welcome the American troops coming in, which he did.

So there was a contingency plan for a friendly takeover.

There always had been a contingency plan. It had to be adapted to the fact that we were already in the process of an invasion when we implemented it, but we quickly adapted that plan. The helicopter forces actually went on to land, but they landed without opposition at that stage. They never knew until they actually landed that there would be no opposition, but in fact there was none. So that all went rather smoothly, but it was a pretty scary experience.

Did you hear reservations in Defense about Aristide?

Yes, not just Defense. But a lot of reservations about Aristide, with his own political agenda and being corrupt and having cronies and all the statements you can probably make about most of the Central American, South American governments, people were making about Aristide. Some of them, I’m sure, were true. On the other hand, he was the elected President who had been thrown out by a general, so we had some reasonable basis for sending him back in.

Coup in ’91.

So that was the way that turned out. The sequel to that story was that a couple of weeks later, I guess it was, we had our forces there pretty much in control of the island. General Cedras was still there, and the President dispatched General Shali and me to go down and tell him it’s time to leave. He was reluctant and we said, This is not a negotiation. We’re telling you it’s time to leave. You don’t have any choice in this matter. Your choice is whether you go out voluntarily or whether we carry you out, and whether you end up trying to find a place to go or whether you accept a safe haven we have prepared for you. After a fairly sharp discussion on the issue, he decided to go voluntarily and to a safe haven that we had already negotiated would accept him. That’s what got Cedras out of there.

Where did he go?

I don’t remember. It was a Central American country, but we had gotten an agreement from the President of that country to give him a villa or something, a safe haven. It was not his desired outcome, I can tell you that. 

For many in the administration, of course, this was a great accomplishment, to be able to restore a democratic regime. If it hadn’t been for the boat people, would we have done this?

I don’t think so. You never know. You can’t relive history. But my observation was that the boat people were the impetus, which allowed us to take the hard actions which we had to take. And they were risky actions. They turned out well, but in a hundred ways they could have gone wrong. 

Well, let’s go on to something easier, China and Taiwan. [laughter] Is there a story beyond the most celebrated incident, which was the firing of missiles over the [Taiwan] Straits?

The whole background for that incident was the Shanghai agreement for one China, which is a work of art, how it is put together, because everybody agreed on one China, but each nation had a different meaning of what they meant by one China. But we had what we thought was an understanding with the Chinese Government that the one China would be—whatever the definition was—reached peacefully. We were content with any outcome the Chinese people agreed on. We were not content to it being directed by military force. 

Against that background then we saw the firing of missiles right off the coast of Taiwan as something more than a political statement. We saw it as military coercion. It was the use of military force. Even though they hadn’t actually fired into Taiwan, it could easily have missed the intended target by a couple of miles and actually landed in Taiwan. It could have killed some people. It was a reckless act on their part, we thought.

This took place after the Taiwanese President had made a trip to the United States, or does that come—

The Taiwan President’s trip to the United States, which is another whole story, but—

Had you weighed in on that? You’re nodding yes.

Inappropriately, I would say, I weighed in. I was asked, would I object to his coming back, and I said no. If I had it to live over again, I would have said yes, because I think he conned us. His story was that he was just coming over as an alumnus for a Cornell University Homecoming thing, and who could tell him nay on that? That was the story that he gave us. I think there was a little uneasiness about that story. There was a lot of pressure in the Congress to let him do it. Basically I think the administration buckled on that. I was asked, after they really decided to do it, whether I would pose any objection to it, and I said no. I should have been pushing a little harder on that. I was suspicious that it was a provocative act, and in fact it turned out to be. That set the stage for it.

Then after that there was the election. Now we’re in ’96. The trip was, I think, ’95. We’re now in ’96. I knew an election was coming up, and the same issue is at stake: Is Lee Teng-hui going to represent Taiwan? Is a separatist going to be the President of Taiwan? And does the Chinese Government consider Lee Teng-hui and his allies to be separatists? So Lee Teng-hui was the enemy in the face of the Chinese, and his trip to Cornell solidified that, although they already had that view ahead of time. It just solidified it. 

