Clinton’s draft dodge - 11 February 1994

Last Tuesday morning, I woke-up and according to my inflexible custom looked at once over the obituaries to see, as a rascally old friend of mine used to say, to see who'd had it. And then according to custom turned to the weather page to read the forecast for the nation. For us, little old parochial New York City, it said, "Today mostly cloudy, windy, a little light snow giving a coating of perhaps an inch to parts of the Metropolitan region". Is that so?

Well, by mid-afternoon, nobody on foot or on the whirling windy highways could see beyond a yard in front of them. Eight inches had fallen in Central Park and beyond in the suburbs 10, 12 and by the time you got into the New Jersey foothills, the two BBC people I work with who have the witlessness to live out there were for the umpteenth time up to their gullets in snow banks, cars frozen or disappeared, 23 measured inches on my producer's porch – in a word another vast blizzard all the way from the far west blanketing all mobile life across 2,500 miles through New England down our coastline into Pennsylvania a coating of perhaps an inch. Regular listeners to these talks if any will have noticed down the years that I have great respect sometimes bordering on awe for the United States Weather Bureau and I am fascinated every night by their new forecasting tools not least by the wonderful satellite pictures, but where were they on Monday? Not as so much as an "oops, sorry", the weather bureau like the Duke of Wellington never apologises, never explains.

I start this way because for I suppose about a 150 million Americans, the main interest of the week has been trying to snatch a little normal comfort from a brutal mother nature just getting meals rescuing the kids from school if they ever got there, hammering away at iced locked cars, shovelling driveways, stuck on trains on ice-bound tracks, opening deserted airports to the homeless, getting ambulances along miles of ice to chains of smashed up cars and trucks operating by emergency generators in blacked out hospitals and so on and on and on all the way across the country.

In the matter of power blackouts, a young mother tells me that an old story actually happened to her and her precious six-year-old daughter, there was no power in the house, no light, luckily an oil furnace but they sat in the evening with candles and an old hurricane lamp oil again and tot wanted to watch the telly. Her mother said "there's no electricity, silly", and do you believe it the six-year-old came smartly through with the classic response, "but our teacher said if Thomas Edison had not discovered electricity, we'd have to watch television by candlelight".

But if there's one place in America that will proceed as usual through flood and fire, wind and rain, blizzards and hurricanes and a tactical nuclear exchange I shouldn't wonder, it's the White House and there were big doings there, one or two of which might be seen at the end of 1996 to have been the issue that sustained or ended the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton. After a great deal of thought and tossing the issue back and forth between himself and every sort of aide and advisor, President Clinton announced that the United States would now lift the 21-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam and pretty soon he made it clear, the United States would resume normal diplomatic relations.

This was a surprising thing to do, we've grown so used in the 20 years since the war ended with the idea of Vietnam as the perpetual if inactive enemy, much more so than say Germany was to Britons and the French between the two wars. Vietnam is unique in many ways, but to Americans pronouncing the very name is like tolling a bell, the only war they ever lost, two presidents couldn't believe it while they were losing it and most people still wince at the memory of it especially the men now ageing baby boomers who were in it, and there is the special rub for Mr Clinton.

No randomly picked 100 Americans will ever agree about young Bill Clinton's behaviour in not serving in the Vietnam War. It was a very touchy topic during the 1992 presidential campaign, he maintained he had not avoided the draft though there were documents and requests on his side, four documents that somehow or other sufficed to release him from the draft or, say, see to it that he was not called. He himself gave an explanation of his feelings, his number was coming up while he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and I remember a letter he wrote to his closest friend, which to me and others closed the matter, he'd given the whole thing a racking amount of thought, his conscience was deeply involved he decided the war was indefensible, he was against it. So were many others, sincere young men and the, the best of them didn't skip to Canada to avoid the draft, they stayed home and declared themselves conscientious objectors.

I wish Bill Clinton had done that but then, if when he was 20, 21 years old he had any ambition to go into politics, he must have known that an entry in his record of conscientious objection would have been a political death warrant. As it is, even when he was president, he was often greeted by claques and little marching squads carrying signs saying "draft dodger". He had a particularly rough time when he went on Veterans Day a year ago to the great wall in Washington, the Vietnam memorial, which is so simple and massive and blank and moving with the inscription of the names of 58,000 men who died. President Clinton came out of that that rather awful heckling with a lot of grace and the visible support of the chiefs of staff and that was probably decisive in marking a new and confident turn in his relations with the military, which for the reasons I've given you can imagine were very delicate at the start. By now anyway, the president has the confidence to end the embargo to urge American firms to get busy trading with the old triumphant enemy and there was only a flutter of protesting recall, perhaps finally Vietnam has been put aside.

However, what has not been put aside what burns still like one of those memorial eternal flames is the knowledge of what in retrospect looks like a great deception, namely two presidents – Kennedy and Johnson – went on assuring us for together four years that the only Americans going to Vietnam were technicians and military advisors.

I remember President Johnson was protesting the truth of that on a very day when I discovered only lately a 125,000 American men, soldiers, were there. It's the fear that any military intervention anywhere could lead to another Vietnam, that's to say a president might say, "we're putting in a limited force but it might helplessly grow to the half million that went to Vietnam". This lingering neurosis is I suspect at the root of what has appeared till now to many Europeans and Americans to be a dithering American policy on Bosnia. After the obscenity of that mortar explosion last weekend, Senator Dole, the Republicans leader in the Senate, came out in favour of air strikes and that really put the president on the spot, it called for an agonised review of all the factors he'd been weighing.

First, he'd constantly been reminded by the French that there's no call for Americans to preach morality, so long as they have no men on the ground under UN command. Air strikes, the prospect here reinforcing the main fear was and is that 100,000 surrounding Serbs would retaliate against the 20,000 United Nations ground troops who are lightly armed, not equipped – never were – for a war. Even if the strikes are mounted, the sanction is there in a United Nations resolution, there lurks – or rather loomed – this week, the formidable figure of Boris Yeltsin who in public anyway believes that the infamous mortar was fired by the Bosnians. In the United Nations, the Russians irate at the thought that the embargo against sending weapons to the Bosnians might be lifted.

I don't think we'd realised until now the strength of the Russian feeling about the Serbs as their allies, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations said even a threat of force against the Serbs might ruin the chances of peace and what he had in mind was underlined in more cold-blooded terms by the Russian Foreign Minister Mr Kosirev. Any air strike, he said, would, quote, "cast a very dark shadow over our relationship" and if that's happened, a Westerner might think that Mr Kosirev was speaking for Balkan he added, I should guess it would have to be under instruction a most remarkably serious sentence, a recollection no less of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. "Don't forget," he said, "that once in 1914 a provocation was staged in Sarajevo when a similar horrible act of terror became the cause of a global tragedy." Add that unsatisfactory element to the others and you leave Mr Clinton with a triple dilemma even if and when the ultimatum expires.

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