John L. Perry
Thursday, Mar. 25, 2004

The 9/11 hearings have shed a powerful, healthy light on just how exquisitely imperative character is.

By selfishly indulging his own personal absence of character, Bill Clinton, over the eight years of his incumbency, made it impossible for his presidency to lead America in a principled response to terrorism.

Charting a New Course

By his strength of personal character, George W. Bush was able in the initial weeks of his first term to begin to bring America’s economic, diplomatic, military – and, above all else, moral – might to bear against terror.

Under Clinton, America was lumbering down the road to defeat in the War on Terror. Bush turned that around, through the strength of his character.

By his artless inability to find his own character, quite possibly because it simply isn’t there, John Kerry is already showing he lacks what it takes to lead a campaign for the presidency, much less lead a war against anything.

Desperation Move

The utter leadership vacuum of Kerry and his coterie of leftist Democrats was exemplified by the introduction of their stealth weapon in a last-ditch effort to rob Bush of his leadership claim in the War on Terror.

In a well-financed and meticulously crafted public-relations offensive, Richard Clarke, who had served Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton and the second Bush as a terrorism expert, materialized out of nowhere just before the 9/11 Commission was to hold its open hearing.

Touting his just-published book excoriating Bush as having done virtually nothing to combat terrorism, Clarke appeared on CBS’s "60 Minutes," repeating his calumny without the encumbrance of an offsetting interviewee.

Nor did CBS bother to disclose that the same media giant that owns it also owns the book’s publisher. So much for conflicts of interest when it’s the left that benefits.

Even Under Oath

During his more than two hours as a commission witness, Clarke repeated the same misrepresentations – even though they flew in the face of his own earlier pronouncements to the contrary.

It was a clumsy, unabashed stunt to turn the commission into a leftist launch pad for political missiles aimed at the Bush candidacy for re-election.

All that viewers had to do to realize what was afoot was to listen to one of the commissioners, Richard Ben-Veniste, who had been appointed to the commission by Tom Daschle, leader of the Senate Democrats.

The left’s designated bottom-feeder on the panel, Ben-Veniste spent his allotted time trolling for morsels of irrelevancy, which may be expected to turn up magically in Kerry’s campaign.

Clarke’s Boomerang

But it was Clarke who stole the show – and in the process behaved so grossly that he may well have turned the whole venture into a campaign plus for Bush.

Clarke’s undoing came – and it clearly caught him by surprise and left him off-balance – when the White House gave permission to Fox News to publish the text of a press briefing by Clarke that it had originally labeled for background only, which had given Clarke anonymity.

Clarke’s briefing turned out to contain seven incontrovertible points enumerating what Bush had done – and early on, too – to reverse the Clinton policy of containing al-Qaida to an aggressive policy of destroying it.

To Tell the Truth

It made a lie out of Clarke’s book, and commissioner James Thompson, the Republican former prosecutor and Illinois governor, caught him red-handed.

Holding up Clarke’s book in his left hand and the briefing text in his right, he asked:

“Mr. Clarke, as we sit here this afternoon, we have your book and we have your press briefing of August 2002. Which is true?”

To which Clarke, with what deserves the Understatement of the Year Award, responded with a straight face.

‘They Made Me Do It’

“Well,” he said, “I think the question is a little misleading. ... I was asked by several people in senior levels of the Bush White House to do a press backgrounder to try to explain that set of facts in a way that minimized criticism of the administration. And so I did.”

An incredulous Thompson tried again:

“So you believed that your conference with the press in August of 2002 is consistent with what you've said in your book and what you've said in press interviews the last five days about your book?”

Clarke’s reply: “I do. I think the thing that's obviously bothering you is the tenor and the tone. And I've tried to explain to you, sir, that when you're on the staff of the president of the United States, you try to make his policies look as good as possible.”

An Indigestible Answer

“Well, with all respect,” Thompson replied, “I think a lot of things beyond the tenor and the tone bother me about this.”

They also bothered another commission member, John Lehman, Navy secretary under President Reagan. Addressing Clarke, he said:

“Dick, since you and I first served 28 years ago [together in the Reagan administration], I have genuinely been a fan of yours. I've watched you labor without fear of favor in a succession of jobs where you really made a difference.

“And so when you agreed to spend as much time [15 hours] as you did with us [in closed session, earlier], I was very hopeful. ... I thought here we have a guy who can be the Rosetta Stone for helping this commission do its job, to help to have the American people grasp what the dysfunctional problems in this government are. And I thought you let the chips fall where they may.

Mistaken Identity?

“But now we have the book. ... I said this can't be the same Dick Clarke that testified before us, because all of the promotional material and all of the spin in the networks was that this is a rounding, devastating attack – this book – on President Bush.

“... I hope you're going to tell me ... that this tremendous difference – and not just in nuance, but in the stories you choose to tell – is really the result of your editors and your promoters, rather than your studied judgment, because it is so different from the whole thrust of your testimony to us.

“And similarly, when you add to it the inconsistency between what your promoters are putting out and what you yourself said as late as August [2002], you've got a real credibility problem.

‘Say It Isn’t So’

“And because of my real genuine long-term admiration for you, I hope you'll resolve that credibility problem, because I'd hate to see you become totally shoved to one side during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book.”

When it became Thompson’s turn again to question Clarke, he tried one more time:

“Are you saying to me you were asked to make an untrue case to the press and the public, and that you went ahead and did it?”

“No, sir,” Clarke answered. “Not untrue. Not an untrue case. I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done. And as a special assistant to the president, one is frequently asked to do that kind of thing. I've done it for several presidents.”

Where Morality Comes In

Credibility is founded upon integrity. Integrity is founded upon morality. And from morality is character built.

It seems not to bother the likes of Clarke, and the leftist crowd out to get Bush at whatever cost, that any of that matters anymore, so long as they perceive political advantage to be gained. Their definition of morality is whatever the politics of the moment require – as illustrated in this exchange:

Thompson said to Clarke, “Well, what it suggests to me is that there is one standard of candor and morality for White House special assistants and another standard of candor and morality for the rest of America.”

Not in His Vocabulary

Not surprisingly, Clarke responded: “I don't get that. I don't think it's a question of morality at all. I think it's a question of politics.”

In other words, politics is, and of right ought to be, barren of morality. If so, then how is morality ever to reach into political leadership? And political leadership without morality is no leadership at all.

Several other lessons emerged in the two days of the independent commission’s televised sessions.