President Carter called me on June 1 and said he would like to go to North Korea to try to resolve the problem. I sent Ambassador Bob Gallucci, who was handling the matter for us, down to Plains, Georgia, to brief Carter on the seriousness of the North Korean violations. He still wanted to go, and after consulting with Al Gore and my national security team, I decided it was worth trying. About three weeks earlier, I had received a sobering estimate of the staggering losses both sides would suffer if war broke out. I was in Europe for D-day, so Al Gore called Carter and told him that I had no objection to his going to North Korea as long as President Kim Il Sung understood that I would not agree to a suspension of the sanctions unless North Korea let the inspectors do their jobs, agreed to freeze its nuclear program, and committed to a new round of talks with the United States on building a non-nuclear future. On June 16, President Carter called from Pyongyang and then did a live interview on CNN saying that Kim would not expel the inspectors from its nuclear complex as long as good-faith efforts were made to resolve the differences over international inspections. Carter then said that because of this “very positive step,” our administration should ease its sanction efforts and start high-level negotiations with North Korea. I replied that if North Korea was prepared to freeze its nuclear program, we would return to talks, but it wasn’t clear to me that North Korea had agreed to that.
Based on previous experience, I was unwilling to trust North Korea and would leave the sanctions hanging until we received official confirmation of North Korea’s change in policy. Within a week we got it, when President Kim sent me a letter confirming what he had told Carter and accepting our other preconditions for talks. I thanked President Carter for his efforts and announced that North Korea had agreed to all our conditions, and that North and South Korea had agreed to discuss a possible meeting between their presidents. In return, I said that the United States was willing to start talks with North Korea in Geneva the following month, and that while they were taking place we would suspend our sanctions efforts.
At the end of June, I announced several staff changes that I hoped would better equip us to deal with our large legislative agenda and the elections just four months away. A few weeks earlier Mack McLarty had told me he thought it was time for him to change jobs. He had taken a lot of hits for the Travel Office and had endured countless press stories criticizing our decision-making process. Mack suggested that I appoint Leon Panetta chief of staff, because he had a good understanding of Congress and the press and would run a tight ship. When word got out about Mack, others also favored Leon for the job. Mack said he would like to try to build bridges to moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress, and to oversee our preparations for the Summit of the Americas, to be held in Miami in December.
I thought Mack had done a better job than he had gotten credit for, managing a much smaller White House with a much heavier workload, and playing a pivotal role in our victories on the economic plan and NAFTA. As Bob Rubin often said, Mack had established a collegial atmosphere within the White House and with the cabinet that many previous administrations never achieved. This environment had helped us to get a lot done, both in Congress and with the government agencies. It had also encouraged the kind of free and open debate that led to criticism of our decision-making process, but that, given the complexity and novelty of many of our challenges, led to better decisions. Moreover, I doubted there was much we could do, apart from reducing the leaks, to avoid the negative press coverage. Professor Thomas Patterson, an authority on the media’s role in elections, had recently published an important book,
“mediator” between candidates and the public, with the responsibility to tell the voters how they should view the candidates and what was wrong with them. In 1992, Bush, Perot, and I had all received more negative than positive coverage.
