NYT: Questions arise about Hillary's 'experience' as First Lady

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NYT: Questions arise about Hillary's 'experience' as First Lady

Clinton�s R�sum� Factor: Those 8 Years as First Lady
By PATRICK HEALY

As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton jaw-boned the authoritarian president of Uzbekistan to leave his car and shake hands with people. She argued with the Czech prime minister about democracy. She cajoled Roman Catholic and Protestant women to talk to one another in Northern Ireland. She traveled to 79 countries in total, little of it leisure; one meeting with mutilated Rwandan refugees so unsettled her that she threw up afterward.

But during those two terms in the White House, Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president�s daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda.

And during one of President Bill Clinton�s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled.

In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her �eight years with a front-row seat on history.�

An interview with Mrs. Clinton, conversations with 35 Clinton administration officials and a review of books about her White House years suggest that she was more of a sounding board than a policy maker, who learned through osmosis rather than decision-making, and who grew gradually more comfortable with the use of military power.

Her time in the White House was a period of transition in foreign policy and national security, with the cold war over and the threat of Islamic terrorism still emerging. As a result, while in the White House, she was never fully a part of either the old school that had been focused on the Soviet Union and the possibility of nuclear war or the more recent strain of national security thinking defined by issues like nonstate threats and the proliferation of nuclear technology.

Associates from that time said that she was aware of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and what her husband has in recent years characterized as his intense focus on them, but that she made no aggressive independent effort to shape policy or gather information about the threat of terrorism.

She did not wrestle directly with many of the other challenges the next president will face, including managing a large-scale deployment � or withdrawal � of troops abroad, an overhaul of the intelligence agencies or the effort to halt the spread of nuclear weapons technology.

Asked to name three major foreign policy decisions where she played a decisive role as first lady, Mrs. Clinton responded in generalities more than specifics, describing her strategic roles on trips to Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, India, Africa and Latin America.

Asked to cite a significant foreign policy object lesson from the 1990s, Mrs. Clinton also replied with broad observations. �There are a lot of them,� she said. �The whole unfortunate experience we�ve had with the Bush administration, where they haven�t done what we�ve needed to do to reach out to the rest of the world, reinforces my experience in the 1990s that public diplomacy, showing respect and understanding of people�s different perspectives � it�s more likely to at least create the conditions where we can exercise our values and pursue our interests.�

Susan Rice, a National Security Council senior aide and State Department official under Mr. Clinton who now advises Mr. Obama, said Mrs. Clinton was not involved in �the heavy lifting of foreign policy.� Ms. Rice also took issue with a recent comment by a Clinton campaign official that Mrs. Clinton was �the face of the administration in foreign affairs.�

�Making tough decisions, responding to crises, making the bureaucracy implement decisions that they may not want to implement � that�s the hard part of foreign policy,� Ms. Rice said. �That�s not what Mrs. Clinton was asked or expected to do as first lady.�

Mrs. Clinton said she was �only tangentially involved� in Mr. Clinton�s first major overseas test, whether to send American soldiers after the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his forces, a raid that ended in 18 American deaths. Asked if she had pressed for an invasion, she said she had acted �more as a sounding board� for Mr. Clinton.

The same was true during the military confrontation in Haiti in 1994, over restoring the exiled president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, which she favored and drew lessons from about joint command of American armed forces.

Asked about her role in Somalia and Haiti, Mr. Christopher said in an interview, �She wasn�t at any of the meetings in the Oval Office or cabinet room, and didn�t take any formal role that I saw.� Mr. Christopher is supporting Mrs. Clinton for president.

Nor was Mrs. Clinton a memorable player on Rwanda. Former White House officials say that no one � not the national security team, not the president, not the first lady � was seriously pushing for American military intervention to stop or slow the unfolding genocide there; the administration�s focus was on confronting the ethnic bloodshed in the Balkans. Mrs. Clinton declined to comment on Rwanda.

Read Full Article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/us/politics/26clinton.html?hp