Condoleezza Rice Oral History

We’ve been doing this kind of work for several decades and our standard course of action is to do individual interviews with the key figures in every administration. We always encourage people to do as you have done, to invite former aides and associates to come and talk with us about their experiences. In the past this has worked out very well. These are among the liveliest of the interviews that we do in the Oral History Program.

In fact, I want to show you a picture, and we’ll circulate this. This is from April of 1977. One of the first things that the Miller Center ever did was to reconvene a group of alumni from the Gerald Ford administration some three or four months after they left office to reflect on their experiences. This is the group picture. There will be some people in that picture that you recognize.

A very august group.

We’ll send this around for everybody to have a look at. It just goes to show you that group oral history is something we have deep roots in.

The one important thing for me to say in relation to this here is that every one of you at the table, in addition to Dr. Rice, will be extended an invitation at some point before the project is over in about five years’ time, to contribute your own individual recollections about your experience with the 43rd Presidency. There are two corollary projects going on: The Miller Center is doing a project; and Dr. Seyom Brown is setting up a corollary project at SMU [Southern Methodist University]. Is there anything you want to say about that, Seyom?

It will be complementary to the Miller Center’s project in that we will be concentrating mainly on second tier: Assistant Secretaries, Deputy Assistants, and so on, to complement what the Miller Center does. It will expand the number of oral history interviews quite substantially.

We will be getting about a hundred interviews collected as a part of our experience. We’ve already done somewhere in the neighborhood of ten or so. We just started about this time last year. The reason I say that is, if you look around the table, there are a lot of people here and to use the metaphor from yesterday, there aren’t really enough basketballs for everybody to score repeatedly. Just be assured that we’ll have an opportunity for you to contribute all of your recollections at an appropriate point later on.

These interviews are very conversational. They’re very informal. We consider ourselves midwives to history. You’re the ones with the stories and the recollections and reflections that we’re trying to get on the permanent record. We’re here to help you with that. The best thing we can do normally is just pose a few questions and stand out of the way and let you go at it. I do want to add, with respect to those of you other than Dr. Rice who are here, feel free, if you think that we’re not getting right at something, or if our questions are not quite sharp enough, to jump in and help us. As outsiders we can’t possibly know sometimes even how to phrase a question properly in order to get at what we really want to know. You can really be a source of advantage to us in helping us to sharpen our questions or direct people in ways that will be fruitful.

Beyond that, our goal is to hear what you have to say. At your request we’re going to focus on your years as Secretary of State. We may occasionally go back into the NSC [National Security Council] years, but I’ll leave that mostly to your discretion. We’ll hope maybe we can get some more time at a convenient moment in the future to come back and talk about those important years.

The only other thing that I want to mention here is something about the ground rules. The proceedings are being conducted under a veil of confidentiality. You see we have audio recorders here. We’ll prepare a transcript of the proceedings. The transcript becomes the authoritative record of the interview. You have a chance to go back to the transcript and to review it, each of you. The canons of oral history law and ethics put the ownership of the words in your possession until you sign off on them. We can’t do anything with these words until you sign off on them. We don’t anticipate the project being over for another five or six years, and it would be at some point after that that these would be released. We have an unblemished record of maintaining these confidences over the 30-plus years that we have been doing this kind of work.

Recognize that you are speaking not just to those of us gathered at the table, but also to future generations of students of the 43rd Presidency, who will come to understand it as you experienced it. I don’t know that there is anything with respect to choreography that I need to address other than to just get started and we’ll see how it goes. If you have questions about the proceedings, let us know. One additional thing that I’ve got to do as an aid to the transcriber—This is going to be a real challenge—is to go around the table and get people to say a couple of words as voice identification. Brian Craig at the end of the table, who is working the recording equipment, will be making notes of the sequence of interventions to help with that too. So, I’m Russell Riley. I’m the chair of the Presidential Oral History Program.

I’m Barbara Perry and I’m a senior fellow at the Miller Center in the Presidential Oral History Program.

I’m John Bellinger, the former legal advisor for the State Department and now at Arnold & Porter.

I’m Eliot Cohen, former counselor at the Department, professor at Johns Hopkins, and noted authority on sports. [laughter]

I was just going to say the basketball reference may have gone over—

Colby Cooper, longtime aide to Dr. Rice.

Cameron Bell, research assistant to Dr. Rice.

Theo Milonopoulos, research assistant to Dr. Rice.

I’m Liesel Bogan, also a research assistant.

Georgia Goddfrey, chief of staff to Dr. Rice.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Daniel Fried, former Assistant Secretary for Europe and currently the Special Envoy for closing Guantanamo.

Jendayi Frazer, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and currently professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Marc Selverstone, assistant director for Presidential Studies at the Miller Center.

Director of studies at the Tower Center, SMU.

I’m Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State and now professor at Stanford University.

Let me begin by asking you this: When you came to Washington originally—Again, we’re not going to park on the NSC years much, but this relates to what happens later—did you anticipate staying the entire four-year period, and can you tell us a little bit about the sequencing or the dynamic as it related to your considering staying on or leaving, and whether there were other positions in the government that you had contemplated moving into during this period of time?

When I agreed to become National Security Advisor, I assumed that it was for the four years of the President’s first term. I had been Special Assistant for Soviet and East European Affairs in the administration of George H. W. Bush and left after two-plus years because I needed to return to Stanford—You know, the two-plus-years rule. But, as senior a position as National Security Advisor is, I felt that I probably owed the President four years. I did not anticipate staying another four years; that was a much tougher decision for me.

When I came in, there was not much doubt that I was headed for the National Security position, because I had coordinated then Governor [George W.] Bush’s campaign foreign policy team. He had long said that he wanted me to go to the White House. I had some interest in maybe going out to one of the agencies, because I wanted to do something that was more line authority, but he convinced me that we ought to be together in the White House. As he put it, he said, “I want you down the hall, not across the street,” so that was the way that it was.

Can you tell us which of the line agencies you had an interest in?

I had an interest in Defense because I always thought that the Defense Department was a very interesting place. I had been on the Joint Staff for a year and had liked that very much. I even toyed at one point with whether or not it would be very interesting to go to Education, because I’d been provost at Stanford and had had, and continue to have, a very strong interest in issues of education. But given my background, and given that the administration was just getting started with a President who had not had much of a foreign policy background, and we had sort of worked through that together over the year and a half or so of the campaign, none of that lasted very long.

During the first term was there ever a possibility that you might have moved out into another position? Were there discussions at some point about your leaving that job and moving elsewhere?

Without being specific, whenever the President was sometimes frustrated with whatever was going on in whatever department, he would simply say, “Why don’t you go to X and run that department?” That would take ten minutes before he would calm down about it. But no, I don’t think there was ever much thought that I would leave the White House in the first four years.

But you didn’t expect to stay on?

I did not expect to stay on. First of all, after four years, particularly four years that had been marked by 9/11, I was pretty tired at the end of that four years. I loved being at a university. I know it is hard for people to understand, but I’m really a university person who took a detour. The thought of another four years in Washington was not very attractive to me. I really thought I would go back. I even said to the President at one point, “Maybe I could take on some kind of Special Envoy role for you.” He was thinking of doing something in the Middle East and I thought maybe I could do something like that. But I really didn’t, especially midway through 2003, early 2004—I think I had this conversation with a number of people; I know I had it with Sean [McCormack]—think I was likely going to leave.

When did the discussions become serious about your sticking around?

I can’t now remember whether it was in the summer, but it probably was in the summer of 2004, with the campaign underway. Someplace in there, Colin Powell let it be known that he did not want to serve another term. President Bush and I were talking in the Oval one morning and he said, “You know, I think you ought to become Secretary of State.” I did what I often did with him when I really didn’t want to have that discussion right then. I said, “Well, there will be plenty of time to worry about that later.” Then I realized that it sounded like I didn’t think he might be reelected, [laughter] so I said, “I mean, after the election we can talk about that.” He kind of laughed. I remember that moment really well.

We began to talk more and more about my staying in the administration. He kept saying, “We have so much that is unfinished. You really can’t leave. Stanford will always be there.” I started to believe myself that that was probably right, but I was really torn about it. I was torn also because I had been so close to the President, down the hall, seeing him five, six times a day. And I thought, What is it going to be like to actually go now to an agency? For me the thought that I would stay on as National Security Advisor was absolutely inconceivable; I wasn’t prepared to do that. We started to have those conversations during the summer of 2004.

What was it ultimately that led you to change your mind?

I really wasn’t convinced that I would do it until after the election. We went to Camp David on the Thursday after the election. The President said, “I want you to—” Let me go back. When I went down to congratulate him the morning that Senator [John] Kerry conceded, he said, “Now we have to talk about the future. We have to talk about your going to State.”

I said, “Let’s talk about that at Camp David,” because I knew we were going up there on that Thursday. That Friday morning, I walked up to Laurel Cabin and we talked about it. I said, no, I really didn’t think I wanted to—I didn’t know. I said, “I’m concerned about a lot of things. Let’s have this conversation again.” By Friday night I’d agreed to do it. The President and I had a way of talking with each other, persuading each other, convincing each other, which was not, “You have the following options.” It was much more a mind-meld than that. I think we just came to the conclusion that that was the best thing. So before we left Camp David I had decided that I was going to—

Did those early conversations also involve who might be some of the other—What might be some of the other changes?

No.

Who might ascend to Defense, and so on?

Well, the President was, as he said in his own memoirs, considering what to do with Defense and thinking about making wholesale change there. It was immediate that Steve Hadley was going to be National Security Advisor. I don’t think there was ever a question that when I left the White House, Steve would be National Security Advisor. The President liked him. Steve was so much more than a deputy. He was really a complete surrogate for me. It was really clear that Steve was going to go to National Security Advisor.

As the President said in his own memoir, he was considering trying to find somebody else at Defense because he wanted a wholesale changing of the team. We didn’t talk much about those other Cabinet positions. I felt a little bit constrained in doing that. I don’t know, somehow talking to the President about my colleagues and whether they ought to stay didn’t feel like the right thing to do, so I actually didn’t. But I knew that he was considering trying to find somebody else at Defense.

Who would he normally talk with, if he is having these kinds of conversations, if not with you?

I think he talked to Andy Card. I’m sure he talked to the Vice President. Maybe [indecipherable] as well would have been somebody who would have been party to those conversations. But I knew he was thinking about it. For one brief moment, back when the Abu Ghraib situation happened and Don [Rumsfeld] offered his resignation at that time, we talked about my going to Defense. I didn’t do it then, and there was another period a little later on—I can’t remember what the trigger was, but it was prior to the retired generals’ revolt, and the President said, “Do you want to go to Defense now?” But now I was Secretary of State, and that would have been a really horrible signal from the point of view of the administration.

Do you remember what might have been the decisive factor in leaving Rumsfeld there after Abu Ghraib?

Well, he said two things: that he couldn’t find an alternative that he felt really worked, and secondly, we were in the middle of a war and changing Secretary of Defense in the middle of a war is no small task.

Could you say something about how and when you started to think about an agenda for the Bush second term? Was that something you started to mull about after you had finally made the decision that yes, you would do this? Or, as you’re winding down in that first term, were you starting to put things together? This is how I would prioritize the challenges going forward.

It was definitely before. I describe it—I’m writing this book, too, which is why these guys are here. I had a lunch with John Gaddis.

My old advisor.

John is a longtime friend. I remember it well. We were sitting in my office and John said, “You know, everybody knows that America is really important. The Europeans know that America is really important. They need American leadership.” In his own nice way, John said, “You know, you have broken a lot of china, and you really need somehow to reassure people and bring people back together.”

I was really struck by that, because I had had a couple of conversations with Europeans, with a French colleague who had said, “You know, we knew we couldn’t stop you from doing whatever you wanted to do after 9/11, but we’d hoped you would at least consult us.” Another colleague, a German colleague, had said during the campaign, “Do you realize that the German Chancellor has less control over the course of American policy than does a voter in Iowa?”

This sense that they were feeling that their future was in our hands and we weren’t attentive to that really had an impact on me. I mention this in what I’ve been writing. Shortly after the election, whenever the next Economist came out, there was a picture of President Bush waving and it said, “Now lead us.” It is about that time that, earlier than the actual election, but really reaching a crescendo with the lunch with John and the conversations that I was having with people, that this had to be now about stabilizing alliances, giving a sense that this system that had broken into chaos with 9/11 had a center again, that we were going to put in place pillars for a more stable environment.

I started, deliberately, to invoke the period after World War II as a period in which the United States, having won the war—and I knew we were still in the midst of a war—but in which the United States had worried about institutional reform and worried about laying new foundations. So yes, that’s really when—Already I was worried about the agenda.

And had you had some of those conversations with President Bush? With Secretary Powell as well?

Not so much with Colin, but quite a bit with the President. And we would have those conversations along the way. For instance, going back a little bit, shortly after the war had come to—Initial combat operations had been successful and the statue had come down. We were standing in the Oval Office and I said, jokingly, “OK, now it’s time to forgive Russia and punish France and ignore Germany.”

You’re smiling.

It was meant to be a joke. But I said it, I guess, in too big a group, or as Benjamin Franklin once said, “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” The next thing I knew, it had filtered into the press. I felt really bad about it because, I mean, this isn’t the nicest way to speak about our allies. But it had come in the most innocent way. The President and I were talking about what we needed to do now to bring people back on board.

We took a series of trips almost immediately. He went to Europe. They were having a G8 [Group of 8 summit] in Evian that summer. It was July, so it was only a short time after Iraq. He sent me to Moscow in April to talk to the Russians and start to bring people—So it had been in his consciousness for some time, that you couldn’t just leave things lying in pieces.

After September 11th, we were stunned and we were aggrieved and we were determined not to let it happen again. We acted quickly and maybe sometimes without bringing others along. I said that with the Chapter 5, Article 5 invocation at NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization]; I felt bad because I think we left the allies all dressed up with no place to go. They didn’t have the capacity to move quickly in Afghanistan and we had to go. President Bush is much more conscious of people’s feelings and concerns than he is given credit for. He knew that we had left a lot of hurt feelings in the wake of what we did and I think he was anxious to see that fixed. But then we had to get sovereignty to the Iraqis.

One thing that I try to teach when I teach this course, and I’m sure Eliot does the same, is that history imposes a kind of order on things, but when you’re in the midst of it, you’re having to deal with that priority first. You don’t have time to worry about this, or this keeps intruding. So we didn’t do as much in 2004 as we might have on some of these issues. Then 2005 comes, and by the time I’m Secretary, I think this is the first order of priority: to bring back together this alliance of admittedly frustrating sometimes, admittedly patronizing sometimes, European allies. But you know, these are our friends. These are the people with whom we share values. We can’t be estranged in this way from our allies.

I should just mention, and maybe John wants to say a word about it, because one of the things that we took on was an agenda to do something about the international law piece of this. We didn’t want to be considered to be outside of the international league of—

You may want to flip through this while I say a quick word. You might want to say something—If you remember, Senator [Richard] Lugar initially wanted to have a confirmation hearing for you within about two weeks, which—I would have had a heart attack; I would have been the worse for it—but then he ultimately couldn’t find a day in early December.

Right.

So then we had to wait all the way until January, which actually gave us a quite leisurely transition to do a fair amount of planning of what I would call a friendly takeover of the State Department. This piece of paper is some of the transition thinking that we did at the time. Two points you’ll see in there, and this was my pet project, was really trying to reach out to the Europeans on international law because this was so important for them, and the Secretary was very supportive on this point.

In your confirmation statement, which was significant, I will always recall your words, “The time for diplomacy is now.” You might say we sat around in the Situation Room, at your apartment in the Watergate, plotting out those themes.

That’s right, exactly. John was going to carry this on the international legal side. I’m somebody who is pretty short-tempered, or lacking patience sometimes, on some of these international legal issues. [laughter]

Am I seeing heads nodding?

Might be a time to chime in.

One reason that I wanted John, and you asked about personnel—One of the reasons that I wanted John to be legal counsel was that I knew that he would not be somebody who would just hook, line, and sinker take every international legal argument to its furthest extension, but that he would take the argument seriously, engage them intellectually, and give us a better foundation.

At the time of the Geneva Conventions decision back in 2001, 2002, John walked into my office and I remember saying to him, “Well, John, if these people aren’t going to be subject to the Geneva Conventions, then what are they going to be subject to?” I felt that we were out there without a net a bit and that it was important to get that. That was a big part of reconnecting with our European allies.

John, if it is possible for us to have the paper, we can put it as an appendix to the interview? People will find it very interesting.

I remember the Gaddis lunch. I was actually there, and it was immediately afterward—I was then the Senior Director for Europe at the NSC. We put together a plan for reengaging with Europe for the second-term strategy and gave it to Dr. Rice, who said, “Thank you, we’re going to hold this until after the election.” Not another word. Kerry concedes on Wednesday. On Thursday morning I was in the Oval Office for a phone call. The President says, “We’re going to reach out to Europe. We’re starting in 45 minutes. I want points. I’m going to give a press conference and I want to know the words for reaching out.” Dr. Rice gave me a look as if to say, That’s where your memo went. I called up my staff and said, “Hey, 15 minutes, four points, the President.” He went out and gave those remarks, and the outreach to Europe was operational that Thursday. All the Europeans reacted well.

Yes.

“What’s this?” The Ambassadors were calling me up, “Is this real? Is this just words or does he mean it?” I said, “I guarantee you this is serious. This is the first policy remark of the second term.” The Gaddis lunch crystallized thinking that we had all had, but it took somebody like Gaddis to say, “[Otto von] Bismarck upset the—” He used the Bismarck analogy.

The Bismarck analogy, that’s exactly right.

Bismarck upset the apple cart. He got a lot done and then he became conservative, consolidated Germany’s position, and things in Europe were stable. That’s what got us going.

Yes.

The date of the Gaddis lunch again—When was that?

Not too long before the election.

It was the summer, I thought.

Maybe it was in the summer. I thought it was after, but you’re right; it was before. I can look back on my calendar and find the date because I have all my calendars.

Just one more point about this, because it is a really important thing. We had done very well, ironically, with several populations. We were doing actually pretty well in Latin America; although, when we come to that piece—I kept feeling that we had aborted some important work with the Latin Americans and the Mexicans as a result of 9/11. We just didn’t have the time.

Sure.

We were doing great in Africa, where the President, through the PEPFAR [President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] Millennium Challenge—He just liked the African leaders. He liked the African problems. He liked trying to deal with poverty alleviation. He liked trying to do conflict resolution. I’ll bet he had more African leaders in the Oval than any President in American history. So we were doing very well with the Africans. And Asia, we were kind of OK, although it was a little bit unformed with the Chinese, and we can get to that.

But with the Europeans—Here we are, our best friends, and I think the President knew that, given their choice, he would not have been reelected. He knew that. But he was now the President of the United States for four more years, and what were we going to do with it? He does a very important speech at Whitehall, which we helped him structure, where he kind of pokes fun at himself and at the European heritage of our “devil-may-care, storm-the-ramparts” kind of foreign policy, by saying, if we’ve been overly zealous in the defense of freedom, where do you think we got that from?

I think the outreach to the Europeans was very important. I’ll just continue on this for a minute. When I then became Secretary, my first trip was to Europe, and my first stop was London. It was very comfortable. I knew Tony Blair because I’d been National Security Advisor through the Iraq war. I knew Jack Straw. It was very comfortable. But when I did the first press conference, I was stunned that the problem wasn’t Iraq. They were so over Iraq. The press didn’t ask any questions about Iraq.

It was Iran. It dawns on me while I’m standing there that we’d gotten ourselves in the position where the Europeans feel they’re moderating between us and the Iranians. How did we get to this position? That became the first really clear signal that we had to shift policy on Iran—not so much because I thought it was going to bring the Iranians to the table, but because we needed to unite the alliance around the Iranian issue.

Before we get too far away from the 2004–5 period, I wonder if you could talk about your campaigning with the President during the 2004 campaign?

I did no campaigning per se. The National Security Advisor—like the Secretary of State, Secretary of Treasury, Secretary of Defense—doesn’t actually campaign. It was a little complicated, because I would go on campaign trips and sit in the van or whatever so as not to—I never went to a rally or anything. What I did do was to give a series of speeches, some in battleground states and some not.

Off on trips by yourself?

Off on trips by myself. Look, it was no secret that I wanted George W. Bush to be reelected. To say anything other than that would have been dishonest. But I thought that his chances for reelection were better if there was a considered effort to explain what we were doing throughout the country in a nonpolitical but almost academic way. I tried almost to take on the guise of an academic explanation of what it was we were trying to do. So I gave speeches. You can get the list from REDACTEDTEXT, but it was probably seven or eight total.

REDACTEDTEXT

Which raised some eyebrows, because people said, “Oh, you’re campaigning.” I said, “No, the American people deserve to know, as they’re thinking about this election, what this President has done on foreign policy, and to give the best explanation that we can of it.” You don’t get good explanations of foreign policy in a campaign. You have 50-second sound bites on the evening news. You have a one-minute rebuttal in a Presidential debate. The President is not going to get up at a campaign rally in Green Bay and give a considered discussion of why Iraq fits within the War on Terror and the Freedom Agenda. That’s why I thought it was important to do that.

Did you do contrast also? I mean, were you talking about what you expected a Democratic administration would do if it were elected?

No. This was to explain our policy, not to—I deliberately stayed away from criticizing what Senator Kerry was saying. I tried to lay out the argument as I saw it.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

You have a list of all of these speeches and these events. In the particular time frame you’re talking about, the target audience was actually World Affairs Councils [of America].

That was my next question.

If I may, on this point—We had to aggregate all of this data because of the notion that she was so engaged with the public. But what the data will show you over a four-year period of time was that as National Security Advisor she gave more than 70 public speeches, so almost 15 a year. Once a month, she was out there talking about the administration. So during the heightened season she was doing nothing more than what she had done for the entire administration; it just became more visible. But again, there was consistency in all of these organizations.

Let me just make one more point about this. When I became National Security Advisor, my model was Brent Scowcroft. Brent Scowcroft is the most important man that no American can pick out of a lineup.

He is the only one that looks exactly the same.

Brent had always been low profile and low key. That was my model, coming in. I followed that model until September 11th. As of September 11th, somebody had to go on the Sunday shows, and as we did the lead-up to Iraq, I got tapped more and more. The problem with having the Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense do it is that it is from the perspective of the Defense Department or the State Department. Then I get pulled into the 9/11 Commission, so the notion that I’m not going to be public is just exploded. Colby is right; I felt that this was something that I could do. As we got into the campaign season, I thought, World Affairs Councils need to understand this. But I didn’t go to the Republican ladies club or whatever. I went to considered foreign affairs fora to try to make—

Do I remember correctly that those speeches were in so-called battleground states?

Not all of them.

Florida, Ohio.

Utah—A real battleground, Utah.

They were in Oregon, Washington, Pennsylvania, Missouri.

Alabama.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

I think I did one in Texas.

She was very careful about this. For me as the lawyer, I would blow the whistle if there were concerns. I reminded people that in past elections, the Office of Special Counsel, which comes along and investigates Hatch Act violations, would come and raise concerns, even though theoretically the National Security Advisor is not subject to the traditional campaign rules. But I was never uncomfortable, because the Secretary really set down pretty clear rules. “I’m not going to go and talk to Republican audiences. I’m not going to attack the candidate. I will go and talk about foreign policy.”

I’m really interested in your historical sensibility. As a historian, that is something that absolutely appeals to me. I would be interested to hear, once you move into the post-9/11 period, if there is a National Security Advisor who starts to loom as a model. But more importantly for this conversation, as Secretary, because you have [James F.] Byrnes, [George C.] Marshall, then you have [Dean] Acheson—how you conceived of these guys who were not just invigorating institutions but creating institutions.

Right. Look, everybody would love to be Marshall. I don’t think there is going to be another Secretary of State who is Marshall, for a long, long time. Marshall was sui generis, a unique character in a unique time. I thought that Acheson offered a lot. I kept four Secretaries of State portraits near me. I kept Thomas Jefferson. Everybody did.

Good for you.

I won’t tell you what I always say about Thomas Jefferson in these speeches. I’m kind of an Alexander Hamilton type.

I’ve read those speeches and I know what you said. That’s why we’re doing this in Washington rather than Charlottesville; you’re just not welcome down there.

I’ve tried not to say this in Virginia, but when I gave the speech at Hamilton College it was very popular there.

I bet.

So Jefferson. I kept Marshall as a great Secretary. But I also kept Acheson, and I kept [William] Seward, because he bought Alaska. But Acheson because he proved two things for me: the importance of leaving institutions and tools in the wake of historic upheaval that over time will create the grounds for victory later on. The riff REDACTEDTEXT, and it did extemporaneously come one day, is that when I was the White House Soviet specialist the first time—I got to be the White House Soviet specialist at the end of the Cold War. In ’91, you have to realize that the good decisions are not taken in ’89 and ’90 and ’91; they’re taken in ’46 and ’47 and ’48. This became a very good device to connect also to the Department of State, because this was the kind of glory period for the Department of State.

I kept asking them, as people felt bad about what was happening in Iraq, or bad about what was happening in Lebanon, “What do you think it was like to come in here in ’46 when the French Communists win 46 percent of the vote and the Italian Communists 48 percent of the vote? Or in ’48 during the Berlin airlift, or ’49 when the Soviet Union explodes a nuclear weapon five years ahead of schedule, or the Chinese Communists win? Do you really think at that point people are saying, ‘Oh, yes, in 1991 the hammer and sickle is coming down from above the Kremlin for the last time’?” Now 70 years of Communism, never mind.

This historical perspective—I always say I was lucky enough to be at the end of an historical epoch: On 11/9, I was in the White House. Then I was at the beginning of one. On 9/11, I was in the White House. People then begin to see that history has this long arc, not this short one. Acheson said to me, “Remember both those things: that you have to start to lay the foundation for later. You may not even see it come to fruition.” And secondly—My other line is always, “Today’s headlines and history’s judgment are rarely the same.”

What do people remember about Acheson? Who lost China. What do people remember about Acheson now? NATO. He kept me centered on those two historical facts.

Could I ask about 10/29/04 and the release of the [Osama] bin Laden tape?

The bin Laden tape? We were on the road. I don’t remember where. I remember getting out of the SUV [sport utility vehicle]. The National Security Advisor always rode with the Chief of Staff in Control, which is where the communications equipment is. Wherever it was, we pulled into an underground parking facility. We got out and Dan Bartlett and Dana Perino were running toward us. The President was getting out of the limo one step ahead, and she said, “There’s a bin Laden tape! There’s a bin Laden tape!” I thought, Saying what?

None of us—It was so late; it was now four days before the election, three days before the election—I don’t think we thought there was much we could do about it. We sort of cobbled together a statement. “This just shows you who he is, and the threat is still there,” and so forth and so on. I remember a couple of people saying, “This will remind people of the President who stood on the rubble.” I thought it could actually remind people that we still didn’t have him; that was my worry. But it went away as an issue pretty quickly because you just keep going. I still don’t know what he was trying to achieve.

Could you tell us a little bit about preparing for hearings? You had some experience with that earlier.

Yes.

