They taught me that no man could be their leader except he who ate the ranks’ food, wore their clothes, lived level with them, and yet appeared better in himself.
—T. E. LAWRENCE, THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM
ONE OF THE MILITARY AIDE’S duties, when he accompanied the president, was to oversee and control the passenger manifest for Air Force One. There was room for sixty-eight people, the first family included. The passengers on board were typically senior White House staff whose presence could be easily identified and justified, Secret Service agents, and a small press contingent. Everybody’s luggage, without exception, was screened by metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs. Many times I’d be notified at the last possible moment to add “presidential guests” to the manifest. During 1995 and 1996, the Clintons invited at least 477 guests—excluding staff, family members, and press—aboard Air Force One. At least fifty-six of these individuals had donated $5,000 or more to the Democratic National Committee or had raised at least $25,000 for the president’s campaign.1 I knew that Air Force One was never intended for junkets or to pay off favors.
Nor should it have been a sexual playground for the president—though even that took on an appearance of inevitability. In the fall of 1997, I received a phone call in my office from Lieutenant Colonel Mark Donnelly, presidential pilot and commander of the Presidential Pilot Office.
“Buzz, we have a problem,” he said grimly. “One of my female stewards claims she was approached and touched inappropriately by President Clinton and she’s upset.”
I knew the woman Mark was referring to, and I liked her. She was bright, cheery, and beautiful. She was also an enlisted member of the United States Air Force—and had just, apparently, been sexually molested by the commander in chief.
“Where did this happen, Mark?”
“In one of the galleys on Air Force One on a recent trip. Apparently, he cornered her.”
“Is she going to come forward? How does she want to handle it?”
“She’s really upset but she doesn’t want this to get out. She just wants an apology.”
I said I’d talk to Kris Engskov, the president’s personal aide.
I walked down to the Oval Office and found Kris. I pulled him aside and told him what Lieutenant Colonel Mark Donnelly had just told me. “I suggest, Kris, that you give Mark a call and arrange for a time where we can get the president to make a private apology.” Kris agreed. I wanted out of this, and Engskov had a closer, more comfortable relationship with the president. He was, after all, one of the politically appointed insiders. I was an officer serving the presidency.
Two weeks later, Kris walked into the compartment where I was seated on Air Force One. He said quietly, “We got them together. The president apologized. She seems fine with it.” I thanked him, and then confirmed his story in the cockpit with Lieutenant Colonel Donnelly.
I brooded over the fact that if our commander in chief had been actually serving in the armed services, he would have been jailed. His immunity struck me as completely unacceptable. Not for the first time did I feel that life was conducted in the military at a far higher moral level than it was in the Clinton White House.
Comparisons between the military and the Clinton White House were something that someone with my background made automatically. But even putting my background aside, surely the American people had a natural right to expect that the president and the administration would be cognizant of military and foreign affairs. Surely these subjects must be high on the list of priorities of any president.
But the Clinton administration’s understanding of, and respect for, matters involving national security and things military just wasn’t there. The sum total of its knowledge of the military seemed to come from movies and from the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. If a military matter didn’t benefit Clinton and his people directly or serve to enhance their playing of domestic politics, it wasn’t a problem for the president or most of the senior White House staff. Not only were they uninformed, but they were profoundly uninterested; they placed no value on what the military did. The military, in their view, was simply an administration lackey. In my opinion, no president in our history arrived in his position less prepared to be commander in chief than Bill Clinton. No commander in chief evoked so much outright and unexpected indignation from the ranks of the uniformed military than he did. And no president ever expressed such a callous disregard for the military as he did by deploying the military so recklessly, often while simultaneously seriously compromising military capability and degrading military morale.
Clinton was the first president in almost fifty years not to have served in the military. He is the only president to have dodged a Reserve Officer Training Corps commitment that he had made solely in order to maintain his “political viability.” He was the only man elected president who could ever have written, as he did, “so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military.” That combination of cynicism, of antimilitary loathing, of treating “a commitment to serve” as a mere scrap of paper to be abrogated by those clever enough, like himself, to protect themselves from “physical harm,” were attitudes that he seemed to have brought from his past into the White House.2
Many presidents have lacked real, frontline military experience, and it has not affected their ability to lead our armed forces. President Ronald Reagan, for example, had no combat-arms military experience, yet he became, among the armed forces, one of the most popular and effective presidents. In part, this was because he had at least served in an Army military unit and reached the rank of captain working on home front celebrity activities during World War II. But even more important was the fact that he held the military in high esteem, made defense policy a high priority, and treated military personnel with obvious respect. Moreover, his cabinet for foreign policy and defense included Marine combat veteran George Shultz and Army combat veteran Caspar Weinberger. Clinton’s high stepping through the Selective Service System in the late 1960s, coupled with his unwillingness to serve and “loathing” of those who did, was a different matter entirely.
