Dennis Ross Oral History

This is the Dennis Ross interview, as part of the Clinton Presidential History Project, and let me thank you again for agreeing to sit with us today. Just for the record, we had a brief conversation before the tape started running, about the fundamental ground rules of confidentiality, and talked a little bit about Ambassador Ross’s book. 

Let me begin by asking a question about your preparation for the book itself. It’s really unusual for us to meet with somebody who has kept an extensive written record of their activities in an administration. It’s clear from some of the supplemental material in the book that you were a voracious note taker and diarist.

True. 

Tell us a little bit about that—how you decided to do that and when you actually found the time to keep these records.

[Laughs] It is an appropriate question, a logical question—and I have to admit, if I were to serve again, I don’t know if I would do it again, even though the value of having done it was obviously immeasurable. The reason I say that is—getting to the last part of your question, and then I’ll go back to why I began to do it—it was in fact a tremendous burden to do it. Meaning, to write up notes of something—or not so much to write up the notes, but to write up impressions of what had gone on, which is what I frequently did. I did it with a kind of discipline that even at times now makes me wonder about my sanity more than anything else. Because it was a tradeoff. Frequently it was a tradeoff between being able to sleep or doing this. That was especially true during the summits, where I was being called on to shape what we’d do every day. At the end of the day, whenever it was—and this could range from three to six in the morning—I would sit down and I would recapitulate what had happened, not only from the standpoint of recounting what had happened, but also trying to make sense of it in terms of what we had planned going into the day and what we would now have to do in light of what had not worked out or what had, in a sense, developed in a different direction.

So it was not a simple thing to do, from the standpoint of just forcing myself to do it. But it did have an incredible value at the time. Obviously, it had a value—if you use the word “measurable,” that in some ways understates it. I could not have written this book if I had not done that. Most people who know me will tell you I’m known for having a pretty remarkable memory, but nobody’s memory is that good, and certainly mine is not that good. Having done this, it provided an incredible baseline, and anybody who is in future such positions—even though I say I’m not sure I would want to do that again—I would really urge them to do it. Not just for the sake of history, but for the sake of giving them a constant perspective. 

It isn’t so important to have a running record, although as a negotiator, it was an incredible advantage for me. Everybody who dealt with me had this sense that I always knew exactly what they had said and when they had said it and could quote it back to them. What they didn’t realize was I actually had a running record and I could go refer to it. Even if I didn’t always refer to it right before a meeting, the fact is it was pretty prominent in my mind because of that. 

So, number one, it was an onerous task. When did I start it? I started it in 1994. Truth be told, there’s a story that goes with it that is less a testimony to my own foresight and more a response to a friend of mine. I got tired of saying to him why I wasn’t doing this. Tom Friedman began suggesting to me, around 1990, 1991, that I really ought to be doing this, during the first [George H. W.] Bush administration. At the time he was the lead diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times and he was traveling with us on every trip, every [James] Baker trip, and I was in a position where I was traveling with Baker on just about every one of his trips. 

Tom would say to me, “You’re having an incredible set of experiences. You’re in a position that nobody else is in—you really ought to keep some kind of record of this.” I would sort of say to him, “Yes, it’s a good idea,” and then do nothing about it, because where was I going to find the time to do it? And I didn’t do it in any meaningful sense. I would do certain things from time to time, but I did it in no meaningful sense during the first Bush administration. But every year Tom would raise it with me. I always knew when he would raise it with me. It wasn’t that we saw each other only once a year, but there was always a particular time when he would raise it with me. After his having raised it with me several years, I just decided, All right, the next time he asks me, I’m going to say, “You know what? I’m doing it.” Literally, that’s what triggered it to begin with.

Once I began to do it, it became kind of addictive. Then, once I saw beyond the addictive quality, I began to see the value of it. I wasn’t thinking about posterity, it was an incredible tool. It was an incredible tool in terms of negotiations because it really did always have me knowing exactly what had gone on and being able to recite it back to people—which gave me a big advantage in all discussions if for no other reason than no one would ever question what I said. If I quoted, saying, “This is what you said,” no one would challenge it. That, by the way, is not the norm in these kinds of things. 

So that was one built-in advantage. But there was another. It gave me a lot of perspective. It’s very hard to maintain perspective when you’re in the midst of a process like this. No matter how hard you try, no matter what your cast of mind is, no matter how much you pride yourself in terms of trying to do that and to take a step back, it’s very hard to do. There are the demands of each day. There are the limitations of time. There are all the different things you’re addressing. It’s a very hard thing to do, even when you’re conscious about it. 

Indeed, I put together a team that was made up of people who didn’t necessarily have the same predispositions that I had. Having constant discussions was a good way to preserve a certain perspective—but it wasn’t as good as this. What this did for me was allow me to go back and look at the discussions we had previously had, expectations we had had, and compare the expectations to what had actually happened. You wouldn’t necessarily engage in that, normally. Even if you surround yourself with a team of people and you’re having constant discussions, the discussions are still, too much of the time, driven by where you are at that moment. They don’t give you the opportunity to sort of sit back and say, “All right, this is what we thought six months ago—what actually happened?” 

So it became, from that standpoint, a remarkable tool for me. It had an addicting quality and then it had a kind of unmistakable benefit for me. So how did I do it? I wasn’t necessarily keeping a dairy per se when I was in the midst of the trips, but I did have voluminous notes. For good or ill, I’m one of these people who is a constant note taker, and in every meeting. 

Now, there’s an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is you’re always taking notes. Especially when I was talking to somebody, I was taking notes of what they were saying. It’s pretty hard to keep notes of what you’re saying. Although I would begin to make notations in the margin of my responses, I mean a shorthand response. Then at the end of a trip I’d come back and I’d have all this and I would refer to it and I would write it up. I would just go ahead on the computer at home. I would basically write up exactly what happened. 

But I wouldn’t just recount what happened. I would sort of start off with, Here were the premises for this trip. This is what we were trying to achieve on this trip. Whether it was a Secretary trip, a President’s trip, or my trip. Then I would basically say, All right, here’s what happened — how did it compare to what we thought we were going to be able to do? Then I would write my own effort to account for the difference. Why had things not worked out the way we had anticipated? Was it something that we simply hadn’t understood? Was it some extraneous development—it wasn’t the case of anticipating or not anticipating, things happen by accident. There are developments that either you can anticipate or not anticipate, there are surprises. Was there something here that still made the assumptions valid but basically had changed the circumstances? In light of the circumstances, you had to adjust behavior. The assumptions could still apply. Or was there something wrong about the assumptions that I saw one way going in and it turned out I didn’t read them the right way? Once I did this, then I was really hooked on it. 

It’s quite exceptional in contemporary Washington, and high political circles, the executive branch in particular, which is one of the reasons that we think the oral histories are so valuable—because the contemporaneous written record doesn’t exist. Part of it is the pressure of time, part of it is just a fear of what an investigator might turn up. Were you ever concerned about something of that nature?

You know, it’s a wonderful question, especially given things that subsequently happened in this administration, and have happened since. Perhaps I should have been. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t, mostly because somehow I guess I separated in my own mind what I was doing. I saw it in terms of its analytical value, its instrumental value. Obviously, no matter what I say about the kind of firewall I thought I was creating from my day-to-day existence—because these were a set of impressions about what was going on—still, if there had been some kind of investigation, this would have been a wonderful thing for someone to be able to go through. 

Which raises another question, would I do it again, from that standpoint. I don’t know the answer to that. I’m saying to you now, I don’t know if I would take the time and the trouble to do it, just because the demands of doing it. But I would have to, again, think about the consequences, the potential consequences of doing something like this and how it could be used for entirely different purposes. So I honestly don’t know the answer to your question. But I can still say I do believe it was a tremendous value.

Again, I concur entirely. I think you have a distinguished career in public service doing what you did, but there was a decided public service in actually reducing this to writing and providing people in the future with the kind of account that really is quite extraordinary and quite rare. This is something people are going to rely on for a very long time. As an aside, I hope that you’ll take all of these notes, and at some point your own archive will go someplace where future scholars can make use of the raw materials.

I probably will turn over all those documents. You know, it’s interesting, I gave the State Department historian what was more or less the original version of my writing, which wasn’t the book per se, and which was substantial in length, as you might imagine. But one of the reasons I wrote the book was also I felt there needed to be a record. Especially because the Middle East is so consumed by mythologies, I felt there was a need to have a record. Some people have questioned me and said, “Others draw different conclusions from this period than you do.” And I say, “Yes, but nobody questions the facts.” I’m not saying that you have to draw the same conclusions I drew, but I am saying, so look at the facts. Draw your own conclusions. 

This is actually what took place. It is very possible to look at the same set of facts and interpret them differently and to draw different lessons from them and to see a set of implications that aren’t the ones that I saw. That’s fair. That’s the nature of the process. I don’t claim to have a corner on the market of truth. But we shouldn’t be arguing over what the facts were. Had I not done this, then it would have been vastly easier to do that. 

Just an interesting aside in this regard. One of the reasons for doing the maps. There was a mythology developed about what we offered. It’s very interesting that if you travel now, especially among Palestinians, you don’t hear that at all. Before I did the book, that was out there. “Well, you know, nothing was offered.” They would constantly repeat that. Again, that for me was an important reason to do this.

Let me take you back to 1992 and 1993.

Sure.

You were going through a transitional period in a couple of ways.

Yes.

One is that you had worked for a former President and you’re moving in, unexpectedly I think, into a new administration.

Right.

I wonder if you would tell us a bit more about that—how you went about developing the confidences of the people you were working with in a new administration, when you’d been on the campaign of an opponent.

Trying to beat the same people— 

Exactly. And secondly, as a part of the transition question, as you were being accepted into the new administration, how were you developing a sense of the people you were working with and communicating that to the people you already knew as your counterparts in other countries?

Let me divide it into two parts because I had—in the first Bush administration I had a broad set of responsibilities, but especially a very important Soviet responsibility. In that case I talked to Strobe Talbott, whom I had known for a long time. During the transition, before even he knew what it was he would be doing, I said to him, “Look, I have a back channel relationship with a key player on the Soviet side. I really feel like it’s important for you to talk to him. I don’t know what’s going to go with the new administration. Maybe you don’t, either, but I feel like you should create your own relationship.” So in that case I made a conscious effort to create a kind of handover.

In the Middle East it was more complicated. For one thing, the people with whom I really had a back channel relationship among Israelis had existed primarily before [Yitzhak] Rabin had been elected. Rabin came in and Rabin was not someone who invested in one person so that you could count on that person as being the channel. There was one person when he was Defense Minister, someone named Oded Eran, who at the time was a number two in the embassy here, who had a special relationship with him, at least in part. Rabin was a great compartmentalizer. So there was no one about whom you could say, boy, this is the guy to use if you want to know what he thinks. Between the time he was elected and the advent of the Clinton administration, there wasn’t anybody who fit that role yet. So there was no natural kind of back channel to identify with. When Itamar Rabinovich became the Ambassador, then you had such a channel, but he didn’t become the Ambassador right away. He became the negotiator for him with the Syrians, here, but he didn’t become the Ambassador right away. So, during that transition, you didn’t have the same kind of handoff there. 

With Egypt it was Osama el-Baz, and it was easy to tell. The people coming in with Clinton—Martin Indyk, who I knew well and communicated with the same way I communicated with Strobe. I conveyed to him, “Look, here’s who I would try to contact.” These were people that Martin also happened to know, so it wasn’t like you had to introduce them. In some cases where they already knew the people, they just didn’t know, look, this is someone you need to know has been a channel that I have used. 

The other thing is, inevitably, you create your own channels when you come in. So just because this is a channel I had used didn’t mean that this person was also going to be the channel for a new administration. But it could be part of a handoff, part of a transition. In the case of Syria, the Ambassador here was someone I had developed a special relationship with. Here again, Martin knew him. During transition, Martin assumed he’d end up at the NSC [National Security Council] and he was acting as transition for them, but again, he didn’t know that. 

Now, when the administration comes in—first of all, as you said, quite rightly, I didn’t know if I was going to be asked to stay. The truth is, having gone to the White House, I had no reason to believe that I would be asked to stay, even though I went back to the State Department very quickly after the election. So it was a time of uncertainty. The fact is, I had planned, Martin was the head actually of this place [Washington Institute for Near East Policy]—even though there was an assumption that I had been here before, and I had not been here before—but he wanted me to succeed him here. It seemed like a logical thing to do and that’s what we had planned, that I would come here when he went in.

So I didn’t assume that I would be asked to stay. When I was asked to stay, it wasn’t until the middle of January and I was asked to stay on a transitional basis. 

