TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/113092/11309930.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5.3 KB | 112 lines

                                                                                THE TRANSITION, Page 36

CLINTON'S PEOPLE

A Foreign Policy Puritan


On the farm, teaching, and in government, TONY LAKE blends
realism with idealism

By J.F.O. MCALLISTER/WORTHINGTON


    When Bill Clinton was phoning world leaders the day after
he won the election, he made a point of placing a call, right
after talking with Britain's John Major, to a farm in
Worthington, Massachusetts. He wanted to thank Tony Lake,
described by a campaign aide as the "heart and soul" of
Clinton's foreign policy team, for orchestrating the strategy
that managed to neutralize voters' concerns about Clinton's
inexperience on the world stage. Characteristically, Lake was
not hanging around Little Rock or jockeying for West Wing office
space. He had already returned to his cows, his close-knit
family and his students at Mount Holyoke College. Friends tease
him about being Cincinnatus, but his love of rural independence
is no act. "I moved up here because I did not want to spend the
next however many years of my life trying to get some job in
Washington," he says. "I just have a very happy life here." But
high office -- National Security Adviser is often mentioned --
may breach his idyll anyway.

    He has been a popular and respected professor of
international relations for 11 years, since leaving Jimmy
Carter's State Department, where he was director of policy
planning. He is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy.
When he talks, his eyes are penetrating and his humor is wry.
Described variously by associates as "a stalwart Puritan,"
"immensely kind," "the opposite of a self-promoter" and "a tough
competitor," he seems psychologically centered, surprisingly
devoid of the egotism and Machiavellian qualities often found
in presidential advisers.

    Lake backed into the campaign. Last fall he was writing a
book about how Republicans had managed to turn foreign policy
against the Democrats in voters' minds, and how Democrats might
do better. He interviewed his former deputy at policy planning,
Sandy Berger, who was directing the candidate's foreign policy
staff. Berger implored his old boss to act on his theories
rather than write them up. After meeting with Clinton, Lake set
to work developing a major foreign policy speech scheduled for
mid-December. It was a hit, and Lake became Clinton's senior
national security adviser.

    Working mostly by phone and fax with Berger and three
other foreign policy analysts -- Michael Mandelbaum, Nancy
Soderberg and Leon Fuerth -- Lake limited his traveling to
Thursday through Monday so he could continue teaching. Clinton
gave speeches stressing mainstream foreign policy themes:
promoting democracy, a strong but revamped defense and the need
for creative thinking on global problems like the environment.
He counterpunched on Iraqgate and Irangate. On a few carefully
chosen issues like aid to Russia, the need to help Somalia, and
punishing Serbia for "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, the Democrat
took positions slightly forward of Bush's and waited for events
to squeeze the President his way. He criticized the Bush
Administration for being too cozy with authoritarian regimes,
such as the one in China. Each of these cases reflects Lake's
view that American values and ideals should be a greater part
of the foreign policy equation, in contrast to the more
power-oriented realism that drove policy under George Bush and
James Baker.

    During the campaign, Lake was able to solicit the views of
a broad range of Democrats and unite the party behind Clinton's
foreign policy, including the neoconservatives who deserted in
1980 in favor of Ronald Reagan's tough anticommunism. The end
of the cold war made a lot of these venerable family quarrels
obsolete, so everyone, says Lake, "was surprised at how easy it
was to work together."

    That kind of unity closes a circle in Lake's own career,
which started with a Foreign Service posting to Vietnam in 1962,
when the Democratic Party was last united around Kennedy's
muscular internationalism. "I was a true believer," Lake says,
convinced that taking the anticommunist struggle to developing
countries was a noble cause. He rose meteorically in the Foreign
Service but concluded that the Vietnam War was being lost
because that country's realities were being ignored in favor of
abstractions about dominoes and national prestige. When the U.S.
invaded Cambodia in 1970, he resigned as Henry Kissinger's
special assistant.

    Lake has thought deeply about this painful period, and
concludes that "the test of your seriousness about pursuing a
policy is the sense of realism and practicality you bring to
it." A policymaker must ponder the impact of tough decisions on
the lives of individuals on the ground, he says, "because if you
don't, you're going to make mistakes, and you may end up killing
people to no end."

    Could a man of Lake's talents and sensibilities refuse to
serve if the new President asked? Lake gives no definitive
answer. He vowed that he would throw his campaign-issued car
phone into his pond once the election was over. He can't bring
himself to fix his broken fax machine, but -- at least so far
-- he's kept the phone dry.