John, I’m assuming you had a piece of the action there, but others here may also—

Yes, John, REDACTEDTEXT, Colby were all part of that team. Well, my confirmation hearings and the 9/11 hearings were different in character. In the 9/11 hearings, you know, I talk about the inquiries into December 7, 1941. I’ll never forget that my research assistants came up with this headline: “Warrior Princess to Defend Administration. The Fate of the Bush Administration Rests On Her Shoulders.” We were in a deep hole by this time on 9/11.

I prepared like I was preparing for exams. One thing about being an academic in those positions is you’re never comfortable skating at 30,000 feet, which drives your aides crazy, because they want you to know the three talking points that you have to give, and that’s just not the way I operate. I would keep delving deeper and deeper and deeper. I wanted to know everything. We prepared. I don’t like murder boards. I think it is a phony thing. People ask you questions like, Senator So-and-So—Come on; just let me get deep enough into the material.

So you didn’t do the murder boards?

We did not do murder boards. We sat in the office and John would say, “Here’s a question you might get.” Then I would say, “Here’s a question I might get. I can go on offense or I can go on defense with these points.” That’s how I prepared. I knew there were some that I was going to be on defense and some I was going to be on offense. Finally, a day and a half before or so, I said, “All right, it is now up to me. I’m an academic. I don’t know how to cure anybody, I don’t know how to make a product, but I do know how to talk. Now you’re going to have to trust me.” Bob Zoellick was there.

Now, you may have known something that I didn’t. We had four or five of us sitting around the room. We probably had about six sessions planned out. We would cover different things and just say, “Here’s something that is going to come up. Senator So-and-So will ask about something.” I said, “Is there anyone else you’d like to bring in?” And you said, “What about Bob Zoellick?”

Right.

Maybe you knew you were going to ask him, but maybe you didn’t.

It’s just that Bob and I had worked together when he worked for [James Addison, III] Jim Baker and I just thought Bob was one of the most fertile, creative minds that I had known. He was also in that class of people I call great policy engineers: people who cannot just conceive of a policy but can actually implement it. I just liked Bob and I felt that I wanted him as an outsider.

It’s a danger when you’re preparing for something like that, that the people who have been around you know the same facts that you do and see them the same. Somebody who could look at the facts from the outside, not from the perspective of how the White House is going to defend itself—a friend, but not somebody who was going to be taken up with our arguments. That’s why I asked Bob.

The confirmation process was not too painful.

No.

Because we had so much time.

Right.

I guess two points that you might want to key off of that I recall: One is of course that Barbara Boxer ended up holding you over, which sort of screwed up the whole process.

Yes, that’s right.

As a result, we were not there on the day we thought we’d get to the State Department.

Right.

The one piece that was vastly amusing, that the whole press completely missed because it was at the end of the day, is—The hearings went on and on and on. All the other Senators had left except for John Kerry, who basically tried to relitigate the entire election, between about five o’clock in the afternoon and seven o’clock at night. Senator Lugar was sitting there patiently. It was only Kerry and Lugar, and Kerry saying, “But what about this in Iraq? What about that in Iraq?”

It was actually—First of all, in the preparation I felt I knew these issues really well. I didn’t feel that I had much to prepare for there, except suddenly I realized how much Colin Powell had done that I didn’t know about, because when you’re at the White House you’re focused on Presidential-level issues, and when you’re at the State Department, every cat and dog from the international community is on your desk. So there were some things I didn’t know much about that were sort of secondary issues. We did quite a bit of work on that.

I thought that the issue in the hearings would be not, do you know the issues? People knew I knew the issues, but, what kind of Secretary of State are you going to be? We’ve just been looking back and the Christian Science Monitor said that it was going to be odd that here I was, having devalued and disempowered the Department of State in favor of the Vice President and the Defense Department, and now I was going to the State Department. In short, people thought I was going to go and be proconsul for the President. He was sending now his proconsuls out. He was sending [Alberto] Al Gonzales to Justice; he was sending Margaret Spellings to Education; he was sending me to State.

I felt it was more about that and establishing “the time for diplomacy is now” piece. So the preparation wasn’t so difficult; it was more, thematically, how am I going to present this? John is right, the two strange moments were Barbara Boxer, who—Actually, we had gotten a leak exactly as to what her plan of attack was, so that was helpful. I knew she was going to say, “In the service of cause, you have shaded the truth,” or whatever. I was ready to be outraged by that.

Then John Kerry—It was kind of sad to my mind, because it was extended. The room was pretty much dark because the cameras had all left. I felt so sorry for Senator Lugar, who was sort of sitting there, his eyes at half-mast, but maybe it was important to Senator Kerry.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

I was just going to say, the bigger issue in the 9/11 hearings, of course, was would I testify? That was kind of a really bad time.

That was what I wanted to ask you about, because the story, as I heard it, was resist, resist, resist—the [William D.] Leahy photo, and then you say, “Well, I guess I have to do it now.” Is that how it—?

Leahy photo?

The Admiral Leahy photo testifying before the December 7th hearings.

No. The Leahy photo I remember, but that wasn’t—I actually had wanted to testify from the beginning, because I thought that we weren’t getting a fair shot. I had done hours of interview with the 9/11 Commission in the Situation Room but not under oath, with a transcript but no public record. I thought that when I watched the first—Dick Clarke was out there saying all kinds of things about me and the administration. Then we get to the people who are supposed to make our case and I really felt bad for them. Colin wasn’t in the White House; he didn’t know those issues. Don wasn’t in the White House. Rich Armitage tried, but he couldn’t pull it all together. I thought we were getting slaughtered. I wanted to testify.

The President was worried about the precedent, so we decided on this really dumb idea, which was to have me go directly to the people through the press. All of a sudden I was giving on-the-record interviews to everybody who would take them. Since I was always mostly on background, this was an unhappy time. I did AP [Associated Press] and Reuters and then I did a 60 Minutes interview. It only served to deepen the hole we were in. People started to think we really were lying about what had happened on 9/11. I actually went to the President and I said, “Mr. President, I have to testify.” He said that I could make the best case, but he also wasn’t sure—He and the Vice President had talked about it, Al Gonzales and so forth. Finally I just said, “I have to do it.” Within a few hours he said I could. That was that.

I’m compelled to ask to ask the question since we’re on to this. Philip Zelikow, of course, is somebody you’d known for a long time. Philip was on the other end of the table. How did that dynamic go?

It was fine. I thought that Philip would do a professional, thorough, if somewhat baroque job. Don’t worry, I’ve told him that. I thought it was good that Philip was there. We were very careful not to have contacts—me, not to have contact with Philip. We went through their counsel. John was the point of contact, because I didn’t also want to burn Philip in any way, since we were friends and we had written a book together, that we were somehow colluding on this. We were very careful with the contacts.

There’s a lot more there, but that’s not our principal purpose here. Let me come back and ask you—George Shultz put together a dinner for you—

Yes.

—as you were sort of getting ready. I can’t remember whether this was during the confirmation process.

No, this was after I’d been Secretary.

Can you tell us about how that came about?

Yes. George had been—Apparently this had been a tradition of Treasury Secretaries for the incoming Treasury Secretary. George decided, why don’t Secretaries of State do this? He held a really nice dinner for me at the Metropolitan Club. All the former Secretaries were there, except Larry Eagleburger, who I think was ill. He also invited the Vice President. Joe Biden came. Nita Lowey came. It was a very nice dinner. Then we did it for Hillary [Clinton]. Madeleine Albright arranged one for Hillary. It has now become a kind of tradition. But the origin was that the Secretaries of Treasury had done it.

A follow-on to that question, because I know where you’re heading—My recollection is that during the transition period you contacted—

Oh, I reached out to every single one of my predecessors.

We talked a little bit about—Only you know what was in your mind as who is your role model, of these people, but I think you talked either over lunch or over the phone with every one of them.

Every single one of them.

I guess I’m eager to hear what you’re hearing from them, if you can tell us, if you have any specific recollections about it.

Well, everybody went through the issues that they—I think every single one said, “You have to do something with the Europeans.” The people to whom I was closest and stayed closest were George, and Henry [Kissinger]—George, because we had been friends and he had been my mentor since I was assistant professor at Stanford, and I felt I could call George about anything, but also because he had been a model of how to engage the Foreign Service and the career service in the support of an agenda that they weren’t always certain about. Remember, he was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, and yet beloved within the Department of State for the way that he engaged the career service.

And that was a problem we had going in. The career Foreign Service ranged from agnostic to hostile about what had happened over the last few years. I wanted very much to repair that. I had great help—Maybe REDACTEDTEXT Dan can say something about this. I was fortunate that I had three Foreign Service veterans who were highly regarded in the Service and highly regarded by the President: Dan, [Thomas A., Jr.] Tom Shannon, and REDACTEDTEXT. It isn’t an accident that they came with me to the State Department. George had done that very well, so I wanted to draw on his ability to do that.

Henry and I came out of the same background. You know, we’d both been National Security Advisor; we both were Secretaries of State; he was an academic. Whenever I wanted to talk about big ideas, I’d talk to him. I would have dinner with Henry if I wanted to talk about the lack of institutions in Asia, and how to begin to get some sort of institutional structures in Asia. We had an idea, which maybe we’ll get to at some point, to try to use the six-party talks and the North Korean denuclearization, maybe even moving to a peace treaty to try to end the conflict, as a vehicle to open North Korea and ultimately bring the regime down, but in a gentle way, to try to align the interest of the states in northeast Asia, China, Japan, Russia, the United States, and South Korea. Because when you think about it—I’m getting a little ahead, but this is the kind of thing Henry and I would talk about.

The old canard had been that the United States could not have simultaneously good relations with Japan, China, and South Korea, let alone India, so how to make sure that we had better relations with each of them than they had with each other. That’s the kind of thing I would talk to Henry about. They became important models for different reasons.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Could you talk about at this point how dynamics within the foreign policy and defense team change? You mentioned the President’s memoir. He is very straightforward about his frustrations at that time and why he wants changes. How does that change when the pieces are shifted and some people go?

Let me, if I may, recast that just a little bit. That is, start by giving us a sort of status report about—You did the global—what is happening in South Asia, Europe, and so forth as you confront it—but we haven’t turned inward. Give us a picture of what the inner personalities and dynamics are within the foreign policy–making apparatus, and then use that—

—as a jumping-off point.

Well, I felt that two things needed to happen, and I thought I had a chance of doing both. First of all, it was really important to bridge what had been considerable differences between the White House and the State Department. By the way, Acheson talks about these. The Department of State has a way of saying, “He too shall pass,” and this almost always gets back to the President; or, “What the President meant to say,” and that always gets back to the President. So very often the President has a healthy distrust, maybe an unhealthy distrust, of the Foreign Service as a career service. I felt I needed to deal with that.

The President loved the military. I mean, he loved those guys. He loved going to bases. He loved their sacrifice. He needed to understand that he had a Foreign Service that was also sacrificing, that there were people willing to go to Kabul and Baghdad and leave their families behind, and they had a whole lot less support than the military did to do it. He didn’t know those people. He thought of the Foreign Service mostly as pinstriped in Europe, and I needed to fix that.

Secondly, I needed to rebalance State and Defense. I don’t think that this was anybody’s fault. In a war, Defense dominates. If you read the history of World War II, Defense dominates and the State Department complains, in ’44 and ’45, about how the generals are running foreign policy. The delicacy was the war wasn’t over. I felt we needed to rebalance toward State to really lead, but State had to lead in a way that acknowledged that the war was still going on. I started to think of our problem as being—In ’45 the war ended and it was time for diplomacy. Our problem was that this was more like a continuum. You might be doing security operations one afternoon and then that evening doing reconstruction, or that evening doing governance stuff and the next morning doing reconstruction.

So the Department, in order to have an appropriate role, was going to have to change its thinking about what it was that it did. It didn’t sit out in outposts and do political reporting, which is the prized possession in the Department. It had to be out there on Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and AIDS clinics in South Africa, and in the highlands in Guatemala. I started to talk about a Foreign Service that would be expeditionary, not static. You should always as a manager ask, What are the awards that we give? We had 30 for political reporting. We had none for civil and military cooperation, and I’m not sure we had any for democracy promotion; I could never find one.

We also rewarded people for spending their entire careers in tough places from a political point of view, like Europe, but not so tough from living. Dan deserves a lot of credit. I went after the maldeployment of Foreign Service officers. I had as many Foreign Service officers in Germany with 80 million people as I had in India with a billion people. So we moved 300 officers out of Europe. The picture that I’m trying to give you is that, yes, it needed to be rebalanced toward State, but it wasn’t going to rebalance toward State as State looked like it has always looked.

I thought that because the President trusted me to do those things—I’d been close to him. He completely trusted Colin. I don’t think he completely trusted the Department. I felt that I needed to find a way for the Department to do what it needed to do in the modern era and that would then rebalance some of this tendency toward Defense. I can’t tell you how many meetings I sat through with the generals saying, “The State Department is not on the job.” John McCain and I actually had a bit of a confrontation about it, because he came over and said, “State is not doing its job.” I really defended the Department. But we were having trouble getting senior people to go to Baghdad or Kabul. Part of that was we had to convince people that that was really what the State Department did.

But we also found out that there were some impediments to people going. For instance, if I needed to send an Arabist from Egypt to Baghdad, they had to uproot their family and take them back to the United States. It made no sense, so we changed the rules so that the family could stay in Cairo. All of a sudden we got many people who were willing to go. That’s how I thought about it, not the personalities. It wasn’t at all, How am I going to deal with Don? It was, How does this institution get restructured in a way that it really is capable of doing the things that are needed in this strange war that we’re in, which is part diplomacy, part deployment?

That was the struggle that went all the way through. In some ways it is still with us.

Yes.

The military saying, “State doesn’t hold up its end.”

I’m actually an active-duty Foreign Service officer still, so I do have a perspective on this. During the transition, in your office, and you were there, we discussed how to get to the State Department, how to work with them. Everything you said I agreed with, but there is one more aspect: most of the Foreign Service did not generally approve of the Bush administration. That wasn’t going to change. But Foreign Service officers actually respond more to the chance to serve in a meaningful way.

Yes.

During the first term, a lot of the State Department, as a building, thought that they were almost dissidents and marginalized within the Bush administration as a whole.

Right.

But when the President’s right-hand close confidante, Condi Rice, becomes Secretary, you will have a leader who will bring them victories. In the building it was known that if you get the Secretary to sign off on your proposal, that may well carry the White House, whereas, if there is another President and another Secretary of State, so what if you get the Secretary? That’s only the Secretary of State. Now, the Secretary is what you need. The building responded to that, big time.

This is a very important part of the story, because the Foreign Service—I’d been an intern at the State Department in 1977. I had a lot of people try to recruit me into the Foreign Service. I thought, There is no way I’m going on worldwide availability. I speak Russian. I could end up in who knows where. So at some level I knew what these people sacrificed, very early in my career. And I had had the great pleasure of working with Foreign Service officers who—I knew their mind and their heart. Nick [R. Nicholas Burns] and I worked together when we were young kids. He was Bob Zoellick’s Special Assistant and I was the Special Assistant for Soviet Affairs at the White House. Then Nick came over to be my deputy.

Dan and I had known each other. He was the officer on the Polish desk in 1989 when we couldn’t get the White House—because the White House was very conservative about what was going on in Europe—to have the President say something positive in February and March about the unfolding events in 1989. Dan—Nobody can hurt him now, so I can say it, at least for five years anyway, Dan.

Go ahead.

Dan would bootleg papers to me at the White House so that I could get them into the President’s speeches, because he couldn’t get them cleared at State.

That’s the way you do it. [laughter]

I knew that these were people whose fundamental—In their core, they wanted to change the world. I kept thinking to myself, What has happened to these people? Here we’re talking about a Freedom Agenda; we’re talking about freeing the Middle East; we’re talking about changing our relationships in Africa. Why can’t we mobilize these folks? It became a very important part of my agenda. I talked to the President a lot about it. I think it helped him that Dan and REDACTEDTEXT and Tom, all of whom he admired personally, were going over there.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Yes. These were senior people. The canard had been, we can only get 25-year-olds to go. Well, these were people who were 25-year people. It made a big difference.

Secretary [Robert] Gates during the [Barack] Obama administration publicly voiced the problem of the underallocation of resources to the State Department. Was he also doing this when you were Secretary?

Yes.

One example, a glaring example I recall, was that they gave a State Department office, under Carlos Pascual, major responsibility for stability and reconstruction, but not the resources, and consequently it gravitated back to the Department of Defense. Were you involved?

Sure, and actually it was always a problem. I wasn’t unrealistic. The State Department’s budget is never going to be more than a small increment of the Defense Department’s budget. That’s just the way it is. I used to say, sitting around and having Defense Department budget envy was not my cup of tea. People also don’t understand the structure of the Defense Department budget, 50 percent of which is personnel, and a significant portion of which is dumb weapon systems that we don’t need, because the Congress won’t cut them.

What we did to get over that is to use—Don and I structured these—a couple of authorities by which the Secretary of State could, in unity with the Secretary of Defense, command Defense Department money—the 1206, 1207 accounts, which the Congress tries to cut every time they come up, because they are across jurisdictions in the Congress. The worst thing you can do is have something that is across jurisdictions. When you have Armed Services on the one hand and Foreign Relations on the other, they don’t really like sharing jurisdictions. So we tried to do it that way. But sure, it’s a problem. Bob and I were laughing at one point because there are more military people in military bands than in the Foreign Service.

This was later on during your tenure, but I ended up dealing well with the military. It struck me that there were several issues. One is that most people in the military have no idea how small the State Department is; this really completely went by them. Secondly, they use “State Department” as a kind of shorthand for the rest of the government—

Right, the civilian.

—the civilian part of the government. In the field, it was much more variable, but even there, part of what would put people’s backs up would be differences such as living circumstances: State Department people being able to drink alcohol. It sounds like a minor thing, but for the military people, it would drive some of them nuts. Or leave policies and things like that. You had all those. A lot of that still persists, and I think the military still doesn’t quite understand that the State Department is really small and that it is not normally in the business of doing [Indecipherable].

Right.

You’re our MC [master of ceremonies], but transformational diplomacy—You may want to do that later, but it fits to the point about management and you might want to ask the Secretary about when did she want to come up with this transformational diplomacy speech, which at the time was not terribly popular, because people thought we were going to redirect the Foreign Service to do the field agenda. It’s a major aspect of policy.

Thank you, John, because I think that’s a good place for us to go. I’m interested in also how you put your team together, and what were your major initiatives. Were they driven by what the President wanted you to do, or were you self-generating, with the Freedom Agenda being a key piece of that?

Well, in terms of putting the team together, I wanted to make sure that the team would be known for its competence and its intellectual firepower, because again, going back to the period of the postwar, I thought what made the State Department what it was in those times was not just that it had a bunch of politically well-connected people; it was that these people had real ideas and they were able to implement them. Bob Zoellick, I wanted to be Deputy. It took some convincing of somebody who was already a Cabinet-level person to come be Deputy, but he did, mostly because the President nearly broke his arm to make him do it. I wanted somebody like that.

REDACTEDTEXT I’ve always thought that the most important position in the Department in many ways is P [Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs]. It is, after all, usually the Senior Foreign Service officer. It is also the utility infielder for the hardest diplomatic task. I think it sends a strong signal to the Department because Ps have been very eminent and very well-regarded Foreign Service officers. So I appointed Nick, who was at that time at NATO, not long after I’d been nominated to be Secretary. Aside from the fact that he is Red Sox Nation, like Sean, he is a really good guy. I just knew that we could work together and that Nick could handle any diplomatic task. You need a P who can do the diplomacy but can also work the Department. It is a very complicated position. Bill Burns, who is now going to be Deputy Secretary, was also an outstanding P when he decided to leave. So P was a really crucial one.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT I should say a word about somebody who is not here, but at some point you should talk to him, Brian Gunderson, because that role of chief of staff is really important to the Secretary. It is absolutely true that not everything, everybody can get to the Secretary, but if you have a chief of staff who gets a reputation of being not a gatekeeper but a palace guard—If you have a palace guard, then the Assistant Secretaries, the line people, the people who actually have to carry out the policy, feel disconnected from you.

Brian had the perfect temperament for it, because he had virtually no ego. He would facilitate rather than standing in the way, but if I needed him to do something tough he was able to do it. I did not want the “seventh floor,” as it is called, to become a barrier between me and the sixth floor. I told the Assistant Secretaries—and maybe particularly Dan and Jendayi can speak to this—When they came in, I told them, “Now you are the face of American foreign policy in your region. You have to be able to walk in at the highest possible level.”

I’ve seen Assistant Secretaries who the Foreign Minister of a country couldn’t recognize in a lineup. I wanted my Assistant Secretaries to be well regarded in foreign capitals and equally well regarded in the Foreign Service, or in the Department and in the interagency. I wanted them to be on the road a lot. This is one of those rebalancing things. The Assistant Secretaries are the counterparts for the combatant commanders. In most regions, the Pacific for instance, the combatant commander really is a proconsul. He’s got his own plane that he’s flying around on. It has taken the Assistant Secretaries 36 hours to get to some place and the combatant commander is on his own aircraft flying around.

They all have close connections to the leaders in those countries. They’re given to making pronouncements that at best are at the border between diplomacy and military, and very often shatter that border. If you don’t have strong Assistant Secretaries who have the confidence of the Secretary, the confidence of the President—This is a little weird thing, when you have a meeting with the President and the President of Germany is there, or the President of Ghana is there, the White House will give the State Department two seats. That means the Secretary of State and the Ambassador. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. The Assistant Secretary has got to be there.”

Now, I didn’t bother them with every meeting. If we were seeing the President of a small country where we didn’t have any issues, I didn’t make Dan come over for that, or Chris [Hill] come over for that. But if it was an important country, then the Assistant Secretary was going to be there. I would go to Steve and I would say, “I’m sorry, the President can have me or the Assistant Secretary or he can have us both.” Pretty soon we fixed that problem. It is just a little way that the Assistant Secretary gets dealt out, because if that head of state comes to the dinner or to the lunch and the Assistant Secretary isn’t there, then they’re going to discount that person.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXTREDACTEDTEXT I was so frustrated with my many efforts to make the Department less layered. I kept saying, “Could I actually get a memo that is not cleared by seven people?”

Seven?

Birthday wishes cleared by eight offices. I recognized that this actually had a functional problem embedded in it. I would get on the phone when I was the National Security Advisor, with Don and Colin, and I realized that I knew before they knew what was going on in their building, because it was slowly making its way up to the Secretary. My one Special Assistant, Jendayi or Dan or John, would say, “You know, the Department is thinking X, Y, Z.” So I wasn’t going to be in that position as Secretary. But it is very hard to get the Department not to be so hierarchical.

There were two ways to try to do it: One was I would reach down and have the desk officer come brief. That was interesting for me, and good for them. The other is the counselor position became a way of getting out into the Department and unfiltered to me. Both Philip and Eliot had kind of free rein to go down and figure out what was going on down there, because that building is really big and if you are “S”—I learned early on that I had lost my first name; I had become S—you sit up there and it is like being at the top of this pyramid. You have no idea what is going on down below until it is too late.

Another thing you managed to do was to recognize junior excellence. I think you heard from Kurt Volker and others, and Sean, that young people who were really rising stars realized it would take them 30 years for their star to actually rise, and it stifled interest in staying in the Department. So modeled after junior faculty fellows at Stanford, you created the [inaudible] and then named it after your [inaudible].

There were two changes of policy/procedure that you instituted that made a difference. One was simple; it was the bureaucratic institution of the note, an uncleared, first-person, direct note to the Secretary from an Assistant Secretary.

That’s right.

We used it for the serious policy stuff. That’s where we outlined Kosovo independence. I’ve still got all that stuff. It’s where we did Kosovo independence, warnings about Georgia, serious stuff. A note, to be successful, ought to be written not in the State Department style. It’s sort of blunt. “Here’s where it is. This is going to be no picnic, four disasters out there. Here are three things we’re trying to do.” Follow it up by a turgid, multicleared action memo.

REDACTEDTEXT

Yes. The second thing was controversial. As an Assistant Secretary you have your own group of deputies. I wanted to hire Foreign Service officers, but the ones I wanted to hire were more junior than the system would allow. In that first trip to Europe, on the plane back, I was still at NSC but I went to the then new Secretary and said, “Look, this is my front office. These are the people I want to bring in.” She said, “Great.” She knew them all. A lot of them had been at NSC. I said, “The system will scream, because they don’t have the proper rank, but they’re all Foreign Service officers.” She said, “Go ahead. If you don’t mind the heat, I don’t mind the heat.”

There was a huge uproar. The Foreign Service system, the guardians of the system, and the union screamed because these weren’t people of proper rank. The only way to actually prove themselves was to be excellent, which they turned out to be and there was no problem. It sent two signals: One, excellence mattered more than time in class, and the Secretary was willing to take heat from the system to promote first-class hungry officers. The older, frankly less capable Foreign Service officers were furious with me, but I didn’t mind; and the younger, hungry ones loved it, and they started trying to get jobs in my bureau.

It was really important. The reason I think it is important to go into this is, when you’re about to become Secretary of State, of course you have a number of “substantive” issues. But I really thought that I had to spend a lot of time on the Department—the management of the Department, the way the Department functioned, the right people into the positions—partly because I’d had an executive position before. I’d been provost of Stanford. I’d run a university. The provost at Stanford is the chief operating officer. I knew that if you didn’t have the right structures, and you didn’t have the right people talking to you, and you got into that rarified air and nobody ever told you until it was too late, that you couldn’t run a big organization. I spent a lot of time on these issues.

I just want to add a couple of points to the access and the empowering of the Assistant Secretary. One is, accompanying the note was also direct access to the Secretary. We had the opportunity to go in and meet with her. She made it clear that there should be no barriers to that access. Then, the small meeting: You have the big huge morning meeting at State Department, where everybody is there, and then on Tuesdays and Thursdays there was a smaller meeting that had the Assistant Secretary-and-up level, where you had much more frank conversation than you could in the big meeting.

The third thing is that the philosophy was carried over from the NSC where she made sure that the Special Assistants to the President had direct access to the President. Whenever there were meetings with our people, our region, we would go in to see the President. She would have us brief the President. That same philosophy carried over to the State Department.

Absolutely.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT I’m not a—and this is different among—I’m not a paper learner; I never have been. It’s funny for an academic. I read a lot, but I’ve always done better in oral interaction. Having the people there in the morning, and then in the evening, really was a way to talk. Again, the counselor’s role, which is different in different departments, was really important. I had two counselors whom I wanted there for their intellectual heft and their willingness in an academic sense—I’m an academic, all right, so in an academic sense—to say, “You’re out of your mind. Have you thought about X, Y, and Z?” They had complete license to do that. I needed somebody who would engage me that way.

Of course you had Steve [Stephen D. Krasner].

Yes, Steve Krasner, Director of Policy Planning, as well.

I’m a steward of the physical as well as the intellectual here, and in deference to the physical, I probably ought to call about a five-minute break here. Please hold on to this thought and we’ll come right back in just a few minutes.