During that initial period there was an awkwardness, especially with the Middle East people, because during the Bush administration I had run everything on the Middle East. There were people who were working for me. As head of the policy planning staff I had a small group there who worked for me and then people in NEA [Near Eastern Affairs bureau, Department of State] understood that basically they had to work in effect for me or through me. And yet, when I had gone to the White House, that had removed me from the day-to-day. [Lawrence] Eagleburger had actually really resisted the idea that I would go with Baker because he said the perception will be that that responsibility will no longer reside in the State Department. If I’m sitting over in the White House, it means that’s where the responsibility will be. It’s true, many of the people from the Middle East who came would stop at the State Department and then would want to come over to the White House to see me. 

So already there was a period where people in NEA were feeling that maybe they could pursue things, in a way, without me. My successor as the head of policy planning had been my senior deputy, Bill Burns, and he would still basically check things with me over at the White House. But when I came back to the State Department, I came back in a kind of special role for Eagleburger. That was to do all sorts of things, and then, during the transition, to help shape the briefings for the transition. 

When I stayed on initially, the people in NEA thought, All right, it’s a new era. After all, he’s no longer in that role. What they were told was that I was there as a kind of special advisor to the Secretary. I should be shown everything, I would take part in meetings. There certainly was an effort, I think, to make sure I was included in certain things, but there was a very strong desire to make sure that that was it, and that the locus of decision-making had changed. 

Your level of interaction overseas at that point was pretty restricted, I would guess?

People would call me and I felt the responsibility to say, “Look, I’m in a different role. I will give you my impressions, I’ll give you my advice, but you really need to be talking to the people who have the day-to-day responsibility now.” 

There were two different levels here. One level was that the people who had the responsibility were jealous of it. Look, if I were in their shoes and I was sitting up on the seventh floor, I would have done everything I could to sort of build my own responsibility, my own turf, and I wouldn’t have wanted someone like me to be affecting what they were doing. 

I think they tried to husband—I mean, Ed Djerejian and the group around him, including people who had worked for me before—they felt, All right, it’s a new day, it’s a new era, and this was a chance for them to be the ones defining the policy. They knew that I would have a chance to respond to it, but in the first instance they saw themselves formulating it. They didn’t feel the need to come to me to check with their formulation. They felt that I’d had my shot with it. It was awkward from the standpoint that I felt, Look, if I’m going to have a shot at it, isn’t it in your interests that I have a shot at it while you’re developing it? So it wasn’t a perfect situation and I certainly wasn’t going to beg them to be part of their formative discussions. 

So what I did was the old Sun Tzu notion that you seek out your own path to be able to affect things, which is what I did. So they would work at one level. Tom Donilon was the Chief of Staff and probably the closest personal advisor to [Warren] Christopher, sat next to him in the office right adjacent. I still had the same office that I had before, which was in what was known as “Mahogany Row.” When Christopher asked me to stay on this transitional basis, it was, “You’ll have the same person who was your assistant before, you’ll have access to me whenever you want it. If we go to the Middle East, you’ll take part in those trips. I’m asking you not just to be advisor on the Middle East, but to be an advisor on everything, so I want you to feel free to write whatever you want and to give it to me.”

I also knew that you don’t frivolously ask for time with the Secretary. You don’t ask for time with the Secretary just to give him your thoughts. You pick your moments there, too, because the demands on the Secretary are high and the Secretary has to know that whatever you’re saying, the Secretary is able to do something with it. There’s no value in going and having a discussion that might be very intelligent, that might highlight all sorts of problems. That’s fine for one time, but all you’re doing, if you’re telling a Secretary, “Here’s your problem,” without telling the person how to fix the problem—well, they’re not going to spend a lot of time with you after that. So I was, I think, wise enough about how these things work and how personalities operate, that I wasn’t going to seek time with the Secretary unless I really had something that I felt would affect what he was doing. 

But by the same token, I would spend a lot of time with Donilon, and I would give him a sense of things. Some of this was my doing, some of it was his. It’s interesting that he came in feeling that there was a lot he needed to learn—and it was substantively, not bureaucratically, not politically. He saw me as an amazing resource for him. And I wasn’t overburdened in terms of demands on my time. So it was a kind of symbiotic relationship from the beginning, because it gave me a perfect point of entry to try to influence what was going on and it gave him this stockpile of information and experience that he could take advantage of. 

So I spent not a lot of time with former colleagues, and I spent much more time, I would say, with him. He would make sure I was in particular meetings, because, again, he would know all the meetings. I was not in a position to know what were critical meetings. One of the things, when you sit as a kind of special advisor, unless you’re being given the Secretary’s schedule, unless you’re being alerted by the people around the Secretary, the schedulers, “Here’s what’s coming up today,” you won’t know. Especially in NEA, they had no particular reason to volunteer things to me and I think it’s fair to say they didn’t. 

As I said, it wasn’t a source of anger to me. I understood the ways of the world. This is the big leagues, and this is the way it is. But I also sought out my own way to influence the process. I was not interested in sitting there if I wasn’t going to influence things. If that was the case, I could be here [at the Institute]. 

But ultimately they saw that your way was a way that had value to them, especially through Tom. 

Absolutely, that’s what happened.

We will interview Tom next week and he sends his regards, by the way. 

I have a very high regard for him for all sorts of reasons. Anyway, you’ll say hi to him. 

So that very much is what materialized at the time. Now there still was a different kind of awkwardness, which was, I literally felt there were times that people would be talking and I’d walk into the room and they’d go, “Oh! He’s here.” And that had nothing to do with NEA, that was that I was the Bush person, and I was the only Bush person. You’d just gone through the crucible of a campaign. What campaigns do is they create more differences than might exist in reality. You have to sharpen your differences and it’s highly emotional. It’s a zero sum mentality. Everything the other side is seen as doing is designed to sort of do you in. I wasn’t just a guy who was sitting in the State Department, I was sitting over in the White House trying to beat them. 

With Baker.

With Baker. So there were all sorts of good reasons to have questions about me. On the one hand they were incredibly nice to me, but on the other hand they couldn’t help themselves. If I were in their shoes, I would have had the same instinctive reaction. And even though some of these people were people I’d known for a long time, there still was this sense of, “You know, he was with the other guys.” 

So in that initial period, I felt very much an outsider and I was sort of mad at myself for thinking there could be a kind of seamless involvement. I thought, well, how naive could I be that I could think that? 

Now, the lucky thing for me was that there were people who did everything they could to integrate me. Tom was one, Martin Indyk was another. So Martin would constantly be telling me things that were going on. Because of that, I was incredibly well informed. And if you’re well informed, then you have a lot that you can do. 

So during this period, it might have been awkward, but I still felt like I could make a contribution and that I was making a contribution. But it was frustrating for me, and it wasn’t just the awkwardness. I had gone from being not just a guy who would formulate and conceptualize, I was a guy who did. I was a guy who implemented. And suddenly I was not the guy. The role I could have was to be a guy who offered his thoughts on what should be done. I could even offer my thoughts on how it should be done. But I wasn’t the guy to actually do it. 

As time went by, that just wasn’t satisfying to me. In effect, having done the things I’d done before, my attitude was, “You know what, I can be on the outside and offer my thoughts. I don’t need to be on the inside and offer thoughts.” The value of being on the outside is I’m freer, because here I’m bound by what goes on. If there are things that are done that I really disagree with, even if I’ve had a chance, I’ve had my shot, okay. But I have no right, then, if I’m going to stay on the inside, to criticize it, I can’t say openly what I think. I thought there were things that were being done that I disagreed with. Even when I had a chance to affect the “what,” frequently I thought the “how” was done in ways that I would not have done.

Anything in particular that you can remember from this early period?

Yes, I thought that what was being done in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations—it was a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation—I didn’t agree with how we were dealing with the Israelis. I didn’t agree with what we were saying to the Palestinians. I didn’t agree with how we were doing things with the Syrians. It wasn’t even so much the “what” as the “how.”

There were certain things that were being done and also certain things that were being communicated, both to the Israelis and to the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, on key issues related to trying to negotiate the equivalent of a kind of autonomy. How to approach the issue of jurisdiction. What was the character of the discussions with the Israelis. What was the character of the discussions with the Palestinians, which I thought, especially with Rabin in as Prime Minister, created needless suspicions on the Israeli side, and raised expectations on the Palestinian side that I didn’t think we’d be able to deliver on. At least from the State Department angle. So I would try to temper those things by going to Tom or by talking to Martin, and that would have some effect. But I felt like it was always a rear-guard action.

You’re a coach rather than being on the field at that time.

Right. And the truth is, even if in the end the basic postures that were then adopted were the ones that I wanted, which in the end was actually true, I couldn’t complain about what the actual policy was. But I didn’t like the process of how it was being carried out. I didn’t like finding out too much of the time after the fact about what had been done and how it had been done. Then having to go in and try to correct it. 

So as I became more frustrated with that, I went to Tom and said, “Look, Tom, I want to leave. The idea was this was transition and I think we’ve gone through the initial period.” I went with Christopher on the first trip out to the area. I had a good chance to help on that and Christopher, I think, had done well on the trip. I felt like, Look, the handoff that needed to be done has been done and it’s time for me to move on. And so forth. 

Tom didn’t want me to go. So Tom tried to come up with all sorts of ways. He said, “How about we create a new undersecretary position for you that will be an undersecretary to deal with local conflicts?” This actually, in retrospect, was probably a very good idea. It was the kind of thing that might actually have been a good thing to have done. But I didn’t want to do it. For one thing, I had told my wife the only circumstance under which I would stay was not to work on all these other issues, it was to work only on the Arab-Israeli issue. Basically, I would have had a hard time rationalizing to her my staying for what was something different. So I said no to that.

Then, at one point, he finally said to me, “What would it take to get you to stay?” I told him what was both truthful but what I also thought was an impossibility. And the two can be consistent. So I said to him, “The only basis on which I could stay, the only basis on which I couldn’t look in the mirror and say, ‘Gee, I’m going anyway,’ is if you made me the negotiator.’” And I said to him, literally, I said, “You’re not going to do that because it means you’ve got to upset the whole bureaucratic structure here. Because you’re not going to have a negotiator NEA will absolutely oppose, and frankly, if I were in their shoes, I would too. But that’s the only basis on which I could stay.” 

I thought that was the end of it—until I was at my going-away party and got a call from Peter Tarnoff telling me that the Secretary decided that that’s exactly what he was going to appoint me to be.

I asked some questions. I said, “That’s fine, but I’ve got to know what the ground rules are. I don’t work through NEA. On this issue, I go directly to the Secretary—I just go to the Secretary and I go to the President, I don’t go through anybody else. NEA is there to provide support for me; they’re not there to in any way be a separate operation on this. This issue is run by me.” 

He said, “That’s what the decision is and the President has signed off on it.” Well, at that point I could have said, “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean it.” [Laughter] So that’s how it evolved and it was really because of Tom. It would not have happened, I think, without Tom.

Let me ask you a broader question and see if you can help us understand something about President Clinton in this issue area. You’ve got, admittedly, a very bright person becoming President of the United States, but somebody who has been a Governor of a small state and who doesn’t have much experience in foreign policy. He comes in, in January of 1993, in the middle of some very important developments in your issue area. 

Yes.

Can you give us an assessment of your sense about President Clinton’s knowledge base when he took office, the processes and procedures that you and others went through to help educate him, and some assessment of his learning curve as he’s dealing with these issues at this period?

Let me put it in some perspective, at least from where I sat. The first time I met with him was as part of a small group and it was in March, just before his visit, the meeting with Rabin. I hadn’t met with him prior to that time. Obviously I had spent a lot of time with Martin, and then I spent time with the transition team, going through briefings for them. I know that Sandy [Samuel] Berger and Tony Lake had organized a number of briefings for him, with Martin, I think, being his lead briefer. 

What I had until March was all secondhand about what it was he knew or didn’t know. What I was being told was very much what you were saying. One, this is not an area that he had focused on in the past. Two, his priorities are domestic issues. He got elected on the basis of domestic economic issues and that’s where his priority and major emphasis is going to be. Three, that he has some instincts, including some instincts about how to deal with the Israelis. He had been critical of Bush on the settlement issue in the campaign and he had a sense also that you don’t do well by creating a problem with the Israelis who are, in the first instance, your allies, and he wanted to be able to operate on that basis. 

He didn’t want to repeat what he saw was some of the tension of the Bush administration in the Israeli relationship, although, to be fair, the relationship would have probably been different with Rabin as Prime Minister than it had been with [Yitzhak] Shamir as Prime Minister. Indeed, at the end of the Bush administration, you actually had the loan guarantees deal done with Rabin when he comes here in August. 

