The Long Transition

...Our involvement probably would be limited to air strikes against Serbian offensive operations...

...Like it or not, he will have to look at the past, if only because the creeping politicization of government symbolized by the episode cannot be ignored...

...When Clinton was asked about the European-American agreement on farm subsidies, he said, "I haven't reviewed it...

...On the night of September 30, Tamposi had the Clinton file sent to her home...

...His Administration had set in motion planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion, leaving the decision on the action to the incoming John F. Kennedy...

...The hard place is the huge demand for news about the shape of the new government and the very minimal supply...

...If there was to be American intervention, he said, it should be an overwhelming force to minimize casualties and maximize the chances for quickly accomplishing a clear objective...

...Making Much Out of Little The transition also has put the American media between Little Rock and a hard place...

...I've got to look at it...

...He defined his mission as creating "a conservative infrastructure" to counter what he called "the permanent government"—the vast network of career bureaucrats...

...Embassy in Havana reduce its personnel...

...A mistake, Eagleburger says...

...Taking both allies and Americans totally by surprise, the Administration, hitherto reluctant to earmark even token units for an international peacekeeping force, suddenly raised the idea of sending a full Army division into Somalia as part of an international force to guarantee delivery of relief supplies...

...Meanwhile President Fidel Castro, reacting to the suspension of sugar import quotas and the imposition of a trade embargo, made the U.S...

...When Clinton came out of a meeting with President Bush and spoke less vehemently about China than he had during the campaign, the New York Times discovered "a sudden, striking difference...

...Remember that this was the President who declared he would do "what it takes" to get re-elected...

...As misgivings arose among private relief organizations and European governments to a force some deemed excessive, it became obvious that the Pentagon had not abandoned its reluctance to use American troops in murky circumstances, but had found another way to make its point...

...Chief of Staff James A. Baker III knew about the search, but claims not to have orchestrated it—a fine distinction, given that he also didn't try to stop it...

...Louis Cordia of the archconservative Heritage Foundation ran a sort of clearinghouse for politically correct job seekers...

...I recall having it when Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler brushed off the "third-rate burglary" in the Watergate building, and when Bush said there was "not a scintilla of evidence" that American war-making technology was going to Saddam Hussein...

...How high this operation went remains to be determined...

...We don't have a minute to waste looking at the past," he said at one point...

...Baker's trusted aide, Margaret D. Tutwiler, knew enough to refuse a phone call from Tamposi...

...Nixon rejected the idea, as did Brezhnev and Kosygin, who were content to await the blessings of detente under the new Chief Executive and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger...

...For General Colin Powell, who had publicly opposed sending U.S...

...The process accelerated during the Reagan years...

...This may help to eliminate the network that facilitated extra-constitutional operations like Watergate, Irangate, Iraqgate, and Passportgate...

...and to participation in a blockade...

...Still, Passportgate, with its explanations that don't quite explain and final reports that are not quite final, makes a veteran wallower want to go wallowing again...

...Questions of a Wallower Anxious to have the transition look like a friendly takeover, Clinton has treated the scandal created by the search of his passport file as no big deal...

...agenda...

...George Bush, in his passive-aggressive period following his defeat, observed that "the interregnum is too ungenerous and too long...

...Next question: Where was Alixe Glen on the night of September 30...

...Someone else in Baker's office spoke to her for seven minutes, but the less than relentless investigation by State Department Inspector General Sherman M. Funk has not turned up who that was...

...For nonwallowers, let me explain that Glen is listed in the Inspector General's report as a "former roommate" of Tamposi...

...But we already know that it was supervised by Elizabeth M. Tamposi—a protegee of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs—who tried to serve her political masters at Clinton's expense...

...President Nixon, distrustful of a Civil Service perceived as loaded with Democrats, started placing in strategic positions people with more ideological loyalty than governmental experience...

...The last big changeover, after all, occurred 12 years ago...

...When Clinton had a particularly warm meeting in a Little Rock church with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who said they were now walking in lockstep, the Washington Post noted the expression of goodwill...

...However different Bosnia is from Somalia, though, both have stirred an American sense of outrage that is pressing President Bush, with the full support of the President-elect, to take a stand...

