Clinton's Long Hot Summer

...It just presents some of the more basic problems in more urgent terms...

...A nonstarter in the face of Congressional Black Caucus and African-American outrage, symbolized by Randall Robinson's hunger strike—not to mention television pictures of American warships repelling desperate people in leaky boats...

...And there ends the resemblance between the electrifying speech of President Kennedy in 1963 and the contrived imitation...

...When overt military action was undertaken, it was justified, at least in part, by the need to rescue or protect Americans...

...But the label, she added, could not be applied to all the killings that were going on...

...It may have also been due to a decision by North Korea under pressure from China and perhaps Russia...

...And certainly by Lewis Carroll, whose Humpty-Dumpty told Alice, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less...

...Working on the pronunciation with his interpreter, he at one point remarked in discouragement, "I should leave the foreign languages to Jackie...

...It would read, "Go to Germany...

...Along the way he recalled the ancient boast of the Romans, Civis Romanus sum (I am a Roman citizen), and asked his aide, Mc-George Bundy, how that could be adapted for Berlin...

...Pyongyang is believed to have supplied 40 per cent of the arms used by Iran in its war with Iraq, including Iran's first Scud missiles...

...By the time the Marines landed most of the 1,200 Americans had departed...

...Lawrence Fuchs, Brandeis University historian of immigration, says, "Haiti is not a unique problem...

...The policy was vaguely reminiscent of those airport signs, "Satellite parking only...

...Access to Berlin was periodically blocked, and Berliners wondered if America would abandon them...

...Navy units were sent into Haitian waters and the Administration declared their mission was "to protect the thousands of Americans who are still in Haiti," some of whom said they did not feel endangered...

...After Kim II Sung met with former President Jimmy Carter in June and agreed to freeze nuclear weapons development, the Clinton Administration reached the cautious assessment that he might be on the road toward accommodation...

...troops left, Grenada also had a new government...

...Before his assassination, five months later, he said he would leave for his successor an envelope with a note to be opened in time of great discouragement...

...In October 1961, the almost muzzle-to-muzzle confrontation of Soviet and American tanks at Checkpoint Charlie was a visual symbol of how World War III might start...

...Until early July, President Bill Clinton had been urging Haitians to stay in their blighted country without offering persuasive reasons why they should...

...Although it had never been invoked by the UN, there was always a chance that this might be the first time...

...North Korea's role as the leading arms supplier for outlaw regimes and terrorists has worried the West more than the country's own arsenal...

...People chanted in unison, "Ken-ne-dy...

...According to Joseph Bermudez, a leading expert on the North's weapons program, Teheran helped to finance an improved Scud and, more recently, contracted to buy the 600-mile-range Nodong I rocket, along with facilities to assemble it...

...That was based as well on the discovery that for about four or five months delivery of missiles and missile technology to Iran had been halted...

...In the past decade some 20 million people have been driven from their countries by privation and fear (not counting Rwanda...

...Well, nothing ventured, nothing ventured...

...Not a feasible policy, if only because conceding victory to the military junta could not be counted on to reduce the flow of refugees...

...sent an aid mission to neighboring Zaire and, in one of those examples of diplomacy by gesture, closed the Rwandan Embassy in Washington...

...jail and a new democratic regime headed by Guillermo Endara...

...When the U.S...

...We cannot ask people to stay in a house on fire," exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide said...

...Asked how many acts of genocide it takes to make genocide, she responded, "That's not a question I'm in a position to answer...

...The U.S...

...Berlin Revisited A WORD ABOUT President Clinton's trip to Europe in early July—his third this year...

...This invasion ended with Strong Man Manuel Noriega in a U.S...

...It has always been easier to sell military action to Congress and the country when Americans are, or appear to be, in peril...

...Hard Questions CONFRONTED BY the Rwanda mass murders and mass migration, the Clinton Administration pretty much threw up its hands—as did most other governments, with the conspicuous exception of the French...

...was willing to delay sanctions and see whether North Korea would return to the negotiating table...

...Return to the antirefugee blockade that President George Bush instituted and President Clinton continued for a while...

...American intelligence learned that, last January or February, weapons shipments stopped...

...Amerika steht an Ihre Seite" (America stands at your side) and "Berlin istfrei" (Berlin is free...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Clintons Long Hot Summer I HAVE HAD occasion before to bewail magazine lead time, but never more than this mid-July when Haiti, Rwanda, North Korea, health, welfare, crime—you name it—stood on the brink of something or other...