But one other point is, when Clinton meets Rabin, he meets Rabin as a candidate. There was a lot of unease because Rabin had a certain history of sort of favoring the Republicans. He had been Ambassador here when [Richard] Nixon was President, he was not subtle back in 1972 about his preferences between Nixon and [George] McGovern. So there was a lot of anxiety on the part of Clinton before meeting Rabin. I was picking up all this from a different vantage point.

It’s very helpful.

Anyway, he comes in, having sought to reassure Rabin as a candidate, and he comes in not having a lot of confidence in his knowledge of these issues or, my impression was, of foreign policy issues more generally. The evolution is very interesting—which I can get to in a second—but in this period, he listens much more than anything else. He asks questions, but also, he doesn’t want there to be problems. He’s not looking for problems. The first problems can damage him politically. He doesn’t want to be damaged politically for all sorts of reasons, but he certainly doesn’t want to be damaged politically when this isn’t even his agenda. His agenda is the economy and he doesn’t need to be damaged politically in a way that could affect him in terms of that. 

Can I interrupt? Don’t lose your train of thought, but I want to get you to refine something. You said that he had certain instincts. Are you implying favorable instincts towards the Israelis?

Yes.

Okay. On balance, he’s coming into office, and if the scales were tilted a little bit, it’s in the direction of the Israelis. 

And, if anything, maybe during the Bush years, there had been a little bit—there was too much tension in the relationship with the Israelis, number one. Part of this had also been in the kind of briefings he’d gotten. Look, the Israelis are the ones you’re asking to do things. The Israelis are the ones who have to give up things, and you need to win their confidence if you want them to make hard moves. That’s a lot of what he’d been briefed, and that made sense to him. It made sense to him from a practical standpoint, it made sense to him from a political standpoint. So he comes in sort of with that kind of mindset. 

In the very first briefing, at least that I’m a part of, what does come through is he wants to know what Rabin expects out of the meeting. It tells you right away, at least in retrospect, that one thing that Clinton had that served him well as President and as the President in foreign policy—and that, in fact, any President has to have—is an instinct for the other guy. What are this guy’s needs going to be? What’s he going to be focused on?

Baker used to be criticized because he was too political. I remember dealing with people in the Foreign Service who would sometimes make cracks to me about, “Well, I know there are political concerns here.” I remember saying to one of them, “And the person who’s coming here, who is he? Do you think he rose up through the Foreign Service? Do you think that’s who their Foreign Minister is? What do you think his considerations are?” I said, “Guess what, they’re political animals, and you’d better have somebody here who understands that.” Well, that was Clinton. He understood it instinctively: What does Rabin want out of this meeting? 

I recall him saying, “Are we going to have any problems in the meeting?” And the nuclear issue came up. I remember in this initial briefing he wanted to know, “So how do we handle that?” The thrust of the briefing was, “Look, this is your first meeting with him as President and the key to this is for you to build a relationship of trust with him so that he knows he can count on you. There’s this real sense of opportunity now. Rabin is someone who wants to do things, it’s not Shamir, who wants to do nothing. You have a Prime Minister who wants to get things done. His priority is Syria more than the Palestinians. Even though he has declared that he’s going to get a deal, an interim deal, with the Palestinians in nine months. So he wants to do things. He’s not looking to avoid doing things. But don’t assume you can push him into doing things. You need to embrace him, in a way.” 

One of the mantras of the meeting ends up being his saying to Rabin, “You take risks for peace, and we’ll be there to protect you against those risks.” Which, by the way, helps to create his own sense of responsibility later on when Rabin is assassinated. This weighs very heavily on Clinton emotionally: “I said to him, ‘You take risks for peace and we’ll be there’ and now he’s dead.” So you take it back to that first meeting because that was with Clinton.

So you were going to tell us a bit, then, about the learning curve as it moves through that early stage.

You see in him a rise in interest, but it isn’t just a rise in interest. You begin to see in him someone who suddenly begins to feel like, Well, hell, I know this stuff. He begins to deal with leaders and he begins to see, There’s no great mystery here. There’s not some oracle out there who knows everything and I have to stand at their feet. Moreover, over the course of a year—now I’m seeing it, in this administration I’m really only seeing it from the Middle East perspective. Although with Donilon, Donilon is asking me about everything, even after I’m the negotiator—

He’s asking you about other things?

He still wants to talk about other issues.

That really doesn’t come out in the book, and that’s something I’d like to have you elaborate on.

Before I become negotiator, before Christopher’s first trip to Europe to consult on Bosnia, he wants to talk about what to do there. I’m saying something that I think probably ends up resonating with him, especially after the trip, because the trip was seen as a disaster. I said, “Consulting doesn’t mean you go and ask someone to do. Consulting means you go and say, ‘Look, this is what we’ve decided to do, now how can we do it together? If there’s something that you think is wrong with this, tell us what it is. If there’s something that we could do to make it easier for you to join with us to get this done, tell us what it is. If there’s a particular problem here, let’s see how we manage it. But this is what we intend to do.’ Don’t go and ask them what we should do.” Which is, in fact, the way that trip ended up going. It ended up being a disaster as a result. 

I had said it to Tom before, “Don’t do that.” And Tom was saying, “How would you guys do this kind of trip?” And I would tell him. So later on, even after I’m negotiator, he brings me into some meetings, not just discussions, but into meetings. He has me join a meeting with the Secretary and Strobe and the Europeanists on NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] enlargement. 

I don’t mean to suggest I was a pivotal player—I wasn’t. But he wanted to bring me into these things. In March, again before I’m the negotiator, they asked me to go with Christopher to his first meeting with [Andrei] Kozyrev, then the Russian Foreign Minister, not just to do the Middle East part of the trip, but to go there as well. I brief Christopher on my view of Kozyrev, my impressions of what you need to do with him, what his own particular problems are. So that’s before, and then even after. So he’ll still talk to me about things. Then Christopher and I spent so much time together. And I’ll come back—I want to come back to the issue of Clinton and his evolution. 

Sure.

Because I don’t really have much, I don’t talk to Clinton about non–Middle East issues. There’s one time later on, I’m over there for something related to the negotiations, and Sandy Berger says, “Dennis knows a lot about these Russian issues, too,” because they were talking about it when I was there. I made a comment, is all. But I played no role there with Clinton. But I did with Christopher, even over time. Christopher, throughout his tenure, would ask me what I thought on other issues. Sometimes I would volunteer it—I would say, “I know you’re not asking, but I’ll just tell you for what it’s worth.” I wouldn’t say that was a normal part of doing business, but with Tom it was a continuing part of doing business. 

Now, clearly, the more I was ensconced as the negotiator, I was traveling on my own more, I was less available, it wasn’t quite the way it had been before, but I was still there to do that sort of thing. I would say the one issue where he probably brought me in for continuing discussions had mostly to do, first, with the Partnership for Peace in NATO, and then with NATO enlargement and how would you manage the Soviets—I mean, the Russians. How would you manage the Russians? How would you deal with [Boris] Yeltsin? What were key kinds of concerns?

You still had familiarity with the back-channel contacts that you’d been using, although I would guess that they weren’t very fresh.

I no longer had any real back channels per se, although sometimes, when some of the people were in the building they would come by and see me. Mostly it would just be to say hello. That was really all it was, although sometimes they would say, “Here’s sort of where we stand.” So there was a little bit of that, but I wouldn’t exaggerate it because the truth is, you had somebody else doing that. And Strobe, I mean, here was a guy, very close to the President, very close to the Secretary, and one thing he got immediately was the value of back channels.

One of the things that I thought was a mistake on the Middle East stuff was that there were no back channels developed in that interim period, at least none that I thought were being used the way you could use a back channel. The value of a back channel is multiple. You use back channels to condition. You use back channels to educate. You use back channels to learn. You use back channels to communicate. None of the kind of back channels that I’d had, I didn’t see them being used effectively. Strobe did. Strobe, from the beginning, got it immediately and developed his own. I obviously didn’t have those; I wasn’t the one doing it and I didn’t have the time, so I didn’t really play much of a role. But Tom wanted me less because I knew specifics of what was going on and more because he would like to say to me, “All right, here’s where we are—what do you think about it?” 

Frequently, I would say, on Bosnia, up until [Richard] Holbrooke really took a role—he would continue to talk to me about Bosnia. So I would say Bosnia, Partnership for Peace, NATO enlargement—those would be the main areas where I would still be asked my point of view.

[to Paul Martin] Paul, I’m not meaning to dominate this. Let me follow up with a couple of things and I’ll come back to you. First, Bosnia seemed like an interesting parallel because there’s the Muslim question there and it’s something that you’re having to deal with intimately. Were there some relevant overlaps there? Was this an issue that resonated at all in the Middle East? Were they at all concerned about Bosnian Muslims?

Not much. The Jordanians would talk about it. The Saudis would give some money. They paid very little attention, in truth. I mean, it’s actually one of the great ironies, when you think about it. There is a history here of us doing for Muslims and getting very little credit for it in the Muslim world, truthfully. 

Why?

It’s a good question. Somehow, it’s hard to fully explain it, even for me, and I’ve thought about it. Some of it is that the sense of grievance is so deeply embedded towards us, towards the western world, that when we do certain things, it doesn’t tend to permeate. In the case of the Bosnians, I don’t want to—I’m dismissing it a little too quickly, because there were, from time to time, pleas for us to do more. There were. Especially between ’93 and ’95. But that also is one of the reasons why in the end we don’t get as much credit as we should, because they feel like, Look at how you let them suffer for so long. That then fit again with this mindset that’s been built up over years. “You always let Muslims pay the price.”

Okay. 

So here again, “You let them pay the price. Yes, you finally did something, but look when you finally did it.” Since there’s never any sense of inherent responsibility on their side, and they’ll always presume more power on ours. I used to say about myself, if I had even 10 percent of the power they thought that I had, I would have been a very happy man. But that’s the nature of conspiracy. It’s the sense of conspiracy, of being imposed upon: “You could do things, you didn’t do them.” So when we finally do, we don’t get the credit for it that we should. I think that helps explain the Bosnia case. 

It would be wrong not to say that, in many meetings with the Saudis and others during this time, when Christopher would have them, they would raise this issue. They would. And they would be frustrated by what they would see as we’re not doing enough. But then when we did something, it was like, “Well, okay, you should have done it a long time ago.”

I’ll ask a neophyte question on this. Was there a kind of ethnic division—ethnic may not be the right word—you’ve got a kind of European versus—

To some extent there probably was some of that. Just like the real issue today, which is quite striking—we kill a very small percentage of Muslims compared to the Muslims that the insurgents are killing. But most of the Muslims that they’re killing are Shia and, unfortunately, the dirty little secret in the Islamic world is that it’s mostly Sunni, and they don’t much care about the Shia. So mosques getting blown up, you would think that should create an incredible sense of outrage. Do you hear any great outrage coming out of the Sunni world when this happens? The silence is deafening. 

The Bosnian Muslims are also Sunni, so there should have been some concern there, and to be fair to them, there was some concern. But not as much as they say because, again, when we finally acted, there was not this great reservoir of good will that emerged as a result. Part of that is also saying, “Yes, it’s important, but it’s less important. Our real grievances are the following and you’re not dealing with that.”

One other question about other issue areas and then I want to steer you back to the question about Clinton’s learning curve. Anything in Northern Ireland? That seems another place where you’ve got controversy and where negotiations were going on. Were you ever brought into that?

Not much. I think it was more—I can recall an occasional comment on it. But it had more to do with the difficulty of the decommissioning of weapons. For any national liberation movement, giving up their weapons is the hardest thing to do, for a variety of reasons. But not much on that. I recall one time on Air Force One with Clinton, he raised Northern Ireland in a favorable way and I pointed out, “But look, you’ve been there, you’re not seeing anything implemented.” 

He thought I was taking it as a criticism of the Middle East, and I said, “No, no, I’m not. You want success where you can get it, but my point is, the most important thing we have to do is not just get agreements, the most important thing we have to do is get them implemented.” You see, even in a place like Northern Ireland, where you finally get the agreement, it’s very hard to actually implement it. I said, “In a sense it’s not a criticism there, it’s a reminder for us, what our problems are here. We have even a harder time getting implementation.” My message was, partly, that it was because we don’t create a lot of accountability. 

