*EPF407 04/20/00
Transcript: Jamie Rubin Interviewed on the PBS Charlie Rose Show
(Outgoing State Dept. Spokesman discusses his career, future) (6430)
(Permission has been obtained covering republication/translation of the text, (including from the usinfo.state.gov web site on the Internet) by USIS/press outside the U.S. On title page, carry: courtesy of "CHARLIE ROSE"/PBS.)
Outgoing State Department Spokesman Jamie Rubin says he is looking forward to moving to London to be with his wife, CNN Correspondent Christiane Amanpour, and their newborn son.
In an interview late evening April 18 with Charlie Rose of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), Rubin said it is the "right time" for him to move on, although he has very much enjoyed working for the last seven years with Madeleine Albright, first as her spokesperson when she was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and then, in the same capacity, when she became Secretary of State.
"One of the great things about my job is that I've woken up in the morning excited about this work and feeling like I had a contribution to make and I had an opportunity to make the contribution," Rubin said.
He said he had not yet decided on what he would do next professionally but it would most likely involve international relations in some way.
"I obviously believe very strongly in what goes on around the world," he said. "And so I want to find a way to involve myself in that. You know, the private sector beckons. The media world beckons. The potential future in the business of government beckons and I have to find a way to put that together with the same level of enthusiasm and excitement that I've had for this job."
Rubin said the reason he feels he has been able to be successful is because he was "driven, determined, and had a desire. And right now there is nothing that is jumping out at me, except the desire to spend a few months at home with my wife and my baby."
During the interview, Rubin discussed his close relationship with Albright, and the relations among members of Clinton's foreign policy team. He also discussed in some detail the events leading up to the war in Kosovo, and current developments in that part of the world.
Following is the PBS transcript:
(begin transcript)
This transcript has not been checked against videotape and cannot, for that reason, be guaranteed as to accuracy of speakers and spelling of names. (DSM)
CHARLIE ROSE Transcript #2663
April 18, 2000
CHARLIE ROSE, Host: Welcome to the broadcast.
Tonight a look at a job in the eye of the storm, reflections from the outgoing State Department spokesman, JAMES RUBIN.
CHARLIE ROSE: Jamie Rubin has had the good fortune to be an eyewitness to history. This comes with the turf when you are assistant secretary of state and spokesperson for the State Department and when you have worked for seven years with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, formerly the U.N. ambassador. He has been at her side through the good times and through some tough times. This was especially true when Secretary Albright tackled difficult relations with Russia and China, and particularly the events leading up to the war in Kosovo.
As President Clinton's administration comes to an end, critics are already beginning to assess this administration's foreign policy. We'll talk about that and other issues with James "Jamie" Rubin as he prepares to move to London to join his wife, the well-known international correspondent for CNN, Christiane Amanpour, and also their new baby son.
This is the first in a series of conversations we intend to have with this administration's policy makers and, hopefully, including the president himself.
We begin this conversation with Jamie Rubin and the obvious question, which is, why are you leaving, and why now?
JAMES RUBIN, Assistant Secretary of State, Spokesman for U.S. Department of State: Well, I've been doing what I've been doing for a long, long time, and I have to say it's been an extremely rewarding and extremely challenging but also brutally tiring experience. And it so happened that this moment coincided with the arrival of our son, and he's now 3 weeks old.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes? Doing well, we hope.
JAMES RUBIN: Doing very well. It's more than anyone can tell you when the boy actually arrives. And my wife is going to need to go back to work, and so I'm going to take up a little bit of the duties for a few months and --
CHARLIE ROSE: Is this a Tony-Blair-like decision for you?
JAMES RUBIN: Well, I'm not sure whether Tony Blair will like it or not like it --
CHARLIE ROSE: Isn't going to give up the prime-ministership, but -- he's at least saying "I'm going to go take care of my" --
JAMES RUBIN: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: -- "baby when it comes."
JAMES RUBIN: No, I'm going to spend a few months at home, living in the same house, in the same city with my wife and now our new son. So it seemed to me like the right time, and there's never a great time, given how exciting and rewarding a job like this can be, but this seemed like the right time for me.
CHARLIE ROSE: We're going to talk about this in detail, but just off the top of your head, what has been the best moment for you, and what's been the worst moment for you?
