WASHINGTON — In his 30 years as a master Washington bureaucrat, Richard Clarke learned to get the job done, no matter what it took -- and no matter whom it annoyed.
If Clarke needed money for a program, he wouldn't hesitate to fish it out of someone else's budget. If he wanted action from a military officer, he'd call the officer in the field, ignoring the Pentagon's chain of command. "Government is designed not to work," he would tell subordinates. "Our job is to make it work anyway."
It made him one of Washington's most effective bureaucrats. But it also made enemies of those he thought stood in the way of his mission.
This week, those enemies have come to include President Bush and senior officials of the administration that Clarke once served as the nation's top counterterrorism official.
On Monday, White House officials denounced his new book, "Against All Enemies," as irresponsible, while Clarke fired back that it was "outrageous" for Bush to run on an anti-terrorism record that the book described as counterproductive.
Over three decades, Clarke, 53, held national security posts at the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House, rising to high-level positions in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
"If you were obstructing things, he'd roll you," said Jonathan Winer, a friend and former State Department law enforcement official. "And people who were trying to defend their territory against him would say ... you couldn't turn your back on him."
Some in the Reagan and both Bush administrations thought his politics leaned a little to the left; some in the Clinton administration feared that, because of his past service, he might be a little too far to the right. But his knowledge of the issues and the system kept his career advancing.
When Islamic militants hit the World Trade Center in 1993 and a Japanese cult attacked a Tokyo subway in 1995, Clarke argued for more action and more spending against terrorism. In 1998, after Al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Africa, the Clinton administration promoted him to be the government's first federal counterterrorism "czar."
Raised in Boston and trained at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Clarke worked night and day at the White House, presiding over one meeting after another between top-level officials.