Now, on Clinton and his evolution, I guess one point I wanted to make, Clinton is profoundly affected by Oslo. When we talk about this, he quickly grasps that this is historic. The public person in Clinton, the politician in Clinton, understands how this captures the attention of the world. He grasped one thing more quickly than I did. Rabin didn’t want [Yasser] Arafat to be there. Rabin was still working through his own emotional difficulties of having done this deal. He was hesitant about it. What comes through, what I describe in the book, is literally he’s on the phone with Christopher and I’m listening in on this phone call. Both of us are out in California, and he informs him that there’s been an agreement. But he’s still not sure of it. He wants to know what Christopher thinks of it. 

So, the next day, secretly, [Shimon] Peres, the Foreign Minister, and the Foreign Minister of Norway, [Johan Jørgen] Holst, will fly to California to meet him secretly, they just need to know where, set up the circumstances. But Rabin tells him on the phone, he’s still sort of not sure what it is, but he wants Christopher to hear what it is. He basically is saying to Christopher, “I want to hear back from you what you think of this.” I’m listening to all this. Then when Rabin gets off the phone, and we’re sure he’s off the phone, then Christopher says to me, “Well, what do you make of that?”

I said, “There’s a couple of things here. One, part of this is that he really does want to see what our reaction is, genuinely, because this was done not with us. Partly it also is a function that you saw him two and a half weeks ago, and when you raised a question about this he was dismissive of it. So he’s feeling a little bit uneasy about that.” I didn’t put that in the book. I put in the other explanation. I didn’t put that in the book, that he’s probably feeling—because, one thing about Rabin, Rabin was this guy who couldn’t tell a lie. I mean, literally. I can’t emphasize this enough. Rabin couldn’t lie, physically, emotionally, he couldn’t lie. It didn’t mean he always told you the whole truth, and it didn’t mean he always told you things that wouldn’t mislead, but he would never say something that was actually untruthful. So when he was dismissive, it may have reflected what he thought. It may have still been, “Look, they don’t have an agreement yet and I’m not sure they’ll actually have an agreement”—because, in his own inner being, he still fundamentally distrusted Arafat. But he knew that what he had said to Christopher two and a half weeks ago was misleading. 

So part of the reason might have been, having still been dismissive two weeks ago, he was still sort of saying, “Look, I’m still not sure. So this is consistent with what I told you a couple of weeks ago.” Part of it may have been that he’d had a hard time, so he genuinely wanted to know. 

When we embrace it after the meeting, or at the meeting, and Christopher tells Clinton about this, Clinton is immediately enthusiastic. Now, when we go over to brief the first time—he’s going to go out and meet the press. We’ve agreed we’re going to have a ceremony here. The assumption at this point is that it’s going to be Peres and Abu Mazen who are coming, not Rabin and Arafat. Clinton asks the question, “What do I say about Arafat?” Martin Indyk and I both give complementary explanations about why Arafat won’t be there—decision of the parties. First we explain that Rabin doesn’t want it, he’s not ready for that yet. I can see that Clinton is not really persuaded, but he doesn’t fight us on it. 

Then when he goes out and gets the question, he basically answers, “Well, he’s welcome to come if he wants.” Martin and I turn to each other and we go, “Well, he’s coming!” 

So we go back in. The first thing Clinton does when we walk in—and this is a pattern that’s repeated often when I will have briefed him on one thing to say publicly and he comes out and he does it a little differently—the first thing he’ll want to say is, “Look, I felt I had to do it,” or “I didn’t feel I had a choice,” or “It came at me a certain way.” He says to Martin and me—because he can see us looking at him as soon as we walk in—he says, “You know, I just didn’t feel I could answer it differently.” Then he said, “And besides, I don’t think you can do this without him.” He didn’t quite say what I’m about to say, but what he meant was—and Martin and I agreed afterwards that he was probably right and we were wrong—the whole idea was that Arafat has to own this, and if he’s not here, he doesn’t own it. 

But I think there was one other element. I think also Clinton thought that if you were going to turn this into a big thing—he wanted it to be, and felt it should be a big thing. I’d briefed him on the significance of this. I said, “You’re taking an existential conflict and you’re making it a political conflict. This is the end of diplomacy through denial. This is the end of diplomacy through rejection. This is a historic breakthrough.” I think Clinton felt, if it’s a historic breakthrough, it has to reflect it in terms of who’s here. 

He understood that instinctively better than we did, because we were in a sense too attentive to Rabin’s concerns. Part of that was knowing Rabin as well as both Martin and I did. So we knew what he really felt and we were trying to bring him along, whereas Clinton understood, well, look, this has to be what you say it is. 

I think that’s also something that reflected not just his intuitive sense, but also was a reflection of him getting his footing and feeling more confident. What happened with Clinton in the first half of the year, especially in the foreign policy discussions, is that he saw people get tied in knots. The one thing you will recall—I’m sure you’ll hear it, you’ve heard it already from lots of people—that there were so many “seminars” over at the White House, which were never definitive, never conclusive, nothing ever emerged from them. What it reflected was that there were lots of different points of view and no one ever decided. But the lots of different points of view also revealed to Clinton, well, hell, these guys don’t know, either.

He kind of saw, well, if they don’t know either, then maybe my own instincts aren’t so bad. Then, once he began to deal with leaders, then he began to gain much more of a footing. So when he begins to develop the footing, he gets much more confidence in terms of how to do things and what to do. I really see it from the first Rabin meeting where he’s asking, “What’s he want?” and “What do I say?” He will still ask me over the years, what should he say, but there’s a difference. When he’s asking me what he’s supposed to say, he’s asking me, “What do you think is the best way to do this?” Partly it’s because he trusts my judgment. It’s also because he knew, in my case, I would say, “All right, what you want to do here, what you want to achieve here, is A, B, and C.” When I would brief him, I would not convey a sense of uncertainty about what he had to do. It’s not that I would say there weren’t different issues that still had to be sorted out, but I would say, “Here’s what you’re trying to get out of this meeting.” There would be a kind of, not just precision, but there would be a kind of succinctness to it. 

Then he could take that and he would run with it. Oftentimes I would say, “Here’s what you want to do and here’s how you want to do it.” Then I would watch him do it better than I told him. You saw his confidence level go up. At least from my vantage point, for him the real breaking point is September 13. He really begins to feel, yes, this is something that’s big. Then when he does this and brings them together to shake hands, he gets this, “I did that.” You begin to see, you begin to feel this, “I did that.” He feels much more confidence from this point on.

The meeting that we have in Geneva with [Hafez al-] Assad—

This is much—

This is January, 1994.

The early one.

Not the later one, but January, 1994, the meeting in Geneva. He feels a comfort level in this meeting. I told him, because when someone begins to feel—you want them to know that in fact it’s the right thing. I don’t care who you are. People want approval. I don’t care if you’re President. Everybody at every level wants approval. They want to know, all right, that was right. And after every meeting he would ask, “Was that okay?” From then on out, he would come up to me, “Was that okay, did we do it right?” He was confident, but that would still be the case.

Assad came up to me at the end of the meeting and he said, “He’s the first American President I dealt with that was real.” I mean, this seems pretty strange coming from someone like Assad, who comes from a completely insular background, but he felt a connection. [Jimmy] Carter had said, after he met Assad in the spring of 1977—and this is after he’d seen Rabin and before [Menachem] Begin became Prime Minister, it was after he’d seen [Anwar] Sadat—he meets with Assad for four hours in Geneva, comes out and he says, “I learned more in that meeting about the Middle East than in any other meeting I’ve ever had.” Which was a very stupid thing to say, by the way, because the message to Sadat and to Rabin was, “Well, you’re chopped liver.” They’re bound to wonder, What the hell did Assad say about us? 

But Carter had seen Assad over the years and Assad had a relationship with him. He had a relationship—he met Nixon. He met Bush 41, and there were certain things about Bush 41 and Baker that he liked a lot. He says to me, “Best meeting I’ve ever had with an American President—he’s real.” There was a connection there. And it was an amazing comment, but it said a lot about Clinton’s capacity to connect with somebody of whatever background, an incredible capacity somehow to communicate to them, “Okay, I understand what your problems are, I really do.” And the way he would do it is, he’d explain it. “I understand you feel the following,” and he’d really do that, he’d do it very effectively. 

I told Clinton afterwards, “This is what he told me.” I said to him, “It’s a pretty amazing statement for him to make, given everybody he’s dealt with before.” 

So, as he dealt with leaders, you could see Clinton grow dramatically. He also saw that people around him often disagreed and their disagreement proved that there wasn’t one way to do it, and there wasn’t only one way to do it. So that too made him feel, Well, hell, I know as much as these guys. As time went on, that became much more pronounced. The first few years of the administration, when his priority was still domestic issues, you felt it less than you did later on. I felt it a lot in the second term, especially when Madeleine [Albright] became the Secretary. He was always very good with her, but you also got the sense that he felt, in effect, Look, I know more about this than you do. He’d never say it. But there was a kind of body language that said, On this one, I know more than you do.

I wanted to go back a little bit, and before we get too much farther ahead in the chronology, and ask about your impression of procedural differences between how foreign policy was made in the late Bush administration versus this early period under Clinton. 

There was, what I would call—I don’t want to exaggerate this, so I may choose my words—I won’t choose them carefully, I’ll say it, but I want to explain it. There are two dimensions to this. One dimension is what I would call the sociology of making decisions and the sociology of the group. The sociology of making decisions gets to the ethic of how you make decisions, as well as the process. The sociology of the group was the group dynamic. 

Now, the group dynamic and the mechanisms for policymaking in the Bush administration were very well developed and formed a strong contrast to what had existed in the Reagan administration, because Bush didn’t want anything like that. All the people who were around Bush at the senior level knew each other well and had known each other well for a long time, one. Two: There was an impulse to work things out and not have any kind of leaking that would be destructive to the administration, especially in terms of rivalries within the administration—and he didn’t really get it. Three, the capacity of the principals to work together was not only very strong—even if they could disagree, the disagreements were kept closed and when a decision was made, that settled the issue. And that was replicated at one level below. 

So the decision-making structures of the Clinton administration end up being similar. You end up with a deputies committee much the same way. Many of the structures that are created are very similar. They may have different names but they’re very similar. It’s almost as if they sort of learned from the Bush administration to do things like that. 

But the sociology is different. First, early on, you don’t create those structures right away. Second, early on, you don’t have clear decision-making processes and you don’t have those who are unmistakably first among equals. In the case of the Bush administration, Bush would make decisions, but also the role of [Brent] Scowcroft was one thing, the role of Baker—you didn’t have anything like the role of Baker in Clinton. Christopher is someone who has Clinton’s respect and he looks to him in a lot of respects, but Christopher doesn’t have the authority that Baker has in the first Bush administration. 

Baker is clearly first among equals in the first Bush administration. If Baker has a certain preference, that tends to tilt the discussion a certain way. Scowcroft is incredibly close to Bush, spends most of his time with Bush, while Tony Lake doesn’t have that relationship with Clinton and doesn’t spend his time with Clinton the same way. Scowcroft respects the fact that Baker is first among equals, but if Scowcroft feels differently, then he has all this time with Bush to raise certain kinds of questions. But then if he does, he’ll also talk to Baker. He doesn’t surprise Baker. I’m not saying it always works perfectly. If you go back and you look at Two Plus Four, that was an area where there was a difference. It gets managed, but that was an area where there was a little bit of tension that gets sorted out. But the truth is, that’s rare and it’s the exception. 

With Clinton at the beginning of the administration, you’ve got [Les] Aspin as Secretary of Defense, and he’s also into this kind of seminar approach to things. You’ve got Tony Lake, and Tony doesn’t have this great personal relationship with Clinton, number one, and, number two, Tony also knows that the foreign policy isn’t the priority, whereas with Bush the foreign policy is the priority. The structure, the strongest people in the administration, are all in the national security area. Are the strongest people in the administration, for Clinton, in the national security area or in the domestic area? It’s just the opposite.

So even if you can create some of the structures, you don’t have the sociology. You don’t have the nature of the group. You don’t have the President being part of the group. Bush is part of the group. Clinton is aloof—not so much aloof, but he’s separate from the group. If you were to look at the domestic decision-making approach, the time he spends on it, that’s a better analogue, although still, Clinton is very different, certainly in the beginning part of the administration, from Bush because of two things. One, Clinton likes the bull sessions. He likes the discussions. They’re a learning process for him. They’re more than a learning process for him, he enjoys the discussion. It’s part of what makes it fun for him. It’s part of what he likes. Making decisions is not what he likes to do, at least not early on. He gets better as time goes on. Bush is different.

