As we developed our plans, the keepers of the president’s time began to push back, asking why we needed eleven days and couldn’t we scale the trip back to three countries in four days? Our colleagues managing North Africa and the Middle East lobbied for a stop in Tunisia or Morocco. After all, since the president was in the neighborhood, how much time would that add to the schedule? We had wonderful allies in Hillary Clinton and her staff, led by Melanne Verveer, and, of course, the president himself, who must have been looking forward to getting out of Washington and the distractions of the Starr inquisition and our original eleven-day itinerary was still intact.
Perhaps the biggest debate in my office was over the stop in Uganda instead of one in Ethiopia, the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity. Both countries merited attention, but Uganda had made exemplary progress in bringing down HIV/AIDS infection rates. We wanted to showcase that success. I traveled to Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, a week before the president’s trip, ostensibly to give a speech but really to convey to Meles Zenawi, the prime minister, that the decision to bypass Addis was not political but a concession to the reality that the president could not do everything in the time allotted, and he was looking forward to seeing Prime Minister Meles in Uganda at the summit on Central African conflict.
Rwanda posed a special problem for us, owing to the security situation there in the aftermath of the 1994 war. The Secret Service was very nervous since it had been the shooting down of the former Rwandan president’s airplane as it was landing in Kigali that had precipitated the 1994 genocide there. We had a series of meetings with the head of the presidential detail to answer all of his questions, reassuring him that the situation was stable enough for the president to travel there, and stressing that the policy implications made the stop worth the effort if there were not specific security objections. The Secret Service did their own assessment with that in mind, and they concluded that the stop could be made. Rwanda had made the itinerary.
While my directors and I were working flat-out to put all the pieces together, we also decided to use the trip as an opportunity to bring in the broader community of U.S. interests with a major stake in the continent and ask them to help us identify the goals we should focus on. This was the first time the White House had conducted such an outreach program before a presidential trip, but we felt that since it was such a rare event, we should actively engage groups that long had been supportive of a more active U.S. government approach to Africa. We covered a series of roundtable discussions, often grouping together constituencies with little in common, putting representatives from business together with nongovernmental organizations, for example. Locked in a room for three hours, discussing all of their distinct hopes for a successful presidential trip, the representatives would leave the meetings realizing that they shared many of the same objectives. The events helped to dispel mutual suspicion and antipathy among the groups, leading in the aftermath to several efforts to work cooperatively. The roundtables proved to be a highly useful source of information and ideas for the president, and after the trip, many of the participants were gratified to see their contributions reflected in what he had said and done while traveling through Africa.
All too soon, the time came to brief the president, Mrs. Clinton, who was also going on the trip, and senior cabinet and White House officials. The briefing was held in the Cabinet Room, and, in another first, I insisted that my three directors—Sanders, Prendergast, and Barks-Ruggles, who had shouldered so much of the work—accompany me so that they could brief the president themselves on the specific countries they were looking after, following an overview I would provide. Normally, only the national security adviser and the senior director, me in this case, would conduct the briefing, but each of my deputies deserved to bask in the glow of the president’s positive reaction to all the planning they had done. The smiles on their faces and the spring in their step, even though we were all exhausted, told me that the decision had been the right one. They deserved the accolades, and I was delighted that they were able to receive them directly from the president.
On the night of March 22, 1998, we boarded Air Force One, knowing that we had done all we could to make the trip a success but still wondering what lay ahead. The excellent briefing books we carried had been prepared by our colleagues at the State Department, under the watchful eye and sharp editorial pencil of Susan Rice. Our embassies had been gearing up for weeks, and with great expectancy, millions of Africans awaited the arrival of the American president. I could not help but be nervous. The trip had attracted naysayers even before we left, many of whom were the usual anti-Clintonites, never missing a chance to criticize him. They argued that the trip was all show and no substance.
Unquestionably, there was some show. After all, an announced objective was to beam back to the American people a different picture of Africa than the one they usually saw, and we were not going to be able to do that without generating positive visual images of the land and its people. We wanted Americans to see the president with ordinary African families as well as heads of state, with survivors of genocide as well as the new breed of business entrepreneurs. Only through making Africa vividly real to Americans would they understand why the policies that we wanted to implement, including the African Growth and Opportunity Act, known informally as the African Trade Bill, deserved their support.
After an all-night flight, we touched down in Accra, Ghana, where the president was to make his opening speech and showcase the Peace Corps’ thirty-plus years of presence there. I was particularly worried about this first stop. What President Clinton said here would set the tone for the entire trip, and for the coverage of it back home. The White House advance staff had resisted the Ghanaian government’s entreaties that his speech be held in the huge Independence Square; they feared that the vast space would not be full and that it would look like their boss was speaking to a half-capacity audience. They could not believe Bill Clinton would draw the half million people it would take to fill the square. I finally intervened when the two sides appeared deadlocked. I had been in Africa a long time and had seen visits of leaders from French President Mitterrand to Muhammar Qhadafi. I was absolutely convinced that the excitement surrounding this historic visit of an American president, as well as President Clinton’s own infectious charisma, would bring out huge crowds.
