When I first got a top secret clearance, I had been appointed to be on a task force which was determining rules of security clearances for the entire civil service. I was to be directly responsible to the head of the entire civil service for, among other things, security clearances.

So this was a fairly important clearance, and it was supposed to be a cinch. For some reason, I always seem to be disappointing people who expect things to be easy.

My adjudicator, looking over the voluminous files that described my wild past in America and abroad, just shook his head. There were lots of files, including some adverse information from both the FBI and the CIA. I wondered how he would make a decision.

He used common sense.

He said, "You are DEFINITELY not a Communist."

When it came to security, our problem was Communists.

Today, our major problem is psychopaths, people who say what we want to hear (See March 20 article, "Rule Without Conscience"). I am often a lousy diplomat and I am definitely a troublemaker. But I am not going to tell anybody what they want to hear.

The last thing the government had to worry about with someone with my history was that I was a Communist. By the same token, you do not have to worry that I will be too nice.

In these columns, I have offended everybody. Pat Buchanan, the closest friend we have in Washington, caught a lot of criticism here from the very beginning of "Whitaker Online." (Please see "Respectable Conservatives Kill Their Wounded", Sept. 26 and October 3 article, "Defining Respectable Conservatives - They're Just Bureaucrats".) Looking back over my Washington career, I have always been amazed that anybody ever hired me.

Shortly after I started working for Congressman John Ashbrook, National Review had an article blasting me and everybody who sympathized with my point of view. On the very first page, who would they quote against my side but -- Congressman John Ashbrook! Standing in his office and looking at it together, we both laughed out loud.

What John Ashbrook needed as a senior staffer was not someone who agreed with him on everything, but an advisor who was brave enough or stupid enough to tell him the truth.

When I was appointed to a job in the Reagan Administration, it turned out that one of my buddies was charged with providing the materials for my political clearance. The big thing that might disqualify me was harsh criticism of Reagan himself. So the first thing he had to do was to tear a couple of pages out of my first book.

It is hard for me to think of anybody I haven't criticized. It is hard for me to imagine anyone I WOULDN'T criticize, including myself.

Especially myself.

In the real world, everybody praises honesty to the skies but very, very few of them actually want to be exposed to it. The person who is successful today is the person who never really offends people. At the same time, he convinces them that he tells the brutal, unvarnished truth and they, because they are tough and realistic, are able to take it.

In short, his "truth" doesn't cause any pain.

That little balancing act requires a psychopath.

Real truth hurts.

Stokeley Carmichael did me a big favor. All through my youth, one thing I really hated was the word "Neeeegrow" (Negro). It is an unnatural word for the English language. Nowhere else in the English tongue was one required to pronounce two long, hard consonants that close together. It is especially unnatural for a Southerner to say that word. That is exactly why liberals loved to force Southerners to say it.

So for many years, every Southerner who spoke in public was required to pronounce the word Neeegrow, which was like forcing him to bow down in public. Southern traitors and Southern Crawlers loved to say "Negro." They loved to bow down to Yankees. But real Southerners like me HATED that word.

To repeat, that is exactly what Yankees loved about it.

It was also a fact that, since black speech and Southern speech have similarities, Neegrow was unnatural for black people to say as well. But that was important to nobody. It is a simple fact that blacks had no place in the leadership of the "Negro" rights movement. There was no black president of the NAACP, for example, for the first sixty years of its existence. Then as now, mainline black "leaders" did exactly what their white liberal masters told them to.

Until well into the 1960s, the civil rights movement was just Northern whites against Southern whites. The main purpose of the movement was for Northern whites to triumph over Southern whites. Forcing Southern whites to use the word "Neegrow" was a major triumph for the Northern whites. Whether or not blacks found the word natural was of no importance whatsoever.

Stokeley Carmichael was the first nationally prominent militant black leader. He was also the first to criticize the word "Neeegrow." It was Stokeley Carmichael who got rid of "Negro," which was unnatural for black people to pronounce. He was the one who replaced "Negro" with "black." This was a shock to white liberals, and it was one of the things they never forgave Carmichael for.

Another thing they never forgave him for was a piece of pure heresy only a black man could have gotten away with. Carmichael told a liberal audience, "If I hear 'six million Jews' one more time, I am going to puke. We have our own dead to bury."

I spent the whole decade of the 1960s hearing "six million Jews" at least a dozen times a week. Liberals used the death of European Jews to justify every single leftist position. I was not the only person who was sick of hearing that phrase, but anyone who objected was called anaziwhowantedtokillsixmillionjews. To me, Carmichael's daring heresy was like spring rain on a wilted field.

Eldridge Cleaver won the love of liberals by demanding that white women be raped "to bring them down off that pedestal." But all Carmichael ever wanted from "whitey" was power. I cannot understand someone who wants to make war on women. I can understand someone who wants power, or I wouldn't be a specialist in politics.

A few years back, a Southern Nationalist buddy of mine had dinner with Carmichael in an Ethiopian restaurant in DC. They talked about power. American black "leaders" talk about being "African-Americans," but they stay in opulent America and enjoy the money liberals give them for their services.

Carmichael went back to Africa and died at his home in Guinea. Once again, he offended liberals by criticizing blacks who refuse to go back and actually HELP what they call "their people" in Africa itself. Liberals like black "leaders" who stay on the dole, and who stay right here under their liberal masters' lily-white thumbs.

I ask the pardon of those who cannot stand any mention of Carmichael because of his politics. But for those of us who have spent a lifetime in the political wars, there sometimes remains a certain respect across the battle lines.