JAMES RUBIN: Boy --
CHARLIE ROSE: It's not only four years, it's really eight years because of the U.N. thing, but the focus, when you've been the spokesperson up front to so many television cameras has been at stake.
JAMES RUBIN: Well, I would say some of the hardest moments for me in my time as spokesman dealing with 24-hour news coverage, intense scrutiny of the media, was during the first couple of weeks after we began the bombing in Kosovo -- in Serbia because of what the Serbs were doing in Kosovo. And the initial effect was clearly to intensify the Serb attacks on the Kosovars, and there were these hundreds of thousands of people moving out of Kosovo at the barrel of a gun and being forced into refugee camps -- terrible stories of atrocities. That was certainly a low point.
A high point, I think, just in one case, Kosovo again, was the capitulation of Slobodan Milosevic and the vindication of a policy that we believed was the best of the alternatives available to us and that achieved the objectives -- I remember every day going out there -- "Serb forces out of Kosovo, refugees back, NATO in." And I said it about a thousand times, till the journalists were quite bored with it, but that's exactly what we achieved. And that was really quite a moment. In Cologne, I remember being with Secretary Albright when we knew that he really had capitulated and had given up trying to mess around with the details.
CHARLIE ROSE: I don't have to remind you that he is still in power, that the -- that what is going on on the ground is tenuous. There's some questions about what former KLA members are doing in terms of violence and what risk it might be for peacekeepers and how many peacekeepers are necessary.
JAMES RUBIN: Well, we went into this with our eyes open. We didn't expect Kosovo to become Switzerland overnight. This is a society riven by an apartheid-like system in which the Kosovar Albanians lived for -- since 1989, prior to that under a pure communist system. And so we're helping the Kosovars to for the first time in their history have democracy. And there's going to be a free and fair election, we hope, this fall.
Yes, there are problems in Kosovo, and the problems shouldn't mean that we cut and run. The problems mean we have to redouble our efforts because what we did there was one of the most important symbols of why America is the most respected country in the world, and that is, we did what was right, even if it was not convenient, even if it was not easy, even if it had negative effects on our relations with other countries. But we did what was right and what was in our interest.
And now we need to stick to it and make it work, recognizing that it's going to take a long, long time before Kosovo meets the standards of democracy and economic development that we hope for it.
CHARLIE ROSE: What's happened to your -- the man that you spent some early time with, Thaqi? How do we pronounce it?
JAMES RUBIN: Thaqi.
CHARLIE ROSE: Thaqi. Yes. Where is he, and what's happened with him? Because in that arena, you moved out of the role of just being a spokesman and also into the role of being a kind of negotiator and a kind of introducer of someone on the ground to the ways of media and -- and nation-building.
JAMES RUBIN: Well, I met Mr. Thaqi at the peace talks in Rambouillet, in which we were determined to get the Kosovar Albanians to agree to a peace agreement. If we couldn't have achieved that, we never could have lined up international support to confront Milosevic with the potential use of force. And it wasn't easy.
He was from a liberation movement that wanted independence. He was not the most powerful player at the time --
CHARLIE ROSE: And he was said by some to be a thug.
JAMES RUBIN: Well, look, in liberation movements in that part of the world, you're usually not dealing with saints. And he was someone who had to develop money, fund-raise, get money for a cause, risk a great deal of his personal safety in order to pursue this case. And that often involves what you might call illegal activities to operate in a communist society.
Nevertheless, he tried very hard after the war to work with us, and he lived up to his part of the bargain. And my first diplomatic mission was in the spring of '99, was to go to Kosovo, to meet with him in his mountain hideaway and meet with all the rebel leaders and their sector commanders and help them to make the decision they promised, which was to demilitarize.
And if you go around the world, Charlie -- you've had shows on almost every topic in the world -- there is -- if I'm not mistaken, there is no case where a rebel movement, and a victorious one, has given up their weaponry, their army, their uniforms in a matter of a few months. We're still trying to get that to happen in many places -- [crosstalk] -- and in Angola and all of these places around the world.
So they did take the step that we asked them to take, but --
CHARLIE ROSE: But are you saying, though -- are you saying that they've pretty much done what would be expected of them, if you look at the history of rebel movements giving up arms, so we shouldn't expect more than they have done so far and that whatever activities they have engaged in in terms of -- of real acts of violence against Serbians should be excused?
