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 t seems like epochs ago, but it was only earlier this year. On January 18, 2001, Bill Clinton boarded Air Force One for the last time as president of the United States. Two days later he would fly from Andrews Air Force Base to New York City’s LaGuardia airport as a private citizen.
Days earlier, flying home to Washington from Little Rock, Arkansas, after one last feel-good pep rally for himself as commander in chief, Clinton knew that he had a loaded schedule ahead of him. He had used the presidential pardon power sparingly in his early years, and unlike previous presidents who had used it evenly throughout their terms, Clinton—“the Big Guy” to staffers, “the Big He” to interns—intended to make up for lost time.
On that final flight back to Washington, Clinton actually “strode into the press section” of the presidential airplane, as the late journalist Barbara Olson reports, and asked reporters with a laugh, “You got anybody you want to pardon?”
Little did we know that the joke would be on us.
And so the forty-second president of the United States returned to the White House for “one final convulsive orgy of presidential excess,” as Olson, in her new, posthumously released book, put it.
Barbara Olson wrote Final Days: The Last Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House during her final months on earth. Like some seven thousand others, her young life (she was forty-five) was cut short on September 11, when she was murdered by a cabal of Islamic terrorists bent on killing and terrorizing Americans. The number of dead is still not final; fires still burn at “Ground Zero” in Manhattan, where the World Trade Center once stood, and bodies are still being pulled out of the wreckage by patient and dedicated rescue and cleanup workers.
Final Days was scheduled to be released shortly after September 11. The Regnery publishing company, in consultation with Olson’s family—including, of course, her husband, Theodore Olson, the solicitor general of the United States, who argued Bush v. Gore before the Supreme Court during the 2000 election contest—decided that to allow the mass murders to silence Barbara would be to succumb to the terrorists. Barbara Olson would never have let anything so evil silence her if she had anything to say about it.
Another potential problem with releasing the book after September 11 was more practical: Would people still want to read about the Clintons?
The answer appears to be yes. Final Days has become a New York Times bestseller—like Barbara’s first book, Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton (1999), which this past summer was re-released with a new chapter about now-Senator Clinton.
Fans of Barbara Olson are buying Final Days because they know her work and would have bought it if she was still among us—able to plug it on Larry King Live and the like. Others are buying Olson’s book as an act of patriotism: doing their small part to let the al Qaeda network and its sympathizers the world over know that they will not silence the innocent victims of its hate. People are also buying Final Days because of its subjects. As Olson observed in the subtitle of her first book, on Hillary Clinton, the Clintons are really a continuously unfolding story. If you thought that they would not be in the news after September 11, you were mistaken.
In fact, in the unfolding Clinton saga, those final days in January that Barbara Olson documented for us to read now may mean more than we thought.
When the four commercial airliners crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, Bill Clinton was in Australia. But it didn’t take long before the former president was on the phone seeking a word with the mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani—now commonly referred to as the world’s mayor—offering to make an appearance. Giuliani, through his staff, delayed Clinton—but not for long. By Friday, the ex-president was parading the streets of lower Manhattan, hugging, giving interviews, and very vocally and visibly feeling other people’s pain, as he does so well.
His wife, now the junior senator from New York, played to type as well. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, a reporter from the The New Yorker asked Mrs. Clinton how she thought “people [would] react to knowing that they are on the receiving end of a murderous anger.” Mrs. Clinton reverted, evidently by force of long habit, to victim mode. “Oh, I am well aware that it is out there,” she said, dragging the subject away from the actual victims back to herself:
One of the most difficult experiences that I personally had in the White House was during the health-care debate, being the object of extraordinary rage. I remember being in Seattle. I was there to make a speech about health care. This was probably August of ’94. Radio talk-show hosts had urged their listeners to come out and yell and scream and carry on and prevent people from hearing me speak. There were threats that were coming in, and certain people didn’t want me to speak, and they started taking weapons off people, and arresting people. I’ve had firsthand looks at this unreasoning anger and hatred that is focused on an individual you don’t know, a cause that you despise—whatever motivates people. Given the egomania of this presidential couple, it should come as no surprise to a nation that watched Bill Clinton as president for eight years that his final days in office were, in fact, even worse than we had heard. Imagine a group of rowdy frat guys during senior week getting away with all the excess drinking, mayhem, and destruction that they can prior to graduation. Then imagine the leader of the frat being the president and his house being at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Olson’s chronicle vividly reminds us of the eight years of adolescent self-assertion, instead of leadership, we suffered from Washington during the Clinton years:
White House aides told reporters that Clinton was determined to leave a legacy that incoming Republicans would have had a hard time erasing (how true that turned out to be). Clinton himself told reporters that his final days as president, as long as he could stay awake, would be equivalent to four more years in office. And he wasn’t kidding. In his final days as president, Clinton set aside eight new national monuments and “signed executive orders like a rock star at an autograph session,” Olson reports. Similarly, “on a last-minute spree, he launched enough new pages of federal regulations to fill a law library, dealing with everything from snowmobiles in national parks, to air conditioning, to the very definition of human existence.” Clinton packed every board and commission he could with his friends and contributors, and nominated nine new federal judges.
And then there were the one hundred forty pardons and thirty-six commuted sentences—all in his final hours in the White House on January 20.
