Samuel Berger, Adviser to Clinton Who Shaped Foreign Ties, Dies at 70
By DAVID E. SANGER

Samuel R. Berger, a political confidant of President Bill Clinton who became his national security adviser and helped manage a period of fundamental transition in American foreign policy, died on Wednesday in Washington. He was 70.

His death was announced by Tara Sonenshine, his longtime aide and friend. Mr. Berger had been treated for cancer for more than a year.

The day before his death, he was honored with a global humanitarian award by the World Food Program USA, a group he had served as secretary-treasurer in recent years.

A stocky, sometimes temperamental and frequently humorous political operative and trade lawyer, Mr. Berger, who went by Sandy, was a major figure in shaping the nation’s role in the world in the years after the Cold War. But he stumbled after leaving the White House when he pleaded guilty to removing documents from the National Archives and destroying some of them.

In a statement, President Obama called Mr. Berger “one of our nation’s foremost national security leaders” and said he had “benefited personally” from his advice.

“Today, his legacy can be seen in a peaceful Balkans, our strong alliance with Japan, our deeper relationships with India and China,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Clinton said he mourned the death of “my wise and wonderful friend,” as he described Mr. Berger on Twitter.

“Nobody was more knowledgeable about policy or smarter about how to formulate it,” Mr. Clinton said in a separate statement, speaking for himself and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Berger played a critical role in the strategy to use American power, and airstrikes, to end a war with President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia. He drew on his experience on Capitol Hill to lobby Congress to allow China into the World Trade Organization, part of a big gamble by the Clinton administration that it could entwine China, the world’s fastest-growing power, in a web of Western-based rules and tame its behavior — a strategy that many still question.

He also broadened the definition of what constituted “national security,” having his expanding staff at the National Security Council address the security implications of water shortages, global warming and epidemics.

And he accompanied Mr. Clinton on the last big trip of his presidency, to Vietnam, marveling with the president over lunch in an upstairs noodle shop that “we’re sitting here in Saigon, and there are people outside cheering.”

Mr. Berger did not bring deep foreign policy experience to the White House when he joined Mr. Clinton’s new administration in 1993. Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright recalled on Wednesday that he had at first rebuffed any talk of being national security adviser, thinking he needed more seasoning. Instead he became a deputy to Anthony Lake, Mr. Clinton’s first national security adviser, then succeeded him in the second term.

“I don’t know anybody else in Washington who did something like that,” said Ms. Albright, who ran a global consulting firm, Albright Stonebridge Group, with Mr. Berger in recent years.

Mr. Berger had his share of critics. Henry A. Kissinger, a predecessor in the post, bristled that “you can’t expect a trade lawyer to be a global strategist.”

Some friends agreed that Mr. Berger was not a grand strategist, but they argued that his time in the White House was a moment for managing alliances and adjusting global expectations of America’s role, not for a Kissingerian reordering of global power.

“It isn’t that he didn’t have grand ideas; he certainly did,” Ms. Albright said. “But he was a problem solver and somebody who was able to see how to get from here to there.”

Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, who worked for Mr. Berger from 1993 to 1997, said he had brought “a lawyer’s precision” to the job.

“He was a role model for many of us here,” she said. “If you are in the Obama National Security Council, and you are 50 or older, you probably learned all this by sitting across from Sandy 20 years ago.”

As Mr. Lake’s successor at the White House, Mr. Berger could not have been more different from his former boss. Mr. Lake was an academic at heart, a professor after a career as a foreign service officer. He was rarely seen in Washington. Mr. Berger, by contrast, was everywhere: at parties in Georgetown, on the Sunday morning news shows, on the phone debating with reporters about how they had characterized Mr. Clinton’s foreign policy.

Mr. Berger had a playful sense of humor. On one presidential trip, he joked with a friend about a great business plan: building a giant, secure set of condominiums on the island of Elba, where Napoleon was exiled in 1814, and letting the deposed dictators from a fracturing world all reside there to talk about their lost empires.

“You’d need a Swiss bank in the lobby,” he said, laughing.

At the time of his White House service he was considered among the most influential national security advisers since Mr. Kissinger, largely owing to his closeness to Mr. Clinton. Mr. Berger remained a political adviser to the president even while holding the national security job. When Mr. Clinton was battling impeachment, Mr. Berger was often among the group that met in the White House residence to plot strategy.

There were lost opportunities on Mr. Berger’s watch. In 1998, in a failed assassination attempt, the Clinton administration ordered that a Tomahawk missile be fired at an encampment in Afghanistan where it believed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, was meeting. But bin Laden had left the camp shortly before the attack, the C.I.A. later reported.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Berger appeared before the commission formed to investigate them to testify on what kind of warnings had been passed to his successor, Condoleezza Rice, in President George W. Bush’s administration, and by implication whether Mr. Berger and his colleagues had done enough to address the rising threat of Al Qaeda in its sanctuary in Afghanistan.