JAMES RUBIN: On the contrary. What I'm saying is how rare it is for a rebel movement to give up weaponry so quickly. They did that. That was my first mission.
The second mission was last month, and that was a very different mission, and that was one where Secretary Albright and the president sent me and Ambassador Hill from the White House to Kosovo. And our message was different that time. Our message to Mr. Thaqi, to Dr. Rugova and to the -- all of the Kosovar Albanian leaders was disappointment, that we were profoundly disappointed with their failure to use all the abilities they have, all of the persuasiveness they have, all the energy they have to stop Albanians from committing retribution against Serbs.
But when we talk about this, and as disappointed as we are and as clear as I was in condemning that, we have to remember there's a big, big difference of retribution violence than an organized campaign of mass murder and mass expulsion by the state, which is what Slobodan Milosevic and his regime have done.
There is violence. There is retribution that's unacceptable to us. And I went there, and I condemned it, and I looked Mr. Thaqi and Dr. Rugova and all the leaders in the eye and said, "Those of us who worked so hard to help you are disappointed."
CHARLIE ROSE: Well, the assumption is, rightly or wrongly -- and you can tell us -- it is it's more former members of the KLA than it is people that had been supportive of Dr. Rugova.
JAMES RUBIN: Well, look, Dr. Rugova has widespread popular support. Mr. Thaqi has developed a political party, and it tends to be amongst those who picked up arms and fought the Serbs. And so yes, there is more of a problem with organized violence amongst the KLA, but Dr. Rugova and Mr. Thaqi have an equal responsibility. Dr. Rugova has moral authority in Kosovo.
And what I was saying to him and to Mr. Thaqi equally was "Use whatever leverage you have to stop this" because it's people doing this. It's not an organized system of violence in the same way that it was with Milosevic. And if Dr. Rugova and Mr. Thaqi and Dr. Qosja and all of the leaders don't use every ounce of their energy to stop this, they will harm their relations with the United States.
CHARLIE ROSE: Speaking of Mr. Hill, who has the admiration of a lot of people for his work there, and who you mentioned, Clint Hill -- is he leaving to become ambassador to another country?
JAMES RUBIN: Yes, I think that's been announced. Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK. I wasn't sure whether it had been announced or not. I -- the country's Poland or not?
JAMES RUBIN: I'm -- I'm not sure if it's been announced.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK. Don't we need him there with -- as tentative as that situation is, isn't that where he ought to be? And why shouldn't he remain there?
JAMES RUBIN: Well, what we've found over the years is that -- he's going to Poland.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
JAMES RUBIN: He's not going to Siberia. And Poland is very close to the Balkans. And what we've found over the years is many of our ambassadors in that part of the world can use the ties they develop in their countries to work on the similar issues. Let's face it, what we need in Serbia is to get the leaders of the opposition to work in as synchronized and effective a way against Milosevic as the leaders of Solidarity worked against communism. And so there's plenty of overlap in that part of the world.
CHARLIE ROSE: All right. Let me pull back to a wider consideration. What do you -- what's the best we can now hope for in Kosovo? And does that make it a successful policy?
JAMES RUBIN: First of all, what we can hope for -- hope for, not expect, but hope for --
CHARLIE ROSE: Expect is next.
JAMES RUBIN: Right -- hope for is that over time, as the months and years go by, that the people of Kosovo will put aside their anger, their retribution and their frustration with their neighbors or their -- members of other ethnic groups and focus on the rebuilding of that society from the damage done by the Serbs and also focus on, for the first time in their history, having the ability to govern themselves through free and fair elections. That's what we can hope for.
What we can expect is that that will happen, probably more slowly than we hope, but that it will be accompanied by continued violence, by continued acts of violence that need to be contained.
CHARLIE ROSE: And will it necessarily, in the end, result in partition?
JAMES RUBIN: No, there won't be partition. You know, people talk about partition in Kosovo over and over again because they remember Bosnia. And I've been asked this question I think by you, even, the last time I was here.
Kosovo's administrative boundaries are the boundaries that NATO is enforcing. And when I say that there's violence in Kosovo, let's bear in mind this is relatively minimal violence compared to what we're talking about in many other parts of the world. The crime rate, the actual murder rate, is roughly the same as many Western cities.