...But the American forces stayed another 17 months until the Washington-backed junta was securely in control...

...But, anyway, I'm not as bad as Bobby...

...It was the most arresting piece of oratory I had ever heard...

...It also—belatedly—agreed to call what was happening in Rwanda "genocide...

...In 1983, President Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada, ostensibly to rescue some 1,100 Americans, most of them medical students, from its pro-Castro regime...

...And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner!' People wept...

...What to do...

...Kennedy himself was overwhelmed by the response...

...Thus, in 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson sent Marines into a civil war in the Dominican Republic because "American lives are in danger...

...Give up on sanctions...

...Berlin istfrei is soon forgotten...

...June 1963 was nearly two years after the Kennedy Administration had let the Communist wall go up...

...All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin...

...As for North Korea, it was frustrating trying to read the tea leaves and discern whether Kim Jong II would be able to consolidate his position following the death of his father, Kim II Sung, and if so, whether in terms of taming North Korea's nuclear aspirations he would be better, worse or about the same to deal with...

...Historically, military invasion is associated with the bad old days when Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua were, at times, occupied in the name of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine...

...In 1989, President Bush invaded Panama, citing as the immediate reason attacks on individual American servicemen and the mistreatment of the wife of one of them...

...After FDR, the preferred form of U.S...

...This may, in part, have been the result of strong pressure on Iran by Japan and other sources of financial assistance...

...To understand why the Clinton speech rang so hollow, I guess you had to be there the first time...

...Genocide" has a quite straightforward dictionary definition: "The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national or racial group...

...It came out as Ich bin ein Berliner, and he had the phrase written phonetically into his speech text...

...A moment like the one Kennedy experienced, however, cannot be recaptured in a different climate, a different era?when walking through the Brandenburg Gate is no big deal, when people worry not about freedom but about jobs, immigration and crime...

...In Berlin the President used German phrases...

...It was meant to reassure the Baltic and Central European states that they would not be the victims of a "Russia First" policy, would not find themselves left in a "gray area" of insecurity...

...Then, before a million Berliners in City Hall square, he said it...

...Then came President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "nonintervention" pledge and Good Neighbor policy...

...So there was a whiff of deja vu as U.S...

...Whatever, the White House's tentative interpretation of the turn of events as a sign that North Korea might be rethinking its defiance of the international community is one of the reasons the U.S...

...The Pyongyang-Teheran connection began to look infinitely more dangerous once indications surfaced that Iran was helping to finance North Korea's nuclear weapons research and was expecting to share in that technology...

...The convention says signatories are obliged to "prevent and punish" acts intended to destroy ethnic groups...

...Consequently President Kennedy, touring West Germany in 1963, had a lot riding on his climactic Berlin speech...

...Here once again was a young American President speaking German to Berliners...

...By the time you read this, you may already know the answer to that question...

...The concern at the State Department was that using it to describe the Rwandan massacres might trigger the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, which the United States finally got around to signing in 1989...

...That left military intervention, which President Clinton kept saying was an option, but not an imminent one, as he tried to assemble an inter-American peacekeeping coalition to take over once the military dictatorship was ousted...

...A week later the White House, recognizing the absurdity of its stance, said okay, it was genocide...

...The 1954 coup in Guatemala, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, the 1973 plot against Chile's President Salvador Allende, and the more recent support for Nicaragua's contra rebels were all manifestations of apolicy of quasi-invasion under CIA rather than Pentagon auspices...

...Aside from the G-7 industrial nations' summit in Naples, featuring the debut of Russia's President Boris N. Yeltsin at the political session, the trip seemed mainly a course correction...

...muscle-flexing in this Hemisphere became covert action...

...Ich bin ein Berliner will be long remembered...

...As the outward-bound tide swelled, the Administration improvised "safe havens" in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay and on various islands scattered around the Caribbean...

...During one briefing, State Department Deputy Spokesperson Christine Shelly said, "We have reason to believe that acts of genocide may have occurred in Rwanda...

...Ah, lead time...

...The Administration's difficulty would have been understood by George Orwell, whose "Newspeak" was intended to strip words of undesirable meanings...

...But more than any other country whose citizens are fleeing, Haiti is an American problem, and at this writing American efforts to deal with it were nearing breakdown...