[BREAK]

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

All right, let’s go back to where we were. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXTREDACTEDTEXT I remember Jim Jeffrey telling me, talking about the Secretary, saying, “The way she works is she has the Knights of the Round Table, and the Knights can all talk to each other, and depending on the problem she’ll throw one of the Knights at it.” That struck me as being kind of the way she worked.

The other thing that I was just going to mention—You mentioned Vespers. That was always the best time for a more freewheeling discussion of some large problem. It was the end of the day, and one of the things that was very good was she got out reasonably early so the rest of us could get out too. That’s where larger ideas could be floated and on a pretty regular basis, which I thought was quite a good thing.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Were there red-team exercises that came to supplant policy?

Well, I’ll tell you, Iraq turned out to be an important—Two or three times we needed to revise, and we wanted to be a kind of red team ourselves, but also to become thorns in the side for the government in general. We can get to 2006, but it was pretty clear by 2006 that whatever we were doing in Iraq wasn’t working.

I was fortunate that in 2005 Philip must have—[inaudible] was my assistant, my liaison officer. Their red-teaming actually came up with these Provincial Reconstruction Teams that would be more unifying, and we perfected that in Iraq, even though they had started in Afghanistan. So yes, things would sometimes turn our policies on their head. I think that was very important.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

I came back from that Europe trip so disturbed about what a mess we’d gotten ourselves in with the allies. That’s when we started saying, How can we shift this policy? One thing you have to realize is that you can’t shift policy in ten seconds; it just doesn’t work that way. The first things we did—There were two pretty small things. There were two decisions pending that the United States had actually prevented: One was allowing Iran to enter accession talks on the WTO [World Trade Organization]. We had exercised our veto. The other was there were some spare parts for some old Iranian aircraft, civil aircraft, that we were holding up. We packaged those and said, “We’re doing this in support of the European negotiations.” You would have thought that we had just given them gold. It was like, “Oh, my goodness, that’s so good.” I thought, It’s spare parts for an aircraft. Sometimes you just have to find a little bit of a way to turn things.

The other one we red-teamed quite a lot was North Korea, because we were dead in the water on North Korea.

These were strictly State Department exercises, the red-team exercises?

Sometimes we would take them into the interagency, but we’d often do them on our own as well. The NSC was—Steve and I had such a close relationship. And we really didn’t experience any leaks. That’s another important point. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT We could talk about very hard things and you never saw them in the newspapers, which was very important.

Often when I was getting ready to try to upend a policy, I would go have a private conversation with the President and say, “You know I’m not going to do anything that you don’t want to do, but we need to push forward here.” We stayed in contact. I would always have—I even did this as National Security Advisor. I would have a feel for how much he could tolerate. That was important.

Another one that I would put on that table was Sudan.

Sudan, yes.

You did a few of them.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

I would send the counselor and/or Steve Krasner off on trips. “Just go look and tell me what you see out there,” which was another way to find out what was going on.

The shift on missile defense from a national, unilateral military program to something with NATO, and an offer to Russia to cooperate—We brought it about three-quarters of the way from where it started, to where it is now under the current administration. They changed the military architecture somewhat, but the political and strategic architecture is where we left it. I’ve seen both halves. It was [Alexander] Sandy Vershbow who carried it the rest of the way.

Yes.

It was under this strategic shift of reaching out to Europe and doing things with Europeans if at all possible. Missile defense started ’07, late.

You had said that you were a bit reluctant at the very first to take the position as Secretary because you had such a close working relationship with the President.

Yes.

Where did that go, once you went to State? How often did you see him, talk to him? Then you also have mentioned your learning style. Can you talk about his learning style and how you briefed him?

One reason we got along so well is we actually are similar in our learning styles. He also is an audio learner. The worst way to approach President Bush was to give him a memo with three options. The first option is capitulate, the second option is whatever the State Department wants to do, and the third option is go to war. That’s frankly what options papers look like in the government. [laughter]

It’s always the middle option.

It could have written on the top of it, “You’re a fool if you don’t take the second option.” It just would never work with him that way. As National Security Advisor, I learned to go to him and I would say, “We had this discussion in the Principals meeting. Here’s kind of where Don is, here’s sort of where Colin is. I don’t know if this is bridgeable.” He would say, “Go see if it is bridgeable.”

Then we’d come back and I’d say, “It’s not bridgeable,” and he would say, “See one more time if it’s bridgeable.” I’d come back and he would say, “OK, we’re going this way.” Or that way. That’s the way that we operated. As Secretary, I had the advantage of Steve, who was very much that way, and had learned that style with the President too.

You asked how often I saw the President. I probably saw the President still four or five times a week or more, sometimes two or three times in a day. Every couple of months or so we’d have dinner, just the two of us, or maybe Laura [Bush] would join us and we’d just talk. At Camp David we would just have time alone or when I went out to the ranch we would talk. Very often Steve would join us, because Steve was part of this troika that I think worked things pretty effectively.

I could read the President well enough that when I’d get up and the newspaper said, “The State Department said X, Y, Z,” I thought, Goodness, he’s going to love that. First I would call Sean and say, “How did this get in the paper?” Those were those 5:30 phone calls. Then I knew that the President got to the Oval between ten minutes to seven and seven o’clock. I always got to my desk about 6:30. I would call his secretary and I would say, “So when is the President coming in?” She would say, “He’s coming down the colonnade right now.” I’d say, “I’m staying on the phone. When he’s at the door, put him on,” because I didn’t want him to get riled up about something before we had a chance to talk about it.

So we talked that way. As I said, I would sometimes say, “Mr. President, I would like to push this this way.” I called him from the road a lot because I was on the road a lot. Hadley could call me sometimes and say, “You know, the President is kind of wondering what’s going on over there.” I would think, OK, I’m out ahead of him. So I would go see him and we would get back together.

The two things that the President and the Secretary of State have to be sure of is that they are both actually on the same page, and perceived to be on the same page, because if there is ever a perception in Washington or in the field that there is some distance between the President and the Secretary of State, then you’re not going to get anything done. People will always be trying to go around you to deal with the White House. I never had to worry about that with the President, because if there was any distance between us we were going to bridge it long before anybody saw it.

There is a popular conception of the President as not being a detailed or a nuanced person. Can you comment on that?

Couldn’t be further from the truth. He wasn’t detailed in the sense that he wanted to sit down with his specialist and debate every A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H about everything that was going on in that country. He was very strategic in knowing what questions to ask and then being engaged in the debate of those things.

I saw a lot of Secretaries go in there to give a presentation to the President, and the President asked the one question that you think, OK, why didn’t they think of that? That he was not curious is just wrong. He was very curious. He read more books, probably five for every one I read. He would say, “You know, I’m reading this book about [Douglas] McArthur,” or, “I’m reading this book about the Korean War.” He was just very engaged that way. I think any of these folks who briefed him at any given time could talk about—

Oh, yes.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

The worst thing you could do is appear to the President to be reading talking points, or what was prepared in a memo. In a briefing to the President, if he turned to the Special Assistant, the NSC equivalent of an Assistant Secretary, you have 30 seconds. Once in a while, one out of four times, he’d push back and want to know what you meant, and challenge you. My sense after a couple of times was he wanted to know what you think. Have you thought it through, or are you just saying it because that’s the paper that has been handed to you? And you’d better mean it. He wasn’t interested in the extreme option; it could be a nuanced option, but you had to mean it and you had to have a reason why you meant it. When he got to the end, OK. But if you answered in jargon, talking points, gibberish, circumlocutions, too many complicated sentences that said nothing, you were dead. If you knew what you were talking about, you could push back.

On Kosovo, I remember him grilling me. This was on Kosovo independence. He was for it. We had just been at the G8. This was ’07 and the French had forced everyone to accept three more months of negotiations. The French were right, but the President was worried that we would lose the Kosovars and they would become impatient, and since we had troops on the ground, we would go from being liberators to being occupiers. He is hammering me in Air Force One. “You’ve gone soft. You’re letting the European hesitation govern you.” I pushed back; he just takes it in, and I think, This is not going to be easy. Later, after we land in Tirana, he sits down with the President of Albania and says, “What do you think of this three-months’ delay? Do you think we’re going to lose the Kosovars? Do you think we’re going to outstrip our welcome and lose control over this issue?”

The President of Albania sits back and I’m thinking, This could go very badly for me. The President of Albania sits back and says, “No, we trust you. We trust your country in general. We trust you in particular. If you need three more months to do it right, take the time and do it right.” He shot me a glance as if to say, “How did you set this up?” I realized then that he was not actually arguing against the delay. He wanted to know whether I had thought it through or whether I had been rolled by the Europeans.

That’s a very important point because very often—The President tended to trust the people that he trusted on the facts and the details. But if there was any sense that you didn’t have conviction of it or you hadn’t thought it through, that’s when—Jendayi was with me when we went in to him about Liberia in 2003. He would say things in a very provocative way. We’re trying to get the United States to intervene in Liberia because horrible things are happening. Charles Taylor is rampaging. The President looks at us and he says, “Why should I care about Liberia? What in the world is going to make me intervene in Liberia?”

Jendayi says, “Mr. President, Liberia is ours. It was founded by freed American slaves.” I think Colin was there. He said, “Even their flag is trying to be our flag.” He sort of rolled that over. Liberia is ours. It wasn’t very long after that, having read stuff, but mostly having talked it through, that, much to our surprise, in the Rose Garden with Kofi Annan, who had just come back from Africa, he was asked by the press, “What about military forces?” He said, “The United States will be involved, and militarily.” The Defense Department went into hyperdrive. I mean, they almost had heart failure over there. The United States had committed militarily to Liberia.

I said to the President, “Is that really what you intended?” He said, “Yes. Now they’ll give me—” It’s the options. The options had been to deploy 500,000 American forces and prepare for a long occupation. Jendayi kept saying, “It’s Liberia. A few soldiers and two ships—”

The war is over.

—and the war is over. It was the way for him to push the process ahead. That’s how he used his—

One process point for the historical record, because you’ve said twice that you’re an audio learner. Having spent eight years with you—I mean, all of us may be audio learners, but you process paper more quickly than anyone I’ve ever seen. It’s important, because I actually at one point saw a disgruntled member of the Foreign Service—I can’t remember now but I saw this—write in to say one reason that the Secretary didn’t understand our policy is I understood that she never read a cable, never read any intelligence. You were a speed-reader poring through all the stuff.

I read everything.

You read actually just early in the morning and this stuff is sent to you all day long.

First of all, John is right. I’m an academic; I read. But the way that I process decisions is not to read it and start making checkmarks. It is to read and then have a conversation with people about it. And, much to the dismay of my staff, I would very often—You know those Monday holidays, like Presidents’ Day or whatever? I would stay home and I would write.

I remember that.

I would write a memo on where are we in Pakistan, Afghanistan? Or have we taken full consideration of the awakening in Anbar? I actually wrote a lot. That was a way for me to stimulate different thinking. They used to hate it when I would go home to write. Oh, the Secretary is writing again.

I just want to add on that, the point about the nature of debate and the President’s decision making, was also the policy times at the White House in the Oval Office. I saw it when it was a give-and-take on PEPFAR. We were deciding to spend the $15 billion on HIV and AIDS, prevention, care, and treatment. I remember he was hammering you about, “How could you spend $15 billion?” Mitch Daniels was there, Margaret Spellings, the Chief of Staff. It was a whole set of us, and there were different views about whether we should do this or not do this at what level. He hammered you. I remember it came directly at you. Some people were arguing that we have domestic policy issues, education, this and the other. Others were arguing you’re spending too much of our budget for foreign affairs. You came back, “I didn’t start this war, but I’ve got to deal with it.” He just came at you so hard about the soundness of this decision.

Right.

But it was, again, testing and teasing and pushing the limits of the policy, not necessarily that he disagreed with it, because he didn’t disagree with it.

In these discussions, is he trying to get you to elaborate the logic of your decision, or is he testing your visceral connectedness to what you ultimately conclude?

Both, it’s both. But you know it wasn’t really fun to brief the President. He is a very tough customer when he has a Special Assistant in front of him. He was very challenging and sometimes in a way that you would just—If you weren’t careful, you would pull back. Very often, we would sit through this and then I’d go into the Oval and we’d have a more direct conversation between us. He could be so direct and so challenging that if you weren’t careful, people would pull back just because he was President of the United States.

That’s part of what I’m getting at. In the host of interviews that we’ve done, we pick up that the Oval Office experience itself can be intimidating, particularly for somebody who doesn’t have the experience that you folks have. So if you come into an environment that is already intimidating, and then you happen to be on the receiving end of the President pushing back—

Yes, but he knew who could take it.

I’d been in the Oval before, but not often, during the [William J.] Clinton administration, maybe once or twice, but when I went in with President Bush the first time, I noticed the first thing he does when there is somebody new in the Oval is he makes them feel comfortable. He immediately interacts with them in a way that calms them down.

Just for the record, I’m getting nods around the table.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

Now we had shifted to try—Maybe it is useful for the project to kind of go through Iran. It is emblematic of a lot that we were doing. We’re sort of stuck. The Europeans are pretty stuck too, but they really don’t want to admit that they’re stuck with the Iranians. The Iranians are being terrible to them—They had renounced the suspension in 2005 after [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad—

It was January ’06.

January ’06, right. We had done the little things, with the spare parts and so forth, to just say we are supportive of the European negotiations, but the question that is on the table is, can the United States join these discussions? The Iranians have a way of slapping their friends, or slapping people who are trying to deal with them nicely. They basically kept telling the Europeans that unless the Americans are at the table, this doesn’t matter. And the Europeans kept saying to us, “Unless you’re at the table, it doesn’t matter.”

For me, the goal always was to never lose contact with our friends, to try to keep the alliance united, because I didn’t have very much confidence that we were actually going to move the Iranians, but if we were going to move the Iranians, we were only going to move them if we were united. So leading up to May I was looking for a way to join the Europeans in the negotiations. That then becomes the statement that we made in May, that if the Iranians suspend, the United States will join the negotiations. I say I’ll meet with [Manouchehr] Mottaki any place, any time, anywhere, under those circumstances. Coming up then to the UN GA [General Assembly] in September, we tried to operationalize that—That’s the calendar—to try to get pressure on the Iranians, resulting in their agreeing to suspend.

The other thing that we did was—In the late fall of 2005 we decided to try to unify not just the allies but the Russians and the Chinese as well. We therefore had a meeting in London that Jack Straw hosted. I think it was in November.

Late January ’06, at Carlton Gardens.

[Late January ’06] At Carlton Gardens, right. We come up with the P5-plus-1 structure [five permanent members of UN Security Council—U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China—plus Germany]. That then becomes the structure that is still in place to try to deal with the Iranian problem. But it starts with, “We’ve got a problem. How do we get out of this?” It doesn’t start at the interagency desk officer level and work its way up; rather, we start at the top and work it with the President and with Steve.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

This is not universally popular within the administration. The question is, at what point does the President give his sign-off to this, and what is the bureaucratic tangling behind the scenes to get others, who weren’t so enthusiastic, to back off?

There’s a lot more bureaucratic tangling in the traditional sense of bureaucratic tangling around the North Korea issue. Around this one, I didn’t have bureaucratic problems; I went directly to the President.

The trip to Europe in ’05 and the dinner with [Jacques] Chirac—Remember that? When the President did this—

Yes.

This is ’05 and we’re resetting relations with Europe, to use a phrase from a different context. The Secretary does her trip and the President is doing his. He’s meeting with NATO, but also the EU in a full-up summit meeting, which is a big deal.

The olive branch tour of Europe.

Exactly, and the Europeans are really impressed by this. It was a lively meeting. In this context he sits down with Chirac, his nemesis over Iraq. Their relationship is complicated, but in this one, Chirac is leaning forward, the President is leaning forward, trying to make things right. Iran comes up and the President puts it straight to Chirac, “Is it acceptable for you for Iran to develop nuclear weapons?” Chirac says no. The President says, basically, “You mean that?” And Chirac says, “Yes, I mean it.” The President says, “That’s all I need to know, because if you mean that, then I want to help your diplomatic track, but it is on that basis.” That was an important strategic understanding. Chirac was clearly trying to meet us, also. He didn’t want the Iraq divorce to become final; he wanted an end to the fight.

Sure, but you keyed up the President on this issue beforehand.

This was clearly—

I had gone to the President immediately after I got back from Europe. As a matter of fact, it was either the next morning or that day when I got back. I had called him from the road to say, “We have a problem. I’ll talk to you more about it when I get back.” Then we had a conversation. What’s interesting is the Vice President was there when we talked about it and the Vice President was not opposed to trying to unite the diplomatic track, because he believed that if we could get that done, then anything we had to do later would be easier. I remember that he didn’t fuss about it, at least not then. So we go through it and the President goes to Europe. I said to him, “You can take their temperature yourself. I think they want to cooperate; they just feel like they’re out in the cold. They don’t have a vehicle for cooperation. But you take the temperature; you don’t have to take my word for it.”

Then he has this conversation with Chirac. Blair of course—He basically comes home saying, “All right, I think if we do this then they will be there.” Before we made the move in May, to actually say we would join the negotiations, he had lunch with Blair at the White House. He called [Angela] Merkel. He called Chirac. And he called [Vladimir] Putin. He called Hu Jintao, but he could never talk to the Chinese on the telephone. I don’t know if they thought that somebody was listening to their conversations or whatever, but they were the most stilted, horrible conversations on the telephone.

But he did have a good conversation with Putin, Chirac, Merkel, and Blair. “If I do this are you going to be there for me if the Iranians don’t play ball?” He got a yes from all of them. Then at that point we were free to really push and develop the policy. One way to think of it is that you need to get the parameters right. Within what parameters am I working as Secretary? If you’re not careful, what you end up with is that you don’t have parameters, so every decision becomes one that has to be cleared in the interagency, or cleared with the President. If you’ve got the parameters, you’ve got a lot of running room and you can make decisions on behalf of the United States.

I made decisions, REDACTEDTEXT will tell you: “Yes, we can accept that in the communiqué.” “No, we can’t accept that.” I didn’t call Washington, because they run this through the interagency. So a lot of it is establishing how much running room you have and then using it.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Can you recall what were the principal concerns?

That we would appear to be caving to the Iranians. Look, there was still a kind of regime change or a divide in the administration. My view was yes, I want to change these regimes too, but I don’t have the option of doing it today. Right now I need to do something about the nuclear weapons program. It’s going to be kind of hard to change the regime and do something about the program at the same time. But if we’re successful in keeping everybody united and putting enough pressure on them, that might ultimately lead to the change in the regime. That was really the divide.

I was going to say, one of the things that kind of cemented this, going forward, just in the period I was engaged, was that the Europeans’ intelligence picture of Iran got darker.

Yes, it started to change.

We’d inflicted a wound on ourselves with the infamous NIE [National Intelligence Estimate], but by and large they were coming to a more and more pessimistic view about the Iranian program. By the end, in some respects, they were out ahead of us.

The French, in particular.

The other thing about that is that the intelligence picture was getting darker, and the Iranians were our best friends, because every time we thought somebody was wavering a little bit, the Iranians would do something to unite people, including in 2007 when Blair and Putin went there, treating him unbelievably badly, telling him they were going to do things and then embarrassing him by saying publicly, no, that’s not what they were going to do. They had a way of shooting themselves in the foot that helped us.

Here is a precise question: The President, although he was trying to signal willingness to work with Europeans, a couple of times for reasons that we understood, said, “All options are on the table.” Whenever he would say that, it would drive the Europeans into the ceiling. Had you had specific discussions? Were those carefully phrased?

Absolutely. First of all, an American President should always keep all options on the table. I would say to the Europeans: You want him to keep all options on the table. If nothing else, the Iranians need to think he has all options on the table. But John is right, they would get kind of—

Well, this is a Texan who had used some options.

I do remember one day we were having a discussion—I don’t actually remember the issue—and somebody said, “We have to establish credibly that we can use force.” You know, I don’t think that is our problem. [laughter]

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

I like negotiations. Sergey [Lavrov] and I had—He’s a debater; I’m a debater. We would get into these knock-down, drag-out debates and the Europeans would get really nervous. Condi and Sergey are at it again.

Not everybody was nervous.

Not everybody I guess, but most of them were, Dan. Didn’t they think we were about to walk away or something?

The British liked it. The Poles loved it. The Germans were always nervous.

That’s really what I meant. But it was good because we would eventually get to something that we could both live with. It was just kind of contentious getting there. I personally don’t mind contentiousness. I’m an academic; again, I don’t mind conflict, verbal conflict. I kind of like verbal conflict.

Going back to some of the first questions you asked, I think I was just a much better Secretary of State than I was National Security Advisor. I was more suited to the job. I felt freer in the job. I loved some things about being National Security Advisor, but after a while I was tired of coordinating people. I was tired of trying to run foreign policy by remote control: Let that Secretary do that. I didn’t have troops, I didn’t have diplomats, I didn’t have a budget. I liked the freedom of working with the President to establish a framework and then going and carrying it out.

We talked about this a little bit at dinner last night, your own sense of your skill set for each of the positions. When is it that you felt that you really hit your stride in that new position? This is mine. I own this. This is where I’m going to really excel.

That first trip.

It was so obvious. Your staff, Jim Wilkinson, and I, and everybody else was watching this—By the time we got to the base in Germany, Jim Wilkinson, a very savvy, media image person, and not a self-promoter at all, turned to me and said it was so clear. It was both the outreach to the Europeans and the Secretary in her element. You were having a great time.

Yes.

Paris—When you delivered—sorry to do this—Dressing so that you would meet or exceed Parisian standards, and the French knew it and they appreciated it.

Dan is right. I thought to myself, Wear the wrong suit in Paris and you’re dead. It shouldn’t be that way, but that’s the way it is, so choose carefully what you’re going to wear and look stylish but professional, and then they’ll listen to what you say. But if you’re wearing the wrong suit, you’re dead.

Did you have a consultant, or did you do this on your own?

I did it on my own.

Wilkinson was laughing and he said, “This is just so good, kill me now.” That’s what he said, “I’m ready to die, right now.”

I loved—I liked all aspects of the Secretary’s job. I liked running a big department. As provost I liked making the trains run on time. I liked trying to inspire people who might otherwise not be inspired to do something that they weren’t sure they wanted to do, and kind of giving them the capacity to do that. I loved representing the United States and I loved negotiating, and I liked trying to conceive of these things strategically and then make them work. I think it was a job that suited me much more so.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of moving from the National Security Advisor position to the State Department, if any?

A major advantage is that you already know all the major players. When I went to Germany, I sat with [Gerhard] Schroeder and with the President. I knew who he was; I knew how he operated; I knew how to be careful. You know the characters and the players, and that’s very helpful. You have to get used to—There is actually not anything in the executive that you have to get used to, because I was pretty clear on how I wanted to be Secretary of State within the agency, and what I wouldn’t tolerate from the interagency and what I would. I tried to enforce that. I think my Assistant Secretaries would tell you that there were times when I would just say, “My Assistant Secretaries are not going out with guidance that they read; that’s not how we operate. They have guidance and they will go and they will negotiate on behalf of the United States, and if there is a problem, then hold me responsible, but don’t sit there and tell them, ‘Go to the end of the table and don’t talk to the North Koreans.’”

The biggest shift and the hardest part was getting used to dealing with Congress in a different way, because you are now a constituted officer. You have responsibilities to Article I that are quite separate from your responsibilities to Article II. Being a member of the administration but taking that seriously—I’ll give you one example: Guantanamo—We’re trying to find a place for the Uyghurs. We make a deal with [the Republic of] Kiribati, or at least we think we have. In order to make it work, we have to give Kiribati some incredible amount of money to do this, foreign assistance well beyond what they would ever have gotten. Somebody actually says, “Well, we should say that we are doing this as foreign assistance.” I said, “First of all, nobody will believe it, and secondly, I’m not telling the Congress something that I know not to be true. I know we’re doing this because we want them to take Uyghurs, so when this appropriation shows up, I’m going to say this is because we need them to take Uyghurs.”

It is also getting accustomed to going to Congress. Defending policy isn’t hard, isn’t so difficult, but the myriad constituency issues—the water treaty that Mexico is not fulfilling for Texas—that is the stuff that I found I was not particularly knowledgeable about, going in. You realize you have an obligation to do that, because the way the Secretary of State’s role was originally conceived—and I spent a lot of time on this, as these guys can tell you—was as a ministerial function, not as a foreign policy function.

I kind of imagine the Founding Fathers sitting around saying, “Oh, well, Tom Jefferson doesn’t have much to do, so we’ll give him all of these functions, including being the Keeper of the Great Seal.” So you are sitting there signing the commission for the new Secretary of Agriculture and you say, “Why am I signing this?” And they say, “Well, you’re the Keeper of the Great Seal.” I say, “When did I become the Keeper of the Great Seal?” “Thomas Jefferson was the Keeper of the Great Seal.” And you realize you’re the notary. You’re the country’s notary.

You have to learn to deal with all this stuff that comes with it that can be somewhat annoying when you are trying to solve Middle East peace. Refugee policy—that’s another one. There has come a process now where the Secretary now must personally go and report to the congressional committees on refugee numbers, and plans to achieve those numbers. There are just a lot of functions that you don’t know about as National Security Advisor, and if you’re not careful you will undervalue them as Secretary, and you have to take them very seriously.

Within the government, did you ever encounter troubles with people continuing to treat you as staff?

No.

Not likely. [laughter]

I’ve got to ask. That was emphatic.

Not from Day One.

All right, fair enough. I did notice that, in your hearings, the other thing that you have to do is sit and listen to a lot of members of Congress in a way that you didn’t before.

Yes. And you have to say to yourself, This is about them, not about me, particularly on the House side. On the Senate side, Foreign Relations is—People don’t get on Foreign Relations to do constituency politics. They get on Foreign Relations either because they’re like Lugar and they really consider that to be a primary function, or maybe they get on there because they’ve got strong agricultural interests or something like that, but it has a real foreign policy—You go to the House Foreign Relations Committee, and the number of bizarre issues that can come up—

I remember somebody asked me once what was I going to do about Palau? I thought, OK, Palau? It turns out he had five people from Palau in his district. Or, I had a Congressperson ask me one time, “Secretary, can you talk about the disappearance of the bees?” I’m sitting there thinking, What underrepresented group in what country are the Bees? Well, it turned out it’s real bees; the bee population is declining and that’s what he is interested in. So in the House you can get unbelievable, bizarre stuff in the hearings, but in the Senate it was pretty straightforward.

Can I ask about another element of this? That is, as your star is rising everywhere, it is certainly rising in the media. What are the benefits and the detriment of that, or were there any drawbacks to it?

Well, there are a couple of drawbacks. There is really no benefit. There really isn’t. If I didn’t call Sean at 5:30, maybe he felt good. Just kidding.

Obviously the benefit is that if people abroad see that, and people in government see that, it helps to give you a little bit more steam. But I think the downsides are actually greater. First of all, if you’re not careful, you engender jealousy among your colleagues, which I don’t think is—The fact is that nobody does this job alone, and if the Secretary of State is always the one being trumpeted, then it is natural for other people to feel, Wait a minute, am I chopped liver? I’m working hard too.

I think we avoided this, but you never want the media to make you the President for foreign policy. It is extremely important that people always realize that there is a President of the United States and he is the one who was elected and you’re the Secretary of State and that’s an important position, but not nearly as important as the Presidency. The press will tilt that way sometimes.