I went out on a limb and guaranteed the advance staff that Independence Square would be full. Reckless, perhaps, I thought as we landed, but my doubts soon faded. The streets from the airport into the capital were jammed with people cheering our motorcade. I was in a car with Jesse Jackson, for whom the welcome was only slightly less enthusiastic than for the president himself. There were at least 500,000 people on the sidewalks as we snaked through the city. Given the festive atmosphere, it was clear they would soon join the others already at the square.
The welcome in Ghana and the president’s speech did indeed set the tone for the trip. President Jerry Rawlings draped President Clinton in the colorful kente cloth for which Ghana is famous, and the American president addressed the largest audience he had ever faced, a sea of African faces all across the square. The enthusiasm was indeed infectious; by the time we returned to the plane for the night flight across the continent to Uganda, all doubts had been erased. The continent had welcomed the president with the warmth and enthusiasm for which it was famous, and American news cameras had recorded it all.
In Uganda, the president visited a school to underscore our support for girls’ education, and an AIDS clinic to support Uganda’s efforts. Then we made our way to Rwanda to meet with genocide survivors before returning to Kampala to conduct the summit of Central African leaders.
The stop in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, was not without controversy in the administration. There were those who felt that the president had nothing to gain by revisiting a painful experience where the international response to a horrible bloodletting had been ineffectual and unacceptable. President Clinton
felt differently: it was important to make the gesture, not as an apology, as some congressional critics later complained, but as a commitment to a better future. We could not ignore the instability that continued to threaten to engulf Central Africa, and there could be no more appropriate place to address it than in Rwanda. We wanted the president to have the opportunity to meet with survivors of the genocide—not simply to hear the litanies of suffering they had endured during the massacres, and the grievous losses they had experienced, though we did not shy away from that—but to showcase how they had put their lives back together in the aftermath of the tragedy, that they had resumed coexisting even among neighbors who may have killed their sisters, brothers, parents, sons, daughters.
The draft of the president’s upcoming speech was closely reviewed en route to Kigali and generated a spirited discussion about how far he should go toward saying “never again” on the question of genocide. Sandy Berger, Susan Rice, and I were summoned to Clinton’s office on Air Force One to go over, line by line, what had been written. The discussion over what he should say became animated, with Sandy urging caution about committing the U.S. to something we might not be able to achieve, and Susan and me arguing that he should seize the occasion to challenge his and future administrations to come up with a rapid response plan that would address similar crisis situations before 800,000 people perished in another bloodletting somewhere.
We were still going at it when, much to our surprise, the plane landed. None of us, the president included, had even buckled up our safety belts. We were excused as he prepared for the arrival ceremony without knowing what the president was finally going to say.
After meeting with dozens of survivors of the genocide—many of whom had been forced to watch or listen as their loved ones were butchered by neighbors—President Clinton walked from the meeting site, adjacent to the landing strip, to the airport terminal in deep and somber conversation with his hosts, the all-powerful vice president, Paul Kagame, and the figurehead president, Pasteur Bizimungu. Clearly moved by what he had just witnessed and the stories he had heard, Clinton stepped up to the podium and began speaking. Suddenly I realized that the words I was hearing were not the words we had written. The president had discarded his text, and was speaking from the heart, after his affecting encounters with those who had survived. It was so wrenching that when I looked around the audience, the usually stoic Rwandans were reacting with strong emotion. Among our own delegation there were few dry eyes. It was the most moving speech I had ever heard.
Having walked among piles of dead bodies myself in Rwanda just a few years previously, I knew that we had to do better, and that was what my president was committing us to. We could not promise to prevent all acts of genocide, but we could make sure we improved our response prior to a catastrophe. He could not commit the United States government to “never again” countenance a genocide, but he got as close to it as he possibly could when he said: “Genocide can occur anywhere. It is not an African phenomenon. We must have global vigilance. And never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence.” His speech soared with hope for the future, even as he sadly acknowledged our failure to react to the tragedy as it was occurring until after so many had been killed. He adopted the cadence of a Southern preacher, almost singing to the audience. It was poetry.
When he had concluded, I rose and moved into the holding room just behind the stage from where the president had spoken. A minute or so later, Clinton came in. Just the two of us were there together—no Secret Service people, no staff, no one else—and the president, with tears in his eyes, walked up to me and asked, “Did I do okay?” I was barely able to speak, the lump in my own throat was so big, but I managed to blurt out, “Yes, just fine,” when he put his arms around me in a warm hug. We separated, the Secret Service came in, and the tableau dissolved seconds later. To this day it remains one of the most stirring moments of my life. My president got it, pure and simple.
