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If the public was surprised by Friday's overture, policymakers were not. The junta, while publicly professing defiance, had been putting out feelers about leaving for at least two months. All their offers bore conditions unacceptable to the U.S.: that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide not be allowed back, that Jonnaissant, Cedras' 80-year-old puppet president, stay in office, that only one or two of the Cedras-Biamby-Francois trio leave.
Yet there were some interesting aspects to the offers. A common theme was that the Haitian leaders wanted to leave with "dignity." Another key ingredient was Carter, whom Cedras had come to know under what would seem like unpromising circumstances: the former President was one of the international monitors observing the 1990 Haitian elections that Cedras' eventual foe Jean- Bertrand Aristide won with almost 70% of the vote in the only genuinely free balloting Haiti has ever known. If the dictators were going to bail out, they wanted to say yes to a respected statesman.
The feelers came with increasing frequency as Washington beat the war drums louder. Last week U.S. intelligence intercepted communications from Cedras to colleagues in which he said he would determine his course after seeing how the American people reacted to Clinton's speech Thursday night. Publicly, both sides put on a vigorous display of bluster. Clinton in effect called the Cedras clique a gang of murderers. He ticked off a catalogue of their atrocities -- "executing children, raping women, killing priests" and said the U.S. had only one message for them: "Your time is up. Leave now, or we will force you from power." Cedras replied by telling Dan Rather of CBS News, "I am ready to fight."
Apparently, though, he noticed that quick polls in the U.S. showed a decline in public opposition to invasion -- to 60% against in one ABC News poll, from 73% earlier in the week. While that was still far too high to comfort any President planning a major military action, it still constituted movement in what for Clinton was the right and for Cedras the wrong direction.
By the post-speech meeting in the Oval Office, Clinton was already settling on Nunn and Powell as other members of a potential Carter mission. Nunn, in the White House view, was in a particularly good position to warn Cedras that Congress had no chance of stopping an invasion, a convincing message from the head of a powerful Senate committee who is personally strongly opposed to an invasion. Powell would appeal to Cedras as both a military man and an African American; as the successful planner of the Gulf War he would give the mission credibility among Clinton's Republican opponents.