So we have a lot of journalists there, a lot of international spotlight focused on every act that occurs in Kosovo because we have our troops there and because the international spotlight has been there. But it's not a society that has a violence like Chechnya or like other places around the world. There are problems, big problems, and we have to work on them.
CHARLIE ROSE: Milosevic.
JAMES RUBIN: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: How long will he be in power?
JAMES RUBIN: That's unknowable. You know, hope is easy in the case of Milosevic. We've done a lot in recent weeks and months to work with the opposition. We saw a very important rally last week, where over 100,000 people gathered in Belgrade, made clear that it's Milosevic who's forced the people of Serbia to live as badly as they live, and only the removal of Milosevic will allow them to -- to enter Europe.
I mean, let's remember this man has lost five wars -- Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo. All of those places that the Serbs used to have a connection to are now severed because of Slobodan Milosevic. The people know that, but they haven't yet decided to do all that's necessary to deal with --
CHARLIE ROSE: Which -- which raises this interesting question --
JAMES RUBIN: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: -- and I'm not sure if there's an answer and whether we would get any -- anybody who would believe that there was more the United States could have done, and I don't know what it might have been. But during the most severe imposition of pain from the bombing on his administration in Serbia, was there ever an opportunity to do something so that you wouldn't face the reality of him continuing in power?
JAMES RUBIN: Well, there --
CHARLIE ROSE: And -- and --
JAMES RUBIN: The legal point here, obviously, is that assassination is not something that this government can do, by executive order.
CHARLIE ROSE: And there was never a possibility of any kind of negotiation to get him out of power and say, "Look, there's a plane that'll take you somewhere?"
JAMES RUBIN: There -- there has never been any indication that I'm aware of -- a serious indication -- there's always rumors, but a serious indication that he's ready to leave power. But look, his day will come. You go around the world, and you see that people like Milosevic don't last as long as they think they will. And slowly, slowly, the opposition is getting stronger. The Europeans and us are united that we're not going to have normal relations with Serbia so long as he's there. And that will mean that some day he will go, and we'll have to see when that is.
CHARLIE ROSE: Since you have already suggested Kosovo was an important part of --
JAMES RUBIN: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: -- what you did, let me go back to Rambouillet. Was that a success? Will history consider that a success?
JAMES RUBIN: Well, it's funny. You have to think about Rambouillet -- you know, the usual sentence, "the failed peace talks"--
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
JAMES RUBIN: -- is the way everybody writes about it. But I think that's not a serious historical analysis of what happened there, and maybe some day I'll write about it myself. Probably, the mistake we made is not being clear enough with the world that we didn't expect to get agreement from the Serbs and the Albanians --
CHARLIE ROSE: Because the argument is the Albanians were there with some serious purpose, and the Serbians were just --
JAMES RUBIN: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: -- having fun.
JAMES RUBIN: But let's bear in mind what situation we were in then. And people forget the context. Context matters in big historical events. The context was that our European allies were not prepared to confront Milosevic with force.
And the only thing that convinced them to confront Milosevic with force was the fact that the Albanians signed a peace agreement, that they were turned from the bad guys who were starting this conflict, provoking war, seeking independence, criminals, drug dealers -- all of that we heard over and over again in European circles.
And we turned that fear of Albanians into support for Albanians as a result of the signing of a peace agreement. They became the ones that chose peace, and that's what allowed us to operate through NATO and confront Milosevic with the inevitable force that was necessary when he began and continued his ethnic cleansing campaign.
So our internal goal was not to get a peace agreement at Rambouillet. We had very low expectations of that.
CHARLIE ROSE: So Rambouillet, in your judgment, was not another Dayton.
JAMES RUBIN: It was never intended to be another Dayton. If we wanted another Dayton, we would have invited all the parties to Washington or to Bolling Air Force base or to some other place.
CHARLIE ROSE: Was this Madeleine's war, as they said?
JAMES RUBIN: You know, what I loved about it, it was Madeleine's war when it was going bad, and when it was successful, then somehow everyone forgot that. And so I can't really answer that question other than to say that Secretary Albright was convinced very early on that the only way to confront Slobodan Milosevic was through the threat and, if necessary, the use of force. And she certainly was instrumental in organizing the NATO alliance behind this logic that I just went through with you.
