Biden Played Less Than Key Role in Bosnia Legislation

According to Biden's book, Milosevic asked the senator what he thought of him. "I think you're a damn war criminal and you should be tried as one," Biden said he shot back. Milosevic, he said, did not react.

Milosevic is now dead and only a handful of people were in the room. Ted Kaufman, then Biden's chief of staff and now an aide in his vice presidential campaign, said the incident occurred exactly as Biden recounted it.

But John Ritch, then deputy chief of staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, does not remember such a blunt statement, but rather that Biden more gently made the case that Milosevic could be a war criminal. "The legend grows" regarding the meeting, Ritch said. "But Biden certainly introduced into the conversation the concept that Milosevic was a war criminal. Milosevic reacted with aplomb."

A third Biden aide in the room did not recall the confrontation and a fourth declined to comment.

Upon his return to the United States, Biden issued a 36-page report on the trip, laying out eight policy proposals, including airstrikes on Serb artillery and lifting the arms embargo. The report, largely written by Ritch, does not mention the war-criminal exchange in the two pages devoted to the Milosevic meeting. But the day after it was issued, Biden appeared on NBC's "Today" show and said he had called Milosevic a war criminal to his face. "This guy looked at me as if I said, 'Lots of luck in your senior year,' " Biden said.

Biden continued to make fiery statements on Bosnia, demanding action. Richard C. Holbrooke recalled that when he was nominated as assistant secretary of state for Europe in late 1994, Biden "in no uncertain terms made it clear to me that the policy on Bosnia had to change and he would make sure it did. He believed in action, and history proved him right."

"When you look back, Senator Biden got Bosnia right earlier than anyone. He understood that a combination of force and diplomacy would revive American leadership and avoid a disaster in Europe," said James P. Rubin, a Biden aide at the time who later became spokesman for Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.

But when it came to votes on the floor, Biden did not consistently follow through. In deference to Clinton, Biden supported a competing version of the Dole-Lieberman bill that called for first working with the United Nations. "My position is simple and straightforward," Biden said on the Senate floor before a vote on the bill in May 1994. "We should lift the arms embargo, but we should first make one more attempt, in good faith, to end it where it began -- in the U.N. Security Council."

But Russia was poised to veto any effort that would harm its Slavic cousins. "Suggesting that the president should ask the Security Council to end the embargo amounted to little more than sending him on a fool's errand," said Rademaker, who called the alternative bill "nothing more than political cover for senators to vote no on Dole-Lieberman, thereby sparing the Clinton administration political embarrassment over its failed policy."

By the time Biden signed on to the Dole-Lieberman bill, two years after his encounter with Milosevic, he was listed only as the ninth co-sponsor.