So the missile firing was really intended to intervene in the election, which was underway at that time, and intimidate the Taiwanese into not electing somebody who showed any separatist tendencies. Of course, it had the opposite reaction. What it tended to do was solidify the support for Lee Teng-hui and his faction in Taiwan. So it not only was a problem as far as we were concerned, it was probably a very unwise political action on their part too. It had the opposite effect of what they were intending. But our immediate concern was that it was a violation of the agreement we had with the Chinese going all the way back to the Shanghai Communiqué on what the China policy was. So everybody in our government agreed to that. 

Now the question was what to do about it. The State Department’s view was that we could send a sharply worded statement to the Chinese Government making clear, and making public, our objection, why we objected to it, that it was a violation. Shali and I both thought that wasn’t enough. We needed some indirect communication that got the message across more strongly. To do that we needed some show of military force to indicate to them that we thought this was a violation of the use of military force and that it could lead to the use of American military force. 

So rather than say that, we thought that we would demonstrate it. And we decided we would do a deployment of a show of military force in the Taiwan Strait. I had a long and detailed discussion with Shali about what to do there before we actually made a recommendation to the President. I must say, I started off the discussion more bullish than he. We both agreed that sending one carrier battle group wasn’t enough because we had one carrier battle group, more or less, in the area all the time. We needed two. I wanted to steam them into the Taiwan Strait, and Shali, in his polite, careful way, winced when I started talking about doing this. Well, yes, but, and all the problems of doing it. Finally he persuaded me that that was unnecessary provocation. We could get our point across just by having two carrier battle groups there, and he was right. So he won that argument on its merits. 

So we went to the President with the recommendation that we send two carrier battle groups. We would steam them up to the Taiwan Strait, but we would not go into the Strait. When we announced we were sending them, we wouldn’t say where they were going to go. We just said, We’re sending them to Taiwan. When they got to Taiwan, we would not send them into the Strait. That was the plan the President agreed to. 

Was there opposition from State to doing it?

No. As I recall the situation, Lake and Christopher and the President all agreed to that plan. Once we presented the plan to them, there was no serious dissension to it. They said, Sure. Why not? 

Nobody wanted to be more bullish?

Nobody pushed. I was actually the most bullish in the room at that time. By the time we got to the meeting, I backed off so that Shali and I were together on it. Nobody pushed to go beyond what we were proposing. There was some discussion that maybe one carrier battle group would do it, but by and large, it was not a controversial issue. The President said, Do it, and it was easy. He said that with the concurrence of both Christopher and Lake. So I announced we were doing that. 

It was a problem finding the other carrier battle group. They’re not just lying around waiting to be deployed. We had big actions going on in Bosnia at the time. We had a carrier battle group off Bosnia supporting our military operations in Bosnia then. So the final plan was that we would deploy an Air Force wing to Italy to provide that support so it could free up the carrier battle group to go around the Suez Canal and over to Taiwan. All of those were the details, but they were difficult details to work out. We finally got them worked out, so by the end of that day, we had the plan, and we had the orders out to the forces. The Air Force was redeploying their forces, the carrier battle group was able to pull it off, and we had two carrier barrier groups steaming to Taiwan. Most importantly, we had announced clearly that we were doing it and why we were doing it. 

At the same time we announced that, I was scheduled two weeks later to have a visit from the Chinese Minister of Defense. I called in the Chinese Ambassador and said, It’s off. The invitation is off until the present situation gets resolved. There were very hard feelings over that. 

It turned out it didn’t matter where the carrier battle groups went. What mattered was we announced we were sending them. Once we announced it, everything just calmed down after that. No more missiles were fired. No more discussions. That whole crisis went away. That’s why I say Shali was right. We didn’t need that extra little provocation. We got our point across very well just by announcing we were sending two groups over there. When they got there, it was totally anticlimactic. It wouldn't have mattered what we had done. 

To what extent might there have been concern within the administration that in dealing with Taiwan we had to be concerned about the tail wagging the dog?

That’s a good question. At the same time the President authorized us to do this, he authorized Christopher to go to the Taiwan Government and say, Don’t misunderstand this action. This is not a blank check for provocative action.

That’s what I was wondering about, what message was sent to Taiwan?

A very strong message was sent to Taiwan: Don’t do anything foolish. This is an action we’re taking because we think the Chinese Government has done something provocative. Don’t believe we will support you if you do something provocative. So I think we were equally concerned about those two problems at the time.

