The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

by Nancy Gibbs

  A Breakthrough, and Then Breakdown

  Carter stopped in South Korea on the way to Pyongyang. Both Douglas Brinkley and Don Oberdorfer, in their fine, separate accounts of Carter’s visit to Seoul, reported that he found the city on war footing. The U.S. embassy was working up plans to evacuate more than eighty thousand Americans from the Korean Peninsula. Locals were stripping the food markets of rice, candles, and noodles, stockpiling water, building makeshift bomb shelters. The Korean stock market had plunged 25 percent in forty-eight hours and the U.S. ambassador was making arrangements to airlift his own family out of the country. South Korea’s president, Kim Young Sam, met with Carter and gave the American his own letter to deliver: a secret offer to Kim Il Sung to start bilateral talks between the North and South.

  So by the time he left the South Korean capital and headed north, Carter was on multiple missions: one for President Clinton and another for South Korean president Kim. And Carter had his own goal: he believed that economic sanctions could be avoided if Pyongyang agreed to let U.N. inspectors monitor the fuel rods they had removed from the Yongbyon reactor and promised not to refuel it. He was not going to just take Kim’s temperature. He was determined to cut a deal to defuse the crisis.

  The Carter delegation—made up of several aides and a State Department official, and a CNN news crew—crossed the Demilitarized Zone on June 15 and climbed into armored military trucks for the trip along an utterly deserted four-lane highway to Pyongyang. Carter’s official reception was predictably weird: the North Korean foreign minister treated the Carters to a dinner headlined by an all-girl rock ’n’ roll group, dressed in crinolines, who sang “My Darling Clementine” and “Oh! Susanna.” Carter’s earnest dinner toast included a push for clarity on nuclear inspectors; the foreign minister gave a hostile toast in return—so hostile that Carter went to bed that night fearing his mission might be a lost cause.

  With that prospect in mind, Carter dispatched an aide to the DMZ before dawn with a secret note for Clinton urging him to quickly launch direct and official communications with Pyongyang should his mission fail. Carter feared the worst; the situation was so grave that nothing short of direct intervention by Clinton himself would defuse the crisis. But U.S. diplomats, certain that Carter was overreacting, intercepted Carter’s courier at the DMZ and prevented his letter from reaching Washington. And as it turned out, relations had not quite reached the breaking point. Later that morning, Kim greeted his American visitor with a big smile and a bear hug and the two men got quickly down to business. Carter told Kim he had to give the U.N. the authority to monitor all fuel rods immediately. Kim said he would happily exchange his aging graphite block reactors (which made lots of plutonium) for light water reactors supplied by the United States; and if those could be provided, he would abide by the nonproliferation treaty and its terms.

  As to the all-important matter of whether the international inspectors could return, Kim claimed ignorance that they had been barred in the first place but quickly announced that they could go back. In a very short time, the two men were on the verge of a deal. Carter huddled with Kim’s aides after lunch to work out the details; in these sessions, Carter had to push back against almost constant attempts by Kim’s aides to retract Kim’s verbal promises.

  Despite his instructions, Carter now had the makings of a breakthrough in hand. He phoned the White House just as Clinton and his national security advisors, meeting in the Roosevelt Room, had agreed to propose stricter sanctions in the U.N. Security Council and were finalizing plans to send an additional Army division to South Korea. Gallucci took the call in another room and heard Carter report from Pyongyang that Kim had agreed to let International Atomic Energy Agency monitors back in and freeze its nuclear program. Carter informed Gallucci that he would be making the announcement on CNN in a few moments.