But this was the president, Secretary Albright, and Secretary Cohen who made these decisions, and it was their victory, all of them.
CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me about this relationship you have with her. I mean, are like a son to her? Is she a great friend of yours? It's more than a secretary of state and assistant secretary of state who happens to be her out-front spokesperson.
JAMES RUBIN: Well, you know, the family analogies we're all getting a little tired of.
CHARLIE ROSE: You mean both of you?
JAMES RUBIN: She gets the question too. I get the question. It's not an appropriate thought. What we are is we are friends. And she is obviously older than I am and more experienced than I am, but we spend an enormous amount of time together.
We were on a 24-hour, seven day a week work load that involved traveling all over the world. And most of the time, in the first term, I was the only one traveling with her. And so we spent time together. We have the same sense of humor. We're friends. We like to do the same things in our downtime -- go to the movies. And we became very good friends. We became allies, friends. And she'll always be my friend.
CHARLIE ROSE: I had a friend of mine tell me that she would not have been secretary of state without you.
JAMES RUBIN: Look --
CHARLIE ROSE: That because of your artful handling of her image as U.N. ambassador, she became secretary of state.
JAMES RUBIN: Let me say this -- I'm flattered and I want to thank your friend for that thought. But the fact is that Madeline Albright was a named U.N. ambassador, a part of the president's team and worked very, very hard for those four years to prove to the world that she was the best diplomat the president could choose. And the president made that decision based on her skills and not about what was in the newspapers.
CHARLIE ROSE: There was a piece in The Washington Post written by John Lancaster, which I am sure must have driven you -- I can't imagine how quick your hand was on the phone to talk to Mr. Lancaster after he wrote this piece -- for good reason. You don't want anybody --
But here is one of the things he said. Now I just want your influence. I mean, just take it for what it says.
"Three years ago, Albright was at the top of her game; a blunt-spoken, former Georgetown University professor with a reputation for wearing outside broachees" -- broaches, maybe -- "and staring down dictators. Today her influence is much diminished, eroded by rival agencies and the White House and undercut by criticism of her outspoken, sometimes schoolmarmish, style."
This is dated March 28, 2000.
JAMES RUBIN: Charlie, Washington can be a pretty tough town. Just for your amusement I'll tell you where I was when that happened, because --
CHARLIE ROSE: I hope you were on your -- I don't know. Go ahead. Tell me.
JAMES RUBIN: March 27th was the birth of our son and I spent the night in the hospital with my wife. And I went home in the morning to change my clothes. It turned out that March 28th was my 40th birthday. So there I was spending my 40th birthday changing my clothes from the birth of my son, which was the biggest event that had occurred since my marriage and a transforming event, and I see this piece of you-know-what sitting on my doorstep. And I have to sit down and read it.
This was the kind of article that really has given journalism a bad name. And what was funny to me is even as I was trying to formulate what would be the criticism that I could make to Mr. Lancaster, some journalist himself went out on one of these computer Internet magazines called Slate and wrote the most devastating critique of this article that I've ever seen. I couldn't even match his eloquence.
CHARLIE ROSE: It appeared where? In Slate?
JAMES RUBIN: In Slate.
CHARLIE ROSE: Michael Kinsley's online magazine.
JAMES RUBIN: Yeah. It was written by a guy named Jack Shafer. And what it basically said is this is the oldest trick in the book. You pile together a bunch of anonymous sources, none of whom will go on the record except for one guy who went on the record a year ago saying he didn't like the secretary.
CHARLIE ROSE: This is Peter Krogh?
JAMES RUBIN: Right. By that, you concoct a cocktail party chatter caricature of what government is really like. And it seems to me that one rule of journalism used to be that if you got something negative to say, you don't get in the paper unless you are going on the record. And what Jack Shafer coined in his response was this great concept. He called The Washington Post's article an example of how a new species of Washingtonian was created. It is called the Washington coward. The person who will only say critical things, but will say them on background -- at cocktail parties, in gossip -- and won't go on the record and make these points.
In the old days --
CHARLIE ROSE: You wouldn't do that, would you?
