But he’s more than happy to tell you about the party he threw for the 100 rescuers afterward, right around the time O’Grady was lunching with Bill Clinton at the White House. “They were coming to Naples and I was in my office, talking to my wife, y’know,” he says in the singular drawl of Mobile, Ala., where he was born and raised. “And I said, ‘Hell, y’know, we have this big house . . . ‘” Smith’s wife, Dorothy, recognized the ploy. Never mind that it was their 85d anniversary; he’d pulled the stunt before, dozens of times, inviting the fliers of his attack squadron home for pizza–but usually forgetting to tell his wife. That’s how the pilots came up with an affectionate sobriquet, “Poor Dottie.” This time she gave her informed consent to the bash, and Smith rousted up pizza, shrimp, turkey and more than 20 cases of beer. “I tried to show my appreciation to them,” says Smith. “And if I made an impression on them that admirals are real people and care about real people, that is a very important point.”
A tough planner with the common touch–that’s the leader of Operation Joint Endeavor. To friends and everyone in the military (from the lowest grunt to the highest brass), he’s known as “Snuffy,” after the hillbilly cartoon character, because of his country–boy act and his rowdy barracks jokes. In an 80-minute interview with NEWSWEEK, Smith talked about peace enforcement m Bosnia and revealed himself as a complex warrior and civilizer, a latter-day George C. Marshall. To protect the 60,000 soldiers under his command, Smith fought with NATO bureaucrats to win robust rules of engagement. “They finally said, ‘What contingencies do you want?’ and I said, ‘Everything. I put the goddamn thing together and that’s what I want. Now give it to me’.” They did. But Smith, 58, also recognizes the novelty of his mission: nailing down the peace so that Bosnia can begin to rebuild. “We’re not cowboys in here looking for a fight,” he says. “We’ve got to keep the warring sides apart. But it’s the guys coming here with the checkbooks and the cranes and the bulldozers who will make a difference for this country.”
Smith has already left his mark on Bosnia. Soon after his latest assignment, he launched NATO’s first military attack ever against ground targets in April 1994, pushing Serbs back from the Muslim enclave of Gorazde. Last August he icd the aggressive, two-week-long air campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, blasting them to the Dayton peace table. Last week, as head of the Implementation Force (IFOR), Smith spent 90 minutes trying to convince those same Serbs of the fruits of peace, going on live TV to take calls from viewers. “One of the questions I was asked was, ‘Admiral, is it true that IFOR is going to arrest all the Serbs in the Serb suburbs of Sarajevo?’ Isaid, ‘Absolutely not, I don’t have the authority to arrest anybody’.” Just after Christmas Bosnian Serb leaders demanded a delay of the mid-March turnover of Sarajevo to the Muslim-led government. Smith “didn’t say yes and didn’t say no,” but he showed the kinder side of NATO muscle. “What I told them in the room was this: ‘I can do something about your fear [of Muslim reprisals]. I can put forces in the area, and if we see atrocities occur, we can move in and stop it’.” He adds, “I would tell the Muslims exactly the same thing:”
A 33-year veteran of the navy, Smith won his spurs in Vietnam as a fighter pilot. He flew more than 280 combat missions, winning a chestful of medals. “He’s the guy that dropped the Thanh Hoa bridge in 1972, after 128 aircraft were lost trying to knock it out over a seven-year period,” says retired USMC Col. John Ripley, a Naval Academy classmate (Annapolis, 1962). Unlike most of the current crop of four-stars, Smith has done minimum time in the Pentagon. He has spent most of his service in a cockpit or on the deck of a carrier, where he moved up the ranks from fighter jock to squadron commander and, eventually, to skipper of the giant carrier USS America.
He has also served the cause of peace. In the early 1990s, Smith was sent by the then Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Frank Kelso as his personal emissary to meet with thee head of the Soviet Navy. It was such a successful trip that when the Russian admiral visited the United States, Smith took him around the country. Later he helped develop “From the Sea,” a post-cold-warblueprint to lead the navy into a 21st-century fighting strategy. “Even though a lot of people take credit for this brilliant concept,” says retired Adm. Stanley Arthur, “Smith put it together and was the principal author” – helping him earn his fourth star. That’s when the Pentagon tried to polish his image. Word was that “‘Leighton’ was in, and ‘Snuffy’ was out,” Arthur says. “But to those of us who know and love him, he’ll always be ‘Snuffy’.”
That implies bluntness. Last September,Smith ignored the wishes of his boss, Gen. George Joulwan, and ordered the last two of three unsuccessful missions to rescue two French NATO pilots captured and tortured by the Serbs. (They were later released.) “Let’s just say he didn’t adhere to Joulwan’s guidance,” says a senior NATO official. But it also suggests a warrior who calibrates every move in an unprecedented operation fraught with unknown danger. As Smith puts it: “I’m the guy in charge if it gets screwed up.”
While arriving Americans took the limelight, established European troops started rebuilding Bosnia.
Other progress:
Checkpoints at former confrontation lines bulldozed.
Hundreds of roads and convoy routes securred.
Under NATO pressure, Serbs freed 16 Muslims taken captive in Sarajevo.
