Scandalous pardons, questionable gifts, endless new legislation, eleventh hour appointments–all in the matter of a few weeks. Barbara Olson’s new book, “The Final Days”–the title eerily reminiscent of the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein book about the final days of the Nixon administration–details the closing days of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Unfortunately for the reader, Olson, who was on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11th, wrote the book with an unwavering bias and a tendency to take urban myths and turn them into stone cold truths.
Olson, who is also the author of “Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” was the wife of the current Solicitor General Theodore Olson, a former Harvard Law Professor. She had been a prosecutor for the Department of Justice and a counsel to numerous congressional committees. These jobs enabled her to get the inside story of what went down in the final hours of the Clinton administration.
Although the novel is entitled “The Final Days,” Olson strayed far from the end of the Clinton presidency to discuss all of the “disgraceful” acts during his time in office. She spends a good portion of the book discussing Hillary as if she had things left to say from her previous book. The connections she draws between Hillary’s actions and beliefs and the actions taken by Clinton are unwarranted.
The brunt of Olson’s argument against Clinton centers on the presidential pardons he made. The pardons that she goes into also stretch as far back as 1997, thereby nullifying the title of the book. According to Olson, Clinton bypassed the normal procedures for pardons that included a review by the Department of Justice and a thorough background check, and made his decisions on some pardons in a matter of hours.
Most controversial was Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich. Rich was number six on the FBI’s “most wanted” list of fugitives and had been living in Europe for nearly ten years since his 51-count indictment, which ranged from tax evasion and misrepresentation to a number of unfair business practice violations. Olson asserts that Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, bribed Clinton into pardoning Rich. With $1.5 million in donations to causes benefiting the Clintons’, it is hard to argue that Denise was not trying to pay for Marc’s pardon. Clinton stunned the world by pardoning Rich on the last night of his presidency. Among those shocked by Clinton’s actions was New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was the attorney responsible for the Rich case. In Olson’s words, Giuliani was “dumbfounded.”
Ironically, the first chapter takes great strides to identify some of the men pardoned by Clinton as “terrorists.” The members of the Weather Underground, an extreme left-wing militia group, and the FALN, a Puerto Rican Marxist group, which were pardoned were indeed criminals. However, Olson goes as far as to call them terrorists, which is a stretch for the crimes for which they were convicted.
Olson is especially critical of the actions Clinton took to veto previous presidents’ orders. Clinton’s executive orders far outnumbered those of any previous president and, consequently, were subject to much scrutiny from many in Washington. Among the more controversial orders were those to make nearly six million acres of forest into federal land, thereby eliminating the industrialization of those areas. This was seen by many as a blatant stunt to add to his legacy of pro-environmentalism.
At the end of the book, Olson comes full circle, once again talking about her obsession, Hillary Clinton. She makes far-ranging allegations against the former First Lady, including, “Few can now doubt that she wants to become president.” Her surprisingly clear bias against the Clintons and all that is liberal retracts a great deal from her argument. While making some valid points, much of what she says is muddled in nasty comments about the Clintons and a sheer jealousy of Hillary. While an entertaining and quick read, the book leads to frustration and confusion over what really happened in the final days of the Clinton presidency.
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