During the investigation, Mr. Berger went to the reading room of the National Archives in Washington, gathered several documents related to the Clinton administration’s handling of a Qaeda plot and spirited them out of the building, hiding them under a nearby construction trailer and retrieving them later.

A prosecutor found that while Mr. Berger had destroyed some of the papers, he had taken only copies, so nothing was permanently lost. Mr. Berger pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge, paid a $50,000 fine and temporarily lost his security clearance. He also stepped down as an adviser to Senator John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

The episode made Mr. Berger politically radioactive for a time, and while he quietly advised Mrs. Clinton during her White House run in 2008, it was only in recent years that he began to re-emerge more publicly as a national security voice in Democratic circles.

Samuel Richard Berger was born on Oct. 28, 1945, and grew up in Millerton, N.Y., a village in Dutchess County, where his parents ran an army-navy store. As a high school student he worked setting pins at a bowling alley. His father died when he was a child. He received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell and a law degree from Harvard.

Mr. Berger met Mr. Clinton as a speechwriter for Senator George S. McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. He joined Jimmy Carter’s administration as deputy director of policy planning at the State Department, working for Mr. Lake.

He later worked as a foreign policy aide for Gov. Michael S. Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign.

As a partner with the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson, Mr. Berger directed its international trade group, whose clients included the governments of Poland, Japan and China.

He is survived by his wife, Susan Harrison Berger; a son, Alexander; two daughters, Deborah Berger Fox and Sarah Berger Sandelius; and five grandchildren.

Ms. Albright said Mr. Berger had never let his cancer stop him: He was working until about 10 days ago, she said, adding, “He was a fighter.”

On Tuesday, though, he wrote to his colleagues that his condition had worsened. “Time,” he wrote, “is not on my side.”

當年斡旋台海危機 柏格逝世

美國前總統柯林頓的國家安全顧問柏格（Samuel Berger）2日因癌症辭世，享年70歲。柏格在1996年台海危機期間，與我總統府國會安秘書長丁懋時在紐約會談，開啟台美國安高層會商先河，兩國國安高層至今仍維持不定期會談做法。

美國總統歐巴馬發表聲明指出，從和平的巴爾幹半島局勢、美國與日本強健的同盟關係，到美國與印度和中國大陸的深厚關係，見證了柏格留下的資產。

長期擔任律師的柏格於1972年為參選總統的麥高文助選時，與柯林頓建立交情。柯林頓競選總統時，柏格擔任他的外交政策顧問，柯林頓當選總統後，柏格出任白宮副國家安全顧問；柯林頓連任後，他升任國安顧問。卸下公職後，他與前國務卿歐布萊特共同成立一間國際顧問公司。

1996年3月台灣總統大選投票前，中共在台海附近進行導彈演習，時任白宮副國家安全顧問的柏格與我國安會秘書長丁懋時在紐約會面，商討如何化解台海危機。最後美國派出「獨立號」和「尼米茲號」兩艘航空母艦前往台灣東部與菲律賓海域，讓危機宣告解除。

當時這場歷史性「丁柏會」開啟台美國安高層會商的制度性溝通管道，建立了我總統府國安會秘書長和白宮副國家安全顧問不定期會商機制；扁政府時期的國安會秘書長邱義仁曾前往華府會晤白宮國安高層，馬政府任內的歷任國安會秘書長也維持相同做法。

資深外交人士指出，當時美國指定與丁懋時對話，是因為丁懋時曾任駐美代表，受到美方信任；其次為美國當時迫切想了解台灣的想法，也希望能和台灣高層討論軍事議題，因此促成「丁柏會」。

2000年11月柏格在擔任國安顧問期間，曾受訪談到96台海危機，他表示，美國當時核發簽證給李登輝總統到康乃爾大學演講，引發很大爭議，這麼做是對是錯很難說，但那的確導致美中關係嚴重惡化，他認為這和中方對台灣的挑釁不無關係。

柏格說，他記得當時在一場早餐會上，與會的有他和國安顧問雷克、國防部長培里、國務卿克里斯多福，培里提議派遣兩艘航母到台灣附近，對中方釋出美方認為任何攸關台灣未來的事必須和平解決的強烈訊號，「這樣的舉動不無風險，但我認為結果證明這是正確決定」。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/samuel-berger-dies.html

2015-12-04．聯合報．A13．國際．華盛頓記者賴昭穎