Clinton's People

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.