The Wonk That Roared
Richard Clarke and the Rise Of the Heroic Bureaucrat
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page D01
....Despite his procedural virtuosity, no one could call (Richard) Clarke a pencil-pusher. No, he's pistol-packing. He writes that, late on the night of the attacks, "I had to get back to the White House and begin planning to prevent follow-on attacks. I found my Secret Service-issued .357 sidearm, thrust it in my belt, and went back out into the night, back to the West Wing."
Richard Clarke: The alpha-bureaucrat.
The political controversy over Clarke's book centers on his explosive charge that the White House failed to prepare adequately for Sept. 11, 2001, and that President Bush and top aides were determined to find a link to Saddam Hussein to justify a long-planned, counterproductive invasion of Iraq. The White House has branded Clarke a self-promoter who became disgruntled after being passed over for a higher post.
However that high-stakes political battle turns out, Clarke's book has given America a vivid glimpse of culture clash at the highest level of government. The protagonist is a career civil servant with an ability to amass unusual amounts of power and make himself indispensable in a crisis. The antagonists are politicians and political operatives and other bureaucrats, people who fail to schedule the high-level briefings they need, who don't heed the civil servant's warnings, who drop the ball time and time again.
Clarke's book provides an archetypal figure that has been relatively rare in popular culture or political discourse: the Heroic Bureaucrat. As a general rule, Americans have viewed bureaucrats as irritating figures. In common speech, to be "bureaucratic" is to be obsessed with procedure and prone to inertia....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30216-2004Mar27.html