How did you right that balance?

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Could I add that it was even more organic in the sense that the President was involved in the decisions? They were his decisions. Even from the NSC days, it was very natural to say, “The President has decided,” or “The President believes,” or “The President—” It would be something if he wasn’t actually deciding and you were doing it sort of pro forma, but in this case it was actually true. I think it was a very organic approach, which is, “The President has made some decisions,” or “He’s thinking this way.”

It’s very useful to have as your boss somebody who is seen to be very powerful and has the President’s ear. State is not always viewed as a powerful organization. Both in dealing with interagency issues and abroad, it was a big help.

That’s exactly right. It was also well known that the Secretary had a close personal relationship with the President, with the family, going up to Camp David all the time. We said in both NSC and in my shop at State, it will go into the Rice–Oval Office black box. That is, you send a memo, the Secretary will talk to the President about it and work it, and you don’t have to worry about that, because it will come out fine, and you’ll know. That’s very unusual. That’s the first—In my experience, Secretaries are often close to the President, but not that close.

I think we’re saying two different things, though, and it is important to get both out there. One is that in the Bush administration we had rock star Secretaries of State. Powell was a rock star Secretary of State and Rice was a rock star. But there was also, with Rice, the perception of the closeness and the reality of the closeness, which made it—The in-box comes out more importantly.

I agree.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Some of that really also redounds to Steve Hadley, who was very good at reminding people in the interagency that the State Department had the lead on that. It helped that when we would sit around that table there was never any question that the President thought that I had the lead. But Steve made sure that everybody kind of stayed on that page. If Steve felt that we were getting too much turbulence at Defense, or too much turbulence in the OVP [Office of the Vice President], he would call and say, “Can you call the Vice President?” “Can you call Don?” He knew that I didn’t want the interagency to slow down what we were trying to do, but he would sometimes say to me, which he did when he was Deputy National Security Advisor also, “Can you slow down for a minute here and bring others along?” He was actually very good.

We’re going to break for lunch in ten or fifteen minutes. We may not have time to exhaust the response to this question, but let me go ahead and pose it, because you had indicated that on Iran you had a meeting with the President where the Vice President was in attendance and you said, “He didn’t object,” and then parenthetically you said, “at least not at that time.” Tell us about the Vice President’s position in the administration. I don’t mean on any particular issue, but what was his role? What was his modus operandi in terms of working with the President on foreign policy issues? Did what you saw during the first term help you during the second term to know—Would it have been more like him, if he had an objection, to raise it with you present, or would he have held onto that and then in a private conversation—?

He would have raised it with me there.

OK.

One of the most misunderstood relationships here is with the Vice President. The Office of the Vice President, his staff, was quite a different matter. They were of one hawkish mind. They wanted to be a separate power center. They tried many, many times to insert themselves, and sometimes did, into processes that they probably shouldn’t. But not the Vice President. The Vice President, from Day One, respected me as National Security Advisor and then me as Secretary of State. If the Vice President had something to say, particularly when I was Secretary of State—When you’re National Security Advisor, you don’t argue with the Secretaries in front of the President. You just don’t. If you’ve got something you want to say, you say it to the President privately. It makes Presidents very nervous if their National Security Advisor, who is really staff, is arguing with the Principals. It just isn’t done.

On the other hand, when I was Secretary, the Vice President and I would just go at it right there. It was never personal. He would say, kind of half laughing, “Well, it won’t surprise you that I don’t agree with Condi on this one.” Or I would say, “This is about diplomacy, so the Vice President won’t like it.” We would just debate right there.

It made decision making a lot easier for the President, because I didn’t mind verbal conflict and the Vice President didn’t mind verbal conflict. Ironically, Colin and Don didn’t like verbal conflict. They didn’t. They would always back off. It was kind of frustrating, because you knew they didn’t agree, but they didn’t not agree in a direct way.

I never found the Vice President going around me. There were a couple of times we had slipups, where things happened that I didn’t know about. The Vice President always said, “That’s wrong; I shouldn’t have done that.” He would have his conversations with the President over lunch and he would tell the President what he thought. Either he would tell me what he’d said to the President or the President would say, “The Vice President thinks this, this, and this.” We’d work it out. I never felt blindsided, or hooded, from what the Vice President was doing. He was absolutely transparent.

Is it your sense that the more openly contentious environment when you were Secretary was more advantageous to policy than previously? That policy suffered as a result of—I don’t want to say “suffered.”

Yes. It was harder. We’d have to tease out what—Maybe some of these guys were in these meetings in the NSC where you try to actually get them to disagree and nobody actually really wanted to say they were disagreeing, although you knew they were disagreeing. You’d have to kind of intuit sometimes what the disagreement was. That was not as useful a way to go about it. I liked the open contention.

Here is an example in my area, on the bringing in of the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] detainees, which was something that we wanted to do. We really thought about it as early as 2003, 2004, but decided that we couldn’t really spring it right before the election, but we turned to it immediately after the election. It took two years to ultimately get done, which was a surprise. The point here is that it finally came to a head in a meeting that I was in, which surprised me, where you and the Vice President actually went at it on the policy. Not quite hammer and tongs, but I think the Vice President realized that this was going to be his last chance.

You laid out all the reasons why we couldn’t leave these people in secret detention sites, why we needed to get them tried on our watch. It wasn’t a sustainable policy over time. It was a long, long argument in front of the President. I was generally used to the Vice President asking sort of Socratic questions. “Well, what about this?” or “What about that?” But I think he realized this was about the last decision. Then he made a quite impassioned defense of why we should leave them there. The President, not surprisingly, didn’t make a decision on the spot. Others might speak to North Korea and Iran, but this was the other big issue where there was really a disagreement. In the first term, the disagreements were there, but they just didn’t get hammered out to a final decision.

Right.

My sense that the al-Kibar reactor was also one where you had a very different view than the Vice President.

Yes.

I thought that whole process ended up being a model, because you folks did get real options and you had disagreements and the President made the decision.

A third one was Liberia.

Yes.

This is now at the NSC, where the State Department wanted to intervene and Defense did not want to intervene. But that debate never got on the table, because State was a little hesitant, for whatever reason, to make the case for intervention. The Vice President was there. He was opposed to intervention, but he also did it more Socratically, asking the right questions, which actually made the policy better. But it is a case on the counter where you’re saying—where at NSC it was hard to actually get the difference on the table.

It was hard.

This is what we picked up. And of course it is very much in the literature out there, this business of, not relitigating, but refusing to litigate at the moment of the meeting, and then having internecine battles afterward, particularly generated out of the Vice President’s office. You make a distinction between the Vice President himself and the Vice President’s office. Maybe I can get you to spin that out a little bit.

I have to say—and of course I’m more hawkish—[laughter]

We’ve read that.

I actually got along fine with those people. I would say just two things from my observation of the OVP: First, it depended on who it was. Someone like John Hannah—again, I’m thinking about the al-Kibar discussions—rather strong, was one of the people in the room. He made his arguments and—

I would not put John in that category.

He was very straightforward and productive. But the other thing that struck me about dealing with them is that they often had no idea what their boss had actually done. They had their views. They had sent him lots of opinions and so on, and they were feeling sort of frustrated. It was bizarre. They had this sort of Darth Vader image in the bureaucracy. Actually Chris Hill, I think, suspected me of being one of their agents. But in point of fact, they were pretty powerless.

I think in the first couple of years they were more powerful. Particularly David Addington. But I do think that Eliot has hit the nail on the head. There was actually kind of a disconnect between the Vice President and his office. The Vice President was acting as a principal in these NSC meetings. He would come in and he would make his position known. He would talk to the President, but he never wanted other people not to know. He would often say, “I want to make sure Colin understands that this is where I am.” So the Vice President is off here operating as a principal and then the Vice President’s staff at the deputy level and below is operating as a staff. Sometimes the connection wasn’t all that strong.

There’s one example that is now urban legend. When I first got there, I heard that the Vice President had said that he should chair the Principals Committee. Well, that’s what the National Security Advisor does. When Steve Hadley asked him about it, the Vice President said, “Whose idea was that? That’s a dumb idea.” This was a staff idea that they had taken in to—So sometimes the Vice President was operating differently.

That is not as clear in the literature.

But ultimately who is responsible for the staff?

It wasn’t that he was—I don’t mean to say the staff was—It’s just that they weren’t always aware of everything. The Vice President operated on many levels. He operated as a senior advisor to the President. He didn’t go and staff himself in that, right? He operated in the Principals Committee. Generally [Irv Lewis] Scooter [Libby] and Steve, and then [Victoria Nuland] Tori and Steve talked a lot at that level—but below that there would sometimes be OVP—and it wasn’t just OVP. Steve and I would laugh that he would get word, “Well, Secretary Rice insists that that’s not the case.” Steve would say, “That doesn’t sound like Condi. Let me just call her.”

Or Bob Gates and I would talk because, down below, particularly below the level of Assistant Secretary, where people don’t actually know what the Secretary is thinking, they will claim all kinds of things in the name of the Secretary, or the Vice President, or whomever, and it really hadn’t even gotten there yet. So there was some of that going on.

Can I just add—Structurally, in the first term you tried to bridge some of that by actually allowing the Vice President’s staff to be part of the NSC meetings in the morning.

That’s right.

So there was some effort of integration.

We said we should be one staff, but it wasn’t always the case.

Then we had to take them off our A-list because then they’d know our position on something they were opposing us on, like Liberia.

[ONE PAGE REDACTED]

REDACTEDTEXTREDACTEDTEXTREDACTEDTEXTREDACTEDTEXTREDACTEDTEXT I was always impressed, but maybe it was just common, that every trip you went on, and of course you did lots and lots—After a period of time you would go to the back of the plane and hold probably a 30-minute graduate seminar and the press just lapped this up.

Off the record.

Maybe that was common, REDACTEDTEXT but I just—

Fairly regular. Most Secretaries did that.

But sort of a lengthy—?

What I tried to do was not to go back—I had two different ways of going back to talk to the press. One was when we had four points I wanted to make before we were landing or as we were taking off, to write their stories. But then I would do the off-the-record, let’s just talk about what happened here. They always respected it. That was more context setting. Sometimes that was a fairly deep, academic even, sense of—I would go to Russia and I’d talk about the Russia that I once knew, and so forth. I think that helped to build some links to them.

The other thing is, the State Department press corps is really good. They’re policy wonks. They actually care about the policy. I contrast it with the White House press corps, which is really more—because that’s a high-profile position from which to launch to be an anchor. So they don’t tend to have the same interest. It’s obviously a generalization, but I think they don’t have as much interest in the depth of the policy. Frankly, they have to cover the whole waterfront. The State Department press corps can cover foreign policy and know it. We had longtime people like Glenn Kessler and Steve Weisman and Andrea Mitchell, and people like that who really knew the issues. It was actually a lot of fun.

Can I interject here and pose the notion—REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT Whereas you had this relationship and the perception of that relationship with the press between you and the President, there was also that continuity arm among your staff. Sean had been with you for eight years. Your Assistant Secretaries had been with you for six, eight years. When they were speaking to a Sean, they knew they were speaking to you. You don’t see that all of the time.

That’s right.

Yes, that’s true. Moreover, we had far more license to develop relations with the press and talk to the press than was the case before or, frankly, after. This is counterintuitive. The Bush second term was a much more decentralized, hold-the-reins-loose sort of operation. By this time people trusted each other, and although the politics in general were awful, we had license to develop relations with the press, and individual policies could still move forward despite the overall bad political climate. Basically, if you were explaining things in depth you didn’t have to run to Sean to get his permission to take two steps. You could do it. If we screwed up, that was—we were screwed. But generally we were given license to background, all of us. We would all do it.

I thought I was getting away with something. [laughter]

No, we were all doing it.

There’s a larger point here and I’ll say this at the risk of being thought a suck-up.

It’s too late.

The raw ingredients were here for a cult of personality, because the boss really was a superstar, in fact the only popular person in a very unpopular administration. There are two ways in which that didn’t happen. First, what Dan just mentioned: We all, in different ways, had running room. I was astounded how much running room she gave me. But she gave everybody a lot of running room once the basic conditions of press had been established.

The other thing is, down to the very end, you could argue with her, which I did because that was what I was paid to do. As I said, the conditions were right for a cult of personality and it never went over the edge.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT It worked out really well and I’m very glad I did it. But it’s partly that if you’ve got people you trust and they’re saying to you, “You really ought to do this,” then even if your instincts are the other way, you tend to think about it and work your instincts.

I was going to make just one other point about the agenda and how to drive the agenda. It’s much easier as Secretary of State to drive the agenda when you’re on the road. When you are in Washington and you’re competing with the latest—the strength of the dollar, or the oil spill, or XYZ—it is a lot harder. When you’re on the road, first of all, you have a sort of captive press corps who want to report. Usually in some fashion you’ve got a time change working for you so that you’re not in the middle of the cycle for everything else, and you have visuals that are helping you push the agenda. Being on the road is a good thing for the Secretary of State.

The management style point actually is important for history because Secretaries manage differently. REDACTEDTEXT I think one reason why all of us stayed with the Secretary for six to eight years is that you gave us a lot of running room, but you did give us a chance to really argue with you on different things. That is where I think you are oral.

One sad thing is there just wasn’t much time at the State Department. Amazingly, at the White House you actually somehow were able to make more time to sit down and get people to come and debate a policy. I was always amazed to watch as the lowest person in the room would be talking and then you would say something and they would immediately pull back. And you would say, “No, no, finish your point.” You would absorb all this information. I would watch Nick pushing you and pushing you on various issues—“come back to the well”—on the [Human] Rights Council. And what were your darn F-16s to Iceland or something?

Actually the Iceland story is kind of an interesting one from a historical perspective, because it shows you how hard it is to change things. Don Rumsfeld in 2002 says, “We have four F-15s ‘patrolling Iceland’ and we need to get them out of there. There is no threat to Iceland.” This is absolutely, fundamentally true. The Icelanders go absolutely nuts about it.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

They don’t have a military. We built them a military. They actually accused us of—and threatened to pull out of the 1951 mutual defense treaty. This is just a big mess within the alliance over these four F-15s. Poor Dan bears the scars of it. This thing still hasn’t gotten done by the time we get to the State Department. The President has talked to the President of Iceland; I’ve talked to the Foreign Minister; Colin has talked—We can’t get it done. We finally get it done in 2006.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

The only way that I make this work is that I promise to go to Iceland, which I did.

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

There was the scene at the retreat.

I was just going to tell that. Go ahead. I didn’t want it to be corrosive.

There was a senior management retreat and there was a reasonably small group of Under Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries.

This was early?

This was fairly late. This was ’07. We come in, and it’s the opening session. She says, “All right, let’s talk about Iraq.” Silence. People are like, What about Iraq? This is ’07. She says, “Come on, people, you know as well as I do how rough this is. It’s not going well. Many of you have doubts. Can we discuss options for the way forward?” Like, Please. We’re all grown-ups here. We’re not on TV. This isn’t the Sunday talk shows. You had to pull—It was a frozen moment.

I said, “There’s an elephant in the room here,” because people were saying that we ought to be engaged in, you know, the Pacific Partnership for blah-blah.

And getting this Iceland thing fixed.

Getting the Iceland thing fixed, right. I’m thinking to myself, Nobody in this room is really thinking about the Pacific Partnership at this moment. It was during the surge—

REDACTEDTEXT

—the summer, and things had not gone very well. It was really ugly on the Hill and we were getting ready to go into an election year, and I knew these guys were catching it out in the field, too, because remember, they’re on the front lines every day with the foreigners who are questioning what we’re doing in Iraq. So I thought, We’ve got to get this out on the table, because you never want dissent to be corrosive. People have to know that dissent is OK. I knew that once we made a decision I expected people to go with it, but it is not good to have people harboring a sense that they haven’t had a full say.

We’ll pick up on this after lunch.

[BREAK]

Let me ask you this: You have a book that you’re working on and, as I understand it from lunchtime conversation, you have some approaching deadlines.

Yes, very close.

I wondered if there were things, in coming here, that you wanted to talk about, that were bits and pieces of things that you wanted to have an opportunity to discuss or inquire about among your colleagues.

This is very helpful. First of all, I would not have remembered some of the issues around the planning for the transition—John’s paper is very helpful on that. The way we’re going is actually very helpful to me because I’m also going through my papers. In going through my papers, I can reconstruct the written record. I’ve been able to go through my calendars, and I can reconstruct that, but what is harder for me to reconstruct is the color behind it. So this is actually very helpful and I think if we keep going, I’d just like to make sure—We’ve talked about Iran, which was a very good change. I would like us to hit the North Korea issues in more detail. Particularly, Eliot was very much a part of that, and Sean was fighting the wars on that every day.

I would like very much for us to talk about Sudan, because that is a piece that I have been—We’ve talked quite a bit about Europe, so that’s helpful, although perhaps we could talk a little bit about Kosovo and Georgia, which would be very helpful, and then anything else that is on anybody else’s mind. But if we could make sure that we go through those, that would be helpful.

All right. I’ve got the list of geographic areas. There are a couple of follow-ups that I wanted to pose from the morning session. One was a question about any occasions where you truly were at odds with the President or the White House on policy.

Well, I can talk through this with John’s help. We came to the right place, but we had a struggle from the beginning, not the very beginning but a couple of years in, on the detainee issues, and on some of the court decisions that were coming down, and how to deal with Guantanamo, and how to, if you will, put a legal framework around things to clean up the record.

By early 2006 I thought we were running out of time to put this on a sounder footing for the President, both as a matter of his historical legacy and as a matter of what we left as a framework moving forward. Both Eliot and John were pretty involved in those discussions. It got easier to have those discussions, frankly, after there was a change at the Pentagon, but even with the change at the Pentagon, just how to move people out of Guantanamo, and what to say. We kept getting these adverse Supreme Court decisions, so how to respond to them, whether to fight back. It wasn’t so much at odds with the President, but it was at odds with both the White House and with the Vice President on this.

This is a hugely long story, but from my point of view, and the Secretary can certainly talk about it from her point of view—I wrote a transition paper—She asked all of us to write transition papers in 2004, on what we had accomplished and what remained to be accomplished, and what were our top three agendas. Jendayi wrote one, Dan wrote one, and all of us who moved over. In my area, one of the key issues was we’ve just got to move to a better place on detainees and Guantanamo, and just get to a better place. The second was the international criminal court.

On the detainees, we started with that head of steam, with her sort of backing what I was doing in terms of outreach to the Europeans, but also trying to brief the policy internally.

John, is it the global pressure? Is it the international pressure that is causing you to move from the policy?

Let me try to set the context, because maybe it takes us back to 2001. We have the attack on September 11th, and quite frankly, anybody who tells you that we had any warning whatsoever is just blowing smoke; we didn’t. Nobody saw anything coming on our territory. So there is a fair shock value to having that happen. For several months there is a lot of fear that it is going to happen again.

We had a series of threats that emerged. Anthrax happened. We actually had a smallpox threat, which I’m going to talk about in the book. I think people don’t know much about that, but there really was a very severe smallpox threat. There was a quasi–nuclear radiological threat in October of 2001. So it is really scary out there.

Then there was a—You yourself had been—

The botulism toxin—Had we all been contaminated? We’re sitting in China and the Vice President tells us we’re all going to die. So this is a bad environment. [laughter] We’re just determined to—John can correct me here, but I don’t think anybody argued that this was a law enforcement framework that we were operating in. Everybody understood that we were going to be operating under the laws of war because this was the President as Commander in Chief. Then the question became, how much could he do under the laws of war as the Commander in Chief?

There was the very expansive view of it, which was associated more with David Addington, maybe with John Yoo, and there were those who were more cautious about it, like John, and others to a certain extent. But for a variety of reasons, the more expansive view was attractive to everybody in the early days because you’re just trying to prevent the next attack. If you’re told it is necessary and legal, then you’re going to do it. Over time, as we got more grounding or footing as to where we were, we began to understand what al-Qaeda really looked like. We started to capture their field generals. Particularly when we capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003, we know a lot more.

About that time, toward the end of 2003—Yes, we’re starting to get some pressure from the international community. People can’t get into Guantanamo to see their citizens, even our best friends like the Brits, because of the bureaucratic red tape in the Pentagon. So we start thinking, in an immediate=war environment a lot of this makes sense, but maybe we ought to start moving this to a better framework. There was even some thought that maybe we ought to go to Congress and try to get legislation, which was Steve Hadley’s view, but it didn’t quite get there until later on. We also started—John, help me with the dates—at the end of 2003, beginning of 2004, to experience some adverse legal rulings.

Right, we had [Yaser Esam] Hamdi [v. Rumsfeld], and then in 2004, 2006, 2008—We started losing at the Supreme Court every two years. First, we had to have reviews of everybody who was in Guantanamo, then military commissions were struck down, and then ultimately everybody had to have habeas.

We were experiencing some international pressure, some pressure from inside the U.S. legal system, and then just a sense that maybe the time had come to put—

You should take credit for this. Part of it was a feeling that we just had to move to a better place. Like the CIA detainees—You just couldn’t leave them there for 20 years.

Right.

We thought we would get that resolved in 2005. Having read Don Rumsfeld’s book, I now understand—He says in his book that he told Steve Cambone, “Slow-roll this. I do not want these people coming to Guantanamo,” which is one reason why it took us two years to ultimately get that resolved. And Philip felt the same way.

I would from time to time talk to the President about it. Actually, when Karen Hughes came to be Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy—Remember, she left the administration, then she comes back—we were having breakfast with the President one morning. She had just decided, maybe she had just been confirmed—I’ll have to look through the record—but someplace in that period of time she raises, unprompted by me, the issue of his legacy with all of these issues. He wasn’t resistant to it; it was just that it kept going back into the interagency to get solved and it wouldn’t get solved. It got pretty frustrating until it reached the crescendo, as John puts it.

But this sort of rethinking, and I’ll look to my colleagues on this—This not the kind of rethinking that was getting into the newspapers.

No, it was not.

So for those of us on the outside, when the President is holding firm and is being steadfast in defending the decisions he has taken with the administration, there is a reasonable conclusion on the outside that there must be satisfaction with the prevailing policy.

Yes, and I don’t think anybody—at least, I didn’t think we’d done the wrong things when we did them.

Sure, OK.

But you could keep doing the right things in the wrong time frame or under the wrong circumstances, and end up doing the wrong things. That was how I thought about it. So while in October of 2001 with radiological threats on the horizon against Washington, D.C., you might do a certain set of things under Presidential authority as long as they were legal, even if they were legal in October of 2004, maybe it wasn’t wise to keep doing them.

Understood.

And to get to your point, this was where there was interagency disagreement.

Strong.

I was having to push. She was having to push. It was basically pushing up against extremely strongly held views by OVP, by DoD, and by the Justice Department. CIA would sort of sit on the fence, depending on what the issue was. They actually came around on the detainees, because they realized that they didn’t want to hold them forever. On the other hand, they were not with us on wanting to close Guantanamo, because they thought there were bad people there. There was only one agency in the whole government that was trying to move the ball forward on the whole panoply of detention issues, from closing Guantanamo, to the CIA interrogation program, to the CIA detainees in secret sites, to the whole legal framework to move this whole basket of issues to a better place.

I think I gained some credibility with my colleagues because— REDACTEDTEXT will remember this, and Dan—I went to Europe in December ’05. There had been a leak about the so-called secret prisons. It was about two days before I was supposed to leave for this NATO summit. REDACTEDTEXT will remember this too. I beat up the—I told the President, “I can’t go there and say nothing. This won’t work.” So he sort of sent the signal that I ought to get more running room to be able to say something.

We worked very hard with Porter Goss to get the Agency to say something useful. Here you are, you have allies—The whole thing was clouded. Without getting into too much detail here, it was clouded because not much information was available even within the administration. But I needed to get them to acknowledge that we did renditions and so forth. This just had never been done before. So I went to Europe and I was pretty constrained in what I could say, but I was not as constrained as we had been in the past.

I will never forget having a dinner with my colleagues that night. It was in Belgium. I had given a press conference before leaving Andrews Air Force Base, because I decided—Sean was the one who had really come up with the idea—that I had to put it on the record, get on the plane, and have it in the European newspapers when I got there. So I gave the press conference, read a statement, a very carefully cleared statement by all the proper people. When I got there, actually I got pretty good—I remember a CNN [Cable News Network] reporter saying, “You have to say she has made some headway here with the Europeans,” because they started to back off that we were just horrible people.

We had dinner that night at [Karel] De Gucht’s residence, the Belgian Foreign Minister. He said, “OK, I’m going to keep this issue to the very end, because then we won’t have much time for it.” That’s what he said. I said, “No, if there is an 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the table, you start with it. That’s where we’re starting.” We did. We went at it, Ministers only. The dinner was two hours, I think, and for an hour and 45 minutes we talked about this issue. At the end of it I thought they understood better.

I remember using an example: I said, “I know you think that the United States is always going to be the toughest on terrorism, but you know, some of this is tradition. We could never have the anti-incitement law that Great Britain has just passed, because it would never pass the First Amendment test in the United States. You have to understand that some of this comes from the structure of our government.” It really had an effect.

I think the fact that I had held the line, so to speak, and gone and defended the policies helped me with the agency and with people back here as well. [Eugene] Gene Robinson, the Washington Post columnist, and I were talking sometime later and he said, “You play two deuces pretty well, don’t you?” [laughter] But anyway, that helped, but that’s one set of issues where there remained a lot of contention.

I get to see the Bush administration’s Guantanamo policy through the eyes of the Obama administration because of my current job. I watched John Bellinger warn, fight, and lose all the battles with Addington of OVP. John was warning people that this was a disaster. The problem, the original sin, was not picking up people on the battlefield and holding them under the laws of war. The Obama administration policy on Guantanamo allows for that explicitly. The problem was after the immediate rush was done, not having any international legal framework nor searching for one to ground Guantanamo in an adequate way, and then to compensate for that, exaggerating the threat. We felt we had to hype it. This was coming from DoD and OVP, that these people—the detainees—were all supervillains.

By the way, hyping not to the press, but hyping within the interagency.

Within the interagency, absolutely, that they were all KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed]. Some of them are KSM, but some of them are “innocent lambs,” to use the mythology of the left, though very few. Most of them are sort of in between: low-trained cadres, the kinds of jerks that join militias or bad groups, and whose lives could have taken another path. To unwind this has proven difficult, ironically, because now the politics have moved to the right of the Bush administration.

By the second term, and I’m saying this through the prism of the Obama policies, a reasonable solution was beginning to emerge. People were going back from Guantanamo. Human rights criteria were in place. Looking back, we kept them all. We haven’t changed them from the Obama side. But the original lack of legitimacy hurt the Bush administration. The Obama administration, which has had lots of legitimacy on the issue, has run afoul of the domestic politics, which now—The domestic political center on this is now about where we were in 2002.

Yes.

It’s just a tragedy.

Part of the problem is, this is just a really hard issue. When people have to start thinking about it—I remember when we were thinking about closing Guantanamo, I talked to a certain Senator and I said, “You have a brig, a military prison in X state—How about there?” “Not in my state.” You think you have a NIMBY [not in my back yard] problem with telephone towers? Try telling them terrorists are coming.