So the sociology is different, the group dynamic is different. The structure to support it is different. The people right below the senior level worked together really well. You don’t have any of that, even though you have someone like Tom Donilon who tries to create that. He works very well with the White House people, because he knows them all. He’s a politico, much like they’re politicos, so he’s got a close relationship with all the political people in the White House and he uses that to try to smooth over differences, to try to get decisions made. But he’s a one-man band in terms of trying to do this. This is where I see a real gap between the two administrations. 

Some might say, in the first year of any administration, you have growing pains, and I’m not saying there weren’t any in the first Bush administration. We had all these long reviews, on all national security issues, and there was some sense of how long it was taking to adopt positions. But the truth is, we didn’t wait for that stuff. From where we sat—Bob Zoellick and I, who were the inner circle with Baker—we paid zero attention to the reviews, because we thought they were irrelevant. In the meantime we were shaping policy. 

So, on the short-range nuclear force issue in Europe, we were shaping policy. We didn’t wait. We knew that you had to compete with [Mikhail] Gorbachev and Gorbachev had launched an incredible sense of dynamism in terms of who he was. He was an incredibly attractive figure for those in Europe. We couldn’t be on the wrong side of issues, so we had to launch initiatives. We had to manage the short-range nuclear force issue. We had to compete by changing the focus onto other issues, including onto conventional weapons in Europe, which is where the Soviets had a huge advantage and where changing that equation could actually put the Soviets a little bit more on the defensive. 

So you still have a transition process, but we weren’t waiting. In the Clinton administration, the transition process is a much more difficult one because you don’t have one player who can sort of command the direction. You don’t have a National Security Advisor who can bring everybody together, even if he wants to. I’m not saying Tony Lake doesn’t want to, but he isn’t invested with the authority to be able to do it. You have a Secretary of Defense who doesn’t take over the building quickly, who also is searching for how to approach the big questions. You have a President who doesn’t want his focus to be on these issues. All these create real contrast, I think, in the early going and make for a different kind of decision-making process.

How does that affect the actual substance of the policymaking? Is it a situation that Bush’s foreign policy sort of creeps over and continues into the Clinton administration?

You know, it’s an interesting question. If you look at Bosnia, I would say that the answer is yes, because notwithstanding what the Clinton campaign was on Bosnia, where it was highly critical of the Bush administration for not being active enough, for not supporting the Muslims enough, in fact you have rhetoric that’s different, but you don’t have policy that’s particularly different. We remain pretty reluctant to do much and you end up with this Christopher trip to Europe, which is a disaster precisely because we don’t really know what we want to do, and even though we’ve talked a very strong game, we’re in a sense going over there and we’re asking them, will they do things or not? It’s more us asking them what can be done as opposed to telling them and setting, in a sense, the agenda for what needs to be done. 

On the Middle East it’s a little different because when Clinton comes in, Rabin has made this decision to deport these Hamas into Lebanon and the Lebanese don’t take them. So you have these four hundred guys sitting in no man’s land and negotiations have been suspended on all tracks because of it. So the first item of business is to try to reestablish negotiations, and Christopher is left with a kind of crisis management from the beginning and it doesn’t require Presidential involvement. This is stuff he can pretty much do on his own, and so he does. It still takes a trip to the area, a March trip after Rabin has come. I don’t remember the sequence now exactly, but he takes a trip to the area to solve this. No, actually, he goes on the trip and he solves it with Rabin when we’re there. Rabin signs off on allowing some of these guys to come back over the course of a year. 

So, at least on the Arab-Israeli issue, something gets done. But on a lot of other issues, you have to form an approach. My impression is that the Russian issues go a little bit better as well, but here again, you have someone driving the policy, and that’s Strobe. So where you have someone who can drive the policy, you see activity, but here again I would say it’s more continuity than change on the Russian policy at that point. There’s a need to deal with Yeltsin, but Yeltsin has already been dealt with in the last year of the Bush administration. But I still see more continuity than change on Russian policy at that point. The same with the Middle East, but you have an issue you have to solve. The big issue they’re having to confront is Bosnia and here they don’t confront it very well and there’s no consensus in the administration. The administration is at odds with itself on that issue.

There’s bureaucratic innovation in the State Department in that you’ve got a kind of specialized portfolio. Strobe has a specialized portfolio. Holbrooke.

Right.

If you’re an organizational theorist on the outside, this is a very peculiar set of circumstances. Did it work well?

Well, it did, but you have to ask, why did it happen?

Okay. 

Because I remember being on the first trip with Christopher, when Christopher was making all sorts of efforts to say we’re not going to run the department the way Baker did. In fact he says that. We’re in the Jordanian embassy and he says, “It’s an open State Department now, I want input from everybody. The regional Assistant Secretaries, they will have a major role.” It’s a direct response to the sense that Baker ran the State Department through this very small circle of people—which is true, he did. 

When Christopher comes in, he’s going to run the State Department differently, and I’m telling Donilon, “You can try it. It won’t work, but you can try it. You’ll come back.” What happens is, he ends up appointing what amounts to these special envoys. And what is the role of special envoys? Well, they’re to drive the policy. It’s not the regional Assistant Secretaries who end up doing it. He tries it for a while, but then—in the case of Holbrooke, Holbrooke is given a role as the Assistant Secretary, but then he’s invested with an authority. But in a lot of other places—the Russia policy is taken out of the bureau—the Middle East policy is taken out of the bureau. There are a number of others who end up being appointed in a comparable way because in the end what Christopher finds is that the building, as such, doesn’t generate anything new. The building’s great strength is to generate talking points. The talking points rarely are geared toward achieving anything. So you have to have more action-oriented people put in place.

The truth is, there’s nothing that says you can’t put action-oriented people into the Assistant Secretary positions. But the problem is, there are certain issues—and the case of the Middle East being a good example—where you also have a conflict. Or you may have more than one conflict but you have one that requires a kind of intensive effort. Now, if you don’t create a separation between the Assistant Secretary and envoy positions, the Assistant Secretary, by definition, is going to end up being spread too thin. Inevitably, the Assistant Secretary then appoints a deputy to take on that role, and that’s simply a person who is never seen in the region as having the kind of authority that’s necessary. One of the mistakes of the [current] Bush administration has been never to create an address on this issue. That’s been a problem. I don’t care, you want to create an address? Create an address. It can be the Assistant Secretary, but then understand, the Assistant Secretary is going to spend most of his or her time on this issue and then you’ll have to have others—a senior deputy or other deputies—who take responsibility for other issues, because otherwise it doesn’t work. 

When I was the head of policy planning, my role with Baker was ostensibly to be with him all the time. It took on a strong operational cast. Bill Burns was my senior deputy and I basically said to him, “Look, you’re going to run the rest of the staff. We’ll do things with me and the staff when I’m available, but otherwise, you’re going to do that. On all the other issues, when I’m not taking the lead, you’re going to make sure that the staff is supporting the Secretary. You’re going to make sure that the rest of the bureaus are working with us because, in the end, you let me know that they’re cutting us out or they’re coming in with certain things that we don’t agree with—and I’ll make sure that Baker either doesn’t see that, or that if he does see it, he sees it with a note from me on top of it.” 

So, in a sense, the model, I think, for most Assistant Secretaries depends upon whether or not you have one of these major conflicts. When Holbrooke was the Assistant Secretary, the first thing he did was deal with Bosnia. He wasn’t dealing with every other issue, he was dealing with Bosnia. If you have a conflict that is the defining, or one of the defining, issues of that area, the Assistant Secretary has to be the one working full time on it, and has to be the address. Which means, on every other issue—and there are a multitude of other issues that cannot be ignored—someone has to be dealing with it.

So your choice is, either have an envoy who takes on that big issue and then the Assistant Secretary is responsible for everything else; or the Assistant Secretary takes on that issue and everybody else is responsible for everything else.

Let’s come back to Clinton for a bit, if we may. You had said that he had developed an awful lot of confidence by the end of ’93, going into ’94. Did he have any enduring blind spots or weaknesses, as you saw them, things in particular that you had to watch out for as a negotiator? And a follow-up set of questions here would be to give us thumbnail portraits of his relationship with each of the major actors.

You mean in the Middle East or within the administration?

In the Middle East more than the administration. But tell us who he had real good rapport with, who he didn’t have such good rapport with. You were saying with Assad that after that meeting there was a sense that they managed to connect very well. Was that something that endures or not?

Yes, it does. Well, let me do this in the following way. 

Okay.

First, Clinton had a number of remarkable strengths. Then I’ll deal with what I think were the areas that were not his strengths. His major strength was a capacity to learn anything and to learn it quickly and to really internalize it. Meaning—when I say internalize it, it means to learn it and to be able to act on it, to use it. So he could learn anything and he could learn anything incredibly quickly. His capacity to do that was then married with his capacity to relate to people, to empathize with them. So he could take the information that he had and then he could apply it in a way that would tell somebody, “Boy, he really does understand my problem.”

To tell someone, “I understand your problem,” doesn’t work unless you’re able to explain, “You know, I understand why X, Y, and Z are so hard for you.” Or, “I can understand, if I had to contend with that, it would just be almost impossible for me.” He had an amazing capacity to cite examples from his experience as Governor, to show them how he had dealt with something on a kind of personal or local level. 

I’ll give you an example. We were dealing with the prisoner release issue between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and he was talking to the Palestinians and to Arafat and with Abu Mazen and [indecipherable name]. They were saying, “But we have to have prisoner releases.” He said, “You know, one time when I was Governor, I released a guy, I gave him a pardon. I thought it was the right thing to do. It was certainly important to his family and there was a whole group of people who were clamoring for it. I thought it was also politically good for me to do it. And he got out and he killed somebody. And, you know, I felt responsible.” 

Now, honestly, I don’t know if that was a true story or not, because with Clinton, you never knew. But he said it because he was saying to them, “We’ve got to take account of what the Israeli concerns are on this. And I can just imagine the victims, the victims’ families, what they feel. I know how these people felt.” People would listen to Clinton. I mean, leaders would listen to Clinton and they would be almost transfixed. He would command a kind of attention. In every case it did create a connection. 

You can say, “Well, all right, the meeting’s over, it’s over.” And there’s a point to that. I don’t want to exaggerate too much, because at the end of the day we didn’t make a deal with Arafat, and at the end of the day we didn’t make a deal with Assad. We came very close. I would say that part of the reason we came as close as we did was because of Clinton’s capacity with them. The capacity was to connect. The capacity was to learn everything. The capacity was to use his own personal experience. An incredible ability to explain and to have those he was talking to understand why he was asking something of them. That was a strength that was, I think, frankly, incomparable. 

Baker was very good, but Baker couldn’t connect the same way. I think one of my skills was to be able to connect, as well, but I don’t think anybody could connect the way Clinton could really connect. 

His weakness was that he found it hard to be tough. They’re two sides of the same coin. When you’re asking someone to do the hardest thing they’re ever going to have to do, you’d better be able to connect. This incredible capacity to connect was a function not only of his personality but also of the ability to internalize all the information, to understand really what were the issues, and at a level of real depth. Because you’re not going to be able to connect if you can’t prove that you understand why something is so hard for someone to deal with—why, for Assad, getting the territory back was so important to who he was, to his own personal definition, or as I used to call him, the last Arab nationalist. Clinton could convey that in a way that showed he understood it and he could talk to him in terms of how Assad defined public opinion. It might not be our definition of public opinion, but the way Assad defined public opinion, and he understood it.

So the critical thing here, that he could do, with anybody. But what he couldn’t do naturally or easily was to be tough. The reason you have to do both is that when you’re dealing with a historic conflict, to get somebody to approach the threshold, you have to be able to convince them that you understand why it’s so hard to do, and you do things to make it easier. You’ll find ways to compensate. But to get them to cross the threshold, they have to also know the consequence of not doing it. Because when you’re talking about ending a conflict that is also a defining conflict, then there has to be a sense that the price you’re going to pay is worse than the price you pay for settling the conflict. 

So, yes, “I understand how difficult it is, I understand the price you pay by doing this, I understand the challenge, the criticism, the danger you expose yourself to by doing this. I understand all that”—and go through it and explain why. And do it even emotionally, which is what Clinton would do, because that’s the way we connect. If you do it dryly, you don’t connect. It has to be done with a kind of passion, because that’s what these people feel. If they feel personally threatened, let me tell you, they feel a lot of passion. Clinton could do that. 

But the other side of that was to say, “Listen, pal, you know where you’re going to be if you don’t do this? I’m doing everything I can to help you, to respond to this. But, you know, if you’re not going to do it, okay. You’re not going to do it, don’t expect anything from me. In fact, I’ve got to tell you, I’ve got a lot of other things I can do with my time—and I will.”

