Clinton Pitches War to Newspaper ‘Elites’

SAN FRANCISCO —  For seven years he has been pitching himself to the American people on domestic fronts, talking about the economy, education and crime. On Thursday, the president of the United States came to sell something else: a war.

And so, amid confusing reports and often dispiriting news emerging for more than three weeks from Belgrade and Brussels, Washington and Pristina, there was Bill Clinton, for the first time reaching out to what political scientists call “the elites” in a crucial effort to shape public opinion on the U.S.-led campaign against Yugoslavia.

His selected audience was the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and the opportunity to influence them was great enough that Clinton traveled to San Francisco, where they were meeting, on a day that began in Washington and would end after midnight in Detroit.

There were, to be sure, questions about other topics: About the treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan by the Taliban, the radically conservative group to which the United States once lent support. About his presidential legacy, and what he has accomplished in six years in office.

But throughout the 59 minutes the president spent with the editors, there was a pressing demand for more information--more policy, more nuts and bolts, more openness, just plain more information--about what the United States is doing in Kosovo and why it is doing it.

The questions were at times blunt. The bottom line in one, about what happened to a convoy that included refugees on a road in southwestern Kosovo on Wednesday that was decimated by a NATO attack, was this: “Mr. President. . . . Did we screw up?”

It prompted a long answer from the president, which summarized was this: It was regrettable, and inevitable.

Offering a “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” argument, he reminded the audience that the objective is to end genocide, and that the enemy is Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslavia’s president, demagogue and totalitarian. “If the requirement is that nothing like this can ever happen, then we’re saying it’s OK with us if Mr. Milosevic displaces over a million Kosovars, kills and rapes thousands upon thousands of them,” he said.

The questions were at times uncomfortable. A Seattle editor asked how Clinton would respond to what was described as a talk-radio drumbeat that “you, personally, lack the moral authority to be commander in chief,” and what would he say to an Air Force pilot who might be persuaded by that argument.

His jaw clenched in his best stare-’em-down-I’m-the-boss demeanor, Clinton replied, forcefully:

“I don’t have to address it to the Air Force pilot. I am his commander in chief, and they swore an oath to the Constitution and they have performed admirably. And they don’t deserve to hear that.”

After Edward Seaton, the president of the editor’s society and editor of the Manhattan, Kan., Mercury, sought to cut off the questions after the agreed-upon three, and then a fourth, were asked, Clinton verbally nudged aside the effort.

“You know what’s going on, don’t you? The people that help me don’t trust you not to write a story that’s about something other than Kosovo, and they think the longer I stay up here, the greater my chances of screwing up,” he said. “That’s really what’s going on here. And it’s wonderful when you’re not running for anything. You can say just exactly what’s on your mind.”

But what was really going on was a carefully constructed plan to bring the arguments for pursuing the Balkans war to the American people, not in an unfiltered television speech, an oft-preferred presidential medium, but through the editors who decide how a story will appear on the nation’s front pages and what the editorial writers will say about it.

The White House has largely succeeded in muting criticism in Congress--indeed, a leader of conservative House Republicans, Tom DeLay of Texas, entered a White House briefing earlier this week highly skeptical of the administration’s plan and emerged much less critical. And public opinion polls show continuing support for the air war.

But White House aides remain concerned that Clinton needs to solidify that support by making his case for the Kosovo air war and an expanded U.S. and Western European role in the region in decades to come, to an audience the White House believes can have a major impact on influencing public opinion.

The effort to reach out to the editors reflects the lessons policymakers have learned from the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars: that they must work assiduously to earn and then maintain public support for a military operation, the goals of which may be difficult for Americans to understand and the reasons for pursuing them not easily connected to the nation’s apparent long-term interest.

Administration officials found a reservoir of support for the military operation right from the start--along with confusion about why it is taking place. A presidential address to the nation at the start of the mission awoke the nation to the conflict, but it was criticized as being insufficient. So the administration has been looking for--and creating--opportunities each week since then to present Clinton in sympathetic settings as he explains the mission.

Thus, he spoke first to sailors and Marines in Norfolk and then, on Monday, to Air Force personnel, including crews that had already flown missions over the Kosovo theater, at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

But the visit to San Francisco offered a new dimension to the president’s effort, presenting his argument--for the mission, for the extended period it may take to succeed, and for the nation’s need to remain deeply engaged in the troubled Balkans for years into the future--to a segment of American society that has had a tradition of questioning the operations of a military campaign and whether the mission has been adequately explained to the American public.

“We don’t want to see Europe re-fight with tanks and artillery the same battles they fought centuries ago with axes and arrows,” the president said. “And because stability in Europe is important to our own security, we want to build a Europe that is peaceful, undivided and free; a Europe where young Americans do not have to fight and die again to deal with the consequences of other people’s madness and greed.”