This is an excerpt from National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger's interview for the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project. You can read his and others' interviews in their entirety at millercenter.org/president/cli....
Excerpt transcript:
"...when you are committing American troops into harm’s way, it’s an awesome responsibility, and you want to be right. You know some of them are not going to come home. That’s what separates those who have sat in the chair and those who have sat across the table from the President. I think the President in the beginning had a tendency to second guess himself until we actually got to the point where we were moving, and then he would be fine.
I compare Haiti, where up to the end I was getting phone calls from the President saying, “What makes you think that when we drop these soldiers in Haiti that they’re not going to be ambushed?” Those kinds of questions had already been resolved-to Kosovo where the President said, “We’re going to stop this from happening. We’re going to do what it takes. We’re going to convince NATO.” Tony Blair is given a lot of the credit for Kosovo, but Blair did not convince Clinton. They were basically together in their determination to stop this from happening. He was solid as a rock. We had a 78-day bombing campaign in Kosovo, which nobody except Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, Madeleine Albright, Bill Cohen, and our spouses believed would work.