I remember trying to get rid of some terrorists. We wouldn’t take anybody in the United States, but then I was supposed to go sell it to somebody else that they were fine to come to your country. We’ve been around and about this. We were late getting to a legal framework because of a lot of resistance inside. We kind of piecemeal got to where Dan talked about. For instance, very early on I, personally, as National Security Advisor, intervened to get a bunch of people released who clearly didn’t belong there, including a 97- or 98-year-old man. He said he’d been born during the reign of King Blah-blah.

He had been found sleeping in a mosque.

He had been sleeping in a mosque. Somebody in the intelligence community said, “Well, that means that he couldn’t possibly be 99. He must be 95.” I said, “OK, let’s split the difference. He’s 96.” So it was kind of like that early on. But through the combination of some international pressure, an internal clock about this, about the President’s legacy, and starting to lose these Supreme Court cases, we got into a stronger position to actually do something.

Did the President himself express frustration with you about the position?

Oh, yes, especially about the detainees. He couldn’t figure out why these detainees—He was getting beaten up by the foreign leaders. It wasn’t so much the domestic pressure. Blair would come in and say, “My people still don’t have consular access to our people.” The Kuwaitis would say, “We’re still waiting for the transfer of the five people that you told us had been cleared.” So he would hear it from that side. He’d call me and say, “Why hasn’t this been done?” “You don’t want to know.” You really don’t want to know about that sausage.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

But it was then that there was no agreed-upon solution?

It was that we were searching—Remember, to be fair to everybody in the administration, this is totally uncharted territory. Yes, we thought we did this stuff under the laws of war in World War II, but we were talking about German prisoners of war. There was some context for it. Now you’re talking about stateless people who are totally transnational. So when we liberate Mazar-i-Sharif, you’ve got an Australian, a couple of Chechens, a couple of Uyghurs, an American.

It is very hard. You’ve got the problem of American citizens versus foreigners. You’ve got “unlawful combatants”—What does that mean? What rights to they have? You’ve got the continuing need to get intelligence from them. It is a real thicket. I’m not sure that even under the best of circumstances, with everybody wanting to cooperate, that we would have done any better.

What happened was that some in the Office of Legal Counsel and the Vice President’s office in particular had very strong ideological views about this, and then you have the Defense Department that just basically doesn’t like it. Don didn’t want to deal with detainees. He just wouldn’t show up at the meetings. He actually walked out of a meeting one time because it was about detainees and he thought it was about Afghanistan or something. He would delegate it, but then the people he delegated it to couldn’t decide it—Defense was just—They were in a bad mood about it. They were sort of stuck with these people. This wasn’t what they did.

I remember that at one point we were trying to get ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] access, because I had developed a very good relationship with Jakob Kellenberger, the head of the ICRC, who was a terrific person who was not interested in headlines and nasty things about the Bush administration. He just wanted to get a few problems solved. He would quietly see me and we would work with the Defense Department and we finally did get ICRC access. But imagine, for the people at Guantanamo and Defense, this is kind of a pain in the neck. You’ve got some bureaucratic resistance; you’ve got some ideological resistance; and it’s hard to move it forward.

It really only is then the combination of the President continually hearing it from his friends, and we’re losing some court cases, so now Justice starts to worry that we might be on such a slippery slope that we won’t be able to sustain anything of the system. That sort of shifted the Justice Department perspective as well.

The Justice Department shift occurs after you go to State?

Yes.

Some would say they shifted too much.

But these were the people who hadn’t been a part of the original—

Their problem was that there really wasn’t a group inside the White House who wanted to move this whole set of issues to what—Steve was, but he was such an honest broker that he didn’t want to break the china himself. There wasn’t a group of people who wanted to move this to a better place, so it was basically Condi, helped by Steve, and a little bit of Josh Bolten, trying to drag everybody just a foot or two at a time in the second term. By the end of the second term we actually really had moved the ball a good deal down the field, but it was largely because the Secretary was pushing people along and talking to Steve and they would be talking to the President.

I don’t know actually what the genesis of the President’s famous statement was, which I think was either in the Rose Garden or—

It was in the East Room. You mean the “I’m taking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed”?

No, I know that one, but the “I want to close Guantanamo.”

Two thousand six.

Yes, Karen Hughes had a big role to play in that. The other thing to realize is that actually neither Don nor John Ashcroft much liked this whole military commission thing. Don hated the fact that he was the charging officer. This isn’t what people signed up for. You just have to understand that. John Ashcroft really believed he could do this in Article III courts and here he is stuck with these military tribunals.

Don slows the whole thing down by appointing an outside panel with Ruth Wedgwood and Bill Coleman and Judge [William H.] Webster, Lloyd Cutler. He doesn’t like this either. It is easy to caricature people in this environment. They are just headstrong or whatever, but nobody has been in this territory before and nobody really quite knows how to deal with it. We faced a lot of that. Nobody also wants to be in a position that something goes wrong and, oh my goodness, those people that you let out of Guantanamo just attacked Chicago.

The Bush administration sends over 530 people out of Guantanamo, gets no credit, but no hostile scrutiny. The Obama administration has moved 67 people out of Gitmo, gets lots of credit and massive hostility. House Armed Services Committee has hired six full-time investigators to do an investigation of Guantanamo policy. Their subtext is Obama’s people are letting out dangerous terrorists. The 500-plus detainees let out under the last administration doesn’t count. My testimony next week will address this issue, including my service in the Bush administration, you may be confident.

The irony is it is uncharted territory. It is extremely difficult. A series of mistakes, some witting and some inadvertent, produce a problem that the Obama administration can’t resolve, even though it invests a tremendous amount of up-front political capital. Politics have gone bad and this is just an awful headache.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Well, if I could run the tape back, it would be to empower John Bellinger in 2002 to lead the effort for a suitable international legal framework. It would work. He would come up with it and I wouldn’t have the job I have now.

That’s probably true, but again I want to emphasize—

Sorry, John, but you could have fixed it.

I just disagree with one thing Dan said. I don’t think that the original decisions were mistaken. I think the original decisions were driven by a necessity. I try to teach my students that usually the truth is you have bad policy choices. By the time you get to the National Security Advisor or the Secretary of State or the President, the good policy choices have all been taken at lower levels. You’re sitting there with hard, bad policy choices. In September, October, November, December, January—really through the middle to the end of 2002—you don’t have real good choices here. The mistake is it is late then—We don’t get early enough into the business of trying to put this on a more stable foundation.

That’s fair.

Others then start forcing the issue—It is always easier if you can handle something before it has become a front-page story rather than after.

The story that you mentioned early on, though, was incredibly prescient, because I can remember it to this day, of when I came in February 2002 to explain the result of all the bickering among the lawyers on the Geneva Conventions. I stood in her office—It’s like it was yesterday—just the two of us, and I said, “OK, the third convention doesn’t apply because these people are not prisoners of war. The fourth convention doesn’t apply. Common Article III doesn’t apply.” Condi says, “OK, each of those things makes sense to me, but what are the international rules that are going to apply?” “Well, really none.” She said, “I think our allies are not going to be very happy if we say that no international rules apply.” That was unbelievably prescient.

I just want to ask a question that unites a couple of issues: this issue and Iraq and Afghanistan, national security back before 2002 when you’re National Security Advisor, and then see how it changes when you’re Secretary of State. Does 9/11 change everything about the way we think about power and threats? It does.

Absolutely.

In the second term, you’re in a different position and you have to implement more on the front lines in these decisions. How have things evolved over time as we get further and further away from that?

I really did—Let me separate it into war on the defense, and war when we’re starting to stabilize the situation, at least to stabilize the front lines, to use old-fashioned military terminology that Eliot would have used in some of his earlier books. We’re falling back. On September 12th, we are falling back and it is not quite clear whether we’re going to fall all the way back to Moscow, because it is just coming at us in waves. You also have to understand that, having missed the attack, the intelligence agencies by September 13th have dumped every threat on the President’s desk, including the guy who is in Chicago who phoned up in some phone booth to say he’s going to attack the Sear’s Tower. There is nothing that is actually vetting these threats. Having missed it, they’re not going to miss it again.

I would say that for six months, we’re just falling back. We’re using everything at our disposal to prevent falling all the way back to total surrender. That’s how it felt in those first months. We start to stabilize the front lines after we went in Afghanistan, into the summer of 2002. We get Abu Zubaydah in 2002. He tells us a lot. By March of 2003, when we get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I think we’ve at least stabilized the line. We’ve got a chance now to push. We push in Iraq. That’s where we push. In retrospect, 2006 turns out to be a really bad year, but it looks like in 2004—People forget, we returned sovereignty to the Iraqis about a year after we start the war, a year and three months after.

REDACTEDTEXT

In Istanbul. So we’re now on the offense. But when I go over to be Secretary of State, the question is what does the postwar order look like? Do we still have any friends in the postwar order? What are those friends concentrating on? Are they concentrating on continuing to have ill feelings because we’ve gone out there and done these things, or are we turning this now to using our collective power? I gave a speech in France: “to create a balance of power that favors freedom.”

That was chosen deliberately because a new balance of power is something you can only create after the war is over and the pieces have settled. But even in the last year of the war, in 1944, some are thinking, If we go down through the soft underbelly, we’ve got a better chance of resisting Stalinization of Eastern Europe than if we allow the Russians to come across Germany. There are people thinking if the Russians liberate Czechoslovakia that puts them deeper into Eastern Europe. So I’m thinking, What is this going to look like after the dust has settled? It’s my job, as Secretary of State now—Steve Hadley is back there fighting the battles on the battlefield. There’s the Iraq surge and Afghanistan, and yes he’d better succeed or none of this “balance of power” stuff matters. But I really need to start thinking about how to bring the allies along to create a balance of power that favors freedom, and that means we have to do a lot of things to reunite Europe, to get us focused on the same things.

It is, from my point of view, critical to have them involved in ways that are both useful and affirming for them in the Middle East peace process. It is important in northeast Asia that we work with our allies, plus China, to try to create something in Asia. I think of my job as having that strategic piece. Iran becomes almost—Yes, I want to solve the Iranian nuclear problem, but it is also instrumental to uniting the allies around these issues.

In Africa, having had a very good experience with the African Union and with ECOWAS [Economic Community of West African States] in Liberia, we appoint the first American Ambassador to the African Union. We start to work more through the African Union to try to solve this. So there is a series of these structural pieces that I think I see as my role as Secretary of State.

The Gulf Corporation Council—I become really convinced in 2006, when things are really bad—2006 is just a really bad year. Nothing goes right in 2006. I start trying to bring the Arabs alongside on Iraq because they’ve all decided that [Nouri al-] Maliki is an Iranian stooge because he is a Shia. It is that simple: he’s a Shia; he must be an Iranian. You say, “Actually he left exile in Tehran to go to Syria because he couldn’t stand the Iranians.” You say, “They’re Arabs; they’re not Persians.” You say, “You can make this a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can treat them like Iranian stooges and that’s how they’ll act. You can treat them like they’re integrated into the Arab world and that’s how they’ll act.”

One of the hardest things to get people to see—and here, having been an academic and political scientist helps a little bit. You can think of institutions as a dependent variable or as an independent variable. If you think of them as a dependent variable, they are incapable of actually shaping the international outcomes, right? They are just subject to all kinds of forces. If you think of them as an independent variable, then actually they have a potential to really shape those events. At the end of World War II, in 1949 when you create NATO, you create it basically to rearm the Germans without sending the French through the roof. But you create this democratic security institution in which France and Germany become friends again and then NATO actually manages to integrate the East Europeans later on. So NATO is quite clearly acting as a major structural factor in how Europe comes out.

We’re trying to get the Arabs to see that they could be a major structural factor in how Iraq comes out, so we created the Gulf Cooperation Council. There was a Gulf Cooperation Council. My first meeting with them in 2005 at the UN, I’ll never forget, we just had water. They made a couple of jokes about how the United States never has anything to eat at their meetings. It was the most stilted—It was September 2005 at the UN. It was very stilted. Everybody read their talking points. But by 2006, I would get the Gulf Cooperation Council Ministers together and we would have real discussions about Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian problem, et cetera. Then I got them to agree to start inviting Jordan and Egypt, so it became the Gulf Cooperation Council plus two. The big breakthrough was I got them to invite the Iraqis, so it became the Gulf Cooperation Council plus Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq.

Using these structures to reintegrate Iraq into the Arab world—I remember the first of the meetings, when they just invited Iraq as an observer. Hoshyar Zebari said, “You know, you treat us like a virus.” He was the Iraqi Foreign Minister. He said, “You treat us like a virus and I’m not sure what makes you most nervous, the Shia part or the democracy part.” He is now presiding over the Arab League.

There is a concurrent apparent evolution of Condoleezza Rice’s basic thinking about international relations that has intrigued people and puzzled some people. That is, during the campaign, in the famous Foreign Affairs article and so on, people would put you in the “realist” camp. That is, that the internal characteristics of states are not really what we ought to be that concerned with. Then comes 9/11 and it is like you join those who believe that the internal characteristic of states, particularly in this age of terrorism, are very important to deal with. Then, interestingly enough, you get the liberal opposition saying that this has gone too far.

Right.

It looks like you have joined the neoconservative view for a while. Then comes the second Bush term with, of course, the Freedom Agenda inaugural being a most elaborate statement and a most forceful statement about the centrality of these concerns—democratization and human rights—to U.S. foreign policy. It is no longer what the realists would say, an instrument of our foreign policy, but the motive force of foreign policy. Comes the second, third and fourth years of the second Bush administration, and it looks like there is a return to a more prudent kind of realism and that is recognizing that democratization, human rights, and so on might be a long-term goal, but in the short term you have to make friends with dictators for balance-of-power reasons. In the balance of power for freedom, freedom might be far in the distant future; meanwhile, you’ve got to make balance-of-power adjustments. It looks like then Condoleezza has returned to what a lot of people thought was the earlier Condoleezza Rice. Is this an inaccurate construction of what has been going on?

As is often the case, the situation is more complex. Let me start it that way. The Foreign Affairs article basically said—I think this mostly comes out in the context of the 82nd Airborne shouldn’t be taking kids to school. Actually, I still believe that, which is why I think a civilian response corps is a much better idea for taking kids to school than the 82nd Airborne, because I think it does undermine the mission of the military to have them too much involved in this kind of nation building.

But I’ve always believed that, while in academic literature you can have realism, which says the internal characteristic of states does not matter; they’re billiard balls bouncing off one another in a state of nature and it is all about a zero sum of power and who is going to have more of it. That’s the sort of realist concept. Then there’s the kind of more neoliberal version, which is a combination of “Yes, the internal characteristics matter”—the democratic piece—and ultimately institutions that have those characteristics will help to tame the state of nature. If you think of those as kind of opposite—Of course, when you’re actually making policy or policy prescriptions, you have to recognize that those are actually archetypes in academia, but not in the real world.

I would be the first to say the balance of power matters. It matters. It matters that the United States, not the Soviet Union, won the Cold War. If you don’t think both the internal characteristics of states and the balance of power matter, just do a thought experiment, and say the Soviet Union won the Cold War, and what does Germany look like today?

Obviously, both the internal characteristics of states—particularly powerful states that can imprint on the international system, which is why it was so important that we had this ideological conflict with the Soviet Union—Obviously it matters who wins in the balance of power. Now, the balance of power that favors freedom says that what we should strive for is a balance of power in which states are more and more powerful states, and we’re lucky because we’ve got a lot of powerful states on the right side of the ledger: the Europeans, the Japanese, the South Koreans, et cetera. We should continue to press for that democratization.

Anybody who knew me as a Soviet specialist would say that I was very much one who believed that the internal characteristics of the Soviet Union mattered a lot. Three-quarters of the danger of it was the character of the Soviet state. It is why I pushed on—I was an early supporter of Jackson-Vanik [Amendment]. I was a supporter of—Just ask the people who did Jewish immigration. I was one of their best friends. Of course the internal characteristics of states matter. Had the Soviet Union, with that set of internal characteristics triumphed, we would have been in a very bad way as an international community.

The one place in American foreign policy that that had not been understood was in the Middle East, where we believed that the internal characteristics of states could be subordinated to the balance of power and the need to defend our interests through stability in the Middle East. So the June speech at American University of Cairo effectively says, big mistake. We all made it, but it was a big mistake. Sixty years of this policy bought us neither stability nor democracy and then you have to encourage or pressure, or do whatever you can to get your friends, which is why I spent so much time with [Hosni] Mubarak on this, to see that they were creating exactly the unstable circumstances that they thought they were preventing. Mubarak was arresting decent democratic forces like Ayman Nour, and when he would say, “It’s either the Muslim brotherhood or me,” he then went about making it absolutely true, because the Muslim brotherhood organized in the radical mosques and in the madrassas outside the purview of the state.

For me, the shift after 9/11 was not from a realist to a neoliberal, because idealism is not actually liberalism, as you know. But it was to incorporate the Middle East into this context of a blend between understanding that the balance of power and the internal characteristics of states matter. It is why, even in the 2000 article, I talk about the importance of multiethnic democracies—Brazil, India, South Africa—We want to reach out to them, not because they’re just big, but because they are actually multiethnic democracies and that means we share something in values.

Now come 2006, 2007, 2008—Just because you recognize that it is both in the long-term and even short-term interests of the United States to press for democratization, democratic values as the core of its foreign policy, doesn’t mean you don’t have to deal with some states that are not democratic. If you want to make peace in the Middle East you have to deal with Egypt. If you want to disarm the Libyans, you have to deal with Muammar Gaddafi. As Secretary of State you find yourself in the company of some pretty awful people. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t understand that your core values and your interests are in fact better served if they are moving forward together.

When I look back on the 2000 article, I think, Where did this idea of realism come from? I think it is because I had much more a view of limitations on American power to change things internally in countries. What 9/11 does is it makes it an imperative for the United States to change things internally. Even if you have limits, you had better try to do it. It puts the focus on the Middle East, where that policy had been most lacking.

If I could offer an anecdote that will illustrate this: It’s one of the moments that will stick with me. We were visiting Afghanistan. It was 2008, I think. We were getting this set of briefings from the Brits—

Was it in Kandahar?

Yes, Kandahar. I forget whether he was a PRT leader, but he was just going on and on. Among other things, he was saying, “What do you expect of these people?”

Right.

He was just sort of contemptuous of the Afghans. He made the mistake of saying, “It is impossible to do anything with them.” The boss got very annoyed and gave him one of those lasers-through-the-chest looks and said, “I’m an American; nothing is impossible.” The room went very quiet.

That’s right. And I think that. I give these speeches now and I say, “Any number of times it is the impossible that in retrospect seems inevitable.” The Hammer and Sickle comes down from above the Kremlin. Come on.

Historical perspective helps. I would sometimes use my personal background. We come from the South. You’re younger than I am, so you will not remember the South that I do. But I would tell people that there was a time when black people weren’t thought to care about these minor things called voting, because they were too childlike. Or even if they weren’t too childlike, well, they really couldn’t defend their own interests. I would try to get people to see that this kind of patronizing—“They don’t care about those rights because”—fill in the blank—“they’re too tribal; they don’t have food; they prefer caudillos,” if you’re talking about Latin America. It says more about you than it does about them.

When you look at these elections and you see Afghans who are totally illiterate standing in a line for hours because they somehow understand that they want to vote, and that it means something. Some of the most interesting ones would be with the Europeans, because I would remind some of them that it was a good thing that nobody gave up on their freedom in 1942 when things looked pretty grim. Or I would say to the Germans, with the Germans in the room, “You know, Germany didn’t have a tradition of democracy.” They would say, “Oh, but we did.” I’d say, “Now when exactly was that?” Bismarck? Or was it the Kaiser [Wilhelm II], or that short period with [Adolph] Hitler? When exactly is that long tradition with democracy?

You had to kind of wake people up against this idea that there are people for whom this doesn’t matter. Then to your question, it matters also for the international system, although you may not be able to do something about it every time everywhere, and you certainly won’t be able to do something about it in every place in the same way.

One of the things that caused some confusion on this is—and I’m trying to straighten this out in the book a little bit—We did not go to Iraq to deliver democracy in Iraq; that was not the purpose, any more than [Franklin D.] Roosevelt went to war against Hitler to make Germany democratic. Once we had decided that, for security reasons, national security, we had to take out Saddam Hussein—He was 12 years in violation of Security Council resolutions. He was shooting at our aircraft on a practically daily basis in the no-fly zones. He was breaking out of the sanctions because of the Oil-for-Food scandal. He was, we thought, rebuilding rapidly his weapons of mass destruction. He had already built his chemical and biological capability, and was working on nuclear capability. He had attacked his neighbors occupying Kuwait and dragged us into war twice. He was the most violent factor in the Middle East. Once we decided that this security circumstance we couldn’t continue—once we decided we had to use American military power to dislodge him if necessary—we had to have a view about what came after.

We actually had a debate in the National Security Council about whether the goal should be a democratic Iraq or just another strongman. At the end of listening to his folks go around about this—and it’s kind of funny because it wasn’t that anybody was particularly—This was more kind of Socratic questions: “Well, if we did a strongman—” It wasn’t that Don said, “We need a strongman,” and the Vice President said, “No, we don’t.” It wasn’t like that. But as we got to the end of this discussion, the President said, “If American men and women are going to war, they’re going to war on behalf of American principles, not against them.”

It is a misstatement of the debate to think that we sat around and said, “We can deliver democracy in Iraq at bayonet point.” No, it was, “We can get rid of Saddam Hussein, who is a cancer in the Middle East and a security threat, and once we’ve done that we owe the Iraqi people a decent chance of democracy.”

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

And continuity, as well, between administrations and across them. Both Nick and I worked in the Clinton administration, in the Bush administration, and I’m in some capacity in the Obama administration. Everybody is dealing with the development of democracy and its spread, the consequences of 1989 and what that means for Russia and Europe. Everybody is dealing with the issue of freedom, the pathological lack of freedom in the broader Middle East and the advent of freedom now. Everybody is trying to find the tactical balance between what is possible with any given country on any given day and values.

I don’t know that I can speak for Nick, but we usually end up in the same corner. Administrations, wherever they start, are forced to deal with the same issues and come out to a more similar place than they would be comfortable acknowledging.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

A military commission. The Obama administration discovering its own Freedom Agenda, recognizing the possibilities. Brent Scowcroft, who would describe himself as a realist, presiding over America’s moment to put its weight behind Solidarity and a bunch of dissident intellectuals. No matter where you start in principle, or in an article in whatever magazine, you end up in power dealing somewhere with that continuity and more influenced by the American tradition of ideals than you think.

I speak for myself, too. It doesn’t matter where you think you want to be. The American tradition in foreign policy will move you along and you’ll respond to events that way. I can guarantee you that the speechwriters for President Obama last Monday didn’t look at President Bush’s speeches for inspiration. But do a side-by-side comparison. I sent an email to Mike Gerson, saying, “I hope you were smiling.”

He was, he wrote publicly.

Of course, but that’s not a knock; that’s a recognition of some deep intellectual and policy honesty.

One point about that: To a certain extent every administration starts out as if they have a blank palette, but of course they don’t. They don’t have a blank palette in terms of the issues, but they also don’t in terms of who and what the United States is. It may lean a little bit more this way, a little bit more that way, or you might decide you want to tactically talk to those people or not talk to those people, but ultimately you’re somewhat—You do get a 9/11, which does upend our views in the Middle East. That’s what wars do.

Wars wipe the slate clean if it’s World War II and Germany is defeated and Japan is defeated. But if you’re in these kinds of middling wars, they don’t wipe the slate clean. They do change the calculations about what constitutes security. We haven’t talked much about it, because when I was National Security Advisor I probably spent the first year and a half as much on reform of America’s domestic security institutions. I was a part of the group that created the Homeland Security Department. I was a part of the group that led the intelligence reform effort inside the administration. The one thing that does shift dramatically is—It has been the War of 1812 since we’ve had an attack on the American homeland, and you suddenly realize that you don’t have—You have a military command for every region in the world. Africa doesn’t have its own command, but it’s run out of Europe. Nobody covers North America.

You realize that everybody else’s interior ministry means internal security; ours deals with Indian reservations and parks. So you suddenly have to deal with that setup, and I dealt a lot with that as National Security Advisor because the President was very concerned that those institutions not supplant or become redundant with the national security institutions. I was more influenced by those first couple of days after 9/11—I’ve written about this. Walking into that first meeting in the Roosevelt Room on September 12th, there were 50 people in the room.

You’ve got Energy there because there are threats against nuclear power plants, and Transportation because we’ve got to get the airports open. You’re just looking around the room and thinking, how are you going to make sense of this? So I do think that that piece gets completely upended. But the foreign policy piece always drives back and forth.

What was the spat with Scowcroft all about? That he didn’t indicate to you beforehand that he was going to publish that op-ed? Or was it some fundamental difference in policy?

I think there was a fundamental difference. I didn’t mind the fundamental difference; I just thought publishing something in the Wall Street Journal, as close as Brent and I had been, was not the way to start that conversation. He says—and I totally believe him when he says this—he thought he was just publishing something that would help release the war pressures he thought were building. But he was Chair of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and so I thought he could have come to us and talked about it.

Just one other thing on the American idealism. This is very clear, I think, in your rhetoric. Because of your own place in the American story, you tend to be an optimist. I frequently saw you remind people, “Look, this is the South that I grew up in, and this is what this country is now, so don’t tell me other people can’t make similar kinds of migrations.”

Exactly.

I just wanted to touch on one thing in this discussion on continuity. I want to point out a potential discontinuity, one that might resolve itself. The Obama administration decided not to continue the use of the phrase, “Global War on Terror.” Maybe it will resurrect it, but it decided not to continue that. As you spoke about the need to restore those alliances and work with friends, my understanding is that there is a fair amount of resistance to the use of that phrase, unhappiness with it, yet the Bush administration persisted in it. I was wondering if there is any time at which you decided to think about maybe modifying—?

This is one where my staff didn’t win the argument. There are actually people who came and begged me—Sean will remember. I don’t know, Eliot, if you’d gotten there yet.

I have a story from the outside.

Some people, Philip in particular, wanted to call it something else. From my point of view—I was in the White House on September 11th—we were at war. Secondly, it was global; and third, it was against terror. I tried to deconstruct a little bit in the book why we did it this way. There is a sense that this is a kind of unthinking—the Bush administration beating its chest. But actually the thinking was that in order to get the kind of international response that we needed, it had to be broader than, “Help us with our problem with al-Qaeda.” It had to be an approach that could unite people around the problem they were all having with terror.

Secondly, you had to delegitimize not just the organizations but the technique—terrorism itself. That was deliberate. So we completely obliterated the notion of freedom fighters. If you used force against innocents, you were on the wrong side of history. This led us into some complicated territory in Africa and in the Middle East. All of a sudden the Palestinian Islamic jihad or the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the bad part of it, not the Abu-Mazen [aka Mahmoud Abbas] part of it that had always been thought of as freedom fighters—No, no, no. They use force against civilians. The Chechen—It led us into some complicated issues with the Chechen because we were not trying to justify what the Russians had done in Chechnya, but we were saying that the Chechens had fallen into some bad company, and that killing Russian school kids in Beslan was not acceptable.

