Why Richard Clarke is a Hero

WHY RICHARD CLARKE IS A HERO
Sat Apr 3, 8:01 PM ET
By Richard Reeves

WASHINGTON -- Richard Clarke seems an odd duck, or perhaps I mean that you probably would not want to go on a duck-hunting trip with him. He comes across, in both appearance and in interviews, as arrogant, tough to get along with, a loner who spent hours one early morning working out the precise wording of his public apology to the families of Sept. 11 victims. He is also smart as hell and is telling very unpleasant truth in a critical whirl of many truths -- and many lies.

He is a national hero -- odd in that, too. There is no real American tradition of resignation in protest or whistle-blowing. In Great Britain, after all, which does have such an honorable tradition, two members of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Cabinet, Robin Cook and Clare Short, resigned to protest that government's role in the Iraq war. Americans prefer team play, loyalty, patriotism as an end in itself. My country, right or wrong.

The retribution for disloyalty is sure and usually swift. The most famous U.S. government official to blow the whistle was Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, three times the Democratic nominee for president. He quit to begin a lecture tour attacking his old boss, President Woodrow Wilson, declaring that the president's slogans about keeping us out of war were a fraud, that Wilson did plan to take the United States into the great European war if he was re-elected in 1916. The crowds that once cheered and cheered the old Boy Orator of the Platte booed and chucked rotten tomatoes at Bryan until he went home to find a new line of work.

That's the way it usually works here, and that's how it will probably be for Clarke when his celebrity or notoriety has passed. I laugh when I hear that he is "profiteering," dissing the president to sell his book. He may make a few bucks now, but he will surely lose a lot later. But whistle-blowers don't do it for the money. More often than not they pay a high price economically and in their private lives, losing friends and family. Who hires the disloyal? Who can stand living with someone ducking scorn, tomatoes and death threats?

Clarke, I would wager, did not speak out because he wants to own the world; he was happiest running it from behind the curtains. That's the usual profile of such dissenters -- or "squealers" in American jargon. They think, or come to think, they are smarter or more righteous than compromising bosses and adversaries living with official lies.

Profiteers are more like Karen Hughes than Richard Clarke. What is the word for a woman who quits to spend more time with her children and then takes off on $50,000-a-night lecture tours, writes about about how wonderful her boss is, and then rejoins the team at the White House? "Real American," I call her. "Public service" offers celebrity and deferred compensation. For the talented, government salaries are low, but the visibility is high. Ask George Stephanopoulos, or James Carville or Bill Clinton.

What Clarke has done, whatever his reasons or persona, is to break the chain of secrecy. Thank you. More than 20 years ago, I wrote about what happened to other angry men, heroes of mine, who rose up to say the emperor has no clothes -- Curt Flood, the baseball player who questioned the old reserve system, and a Pentagon auditor named Ernest Fitzgerald:

"If you buck the system, you are almost inevitably going to be destroyed. ... To keep the rest of us in line, established power had to make brutal examples of those who dared to challenge the order of things. In the end, though, it wasn't sad. Because some of us would not bend, the rest of us had the small measure of freedom that came with the tiny chance that we might be the next one to stand up."

I still believe that, and this as well: Clarke is important because he is revealing the secrets the government held before Sept. 11, 2001. If those "secrets" -- threats and dangers, not intelligence procedures -- had been shared with the American people by their leaders, there might not have been catastrophic tragedy that day. We, 280 million of us, would have been aware, awake, looking for bad guys, listening for danger.

It's not about connecting the dots; it's about connecting the people. The price of freedom is vigilance, but our own government, hiding its secrets, never let us know what we should have been looking for all those dangerous years.