  Gallucci returned to the Cabinet Room with the news of Carter’s apparent fait accompli and his plans to announce it. The room was aghast. Lake asked Gallucci, “You did tell him not to go on CNN, didn’t you?” No, came the reply. “Did you try?” asked Christopher. Gallucci admitted that he had not. It was hard to tell what upset Clinton and his aides more: that Carter had cut a deal they couldn’t read on paper or that he was about to announce it to the world. “Not since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson had so many barnyard expletives echoed off the Cabinet room wall,” Brinkley wrote in his account. So the group scattered to watch the thirty-ninth president announce on CNN a “new breakthrough” with the Hermit Kingdom. “The reason I came over here,” he explained, “was to prevent an irreconcilable mistake.” Carter even praised Kim for taking “important” and “positive” steps, though all the North Korean leader had done was return to the terms of a previous promise by his government. And then Carter suggested that all that remained was for Clinton to okay a new round of direct bilateral talks.

  This was simply bizarre: a former American president, having been sent on a fact-finding mission, was now pitching a deal he cut in private on international television. Rather than serving discreetly as Clinton’s envoy, Carter was negotiating in public for a deal of his own and explaining to the world what Clinton had to do next. White House officials, gathered around a television in the West Wing, did not try to contain their contempt. “The problem is that North Korea now has a former president as its spokesperson,” one official remarked. One cabinet member saw it more starkly; he called Carter “a treasonous prick.”

  But the immediate question was how, exactly, to respond. The White House had little faith that Kim would keep his word to Carter and no desire to barter away the threat of sanctions in case its instincts were correct. Clinton aides decided on a two-part approach. First, they hammered out a brief statement that offered no more than tentative support for Carter’s apparent breakthrough. Clinton delivered it himself in the White House briefing room and answered a question or two.

  Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Carter was getting spanked. Lake called him in Pyongyang and told the former president in what one official later described as “unvarnished language” that the administration would not agree to Carter’s terms unless the North Koreans specifically agreed not to replace removed fuel rods with new ones. Clinton, moreover, was not satisfied with a verbal agreement from Kim; Lake told Carter he wanted the deal in writing. Carter listened to Lake’s demands as he sat on the edge of his bed before sunrise in Pyongyang. They would be an affront to Kim, he told Lake.

  The normally mild-mannered Lake fought back, raising his voice with his old boss and demanding that the former president follow the instructions of the current commander in chief. “A difficult exchange,” Lake recalled.

  Carter didn’t forget that he had never been authorized to hold negotiations in the first place; he had simply ignored his instructions. But now that he had walked into the Korean bazaar, started making deals, and announced them on TV, he knew he would have to abide by his master’s demands. He agreed to send Kim a letter explaining the new conditions. “That man used to work for me as a young pup,” Carter complained after hanging up with Lake. Taking no chances, Lake sent a copy of his new conditions to Pyongyang’s mission to the U.N. in New York City, just in case Carter didn’t follow orders again.

  Kim agreed to the new U.S. conditions later that day, after he and Carter had taken a leisurely three-hour cruise down the Taedong River. Carter’s Atlanta-based CNN crew was on hand to capture the voyage. Both Carter and Kim brought along their wives, which made things easier; pressed by Carter and Kim’s wife, Kim agreed to take steps to help find the remains of some three thousand U.S. servicemen still missing from the Korean War. But then Carter, in an inexplicable move, turned to the CNN crew and announced that, thanks to his actions the day before, the United States had backed away from its push for U.N. sanctions against North Korea.

  This was plainly untrue—the United States still held out the threat of sanctions in order to force Kim to keep his word on the nuclear deal. In Washington, the response to
Carter’s latest gambit was immediate: White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers dismissed Carter’s assertion as inaccurate. South Korean ambassador James Laney was instructed to meet Carter the next morning at the DMZ with a clear message: knock it off about sanctions. Laney had another message to deliver: don’t even think about returning to Washington from Seoul. Nobody there wants to see you now. In fact, nobody at the White House can see you for a week or two.

  But that message didn’t take either. Before leaving Seoul, Carter called Gore and informed the vice president he wanted to come to Washington to debrief the president or his aides in person. Gore declined that offer; Carter pressed again to come to Washington and, after a few more phone conversations—including one where the vice president had Carter in one ear and Lake in the other—Carter was permitted to visit Washington on his return. Carter’s end of the discussion with Gore had been so heated that aides later reported that it could be heard all through the American ambassador’s residence.