If you were al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda associated, then we were prepared to do certain things. If you were LeT [Lashkar-e-Toiba] in Pakistan or one of the al-Qaeda affiliates, then even lethal force was a possibility. If you were a little bit separate from that, maybe we would list you and so forth. Then in some cases we actually listed ETA [Euskadi Ta Askatasuna], even though obviously it didn’t have any global impact on us, ETA. So we were delegitimizing both the technique of terror and making it a global struggle. We figured instrumentally that that was the only way we got the kind of cooperation that we needed and the only way that ultimately you would just say that this isn’t acceptable.

So it was a deliberate thought, and I still think—What is the term that the administration wanted to use? “Human-made disasters,” or something like that? I thought those were levees that didn’t hold. Maybe Jendayi wants to say a word about that, because it did have an impact on how we thought about Africa.

Yes, the Africans actually supported us pretty much, like everyone after 9/11. But when we went to get the 13 Security Council resolutions, which committed countries to particular actions to counterterrorism, there was concern about the role of freedom fighters. Many of the governments that were the strongest in support of us, like Uganda, considered themselves to have been freedom fighters. So there was a need really to move away from that language and distinguish the use of force against civilians versus against regimes with installations or facilities. But once we dealt with that, it was fairly smooth sailing, except for South Africa, of course, which often aligned itself with Europeans, and maybe even went beyond where they were in their positions.

But there was a vigorous debate within or from the outside?

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

There was a review. As I recall, Philip participated in it and there was this long review on how we’re going to deal with terrorism. If I recall, people decided there was continuity in the policies and they really weren’t going to change a lot of stuff. The only thing that ended up possibly being changed was the label. I remember you came back one day and at least said to us, “The President has made a decision. We’re going to have a huge review and at the end, all we’re going to do is change the label.”

Yes, that’s right. I remember just saying, “Come on, we have more important things to do than this.”

On the freedom fighter point and terrorist labeling, it is also important to say how you dealt with the South Africans in terms of actually getting them off the list as designated terrorists.

Oh, yes.

[Nelson] Mandela and others were still labeled as terrorists.

Believe it or not. This was one of the most amazing things. Jendayi came to me one day and she said, “We’re having trouble getting the visa in time for the Foreign Minister.”

Yes, Foreign Minister [Nkosazana Diamini] Zuma.

I said, “Why is that?” She said, “Well, you know, they’re on the terrorist list, so you have to go through this whole thing.” “What? The Foreign Minister of South Africa is on the terrorist list?” It turns out that the South Africans—Because the ANC [African National Congress] had been designated as a terrorist organization, everybody, including Mandela, was on the terrorist list. I was so embarrassed. I just remember being really embarrassed by this. How long did it take us to get—

We started when you were at the NSC.

Right.

It didn’t happen until you were at the State Department. You actually went up to Congress and pushed Congress to take them off because there was a concern that if you take the South Africans off, then what does that mean for what was going on in other regions, particularly Ireland. The IRA [Irish Republican Army] was really the issue. What does that mean for them? So you had to go up. In testimony about appropriations, you talked about it there. You gave a very strong signal to Congress that this had to be done.

What I just remember about it was thinking, Nelson Mandela is on the terrorist list.

I want to make sure that we come back to these geographic items that you mentioned at the outset this afternoon.

Before you do that, can I steer you to just one thing? The words “UN” have not really been mentioned. I guess I would frame the question—I was going to say, and you may want to speak to this, but as historians know, we were the administration that—We’re unilateral. We hated the UN. We wouldn’t work with anybody else. John Bolton wanted to lop off the top. There was a bit of that in the first term, admittedly. The Vice President’s office, at least from my point of view, had extremely strong—You really couldn’t mention the words “UN” or “international community.” But in the second term, you might really want to talk about—

Even before the second term. Here we have a little bit of—The President actually used to say, “In the part of the country I come from, there are more bumper stickers that say, ‘Get the U.S. out of the UN’ than ‘God bless America.’” He would joke about it.

Very early on he met Kofi Annan and he liked him. They had a pretty good relationship and they did the Global Fund for AIDS Relief together. He hated going to the UN and doing that UN GA speech because, and he was right, he said it was like addressing a wax museum. Everybody sat there, nobody applauded, nobody did anything. He hated what he called the mosh pit—the way the UN operated. It was always so slow, and there was all this UN-speak. But when it came to UN peacekeeping operations, when it came to using UN structures in Liberia, the President was much more favorably disposed to the UN than he would even—If he were sitting here, his eyes would be rolling that of course he wasn’t. But it was never actually hard to get him to do anything with or through the UN, even though in his administration there were people who thought it was just slightly better than the devil. He really didn’t have a kind of visceral reaction against the UN. He really used the instruments.

Over time we became even more that way. For instance, in doing the ceasefire on Lebanon, we used the UN. Probably my best partner in solving the war in Lebanon was Kofi Annan. The French, who were supposed to be helping us, disappeared about halfway through the crisis. Kofi Annan was really great. John, was there something more you wanted to say?

I was just thinking that from literally the first day to the last day of the second term you were personally working UN resolutions. I would say, and I say this now in my public speeches, we became probably the most multilateral administration in history by the second term. Maybe that’s just the way the world becomes.

If there is a reporter listening to you, he’d say, “What is this nonsense?”

That’s the perception, but let me give you two resolutions from the very beginning to the very end. One was 1593, the referral of the situation in Darfur to the ICC [International Criminal Court]. The President made the decision that he was more concerned about genocide in Sudan than he was about the ICC. At the end of the administration, there we were, up dealing with pirates. All along the way, though, you were working the details of UN Security Council resolutions. This was not an administration that had said, “Well, we’re just going to do everything on our own.”

Yes, we got UN Security Council resolutions on Iran. You know, 1559, which turned out to be on Lebanon, which we did with the French in 2004 before anybody thought getting Syrian forces out of Lebanon was a possibility—We got that resolution, which then became the key.

Yes, I was in the Clinton administration for a little bit, and then the Bush administration, and on peacekeeping—If you recall, in the Clinton administration there was Presidential Directive 25, which was a whole list of reasons that any operation had to meet before we could agree on a peacekeeping operation. There was no such thing in the Bush administration. We agreed on every single peacekeeping operation in Africa. Where it was a huge fight during the Clinton administration that I participated in quite a lot, it was never a fight during the Bush administration.

One interesting point is that, where people would think that we were disagreeing with the peacekeeping operation in Africa during the Bush administration, it was typically about—We would hold up the resolution until they strengthened the mandate or increased the numbers. It was never that we were going to disagree or vote against any of the peacekeeping resolutions. You could just go through the record and you will see that we actually approved every single peacekeeping operation in Africa.

The sense that I had—and for the record I just sent Sean a note—At the end of one meeting he sent me this note saying, “Eliot, your Bolton is showing.” [laughter] That’s when I came out on some of these things. But it seemed to me it was a fairly instrumental use of the UN.

It was an instrumental use. It wasn’t theological.

There was nothing goopy-eyed about it.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

What I want to ask though is, from the outside, if you look at who was there, He-whose-name-has-been-mentioned-several-times—That seems to be a countervailing piece of evidence. I’d like for you to explain why having Bolton—

I was very much, not just supportive of, but I was actually the one who first suggested John.

In the briefing book someplace, you’re credited with that.

I did. I thought that—John’s name was being bandied around for a lot of things. He wasn’t going to work as my deputy; he wasn’t. But I liked John. I thought he was tough-minded. And to Eliot’s “not goopy-eyed” point, I actually am something of a UN skeptic myself when it comes to the kind of theology about the UN as a place where the world comes together. Come on, give me a break. The UN can be the most frustrating—I can’t stand most of its institutions because they’re populated usually by international “servants” who like the tax-free status in New York. I really just don’t have much—for the institution.

But, I accept and recognize the legitimizing impact that it can have on decisions. I was with Colin, the voices for the President who go to the UN in 2002 on Iraq. So I do think I tried to push us toward it. But John Bolton was in that sense perfect, because he was a skeptic. I knew that with John there he would have a little bit of a tempering effect on some of the runaway multilateralism of some of our diplomats in the UN who get up there to New York and start forgetting which country they really represent. I thought John would have a tempering effect.

When John did it, and John would carry the water, then there was some comfort for those who worried about a too-UN-centric policy, including the President. Now, it wasn’t always the easiest management job, because from time to time I’d have to say, “You know, John—”

I’m openly looking for confirmation.

Did he actually deliver the resolution? My understanding was that he delivered—

He delivered.

He tried to torpedo the reform summit.

But Lebanon—John would follow instructions if you were clear and you said, “John, I’m Secretary of State; you’re not.” I didn’t have to worry about John not following—This also goes back to confidence. It’s back to your question—“Did anybody ever treat you like staff?” Well, not only that, but people knew not to challenge, under those circumstances. John Bolton wasn’t going to run to the Vice President on something. He would have been slaughtered. I would have had him fired that day and he knew it. So I could trust John Bolton because I knew that he was a tough-minded, actually good, diplomat. He had negotiated the resolution—I’m trying to remember which resolution it was.

He worked the North Korea—We were at the G8 summit.

That’s what it was. He worked North Korea. He worked brilliantly.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

So if you could harness John—and what he represented was an American diplomat who didn’t care much for the UN but found himself as UN Ambassador—this was the best of all worlds.

[laughter]

I’m glad the laughter came out openly because the transcriber will pick that up. The giggling behind, she would not have picked up.

Did he resign out of frustration?

No, he was a recess appointment and couldn’t be continued. We actually pressed to have him continue, but he couldn’t. He was a recess appointment.

With that, let’s get to some of the things that you said that you wanted to talk about. Dan reminds me that he is going to have to take off at 4:00, but there were a couple of things—You had mentioned Kosovo and Georgia in the list of things. Let’s take those out of order and you guys go at it, whatever the story is here. Sort of fill us in on what happened.

Kosovo works, Georgia less successful.

We should also do MAP [NATO Membership Action Plan] for Ukraine and Georgia.

Yes, that’s part of it. I was thinking about this, because in ’07 and ’08 we have a collision of issues having to do with Russia, which ends up with Condi’s speech in September ’08, and all of our hopes for Russia end with Putinism at its worst. By the way, I think anybody would have done the reset, including McCain in his own way, with Russia—There was no problem there. But Kosovo and Georgia, and also missile defense, collided. Strategically what happened was that the freedom impulse of 1989 moved as far east as it is going to in this historical cycle, and ran up against Putin’s counterrevolution. Putin is not [Joseph] Stalin, but he is a little bit Nicholas I and a little bit Kaiser Wilhelm II. This is what we were talking about at the time.

In Kosovo, it had its own logic and Nick was—This was something that Nick and I did. It was the last unsolved piece of the Balkan puzzle. In ’08, when the Bush administration was at a low ebb politically, and was horribly unpopular in Europe, we managed Kosovo independence with the Europeans, without the UN. The Russians made it clear they would veto a UN resolution resolving this. We had to talk the Europeans into all holding hands and moving forward toward Kosovo independence.

Several times. They would hold hands and we’d be fine, and then we’d go back to the next meeting a month later and—

But it ends up with success; that is, the Balkans in general and Kosovo in particular. Success, as we put it at the time, is another half-functional state but better than the alternative, which was us coming as liberators and ending up as unwanted occupiers—Yuck. It took consistent, multilateral efforts, patience, and an ability to stare down the Russians. The Bush administration managed to get the Germans, French, Italians, British, and most of the EU on board. It was the culmination, in a way, of all the political capital that had been invested in the second term. That shift to Europe bears fruit four years later.

I think that’s right.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

John Bellinger almost died, because I came to him at State and said, “We’re going to do this.” He turned very pale and said, “How can we possibly justify this legally?” The Serbs then decided to take us to the International Court of Justice.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

We won. Not only did we win, it was a complete victory. We thought it would be a muddled victory, a qualified, miserable victory, though anything was better than a defeat. No, we got a clean sweep, a hundred percent. It was your team that drafted the briefs.

I never talked to you about this, but the opinion that came out of the ICJ [International Court of Justice] was the most unbelievably clear opinion. It said, essentially, this is legal.

It was.

I did not read the opinion.

I remember telling you beforehand, “I think we’re going to win, because I can’t imagine the ICJ is going to try to put the toothpaste back into the tube.”

But it will be muddled; it will be messy.

And it wasn’t.

We warned the Serbs: Don’t go there, because you may not win. But they thought they knew better.

There were three management pieces to this: One is managing the Kosovars, which—Well, let me go back. I think backing [Martti] Ahtisaari for his negotiations was a really good thing, because he is a very good negotiator, and when he came up and said, “I’ve done as much as I can do; this is the best plan I’ve got,” it was somewhat easier to bring the Europeans together around that than if we had not had something clear.

Secondly, managing the Kosovars, which Nick did and Dan did, and getting them not to do something dumb—and we had Frank Wizner working this account because we were really worried that in the final analysis they would get frustrated. Dan has already described the President worrying that if we delayed—

Yes.

I was trying to engage in what I would call strategic delay, which is, I knew I needed to keep the Europeans on. They were so terrified that the Russians were going to do something awful or that this whole thing was going to blow up. I understood, because they were the ones who were on the ground. They had more at stake, in a sense. You know, the Balkans are the Balkans. So each time, we had to fall back just a little bit to keep everybody in line, it seemed.

You’re managing the Kosovars, you’re managing the Europeans, and you’re managing the Serbs. Here, I think we did a lot. Once we got a reasonable government in Serbia—[Boris] Tadić comes to power in Serbia, who is not a flamethrower, and who isn’t trying to recover 1389, but is managing some fairly difficult domestic politics—we actually make a decision to accelerate. I changed, personally, over the objections of almost everybody, the terms for Serbian entry into Partnership for Peace.

Right. The long-ago issues that [Slobodan] Milošević carried.

Yes, because the issue had been, until they arrested [Ratko] Mladić and [Radovan] Karadžić, they couldn’t be in Partnership for Peace. I decided that if we were going to support Tadić because he was our best bet not to have a Serbian—I kept saying, “We don’t need the Balkans to once again have an aggrieved, bitter Serbia. We need a Serbia that is looking west.” This was the way to make an integration decision early on. I think we managed the Serbs pretty well and we managed the Russians pretty well.

Despite Sergey’s huffing and puffing, I don’t really think the Russians wanted to blow up Europe over Kosovo. They have this patronizing view of the “little Slavs,” as they call them, or the “little Slavic brothers,” which drives the Serbs crazy, but they didn’t really want to fight on Kosovo. So we were able to manage it. They wanted a fight on Georgia, but that’s another matter.

Georgia was, and remains, both a huge problem in Europe and a potential flashpoint in the future. That was very nasty.

The Georgia thing was really interesting, for a couple of reasons. Actually, it was part of the payoff of the European policy, because the French wanted to take the lead and you kind of rolled right in behind me when they were doing things like not looking at maps. They were negotiating—Remember that one?

Vividly.

The French had made a deal between the Georgians and the Russians about this exclusionary zone where Russian forces could go. They said, “It’s 15 kilometers this way and that way.” I said, “Does that include Gori?” They said, “It couldn’t possibly include Gori.” I said, “Did anybody look at a map?” Of course it included Gori. So then we had to discuss putting together—getting it straightened out.

That was awkward. [laughter]

Really awkward.

Wait. The French were in a position we often found ourselves in as Americans; that is, they were out in front, having to take responsibility for something. It was our decision, I think the right one, to let them take the lead so that you didn’t have—

That’s right, the Georgia problem.

Exactly.

They did all right in the final analysis.

And they did stop the shooting. We had to clean it up.

Was that our “little French brother” you’re talking about?

It was really funny.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

They thought they were going to be shot. They thought the Russians were going to attack the Presidential Palace. We’re mixing stuff up, but my “Oh-no” moment came when our Ambassador called me on Monday and said, “Dan, the Georgian lines have broken. The army is coming back, outside my window.” We were on the road between the main east-west road and Tbilisi; that’s where our embassy sits. This is John Tefft, who doesn’t get excited: “You realize, Dan, that Russian armor could be here tonight.” Yikes. This wasn’t just diplomacy and maps; this was war.

Yes, that’s right.

And it was Putin’s war. Saakashvili stumbled into it, or he gave in to provocations, but the Russians were planning this.

One of the things that really struck me about your reaction to this was that I had the impression that this was a real crystallizing moment for you. I remember you being furious at Lavrov and chewing him out. It was that you really thought they wanted to see Saakashvili dead.

Well, they said so.

What happened was the morning that the Russians invade Georgia, I’m on my way to the Greenbrier on vacation. I’ve got six friends and family waiting in my living room while I’m talking to Dan and Sean and everybody, trying to get it straightened out in terms of what is going on in Georgia. They have no way to get to the Greenbrier if I don’t go, because we’re going with diplomatic security. So I get in the car and we all go down to the Greenbrier and 24 hours later I realize—Big mistake. There’s no way I’m staying here, because this is out of control.

While I’m there, I have a phone call with Lavrov and he says, “They’ve broken through the Georgian lines and are pushing toward Tbilisi. We have three conditions to stop the offensive.” I said, “What are they?” He said, “The Georgians have to return to their barracks.” I thought, Fine, they’ll be happy to return to their barracks. I had told Saakashvili in July, “Do not engage the Russian forces. If you engage the Russian Armed Forces, you will lose and nobody will come to help you. Do not engage the Russian forces.” I’m furious at Saakashvili, too, but in any case I figure it’s not that hard to get them back to their barracks. The second is he has to sign a no-first-use-of-force pledge. Fine, I’ve been trying to get him to that. Then he said, “And this is the condition that will just be between the two of us—Mikheil Saakashvili has got to go.”

I said, “Sergey, the American Secretary of State and the Russian Foreign Minister do not have a secret conversation about overthrowing a democratically elected President. It just became public that you asked me to do that.” He said, “Wait a minute. I said this was between us.” I said, “We don’t have this conversation. When I get off this phone I am going to call every single European I can get on the phone and I’m going to tell them that the Russian condition for ending this war is the overthrow of the democratically elected President of Georgia.” And I did. I called the Brits, I called the French, I called the Germans. We said it publicly in the UN.

Sergey was furious with me. Our relationship was never the same again. But I thought it was the only way—I thought they were going to go for him. I really thought that they would break through those lines.

It would be like Grozny.

They would confront the Georgians with, “He’s out, or your capital is ours.” I thought the only way to stop them was to expose them.

Then you gave that very tough speech.

I gave a very tough speech in September.

Let me go back. Because this is an oral history, it’s an important point to make. We weren’t utterly taken by surprise. We had been watching the uptick of Russian provocations against Georgia.

For months.

We had been working with the Germans on accelerating a diplomatic plan. Things were getting dicey, and in July we flew out—Condi took her team out to Tbilisi two or three weeks before it starts, and we get Saakashvili to agree to a no-first-use-of-force pledge as part of the then German-led, three-part diplomatic strategy for reducing the chance of a war. He agrees. You pushed him into it, on that terrace overlooking Tbilisi.

Yes. He said, “I can’t do it until something happens.” I said, “What good is it going to be after the Russians—?”

You said, “You don’t have a use-of-force option anyway, so you’re not getting anything out of a threat that is empty. So get something out of renunciation of that threat.” He thought and he said OK. Then he said, “Let Dan and my guys go over and draft it up.” So we did. About 3:00 in the morning we finished, called the Germans, and said, “We have your no-first-use-of-force pledge.” Condi says, “No offense, Dan, but it’s got to be above your level.” I said, “Yes, please.”

We say, “Bill Burns, the Under Secretary, should go to Berlin and talk to the Germans.” They’re willing—the first week in August, right at the time we know the war starts—for Georgians, Europeans, Russians, Americans to get together and work on this three-part plan. The Russians tell us that they’re busy; they’re on summer vacation, they can’t come. Maybe the end of August, early September, they’ll have time.

That Sunday, shelling starts in South Ossetia. The South Ossetians, and maybe the Russians, are shelling Georgian villages. Saakashvili goes nuts. We keep pushing him back for three or four days. When they start killing more Georgian villagers inside South Ossetia, he decides impulsively to send in his people.

That’s right.

That’s what happened.

Then we make a strategic decision. The Europeans are going to be out in front. We get a lot of help, by the way, from the Finnish Foreign Minister.

Alexander Stubb.

Right, who is OSCE Chairman [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] at the time, so we have the European Union and OSCE. Keeping them coordinated is not so easy, but we’re trying to keep them coordinated. In the final analysis, it worked out better than it might have. Then in September, Sergey and I were together for the first time at the UN GA and we decided to have a meeting. REDACTEDTEXT will remember. Everybody is waiting to see whether or not we’re going to be able to sit in the same room after all this upheaval.

I say to him before the meeting opens, “Congratulations. You have done what I could never do. You’ve made Misha Saakashvili the darling of the international community and the Georgians now have more donor money than they can ever spend. The Russian stock market has gone through the floor and, oh, by the way, you’re sitting in South Ossetia with the resounding diplomatic support of Hamas, Nicaragua, and—Oh, Venezuela. Sorry, they haven’t supported you yet.” Sergey was not that difficult. He sort of just took it on. But it remains a problem. I was sorry to have left that problem. But if there’s one thing that I really feel good about—and I made it as a snap decision on the telephone—it’s that I made the right decision to publicly expose the Russians on that.

Are you affected at all by the fact that the President is at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, sitting next to Putin? Is that part of Putin’s grand plan? He has a window of opportunity.

I don’t know. I know he pissed off the Chinese by doing it during their Olympics. They weren’t so thrilled that this was overshadowing their big day. I don’t know if he is that calculating. He is a very calculating man. Here they are, sitting at the opening ceremony, and the President is trying to ask him what’s going on in Georgia, and Putin is sort of evasive about the whole thing.

One thing I do know is that there is some split in the Kremlin, because [Dmitry] Medvedev keeps going out and saying things in response to the Europeans that then don’t happen. Medvedev keeps saying, “We’re withdrawing our forces,” but actually their forces are still on the move. So something is going on also between Putin and Medvedev in this period of time that hopefully one day we’ll have Kremlin records on.

But yes, it was complicated to have the President off in Beijing. Steve always said August was a dangerous month because we were always maldeployed. People were in different places. But Dan, before you have to go, why don’t you do MAP? I think that’s also important.

We took this out of chronological order, but MAP is NATO’s Membership Action Plan. Back in the ’90s when NATO expansion was the big contested issue, NATO comes up with stations, NATO’s version of Stations of the Cross, except it is supposed to end well in NATO. [laughter]

Steps toward paradise.

Think of it this way, as stations along the marathon trail.

There you go. A Membership Action Plan is one of them, where you say that a given country will someday be a NATO member, but they’re not ready yet, so you give them their homework assignment in a formal way. That’s the Membership Action Plan. Now, NATO enlargement has been a fabulous success. Clinton started it, with bipartisan support. Bush pushes it forward with seven countries in the Baltics, which was one of the great achievements of the Presidency. And now Ukraine and Georgia are at issue.

The Ukrainian President and his government really want NATO membership, but their population is divided. The Georgians are utterly united, 85–90 percent support for NATO membership, but Georgia is far away. The Russians hate NATO enlargement in general, and they hate it for countries like Ukraine and Georgia, in particular. The NATO alliance is divided. We don’t make up our minds what we want, but in—

I meet with [Viktor] Yushchenko in Davos in January.

Yes, late January.

I go for one day to the Davos conference. It was my last year as Secretary and I’d never been, so I felt like I had to go. I went to the Davos conference and I met with [Hamid] Karzai and I met with Yushchenko. Yushchenko is in near tears telling me about how, if they don’t get MAP, then Ukrainian independence is ended because [Viktor] Yanukovych—and he is fighting with [Yulia] Tymoshenko, and it’s just really a mess.

I basically say to him, “Forget it, you’re not getting the Membership Action Plan. Set your sights someplace else.” But we go back to the White House and the President says, “If he’s asking for it, how can I say that they can’t have it?” I say, “Well, you can say they can’t have it.” We have an NSC meeting where we review the question of whether or not Georgia and Ukraine—because we have a Bucharest summit coming up at NATO and we have to have a decision.

NATO summit in April.

The President decides that he wants to go for it. I have to admit that this is one time that I wasn’t so sure. I was kind of 50/50 on this one. We decide we’re going to try to do it and we’re trying to find some way to get through the Bucharest summit to meet two conditions: One is that the alliance doesn’t blow up over MAP, and secondly that the President can go on to meet Putin in Sochi.

He’s going right across the Black Sea.

Putin had invited the President to come to Sochi. As you might imagine, this is a delicate act. If you put them in MAP, then there is no way you can go to Sochi. If you lose on MAP, then there is no way you can go to Sochi. So what’s the way forward? We go to Bucharest.

We go to Bucharest and the night before, there’s a leaders’ dinner and there’s a Foreign Ministers’ dinner. It’s members only, so the staff is outside. Condi and the Polish Foreign Minister go in to fight for MAP. They come out at the end of the dinner, and everybody is divided. It’s like 11:30 at night. The Germans are dead set against it.

Angela Merkel is.

Merkel is dead set against it. There is a meeting with the President at midnight. The summit is the next day, and how do we navigate our way forward? The President smiles and says, “Well, y’all take care of it. I’m ready for action tomorrow.” He’s not worried. He’s not saying, “My God, what did you get me into?” Not at all. It’s sort of, “OK, I’m ready. Prepare the battlefield; I’m going in. I want to do this.” Very interesting. Not, “What have you gotten me into?” He is fearless.

The NATO Secretary General wants a small group meeting in the morning with National Security Advisors plus one. Steve Hadley decides his plus one will be the Secretary of State. That will sort of set the tone. [laughter] And we want—In addition to the Germans, the French, and the British, we also want the Romanians—It’s their country—and the Poles. So at 1:00 in the morning I’m inviting people to a seven o’clock meeting. This is great. At the seven o’clock meeting, still no decision. We go into the summit and there’s no decision. The Poles, the East Europeans are trying to work with the Germans—

No, that comes a little later. We’re there, the President and I are there, and he says, “So, did we get it fixed?” “Not really, Mr. President.” They start the meeting and I go off in the corner. We’ve got some possible language that we’ve worked out in this morning meeting and I go off in the corner to talk to [Radoslaw] Radek Sikorski to see if he can hold the East Europeans, who are ready for—I mean, they’ve got George Bush in front of them, right? So they’re ready to fight. They’re ready to storm the barricades. I’ll never forget the Poles saying, “MAP now! MAP now! MAP now!” That’s going nowhere.

I’m talking to Sikorski and I say, “Look, this language isn’t perfect but it does say—” And it’s kind of fuzzy about them getting into NATO someday and therefore we ought to be doing MAP, but it doesn’t promise them to start MAP, which is the best we can deliver. And this is after I beat up poor Frank-Walter Steinmeier. I really beat him up to get there. So Sikorski says, “Yes, I think I can sell that.”

He goes and gets the East Europeans together. He comes back and says, “Yes, it’s all set.” So we sit around and the President says to me, “Angela is standing over there and I told her you were going to come and show her what you’ve come up with.” So I go over to the Chancellor and I say, “Chancellor Merkel, can you live with this?” She says, “Well, I think so.” We’re all set. We sit around the table and the President starts to say it, and all of a sudden the Poles say, “No, there has to be MAP today.”