How would you assess the administration’s record on China during the first term? This was an issue that was made into a campaign issue in ’92.

We were very slow off the mark with China. We spent a year trying to get the President to back off his campaign China-bashing rhetoric, to see that we needed to engage them. That was a view that I held, that Shali held, that Christopher held. But the President had dug himself in pretty deeply on the campaign. We had to persuade him that that was wrong, and it took a while to do that.

Where did Anthony Lake stand on that?

I’m not sure. By the time I became Secretary, the battle was pretty well over. I had a long history and experience with China, and I wanted to go over as the Secretary of Defense on a military-to-military visit to China. By the time I became Secretary, we had an agreement in principle to do that. I think it was just a few months later that I actually made the trip. 

A little history on that is that I had led the first military delegation to China in 1980 during the Carter administration, just as China was starting to open up. So I was following up. In between those two times, in my position here at Stanford, I had made many visits to China. So I knew the Chinese Government officials, knew the military officials very well. I was anxious to get those reestablished. 

Obviously, I was on the side of engagement with China and was pushing for it very hard. But most of the other people in the administration were as well, and it was just a matter of getting the President to accept that. Once he accepted it, then he became one of the strongest advocates and supporters of engagement with China, to the point that, by the second term, people were criticizing him for being too strongly supportive of China. But we lost the first year, I think, probably for no other reason than we stuck with the campaign rhetoric. 

Were technology-transfer issues with China a big concern during your time?

Not a big concern. There was a concern that people kept raising, but I never saw it as a major issue. The technology concern here basically is computer technology, and the people who were raising the concern didn’t have a full understanding of the fact that the computer industry was an international industry, and the U.S. didn’t have really good control even if we wanted to control it at that time. There were some technology issues, of course, that had to do with nuclear technology. There were some that had to do with very advanced semiconductor technology. But in terms of trying to keep China from getting laptops and desk computers, that was, I thought then and I think now, silly. 

The person who probably led the charge in getting what I considered to be a more rational approach to the technology-transfer issue was Vice President Gore. He took real leadership in working with industry to try to come out with a set of guidelines that would allow the industry to move forward and deal with China and not be hobbled by a set of obsolete things.

The President, at least among contemporary political figures, had what seemed to be a very advanced understanding about globalization and economics, and the relationship of economics to foreign policy. So it’s a little surprising that, given the role that China was about to start playing in the global economy, that he was slower on coming around on this point.

This is true, but when he came around, he came around very fast and very strong for the very reasons you mentioned. He saw the importance of it to the global economy. 

Khobar Towers is next, and we’d like to talk a little bit about terrorism and counterterrorism in this regard. Where were you when you got the news? 

I don’t remember. I could have been in Washington.

The possibility of an attack like this was something that didn’t come as a complete surprise?

No, there had been a prior attack in Saudi Arabia, a car bomb. But Khobar Towers was a huge truck bomb, ten times the size of the earlier one. But there had been a car bomb attack about six months before that, so everybody was uptight about it. We had extraordinary security around the area where our troops were based. That extraordinary security was quite sufficient for dealing with the kind of car bomb we’d had, and it was sufficient to minimize the damage from the truck bomb that had come in, but not sufficient to prevent it altogether. I mean, this was a bomb that was bigger than the one that used in Lebanon that killed 250 people there.

It would have killed 250 people in Khobar had the truck actually been able to get to the barracks. We had designed offsets for the barracks that made it difficult for the truck to get that close. The trucks couldn’t get any closer to the barracks at Khobar Tower than a truck could get to the Pentagon, say. So the risk to Khobar Towers was certainly equivalent to the risk of the Pentagon, somebody driving up with a truck bomb and setting it off. But they did use it, and it was a huge bomb, and it ended up demolishing that one building and killing about 18 people in it. 

Retrospectively, the one weak link in the security there that we should have caught ahead of time was not the separation and the guards, which actually did a pretty good job of it, but that we had not reinforced the building in various ways—simple things like putting duct tape on the windows and so on. We could have probably saved some of those casualties. In the after-action report—Why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you do that?—that was the one that stood out most prominently in my mind. Given that we knew there was a danger of that kind of an attack, and given that we’d taken the action to provide an offset from the barracks so we couldn’t have a repeat of the Lebanon thing, why didn’t we take the additional step to actually duct tape the windows? That was a fair question and the answer was mea culpa, that was a mistake. That was a pretty grim incident. It was not Lebanon, but it could have been Lebanon, and it was still pretty bad.