  And yet for all the collateral damage, the trip was a success: Carter won acceptance from Kim to hold bilateral talks with South Korea, as Kim Young Sam had proposed. He cleared the way for a joint Korean War remains commission. Most of all, he had helped defuse the fuel rod crisis. Carter expected, at the very least, some thanks for that. But Carter had a way of making gratitude difficult. Before leaving Seoul, Carter issued another slap at the White House, saying sanctions would be “a personal insult to their so called Great Leader.”

  When Carter arrived in Washington on Sunday, June 19, Clinton’s aides hoped to smooth over any lingering resentments. But it quickly became apparent that Carter was not interested in making peace at home. The former president entered Lake’s office, sat down on the sofa, and proceeded to read his written report—word for word—as if he was lecturing a roomful of schoolboys. Hope for reconciliation faded further when Carter announced that he would circulate his final report on the trip only to Clinton, Gore, Christopher, and what he called “my mailing list of supporters.”

  It was all evidence, if any more proof were needed, that Carter could be a complicated partner. When it was over, Clinton was circumspect, telling his aides that he had relied on the club to get the deal done. Even when they go rogue, he said, former presidents could still be a useful instrument of presidential power. For all the problems they cause at home, the club had special influence with some foreign leaders. “Look, I knew I was going to take some heat for letting Carter go there,” Clinton said. “But I also knew we needed to give the North . . . some way to climb down without losing face. I figured if they could say to themselves that a former president had come to their country, it would allow them to do that.”

  It was a lesson Clinton would remember.

  Mission to Haiti

  Just three months later, Clinton deputized Carter again. The assignment, this time, was even riskier. Carter’s secret mission in June had simply been to make contact with a reclusive leader in a troublesome kingdom.

  His much more public journey to Haiti in September was to remove a gangster from power as war loomed.

  By mid-1994, Haiti’s military boss, General Raoul Cédras, had been waging a campaign of terror against the supporters of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide since he and a handful of other military officers kicked Aristide out as president in 1992. An estimated three thousand Haitians had died under Cédras’s rule, many of them hacked to death by his goons and left in pieces to die on the streets. In cities where Aristide had once been strongest, women and girls were routinely raped or assaulted while Cédras’s security forces filled Haitian prisons under a new arbitrary arrest policy. Dozens of people just vanished.

  It is easy to forget now just how close the United States came to invading Haiti in 1994. Clinton spent much of 1993 and 1994 trying different nonmilitary approaches to dislodge Cédras’s generals from their perch: an oil embargo, economic sanctions, special envoys, tighter sanctions; nothing moved them. If anything, the Haitian military and its allies in the ruling class were only getting richer on the shortages resulting from the sanctions. Clinton finally pushed through a unanimous United Nations Security Council resolution in late July 1994 authorizing the use of force to restore democracy—a first for the U.N.—on the hunch that the mere threat of a U.S. invasion would force the junta to give way. But it was possible that global sanctions would not budge Cédras from power, and by midsummer invasion planning was already under way at the Pentagon. Against an army that was estimated to be no larger than seven thousand men, the thinking went, U.S. forces would face only token opposition.

  But the idea of sending troops to Haiti was a deeply unpopular one. Public confidence in Clinton’s handling of foreign policy during his first term was never very high and the prospect of invading the hemisphere’s poorest country made little sense to most Americans. Arkansas senator Dale Bumpers warned Clinton that an invasion might provoke the Senate to pass a resolution of disapproval. Reputable alternatives to Cédras weren’t easy to come by; former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell had warned Clinton that exiled Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide was unreliable and hardly worth the American lives it would cost to reinstall him. “Nobody is for this,” Clinton complained. “Nobody.” Still, he was fatalistic. “I’ll get through this,” he told Taylor Branch. “Don’t worry about it. I can always find something else to do to make a living.”