The President overrules his Foreign Minister.

Yes, the President overrules his Foreign Minister. The Poles want MAP now. Now the Romanians are with them, and the Balts, and it has come completely unglued.

The Secretary General throws out all the backbenchers, so at this point I leave the room.

So it is just the Foreign Ministers and the heads of state. It is chaos. Everybody is trying to get recognized, and poor Jaap [de Hoop Scheffer]—Finally, they call a time out and I go to the Chancellor and I say, Madam Chancellor, why don’t we go talk to the East Europeans together? We went over into a corner and I’ll never forget—She’s sitting down, these East Europeans are all around her. I’m standing over her. The only common language is Russian, so we start searching for language in Russian. We come up with something—

We’re translating it back into the English and then I go off to tell the President what is going on. A few minutes later, Jonas [Gahr] Støre, the Norwegian, comes over and says, “I think you’d better go back over there. They may speak Russian, but their English isn’t very good and I’m not quite sure what it is they just wrote.” I look and they’ve actually said Ukraine and Georgia will be members of NATO.

And this is the Chancellor.

The Chancellor has written this in and I’m thinking, OK, good by me. So we went back and that became the document.

The East Europeans are running out of the room, telling me, “This is really great. This is a democratic alliance. They’re listening to us.” And they’d run back in, then run back out. “We’re making progress.”

The meaning was fuzzy enough in that when MAP would come was not clear; but we had won something in that they will become members of NATO, which is more than we’d ever said about any other MAP applicant.

Putin came the next day and gave his valedictory, because he was getting ready for the Presidential visit.

Apparently Putin had been told, “Good news, Vladimir Vladimirovich. They’re not in MAP.” Nobody told him that someday they’re going to be in NATO. [laughter] He finds out and he shows up and you see him walking and you realize, he’s in a mood. He has just discovered what the compromise is. Somebody had the courage to tell him. He gives a blood-curdling speech, where at one point he threatens Ukraine’s territorial integrity. He said that the Crimean transfer from the Russian Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Socialist Republic in 1954 was not fully legally valid; not all the proper procedures were followed.

I’m sitting next to the Polish NSA [National Security Advisor]. We both stand up and say, “Did you hear that?” The Pole says, “He just laid a marker down, questioning Ukraine’s territorial integrity, threatening to grab back Crimea.” So he’s in a mood. That’s where the summit ends. We fly off to Sochi.

He’s in a mood, but he ends by saying—It’s a horrible speech, and then he says, “And I very much want to say that I have enjoyed my association with NATO,” and kind of, “I’m out of here.” [laughter] “I hope to be President the next time you meet.”

He sort of goes back to the text.

Yes, he goes back to the text. It’s clear he had a prepared text based on the compromise that he thought he liked. He read about half of that and then he couldn’t control himself and he gets going. This is when he starts threatening the territorial integrity. But then he ends with the text that he came with.

So he leaves. We get on a flight and go to Sochi. I’m thinking, What is this going to be like? But actually he’s in a pretty good mood and he’s busy showing us about the Olympics and so forth and so on. We get to Sochi and we create this strategic framework for U.S.-Russian relations going forward. That’s kind of the end of the U.S.-Russia piece of it.

I have to say just one other thing, since we’re using this to talk about Russia. I think that Putin thought, at the time of 9/11, when he supported us in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, et cetera, that we had come to a new understanding about U.S.-Russian relations. He was all in for the Global War on Terror. What he didn’t recognize was that the second part of the Global War on Terror was going to be the Freedom Agenda. Particularly as the “Color Revolutions” started, as he saw it, to encircle Russia, he starts to feel betrayed by what we had done. As long as we were talking War on Terror, Middle East, North Korea, even Iran, where actually they were more cooperative than they get credit for; for instance, they withheld fuel shipments to Iran until the very end.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

They went slow on Bushehr; they weren’t bad at all. But the periphery of Russia—When you’re talking about Ukraine and Georgia, that’s where we would run into trouble with them. Or missile defense. Sergey told me, “Put your missile defense in Turkey, I don’t care. But Poland, Czech Republic, no.” The Thermidor was around the periphery of Russia, not around the relationship as a whole. But that’s the end of the story on Russia.

Then the Russo-Georgian War takes place after this.

Right.

There is no dénouement; it’s an unresolved issue. Putin has not overthrown Saakashvili. We put together a billion-dollar assistance package. The number billion came from, of all people, Senator Biden.

That’s right.

When he mentioned it, we jumped on it and said we’ll remove that from the campaign. Biden was right. He had good instincts on this stuff. We jumped on it and thank goodness we did.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

They said, “Well, the Chechens want independence too. So how do you say to them that they shouldn’t—” We just kept saying, “There’s no such thing as a precedent here, and Kosovo comes out of a different set of circumstances.” But just to use this for the Russian relationship for a second, if you look from Slovenia out to Sochi—They meet one more time, right? They must have met in the fall at the UN GA meeting because Putin—When is the Presidential election in Russia?

I don’t know. I don’t remember.

We meet Medvedev in Sochi. Putin invites Medvedev to all of the events in Sochi.

Yes, he’s there.

So the last time the President meets Putin as the President of Russia—The election must be in September.

It was actually before. The Russian Presidential election was held on March 2, 2008.

So Putin was Prime Minister?

Already, at Sochi?

Medvedev is President-elect. The inauguration had not occurred.

The inauguration had not occurred. Putin is Prime Minister during Georgia because Medvedev is theoretically President and he’s the one who is dealing with us.

He flies down to the—

Exactly, that’s right. So when he comes to NATO, Medvedev is President-elect, but has not been inaugurated. That’s the last time we see Putin, in Sochi. He invites Medvedev, who is President-elect, to all the events. Georgia then happens after Medvedev is inaugurated. So the last time that the President and Putin meet as equals is Sochi. After that, I think we must have had one or two meetings with Medvedev at various things. So from Slovenia to Sochi, you see the overlapping evolution of the U.S.-Russian relationship in a couple of ways. We go through a period of objectives that are shared, that begin to separate around the Freedom Agenda, particularly as it is associated with the periphery.

We always continue through this whole period to have good cooperation on a lot of the global issues. We do PSI [Proliferation Security Initiative]; we do the global nuclear threat–reduction thing together. Putin and the President have a similar view of how to deal with the NPT [Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons] and the loophole of enrichment and reprocessing.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

They support us on civil nuclear with India. Lavrov is extremely helpful on the whole Annapolis process. He sort of helps with the Syrians, helps with Hamas. All through this period they’re good on global issues. But what you really see, from Slovenia to Sochi, is a divergence on the post-Soviet space.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

That’s the Moscow summit, the Treaty of Moscow.

When you think about the fact that the Treaty of Moscow is less than a year after we have unilaterally gotten out of the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty, which—If you look at the historical record, Putin is quite calm about it. We start talking to him about abrogating the ABM treaty when we first come to office. We want to do it bilaterally if we can. He basically says, “Look, I’m not going to do this bilaterally, but I’m also not going to get excited about it.” He doesn’t, and we actually coordinate the press guidance on the day that the President announced the abrogation.

It is kind of interesting that we have this long period of really good cooperation, but it is really another color revolution—Putin starts to turn authoritarian at home and the Color Revolutions start to “surround” them.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

I noticed that when Chirac and Schroeder form this bloc to try to stop us on Iraq, they invite Putin.

Yes, that was the problem.

They invite Putin. Putin doesn’t lead this. Schroeder invites him in. Schroeder, for domestic German reasons, is taking us on over Iraq; and Chirac, for strategic reasons, is taking us on over Iraq. Putin gets a taste for anti-Americanism and he sees that he can play it to divide Europe and the United States, which is an old Russian/Soviet objective. He gets a taste for blood. But it gets much worse after the Color Revolutions. We don’t realize that he thinks we’re behind it.

Yes, he does. He thinks we’re behind all these revolutions.

You know this how?

They accuse us of it. They start saying, “This is American money.”

American NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], the “gray cardinal,” all these people, the NGOs.

We’re putting tens of billions of dollars into the political process in Iraq, coming up with not much, but for a few million we’re overturning governments in Ukraine. What?

The President always felt, and I did too, that Putin was at least straightforward. He always told us he couldn’t support the war. He was not like Schroeder, who basically said about Iraq, “Do it quick and I’ll be fine.” Putin was in that way straightforward.

The other thing is Putin was pretty clear that his biggest concern was their economic issues. They had a lot of contracts there. The Iraqis owed them a lot of money. “We need to be sure that our interests are protected.” When I went to see him in April after the fall of Saddam, he says, “How are things going?” We talk for a few minutes and then he starts right in on, “Well, you know we have these contracts—” He was pretty clear what his concerns were.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

The ’90s, we tend to think of as the glory years of Boris Yeltsin taking Russia headlong into capitalism and the great birth of democracy and a very pro-Western foreign policy. But I used to go to Russia a lot in the ’90s, and actually, for most Russians it was deprivation, humiliation, and chaos.

REDACTEDTEXT

Yes, hyperinflation, chaos, drive-by shootings. This was not a good time. And Putin comes at the end of the ’90s and says, “I’ll give you prosperity, respect, and order,” and for a while it’s prosperity, respect, and order because, frankly, under Yeltsin the state had sort of ceased to exist. So for a while, what Putin is doing is really not a bad thing. But both in its domestic expression and its external expression, it moves more and more in an authoritarian fashion. Along with that movement in authoritarian fashion comes a kind of psychological link to the days when the Soviet Union stood astride the earth.

The thing they always loved most about 1972 was not the SALT [Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty] Treaty; it was the basic principles and relations that Henry wrote, which said that the United States and the Soviet Union really do manage the world. They felt, in the ’73 war, that the United States had gone back on its promise, because we were supposed to manage this together. They loved that moment in a summit when the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the President of the United States would meet to show the world that we weren’t going to annihilate each other, even though we could.

The arms control for them and all of the trappings of that Soviet-U.S. period reminded them of the days when they were the equal of the United States. Now here they were begging to be in WTO, begging to be at the G8. Putin told me when I went to see him one time, “We should be in the G8 Finance Ministers, too. I know our economy is only the size of Norway’s, but we’re an important economy and we should be in there because we’ve got P5 [UN Security Council’s five permanent members: namely China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States] and we’ve got nuclear weapons.” I thought, This is not a good argument. They yearned for that time when they and we stood astride the international system, and I think they still do.

Now a question. Do you think Putin treated you differently because you were a woman?

No, I think he treated me differently because I was a Russianist.

I think the Russians had a problem with you because they couldn’t pigeonhole you. They like pigeonholing people. Hardliner. Softliner. Where do they come from? The whole bio background—For you they couldn’t do it. You could see them frustrated.

He would try to appeal to my Russianist side—twice. Once when I went to Moscow when I was National Security Advisor, I went out to his dacha and he walked me into a room where the whole National Security Council was assembled and he said, “We know that you would love to have been in this meeting, wouldn’t you, when you were writing as a young academic? You would have loved to have known what goes on in this meeting.” It was slightly manipulative.

Even more manipulative, when I was Secretary—Bill Burns was still Ambassador, so this must have been 2005, maybe early 2006. It was when they had just embargoed goods to Georgia. There was some flare-up.

Right, they wouldn’t allow Georgian wine and water. It was an economic—

So I get to Moscow. Usually I would wait a few minutes and then go see Putin. This time I went to my hotel. Five o’clock comes, six, six-thirty, seven o’clock, and Putin can’t see me. Finally at 7:30 they say, “He is ready to see you.” I drive out and I realize we’re not going to his dacha; we’re going out to that old lodge where Yeltsin used to live. We walk in, and literally it is a big old wooden structure. It looks like a big old cabin or lodge or something, with moose heads on the wall, and there is the entire National Security Council, and they’re having a party for Igor Ivanov and Dmitry Medvedev, whose birthdays are that day. They’re having a birthday party, and he says, “We thought you might like to join us.”

Bill and I are the only people there. They’re telling bad jokes about the Russians and toasting with the Georgian wine that they had just—It is like a scene out of, I don’t know, [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky or something.

[Mikhail] Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita.

Exactly. We get to the end and I say, “Mr. President, this is all very nice, but we have to talk, because I had some very specific things that I wanted to say about Georgia.” Bill and Lavrov and Putin and I go into a side room and we start talking about Georgia and I say, “Mr. President, President Bush wants you to know that if anything happens with you with Georgia it will strongly affect U.S.-Russian relations.”

We were all seated, two of them on a sofa. He stood up. He stood up over me, kind of intimidating. So I stood up too, and I’m taller than he is. [laughter] It was one of those moments. But he was like that. He would say, “Condi, you know us [in Russian].” Then he would launch into some long excuses about how the Russian people need a strong hand, and all the great reformers have been like—You expected the double-headed eagle to suddenly start rising. We had some pretty weird conversations.

Did you use a translator in these conversations?

You know what I did? I spoke in English, because my Russian is good but I did not want it to be depended on. I listened to him in Russian, not in English, because they’d translate him and it wasn’t right. Putin speaks a particularly unvarnished, almost vulgar, in a vulgar way. So it was better to listen to him in his own language.

There are a few more things on the agenda and I’ve got to watch the clock. One of the things was the surge, and the business of re-creating a policy for Iraq in the second term. That’s historically very important, and we’d like to hear your take on what was happening in the second term to bring you to a point of recalibrating.

I have to leave at 4:30.

Then why don’t we do Sudan?

OK, let’s do Sudan.

I wanted to hear about the surge. I love the stories.

We might be able to do the surge and Sudan.

Do you want to start on the surge and then Sudan?

Let’s do Sudan first. Thank you so much, Dan.

My pleasure.

We get the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement] and that’s a real breakthrough. But before we can really—Colin and John Danforth and Jendayi and her team did a terrific job on the CPA. They end a civil war that has killed more than two million people. But before we can really get the CPA grounded, Darfur breaks out, so we have an entirely different problem. The problem is to keep the CPA alive by having enough ability to work with the government to get that implemented and to stop the slaughter in Darfur. Why don’t you talk a little bit about how we thought about it?

Why don’t I start a little earlier than that to get Condi’s role in all of this? Essentially, the Sudan policy started the second day of the administration in 2001 when she came to her NSC staff meeting and said that the President wants Sudan to be a priority. That focus continued right through the very end of the administration, when on January 5, 2009, the President was meeting with Salva Kiir, the Vice President of Southern Sudan, who is going to be the President. So attention to Sudan was always there.

When the President made that statement at the NSC, Condi then convened the Principals Committee and held meetings from January through March or so in 2001, setting out the framework for the Sudan policy, which had four basic pillars: a just peace between the North and the South—as she said, two million people dead in a twenty-year civil war; regional destabilization—Sudan was destabilizing its neighbors; counterterrorism—We do know that Osama bin Laden had been there before, and we had a real concern about their cooperation on CT [counterterrorism]; and then the humanitarian disaster that stemmed from regional destabilization and lack of peace there.

There was a choice between how we were going to engage at the senior level on Sudan policy, given that this was a Presidential priority. Are we going to put in place an ambassador, or are we going to have a Special Envoy? That was essentially the choice. Secretary Powell chose a Special Envoy and we selected Senator Danforth. Because the constraints of our policy were basically congressional, there was tremendous attention on the Hill to Sudan policy, as well as domestic constituents. NGOs, the humanitarian community, the religious community—all were very concerned about Sudan policy. With Senator Danforth, we were getting both a person with lots of gravitas, and a person who was a “Reverend” himself and could speak to the constituents, as well as a former Senator who could deal with the Congress. He really did provide a lot of answers to the various constituents interested in Sudan policy.

As Secretary Rice says, that policy carried forth, and on January 9, 2005—I want to say that her role at the NSC in defining the framework was critically important then for the signing of the CPA in 2005, January 9. She travels to Sudan in July 2005. We are now dealing with Darfur. Darfur comes into the picture in about 2003–2004 with the humanitarian crisis, and it becomes very clear that the government is carrying out a brutal, basically counterinsurgency campaign against Darfurian rebels.

So by 2005 this community of activists and NGOs are saying, “Darfur, Darfur, Darfur. The CPA is signed. You need to pay attention to Darfur and deal with Darfur.” The Secretary travels to Sudan. I can’t really explain that. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT I actually was Ambassador to South Africa at the time, so I just watched that trip on the TV.

The worst part of it was I had to sit—[Omar al-] Bashir, his goons, prevented [Constance Berry] Connie Newman, who was still Assistant Secretary, and the people who were with me from getting in. I’m sitting there with just Bashir, his translator, not mine, and [Laura E.] Liz Lineberry, my assistant, my admin, who somehow had gotten through. I was really furious. What I learned later was that his people were pushing around the press. They had knocked Andrea Mitchell to the ground. This was a bad trip. Gaddafi is a lunatic, but this guy was a bad, bad man. But we went. I felt we had to deliver a very strong message that he had to start to cooperate on Sudan.

Including addressing the issue of sexual violence. You went to refugee camps in Darfur.

I went to refugee camps and met with women who had been raped. That was the hardest meeting I think I ever had. You sit in a tent with these women who have been raped going to get water. Their lives were just destroyed. It was that moment that I really started to think we needed to get—We eventually did—a resolution in the UN that declared rape to be a weapon of war, not a consequence of war, so that it was punishable under war crimes.

Two weeks later, John Garang dies. He was really our partner in Sudan. It was a plane crash. This was a huge potential setback for the way in which we addressed Sudan. You might want to say something about that.

Yes, John Garang was—I remember meeting him in the Presidential Palace when I went to—Our hope was to have a strong-enough southern government to infiltrate—basically, the Vice President to infiltrate the government in Khartoum, that would begin to change the character of that government, that would deal with the Darfur problem, that would also prepare for the referendum, which I think all of us knew was ultimately going to end up in independence for the South.

When John Garang died—He was just this very powerful figure. When you looked at the man, he was 6' 8" maybe, just a majestic-looking person. You just knew that he could pull it off. When he died, it left us really with a void. And Salva Kiir, who was his longtime lieutenant, didn’t look initially like he was going to be as strong. But we started to work very carefully with him and also to try to repair some of the relationship between Salva Kiir and Rebecca Garang, the widow, because we thought we needed them both. We spent a lot of time on the internal dynamics of the southern Sudanese to try to give them a good government.

The decision based on the President’s and the Secretary’s strong relations with African leaders was to try to stem the killing of innocent civilians in Darfur by putting an African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur—The aim is the African mission in Sudan—which the U.S. and NATO were able to airlift into Darfur, primarily made up of Rwandans and the Nigerians—

Which I personally recruited.

—building on relations that were there. In 2005 the number of deaths had actually started to go down as that force came in, because the Sudanese reacted to the AU [African Union] force. Unfortunately, over time, by the end of the year, that force had been tested and had been found wanting, so the security situation started to deteriorate again. At the end of 2005 there was, at that point, a quite serious review of military options.

Yes, we looked at military options.

In January. What can the U.S. do?

No-fly zone.

A no-fly zone was definitely one of the options on the table. There were several options on the table that were looked at, including a meeting in the Oval Office with the Vice President and yourself and others, Steve Hadley, with the President really pushing for some serious options. And there were some Principals Committee meetings as well on those options.

The President was not satisfied with what he was getting out of the bureaucracy, which again had the character from the military—You need 500,000 troops to send—It was one of those, option A, option B, option C—and A and C are not doable.

He was always pushing. Because he knew Jendayi very well, having worked for him, he was pushing her very hard, once you came in as Assistant Secretary, to get something done. He was very frustrated. He actually personally considered, in 2006, a unilateral American intervention with anybody he could find to stop the slaughter in Darfur.

And we worked toward that. Bob Zoellick was not too keen on that option and pushed very hard to be given an opportunity to try to get a peace agreement between the rebels and the government. By May of 2006 we indeed got the Darfur Peace Agreement signed. So the feeling was that, well, you don’t need military options; we’ll be able to use that peace agreement and get a UN peacekeeping operation on the ground.

In the negotiations, the Sudanese government basically said yes, if there was a peace agreement, they would go for a UN peacekeeping operation. This was Vice President [Ali Osman] Taha, who was their negotiator and who made that commitment. In the end, he reneged. I think Bashir was part of that reneging, saying, “No, under no circumstances are we going to accept a UN peacekeeping operation in Darfur,” although we already had a peacekeeping operation, UNMIS [United Nations Mission in the Sudan] in southern Sudan. That then led us into a bad situation. They launched another offensive against Darfur, because their decision was, “We can end this thing militarily. We will simply beat the rebels.”

August 31, 2006, we got Security Council Resolution 1706, which said that we were going to transform this 7,000 African Union force into a 20,000 UN peacekeeping operation under Chapter 7, with the ability to use all necessary means. It was a very strong resolution and it was a serious threat to the Sudanese, that whether you like it or not we’re coming in. You agreed to a peacekeeping operation; we’re going to bring a peacekeeping operation in here.

Secretary Rice made a speech at the Africa Society on September 27, 2006, which basically set out the choice between cooperation and confrontation, saying that this is a clear and consequential decision that the Sudanese government needed to make. Prior to that speech I had gone to Sudan with a letter from President Bush that set the terms of that decision, saying, “If you choose cooperation, you let the UN peacekeeping operation come in, we’ll take this path with you,” which was a rapprochement, essentially. “If you continue to reject a UN peacekeeping operation, we’re on a different path.”

Secretary Rice basically outlined that choice in the speech, and talked about the comprehensive peace agreement being the foundation of our Sudan policy, which is basically democratic transformation—the desire for a unified, peaceful, and democratic Sudan—which was John Garang’s original vision. She announced Andrew Natsios as the Special Envoy for Sudan. He had been appointed on September 19. And then she referred to the Security Council Resolution 1706 that there needed to be a peacekeeping operation there. That became the struggle of the fall, to push the Sudanese toward that, which they eventually did accept. Andrew Natsios, working with the African Union and UN, basically got them to agree to a hybrid force called UNAMID [African Union-United Nations Mission in Darfur], which was an African Union–UN force combined. Then we really got into the slog of the hybrid force.

The slog really is an important object lesson about trying to do multilateral stuff, because the problem here was—First of all, Bashir was very brilliant at playing delays. He would promise to do things and then they wouldn’t happen. When he needed the support of the Arabs, he would be Arab; and when he needed the support of the Africans, he would be African. He would play them off one another. And he had the Chinese in his corner. When it finally came to it, the Chinese, because of the oil concessions that they had in Sudan, were not prepared to do further resolutions, for instance, to compel a peacekeeping force to go in. So we spent the rest of the administration basically slogging it.

It didn’t help that—I said I’m not that great a fan of the UN sometimes. What was that UN office called?

REDACTEDTEXT

PKO [United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations], which puts together these peacekeeping forces. You would say, “How quickly can you have somebody there?” And they would say, “Six months from the time that we authorize it, which will be three months from now.” It was just very frustrating. At one point the Ethiopians, who were prepared to go in—They held them up because they had to build barracks for them. I remember Meles [Zenawi] saying to me, “We’re an army. We know how to build provisions as we go along. What are they talking about?” The UN system really was horrible.

Yes, and part of the problem was they allowed themselves to get into a situation with the Sudanese where the Sudanese could dictate every aspect of the operation, such as what time helicopters could fly or not fly, when they were allowed to come in. They were essentially checking with the Sudanese and they used this as a tactical means of delay, delay, delay. It was a very frustrating process. It was frustrating from the way in which the UN operates. It was frustrating from some of the troop-contributing countries that were now coming in. It certainly was frustrating because the Sudanese were using it to their advantage to simply delay. We eventually got 20,000 or so peacekeepers on the ground. But again, because they kept asking for permission, it was very difficult for them to be highly effective.

We also got Colonel Gaddafi to open the Libyan supply route. That tremendously eased the humanitarian problem, because there was a point at which you couldn’t get humanitarian supplies in because the routes were dangerous. So he opened the Libyan route that really—

Yes, and in 2007, consideration of military options came up again. That involved actually getting Chad to give us overfly. There was some effort, the sharing of intelligence with the French and Chad, and creating an option for basing out of eastern Chad, so the threat was always there and the Sudanese would understand when that threat was heightened and then say, “OK, we’ll allow this to happen; we’ll allow that to happen,” and then they would start getting us back into a slog again.

What else can I say about Sudan?

I’d like to ask one question about this in very broad-brush terms. It goes back to something you said this morning, that President Bush took a special interest in Africa.

Yes, he did.

How do you explain that?

I think the President liked real problems. He liked dealing with leaders who were direct. And he became part of the community. He became part of the discussion, the dialogue. What you found with African leaders is they would come to the Oval Office and meet with him, and they would talk about not only their problems but also their neighbors’ problems, or they would send a message. He became part of the community trying to solve problems with them. And they were taking leadership on these issues.

As prickly as our relationship ultimately became with President [Thabo] Mbeki, for example, we worked very closely with him on ending the war in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In fact, in 2002 President Bush and President Mbeki chaired a meeting to bring Paul Kagame and [Joseph] Kabila together.

Right.

So he really became part of that process.

The President—This goes back a little bit. Africa is a very important part of this administration’s legacy and I hope that history will give it full airing. Very early on in the campaign, I was bringing together people who would talk to the Governor about foreign policy, and one of the things that we talked about was Africa. I said, “You know, you’re going to have to do something about AIDS,” and he understood that. This was one part where there was not continuity. The Clinton administration had declared the Africans in a humanitarian category. They had four categories—

Vitals, strategic, important, and humanitarian.

Right, and the Africans were humanitarian. During the campaign I came to see the Africans—Jendayi got together all the African Ambassadors and I said, “Are you really satisfied with being in the humanitarian category, which means you don’t matter in international politics?” That sort of started the dialogue.

The President decided instead that he was going to treat them as equals, treat them as partners, deal with real problems, but do it in a way that really assigned responsibility to them as much as to us, so that they could actually be partners in solving not just their own problems, but sometimes in dealing with other things. This really gets borne out with counterterrorism when we get really good cooperation from East Africa.

I think he did care about the humanitarians’ compassion agenda, but he also found a lot of very good partnerships, and he had particularly good relations with Ghana’s President, John Kufuor. He was one of the only people I knew who could deal with [Olusegun] Obasanjo and actually get him to do anything.

Well, it was President Bush, President Obasanjo, and Kofi Annan who, in the Rose Garden, announced the formation of the Global Fund for HIV, AIDS, TB and Malaria.

Right.

His first meeting with Obasanjo—Obasanjo played an important role, as did Kufuor, in solving the Liberia crisis. Again, it is the building of those relationships. He met with so many of the leaders and he got a sense that they were willing to take responsibility. For instance, when he met with President [Festus] Mogae of Botswana, that was very pivotal in his thinking about HIV and AIDS treatment, the use of antiretroviral drugs. He was part of the community; he was part of the dialogue.

Is it also possible that in the developing world there is more visible payoff of an investment?

If anything, the problems seem intractable, right? I actually think it goes more to what Jendayi was saying about liking the problem solving. These people have real problems. I was saying at lunch that he liked the East Europeans for the same reasons, right? He would look at a Karzai or a Maliki and think, That man has a really hard job. Then he’d look at Gerhard Schroeder and think, That’s not so bad. So there was a little bit of—These are people who have real problems.

