My life

The bombing campaign had three objectives: to show Milosevic we were serious about stopping another round of ethnic cleansing, to deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo, and, if Milosevic didn’t throw in the towel soon, to seriously damage the Serbs’ military capacity. That night the NATO air strikes began. They would last for eleven weeks, as Milosevic continued to kill Kosovar Albanians and drive almost one million people from their homes. The bombs would inflict great damage on the military and economic infrastructure of Serbia. Alas, on a few occasions they would miss their intended targets and take the lives of people we were trying to protect. Some people argued that our position would have been more defensible if we had sent in ground troops. There were two problems with that argument. First, by the time the soldiers were in position, in adequate numbers and with proper support, the Serbs would have done an enormous amount of damage. Second, the civilian casualties of a ground campaign would probably have been greater than the toll from errant bombs. I didn’t find the argument that I should pursue a course that would cost more American lives without enhancing the prospects of victory very persuasive. Our strategy would often be secondguessed, but never abandoned. At the end of the month, as the stock market closed above 10,000 for the first time ever, up from 3,200

when I took office, I sat down for an interview with CBS-TV’s Dan Rather. After an extended discussion of Kosovo, Dan asked me whether I expected to be the husband of a United States senator. By then, many New York officials had joined Charlie Rangel in asking Hillary to consider the race. I told Rather that I had no idea what she would do, but that if she ran and won, “she would be magnificent.”

In April, the Kosovo conflict intensified as we extended the bombing to downtown Belgrade, hitting the Interior Ministry, Serbia’s state television headquarters, and Milosevic’s party headquarters and his home. We also dramatically increased our financial support and troop presence in neighboring Albania and Macedonia to help them deal with the large number of refugees flooding in. By the end of the month, when Milosevic still hadn’t folded, opposition to our policy was coming from both directions. Tony Blair and some members of Congress thought it was time to send in ground troops, while the House of Representatives voted to deny the use of troops without prior approval of Congress. I still believed the air campaign would work, and hoped we could avoid sending ground troops until their mission was to keep the peace. On April 14, I called Boris Yeltsin to request Russian troop participation in a post-conflict peacekeeping force, as in Bosnia. I thought a Russian presence would help protect the Serb minority and might give Milosevic a face-saving way out of his opposition to foreign troops.

A lot of other things happened in April. On the fifth, Libya finally handed over two suspects in the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. They would be tried before Scottish judges in The Hague. The White House had been deeply involved in the issue for years. I had pressed the Libyans to do it, and the White House had reached out to the families of victims, keeping them informed and approving the construction of a memorial to their loved ones in Arlington National Cemetery. It was the beginning of a thaw in U.S.–Libyan relations.

In the second week of the month, Chinese premier Zhu Rongji made his first trip to the White House in the hope of resolving the remaining obstacles to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. We had made substantial progress in closing the gaps between us, but problems remained, including our desire for greater access to China’s auto market, and China’s insistence on a five-year limit for our

“surge” agreement, under which the United States could limit a sudden large increase in Chinese imports when it occurred for other than normal economic reasons. It was an important issue in America because of the surge we had experienced in imported steel from Russia, Japan, and elsewhere. Charlene Barshefsky told me that the Chinese had moved a long way and we should close the deal while Zhu was in the United States to avoid weakening him at home. Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger agreed with her. The rest of the economic team—Rubin, Summers, Sperling, and Daley—along with John Podesta and my legislative aide Larry Stein, disagreed. They thought that without more progress, Congress would reject the deal and kill China’s entry into the WTO.