Had you or Defense had any role in the aftermath of the first World Trade Center?

No.

Any role in the immediate aftermath of Oklahoma City?

No. Obviously, those were domestic law enforcement issues.

Where was terrorism on the radar screen for Defense at this point, and how did covert—?

In the first term, it was not high. The second term it became high. Khobar Towers was one of the things that moved it up higher, although I must say our reading of Khobar Towers at the time was not that. We did not believe then that it was an Osama bin Laden kind of attack, that kind of terrorist strike. We thought it was Iranian Government work. At the time I left office, the number-one suspect in Khobar Towers was Iran. That’s the direction the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] investigation was pointing. That’s the direction the Saudi Government’s investigation pointed. Neither had it nailed down by the time I left, but that was where it was leading toward, not leading toward a terror group. 

I think, in retrospect, that was probably wrong. If you look at it now, it has all the fingerprints of Osama bin Laden. Probably both those Saudi attacks were Al Qaeda, but that was not the FBI’s analysis at the time or CIA. They were both pointing toward the Iranian government. So I have to sharply distinguish the first term from the second term.

In the first term, the threat of terrorists attacking the United States in our country or in forces overseas was not considered a high probability. The best evidence of that is that we did not interpret it. By we, I mean the FBI and the CIA did not interpret the Khobar Towers attack as that kind of attack. That started changing during the second term, and by the middle of the second term, it was pretty clear that transnational terrorism was becoming a major threat to the country. Long before 9/11, I think it was becoming clear that that was a problem.

But a part of the motivation for the loose nukes question was also terrorism, or was it more of a state-sponsored problem that you were concerned about?

It was terrorism. But at a time when nobody was taking it too seriously because we couldn’t point to any terrorist groups that were doing anything remotely comparable, the conventional wisdom then was that terrorists would not want to use weapons of mass destruction. They would be inimical to their political aims. We hadn’t yet focused on apocalyptic groups that were willing to completely upset the natural order of things. So that was later in the thinking. 

Now, when I wrote my book, Preventive Defense [: A New Security Strategy for America], the chapter on terrorism—this was in ’98 or so when we wrote that—I was out of office. But I was reflecting back on what had happened and what was beginning to be clear during the second term. We focused a whole chapter in that book to the thought of terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction, and we suggested that was the number-one security threat to the country. That was long before 9/11, and it was before the Osama bin Laden threat had become really crystallized. But the signs were already there. Looking back to the first term, you could see signs there in retrospect. But they weren’t signs anybody was seeing very clearly at that time. 

I was telling my colleagues before your return that I had read the chapter on terrorism last night, and I thought it was absolutely prophetic. There is so much in there that predicts perfectly much of what we’ve lived through since 9/11, and in particular the discussions about what’s likely to happen to institutions of governance and civil liberties.

Yes.

It was just right on target. So you had been thinking about this—

Those thoughts materialized mostly after I left office. I don’t want to transport my thoughts of 1998 back to the time I was in office, because at that time we did not see transnational terrorists as a major threat that we were facing. There were some signs beginning to develop, but we hadn’t put them together yet. The best way I have of tracing my thinking back to my point was that I found the FBI and the Saudi Arabia analyses pointing to Iran perfectly plausible. Looking back on it with what I know now, I don’t find it plausible. I say it has all the earmarks of an Osama bin Laden operation. We just weren’t smart enough to see it at the time.

I think it’s important to have this discussion on the record, though, because obviously this is going to be the kind of thing that historians in the future will want to come back and look at given subsequent developments. It’s sometimes hard, in retrospect, to imagine that something of this magnitude can crop up relatively quickly in time. Yet people who are very thoughtful and attentive to these things didn’t have evidence at that point that what was just over the horizon was in fact there.

I think that’s correct. Certainly I didn’t know it, and I didn’t know anybody around me who did either. It started developing about ’96, ’97, ’98, but not in most of the time I was Secretary.

Most of the precursor events took place after. There were things like the first World Trade Center bombing, but you’re absolutely right, that was treated as a law enforcement issue. Khobar Towers, of course—

Of course, Oklahoma City turned out to be domestic.

