Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson: Well, I think it will. I believe that my book may be a little more credible than hers, based on what I’ve heard so far. I think it really will provide a counter-balance actually, and an insight that she would not want you to know about, from the internal workings of the White House.

Fitton: Describe the level of your contact with President Clinton and then the First Lady.

Patterson: With the President, I was by his side daily, around the clock carrying the nuclear football, nuclear satchel. The First Lady, a little less often, depending on her schedule. I saw her a couple of days a week.

Fitton: So, you were with the President daily. What do you see as being Clinton’s biggest problems?

Patterson: Very little moral fiber and integrity behind the veneer of the man. I always thought he was a wonderful politician, but there wasn’t much beyond that. I think that he was really driven more by ego and by personal popularity. I expected so much more from the President, the Commander in Chief, and I found so much wanting when it came to that kind of inherent integrity issues.

Fitton: When it comes to Bill Clinton, his self-centeredness is extreme. I guess everyone can be criticized for that at one time or another, even the best of us, but with him, I think it had real world impacts and a dangerous impact in terms of his ability to lead the military. Isn’t that correct?

Patterson: That’s absolutely correct. That’s one of the things that bothered me so much was the fact he was putting his own personal leisure time ahead of what I would call a very critical mass of security incidences. For example, Osama bin Laden, the "War on Terrorism" and also with Iraq. I think he always prioritized things based on what was most important to him personally.

Fitton: Describe your golf game story because I think that is something that’s relevant now in the sense it involves going after Iraq.

Patterson: Well, I had been on the job about three months and if you recall back in 1996, the Kurds were to find Saddam Hussein at our request. Saddam had launched a very aggressive military strike in the north to suppress the Kurdish uprising. The U.S. sent bombers and fighters to the region to support the Kurdish resistance. We were going to stop the aggression. On that day, however, Clinton had a professional golf tournament and I was receiving phone calls from Sandy Berger throughout the day trying to get through to the President to go ahead and launch the attack. But the President simply couldn’t be bothered. He wanted to watch golf, he wanted to talk to Michael Jordan and CBS Sports and ESPN. And it was not so much the fact that he wouldn’t give the nod to the attack, but that he wouldn’t make a decision at all. He just refused to approach the issue and Berger was very frustrated.

Fitton: You know, I read that portion of your book and it seemed to me he didn’t want to deal with it, so he avoided the decision by just making it moot.

Patterson: I agree with that and, again, what really bothered me so much is that he wouldn¹t even take the phone call from Berger.

Fitton: I’m sure being a good military guy, you’re able to respect the Commander in Chief simply by virtue of the fact he is Commander in Chief, but it must have been a strain on the military, at least those dealing with him on a day-to-day basis, given his contempt for their concerns.

Patterson: Yeah, it was very difficult, and it was a day-to-day internal struggle for me personally and also for my fellow military aides that were there.

Fitton: Linda Tripp testified to us that Hillary ruled the school at the White House. Is this true, in your estimation?

Patterson: Absolutely. No doubt in my mind. Absolutely she did.

Fitton: In what way?

Patterson: It was almost like she had the strings to the puppet and the puppet was the President. She was calling all the shots behind the scenes, especially when he got in trouble toward the end there with Monica and the Paula Jones testimony. She ran all of the meetings up in the residence and for her to claim that she had no insight into Monica until late summer of ‘98 is simply not true. She was running the crisis management meetings and the spin control in the White House from the very get-go.

Fitton: You know, one of the slanders that a conservative-oriented president has had to suffer is that they can’t keep track of things, that they’re likely to press the wrong button and blow us all up. How about Bill Clinton? He screwed up big time when it came to managing our nation’s nuclear codes, the codes that basically allow us to launch nuclear weaponry, if needed.

Patterson: That’s right, Tom. He actually lost those codes in 1998 and the codes are really a little credit card sized document the President carries on his person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and has ever since President Eisenhower back in the Œ50s. President Clinton lost those codes in ‘98 about the same time the Monica Lewinsky scandal was in full force. So there was a lot going on in his world and he obviously dropped the ball there as far as national security was concerned. What alarmed me, Tom, more than anything else, was the fact that he couldn’t recall how long they’d been lost. It really could have been weeks if not months that maybe we didn’t have the ability to launch the nuclear attack or retaliatory strike.

Fitton: So for who knows how long, as a result of Bill Clinton’s liaisons with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent cover up, the United States military was decapitated, in terms of being able to use its nuclear weaponry.

Patterson: Yes, and if those codes fell into the wrong hands, our enemies would have gained an understanding of how we prosecute a nuclear war or retaliate a nuclear war. They could have set a lot of great information from those codes if they¹d wanted to.

Fitton: Well maybe one of the Chinese communists who were traipsing in and out of the White House in the Clinton fundraisers took it as a party favor. You saw a lot of illegal fund-raising activity, didn’t you Buzz?

Patterson: Absolutely.

Fitton: Describe it.

Patterson: That was constant, Tom. It was just almost every single day we were doing something with the White House. They were obviously selling the Lincoln Bedroom, selling flights on Air Force One. They focused on raising money for the DNC and it bothered me. For example, we’d go to New York for a couple of days. There’d be one official event and about seven or eight fundraisers and it would be called an official visit and it would be taxpayer funded. I thought that was highly unethical, if not illegal.

Fitton: The President’s disrespect for the military and for women really came to a head on Air Force One.

Patterson: That’s exactly right. He, in fact, cornered and sexually molested an Air Force One flight attendant who was also a member of the United States Air Force as an enlisted personnel member. Again, he got away with it with just an apology a couple of weeks later. I talked to him about his dereliction of duties as Commander in Chief. If that had been anybody in uniform in the Armed Forces, they would have been not only court-marshaled, but jailed. He gets off with an apology.

Fitton: We don’t need to describe how important Osama bin Laden is in terms of national security and the threat he poses and the devastation he’s brought upon our nation. Bill Clinton missed opportunities to stop him, didn’t he?

Patterson: A couple of those opportunities occurred during my time there. The Sudan government offered to give bin Laden to us on a silver platter and Clinton refused based on the lack of evidence. In 1998, we had definitely tied bin Laden to al Qaeda and to terrorist activities against American citizens abroad on several occasions. We had actually located bin Laden and pinpointed his location very, very specifically. We had a Tomahawk missile strike planned to assassinate him, but we only had a two-hour window. President Clinton couldn’t be located. And then when we finally got him on the phone, he waffled until bin Laden got away and no strike was taken.

Fitton: What do you mean, you couldn’t locate the President? Where was he?

Patterson: He was playing golf.

Fitton: Your book is full of specific instances of scandals, sexual improprieties, treating the White House and Air Force One like a brothel. And you make some broad points about the impact that sort of attitude had on our national security structure overall.

Patterson: Absolutely. We’re fighting the war in Afghanistan and on terrorism and in Iraq. North Korea is on the horizon. In my mind, all those are a direct result of the eight years of denial and neglect on the part of the Clinton administration.

Fitton: Buzz Patterson, Lieutenant Colonel Retired, thanks for joining us. Good luck with the sale of your book. Dereliction of Duty is in bookstores everywhere.