Sgt. Manners Meets the ‘Girlie Men’ and Is Shocked!

They did it again! For all their supposed political genius, they got it wrong. All those high-paid, high-profile inside-the-Beltway political journalists missed the point of ex-FBI agent Gary Aldrich’s new book “Unlimited Access.” It only marginally touches on alleged misdeeds by Bill Clinton. That’s not what the book is all about. This is not about political war. This is about cultural war. About the generation gap. In fact, the book would be better titled (and, no doubt, more successfully marketed) as what it really is: “Old Fart Meets Young Freaks.”

At best, Aldrich’s book is the pained memoir of a older man who took his job seriously, surrounded by younger people who didn’t. A Bush administration leftover, Aldrich expected all the Clinton people to let him interview them first for their FBI clearance, before they started their new jobs. Either because they were too busy or just didn’t care, many Clintonites, starting with Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, just shined him on. With this book, the scorned agent gets his revenge.

Even when he was finally able to nail them down for their obligatory FBI interview, the White House’s Rodney Dangerfield never got the respect he felt he deserved. Myers even dared to shuffle papers in his presence. Which was still better than the reception he received from George Stephanopolous: “His office was a mess. There was a half-eaten sandwich on a paper plate that was on the coffee table. Potato chips littered the rug. Newspapers were strewn all over the room . . . A birthday cake that had been given to him on 10 February--nine days ago--was still sitting on an end table. A vase of wilted red roses was nearby. Tired birthday balloons limped along the floor.”

What? You mean George didn’t meet FBI housecleaning standards? Disgusting!

And neither Dee Dee nor George rose to salute when he walked into their offices? Shocking! “It was a hard attitude to swallow,” Aldrich doesn’t swallow, “especially after the graciousness of the Bush people.”

Yeah, but. . . . Even those in the White House who tried hard to treat Aldrich like a human being and not like their study hall monitor still weren’t trusted. When Deputy Counsel William Kennedy greets him by asking how he’s feeling, Aldrich panics: “He was asking how I was feeling. Was I about to be hugged here?”

Ironically, the only one in the whole White House Aldrich learned to trust was the now-controversial former personnel security chief, Craig Livingstone. “I thought then, and I think now,” avows Aldrich, “that Livingstone was really trying to do his best to protect the president.” When Livingstone complained about missing FBI files, Aldrich told him not to worry: “Getting copies of the files isn’t a problem. Just give me a list of the cases, and I’ll have the FBI SPIN Unit send you a new copy.” You can bet Aldrich will drop both of those poison pills in the second printing.

But it wasn’t even the Clinton staff’s disregard for proper security that Aldrich despised most. It was their bluejeans! More than half of this book, in fact, is consumed by Aldrich’s personal offense at everything the Clintonites were and wore. Had Edith Wilson awakened in the White House from a 35-year nap, she couldn’t have experienced more of a culture shock: “I saw jeans,” Aldrich gasps, “T-shirts and sweatshirts; men with earrings and ponytails; and every manner of footwear except normal dress shoes. . . . One young lady was dressed entirely in black--black pants, black T-shirt, black shoes, even black lipstick.” (I know what you’re thinking: Has this guy ever been to Melrose?)

Teenagers in T-shirts weren’t the only ones to offend the defender of puritanism on Pennsylvania Avenue. Not even the most buttoned-down member of the Clinton White House, then-Chief of Staff Mac McLarty, escaped his scorn. “McLarty was an unusual man,” the perceptive Aldrich observed. “He was highly polished in his manner and dress, but when he opened his mouth, out rolled one of the heaviest Southern accents I had ever heard.” Good thing Aldrich wasn’t on duty when LBJ was president.

But McLarty’s accent wasn’t all that offended Sgt. Manners. It was also his physique. To Aldrich’s FBI-trained eyes, McLarty was a “girlie man,” typical of the big difference between the Clinton and the Bush administrations. “It was the shape of their bodies. In the Clinton administration, the broad-shouldered, pants-wearing women and the pear-shaped, bowling-pin men blurred distinctions between the sexes.”

As Aldrich concludes in the perfect summary--and classic understatement--of the book: “Clearly, we were not bonding.” No kidding, Charlie Brown!

Gary Aldrich in the Clinton White House would be like Whoopi Goldberg in the Bob Dole campaign: the perfect misfit.

After complaining to McLarty that junior staffers were not exercising “proper manners or respect,” Aldrich writes, he expected a call from FBI headquarters transferring him from the White House. Too bad, for him and for us, that call never came. Aldrich would have been spared all that heartburn. And we would have been spared “Unlimited Access,” the silly frustrations of an old fuddy-duddy.