Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (25 page)

When the president hosts a foreign leader, the senior director joins the national security advisor as the briefer, note taker, and participant in the debrief meeting. It’s heady stuff, but only for the few minutes the president is actually focused on the issue before he turns his attention to something else. A foreign policy meeting may be sandwiched between events involving domestic issues, like greeting a winning baseball team or signing a bill. I always marveled at President Clinton’s ability, indeed at any president’s ability, to remember which meeting he was in and who he was talking with.

Where the president does become especially focused is on overseas trips. I accompanied President Clinton to Bulgaria and Kosovo just before Thanksgiving 1999, and his capacity to absorb the briefing materials and then hold cogent discussions with his starstruck interlocutors was remarkable. His conversations with the Kosovo leadership in particular showed his sweep of the issues, and his advice was particularly on target: “You are in the world’s spotlight today, but it won’t last. Take advantage of it. Demonstrate progress in building your institutions, because at some point that spotlight will move elsewhere.” That was very good advice for a region that was already becoming yesterday’s news. As I took notes of the meeting, I saw the puzzled looks on the faces of the much-divided Kosovo leadership as they sat across from the president in a makeshift,
austere meeting room at the Pristina airport. It was as if they could not understand that there might be issues in the world more compelling than their own and that could eventually divert the president’s attention.

As relieved as the administration felt about the “victory” in Kosovo, the continued presence of a defiant Milosevic in Belgrade, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq almost a decade before, remained a bitter aftertaste of the war. Some European countries, such as Italy, seemed prepared to move on, though most did not. At the NSC I chaired numerous meetings aimed at finding stiffer, more personalized sanctions that would target family finances hidden in third countries or otherwise restrict Milosevic’s travel and that of his family, so-called smart sanctions. Despite the promise by sanction experts, the sanctioneers, to create financial havoc for Milosevic and his family, no evidence ever emerged to suggest they were anything more than a momentary nuisance, a fly at a picnic. Milosevic seemed to be fully recovered from the war and, if anything, more self-confident than ever.

It would not be until the summer of 2000, just as I was preparing to leave for Poland, that Milosevic, one year after NATO’s entry into Kosovo, optimistically called for early presidential elections in September. He had every expectation of winning, just as he had in every other election. But this time, as I was settling into my new life in Poland, he overreached. By October 5, amid the “Bulldozer revolution” (all transfers of power during that era seemed to require a catchy name, this one deriving its own from a striking factory worker who plowed an industrial vehicle into one of Milosevic’s party buildings), he relinquished power. That night in Warsaw, I was hosting U.S. participants in the Chopin Piano Competition together with Polish guests for a large dinner at my home, the U.S. ambassador’s residence. I’d sneak away from the sixty or so guests seated at small round tables and go to the study to watch the latest CNN coverage, at last returning to announce to the guests that Milosevic was finally gone. They applauded politely and went back to their dinner. I was now living in a different country.

I had arrived in Poland in July 2000 on a hot, sunny day, my family
and I anxious to begin our new lives. The city of Warsaw was unrecognizable from the time I lived there fifteen years before. Construction was everywhere. Miraculously, it seemed, the dull grayness was gone, replaced by bright colors. What I remembered as grim, heavy buildings were now freshly sandblasted to reveal a textured brightness that had been covered by decades of communist grime and soot. Even the weather seemed better than under communism. Somehow out of Poland’s ashes had emerged a vibrant entrepreneurial class of young people whose collective memory of the communist years was fast fading and who seemed uninterested in looking back. They were focused on Poland’s future as a European Union country, a status that would complete the country’s journey of a thousand years, to be in every way a Western European country.