Did that mean you had to be the bad cop more often?

Yes. And one of the things I learned about Clinton was, when I tried, when I would say, “This is how you have to do this part of it,” he’d never do it. Or he wouldn’t do it in a way that was convincing. Or he would do it in a way that wasn’t him. The classic example is the very last meeting with Arafat, it’s what I opened the book with. It’s left to me to say to Arafat, “You’re not responding. You’re saying yes, but you’re not saying yes.” I actually stop the meeting and tell Clinton, “Look, he can’t hear it from me, because he thinks if he’s hearing it from me, big deal. He’s got to hear it from you.” So I left. But then what Clinton did was, Clinton said, “You’re killing [Ehud] Barak.” He didn’t say, “You’re killing me. You’re killing me, you don’t believe in making peace. You’re telling me I spent all this time with you? I’ve done everything I could. I’ve offered something, I put something on the table that is historic, unprecedented, and you’re telling me no. What you’re telling me is that you can’t make peace and I’ve wasted all this time. I’m going to have to go out and tell the world I learned one thing about Chairman Arafat, he’s not interested in making peace. That’s what you’re telling me.” And what does he say? “You’re killing Barak.” Arafat didn’t care if he was killing Barak, big deal. But that was Clinton. 

I had learned—going back to why—you can’t ask Clinton to do something that he’s not capable of doing. It didn’t stop me at the end because we were out of time—this was the end of the story—but basically, I began to try not to put him in those positions, because what you have to be is authentic. He did get tough with Arafat on the phone, but it was the 19th or 18th of January, and also it was impersonal, it was over the phone. A lot easier to do it over the phone. A lot harder to have to do it in person. I can’t tell you how many times I went into a meeting knowing how bad the meeting was going to be, but you had to do it because it’s the only way that you could change things. 

From this standpoint, it wasn’t a good thing, because for me to be the bad cop meant that there was always a court of appeal. I’m not saying, by the way, it would have made a difference with Arafat, because I think in the end Arafat wasn’t capable of doing it. We needed to do things differently; the judgment I made is that we should have exposed Arafat for ourselves earlier. I don’t mean for the world, for ourselves. We should have basically put Arafat in a position where he would have had to publicly say, to his public, that he understood that they weren’t going to get 100 percent of refugees, borders, and Jerusalem, and require the same thing of the Israeli Prime Minister. If he wasn’t prepared to do that, we’re saying, “We’re not going to work on any of those issues, because it’s clear there’s no agreement possible with you, because you’re not prepared to compromise on anything.” 

We would have gotten that public statement from the Israeli Prime Minister. If we’d gotten it from Arafat, I can tell you, he would have needed it from the other side because he would have generated immediate opposition. He would have wanted to move very quickly to show what he was getting. I seriously doubt that he would have done it, because I don’t think he was prepared to compromise on those issues—because I don’t think he was prepared in the end to actually do a permanent status deal. He could live with the process, he could live with partial deals, but he couldn’t live with a permanent status deal.

You said in the book at one point that Clinton never feigned anger. When he was angry he was genuinely angry.

That’s true, he would blow up.

This is connected, right? He wasn’t able to gin up his anger or to be purposely angry at the appropriate moment.

When he got angry, it was because he was genuinely angry—and then he felt bad about it. He blows up at Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu], which is a function of fatigue, frustration, the heat of the moment. But it’s hard for him to sustain the anger. At Camp David, he blows up at Abu Ala. But it’s like it’s a reflex. It’s not, “All right, if I get really mad now, I’m going to use it for this purpose.” 

I think there was one account in here, at some point, where he gets angry and you’re about to calm him down and Sandy Berger—

It’s in Wye. And Sandy understands him very well. My intent wasn’t to calm him down, my intent was to come and report that Bibi was coming in now, and this is what you could do. But Sandy read me as either trying to calm him down, or that the effect of what I was going to do would be to calm him down and he didn’t want him calmed down when he saw Bibi. So it was right after he blew up at Wye. 

I would say this was his greatest weakness as a negotiator. His strength was that he had this capacity to do what, frankly, almost no one else could do—learn the issues in a way that no one else would and then marry it to his empathy so that he could use the understanding of the detail to communicate how well he understood what their plight was, what their problem was. His weakness was he couldn’t do tough love.

One other thing that goes into this, also in the book you say the President was inclined to play his trump card early. 

Yes. 

This is also a function of the same character trait. 

I think so. I think it’s an extension of the desire to connect. The value of connecting is unmistakable. But the desire to connect means that you’re in effect always reaching out. Now, with these guys in the Middle East, reaching out is something you have to husband. You have to reach out, it has to be a part of it, but it can’t be all of it. I think he understood it, but again, to be a good negotiator you have to be authentic, you have to be who you are. His great strength is what you had to play to. You couldn’t put him in the position where he was being forced to play to what isn’t his strength. 

That’s why I say one of Barak’s mistakes was wanting to make everything done with Clinton, because that overused Clinton. It wasn’t just the idea that you lower the currency, devalue the currency. It was also that you were putting him in positions where he couldn’t do the things he needed to do. He blew up at Barak at Camp David, too, at one point. But then he immediately feels bad about it. In each of the cases when he blows up, he’s right to blow up. He’s absolutely right to blow up, they earned it. And Sandy’s right, if he thinks I’m going to calm him down or if he thinks the effect of what I’m going to say is going to calm him down, Sandy’s right to push me out. Because there were times when Clinton needed to sustain it, but it was not who he was. That’s why I came to the conclusion that it was a mistake to try to put him in those positions or to ask him for that. At the very end, as I said, when there’s no time left, there’s no other choice, you’re not left with an alternative. I think that that’s where I saw his limitation as a negotiator. 

I think that he was in some ways more realistic than some of the people around him. Madeleine wants to push, wants to confront Bibi early on and Sandy is pretty close to that. I’m much more hesitant because I’m not sure we’ll sustain it. I’m not against confrontation as a matter of principle. I’m very much against confrontations you don’t sustain, because then I think you’re worse off. I don’t have high expectations that Clinton is prepared to sustain it and I see it pretty quickly. When we’re on the way—when they’re pushing him in the spring of 1998 to take Bibi on, it’s very clear he doesn’t want to do it. Now, is it for political reasons? Could be. Or is it because he himself also feels that a real confrontation with these guys isn’t sustainable? And there’s a part of him that looks at confrontation creating a siege mentality on the Israeli side that actually creates a “circle the wagons” mentality around Bibi, and he doesn’t want to strengthen it. But I would say part of that is also concerns about political fallout here. So is that the most important thing? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. But I see his hesitancy.

I mean, I’m on a retreat with my synagogue in March and he actually calls me while I’m driving back from there and he’s very uneasy about pushing Bibi. We had a discussion before I left about a sequence in which you could end up getting to that point. I was okay with it but I wanted to go through a series of steps, partly because I thought each step would also determine how real we were. I hadn’t said this to him or even to Madeleine—this is my own way of testing what we were really prepared to do. I mean, at the time, Martin was the Assistant Secretary in NEA and they had ginned up this whole strategy of pressure that we could put on him. Everybody, Madeleine was gung ho to do it, Sandy was gung ho to do it—and I was suspicious of it. I just didn’t believe it. 

So we had this meeting at the White House. We’d go over all the things that we would do, but we’d work it as a sequence, and I’m going to make a trip out there again, before we launch this. It’s a Saturday afternoon, I’m driving back from the Eastern Shore, where we had been, and he’s going through all his concerns with me. I can just hear in his voice he doesn’t want to do this. He’s doing it because he knows I’m about to go out and he really wants me to be careful how I proceed. So for me, he hasn’t called Madeleine, he hasn’t called Sandy. He wants me to hear directly from him, and it’s a telltale indicator that he doesn’t want to do this. He doesn’t want to go down that road. 

He doesn’t mind conveying signals of displeasure. He’s out in L.A. and Bibi’s in L.A., and he doesn’t see Bibi. The planes are parked right next to each other—he doesn’t see Bibi. He doesn’t mind doing that. He doesn’t mind sending signals of displeasure, but he doesn’t want the kind of tough, open confrontation where we’re making public demands. He’s convinced that Bibi won’t give in to that and that you’ll harden Bibi’s position. Even if he doesn’t say it, what’s implicit is that he doesn’t think we can sustain it. 

I have this in the back of my mind before I go out and I come up with an idea on this trip. I’m alone with Bibi and this was the whole idea: He’s saying he can do nine percent of further redeployment, and we’ve insisted on 13 percent. At one point he says he can do 11 percent. And I come up with the idea, which I haven’t run by anybody. I said, “Look, what if we come up with an approach that you can say is 11 percent and they can say is 13 percent?” Bibi immediately responds like the skies have parted for him—he’s going to be rescued. The stalemate doesn’t serve his interests. I have no problem with having a sense of stalemate create a problem for him, but I know he’s anxious to get out of this. I say, “Well, we can come up with another category of land that for the Palestinians, they can say ‘Well, it’s redeployment of 13 percent.’ You can say, ‘Look, I only really redeployed 11 percent because this is a different category.’” 

This, for Bibi, is like an epiphany. I haven’t tried this out on anybody—we’re sitting one-on-one. His enthusiasm makes me a little uneasy, so I say, “Look, I haven’t tried this out on anybody. I don’t know that the President is going to accept this, so don’t share this with anybody.” He goes, “Oh, Dennis, if you say it, he’ll agree.” I say, “No, don’t assume that.” He says, “All right, let me check and see if there even are different categories”—because I give him a couple of examples of the kind of territory that can be used. 

I call Madeleine after the meeting. I said, “Look, I did something on my own.” I had told her about my conversation with the President before I left on my trip and I told her, “Look, I’m telling you, he doesn’t want to do this.” She said, “Yes, I think you’re probably right. But you still can’t let Bibi off the hook.” I said, “I’m not going to let him off the hook. I’m just telling you, whatever we do, we’re going to have to take that into account.” 

So when I call her up, I say, “This is what I came up with.” She says, “I think our boss will love it.” I say, “I’m flying back tonight, I’ll brief him on it.” Sure enough, when I say, “This is what I tried out,” his reaction is almost the same as Bibi’s. This again goes to address what I was saying about him. Part of what governs him is his capacity to say, “I know this guy, I know what makes this guy tick.” In this case, as soon as I said it, his reaction was, “Bibi will love that. I don’t even know what he said to you, but Bibi will love that.” I said, “Well, actually he did.” 

He said, “I can tell you why, because it gets him off the hook. He’s in a corner right now and he doesn’t know how to get out of the corner and you just gave him his way out.” Here was Clinton instinctively understanding where he was. The reason I mention this is also that he thought he understood Assad the same way. One time he said to me, “I knew guys like him in Arkansas.” [Laughter] He said, “They were guys who had a kind of constipation, they were afraid of doing anything. You’ve just got to find a way to show ’em that there’s a way to do it.”

Whether it was in talking to people or in his own way of coming to understand a problem, he could find his analogues. Again, whether it was fanciful, whether it was fictional, I don’t know. But he thought he knew Assad. He said, “This is a guy who, we just have to find a way to make it possible for him to do it, because he’s afraid of everything. Everything that’s new, he’s afraid of.” He would put it in his own words and he would say to me, “That’s the way I see him. You think that’s right?” I would say, “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. Let me tell you how I see it.” He’d say, “Well, that’s kind of what I’m saying.” But in effect he would find his own way to explain them, and he’d find his own way to find his connection. 

Getting back to your original question to me, I think he felt he built a relationship with every single one of them. I don’t think there was one he felt he didn’t have a relationship with. King Hussein, very much the same way. And Assad—Assad really valued Clinton. Arafat, for sure. Rabin, definitely. Netanyahu, at a certain point. One month before the election when he’s brought here, he comes out after the meetings—and they’ve been very difficult, he hasn’t “made easy”—and what does he do? He basically makes the case for Clinton. This is one month before the election with [Robert] Dole. Clinton looks like a pretty sure winner, but, you know, Bibi can’t be a hundred percent sure. One of the questions after the meeting comes up because Dole had been saying, “This is just photo op diplomacy.” Bibi comes out and says, “Look, we had a problem, he brought us here, and he helped us overcome it.” Bibi says that. Bibi comes to his defense. Bibi resented him at times, Bibi thought he put him in the corner at times. But there’s something about Clinton that he also appreciated. Barak, for sure. So, with every single leader he creates an unmistakable connection. I think it’s a testimony to who he was and his capacity in that respect.

[Hosni] Mubarak?