One of the prime tenets of military leadership is that you can’t ask (or order) someone to do something that you yourself are unwilling to do. Soldiers want to know that their commanders understand what it is like to be in the trenches, that their lives and the sacrifices they are making aren’t being treated with disrespect or disregard. Credibility is absolutely essential, and the soldier, the sailor, and the airman can spot its absence immediately. Because Clinton loathed those who served, the understanding and respect he would eventually require from his troops would never be there.
The entire administration took its coloring from Clinton in this regard. The senior staff that led the administration when it was first elected had little to no frontline military experience. Vice President Al Gore served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam but did so from behind a typewriter as a public affairs specialist, safely away from the fray. Secretary of State Warren Christopher served in the Navy for three years during World War II in the Pacific theater. Budget director and eventual chief of staff Leon Panetta served in the Army for two years during Vietnam but did so as an attorney. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin served in the Army for two years during the 1960s but did so as a systems analyst. National Security Advisor Tony Lake and his deputy, Sandy Berger, had no experience in uniform. Lake, in fact, once resigned from the National Security Council in 1970 to protest the American bombing of the North Vietnamese. The experience of the others in defense and foreign affairs was even less.
The result was that no one in the White House really understood the people who risked their lives to serve their country. No one in the White House really understood the importance of esprit de corps or unit cohesion, or even how sending men and women into danger zones where the bullets fly needs to be done with a seriousness and sobriety of purpose that takes into account the risks and the costs. To the serving military, the foreign policy that emanated from the White House looked like gesture politics. The deployments we were ordered on never appeared to consider the well-being of those who conducted them. The White House never appeared to think it important that a military mission should be defined by an achievable goal that served our national interests. This basic understanding of military and defense policy, which any serving officer would understand, seemed to be completely foreign to the White House.
Worse, the White House’s ignorance was compounded by arrogance.
During the administration’s very first week, Army Lieutenant General Barry McCaffrey, the assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, greeted a young aide in a White House hallway. “Good morning.”
“I don’t talk to the military,” the young aide replied.3
She may have thought she was being cute. But that story quickly circulated throughout the military and became the first of many blows that lowered morale and raised previously unthinkable doubts in many military minds about the conduct of the administration.
The beat continued. The “gays in the military” issue was sprung on the armed forces—which had more important things to focus on, like defending the country—without any consultation and by presidential edict. Just two months later, in March 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin issued a memo to his staff directing that the number of military personnel in his office “be kept to the absolute minimum.”4 Another incident involved the French chief of staff, Admiral Jacques Lanxade, who wanted to meet with the administration regarding Bosnia-Herzegovina. Jennone Walker, senior director for European policy on the National Security Council, told an intermediary that she wanted nothing to do with any French admiral.5 Eventually, this undiplomatic incident was smoothed over by having the admiral meet with National Security Advisor Tony Lake.
And there were smaller things. President Clinton’s early attempts at salutes to his Marine One and Air Force One crews, long a presidential tradition, were ill-conceived fingertip waves that made him look as if he were ashamed of offering a military salute. At events where the national anthem was played, he kept his arms dangling by his sides instead of resting his hand over his heart. The message, intended or not, came through loud and clear to the military: Bill Clinton and his administration knew nothing, and cared less, about the military.
Years later, my encounters with Vice President Gore were also telling. We didn’t see much of the “VP” and his staff unless it was a campaign or fundraising event. On a few occasions, I found myself in uniform alone with Gore in an elevator or in a sequestered “hold” room.
“Good evening, Mr. Vice President,” I’d offer formally. He’d look at me and look away. No response at all, at any time. Silence and the cold shoulder, that was it. The first time it happened, I wrote it off. The second and third times, I understood what kind of people we’d elected.
