Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House

Barbara Olson, author of The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House (Regnery), died aboard Flight 77 when it hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, therefore, she does not have to account for the nonsense in this slim volume, in which factual evidence lies a lot thinner on the ground than the unexplained debris from 9-11. Compared to the data on George W. Bush after he was in office for just two years—enough to put him, his family and his entourage away for life—this sad attempt to “expose” the Clinton administration as a failed socialist coup (yes, folks, that’s the thesis of this book) should be subtitled Much Ado About Very Little. A much more intriguing book could be written about Barbara Olson. Had she not made those famous airline-seat phone calls to her husband, there would have been no living witnesses to tell the world about the box-cutter-wielding Middle Eastern terrorists. Then again, it has since been pointed out that Olson could not have made those calls because one cannot telephone collect from an American Airlines plane. Is a picture forming here of an ambitious, highly placed Washington lawyer, White House committee member and right-wing socialite and TV gossip monger, who will go down in history as one of the heroes of September 11? If this book is her monument, it’s a tasteless, tacky one.