Just a month before I arrived in Warsaw, the ruling coalition split when the junior partner to the government, the “Freedom Union” (UW, by its Polish acronym), walked out of the government. Freedom Union was the party that represented many of the Warsaw-based intellectuals who had in many cases borne the brunt of Jaruzelski’s martial law crackdown a few years before. Its leadership had been a who’s who of communist-era prison inmates. They were replaced by lesser-known Solidarity figures, who by the summer of 2000 were understood to be temporary, given the expectation of a victory in 2001 by the Left Alliance Party, the former communists. “You’re really unlucky to come to Poland when you did,” one Polish watcher told me. “No more fun!”

Actually, I relished as any diplomat would the challenge of doing my part to keep Poland on track. Poland in 2000 seemed safely out of the communist woods in which it had struggled ten plus years before, but in the meantime, a new form of nationalism had begun to engulf the region. With its large rural and disaffected population Poland seemed to be a prime candidate to catch this new disease. Poland had succumbed to dictatorship in the 1930s after enjoying a democracy of about a decade. Of the new democracies in the northern tier of former Eastern Bloc states, Poland was the one deemed least likely to succeed.

The embassy needed to be close to the opposition, the former communists now social democrats, which had high expectations that they would take over the government, as well as to the Solidarity government, now on its last breath. “Don’t lose track of anyone,” I told the political officers. “Today’s opposition will be tomorrow’s ruling party, and so on.” When Solidarity, as predicted, lost the election in 2001 and went into the wilderness as the opposition, they accepted their role but were back in government in 2005. Poland’s democracy continued to work.

I did what U.S. ambassadors have done in Warsaw for decades, plunging into its complex social and political scene, turning my house into a salon of senior politicians and artists and writers. General Jaruzelski, still wearing his trademark dark glasses from the time he ran the country during martial law, returned my visit to his modest home in the neighborhood. Adam Michnik, a writer who had been imprisoned by the communists and later forgave them (earning considerable criticism from those who had never been near a prison cell or even paid a fraction of the price that he did for Poland’s democracy), became a frequent visitor. There were many others: Helena Luczywo, who brought Poland’s top underground newspaper into the open and made it Poland’s newspaper of record; Wanda Rapaczynski, a teenage refugee in 1968, who returned to help turn that newspaper into a media giant.

Though the Poles had their own thriving democracy, they seemed just as interested in the U.S. elections in November 2000. As embassies do worldwide, we hosted an election party. The Marriott hotel ballroom was filled to capacity as the animated and boisterous crowd carefully watched the coverage, holding drinks in their hands, unworried by the outcome. Poles loved George H. W. Bush and had been equally fond of Bill Clinton, though less familiar with George W. Bush and Al Gore and had no reason to think that anything would change. As the voting returns began to come in at midnight, I stood on the stage and assured the audience that we would not close down until a winner had been declared.

I didn’t keep that promise, and as the weeks rolled by Polish friends would ask: “Are things there going to be all right?”

Joining Europe (the EU) and keeping the United States engaged in Europe were two pillars of Poland’s emerging foreign policy, positions that enjoyed consensus across Poland’s raucous political divide. That effort to keep close ties with the EU and the United States seemed to be getting a tad more difficult as the Bush administration began an unceremonious and relentless review of many U.S. commitments to multilateralism, including in arms control and climate change. The Poles shared some of the skepticism about agreements that also seemed to them to have dubious enforcement regimes, but they did not want to be put in the position of choosing between the United States and the Europeans. The Europeans, a Pole complained, sometimes define being a European as not being an American. Differences over such issues as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming helped them to do that. The Poles watched helplessly as the U.S.-European relationship worsened. They tried to play the role that Britain also tries to play, that of a transatlantic reconciler. But while the Europeans had long since grown used to the British playing that role, an EU aspirant trying to do the same was less tolerated.

Even when the Poles tried to do the right thing with the United States, they sometimes felt out of step with the new administration. Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz arrived in Warsaw in March 2001 for a visit. The Poles explained their decision making on the acquisition of F-16s, a multibillion-dollar program that would make their air force compatible with the United States and one of the most modern in Europe. They outlined their thoughts on possibly joining a consortium for the next-generation Joint Strike Fighter. Wolfowitz brushed them off on tactical aircraft acquisition, explaining that the new administration was reviewing the entire Joint Strike Fighter program and was far more interested in reviving missile defense as a top priority.

