William Jefferson Clinton is a president who will be studied in photos, films and books for generations to come. He may be the most famous man in America. This famous man was given an opportunity to lead the greatest and most powerful nation on earth and in due course he turned his administration into a “carefree `saxophone, dark sunglasses, and 
boogie-down anything goes´” parade of self-interest, so says Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson in his Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Endangered America's Long-Term National Security. Through Patterson, the reader is privy to many occasions when Clinton´s view of national security was no better than fluff and circumstance.
Patterson was one of the military aides who carried the “nuclear football,” which is an attaché case containing America´s nuclear launch codes. He, or whichever officer was assigned to carry it, was supposed to be at the president´s beck and call 24 hours a day in case of a nuclear attack. From this vantage point, Patterson, in eight quickly moving chapters, spins a highly grim yarn. One of the job functions of the president is to keep a set of nuclear codes on his person at all times no matter where he is, but, at one point, when Patterson comes to him to replace last year´s codes with new ones, he discovers that Clinton has lost them. Clinton said “I don´t have mine on me. I´ll track it down, guys, and get it back to you.” [p.56] He never did and, despite a frantic search, the old codes were never found.
The book is both a political and a personal tale. We learn much about the Clinton Administration but we also learn much about Lieutenant Colonel Patterson. He is at first awed by the White House and slightly awed by Clinton himself. “I was immediately impressed by his presence, his charisma, and the way he looked me straight in the eye. I couldn´t help instantly liking him.” [p.44] I personally don´t know President Clinton and if I stay in my current tax bracket I undoubtedly never will, but I suspect that Patterson´s first impression of him is quite similar to what the majority of others have experienced. Clinton, as we all already know, casts a mighty spell indeed.
Many stories told about Clinton cite his reported mental pathology as their focal point, sometimes he is described as having antisocial personality traits or as being the adult child of an alcoholic. Patterson does not do this. His analysis does not include a clinical angle but the conclusions that he does make are based on common sense which seems to be abundantly available to twenty year, highly decorated, Air Force veterans.
The strongest sections in Dereliction of Duty are when Patterson lets events speak for themselves and the narration has a “just the facts” approach. The facts in isolation are able to speak bombastically without further support or qualification. The incidents that Patterson witnessed are unusual as they depict a president who was criminally irresponsible and unable to sacrifice an infatuation with his own life long enough to allow time for managing our nation´s defense. By the end of the book, the reader is profoundly grateful that Clinton´s inattention, passivity and indecisiveness did not get us involved in a nuclear conflagration (where those lost codes would have actually been needed).
Again and again Patterson illuminates that Clinton had no business being our commander in chief. On September 13, 1996, Clinton attended the President´s Cup golf tournament in Virginia and, while the president mingled and gladhanded, an opportunity presented itself to thwart the Iraqi massacres of the Kurds. Sandy Berger, at the time the National Security Council deputy director, called repeatedly to get the president´s okay for launching air strikes against Iraqi positions. Patterson tried many times to get his attention but Clinton viewed golf and socializing as being his work for the day. He dismissed Patterson and refused to speak to Berger. Nighttime air cover was soon lost and the strikes against Iraq were never launched.
A wonderful tidbit of insider information is conveyed in the story of “Operation Bojinka.” As he was organizing the notes in one of Clinton´s Presidential Daily Briefs, he found reference to an “Operation Bojinka” which was Osama Bin Laden´s plan for using airplanes as flying bombs and kamikaze instruments. The author unearthed this helpful find during the summer of 1996 which makes one wonder how the press could have used reports like this one against the current president and concluding that “he knew the attacks were coming.” By the same measure or standard, Clinton would have known five years before 9/11.
The most egregious error made by Clinton was when he turned down the opportunity to take out the same Osama Bin Laden. It was in the fall of 1998 and Bin Laden was located and our forces had a two hour window in which to act. Berger attempted for a hour to locate Clinton but was told he was unavailable. Finally, when they located him, Clinton would not act. He wanted to study and consult with other staff members about the issue. By the time he was done mulling it over, Bin Laden was gone. Had a dirty bomb been in Al Qaeda´s hands before 9/11 the indecisive and uninterested, President Clinton may well have really managed to have dropped the nuclear football.
