Washington ? Richard Clarke, the man who threw elbows and banged heads together to get things done under four American presidents, is the last person friends and colleagues expected to go public.

For decades he was the ultimate inside operator, the person who knew how to tackle the toughest national security problems and overcome bureaucratic inertia with behind-the-scenes guts, arrogance, smarts and hard work.

But writing a book and testifying to an official commission with scathing tales of miscalculations, failures and infighting at the highest levels of government? No way.

“This really isn’t Dick,” said Steven Simon, who worked with Clarke both at the White House and at the State Department. “It strikes me as a pretty clear indicator of the magnitude of his outrage.”

Clarke, who left the Bush administration in early 2003, has become in the past week one of the most talked-about figures in America. In a string of public appearances and a new book that was an instant publishing phenomenon, he has forcefully criticized the Bush administration as a failure in the fight against terrorism that went on a tangent to attack Iraq when it should have been focused on al-Qaida.

The intensity of the Republican campaign to discredit him as a disgruntled partisan who is out to sell books is a testament to how seriously the White House views his criticism.

On Friday, top Republicans in Congress sought to declassify 2-year-old testimony by Clarke, suggesting he may have lied in his criticism of Bush.

Roger Cressey, a business partner who also worked with Clarke in government, said Clarke had expected to be attacked, but “even he is rather surprised at the ferociousness and vindictiveness of it.”

When administration officials questioned his claims last week that Bush was fixated on Iraq the day after the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke countered that he had four witnesses to such a conversation and derided national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Bush for “having a memory lapse, a senior moment.”

Former terrorism adviser Richard Clarke is sworn in to testify on Capitol Hill to the federal panel reviewing the Sept. 11 attacks Wednesday in Washington. Clarke left the Bush administration early in 2003, and in a new book has forcefully criticized the administration for failing in the war on terror.

“This is the president in a very intimidating way, finger in my face, saying ‘I want a paper on Iraq and this attack,”‘ Clarke said.

Getting things done

Over four administrations and three decades in government, Clarke became known as “a very hard-driving, arrogant, not especially pleasant or polite fellow who manages to get an extremely impressive amount of work done,” according to Gideon Rose, who worked under him on President Clinton’s National Security Council. “He throws his elbows around the bureaucracy in the service of getting things done.”

Leslie Gelb, who hired Clarke for his first State Department job in 1979, said Clarke had “annoyed and angered everybody he’s worked with for 30 years. … But everybody wanted him around because he could actually get the job done.”

Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the complaints about Clarke kept rolling in: that he was riding roughshod, he didn’t tell me, he didn’t pay attention to me. The result: “Every boss would nod in agreement and keep him on the job.”

Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, told the Sept. 11 commission that several of his colleagues wanted Clarke fired.

Berger kept him on, explaining, “I wanted a pile driver.”

‘Captain Ahab’

Clarke, 53, did get swatted at in 1992 when the State Department’s inspector general concluded that he had looked the other way as Israel resold Patriot missile technology to China.

Inspector General Sherman M. Funk recommended that Clarke be disciplined, but higher-ups rejected the idea. Clarke disputed the charges, claiming the alleged violations by Israel were “specious on their face,” but he soon transferred to the White House.

There, he served three presidents: Bush, Clinton and Bush. In spring of 2001, Clarke’s frustration with the current Bush administration’s low-key approach to terrorism and al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden boiled over, and he decided to leave his job as the White House terrorism chief for a new government position targeting cyberterror. He and Rice agreed that he would leave Oct. 1, the start of the next budget year.

In his book, Clarke recalls telling Rice and her deputy, “Maybe I’m becoming like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the white whale. Maybe you need someone less obsessive about it.”

He hoped his real message got through: “You obviously do not think that terrorism is as important as I do since you are taking months to do anything, so get somebody else to do it who can be happy working at your pace.”

Clarke, who left government service 13 months ago, now has his own consulting firm on homeland and cybersecurity.

‘A normal person’

He is known for coming down hard on those who let him down, but associates say he also has a pleasant side.

“When you get him one-on-one in a room, he’s very personable and has a great sense of humor,” said Keith Schwalm, a former Secret Service agent who worked with Clarke at the White House and now is vice president of his consulting company. “He likes to drop little hidden jokes all the time. If you don’t have his sense of humor, you won’t get ’em, and he’ll laugh under his breath.”

Clarke, who is single, is known as a voracious reader, from science fiction to history to the latest tutorial on al-Qaida, and as someone who enjoys relaxing with friends over dinner. The native New Englander loves seafood, follows the Boston Red Sox and the Washington Capitals, enjoys jazz and has a room in his Sears catalog home packed with duck decoys and prints. He describes himself as a political independent registered as a Republican.

Despite Clarke’s bulldog reputation, “he is a normal person,” Simon said. “He likes to go on nice vacations. He likes good wine. He is your fairly typical cultivated upper-middle-class Washingtonian with cultivated upper-middle-class tastes.”

Even his small talk, though, shows intensity and focus.

“Small talk for him is telling you about his cell phone and its capabilities,” Gelb said. “He’s all business. That’s his life.”