Of all presidential perks, the pardon power has a special significance. It is just the kind of authority that would attract the special attention of someone obsessed with himself and his own ability to influence events. It also exemplifies the damage a corrupt leader can do even under a constitutional system of checks and balances. As Olson writes, “The power is absolute—even a serial killer could be pardoned—and utterly unreviewable. It cannot be rescinded by the next president. The president may grant a pardon before a trial, after a trial, or without a trial. Once granted, a pardon can never be taken away.”
How Clinton must have loved the attention that went with such power! (And how he must miss it now! The New York Post recently reported that the former president had stated his regret that September 11 happened under President Bush rather than during his illustrious predecessor’s tenure. Clinton said, “I feel I would be better trained for it, more prepared.”) During the pardonmania, “Phones rang constantly,” Olson notes, “as if the White House was conducting some kind of pardon telethon.” Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford; Lady Bird Johnson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; even Don Henley of the rock group the Eagles—they all lobbied the president for pardons for others. The names of the pardon applicants are now depressingly familiar: Marc Rich, Roger Clinton, and Patty Hearst, to mention just a few.
In those final days in office, Clinton largely ignored the Justice Department (DOJ), which would normally have reviewed all these pardon applications before they got anywhere near the president. At least twenty-six of the clemencies granted were not vetted at all by the DOJ. “He also decided to plunge on with pardons over the department’s objections,” Olson notes, “or where he knew that there would be objections if he had let career prosecutors know what he was doing.”
But, of course, the departing president and First Lady engaged in far more disgraceful behavior than just the pardons. In fact, as Olson notes, the pardons were something of a sideshow. The gutting of the White House was quite literal. The Clintons stole White House furniture—perhaps the most breathtakingly brazen act of self-arrogation they performed in Clinton’s entire tenure in office. Hillary, the feisty, feminist working woman, took time out to solicit funds for silverware and other home necessities—of only the most luxurious quality—from campaign contributors and other pals.
In fact, most of the many scandals of Clinton’s presidency were relived in those final days in office—a deal with Independent Prosecutor Robert Ray, for example, pushed Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones finally into Clinton’s past.
In Olson’s recounting of the final days of the Clinton administration, we are maddeningly reminded, too, that both the White House and Congress could have been further along in doing the “business of the American people,” as Clinton always claimed to be doing when avoiding his countless scandals, had the Bush administration’s first months not been consumed with reviews of Clinton’s numerous last-minute executive orders and pardons (as well as the many highly partisan confirmation hearings, such as those for Attorney General John Ashcroft and Barbara Olson’s husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson).
Although Barbara Olson certainly did not know that her last conversation with her husband would be on a cell phone on a hijacked plane headed for the Pentagon (asking Ted, in her take-charge way, “What do I tell the pilot to do?”), she was well aware that the world had been changed by the threat of global terrorism, and that the Clinton White House had been particularly neglectful of the necessary preparations for protecting Americans from terrorist attacks. In the single most chilling paragraph of Final Days, when Olson tells the tale of Clinton’s first major corrupt pardon—of Puerto Rican terrorists, set free to buy votes for his wife’s senatorial campaign in New York—Olson provides what will likely be the most quoted sentence of Final Days: “Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet aggression had been replaced by a number of particularly venomous threats, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama bin Laden.”
Given the Clinton administration’s record of irresponsibility and neglect, one shudders to think about how Clinton would have handled the September 11 terror attacks. In addition to his continual reckless disregard for the law, Clinton has always shown a streak of disregard for, or ignorance of, history. When he journeyed to Vietnam in November 2000, the always lip-biting, apologetic president all too predictably equated the Soviet- and Chinese-backed Vietcong aggressors with the South Vietnamese and American resistance:
When we look back on it, the most important thing is that a lot of brave people fought and died in the North Vietnamese army, the Vietcong, and the South Vietnamese army and the United States army. . . . And the best thing we can do to honor the sacrifice and service of those who believed on both sides what they were doing was right, is to find a way to build a different future. Fast-forward to twenty years from now. Will we hear President Clinton feeling the pain of al Qaeda ringleader Mohammed Atta and terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, both of whom clearly believe that the events of September 11 were part of a righteous jihad against the West in general and the United States in particular? He need only add some fake tears and lip-biting to his already-infamous November 7 speech at Georgetown University, in which Clinton created more attention for himself by trying to redefine—dilute, really—the word terrorism, thereby demeaning the lives lost in the September 11 atrocities. The former president proclaimed that America is “still paying a price today” for past injustices to blacks and Native Americans, and regaled the audience of a thousand young people with the following tasteless, irrelevant, and misleading assertion:
In the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was a Muslim on the Temple Mount. I can tell you that story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it. . . . We need to reach out and engage the Muslim world in a debate. Olson saw deeply into Clinton’s frightening mind when she wrote this compelling book. “In the mind of Bill Clinton,” Olson writes, “political considerations outweigh even life-and-death matters of great concern to his own law-enforcement officials, not to mention the nation.” Now that we know the fruits of his eight years of freeing Puerto Rican terrorists for political gain, spending 229 days in foreign nations for photo ops, ducking the law in his own country, enriching himself dishonestly, lying to the American people, and guaranteeing that only his own needs were served, we will never view Bill Clinton—or, alas, the presidency—in the same way again.
Let’s make sure that we don’t. Only then can we honestly say that Barbara Olson and the thousands of other victims of the September 11 attacks did not die in vain.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is an associate editor of National Review and editor of National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).
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