JAMES RUBIN: Nothing -- not negative. That's not the game that I play. The game that I play is to present the administration's views in as positive a light, deflect negative criticism. But my point is that this was -- yes, it was a tough piece of journalism, but it wasn't a good piece of journalism.
CHARLIE ROSE: Let me move to finally these two questions. Is the secretary of state your friend, mentor, other things, who it has been a terrific relationship; it has worked for both of you. You've had a chance to be eyewitness to history. You've had a chance to help her, explain her to the world. And you've had a chance to sit there and see things.
She, on the other hand, has had someone that she trusted. And by God, in Washington and in the world that you deal in, trust, as you say, is like loyalty, you know, it's hard to find. Right?
JAMES RUBIN: You've got it.
CHARLIE ROSE: Having said that, is she going to become the president of Czechoslovakia?
JAMES RUBIN: No chance of that. There's no chance of that.
CHARLIE ROSE: Was that ever -- did she, for a moment -- a tiny moment -- because she had a great patron --
JAMES RUBIN: Right, Vaclav Havel.
CHARLIE ROSE: Vaclav Havel.
JAMES RUBIN: I mean, imagine her, the great hero, a world historical figure, Vaclav Havel, says "I want you to replace me in the land of your birth as president of Czechoslovakia." Of course she was flattered. Of course she was stunned and impressed by it all. But one thing I've learned in all the time I've been with her -- and it's been coined in some of the articles written about her -- "thoroughly American Madeline." There's no aspect of her personality that's more clear than the pride she feels and the thanks she gives to the American people for allowing her to come here, to grow up as a free American and then to become a Czech-born--
CHARLIE ROSE: And so what does she do after this over?
JAMES RUBIN: Minister? I don't know. I'll recommend that she go on your show and tell you.
CHARLIE ROSE: Well, I would hope so since you have not been very good about putting her on this show as you have on those silly little Sunday morning programs.
JAMES RUBIN: I have too. Well, come down to Washington.
CHARLIE ROSE: All right. Let me stay with this. One, is her relationship with Sandy Berger, was it good? Was it positive? Did it work?
JAMES RUBIN: Absolutely. You know, I've watched the two of them interact and some days they might be on the phone 30, 35 times. I mean, it's a stunning level of cooperation.
CHARLIE ROSE: Better than we've seen in a long time?
JAMES RUBIN: I think you can't find an example that good in recent foreign policy history. And what people have tried to do is because they can't break this bond between the two of them, they've tried to -- one day she's up; the next day, Sandy's up. The next day she's up.
But you've never seen the kind of friction between them --
CHARLIE ROSE: So, no competition, no jealousy? None of that?
JAMES RUBIN: Those jobs are designed to have built-in bureaucratic competition. But what they have done is try to stem that natural competition to work together in the interest of the president and in the interest of the country.
CHARLIE ROSE: Let me go back. OK, the relationship with the president of the United States. It was said about Warren Christopher by many people that he had served -- first of all, was a lawyer, had been in other administrations and, in fact, had served on the transition committee, so he was very close. I mean, this was somebody that the president depended to help him set up his government. Became secretary of state. Would write a note to the president every night before the president went to bed, which he would read.
That was a unique relationship. How unique was the relationship between Madeline Albright and the president?
JAMES RUBIN: I don't know what the relationship with Christopher and the president was and I think some of those accounts are sort of amusing in retrospect. They were written the other way when Christopher was secretary of state.
But in terms of the secretary's relationship with the president, it's as good as it could be. Even during some of the toughest times, she always felt that when she needed the president to weigh in on something that mattered to her, that he was there.
And I'll tell you an anecdote that perhaps sums it up best. The first article that was written on the front page of one of the nation's newspapers basically criticizing the secretary of state for miscalculating the war in Kosovo was this elaborate article, front page story, unsourced, of course. And it said that she predicted Milosevic would fall quickly or give up, sorry, Kosovo quickly. Which, of course, she had never done.
It went on to basically have a number of different officials, unsourced, criticizing her. We're about two or three weeks into the war and obviously it's not going perfectly. The refugees keep pouring out; Milosevic is showing no signs of giving up at that time. And it was a tough moment.
The president took her aside that night and said, "Madeline, I read the newspapers for facts. There were no facts in that article." That was a pretty genuine, perfect thing to say; the kind of thing that you can only say when you have a close relationship.
