In his 1996 book Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House (Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, Inc), Gary Aldrich relates how, as president of the United States of America, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, simply known as Bill Clinton, his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton, and their key employees (mainly former associates of the Clintons) upturned laid-down security procedures and lowered White House standards set by previous presidents going back many decades – just to “let in” their friends and associates.
According to Aldrich, in order to protect national security, the president, the taxpayer, and the White House itself, there is in place a comprehensive and effective security system whereby the FBI, the Secret Service, and the president’s counsel, working as a team, “clear” the hundreds of new staff members – “from the chief of staff right down to the most obscure messenger located far from the Oval Office” – who come with a new president. He describes the FBI background investigation as an extensive process which can cover “the past fifteen years of their lives” for lower employees, and “their entire adult lives – including all former employers and employment records” – for more senior employees. The FBI also reviews college transcripts, interviews representative professors, investigates other material related to education, investigates any accusation of wrongdoing and interviews neighbours, friends, and associates of a potential employee. Four key elements to a background investigation are character, associates, reputation, and loyalty, or CARL. In addition, the FBI also investigates an applicant’s dangerousness and suitability.
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This is how Aldrich captures the origin of the background investigations: During Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, Walter Jenkins, a close, personal friend of President Johnson whom he had selected to run the White House, was arrested in the bathroom of the YMCA having sex with a man he had just picked up. And it wasn’t the first time. This was about the summer of 1964 when President Johnson and his administration were already plagued by problems and scandals, not to mention the Vietnam War. He couldn’t afford another scandal, nor could he allow his loyalty to Jenkins, however strong, do further damage to his administration. He also knew that public confidence in his administration was at an all-time low.
“President Johnson needed a way to restore confidence in his administration, and fast. To rid the White House and the Executive Branch of any other ‘ticking personnel bombs’ before they exploded in the media, he called J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, and ordered him to create a system to investigate the backgrounds of all White House employees and all others who would serve in major posts, such as agency directors and cabinet secretaries. If the FBI investigated the White House staff in the same manner that it cleared its own staff, who would think of arguing about the quality of the White House staff?”
All administrations after Johnson gave this security programme all the seriousness it deserved, and numberless prospective White House employees were turned down as a result of the muck raked up during their background investigations. But not the Clinton administration.
Under Clinton, “the White House security program – and the quality of White House staff” – took a nose-dive; the Clinton staffers and volunteers behaved “as if they had a ‘right’ to work in the White House, independent of their being investigated by the FBI and being cleared by the Counsel’s Office and the Secret Service”; “the Clintons felt that the Secret Service’s searches were a ‘hassle’ and unnecessary and just another way for the ‘disloyal’ Secret Service agents to ‘bug’ the Clintons and their friends. So they ordered the Secret Service to modify the security program to fit the petulant and immature demands of the Clinton staff”; “hard-core drug users could be White House employees in the Clinton administration if they promised to quit after they were caught”; and the Secret Service, whose duty it was to review the findings of the FBI investigations, was virtually denied access to the reports. Meanwhile, the FBI background investigations of the Clinton staff unearthed a long list of character flaws – “drugs, bizarre sexual behavior, failure to pay taxes, failure to honor financial obligations, severe credit problems, bankruptcy, civil suits, liens, loan defaults, failure to repay federally funded student loans”; and “there were certainly plenty of homosexuals in the White House who flaunted, rather than tried to hide, their sexual persuasion”.
For instance, as governor of the state of Arkansas, Aldrich writes that Clinton “had given a pardon to his good friend Dan Lasater, a convicted drug smuggler and the person who supplied the president’s half brother Roger with cocaine”. Then as president, Clinton “had brought Patsy Thomasson, Lasater’s business partner, to the White House to be his director of Management and Administration, and a special advisor to the president. These were very strong signals about where this president stood on the issue of illegal drugs”.
Partly for these reasons, the Clinton administration was described as “a corrupt disaster, beyond redemption or repair”, while the Clinton White House was called “dysfunctional”. Shocked by it all, Mike Lafrano, a Clinton loyalist who worked in the Office of Presidential Scheduling, is quoted by Aldrich to have said, “Gary, I’m telling you, I know a lot of these people, and I cannot believe they are here, in the White House. Don’t you people have any standards at all?”
There are other issues that Aldrich raises, like the Clintons being a half hour late for their own inauguration; Hillary wanting to occupy the West Wing office usually reserved for the vice president; Hillary screaming at her husband in “uncontrolled and unbridled fury” in the holding room in the Capitol building on the day of their inauguration; President Clinton going “missing” for hours, his whereabouts unknown to staff, not even the Secret Service who should know where the president is at all times, not even the first lady, whereas previous presidents maintained an unbreakable link 24 hours a day between themselves and their key advisers, especially at the Defense Department; the Clintons giving “no apparent thought” to “matching experience and education with particular job vacancies”; the first lady being so influential and overbearing that she was referred to as “Mrs President” in some quarters; etc.
After reading Unlimited Access, I am no longer surprised why widespread scandals nearly rocked the Clinton presidency. My take is that if all the allegations made in the book are true, and if they are public knowledge, then Americans and the world should by now already know what to expect under a Hillary Clinton presidency. But of course, Hillary enjoys massive support in her presidential bid. And why not? If homosexuality, which was such a big issue as to compel President Johnson in 1964 to institute a process of background investigations into would-be White House employees, is now a “fundamental human right” in the US, it may go to show how much lower White House standards, and the overall standards of the American society, have dipped since 1996.
As I read the book, I saw a close resemblance between the Clinton White House and our own dear Aso Rock in the immediate past dispensation. The difference, though, is that Aso Rock has not been known for any form of standard. It is a place where about anything goes. For instance, who are those working in Aso Rock today? What is their background? Who investigated them? Which of their friends or associates, past or present, were interviewed about their character? Who can testify that some of them are not potential threats to the president, or to national security? And beyond the perfunctory security clearance and the charade called Senate screening, who really investigates nominees to ministerial positions in Nigeria? Perhaps if such background checks had been carried out in the past, it would have helped former President Goodluck Jonathan to avert his government being infiltrated by Boko Haram, or the humongous sleaze that is alleged to have happened under his watch, because such character flaws would have been thrown up in the course of in-depth investigations.
So, can President Buhari, a man celebrated by the whole world for his integrity and probity, be another Lyndon Johnson and begin a process of setting even minimum standards for entry into Aso Rock, or to any appointable government position? His early steps haven’t shown that he can.
