I wORKED FOR PRESIDENT WILLIAM Jefferson Clinton from May 1996 to May 1998. I was his Air Force aide, one of five trusted officers who serve the president directly in a variety of duties, mostly sensitive and classified in nature, including—and most important—being the officer responsible for carrying the nuclear “football” necessary to launch a nuclear strike. I arrived in this position filled with professional devotion and commitment to serve. I left disillusioned and disheartened.
I don’t pretend to speak for the United States military establishment or its members. I am but one of countless soldiers, sailors, and airmen who have dedicated themselves to the service of their country. But I do speak as a career Air Force officer who had the rare opportunity to participate in combat operations in the 1980s and 1990s and later serve directly for the commander in chief. By chance, I happened to be a man who, in a highly turbulent time in our history, had a front-row seat in the Clinton administration.
I offer a unique point of view. As an Air Force pilot and career officer, I was on the receiving end of presidential directives to deploy in Grenada, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia. As the military aide to the president of the United States, I dealt with President Clinton and his chief advisors personally and on a daily basis during challenging times.
In this book, I will speak to responsibility, commitment, and honor. I will speak to integrity and accountability. I will speak to the obligations of command and leadership. And I will speak to how I found these qualities missing in the Clinton White House.
This book is not a personal attack on President Bill Clinton. It will not be a sordid recounting of scandal, personal or professional. President Clinton is a likable person who treated me well on a personal level. If he had been a private citizen, whatever I thought of him privately would have remained private. He was, however, president of the United States. This book is a frank indictment of his obvious—to an eyewitness—failure to lead our country with responsibility and honor. Instead, he led in ways that directly and severely harmed this nation’s security and left huge areas of vulnerability that his successor has, in terrible circumstances, been compelled to rectify at speed. President Clinton inherited the most powerful fighting force that history has ever known, on the heels of our country’s most decisive victory ever. He left his successor with a fighting force incapable of prosecuting more than one regional conflict at a time and in dire need of reconstitution and resupply.
The soldier’s commitment demands that he submit his personal wants and needs completely to the greater good, and in that spirit, I have no personal ax to grind; I have no political agenda; my focus is on the duties of the commander in chief and the basic execution of them that any American should be able to expect. And I know that the greater good was demonstrably not served by President Clinton’s administration, which put personal wants and needs ahead of the national interest.
As a military man, I was taught the manifest truth that the world is a dangerous place—and I was trained to prepare for these dangerous contingencies, to meet the challenges, and to defend my country. What, in my patriotism and sense of duty, I had not been prepared for was to serve in close proximity to our commander in chief in the White House, on Air Force One, and elsewhere, bearing the nuclear football that was the most fearful responsibility the president bore, and to find that he—the man who led our country and our armed forces—regarded the military with contempt, his duties as a playground for ambition and personal perquisites, and the country as a mass to be manipulated rather than defended.
I do not mean to arrogate to myself the viewpoint of a secretary of state or secretary of defense. But to my presidential aide’s eye view, and as a serving military officer who had been sent in harm’s way around the world, I was utterly dumbfounded and appalled to see the president treat foreign policy as an afterthought and, apparently, as a distraction that was important only insofar as it impinged on domestic politics and the media. I could regard it only as arrant irresponsibility toward our national security and foreign policy, which, in my opinion, exposed us to the disaster of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. President Clinton had not only lowered America’s guard to an unjustifiable level but had also established to the world and to those who conducted the day-to-day work of foreign and defense policy that these things really didn’t matter, that the country was probably as invulnerable to danger as he was to the many scandals he so successfully dodged, and that really these things could be handled cynically, haphazardly, and on the fly. In the post–Cold War years, it was safe, the thinking went, to play social engineering and vague humanitarian politics with the American military. That this lowered morale and effectiveness distracted the military from its real duty and stretched our troops all over the world on ill-defined, but often dangerous, missions (while sharply cutting their numbers as one benefit of the “peace dividend”) didn’t matter to the Clinton administration. The inevitable reckoning was horrific.
This book, I hope, explains how one serving military officer saw the groundwork for that reckoning being laid. I hope it is also a warning to the American people that we must never allow the purveyors of such dangerous military policy and irresponsible foreign policy claim the power of the presidency again. I would not come forward now if I didn’t think the message was so vitally important to our future as a nation. But as we now fight a global war on terror, we need to remember what plunged us into it. And from my experience in the Clinton White House, I have no doubt of the cause.
I retired from active duty in September 2001. Only then was a book of this nature possible. Since then, hundreds of current and former military men and women have prompted and encouraged me to “tell the story that needs to be told,” a story that they know to be true, and of which I was a personal eyewitness in the White House. This is that story.