In damage control mode, I made numerous calls to the Pentagon to make sure the Poles didn’t believe they were receiving mixed messages,
and at one point asked President Bush to raise the subject in the Oval Office with Prime Minister Miller to ensure that the Poles understood that buying our tactical aircraft was also a top priority. “You want me to talk about airplanes in this meeting?” the president asked as he got ready to host the prime minister. “Sir, we need to show a level of effort. Tony Blair talks airplanes when he meets the Poles, and I really can’t stand the thought of them flying around in a Swedish-British thing called a ‘Grippen.’ Can you?” He raised the issue with the prime minister and the Poles got the message that we cared.

As if to stress the bipartisan commitment of the United States to its ally Poland, Bill Clinton made a private trip to Warsaw to make a well-remunerated speech in May 2001. At his request, we took a walk through Warsaw’s old town streets, greeting shocked passersby who were not sure they were seeing a street entertainer or the former president (or both, as I watched his performance). We ducked into a restaurant and the former president ordered just about everything on the menu as he surveyed food being carried to other tables. “That looks good, let’s have some of that, too . . . Oh my, what is that? Polish apple pie?!” After the lunch we continued to walk through the streets, stopping for an ice cream (“It looks sooooo good!”), the crowds thickening by the minute as he shook hands with everybody in reach, saying in that raspy voice, “Hah there, how yah doin’?” Finally an antiglobalization demonstrator (proof that Poland was a member of Europe!) threw an egg that found its mark on the president’s blue blazer. While shaking another hand he quickly removed the jacket and handed it to an aide, never missing a beat. “Hah there, how yah doin’?”

George W. Bush arrived in Warsaw on a brilliant mid-June day, and the Poles loved him. He had just come from a particularly desultory meeting with the Europeans in Copenhagen, where he felt he had been treated to one too many lectures from the Danes and others as to the need for the United States to build more windmills. In Warsaw, nobody pressed him about windmills. They just thanked him and the United States for being a friend.

We stood outside the Presidential Palace for the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I noticed the eyes of Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, who was standing next to me, brimming with tears as the music played. Rice’s entire academic and professional career had been dedicated to achieving the end of the Soviet Union, the end of the long and bitter division of Europe, so I decided to cut her some slack for shedding a tear or two at the playing of the U.S. national anthem in Warsaw. Later in the morning the president visited Poland’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a monument that sits amid the decapitated remains of a nineteenth-century palace destroyed by the Germans in 1944. It doesn’t take too much time at that site to understand why Poland wanted to be in NATO. For lunch, Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek hosted Bush at an eighteenth-century palace built on a lake and took him on a tour of the frescoes and statuary. The president quipped to everyone’s amusement, “We don’t have anything like this in Texas.”

In the afternoon he spoke to a large audience in the Warsaw University library about America’s enduring commitment to Europe. In an important statement given all the rethinking that was going on in Washington, he announced his support for further NATO enlargement. It was music to the ears of the Poles, who did not want to be NATO’s northern and eastern flank and looked for the day when countries north and east could also join NATO. In the Balkans I had been accustomed to urgent and gut-wrenching, life-and-death issues of war and peace. Here I just enjoyed the show. After the library speech, the president plunged into an enthusiastic crowd, who didn’t want to let him go. Many Poles, not quite able to reach the president, tugged at me to congratulate me on the speech. I gave credit to my predecessor, Dan Fried, who after leaving Poland had started working in Condi Rice’s NSC, but I finally learned just to say, “You’re welcome.” Over the course of a career where one is blamed for many things one never does, I thought it might be some payback to get credit for something I had little to do with, too.

After the event, President Bush asked me what was next on the
schedule. I told him we had arranged for a brief walk in the old town market square, where he could duck into a shop and buy a small pastry.