December 5, 1992

President Bush ordered troops into Somalia today on a mission to "save thousands of innocents," as the Pentagon outlined an operation that will leave soldiers and marines in Somalia well into the Administration of President Bill Clinton. Mr. Bush gathered broad support for the intervention from top leaders of Congress, from other world leaders and from Mr. Clinton himself, and then went on television at midday to announce an operation that thrusts the United States into a new post-cold-war role as a military force on behalf of humanitarian, not strategic ends.

In a remarkably frank memoir, New York City Schools Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez describes how he regularly snorted and injected heroin for years as a teen-age dropout on the streets of Harlem, more than once passing out from a near overdose. In the book, Mr. Fernandez, the leader of the nation's largest school system, appears to cast his drug experience as a parable of redemption to show how education, in his case the mathematics classes he took in the Air Force, can save troubled, impoverished youngsters from the squalid life of the streets.

Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat of Texas, has emerged as President-elect Bill Clinton's top choice for Secretary of the Treasury, Clinton campaign officials said tonight. Mr. Bentsen, 71 years old, has been informed that he is Mr. Clinton's first choice for the sensitive economics post, but officials of the transition team have not yet completed the required background examination of his financial records.

Solid confirmation of a perked-up economy emerged today as the Labor Department reported a rise in jobs and a two-tenths of a point decline, to 7.2 percent, in the November unemployment rate. Unlike earlier improvements that have edged the jobless rate steadily downward from 7.8 percent in June, the latest included diverse gains in jobs, including factory employment, and did not result from a shrinking labor force. As a result, 9.2 million people are now out of work, nearly 800,000 fewer than in June.

The decision to intervene in Somalia marks a turning point in American foreign policy: for the first time American troops are entering a country uninvited, not to shore up an anti-Communist regime, protect American wealth or stifle a strategic threat, but simply to feed starving people. President Bush, with the enthusiastic backing of President-elect Clinton, has crossed a red line.