Exactly. Correct me if I’m wrong, but for instance, there were not a whole lot of intelligence assets directed at non-state terrorist groups. 

If there were, I wasn’t aware of it. Certainly it didn’t uncover what was going on. It never uncovered the possible connection in the Khobar Tower. In retrospect it seems obvious that that should have been a prime suspect, but the fact that they didn’t find the evidence for it may be primarily due to the fact that they were not looking in that direction.

Do you recall what Clinton’s reaction was to that event?

To Khobar? Everybody was shocked. There were two big issues that came out of Khobar Towers: One, of course, was the tragedy for all the people involved and what could have been done to minimize the damage. Had we done the right thing? 

The other was, was this going to drive us out of Saudi Arabia? So the major issue I discussed with the President was the latter one. My view then, which he supported me on, was that it should not drive us out of Saudi Arabia. I said, Given that we don’t know who is doing this, and given the ease with which they did it, we have to find some different way of protecting our forces in Saudi Arabia if we’re going to stay there. So I had his permission to go to the Saudi Government and ask to move our entire U.S. forces out into an air base located out in the desert where they could be adequately protected, and we did that. 

It took us about six to nine months to get all the forces out there. It was a huge transformation. All of the forces in Saudi Arabia were moved into this one big air base in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia. It was a perfectly satisfactory way of operating, except it deprived all of our troops of any ability to be with, and mix with, the population in Saudi Arabia, which probably was a good thing anyway as we now understand the problems in Saudi Arabia. But in particular, it was the only way I could think of how to deploy and protect them from whatever it was we were up against there. As far as I know, once we had to move into those bases, there was never any successful attack made on them after that. But that was a very expensive and very difficult move to make. We made it with the full support and cooperation of the Saudi Government. They provided the air base. They had an unusual air base out there, which we took over, and they helped to underwrite many of the expenses for getting that base fixed up to snuff. 

Was there anyone on the national security team who resisted keeping the troops in Saudi Arabia?

Not that I remember. I couldn’t imagine why they would. It was not a big expense for us because the Saudi Government was bearing most of the expense.

U.S. forces were in Saudi Arabia, of course, to deal with Iraq. Did members of the administration expect this effort to continue, to keep Iraq and Saddam in what President Clinton, I think, put as a tight box indefinitely?

The key to that tight box was the over-flights we made every day over Iraq. They were mostly coming from bases in Saudi Arabia. We absolutely depended on the bases in Saudi Arabia. To try to do all of those from aircraft carriers would have been prohibitively expensive and dangerous. So those bases were essential to being able to keep Saddam in a box.

I should have mentioned that after the move that Saddam made of sending his armored divisions south again and we pushed them back at that time, we took the no-fly zone we had and widened it so he had a very little narrow strip of the country. And much larger areas than that we would fly our airplanes over every day. They would start playing a cat-and-mouse game with us, sending antiaircraft missiles and guns firing at us. We were always concerned about the fact that one of those might get lucky and actually kill one of our airplanes, but in all the years we conducted it, it never happened. That was an ongoing risk to doing that kind of thing.

Were members of the administration prepared to keep doing this indefinitely? Was there any end in sight to dealing with Iraq?

There were two facets to keeping Saddam in the box: One of them was keeping him from deploying his troops in dangerous ways, and the air surveillance was intended to ensure that that happened. The other was to control his weapons of mass destruction. The air flights didn’t do much for that. There we depended on the UN inspection teams, which I thought then were doing a reasonably good job. 

But in the second term, I think ’98 or ’99, something came up that caused UN forces to pull out. So there’s a period of a couple of years where we did not have UN forces in there, which was a matter of concern, I think, to everybody involved with the problem. But prior to our forces going back in for the second Iraqi military operation, we, under pressure on Iraq, got authority to not just send the inspector force back in, but a very intrusive inspection force went back in. Everybody, in my own judgment and in the judgment of people who I thought were most knowledgeable, probably believed that what those UN forces were doing was quite adequate to contain the weapons of mass destruction.

So between that enhanced UN inspection and the overflights that were going, Saddam really was in a box. So the argument for an invasion, I thought then and think now, was very weak. Given what we were doing at the time, the only plausible argument that can be made was, Well, it’s difficult and expensive to keep this going. We want to bring it to a head. Or a variation of that argument, Maybe the UN will lose their stomach for the intrusive inspection, so we’d better get this invasion in and over with before that happens. But in fact what we were doing at that time, had we continued it, was more than sufficient to keep him in any box we wanted to keep him in.