Our next stop was Entebbe, Uganda, where we held the Central African summit, which included several leaders whose countries we didn’t have time to visit on the trip. Discussions there focused on conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation, and gave rise to the Great Lakes Justice Initiative, with a mandate to repair a region damaged by years of horrible violence from successive civil wars.
In South Africa, President Clinton clearly wanted to render homage to Nelson Mandela. We visited Cape Town, where the two leaders paid a visit to the prison cell on Robben Island where Mandela had been imprisoned for so many years. Mandela is one of those rare individuals for whom a lifetime of struggle and adversity has left an aura of serenity and quiet self-confidence. In Mandela’s case this translates into plain talk sprinkled with humor. In the press conference after the meeting of the two presidents, Mandela made plain his differences with the United States over policies toward leaders who had supported him during his time in prison, notably Qhadafi and Castro. Clinton could only listen. Mandela, because he was Mandela, could say whatever he wanted without arousing the anger of the United States.
In Soweto, near Johannesburg, the president attended church services and then met with a number of groups of human rights activists. We had two policy objectives that we wanted to address with the South Africa stop: commitment to the development of civil society, and support for increased investment and trade between the U.S. and Africa. In Johannesburg, we opened the Ron Brown Commercial Center to support the latter goal.
The morning of our departure for our next stop, Botswana, I glanced in the mirror and was startled to see that half of my face was paralyzed. I could not move the right side of my mouth or nose, or my right eyebrow. Assuming either a spider bite or a stroke, I could not find evidence of a bite. As I thought about it, I was glad that only my face was paralyzed. If it was a stroke, I had gotten off lightly, though Valerie might think twice about marrying a man with only half a smile.
When I saw the president on Air Force One, he knew immediately what I had—Bell’s palsy, an inflammation of the nerves on one side of the face. He took the time to tell me about friends of his who had been afflicted with it and what they had done to get over it. It is treatable with anti-inflammatory medication and, if caught early, can clear up within months. It was difficult to eat soup or smoke cigars, but there was not much I could do about that. Bill Clinton’s kind attention helped me realize that however weird I might feel and appear, it would eventually go away once I got help for the condition. Fortunately, traveling with the president meant traveling with his doctor as well, and within hours I was taking the appropriate medication.
Botswana provided the president’s road show with two superb opportunities to show off Africa in a favorable light. The first was the peaceful transfer of power from a democratically elected president to his vice president and successor. In other words, the president was there to celebrate democracy. The second came a day later when we visited Moana Game Park in Kasane, along the Chobe River in the north of the country, and used that setting to talk about environmental issues. We had all agreed that the president could not come to Africa without visiting one of the famous game reserves. Its wildlife is one of Africa’s gifts to the world. The president so enjoyed his afternoon there that he returned the next morning, delighted with the parade of elephants, lions, hippos, giraffes, and various species of antelope that inhabit the preserve on the sandy plain along the banks of the river. When he returned to share his thoughts with his audience, he spoke passionately about the environment in Africa, about its fragility and about the need for conservancy and good stewardship to protect its future.
By then, we were about halfway through the trip, so the visit to Chobe gave everyone a bit of a break. But not me. When the president went to Moana, Jim Jamerson, who had accompanied us as the military representative on the trip, and I flew from Botswana to Angola to meet with Angolan President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos. It was yet another effort to try to move the peace process forward. On arrival in L
uanda, I made a televised statement to the Angolan people on behalf of President Clinton. We followed that with meetings with Dos Santos and his key advisors and returned to the plane in the afternoon to fly back to Botswana.
Before we boarded, Angolan radio asked for one last interview, which I was pleased to accommodate. We went into a private room with a television on. I looked at the screen and saw myself delivering the statement made when I arrived. Because of the Bell’s palsy, I looked for all the world like a gangster from a B movie talking out of one side of my mouth. I was comforted in knowing that only a few Angolans had probably ever seen Edward G. Robinson in his cinematic heyday.
Our last stop on the trip was Senegal, which we had selected as the Francophone country because, under the exemplary leadership of President Abdou Diouf, it had long been functioning effectively as a moderate democracy, even though Diouf ’s party had been in power since independence twenty-eight years before. Senegal offered other accomplishments as well. We observed a USAID women-in-development project, which was helping to effect the empowerment of Senegalese women. We reviewed a military exercise that had been organized by the European Command with Senegalese troops—an event that allowed the president to promote the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), which Susan Rice, Jim Jamerson, and I had worked on for the past several years.
To underscore the cultural and historical ties that bound the United States to Africa, the president visited Goree Island, where a building that had once housed slaves has been turned into a museum and shrine to those Africans who passed through its door of no return to be taken to America as slaves. On this occasion, the president again delivered another moving and heartfelt speech, introducing all the African Americans accompanying him on the trip, from Susan Rice to his secretary, Betty Currie.
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