I remember he called her the night the bombing started. I'm giving you examples from Kosovo because it's an area where I know more of the examples; I feel more comfortable. But that applies --
CHARLIE ROSE: He calls the night the bombing started and said -- ?
JAMES RUBIN: And they talked for a while. And they talked about how they had gone the extra mile, they had tried every diplomatic means but Milosevic obviously was determined to continue this ethnic cleansing campaign. And they sort of cheered each other up that they had made the right decision knowing the momentous nature of that decision.
CHARLIE ROSE: Holbrooke. Ambassador Holbrooke?
JAMES RUBIN: Yes? I mean, people love doing this. There was some article --
CHARLIE ROSE: What do you mean doing what? What am I doing?
JAMES RUBIN: You know what you're doing. And there was some article one day in the paper that said he and I had this fight.
CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly. I read that. Just today I read that.
JAMES RUBIN: Look, Richard Holbrooke is an excellent diplomat. I am working with him time and time again. Of course, between any two people occasionally of different views, of tactics, maybe in the huddle you get together and you argue. But once the huddle breaks --
CHARLIE ROSE: Once the quarterback calls the signals or what?
JAMES RUBIN: And the play has been called by the secretary of state and the president, we work together very well.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK. You. You're going to London. You're going to take care of that extraordinary young son you have, who's now how old? How many days?
JAMES RUBIN: Three weeks yesterday.
CHARLIE ROSE: So, 21 days. Your life has been at the -- where media and foreign policy come together, for the most part. Is that where you'll end up?
JAMES RUBIN: I hope so. I mean, one of the great things about my job is that I've woken up in the morning excited about this work and feeling like I had a contribution to make and I had an opportunity to make the contribution. And it's hard to imagine how that combination could be recreated, but obviously journalism is something I feel very strongly about and I believe in very strongly -- the best kind of journalism. The kind practiced by my wife, for example.
CHARLIE ROSE: And at this table, for example.
JAMES RUBIN: I'm just keeping it in the family, Charlie. And I obviously believe very strongly in what goes on around the world. And so I want to find a way to involve myself in that. You know, the private sector beckons. The media world beckons. The potential future in the business of government beckons and I have to find a way to put that together with the same level of enthusiasm and excitement that I've had for this job.
The reason why I feel I've been able to be successful is because I was driven and determined and I had a desire. And right now there is nothing that is jumping out at me, except the desire to spend a few months at home with my wife and my baby.
CHARLIE ROSE: I'm way over, but was there ever a moment that you had a conflict between what you do and what you were doing and what she was doing and what she wanted to know?
JAMES RUBIN: Absolutely.
CHARLIE ROSE: And so what did you do?
JAMES RUBIN: I did what I'm supposed to do, which is --
CHARLIE ROSE: You didn't tell her?
JAMES RUBIN: Of course not.
CHARLIE ROSE: Did this come up a lot?
JAMES RUBIN: Look, first of all, she didn't cover the state department so it was a lot easier.
CHARLIE ROSE: She was not a correspondent there. She was not a correspondent for CNN or ABC.
JAMES RUBIN: It was a lot easier than it would have been if she had been covering the state department. It would have been harder. But look, every day I have to keep things from journalists. One of the reasons I've been given this job is I tell the truth but I can't tell everything I know because that would be wrong. And so I've developed very good skills at avoiding difficult questions.
CHARLIE ROSE: So what would you do? The two of you wouldn't talk about it? She wouldn't ask you? Or she'd ask you and you'd say, "Oh, darling, I can't talk about that. You know that."
JAMES RUBIN: What would happen was we could talk, argue, fight, whatever, about the policy, the question of what should be done, but on the details I would just use --
CHARLIE ROSE: Or what the secretary might do or the president might do?
JAMES RUBIN: Right. And those are the questions I've learned to be politely evasive about at the podium and in background conversations with journalists. And I can do the same thing at home when I have to. But I won't have to do that anymore.
CHARLIE ROSE: Congratulations. Thank you for coming.
JAMES RUBIN: Thank you.
CHARLIE ROSE: Jamie Rubin, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. We'll be right back. Stay with us.
(end PBS transcript)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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