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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > March > 23 > Entry
Martin Gottlieb: Christopher knew how to handle Holbrooke in Dayton
In the last moments of the touch-and-go Dayton peace talks about Bosnia in 1995, the holdout was the Bosnian Muslim government, not the Serbs or Croats.
At a pivotal point, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said this to the Bosnian leader:
“Mr. President, I am truly disappointed at the fuzzy, unrealistic and sloppy manner in which you and your delegation have approached this negotiation…. (W)e must
have your answer in an hour. If you say no, we will announce in the morning that the Dayton peace talks have been closed down.”
Anybody familiar with Christopher’s public image knows that when he said “fuzzy,” “unrealistic” and, worst of all, “sloppy,” he was swearing.
Besides being a strikingly fastidious, impeccable dresser, a man whose bearing and appearance bespoke perpetual self-discipline, he was precise to a fault in his thinking and speaking. He was not one to say things he had to take back or to overstate.
If you go by the image, though, he was also not one to speak so undiplomatically. But he could do it in the crunch.
Christopher has been something of an invisible man in the history of the talks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that ended the Bosnian war. That’s understandable.
The talks were the brainchild of then-Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke. His ultimate boss was President Bill Clinton. Both of those men have been seriously honored in Dayton.
To add a third honoree would be pushing it. And Christopher, who died over the weekend at 85, wasn’t very visible.
However, anybody who reads Holbrooke’s book, “To End a War,” from which the quote above is taken, knows that Christopher’s role was substantial.
He approved Holbrooke’s call for a peace conference in this country. The first instinct of most in the Clinton administration — perhaps including Christopher — was that the risks of failure were too high. Holbrooke had to do some convincing.
Christopher decided not to attend the talks regularly. He thought his presence would be an invitation to others of his rank to attend — foreign ministers from Russia, the European Union and maybe even Britain, France and Germany. That would have been too many bigwigs with speeches.
But, after being here for the opening, he returned repeatedly at crucial moments. His job was to pressure the various presidents from the Balkans to break through various roadblocks. His presence was designed to make sure that everybody understood that this wasn’t merely a Holbrooke thing, but that Clinton was engaged and had strong views about how it ought to come out.
Before Dayton, Holbrooke and Christopher had been considered professional rivals. Reporters had written about tensions between them. They were opposites in style, Holbrooke being the colorful personality, the outside-the-box big thinker, and Christopher the conservative lawyer.
On Bosnia, though, Christopher told Holbrooke, “I’m not always sure what you are doing or why. But you always seem to have a reason, and it seems to work. So I’m quite content to go along with your instincts.”
That understates his own knowledge of the subject, which was intense. He was instrumental long before the talks, when the dicey Croat-Muslim “Federation” was created. It’s now half the country, with the other half being the Serb entity.
But things had gone horribly in Bosnia for Christopher and everybody else before Dayton. Washington and the United Nations had been laughably ineffective. The Clinton administration was being accused of cowardice. A couple of diplomats had quit the State Department in anger. Three others — people close to Christopher and Holbrooke — had died when a military vehicle they were in tumbled off a cliff.
Christopher needed something. So did Clinton, who had all manner of other problems. (The Dayton talks coincided with the government-shutdown crisis over budgetary matters.)
Before Christopher was secretary of state, he was chosen to deliver the news to Taiwan that President Jimmy Carter was recognizing what was then called Red China. And he was the administration’s point man in the fight for ratification of a Panama Canal treaty opposed by Ronald Reagan. And he was the chief negotiator in the Iranian hostage crisis under Carter.
Tough assignments.
(Later he was Al Gore’s top representative in Florida for the fight after the 2000 election.)
So he knew something about people in Holbrooke’s position and their need for support from Washington.
He had a long career, with ups and downs. He did not emerge as a legendary or pivotal figure.
But he was not afraid to let others emerge.
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