Yes. I mean, Mubarak is less of a central player. But because this is Mubarak, Mubarak feels like he has a special relationship. Mubarak has to feel that, because he’s always trying to suggest that Egypt is more important than anyone else. I once described Mubarak as, I never met a leader who took more credit for things he didn’t do. But that also meant, if it looked like Clinton had all these special relationships with everyone else, he had to have it, too. And the truth is, there isn’t anybody Clinton dealt with, at least that I saw, that he wasn’t successful in doing that. So I think it really was a testimony to who Clinton is and his capacity to connect. 

Look, he also had a talent that is like nobody else in terms of publicly connecting with publics. Not only does he connect in Israel, after the Rabin assassination, in a way that is extraordinary, to this day, but I watch him speak to three thousand Israeli kids, not all of whose English is great, and he creates this incredible bond. I watched him speak to the PNC [Palestinian National Council] in Gaza and he creates this incredible connection. These are speeches, by the way, that I drafted, and he ends up ad-libbing three-quarters of it. The part he ad-libs is much better than the part I drafted.

I’d like to shift directions slightly. When you’re in the process of negotiating with various leaders, on what kinds of things do you have to check back with the White House, or check with the State Department? And along those lines, what kinds of things do you decide, Okay, this is something I have to involve Clinton directly on, versus more mundane things?

Well, truth be told, I felt a lot of freedom. The one thing I didn’t want was ever to be in a position where I was putting out a proposal and the first thing they heard about it was from the press. It didn’t mean I felt the need always to clear what I did before I did it, but I always felt the need never to be in a position where the way they found out about it was because of what was appearing in the press. So, one, I usually had somebody from the NSC with me so that they would be responsible for communicating this—so, in a sense, if there was blind-siding it was because they hadn’t done it, not because I hadn’t done it. 

Secondly—I should say, by the way, as I go on, that I didn’t want to be limited in terms of what I could do in negotiation. Now, there’s a difference here between making a proposal to solve a problem, and making a proposal that involved American troops to solve the problem. If I was going to raise an issue that required a commitment of American forces, that’s not something I would do on the spur of the moment. That’s something I would anticipate beforehand and then I would get it cleared here. So if it involved a serious commitment of American resources, I would want to at least know that I had, if nothing else, the President’s support for this. Not just the Secretary’s support. Either I would raise it with the President or I’d get the Secretary to raise it with the President, but, either way, it would be raised in a way that got support. Sometimes, on an issue like this, because I didn’t want it leaking out that this is something we might do, I didn’t want to run it through even a senior person in the Pentagon. But that didn’t mean that I felt free to raise it unless I had some kind of imprimatur or sanction to do it. So those were the only circumstances in which I would really run something by in advance. Otherwise, I would make sure, if I raised an idea, I would immediately convey it to the Secretary and/or to the National Security Advisor, just to be sure that they wouldn’t be blind-sided. 

Did that change at all between when Warren Christopher was the Secretary versus Madeleine Albright?

Not really. He gave me really an incredible license and she just sustained it. She didn’t change how we operated.

One of the things that I was unclear about when I was reading your book is the degree to which you are negotiator versus policy maker. My understanding was that you were probably both and they were blurry at many points in time.

Absolutely. Because, in a sense, you couldn’t really do one without the other. To be able to raise ideas, or even to figure out how you were going to bridge differences, you had to shape what we were going to do, because we were such a central part of it. This was one of the reasons, every day when I was in Washington, I would have a meeting at ten in the morning. It wasn’t a large meeting, but I had somebody from the NSC, and if I needed, if it related to security issues, I’d bring somebody over from the Pentagon, too, and also an NEA representative. One reason to do that is that I needed to know if there was anything else going on that could impinge on what I was doing. So, for me, there wasn’t a distinction between the two, I had to be both. 

Now it didn’t mean that I had to be affecting things outside my domain. As an example, Sandy Berger called me up at a point when we were considering using force in Iraq. He asked me, “How would this affect what you’re doing?” That was a smart thing for him to do, but it also meant they gave me an entrée into that issue as well. I didn’t feel that it was my responsibility, so I didn’t make any big push, but this was a case where I would communicate what I thought, from my vantage point. But at least in terms of the Arab-Israeli issues, I needed to know what was going on, on bilateral issues, because that could affect what I was doing. 

When it came to shaping what we would do, in the first instance, my responsibility was to shape our strategy. That meant I was shaping what our approach was. So someone else wasn’t deciding, “Well, here’s what our policy is, now you’ll do it.” I had to shape the policy. There are two dimensions of policy—really three. One is what you’re going to do. Another is who’s going to do it and who you’re going to do it with. And the third is how you’re going to do it. In this area I felt I was responsible for all three. 

You asked also about involving Clinton.

Yes.

I was not keen on involving him except at those times when I felt that I couldn’t affect the situation or I thought the Secretary also didn’t have enough clout to affect the situation. Clinton plays a much more reserved role throughout the first term. Wye is a turning point for him. Madeleine likes to say that he thought he did Wye. She said, “You did Wye,” making him think he should do more, that he should do. What it did is it gave him a taste for it more than it had before. He felt a responsibility. I said it from the beginning. You can’t underestimate the impact the Rabin assassination had on him. Oslo—after that, he felt, All right, this is one of my signature issues. But he basically stayed out of it except, for example, if we wanted a phone call, he would do it.

There were two trips I wanted. Basically, one, I wanted no hesitancy that he was going to go to Israel after the assassination—that was pushing an open door. But the other one, I wanted him to go after the four bombs in nine days, because I knew, this was such a disjunction that we needed a lot of drama to save the process. So when I felt like we needed a lot of drama, that’s when I wanted him. I wanted him to take the trip even though all his political advisors were against it.

That was in ’96?

This is March ’96. This is a time, by the way, when—for those, again, who see Clinton as being excessively political, and as making judgments accordingly—that was not my experience with him on this issue. I’m not saying that they didn’t enter in. When I talked to him before about confrontation, I do believe at least one consideration was political, which, by the way, would be true for anybody who was President, not just him. But I also believe that, if the issue was presented as, “Politically this is a bad thing to do” versus “This is something that you need to do,” every single time he would decide “This is what I will do.” I’ll give you two examples, and I’ll give you another one later that I don’t know if it’s political or not, but I think it’s again, a reflection of his mindset and his desire to do things. In a sense, he’s a risk taker in this area, maybe more so than in other parts of the administration, but he’s a risk taker. 

After the four bombs in nine days, I go to Christopher and I say, “Look, we’re going to lose this. Peres is going to go down and this process is going to collapse and we’re going to lose it. This has shaken the Israeli public to their core. They wonder what the hell this is about. They need something to re-establish their faith in this because they’ve lost their faith in it. If it’s really lost—we’re in the early stages of it—if it’s really lost, you don’t get it back.” He said, to me, “What do we have to do?” I said, “The President has to go over there. We should organize a meeting of all the Arab leaders with the Israeli leaders, to show the region has changed fundamentally and Israel is not alone. But it has to be great drama and we have to show with great drama that Israel is not alone. That’s the payoff of having a peace process, because the region has been transformed. So in fighting terror, they’re not alone.” 

Christopher calls him up and says, “Dennis and I need to come over and see you right now. Dennis thinks we’re going to lose this.” Clinton drops everything and says, “Come over.” We go right over there. He has other people—George Stephanopoulos is in the room, Rahm Emanuel is in the room, and the Chief of Staff is in the room. They all chime in immediately, after they hear me out, and say, “Look, there’s no guarantee that if you’re there, there won’t be another bomb while you’re there. Another bomb right afterwards, in which case you lose it anyway. Then you’ve made this great dramatic gesture and it’s all for naught.” So they’re all against it. Tom Donilon is also against it. Tells Christopher he’s against it for the same reasons. Clinton listens to me for literally five minutes, says, “We’re going to do it,” after he hears them. 

Then one month before the election, we’ve had the opening of the Hasmonean Tunnel, there’s a week of riots and demonstrations, and 15 members of the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] get killed in riots outside of Joseph’s tomb in Nablus. We’ve been intervening, Christopher and I, daily over the phone. It’s clear to me we can’t generate enough drama on our own. Christopher said, “Should I go out there?” I said, “It won’t do it, we need something that creates a break, right now, that gives everybody a reason to take a step back. The only thing that’s going to do it is, let’s bring them here, to see Clinton. I’m not saying have Clinton go out there, let’s bring them here.” 

Everyone on his side—one month before the election—said, “What do you need it for? The direction of this election, you’re going to win unless you do something that creates a problem. Why do this?” All the political advice is, “Don’t do it.”

He said to me, again, “Do we need to do it?” I said, “Yes, we need to do it.” He said, “Okay, let’s do it.” So it’s quite striking, but these are, I think, demonstrable examples. He’s prepared, because obviously he believes in it, to run the political risk.

Later on he wants to do something I’m dead set against. Barak wants him to fly to Damascus, without any preparation, and say to Assad that if Assad agrees to resume negotiations, that he’ll get from Barak a commitment to what Rabin had given to us. I go through all the reasons this is a bad idea. I’m out there at the time. Sandy is dead set against it, Madeleine is dead set against it, and I’m out there at the time. Barak has called him after I’ve left. Barak calls him and says, “I want you to do this. I think it’s the only way to shake up Assad, the only way. We’re at a moment, let’s not lose it.” 

So Sandy has argued against it and I go through the reasons I’m against it. Actually I’m in the midst of a meeting with Barak when Madeleine calls me out of the meeting, a phone call. One of the DOS [Department of State] guys comes in, says the Secretary needs to speak to you. I’m sitting with the Prime Minister of Israel and I say, “It can’t wait?” He says, “It’s really urgent.” I’m actually in Barak’s residence. I go to another place, I get the phone call. She tells me that Barak had made this call, unbeknownst to me. She says, “You have to beat it down with Barak.” 

I said, “Madeleine, answer me one thing—what did the President say to him? I can marshal every argument in the book, but if the President isn’t the one saying no to him, guess what—it’s going to happen.” She said—because she was also not in Washington at the time, she’d left, too—“I don’t know.” I said, “All right, I’ll do my best.” 

And Barak just dug in. I call Sandy after I get back from this meeting and I say to him, “I used every argument in the book and the only thing I did after three hours was succeed in having this guy dig in, even more convinced it was the right thing to do. Look, the only way it’s not going to happen is if the President says no.” Sandy says, “Well, I’m dead set against it.” 

Then Sandy calls me back a little bit later and says, “He won’t say no if he’s asked by Barak.” 

The only reason it doesn’t happen is that we go there the next day and he has told me we can’t reveal this to Assad. Because I said, “What if the Secretary were to say to Assad, ‘Look, if you’re prepared to do this, then we’re prepared to try to get that done, but if you’re not, forget it.’” He says, “No, it won’t have much drama.” 

One of the things I said to Barak at the time, “Do you realize, if you have the President go, without any preparation, it’s going to tell Assad that the President needs something. So he’s going to raise his demands, he’s not going to lower his demands. Do you think that Clinton is going to get there and really want to fly out of there without having achieved anything? What’s his explanation for having gone? You’re going to put Clinton in a position where he has to lean towards what Assad wants”—which I thought was a pretty effective argument at the time. 

It got Barak to pause for a second. Then he said, “Well, you just have to convince him to be tougher.” Barak had it in his mind that that was it. But Clinton was prepared to do it anyway. This was like a leap into the unknown. But he said to me afterwards, “I don’t care. If there’s a chance to do this, I’ll do what’s necessary. I don’t want to look back and feel that there’s something I could have done that we didn’t do. If it doesn’t work out, okay.” This is the same attitude he had when we went to Camp David. He said, “I don’t want to look back and feel like there was something I could have done that we didn’t do.”

I think that is very revealing of him on this issue and it also addresses this view of some that he only did things for political reasons. My experience with him, on this issue, was that he didn’t do things for political reasons. He did what he thought to be right. Whether it turned out to be right is a different issue.

Let me ask you about one time period that you address in the book that a critic might throw back at you in this regard, and that’s what’s happening in the fall of ’98. You’ve got the [Monica] Lewinsky revelations in January—

Right.

And then in the fall, as impeachment is coming on, you’re beginning to get an awful lot of pressure from Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright to get a summit. 

Right.

Is that a case where the politics were driving them to make something big happen?

I would say, certainly, the domestic reality, if you ask me what was driving Clinton, Clinton wants to show he’s being Presidential, one, and he wants to change the focus, number two. He sees his Presidency at stake. So there’s no doubt he’s looking for something that gives him a strong Presidential role. And yes, they’re putting me under a lot of pressure to do something that I think makes absolutely no sense. I would say that’s the one time—and I would also say that’s a unique circumstance where he literally thinks that his Presidency may be at stake and the only way to save his Presidency is to show that he’s being Presidential. 

