WASHINGTON - As President Clinton headed for the White House press room in December to declare an open-ended American troop commitment in Bosnia, his national security adviser gently but firmly stopped him.
"You can't go out there with that tie on," Samuel R. Berger told him, pointing to what aides described as Clinton's "goofy" Christmas-holiday neckwear, totally inappropriate to a public announcement that would put American troops at extended risk.
Clinton balked at changing it, but Berger insisted and prevailed.
For Berger, who is known even to White House secretaries as "Sandy," challenging the president is part of the job. Among Clinton's advisers, few have gained the same respect for their policy judgment, political instinct and what a former colleague calls "an olfactory sense of what will fly."
Now, in the tense countdown to a possible bombardment of Iraq, a heavy responsibility for sober judgment in a White House beset by scandal falls on this rumpled former trade lawyer whose usually calm, no-nonsense demeanor can be broken by a sharp Borscht Belt wit and occasional flashes of temper.
"There is no one who has had more of the trust of the president than Sandy," says Joseph Duffey, director of the U.S. Information Agency and a friend of both men. "There is never a question about Sandy's motives. No one has ever felt Sandy's ego is out of control."
The Iraq confrontation poses the "first profound challenge" for Berger and Clinton's second-term foreign policy team, a close associate says. "It's a place where you have the least room for error because there's so much at stake."
With Washington riveted by the Monica Lewinsky drama, Berger has been intent on keeping Clinton and his top advisers focused on the crisis. He has convened meetings every other day, and led teams that have briefed congressional leaders.
"It's a way of making sure the process does stay on track so there aren't outside distractions," the associate said.
If Berger lacks the intellectual stature or vision of past national security advisers like Henry A. Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski, he has managed to prevent the bureaucratic squabbles they often fomented.
He lunches at least once a week with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Defense Secretary
William S. Cohen. Most Sunday mornings, he meets over bagels at his home with the deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott.
Berger has also worked well with Republican leaders, even frequent critics of the president such as Majority Leader Trent Lott and Arizona Sen. John McCain.
Iraq is just at the top of a mounting pile of foreign-policy troubles that includes financial turmoil in Asia, a collapsing Middle East peace process and simmering unrest in the Balkans.
Telling anecdote
"It's tough," says a predecessor, Brent Scowcroft, of the multiple challenges facing Berger now. But an aide recounts an anecdote to show Berger's pluck:
After last October's summit in Washington with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Berger gave a well-received speech to a number of foreign-policy heavyweights, giving no hint that he was in pain from surgery to remove a benign growth from his back. An aide only learned of his discomfort when Berger removed his suit jacket to reveal "a blood stain the size of a dinner plate" on his shirt.
The son of an upstate New York merchant who died when he was 8, Berger, who is 52, graduated from
Cornell and Harvard Law School. He has spent most of his adult life in Washington, moving easily among Democratic politics, foreign affairs networking, government and the law.
First encounter with Clinton
As a speech writer for George S. McGovern in the 19972 presidential campaign, Berger first encountered a tall young man in a white suit, Texas coordinator Bill Clinton, bounding up the stairs at an airport in San Antonio, Texas.
The two stayed in touch as part of a network of former McGovern campaign aides. Berger served in the Jimmy Carter administration as a deputy director of policy planning in the State Department, then built up a trade-law practice in the 1980s at the blue-chip Washington firm of Hogan and Hartson. He and his wife, Susan, a successful real estate broker, have three children.
He joined the first Clinton presidential campaign in 1991. He jokes: "Since I was the only person who could name four capitals, I was the foreign policy person." He brought in many of those who formed the core foreign policy team of the first administration.
Berger remained in the background during the first Clinton term as deputy to National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who had been his boss at the State Department and brought more credentials as a foreign-policy intellectual.
He played a key role in one unhappy early episode that he counts as his worst mistake.