There were contingency plans for doing more?

Yes.

Were there people inside the administration who were pushing to do more?

No, not that I’m aware of. We believed that these were very successful operations. At the time I was there, the UN operation was still going on. So between the UN inspection operations and the overflights, I did not see Iraq as a significant military threat to the United States. It was an annoyance but not a military threat of any significance. 

This is an administration that occasionally took some heat for making a lot of decisions based on public-opinion polls. During the second term, you would occasionally hear people use the analogy of wag the dog. Did you ever see signs of this in your experience in the first term?

No, quite the contrary. The President was prepared to invade Haiti. That would not have been a popular decision. There was no great popular support, and certainly no great Congressional support, for doing that. So whatever motivations you want to ascribe to President Clinton for authorizing that invasion, it certainly was not gaining popular support. My own reading of it was that he was propelled by the boat people issue, which we talked about earlier. He saw that that somehow had to be brought to an end. 

But I think the more important case is Bosnia. On the one hand, he resisted those Republicans in Congress who were pushing for a lift-the-embargo approach, which would have been politically easy for him to do, but which he was persuaded would have been counterproductive. On the other hand, when it came time to send a military force into Bosnia, he did that with only modest support from the public and a substantial amount of opposition in the Congress. 

I was the one who did most of the testimony on that to the Congress. Those were very tough hearings of people challenging that we could do this successfully. They were forecasting in Bosnia what basically later on happened in Iraq—insurgency operations, terror operations, hundreds of troops coming home in body bags every month. That was a phrase that was actually made to me in public testimony to the Congress, that we were going to have a hundred body bags a month coming back from Bosnia. 

So it was not an operation that had much popular support, and it had a lot of negative Congressional reaction. In my last week before we actually had to force it in there, I had a lonely one-on-one session with the President on a Saturday morning in the Oval Office. I listed for him all the things that could go wrong and what we had done to try to prepare for that contingency—insurgency operations springing up after we got there; terrorists attacking our bases and our troops; troops being killed on patrols; roadside bombs; all the things that are now happening in Iraq were really quite predictable. We had them all laid out and contingency plans for them. Not to make too much of the point, but I insisted that no Humvees would be sent over there without armor on them. No force would go on patrol individually. They’d always go as a unit. They’d always go with heavy armor because we were expecting all these things could happen.

Now, it turned out they didn’t happen. My judgment at the time was that they didn’t happen because we were prepared for them. We squashed the opposition before it had a chance to take a foothold. But as I laid all these out to the President, I told him, We’re going to do this, that, and the other thing, and I think these will all be successful. I think we’ll deal with these problems adequately, but maybe not. If this goes badly and we actually have hundreds of American casualties and you’re doing this in the face of the opposition from Congress, Mr. President, this will be the end of your Presidency. You’re out of here. 

He said, I know that, but it’s the right thing to do. I want to do it. Now, he might have just convinced himself that that was the right thing to say, but my own view is that he actually deeply believed that. He had been seized with the atrocities that had been happening for several years in Bosnia and saw this as an opportunity to stop the killing—which, in fact, it did—and that we had a responsibility, and that we were the only country that could find the leadership to make that happen and we ought to do it. He was willing to risk his Presidency on doing it. Given that, though, we had some responsibility to do it as well as we could, so that we didn’t unnecessarily risk those casualties and risk all the other consequences that would come from them. 

You said earlier in the day that you came to understand that the President liked grappling with questions of foreign policy. I wonder if I could get you to elaborate a little bit more on that.

He was a policy wonk by the end of the first term, I think. He could hold his own with the other policy wonks very readily. But he did it an issue at a time. 

On Haiti, he became very conversant with all the issues in Haiti as well as the military issues. He knew the details of what we were planning, the invasion and so on. On Bosnia, he became very familiar with the political issues, the economic issues, the whole set of things we had to deal with in Bosnia, and he was very insightful, I think, when I would brief him on the military aspects of it. 

How did he go about getting up to speed on issues like Haiti and Bosnia?