Two things, Sudan and Bashir, which I hope you mention in the book. One we touched on, which was 1593, and you might want to actually say whether—I assume you went to the President to say, “Do you care more about the ICC, or do you care more about Sudan?”

I did.

It was John Bolton, and you have to respect his purity of views on this, who basically said, if we hate the ICC, we can’t say it’s good for some things but bad for others.

Right.

But you came back to me and Nick and said, “The President has made a decision.”

Yes, we had a conversation about it. I said, “You know, Mr. President, here are the choices. But recognize that if you will veto a resolution saying anything about the ICC in conjunction with the war crimes prosecutions of these people, you effectively look like you are prepared to countenance war crimes rather than get away from your ideological position on the ICC.” That’s one of the choices.

And he said?

The language is careful. It said the United States doesn’t agree with the ICC, and it thinks it’s a bad organization, et cetera, but if it comes to that, we will cooperate.

And this is really not dissimilar to what the Obama administration just did on Libya. I mean they were one step further, because they didn’t abstain; they voted for. Then an interesting part is the bookend at the very end that Jendayi was involved in, when the French and the Chinese are trying to let Bashir off the hook by deferring the ICC investigation. Although we were not entirely keen about the arrest warrant, because it kind of complicated things, once it was done; we were not going to let him off the hook.

The funny thing is, here we are not members of the ICC, and we’ve said this is a terrible idea, and we’re the ones saying to our friends, “But if you’re going to have the ICC, you can’t stop an indictment of the ICC.”

Then you said—and I don’t know what the genesis of this was, whether you again talked to the President, but you said, “If you try to bring this to the Security Council to get a deferral—”

I said, “The United States will veto it.”

You said, “I will veto it twice!” [banging on the table—laughter]

And so, by the end of the administration, we have Ken Roth, the president of Human Rights Watch, writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, saying the U.S. has become the defender of the ICC.

It was really weird. But how could you say you support the ICC and then the first time they want to issue an indictment that matters, you say, “Whoa, wait, the Security Council is going to veto that”? It was strange.

On Darfur, despite the fact that it was a Chapter 7, once it was agreed that the African Union would provide forces, wasn’t it structurally now allowing Bashir to actually have a veto? I mean, all of the actions that you indicated that he took.

Yes. [Leaves room]

So it was structurally deficient from the start.

There were two resolutions: There was 1706, which was “use of all necessary means,” and then there was 1769, which was what established UNAMID. That was in July of ’07, and absolutely what you’re saying is because they kept going and asking for permission. It wasn’t because there were African forces in it; it was because it was an experiment. Where did command actually reside? Is it with the AU [African Union]? Is it with the UN? You had to negotiate all the time between those two organizations. African forces that were part of AMIS [African Union Mission in Sudan]—When we were sort of looking at options, some of those forces were also like, “We’ll deal with what’s happening on the ground. If you do a no-fly zone, we’ve got—” They were not opposed to more robust measures to protect civilians. But UNAMID, yes, structurally it was very difficult to get decisions out of it. It was just how they decided to go about it, with asking for permission all the time. They didn’t have to do that, according to the resolution. That’s just how it evolved.

She’s not here [Dr. Rice] so if you’ve got any good embarrassing stories you want to get on the record, we can spring it on her when the transcript comes.

The crowd is too loyal. Can I just maybe ask a complementary or rhetorical question, and that is, in ’04, ’05, you start to see a surge of public action from these NGOs, such as Bono [Paul Hewson], the celebrity, starting to demand accountability and involvement in Africa. Correct me if I’m wrong, and not being biased—Is the game plan that the Bush administration wants to give Jendayi and others credit, the President himself, for setting the foundation for what was going to be such a robust, successful African policy that it has gone unnoticed, but silenced these action groups; whereas, they thought they were holding America accountable? What would you say the reaction was in Europe? Because the Europeans, frankly, were never held accountable, whether it be the 10 percent GDP [gross domestic product] or—The President kept delivering and delivering and delivering. [Rice reenters room]

Right. I think they were found a bit flatfooted. He was out in front on HIV AIDS. He was out in front on the World Bank, the whole debt cancelation. In June or July of 2001, he made a speech essentially saying that we need to end the cycle of lend-and-forgive, and that there needed to be 50 percent of all new aid from the World Bank going to Africa in the form of grants rather than loans, and eventually that became the debt cancelation of multilateral debt.

Which, by the way, he said at the second debate with Al Gore, and which Jendayi had written the points for.

That’s right, saying, “What are you going to do about poverty? One of the things we can do is get rid of the debt.” He followed through on that. The framework for a robust Africa policy was laid very early, and importantly laid before September 11, 2001. Some people said that after September 11 we realized that we had to deal with these issues of failed states. In fact, most of these policy pronouncements were made prior to September 11. That foundation was already laid very early on.

And we were able to leverage those relationships in many ways. I don’t want to say that it was all one-sided. We also asked Africans to support us in the Security Council or at the UN General Assembly on some of the issues that we had, and we typically would get their votes. And they were a lot of votes. People forget how many—53 African countries, 48 in sub-Saharan Africa. We really did develop a very strategic partnership, in general, with the African countries.

Let me say one last thing: It reflects the transformational diplomacy. When you start talking about transformational diplomacy: “We’re not going to do for you; we’re going to help you do—” That whole sense of, “We’re going to partner, not be paternalistic,” I would argue, was driven out of our Africa policy and carried over to the rest.

Our African policy was strategically sound. It had good execution and it had an effect on the other policies. Africa sometimes could get to feel like a backwater in American foreign policy. It was very central, and the President kept it there. That was mostly him.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Yes, we really need to talk about India.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

And Pakistan and Afghanistan. One of the things we did in the State Department was—When we went to Camp David on September 16 to start the planning after September 11, we rolled out this map of Afghanistan, and the color drained from everybody’s face. Why are we going to be in Afghanistan? It’s the place that great powers go to die. But I started thinking about it as the “spine of a book,” I used to call it. You had India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, up through central Asia that folded out toward southwest Asia on the one hand and Iran and toward the Middle East on the other.

I actually changed the structure in the Department to create a Bureau of South and Central Asia that also included for the first time the “stans.” There was howling from the Europeans and from the “stans.” But the only reason that Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan had been in Europe was because they were part of the Soviet Union. I thought the future was to look at that as a region. So we did that. We should talk about that sometime.

And India—Yes, we inherited a move forward, but the President saw it as a much grander vision, and he was prepared to take the really hard step, which was to get the civil-nuclear deal with the Indians, which everybody knew was going to be very hard because of the high priests of nonproliferation policy in the Congress and in the administration, including in the Department of State. That was a big step. We got that at the 11th hour. Nick did a lot of the negotiation, and then John Rood took up the negotiations.

We got the deal only by—We had to get a bilateral deal with the Indians that then had to be approved through the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]. Mohamed ElBaradei was extremely helpful. Then it had to be approved by the nuclear suppliers group. Then it had to be approved in the Congress.

We had three votes in the Congress over three years.

Exactly, to change American policy.

Led by Joe Biden.

Joe Biden, that’s right.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

We should do Asia in general, because we won’t be able to do justice to North Korea. Then there is the Middle East.

That’s about three days’ worth of material.

Maybe we can find a way to get back together to do—Anybody want to come to California?

I have to check my budget. Stanford is lovely 365 days a year.

Not quite. That’s a myth. January and February are pretty awful, but it is beautiful now.

Let’s agree that there is more to be done and we’ll try to find a way. You have to let us know what your timetable is, because I know you have a publishing deadline.

I would like to be able to get these other—I think if we had one more session, and I don’t know if we can get back here, or some people could get out to us, but we’ve got Asia: Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia.

And South Asia.

And we’ve got the Middle East, the Palestinian-Israeli, which is a huge story.

REDACTEDTEXT

We really haven’t dealt with the first period. I don’t know if this would be the right group of people to be involved in talking about that.

We’ve got to get Steve Hadley. Sean was part of the first period; Jendayi was part of the first period; John was part of the first period; Dan Fried and Colby were part of the first period. The reason I wanted to concentrate on the Secretary of State years is because that’s where I am right now.

In your writing?

Exactly. But I think going back and picking up—

We can be in discussion; we don’t have to settle this right now, as long as we have an agreement in principle that there is more to be done. We don’t have to exhaust it today. We’ll make some suggestions and follow your lead about what you prefer to do. With that said, we still have about a half hour, if we can go ahead and deal with the surge question. Do you have some questions about that?

Maybe I’ll just start it off by saying the impression on the outside was that the President was very ambivalent about the surge; he could have gone one way or the other. Could you characterize the arguments and the personalities involved?

I have to go back a little bit. We all knew by late 2006 that this wasn’t working. You have to understand that in 2005 we thought it had a chance of working. We all were hopeful that Iraqi security forces were going to start to really come online in significant numbers. The Defense Department would give these briefings about the number of Iraqi security forces, and they were almost always inflated. Not intentionally, it was just that—You have problems like the Iraqi security forces—The Iraqis didn’t have bank accounts, so they would get paid and they would go home to give the money to their families and they wouldn’t come back, so you always had people on the rolls who actually weren’t in the security forces.

We thought the political process was moving forward and that would help. We thought that the capture of Saddam Hussein would help. We kept waiting for the security situation to turn around for some other reason. At the end of the bombing of Samara in February, we were still hopeful. By the summer, spring really, it was pretty clear this was not going to get better. In a number of places people started to think, What’s wrong here and how do we fix this? We’re losing it.

Steve Hadley started a process at the NSC. I started a process at State. Peter Pace started a College of Colonels in the Defense Department. I don’t know if he did it with the blessing of his boss or not, but he started it. We would talk among ourselves. Eliot kept in touch with the—You were in by then, right?

No, I came in the very beginning of 2007, but I got pulled into these sessions with the President during the summer and into the fall. The College of Colonels included some very close friends I had through the Defense Policy Board.

Right, Eliot had connections to those people. We started doing some fairly far-ranging thinking about what was possible. By this time, I had really lost confidence in the strategy we were pursuing militarily. Steve had. I think the President had. If I heard one more time, “This is really a political problem and the security will improve when the politics improves,” I was about ready to—I had a couple of confrontations with Don and George Casey about it. We started thinking at State, well, if the military was going to play it this way—Philip came up with some ideas that maybe we just ought to pull back to the cities and let them fight it out, because continuing to lose American lives in a feckless strategy that was getting no one anyplace made no sense.

Steve was doing work to try to get the military to consider a significant augmentation of forces. We talked about it all the time. The President I think believed by now that he needed to augment the forces. In September, maybe late August, we go to see Maliki in Amman, Jordan. Is that late August? We’ll have to get the date.

We go to see him in Amman, Jordan, and the President basically says, “I’m prepared to put 100,000 more forces on the ground if you’re prepared to do what you need to do,” because we were really worried about the sectarianism of the Iraqi government, which had security forces. [Bayan] Jabr was the head of the Interior Ministry and he later becomes a pretty good Finance Minister, but at the time, you were reading intelligence and stories about people in Iraqi security uniforms just laying waste to Sunni villages. But Anbar was starting to awake as well.

The President, by September, had decided he probably wanted to do something, but he did not want to confront the military with an either/or. He wanted Steve, initially Don and Casey—and Pete Pace is the hero in this story—to work it to get him a usable option for an increase in military forces. That’s really what went on in the fall.

Was the Heritage Foundation—

No, it wasn’t, it was AEI [American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research].

Part of that was [John M.] Jack Keane operating on [David H.] Petraeus’ behalf to provide something.

Right.

The summit is November 30, ’06.

In Amman? That’s late. Did we meet someplace else?

Isn’t that where Maliki presented his whole thing?

That’s right, he presents his plan. By then this work is going on and the President has—Yes, Maliki brings out this plan and says, “I have no way to implement this, but here’s my plan.” It was really kind of a moment again when Maliki seemed to be stepping forward, which the President liked.

I was probably the biggest skeptic of the surge. I had favored more troops from a long time ago, but not if they were going to keep doing the same thing. I told the President, “This is your last card, and if you play it, it better work. If they do the same stuff that they’re doing now, it won’t work. I can’t support sending more American troops into slaughter to carry out failed strategy.”

It was when Bob Gates comes in, and Petraeus—We know it’s going to be they, because Steve Hadley and I have dinner with Petraeus to talk about what he actually would do. I talk to my friends in the military and say, “Does this have any chance of working?” People start talking about this counterinsurgency strategy that we had actually tried to articulate in the State Department in 2005: Clear, hold, and build.

The reason that the Defense Department had reacted so strongly against that was—George Casey and I had a confrontation about whether or not the “State Department” had the right to talk about military policy. I said, “Look, I’m sorry. Let me apologize that you were blindsided, but don’t ever call me the ‘State Department’ again. I’m the Secretary of State, and that means I’m the President’s principal advisor and I can say whatever I want.” George and I come from the same university and we had basically a good relationship, but there were a couple of times when this just got the better of me.

We were trying to lay this out in 2005—clear, hold, build—but the reason I think that the Defense Department reacted badly is that they knew we didn’t have enough forces to hold. The foundation of clear, hold, build was that you needed more forces. When the surge plan finally comes out—The President has a series of meetings, very intensive, between the middle of November and there were a couple of really key meetings around Thanksgiving. The Friday after Thanksgiving he called the whole National Security Council together—including [Henry] Hank Paulson, who was new as Treasury Secretary—into the solarium up in the Residence and we really go at it about whether this is going to do any good, and what does it mean that the United States is accepting responsibility for population security, and is Maliki somebody that you can trust in this regard?

I had just come back from Iraq, and I had really had a bad set of meetings with the Iraqis. Sean will remember this—The Sunnis showed me severed heads of Sunni children and people to impress upon me how bad the Shia were and how the Shia came in with their severed heads. I said to them, “You know what? You people are either going to hang separately or you’re going to hang together, and the way you are behaving right now, when I come back here you’re all going to be swinging from lampposts.” I walked out of that meeting. It was really bad. I came back and I told the President, “I don’t think these guys—There are two conditions: First of all, the military can’t keep doing what it’s doing; and secondly, Maliki has got to commit to not being sectarian.”

Through December we continued to work on it, and by January he had come up with something workable. I went then to the Gulf Cooperation Council for a meeting, right after the Amman meeting with Maliki. That convinced me that we probably had to go with the surge. I remember the Egyptians saying, “We tried to tell you not to do it,” which of course they didn’t, “but now that you’ve done it, you have to commit more troops, because Iraq is coming apart, and it is coming apart all over us. This isn’t acceptable.” I realized that we had a Middle East credibility problem. REDACTEDTEXT Baker-Hamilton [Commission; aka Iraq Study Group] had come out.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

There was a lead-up to Baker-Hamilton, so there was a lot of belief that we were going to cut and run. The United States couldn’t cut and run. I came to the conclusion that the President was right, even though I continued to present him—I presented him an option. I said, “Here’s what else you can do.” He said in this meeting, “So what do we do, Condi? We go to the cities, we let them kill each other, and then what do we do? Where am I?” It was a very sharp exchange between us. I said, “You know that’s not what I mean, but it’s better than dead Americans for no purpose.”

This was a pretty raw meeting that we had about the surge, with the national security team, just the Principals. At this point there was nobody, no backbenchers, no White House staff except Steve, and of course Josh. It was pretty tough going. I followed him into the Oval and I said, “Why did you say that to me?” He said, “Well, isn’t that the logic of what you’re suggesting?” I said, “You know that I’ve been a part of this Iraq project from the very beginning and there’s no way I’m asking you to ‘fish or cut bait.’” I think that’s when I said, “This is your last card.” I’m saying that because this was a pretty intense and pretty raw set of conversations among—I think the only people there were me, Gates, Hank, Pete Pace, Steve, Josh Bolton. That’s it. These were tough conversations.

He decided on the surge. We put together the announcement. There’s a lot of talk about what we should say our obligations are. He specifically rejects the idea that he will give any indication of a timeline. I said, “Are you going to address the Baker-Hamilton issues—the regional dimension—talk to Syria, talk to Iran?” He said, “That’s what I have a Secretary of State for, Condi. You do that.”

Then he gave the talk. We went to the Hill a day later, maybe two days later. These hearings were really rough. I mean they were very rough. There was not a single Senator on Foreign Relations who supported us, not a single one. Every single one of them went after me. I kept saying, “Look, I started out skeptical on this, too, but here’s the logic: We don’t have an option.” I had the driver bring me back to the White House and I went into the secretary’s office and I said, “Is the President here?” She said, “Yes, he’s with—” some domestic person. She said, “You want to see him, don’t you?” I said, “Yes, like now.”

I don’t know how he shooed out whoever it was, but then we sat down and I said, “You’ve got a rough sell. I don’t think you’ve got the Congress with you. I don’t think you’ve got the American people with you.” He said, “You are.” I said, “Of course. We’ve decided. But this is a rough sell.” We went through just a terrible February, March, April, May. I was supposed to go to Africa in June, and we were losing the Republicans, even the Republicans, who were telling us they were going to start—Remember the whole thing about metrics and tests and benchmarks?

Eighteen—

Yes, including that the Iraqis needed to pass a budget, which of course the U.S. had not done, but that was only a debating point. They wanted to tie these benchmarks to funding and to troop-withdrawal deadlines. The hard decision had been made to do the surge, but we were in danger of losing the policy. We had discussions about how this felt like Cambodia, cutting off assistance and so forth.

I was supposed to go to Africa, and the President called everybody in and said, “You’re staying here. Our fight is on the domestic front.” Bob Gates and I trundled up to Congress for endless briefings and sessions and questions. We started a press campaign. The President was determined he was going to win this one. By the end of the summer of 2007, when they went home—because he felt what was going to happen was that Congress would go home, they would hear all of this anxiety and anger about the war, and they would come back and vote something crazy in the fall. So the summer was devoted to holding the vote and to holding the home front. That’s kind of the story.

If I could just add a couple of things: The record will show that you made very important contributions in the success of the surge by appointing Ryan Crocker.

Yes.

It was as important as appointing Petraeus. When you’re talking about the surge, the appointment of those two guys, in particular, is almost as important as sending the troops. The other thing is that, even before I came on board, you sent me to Iraq to kind of poke around for about a week and a half. I remember the impression I had, that began to be the impression back here, was that there were two different clocks. There was an Iraq clock and there was a Washington clock, and the Washington clock was just a lot faster than the Iraq clock.

What happened was that people began to have some idea that there was something happening in Anbar, but there was a lag of time between people in Baghdad figuring out that something was happening in Anbar. Then there was a further lag of time for people to figure it out in Washington in the administration, and then a much bigger lag of time before they figured that out on Capitol Hill. As I recall, the problem that you found yourself managing later in that spring and summer was not what the trajectory was; it was kind of slowing down the congressional and the domestic political piece of this in time so that the progress that we thought we were seeing would become manifest to everybody.

And we got manna from heaven that fall when they published the article—Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon said something is turning.

That slit their throats.

Suddenly, somebody other than us is saying there is a horizon out there that doesn’t look so dark. That really helped.

I want to underscore what Eliot says. We talked about a civilian surge. We really started—Ryan Crocker, by the time he became Ambassador, shortly after Pat [Patricia Butenis], working for him—four Ambassador-level people in sub-Ambassadorial positions—

People who had been Ambassadors in other countries—

—who agreed to come be his top team. We put our A-team in Baghdad. We’d had good people there, but these were really senior people. The economic counselor—

REDACTEDTEXT

Charlie Ries had been an ambassador. The political counselor had been an ambassador. Soon we would send out a spokesman who was on leave as Ambassador from Bahrain. We brought very senior people in.

This goes back to our first discussion about management of the State Department. One of the things that was sort of frustrating about the appointment of Ambassadors is that it went through this committee called the “D” committee, which the deputy oversaw. There was a practice that it came to the Secretary as a list of people and you OK’d it and sent it off to the President, and if the White House didn’t have any problems with it, that’s who became Ambassador. I started really questioning some of the decisions, because I would say, “What possible experience does that person have to work with the military in the way that you have to work with the military in Pakistan?”

We started moving people, not just for regional expertise, but for functional capabilities. For instance, Anne Patterson moved from being Ambassador to Colombia to being Ambassador to Pakistan. Now what is the common thread there? Both are real strong counterterrorism operations; both have to work directly with the military; both have to make on-the-spot decisions about whether or not you can go after the bad guy and still keep American relations with the allies, with the country, intact. Ryan Crocker goes from being Ambassador in Pakistan to being Ambassador in Baghdad because, again, he has an understanding of the way that these things work.

In those really core quasimilitary functions we started looking for different characteristics in the Ambassadors. Ryan turns out to be just unbelievable in the way that he works with Petraeus. They really are just like—They are symbiotic. That’s a lot of the story of why this worked.

You had part of the surge. You had the civilian surge.

I had the civilian.

You had to recruit—You had to change the culture of the State Department.

I did.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Despite the fact that Foreign Service officers were in danger all the time. I mean, we tried to counter it a little bit. We did that piece in Time magazine, about the Hellhole Gang [“How Rice’s Posse Struck Back,” Time, March 8, 2007]. These folks have been—David Welch and Ryan and all these people who had been there when various embassies were burned or sacked or whatever.

But it was unfortunate. I had to threaten—We were not getting the positions filled for the hardship posts, so I did two things: I talked to the Director General and we actually changed the rule so that you could no longer be promoted without serving in a hardship post. Secondly, I threatened to start directing people to go. The Foreign Service association—What do they call themselves?

REDACTEDTEXT

AFSA [American Foreign Service Association]. Who was it that dealt with AFSA? Who was it that took the message to them that I said, “Go right ahead and take that to the Washington Post, and we’ll see how the American people feel about Foreign Service officers who don’t want to serve.”

[TWO PAGES REDACTED]

That’s really true. And it’s interesting how he reacted to Baker-Hamilton. It was like, “Yes, there are some good ideas in there. But the minute I say I’m embracing them—” Because he read it the same way: Now this is to tell me how to do my job, and I am not going to go there.

I was on the outside, but I remember the assumption at the time was that of course the administration is going to do what Baker-Hamilton says.

Right.

In fact, when I was in Iraq, there was this view among the Defense Policy Board—Our acting Ambassador, on his coffee table, that was the only thing that was there.

When I went to see the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], they were unnerved by Baker, because it looked like we were looking for a way out. We had started Iraq and left this mess in the region and now we’re going to leave? That was a very touchy time, a very difficult time.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Yes, there was one story, “We can no longer carry out the two-and-a-half-war doctrine.” Where is that other half war?

They were under a lot of stress and the problem was that [Indecipherable] field commanders, [Indecipherable] responsibilities. So Casey and to some extent even [Indecipherable], were thinking more about the [Indecipherable] force than about what does it take to actually finish this. But [Indecipherable].

Thank you, Jendayi.

[Frazer leaves room]

Thank you very much. Mark, did you want to pose one final question?

I know we are moving toward the end. If there is an opportunity to talk later at some other point, it would be great to hear your thoughts about how you moved from a position of not wanting to talk about the status of forces and that discussion at some point. I’d be interested—

That’s a very interesting discussion.

—but also using whatever the metaphor was—Instead of “doubling down,” we’re “all in,” or the “Hail Mary.” What the option was or what the conversation was, by the time that Petraeus and Crocker in September are back talking to Congress—If this is not working, what is it that is going to help?

The President allowed no such discussion. At some point, you kind of have one option and it is “make it work.” Plan B is to make Plan A work. It’s really hard, in retrospect, because it kind of comes out OK. It is hard in retrospect to realize how really awful 2006 and early 2007 were.

When you read this, it comes through and it is fairly remarkable.

It is just a period where you’re on the precipice of losing this. Not just not succeeding, but losing this war. When that’s the option, you don’t say, “Well, what if we lose?” You say, “We’re going to win it.”

Briefly—We can talk more about it some other time, but briefly what happened when we did that—I think I was the one who pushed hardest for a strategic framework as a part of the Status of Forces Agreement [SOFA], which is not what we called it, but that’s really what it was. It couldn’t be “Status of Forces.” What did we call it?

We had SOFA and a Strategic Framework Agreement. We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t a treaty.

That’s right; it wasn’t a treaty.

There were people who kept insisting, “This is a treaty,” and we kept saying, “No, we have lots of SOFAs.”

Yes, that’s right, so it was the Status of Forces Agreement and a Strategic Framework. To my mind, what started to happen, as we were negotiating this, was actually a good story, not a bad one, although it was a pain in the neck and a headache for us, which is that the Iraqis were starting to actually act like democratically elected Arabs. I remember that Ryan Crocker said, “Oh, good, they’re acting like Arabs, except they’re democratically elected.” It was really true, because what was happening was they were very worried about their domestic street, their constituency. Maliki was starting to feel that he had to defend Iraqi sovereignty.

Some of the issues we had in our SOFAs in some parts of the world, like Japan, where you turn over an American soldier who has committed a crime immediately to the Americans, sort of didn’t translate in the Iraqi context, with all of our history there. They were pushing back and they were pushing back really hard. You should talk to Brett McGurk, who really is the one who was at the center of this, or Meghan O’Sullivan. I kept saying, “Look, let’s keep our eye on the strategic ball here. We’re about to have a Status of Forces Agreement and a Strategic Framework with the most important geostrategic country in the Arab world—Iraq. We’re going to have to find a way to deal with their sensibilities about the immunities issues and the issue of timeline and how long we stay, and all of those things.”

What would happen is, we’d think we were there, and then the Iraqis would come back and say, “No, no, that’s not right. We can’t say it that way.” Immunities was an absolutely red line for the Pentagon, for all kinds of very good reasons. Immunities was an absolute red line for the Iraqis, for all kinds of very good reasons. So the question was to find some way to square that circle or thread that needle.

I always thought the issue of the timeline was less critical, because if we couldn’t start to say that by 2011 we wanted to be on our way out, what are we doing? It’s been eight years and we can’t figure a way out of this? The biggest proponents of having nothing about timelines, nothing about dates, were actually the political people and the press people in the White House who kept saying, “This will make the President look bad. This is about his legacy. It will look like we’re cutting and running.”

I’m thinking that this is a strategic agreement with this country. This is how you end a war. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. My goal and my role at these meetings was to push for flexibility. Bob Gates would, of course, defend the prerogatives of the Pentagon and then go back and work the question, because when he came back, the Pentagon had always moved a little bit. Through that process, and the fact that the President ultimately would say, strategically, “Does Maliki want this or not? Can anybody tell me, is he just yanking our chain here and he really just wants us to leave with no agreement?” He became convinced that actually Maliki wanted an agreement. It was very difficult, but that’s really what was going on and that’s how we moved to something that looked more like a timeline with dates.

I promised you people that I would have you done by five o’clock. I thank you, all of you. This has been absolutely fascinating and very rich material for our purposes, and we’re delighted to hear that there is some expression of interest in doing some more. I need to talk with you about how you want to do that.

Exactly. And there are a couple of other people—Chris Hill is somebody we really need to involve somehow. I think having Chris and Eliot, for a cage match on North Korea. [laughter]

[END OF INTERVIEW]