I mean, it didn’t have to be this issue, it could have been something else, but this was the one that was there and it was probably most prominent and could capture attention.

Did you get the sense during ’98 that the President was in fact impaired, either internally in terms of his ability to focus on the issues, or internationally—is the Lewinsky fallout creating problems for him overseas? The root of the question goes back to the Court’s decision in the [Paula] Jones case that said we’ll allow this to proceed, that it’s not going to impair the Chief Executive’s ability to function. I think there’s still a debate among scholars about whether empirically it did or it didn’t. So I’d like to get your judgment on that.

You know, I’m not sure I can comment on it definitely. I can say it had an effect. Now, is having an effect the same thing as impairing? Did it have an effect? Did I feel the need to sit with Arafat at some point and explain to him that I didn’t think that he would be forced out of office? I did. Did I feel the need, when I was out there, to explain what was going on here? I did. Were they highly attentive to what was happening here? Absolutely. 

I mean, they wanted to know. I walk into these meetings and they’d look at me and I could look at them and know immediately, there was a question mark that was all over their body language. Now, did that impair his ability to do foreign policy? Well, I don’t know if it impaired it, but it raised questions and the questions had to be addressed. One of the things I said was, “Look, don’t assume that you bring these guys here, that they’re simply going to roll over and agree to something because they think he needs it—no way.” I also said, “He doesn’t have the authority today that he had before this came out.” I say that in there. Because there was no doubt in my mind that both sides had real question marks. 

At the same time, when Arafat comes here and sees him in September, but then again on the day that we’re going down to Wye from here, Arafat is enormously impressed that, given everything that’s going on with Clinton, Clinton would be willing to do this. So in a strange way it has an effect of conveying that he’s not doing this because he needs it, he’s doing it because he believes in it. That was a kind of interesting impact at the same time. Now, was it enough to offset the other? Bear in mind that this is six weeks later, so they’ve had a chance to get used to it and they see he’s still there. 

But initially when this comes out, there’s no doubt in my mind that everybody has a question mark: “Well, should I do something because the Americans want us to do it? I don’t know. How long is he going to be there?” That was in the air. 

Are there concerns just about his political viability, or did they respond to it as a moral issue at all?

No, their reaction is, “Hell, this goes on all the time.” They view this as, “Why should this bring down a President?” Everywhere I go—I get it more with the Europeans. They’re stunned at the American sense of outrage over this. To some extent you get it in the Middle East, too. I mean, if I were to describe it, it’s “You Americans are so puritanical. Okay, even if he did it, so what? It doesn’t affect who he is as President. People do these things, what’s the big deal?” The misunderstanding was, “Why would you Americans make this into such a big issue? It shows a kind of immaturity on your part.” I got a lot of that.

It almost strikes me that what you’re saying is the scandal affected more our standing as a country than Clinton’s standing as a leader.

It did two things. Because they wondered about us—“Why are you that way?” Then that raised the question, “Maybe he won’t survive. If this is such a big deal, given who you are, maybe he won’t survive. We think he ought to, but maybe he won’t.” 

I want to go back and ask you about the change in 1994, which has profound consequences for domestic policy. Did it affect you materially, the change in Congress?

In one way—that I had to spend much more time going up to the Congress than I did before that. I would say that probably after every trip, I would go up. We got an agreement that I wouldn’t have to go testify because it would be too hard as a negotiator to have to be revealing what was going on.

That was the agreement with whom?

Basically with the Foreign Affairs committees, there was an understanding that I wouldn’t have to testify, but I would go up and have off-the-record briefings with the whole committees. That was not that unusual an occurrence. 

This would just be in the House, not the Senate?

Principally. I did meet with the full House Foreign Affairs, International Relations Committee. With the Senate I would go and I would meet frequently with the Chairman and the ranking member. But also something else. Sandy Berger and I would go up together and see [Newton] Gingrich for private sessions. That wasn’t my initiative, that was Sandy’s, but it was also because Gingrich wanted it. I think that was simply reading the reality. But I would spend a lot of time up with [Richard] Gephardt as well. I would spend a lot of time with the appropriators. I spent much more time after November of ’94 on the Hill than I did prior to that time. 

Was Gingrich relatively easy for you to deal with?

Yes, he had a real interest.

I want to ask a general question about Israeli influence on United States public opinion and how that affected the politics of Middle East diplomacy and get you to talk maybe just a few minutes about AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and what it does. Then, in particular, there was a moment in early ’98 when Netanyahu comes over and meets with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. What reaction did that generate?

On the former issue, I have to say I think the notion of AIPAC’s influence, on at least our administration, is greatly exaggerated. I can’t think of a single thing we did that we did because we felt we had to do it because of them—not one. I can think of reasons I had to go up to the Hill because of what they were doing, frankly, to counteract the things that they were doing. 

Now you have to understand, you have to break this into different periods as well. When we had a Labor Prime Minister with Rabin, AIPAC mainly was more of a problem to him than it was to us. So they were torn because they had such a problem developing a certain consensus on their own side. But they defined their role basically as supporting what the Israeli government wanted. So we didn’t face any problems with them, and in fact, frequently during his time, they were very helpful to us because they would give us early warnings of who was a problem. When Rabin was Prime Minister, you had people from Likud going and lobbying the Hill against him. They launched an initiative to oppose the possibility of stationing American peacekeepers on the Golan Heights in the event of an agreement. We had to spend time going up there to beat that back. I worked very closely with Itamar Rabinovich and with AIPAC to beat it back. It came from Likud and so AIPAC was actually on the side of the administration. Because Rabin and Peres wanted financial support for the Palestinians, AIPAC was lobbying—I mean, they had to be careful—AIPAC basically worked with us to figure out the best ways to overcome opposition to it. 

So the irony is, when you had an Israeli government that basically we were working very closely with, AIPAC was on the supportive side of the equation. With Netanyahu in there, then you had a different story. First of all, there weren’t people from Labor coming over and lobbying against him, so you didn’t have that. Secondly, again, they defined their role to be the lobby for Israel. So basically there was more contention during that time. But what it meant was I simply had to spend more time up there.

Now you ask me about change in Congress. Well, there were two factors. One is there was a change in Congress, and, two, AIPAC was very close to the Republican leadership at that time. So that required more time. But again, many of the people up there wanted this process to succeed. There were times it was hard. For example, moving the embassy to Jerusalem. First of all, even for Rabin, this was something that was launched independent of him and Rabin wasn’t going to come out and look like he was soft on Jerusalem. So on that one he wasn’t going to help and for AIPAC, this was an easy one. Part of their constituency wasn’t happy with them for doing things they were doing on behalf of the Palestinians because this is what Rabin and Peres wanted. So here was a winner for them, an easy one for them, they could mobilize support. 

So that was not an easy one to contend with. At one point I had to go up and meet with [Joseph] Lieberman and Dole when they were pushing for it. This was when Dole was going to be a candidate, so it was no-lose for Dole. In the end, what we got—and AIPAC was doing everything they could to gin this up—in the end what we got was that we built in a waiver that allowed this to pass, but a waiver that allowed us also to say that for national security reasons we wouldn’t do it. 

But I can’t think of a single time that there was something that they were pushing for and that we didn’t want to do and were forced to do. I can’t think of one thing that we did in that way. What I can tell you, and what I think people don’t get—those who want to sort of portray what our policy, what a prisoner of [indecipherable]. I’m talking about our administration. Obviously, in the first Bush administration that was not the case. In the Clinton administration it wasn’t the case, either. 

The relationship with this [current] administration and AIPAC is a different story. But again, I don’t think it’s a function of AIPAC. It may be more a function of the evangelicals than maybe anything else. And also the reaction, “Well, we won’t do what Clinton did.” So there are other factors that influence it. But what we had to do—and then I’ll get into the Robertson-Falwell meeting—we had to spend more time justifying our policy. We had to spend more time, in effect, making the effort to sell it. We had to spend more time counteracting things where they were trying to constrain what we wanted to do.

I for one have to tell you, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think it’s the nature of our system. One big mistake of the current Bush administration was not understanding the importance of explaining their policies and selling their policies. Whether you agree with them or don’t agree with them, they had to go out and make the case for them, and they didn’t. Why wasn’t the President making these speeches he’s making on Iraq—why wasn’t he making these speeches two years ago? The fact is you have an obligation. If you think your policy is right—and if you adopt it, you ought to think it’s right—then if you have to sell it, so be it, go sell it. There were lots of times I would literally have to come back from the Middle East and go spend the day on the Hill. I can tell you there were a lot of things I wanted to do other than that. But the truth is, it’s our system. That’s the way it is. Bemoaning that, then, is almost to say, “Well, I really don’t like democracy.” I think you ought to be prepared, that this goes with the system, it’s one of the prices of the system, and you ought to be prepared to do it. 

Yes, we were very aware of the meeting with Falwell. There was a lot of anger within the administration over it. For those who were more prone towards confrontation with Bibi, they wanted to do things to embarrass him. Clinton didn’t like it, thought it was directed against him personally, but I think Clinton’s attitude was it’s a stupid thing for him to do. It doesn’t help him. In the end, it doesn’t hurt us. It tells us more about who he is. So there was a lot of anger about it, but it didn’t produce a lot.

We’re getting very close to our appointed time. I want to ask one more question if I can. In the book you give a fairly extensive description of the summit where the [Jonathan] Pollard issue becomes a big issue, but you’re very careful about not specifically identifying where you felt the Israelis believed that they had a commitment. Do you have a notion about this?

Here’s what I believe. One thing about Clinton, and one thing about Bibi. Clinton was certainly someone—and undoubtedly you know this—who could make you feel like he was agreeing with you and he could certainly tell you oftentimes what you wanted to hear. And Bibi was someone who was very good at hearing what he wanted to hear. In Clinton’s case, he could say something that seemed really forthcoming, but in his mind he’d have a little bit of a qualifier in there, just enough of a qualifier to say, “I really haven’t made that commitment.” For someone like Bibi, he wouldn’t hear that little bit of a qualifier. So I believe that Clinton in private with Bibi was very forward leaning, but not, in his mind, definitive—but certainly very forward leaning and giving Bibi the impression that this was something that certainly could happen. I understand the word “could” as opposed to “would.”’ Bibi probably heard “would” and he probably said “could.”

I recount in the book that when everybody thinks the deal’s been done, Clinton leaves these two facing couches and motions for me to follow him into the bathroom. He says, “He says he’s not going to do it. He’s not going to do the deal unless we release Pollard.” And I asked him flat out, “Did you tell him we would? If you did tell him we would, you have to do it. If you didn’t tell him that, then he’s just trying to hold you up for it, so you don’t have to do it.” As the morning wore on, he was becoming more and more insistent that he had not done it, which convinced me more and more that he had been quite forward leaning on it.

I don’t trust Bibi because I know who Bibi is. But Bibi told others, before the end—and that’s also Bibi, Bibi also tells people what they want to hear—but he told [Natan] Sharansky, and he would want to tell Sharansky what Sharansky would want to hear. But Sharansky is also the kind who would ask him, “Did you really have that?” And Bibi said, “I really have it.” Which tells me that Bibi honestly believed that he had it. My sense is, what happened is exactly what I described—that Clinton left a little wiggle room in there and Bibi either didn’t want to hear it or didn’t hear it, given who he is. Because he wanted it so much, and he saw it as such a trump card for him. That’s my guess at what happened.

This is the risk of a summit?

It’s the risk of having what are known as “four-eyes meetings.” They have benefits and risks, especially with two leaders like that. Clinton could be very precise. Bibi was not very precise. Clinton once asked me, “Does he lie? Is he lying to us?” I said, “Nah.” And he expected a different answer. I said, “He doesn’t lie, because he really doesn’t remember what he says.” I actually think it’s sincere. It’s an acquired capability, because when he says something, it’s like he said it but then it’s gone. I would oftentimes say to Bibi, “This is what you said,” and he would never challenge me. It’s because I was precise and I did take everything down, and then I would repeat it. But the fact that he would never challenge me told me that he knew I remembered it and he wasn’t sure if he did. It’s not because Bibi’s not smart, he’s very smart. I think it was something that became a subconscious way of protecting himself, that he really didn’t remember exactly what he had said. He might remember what was said to him, and there I think he probably did. But he wouldn’t remember what he said. 

We haven’t covered everything, but this has been fascinating and we’re very grateful for the time. I think this will make a first rate supplement to what’s already out there, so thank you so much for taking the time.

I’m glad to do it. Good luck with it.