A Changed Clinton Sees a Long Battle

President Clinton had just finished delivering his weekly radio address, exhorting the nation to stand behind his Kosovo policy, when he acknowledged to his aides that airstrikes were not forcing Yugoslavia to its knees.

“This isn’t a 30-second commercial,” he said to his most senior advisors, who had gathered in the Oval Office. “We have to be steady as it goes.”

Clinton’s intended message was clear: The administration and its NATO allies are in this battle for the long haul, but it was time to pick up the pace and expand the target list. With that, the decision was made.

However, the president’s remarks carried a second, perhaps unintentional, signal. This was not the same Bill Clinton who took office six years ago with a lack of interest in foreign policy, the onetime antiwar protester who was loath to commit American men and women to combat.

As described by some of those closest to him, the president has worked on little else but the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia since it began Wednesday.

He took some time off Saturday afternoon, and that evening he watched the semifinal round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. But earlier in the day, he spoke by telephone to the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy, among the most active members of the NATO coalition. Throughout the day, he received updates from Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, his national security advisor.

On Sunday, with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in the midst of a 12-day trip to North Africa, the president left the White House for the first time in five days to spend the late afternoon and evening at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.

On Tuesday, the day before the North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched its assault, the president had asked Americans to get out their atlases and locate the crisis-torn center of the Balkans.

His ad-libbed remarks in a speech to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees evoked memories of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats at the outset of World War II, in which he recommended that his fellow citizens locate for themselves the strange-sounding places that would eventually become seared into the American consciousness.

But in the Oval Office on Saturday, it was Clinton, with Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was poring over maps. And, aides said, he has been studying aerial reconnaissance photographs of damage inflicted by the cruise missiles and bombs unleashed by his orders.

Throughout the crisis, the president has demonstrated little emotion to those who have spent hours with him.

“Whether it’s Kosovo or Paula Jones, he’s not that emotive,” a senior administration official said. “He’s rather circumspect.”

Nor has his pace been feverish.

He suffered for much of the week, as he often does in the spring, from an allergy or head cold. It cost him sleep. It made him look wan and haggard.

But he has kept to his routine, an aide said. Each morning, he meets with Berger, Shelton and his other senior national security advisors: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, among others.

It was at such a meeting Saturday that the president set out the reminder--if any was needed--that he did not see a quick solution to the crisis in Kosovo. If anything, the reports he was receiving of brutality inflicted on the ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province had hardened his determination, said David C. Leavy, a spokesman for the National Security Council staff.

He has been asking questions about the choice of targets, about the potential for what the military calls “collateral” damage to civilian sites, about the military capabilities of Yugoslavia, where Serbia is the dominant of two provinces. He doesn’t forget the bottom line: restraining Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from his campaign against the ethnic Albanians, who make up 90% of Kosovo’s population.