Patterson provides a rather humorous summary of what the Clinton Doctrine would have been had he ever decided to dictate one: “we´re doing so much more with so much less that we should be able to do everything with nothing.”[p.116]
The malaise that Patterson describes the Clinton military as suffering from was acute. As Michael Mandelbaum put it, Clinton´s approach to the world was “foreign policy as social work.” Patterson describes the military´s reactions to one such assignment. He often heard the question while stationed in Haiti, “What the hell are we doing here?” [p.37]. Is it really a surprise that Clinton´s operations were rudderless when he was a full-time product of the anti-military ethos of the 1960´s? It reminded me of that old line from a song of the era “It´s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don´t ask me I don´t give a damn.” Clinton clearly didn´t either.
Who was William Jefferson Clinton? Patterson´s book gives us some insightful glimpses. Clearly, as alluded to above, he was the embodiment of the sixties mentality that our own leadership in the United States of America is the cause or at least a few degrees of separation from being the main actor behind every imbroglio that affects the rest of the world and, unlike other veterans of the 1960´s like David Horowitz or Ron Radosh, Clinton has never acknowledged the illogicality of this worldview. Regarding Clinton´s failure to divorce himself from his radical past, the words of Steinbeck are instructive, “The man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 30 has wasted 20 years of his life.”
Clinton´s understanding of America´s place in the world was and is perverse. In a speech on November 7th 2001 he revealed that he had learned nothing from 9/11 and was in no hurry to learn anything in the future. He equated the Islamofascists perpetrators of Al Qaeda with ourselves saying
“Even in the twentieth century in America people were terrorized or killed because of their race. And even today, though we have continued to walk, sometimes to stumble, in the right direction, we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation. So terror has a long history.” [As quoted in David Frum´s The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, p.146]
Clinton equated the occasional act of a psychopathic mind as being the same as a terrorist plotted, state-sponsored, mass murder of innocent citizens. Thanks to President Clinton the reader can glean, that not only terror, but geopolitical ignorance and the bafflement of what constitutes human nature also has a very long history.
Patterson, perhaps accidentally, defines in his text exactly what is missing in the minds of most leftists like Clinton which is a rudimentary understanding that human beings are not inherently good and that the world is not a few million dead conservatives away from being Disneyland. Patterson says that he “…was taught the manifest truth that the world is a dangerous place.” [p.21] One wishes that Clinton was taught the same thing somewhere down the line.
The anti-Amerika and anti-military bias in our culture from the sixties will take many years to dissipate and until then we have to react to the boilerplate forcefully from whatever source it emanates. The first course to the leftist is to condemn our reaction to hostilities more than they condemn the hostilities themselves. The far left holds that our defense of America is the true barrier to peace on this earth and that anybody who worries about the nation´s defense is paranoid. As an example, Patterson makes mention of one administration member´s now infamous quote about the Marines being a bunch of extremists.
This fundamental misunderstanding about who our international neighbors actually are is finally interfering with the left´s electoral success and hopefully their misconstructions will continue to plague them in the future. The majority of our citizens now understand that America is not the root of all evil in the world. Their futile desire to “gain understanding” about why someone or some nation hates us will not bring the left victory in the elections to come. Their habit of blaming us before blaming the truly guilty has been evident again and again over the course of the last fifty years. Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and even the Soviet Empire prove my assumption true. Clinton´s speech above demonstrates these delusionary tendencies quite accurately. Thank G-d Clinton wasn´t in office on September 11th or we would have sent well-dressed lawyers to Afghanistan as opposed to the field dressed special forces operatives who freed and provided democracy for yet another nation full of suffering souls.
If there is one major drawback to the book it is that it is too brief. Patterson is an exciting candidate for historians as his memoirs of presidential service will be viewed as a primary source document but he offers up too few parcels of his former master´s words and conversation. More direct quotations or paraphrases would have been appreciated as the few occasions that Clinton is quoted make for the most memorable reading in the work. Most likely, a man like Patterson will provide the best descriptions of Clinton´s personality but, in Dereliction of Duty, there is not enough firsthand material to make the book a “must read.” It is probable though that this book will tell the reader more about Clinton than the president´s own autobiography will - should it ever be completed.
Perhaps maybe we should avoid reading the autobiography anyway as it will contain more spin than a tilt-o-whirl ride at Great America. Patterson´s words add to the growing consensus that the best way to sum up the Clinton Administration is via a corruption of a famous quotation: full of sound and pleasure, signifying nothing.