Secretary of State Takes Some Hits More Properly Directed at His Boss
It’s time to bid an early farewell to the much-maligned secretary of State who has served as flak-catcher for President Clinton’s foreign policy--and to ponder what his experience in Washington has told us about America’s role in the world.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher, by all indications, is leaving. He seems to be in his last months. Christopher won’t say that, but all the signs are there. He was traveling in Africa last week, after a tour of South America earlier this year. The reality is that when secretaries of State finally get to these oft-neglected continents, it’s a tip-off they are preparing to depart.
During the past four years, Christopher may have been criticized more than any American secretary of State since Dean Rusk, who pursued the Vietnam War for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. And yet much of that criticism is misplaced. It should have been directed at Clinton, and at ourselves.
Christopher is an easy target. Like Rusk, he is wooden in public, giving the impression that he can’t speak plain English if he tried. He is both unable and unwilling to give voice to the emotions America wanted to express to the world.
America doesn’t like to think of itself as a gray-haired lawyer in pinstripes. The Italian journalist Oriana Fallacci, who would never have bothered to interview Christopher, once elicited from Henry A. Kissinger the fantasy that, as secretary of State, he was playing the role of a cowboy. That fit America’s self-image.
Christopher had the misfortune to be secretary of State at the wrong time. During the Cold War, he would probably have been fine. America didn’t need a vision then, so much as a calm, steadying hand, and Christopher certainly has that.
Instead, he has served at a time when America is truly adrift. Christopher often lacked the imagination to figure out a guiding principle for what the United States should be doing overseas after the Cold War. And he certainly didn’t have the skill with the news media to articulate what that role should be.
Probably the two most famous episodes in Christopher’s four years occurred during his travels.
In 1994, he sojourned to Beijing in an effort to persuade China to improve its human rights performance; for his efforts, he was greeted with nothing but defiance. In private, Chinese Premier Li Peng gave Christopher an icy lecture; on the streets, security officials rounded up dissidents before and during the trip.
Last spring, Christopher traveled to Damascus, seeking help from President Hafez Assad for a cease-fire in Lebanon. Not only did the Syrian president force Christopher to conspicuously wait in line behind the foreign ministers of other countries, but on one occasion, Assad let Christopher fly to Damascus, then said he was too tired to see the secretary of State at all.
I was present on both of those trips. They were reported accurately. And yet, in retrospect, I have always wondered why Christopher garnered the blame and public opprobrium, rather than the president for whom he works.
Who did the American public think Christopher carried his human rights message to Beijing for? Mrs. Christopher? Who did everyone think he kept trudging back to Damascus for? His old law firm in Los Angeles?
No, it was for the president of the United States. There is a phone on the secretary of State’s plane. He talks to the president regularly, even from remote corners of the Earth.
If Clinton thought Assad was too insulting, he would have told Christopher not to go back. Instead, Clinton wanted the deal in Lebanon (and got one), even if it meant having his secretary of State standing hat in hand outside Assad’s palace.
If Clinton thought it was an affront to American values for Chinese cops to be arresting dissidents while his secretary of State was in town, he could have turned Christopher’s plane around or ordered him back home. Instead, Clinton wanted his China policy both ways: to claim he was carrying out the human rights pledges of his campaign without unduly offending Beijing.
Christopher has served a special role for Clinton. He is, really, the calm, rich, supportive, well-connected daddy Clinton never had. And on foreign policy, the daddy has managed to shoulder the blame while the son did some crash schoolwork.
For his own part, Clinton, that ultimate reader of polls, has been a reflection of the confusion and contradictions of the American people. It is easier to blame Christopher than ourselves.
We are living in a time when the American people want to tell off Li Peng and Hafez Assad, but not if it costs anything. The American people think we ought to teach a lesson to thugs like Saddam Hussein or the former military junta in Haiti. But we also don’t want the United States to play the world’s policeman all by itself.
The American people expect our allies to help out and follow us, just the way they used to during the Cold War. And yet we don’t exactly treat our allies the way we used to either, threatening them with sanctions if their Cuba policy is different from ours.
The American people say we want to do things in concert with other nations, rather than unilaterally--but not if it means working with the United Nations or any other international organization.
The American people dream that with the end of the Cold War, we can make the rest of the world like us--and yet also dream that the collapse of communism means we can forget about the rest of the world.
The secretary of State was swept up in all these contradictions. And he was also beset by the thankless assignments he took on for Clinton.
The selfless Christopher was truly the opposite of former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who often seemed to get in on the action for political winners (the fall of the Berlin Wall) and to leave the political losers (China, Bosnia) to others.
When the Clinton administration wanted to ask European governments for help on Bosnia that they didn’t want to give, the job went to Christopher. When it was time to make the final Balkan peace settlement, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke was there to claim the glory. Holbrooke quit soon afterward, leaving Christopher and others in the administration to clean up the messy aftermath of the Dayton accord.
So too, when Clinton was taking a tough line with China, Christopher carried the message. But this year, when Clinton was sending much more conciliatory messages to Beijing, the job went to someone else: National Security Advisor Anthony Lake.
Outside the administration, former President Carter sometimes floated in and out, volunteering to carry out negotiations with North Korea and Haiti that should better have been carried out by the U.S. government itself. (But when Clinton asked Carter to take on a job he didn’t want, heading a human rights commission for China, Carter nixed the idea.)
History may not be as harsh with Christopher as the American people have been for the past four years. Chances are he won’t be rated as the most inspiring or innovative secretary of State in history either.
Yet Clinton, if he is reelected, may well look back on Christopher’s tenure four years from now with considerable nostalgia. And so, perhaps, might the rest of us.
The guessing game has been on for months over who will be Clinton’s next secretary of State. Will it be Lake or Holbrooke or Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), Defense Secretary William J. Perry or former Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell?
Whomever it is, the new secretary of State is likely to be someone less willing than Christopher to serve as flak-catcher for a president who doesn’t want to be blamed for what happens around the world. Whoever it is, a new secretary of State will not play the role of Clinton’s parent or teacher.
So too, a new secretary of State may actually try to tell the American people we can’t have everything when it comes to foreign policy. We can’t insist that everyone do what we want overseas while we cut back on the money we spend and the commitments we are willing to make. We can’t remake the world in our own image and withdraw from it too.
Christopher has served honorably both his president and his country. The confusion and the contradictions in American foreign policy have mostly been Clinton’s, and ours.
The International Outlook column appears here every other Monday.