  His defensiveness wasn’t much different when he talked about Haiti in public. On September 15, Clinton gave an Oval Office address explaining his rationale for an invasion. “I have bent over backwards. I have used sanctions and everything else. I have also not had the United States be the Lone Ranger. We had the UN come in here.”

  As he finished the speech, he gave no indication that he was working secretly to give peace one last chance. For several months, Carter had been urging Clinton to let him go to Haiti and try to make a deal with Cédras to step aside. Clinton thought it was worth a shot: Carter had known both Cédras and Aristide for years and had visited Haiti seven times in the previous decade. It was Cédras, after all, who had helped to install Aristide in February 1991 before kicking him out eight months later. If Cédras could be convinced to step down beforehand, Carter argued, the Marines would be able to go in peacefully. Carter volunteered to fly to Haiti and negotiate Cédras’s departure ahead of the invasion.

  Carter’s return made Clinton’s aides pull at their hair. Gore and Christopher flatly, and loudly, opposed the idea, recalling what had happened that summer in Korea. Perhaps mindful of that episode, Carter came up with a solution to his own problem: he called Sam Nunn of Georgia and Powell, neither of whom favored an invasion, and asked if they would be interested in taking on the mission as well. Both men said yes, they would go, if the president agreed. Clinton, Carter recalled, “wouldn’t let me go until I got Sam Nunn and Colin Powell to go with me.”

  Clinton then called each man, laid out the parameters of the mission, and officially invited them to take it on together. The goal: tell Cédras the Marines were on the way and see if he would step down in exchange for a peaceful takeover.

  The exact terms of Cédras’s departure were left up to the trio—in part because everyone knew they would need some flexibility to pull it off. The anxiety was over how much flexibility that would turn out to be. Powell recalled that Clinton was worried that Carter might cut a deal that went well beyond what Clinton had authorized in advance. After Carter’s gambits in Korea, George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s senior advisor, recalled, “We couldn’t afford more freelancing.” Clinton himself spent part of a day talking himself into his decision. “I’m sending Carter,” he told Stephanopoulos. “You think it will be OK, don’t you?”

  In the end, Clinton again decided to trust his instincts, in part because the alternative—in this case, an invasion—was worse. As he explained it to Powell, “Jimmy Carter is sometimes a wild card. But I took a chance on him in North Korea and that didn’t turn out too badly.”


  Clinton gave Carter, Powell, and Nunn one secret weapon before they departed: “I told them to feel free to tell the Haitians they disagree with my policy because they [the Haitians] would be more likely to believe I was going to invade.” With a small group of aides, Carter, Powell, and Nunn arrived in Port-au-Prince just after noon on Saturday, September 17, and went immediately to see Cédras at Haitian military headquarters. The Americans sensed they were literally walking into a trap: the run-down building was ringed by several thousand of Cédras’s irregulars, who were chanting slogans and brandishing machetes. Upstairs, in a corner room, Carter coolly explained to the general and his lieutenants that a massive U.S. invasion was imminent and urged the Haitians to lay down their weapons and step down from power. Nunn reported that the Congress was completely behind the president, while Powell, the former general, played the heavy, explaining how the U.S. military would come at Cédras with two carriers, two and a half infantry divisions, the usual array of helicopter gunships, artillery, tens of thousands of troops, and support from two dozen other nations. The show of force from Powell prompted Cédras to joke, “We used to be the weakest nation in the hemisphere. After this we’ll be the strongest.”

  That cut the tension but it did nothing to clear the way for a deal. Cédras told his guests he wasn’t budging. So the U.S. team took a break, met with local business leaders for dinner, and then reconvened with Cédras later that night. That meeting, which began at 11 P.M., went well past one and still produced little movement. But Carter won from Cédras an invitation to meet his family the next morning at his home. By now, four U.S. naval vessels were staging offshore, along with at least sixteen thousand soldiers and Marines. U.S. troops were set to move at midnight Monday, which meant the trio had less than twenty-four hours to do a deal. But the three men had perhaps eighteen hours remaining if they wanted to get out of the country before the shooting started.