He’s a pretty smart guy, and he probably reads five times as much as I. I read a lot, but I think during the time he was a sitting President, besides the regular reports and stuff, he was reading a couple of books a week. I couldn’t discuss a book with him that he hadn’t read and understood. So he had this vast storehouse of information up there, and more important, the ability to synthesize and pull out what he needed and apply to the problem—an amazing capacity.

Did it ever fail him?

Not that I ever saw. I’m sure it has.

Were there downsides to having that kind of capacity? Was he overconfident?

Sure, not in overconfidence. The downside, it’s just sometimes you get overeducated on a problem and you miss the essence of it.

Too much of the details, you mean?

Too much of the details. But he was usually very good at getting to the heart of the matter. It wasn’t just that he had the information. He had the ability to get to the heart of the matter, usually better than the other people in the room on the subject. So that was a theoretical drawback to it, but I never really saw that manifest itself. 

Now, I qualify all of my statements by saying, I did not know President Clinton before he was in office. I was not a friend of his or a fan of his. I voted for him. That was about it. I went in very skeptical about whether he would be able to provide the proper guidance and leadership as the Commander in Chief. I came away convinced that he did it very well indeed. So I was transformed during my years in office.

You think that the officers you worked with were also convinced?

The ones who worked closely with him, certainly Shali did. I have no doubt in my mind about what Shali’s view was. Two of the ones that I worked most closely with on our big operations—in Bosnia, of course, with General [George] Joulwan, who was also very closely exposed, worked with the President. Those who worked with him on serious issues, not just protocol meetings at the White House, who had some basis for making a judgment, came away with a positive view. General Clark was a big fan of his also. He later had a fallout—another story—during the second term, on Kosovo, but he never believed his fallout was with Clinton, but with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I don’t know. I wasn’t there at the time. I don’t know what the full story was. I think, to this day, Clark holds a high opinion of Clinton, and vice versa.

Do you feel like, given the activities in office, that he was able to win a measure of support within the rank and file of the Pentagon that wouldn’t have been expected? 

I thought that was happening. I thought I helped him do that, as a matter of fact. I had very good support among the civilians in the Pentagon and the rank and file in the military—very good, very strong support. I think that helped bridge the gap for the President. But the President also, when he would go to military bases, never failed to make a very positive impression there. So I think there was a certain Washington buzz about the military not liking, not trusting, President Clinton. I think that was certainly true in the first year or two, but I think each year that approval was getting better.

It’s remarkable, given the size of the hole he was in.

Yes, he was in a very deep hole to begin with. I’m not saying he was completely out of the hole, but there certainly was a dramatic difference at the end of the first term from the beginning of the first term. 

If you were a political historian looking back 20 or 30 years from now, what do you think is likely to be the Clinton legacy in defense matters or in foreign policy more generally? What ought the historians pay attention to out of your time there?

I’ll focus more in the first term, which I have personal familiarity with. First of all, we kept the peace for four years, which is no small thing. Probably had the fewest casualties in our armed forces those four years than periods before or after that. Second, he took strong and, as it turned out, decisive action in Haiti, in Bosnia, and later on in Kosovo. Those were not simple or easy issues to deal with. There’s been a whole history of failure in dealing with those kinds of problems. He can be criticized in Bosnia for how long it took him, but I myself am convinced that that was the hand he was dealt. 

When the Bush administration turned that problem over to the Europeans, that set up a dynamic which was very difficult to turn around. I think his way of turning it around was about as successful as it could be done. Maybe it could have been done sooner. But I think that action will be regarded by political scientists 20 years from now as having been an amazingly successful use of military force in a non-war situation to deal with the failed-state problem, to deal with humanitarian problems, to deal with virtually a genocide problem. 

I think political scientists will look at Rwanda as a vast failure. There are things we could have done there. I’ve offered you my opinion already that the President was very limited in what he could have done in Bosnia, given the debacle that occurred just a few months earlier in Somalia. But we could have done more than we did. Short of sending in a brigade, we could have rallied the UN. We could have offered support for the French and Belgians, who already had troops there. A whole set of smaller things we could have done that might have made a difference, and that we not only didn’t do, we didn’t even discuss.

Because of Somalia.

Yes. Even given the constraints of Somalia, there were some things we could have done that we did not do. I think political scientists 20 years from now will judge us harshly for that. I would, anyway, if I were a political scientist 20 years from now. 

