On June 21, 1995, Clinton signed PDD-39, among the most important of his presidency ... It was the first major step toward centralizing control over federal counterterrorism policy in the White House. The issue had never required such high-level focus before.

The concentration of authority was recognized by everyone in the "interagency" to be the handiwork of Richard A. Clarke. with the support of the NSC leadership, Clarke used his position as chairman of the ... [Counterterrorism and Security Group] to bring together high-level representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, and Justice, the CIA and the FBI, and others as needed to drive the administration's efforts. The CSG was one of the oldest interagency groups in the government, its roots stretching back into the early 1980s. Its original function, however, was to handle crises, not to be a policy forum; counterterrorism policy discussions were handled by another group, chaired by the State Department. Early in Clinton's first term, Clarke, characteristically, threw a bureaucratic elbow at the State Department by announcing that he would not attend their meetings; from now on, they would be attending his. PDD-39 formally enshrined that shift of power.

By the mid-1990s, Dick Clarke had become one of the rare career civil servants in Washington to rise to the uppermost regions of the policy-making world. He had become an indispensible, if sometimes uncontrollable, figure in the nation's security apparatus. Clarke was something like a Whitehall mandarin, one of the demigods of the British civil service who, in a system with only a handful of political appointees, exercise considerably more influence than any American bureaucrat can aspire to. But in Clarke there was nothing of the hyperrefined snob that the term conjures.

Raised by a divorce nurse, Clarke grew up in working-class Boston; he attended the Boston Latin School, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, where he earned a management degree. Clarke had little patience for the fine manners and gentlemanly play of the well-to-do who fill many of the senior ranks of government. In fact, he had little patience at all. He began he career as a Cold War defense analyst counting nuclear warheads, and then became a State Department specialist in intelligence and political-military affairs, the clutch of issues that include arms control, regional security, and technological transfers. Clarke became the second youngest assistant secretary of state ever. Only Richard Holbrooke climbed faster, and he, unlike Clarke, was a well-connected political appointee. Along the way, Clarke acquired a reputation for bright ideas and bullying tactics. A rarity in government, he produced a stable of loyal proteges to whom he gave considerable responsibility, and a horde of antagonistic peers and superiors. In 1992, he ran afoul of Secretary of State James Baker, who fired him for appearing to condine Israel's illicit transfer of U.S. technology to China. Brent Scowcroft gave Clarke asylum on his White House staff, where he became a senior director handling portfolios that included counterterrorism, counternarcotics programs, peacekeeping operations, humanitarian interventions, and U.S. relations with the UN.

In the Clinton administration, Clarke was one of only two senior directors kept on from the old regime. He struck up a friendship with Tony Lake, whose respect for him grew early on because of the job Clarke did as chairman of the committee coordinating the military and political operations involved with the U.S. presence in Haiti. He infuriated other NSC senior directors by refusing to attend the twice-weekly staff meetings and by sending, in bold, red-type, e-mail messages that ranged from the merely snide to the blatantly insulting. Clarke knew everyone, and, to the chagrin of the Joint Chiefs, delighted in working out of channels to call the commanders-in-chief at the Central, Southern, or Special Forces Command when he wanted something done. One assistant secretary of defense put it cogently when he said, "Dick drove the Chiefs batshit." It is no exaggeration to say that one person or another at the cabinet or subcabinet level or in the top NSC staff urged the national security advisor to fire Clarke almost every month. Among the half-dozen executive assisants who served Tony Lake and Sandy Berger during the two Clinton administrations, few sentences were uttered with the same frequency as "This time Dick has gone too far."

For all the irritation he caused, three qualities distinguished Clarke. First, he understood as well as anyone in Washington all the levers and pulleys of foreign policy, from the particular images a specific satellite could provide, to what hardware could be transferred to a friendly country without congressional approval, to the mechanics of imposing economic sanctions. No one had a better mastery of the repetoire. Second, he was relentless. Of the top officials who worked with him and recognized his talents, many shook their heads as he overplayed his hand in bureaucratic battles and needlessly alienated people who might have helped him. But even if his abrasiveness did not always lead to the desired results, he delivered considerably more than most. Third, Clarke had a preternatural gift for spotting emerging issues. Whether it was terrorism, money laundering, or protecting the computer-driven infrastructure that kept everything from airports to stock exchanges running, he quickly identified the problem, devised a set of policy options, and took charge. This skill helped Clarke acquire a small bureaucratic empire, and it served the interests of his supervisors, who were eager to stay ahead of the curve of global change. His proficiency in this regard, as well as the growing danger of terrorist attack, would be recognized again three years later in another Presidential Decision Directive, this one numbered 62, which made him America's first coordinator for counterterrorism. The position provided less power than Clarke wanted but still placed more authority on counterterrorism issues in one set of hands than ever before. The directive also gave the national coordinator a seat at the table when the foreign policy cabinet discussed terrorism. It was the first time an NSC staff member had been so elevated. That created a voice at the top for counterterrorism concerns -- an advance over the past practice by which discrete responsibilities were scattered among the agencies that historically viewed the issue as a secondary concern.

[Any typos are mine -- Ed]

I don't post this to in any way denigrate Clarke, or in an attempt to deflect his criticisms of the Bush administration's policies and actions before and after 9/11 (which were, as we know, not entirely new with Clarke at all, but had great force in being stated by him in such a cogent and powerful manner), but I do think that this capsule evaluation of Clarke, by two people who knew him well, were actively sympathetic to his aims, and were (at least partly) in his orbit, serves to reinforce the impression I got about him from watching his testimony before the 9/11 Commission and from reading his book, which was that Clarke was probably a difficult and annoying person to work with, but was exactly the kind of person one would want in a position like that.

It also serves to underline another point that I've made before, which is that the current liberal infatuation with Clarke is primarily a function of his value as a tool to take down the Bush administration. I seriously doubt that many who extolled Clarke's whistleblowing are really on the same page with him at all, and that many would have found his opinions about how the country should be fighting terrorism to be almost diametrically opposed to their own. A prime example is Clarke's push, prior to 9/11, to fight the Taliban and al Qaida militarily with rolling air attacks similar to those going on in Iraq at the time, as a response to the al Quaida attacks on our East African embassies and on the U.S.S. Cole. My feeling is that a large percentage of those who patted Clarke on the back last month would have been calling for his neck in a noose in 2001 if he had gotten his way back then. He may well have been right, we'll never know, but we certainly know that liberals would not have been supportive of yet another military operation at that moment.

And that goes for myself as well, I think. In the post-9/11 world, it's exceedingly hard for me to recreate my thought patterns before the attacks, but I assume that, if I had known about it, I would have seen Clarke's plan as an overreaction.