It wasn’t just I or the other military aides or foreign officers or general military White House staff who were treated this way—so were members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
On several occasions I received phone calls from the office of General Ron Fogleman, the chief of staff of the Air Force. “Major Patterson, every time the general gets called over to the White House for a meeting, no one meets him, no one tells him where to go, where the meeting is being held; there’s no protocol, no consideration.”
Yet when Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow came to the White House for an event, you can bet they were met with bells on. I had to explain over and over to the Air Force that there was little I could do. If I was available, I’d happily escort the general. Normally, though, I was with the president or on the road, and the general was left to fend for himself. My fellow aides and I alerted the White House Social Office and the National Security Council that simple efficiency, let alone politeness or protocol, meant that Joint Chiefs of Staff ought to be met and escorted by an aide. They couldn’t be bothered.
General Fogleman was a friend of my family’s and the most respected Air Force chief of staff that I served under in my twenty years. Yet he retired from his position before his term was up because he “had simply lost respect and confidence in the leadership that [he] was supposed to be following.”6
Early in the administration, the “buzz” was that Chelsea had refused to ride to school with her military driver and that Hillary had banned military uniforms in the White House. The president eventually called the uniform ban “an abject lie,” once it became apparent that this story didn’t play well politically.7 I can’t speak on whether Chelsea refused military drivers, but I do know the uniform issue with Mrs. Clinton was real. Soon after I arrived at the White House, my predecessor briefed me that Mrs. Clinton didn’t want the military aides in uniform. The White House Military Office argued that, for the safety of the president, it was critical that the Secret Service and staff be able immediately to identify the military aide. Common sense and security finally prevailed—at least at official functions with the president. At all other times, however, we were expected to be in business suits or civilian clothes in order to downplay the military presence at the White House.
Sometimes even President Clinton, the glad-handing politician, let his contempt show. In spring 1998, a Marine crew chief on Marine One who had spent several years serving President Clinton wanted a photo with the president as a departing memento. He would be shipping off soon, and this would be his last duty in service directly to the president. This was a standard benefit for just about anyone who served President Clinton.
One of my fellow military aides pulled the president aside and asked him, “Mr. President, can we do a quick photo with the Marine crew chief? It’s his last trip with you.” The president glared at him. Undeterred, the military aide continued, “Sir, he’s served you for four years and the picture will take twenty seconds. Could you please do it?” The president sneered, but acquiesced.
Once the picture was taken and Marine One was lifting off the ground, the military aide leaned over, caught President Clinton’s eye, and thanked him. The president, obviously irritated, looked away and didn’t say a word.
As commander in chief, President Clinton seemed to believe that he was privileged to conduct himself at a much lower code of conduct than the men and women he would repeatedly order into harm’s way. At a time when his military was sending noncommissioned officers and senior military officers to prison for sexual misconduct, President Clinton was, notoriously, having his own personal behavior problems.
Many in the military lost complete faith and trust when President Clinton used the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Relief Act of 1940 and invoked his position as commander in chief of the armed forces as a legal defense to delay the sexual misconduct suit of Paula Jones. The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Relief Act was instituted to protect active-duty personnel from civil suits, such as divorce, until after leaving the military. Several veterans’ groups protested and demanded that the president withdraw his argument. He did, thirteen days later, but only because it was legally untenable.
Events like this lowered morale, and the lowered morale developed into falling military performance standards and historically low levels of respect for the commander in chief. In one of President Clinton’s first visits to a military unit of any sort, the sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt were openly derisive and disrespectful. Laughter and catcalls referring to Clinton’s draft-dodging and his plan to repeal the ban on gays in the military echoed across the ship’s deck as dumbfounded reporters looked on.
Air Force Major General Harold N. Campbell called the president a “dope-smoking,” “skirt-chasing,” “draft-dodging” commander in chief in a banquet speech. He was fined and forced to resign.8 On several occasions, the separate services were forced to warn their members not to make insulting, rude, or disdainful comments about the president.
These highly visible incidents were only the symptoms, of course. Ultimately, in any military chain of command, the commander is responsible for establishing the guidelines for authority, morality, and capability. Clinton’s primary downfall as commander in chief was his inability to bridge the gap between legal authority and moral authority. Legal authority resides in the president’s constitutional rights as the commander in chief. Legal authority was his from the outset. But his moral authority was shot almost from the outset. A man who refused to serve when his country was at war was poorly placed to order other young men and women into harm’s way. It was as simple as that at the start, but the administration took that poor starting point and made it progressively worse.