What about in your own agenda? Did you leave office with unfinished business or regrets, things that you wish you’d been able to tackle and you didn’t get to?

Well, the big unfinished business is the loose nukes issue, which we got a tremendous start on. I mean, we actually dismantled 10,000 nuclear weapons in the three years I was Secretary, which was a lot. We got all nuclear weapons entirely out of Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine, which was—particularly considering that Kazakhstan is a Muslim nation with an uncertain leadership right now, and considering that Belarus is being led now by an unstable dictator—much better off having those nuclear weapons out of there. So those were major accomplishments. 

But it was work in process. It slacked off some during the second term. It slacked off even more during the Bush administration, not because anybody is opposed to doing it, but because doing it requires enormous political capital. I say again, as Secretary of Defense, I probably spent literally a third of my time, hours involved, working on that problem, dealing with it, the Defense Ministers and the Presidents, everyone we needed to deal with, making deals with them, trying to get the agreements to do those things.

Trying to find resources so that you can—

Diverting resources to get this done, fighting with the Congress. All of that took a lot of time, and there was political cost, of course. I could have been doing other things at that time, but I just judged that was the most important thing I could be doing. 

My successors did not have the same view. They agreed that these were good programs, but they were not willing to put themselves behind them personally to make them happen, and therefore, there was a slacking off of the effort. We have not since then had the same intensity of trying to deal with this problem. So to me, that’s a major piece of unfinished business that I would have liked to have seen done that’s not done.

The other one, of course, is North Korea. I left office with an uneasiness about the state of the North Korean situation, which bubbled up again in ’98 and ’99. I agreed, reluctantly, to go back and work part-time on that problem for the President to conduct the policy review, bring the Japanese and South Koreans on board, and present a new proposal to the North Koreans. All of that was very successful, I think, but it came to a conclusion in about September of 2000. Two months later a funny thing happened, which is, we had a new administration voted in.

At the time, I discussed with the President bringing that issue to a head before he left, concluding it, making the agreement with Kim Jong-Il, which could have been done and probably would have been successful. It probably would have taken the President’s personal time. I pushed it as far as I could push it as an envoy of the President. He agreed to that, was willing to do it, but in the time he had left, he could either work the Middle East problem, where he thought he had a peace agreement at hand, or North Korea. He weighed it and chose the Middle East. I think if I had been he, I might have made the same decision. It turned out to be the wrong decision. 

That’s another major source of regret. At the time I believed, and he believed, that the Bush administration would pick up where we left off with North Korea and follow through. Colin Powell said that in so many words. Up until the second month of the Bush administration, it looked like that was going to happen. Then the President, for reasons that completely mystify me, cut off all discussions and negotiations, ended it, and everything stopped for two years.

He did that at the humiliation of his own Secretary of State, who had already said he was going to proceed. But I must say that President Clinton’s judgment to choose the Middle East, and my acquiescing with that judgment, was based on the implicit belief that Colin Powell and the Bush administration would follow up on what it was we had been doing, which turned out to be wrong. But I was just as wrong in that as the President was.

Dr. Perry, we’re at our appointed hour, and we have a very broad understanding of public service in the Oral History Program. We spent a long time talking about yours through the course of the day, but I hope you understand that we consider the time that you spent with us today to be a public service also. Knowledge is important. There will be practitioners as well as students in the future who can come back to this and gain an understanding about the defense and foreign policy affairs of this administration.

Well, that’s the spirit in which I’ve had this discussion. As you can discern, I’ve been quite open with you in my views. 

The one thing I’ve been reluctant to talk about publicly are things that involve judgments of other people. I don’t like to put myself in the position, and yet that was implicit, if not explicit, in some of the things I said today. That was my only reluctance really to talk with you more openly. If what I’m saying seemed to be critical of Tony, for example, in one way or another, I don’t like to do that. I just described what it is I was doing, how I saw it at the time.

I think it’s very important for people to have that understanding, because you're an informed critic of what’s going on in the administration, and whenever you decide this can be open, readers can make an informed judgment about what your posture was on each of these points as well. So again, we’re very grateful. I know your time is very valuable, and you’ve been good to give us an entire day, so thank you very much.

Good, intelligent questions, I must say. You obviously did your homework.