...Although his report lists the jobs of all the other 106 witnesses interviewed, it neglects to mention that Glen (who shared a town house, not a room, with Tamposi) was a senior member of the Bush-Quayle campaign research group known as the "attack team...

...Embassy in Teheran...

...But, even without an "October surprise," the Iranians had written off Jimmy Carter and put their bet on a friendlier administration, with the result that they contrived to turn over the hostages just in time for Ronald Reagan's inaugural...

...Still, the anti-intervention dam appeared to have been broken, immediately raising the question of whether former Yugoslavia would be next on the U.S...

...forces into dangerous situations with ill-defined goals, this was not quite the reversal it appeared to be...

...Finally, why did Acting Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, who knew from monitored telephone conversations that at least two assistant secretaries were involved, nevertheless authorize a statement on October 15 that only "low-level people" and "clerks" had a hand in the search...

...A President handing over the reins of power to the opposition party may wish to keep the world on hold during those ambiguous 11 weeks, but it does not necessarily stay on hold...

...Increasing numbers of slots were put under the control of the White House personnel office...

...When he met with Powell the headlines stressed the General's well-known objections to removing the ban on homosexuals in the services, not his statement that, in the end, the military would comply with orders...

...One can only surmise why Iraq chose this time to start a drive for lifting United Nations economic sanctions...

...It has developed a destructive ideological component...

...She says she never saw the file...

...Glen first said she was out of town that night—in Little Rock...

...But the prospects of unimaginable suffering, brought into American homes by television and threatening to stain President Bush's place in history, seemed to rouse him from sulking in his tent—at least in the case of Somalia...

...Would she have seen it if it contained a letter suggesting that Clinton, reacting to Vietnam, did contemplate renouncing his citizenship...

...In Bosnia we would be facing well-armed organized militias, not marauding youths, on much more difficult terrain...

...Or why rampaging Serbia, its conquest of Bosnia virtually complete, began casting a baleful eye on the Kosovo autonomous region and Macedonia...

...One military officer said only half-jokingly, "We do deserts, not mountains...

...President Kennedy, who had campaigned for a tougher policy on Cuba, had to cope with the consequences...

...After the 1968 election, Lyndon B. Johnson sought to use the transition to project the continuity of American foreign policy...

...In 1980 President Carter did not have the luxury of being able to ride out the transition...

...Clinton has kept his policy decisions close to his chest, refusing to define himself until he is ready...

...Unable to prove that, she admitted she was in Washington—working very late at her office...

...It is hard to tell how foreign principals will try to exploit the long transition, which is an almost uniquely American phenomenon...

...Or why Iran resumed its bellicose anti-Americanism and goaded the fundamentalist Hezbollah guerrillas into launching attacks against Israel with the evident objective of torpedoing the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations...

...The erosion of nonpartisan public service goes beyond the old spoils system...

...In National Security Council discussions, Powell reportedly objected to sending off a few thousand soldiers...

...In this age of round-the-clock news, the media find it hard to remember what a tough process it is to convert promises into programs and a campaign into a government...

...Except for being a scene of wanton brutality, it bears scant similarity to Somalia...

...Although it is not commonly known, he proposed to President-elect Richard M. Nixon that the two of them meet with President Leonid I. Brezhnev and Prime Minister Aleksei N. Kosygin...

...This led to a break in diplomatic relations on January 2, 1961, 18 days before the inauguration...

...There's that old wallower's tingling sensation...

...After the 1960 election, President Dwight D. Eisenhower made a point of desisting from new initiatives on arms control, Berlin, Indochina, and Cuba...

...Clinton now has the task of cleaning out the "conservative infrastructure" as he names new people to 150 top-level positions and another 3,000 to lower-level positions...

...Then the Post felt it necessary to add that they may "find themselves at odds in coming months" on funding for social projects...

...Let's start with the basic question: What did Bush know, and when...

...An earlier summit had been aborted by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968...

...A perceived vacuum of authority in the capital of the superpower becomes a problem for some and an opportunity for others around the globe...

...Frustrated, the media have tended to make much of little...

...He worked until his last hours in office on negotiations for the release of the Americans imprisoned in the U.S...

...We don't know...

...His noncommittal brush-off led to stories saying he was "holding off on embracing this agreement, as he had earlier done on the North American Free Trade Agreement...