Master of His Game - Bill Clinton talks on, and talks on.

Remember Bill Clinton's search for a legacy? His anxiety about his place in history was never far from his mind, but it reached a high point during his second term, when he sometimes lamented that he had not faced any crises to test his presidential mettle. "The first thing I had to start with was, you know, we don't have a war," he told the New York Times in December 1997. "We don't have a depression, we don't have a Cold War."

Clinton would find his legacy the very next month, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal burst into public view. But now, in the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington, the former president appears to be working to shape a new legacy as a leader in the fight against terrorism.

In the days after September 11, Clinton made a series of public statements claiming his administration came very close to killing Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden during a cruise-missile raid on Afghanistan three years ago. Touring downtown Manhattan on September 13, Clinton said, "The best shot we had at him was when I bombed his training camps in 1998. We just missed him by a matter of hours, maybe even less than an hour." A few days later, on NBC, Clinton said, "We had quite good intelligence that he and his top lieutenants would be in his training camp. So I ordered the cruise-missile attacks, and we didn't tell anybody, including the Pakistanis, whose airspace we had to travel over, until the last minute. And unfortunately we missed them, apparently not by very long. . . . We never had another chance where the intelligence was as reliable to justify military action."

The former president's statements left the impression that he was hot on bin Laden's trail, but one of Clinton's top military commanders, who was deeply involved in the Afghanistan operation, has a different recollection. In an interview with National Review, retired general Anthony Zinni, commander of U.S. forces in the region at that time, described the cruise-missile raid as a "million-to-one shot." "There was a possibility [bin Laden] could have been there," Zinni recalled. "My intelligence people did not put a lot of faith in that. . . . As I was given this mission to do, I did not see that anyone had any degree of assurance or reliability that that was going to happen." Zinni continued: "In weighing that out, without great intelligence, it's a million-to-one shot. Should you take it? Yes-you might get something, but in the absence of that, you can send [bin Laden] a message, maybe cause him to go off balance and set him back a little bit."

At the time, the Clinton White House claimed the raid was just the beginning of an extended assault on terrorism. But the assault didn't continue. In fact, despite Clinton's ongoing effort to justify his actions, his administration's record is a richly detailed manual of how not to conduct a war on terrorism. In virtually every case in which Clinton confronted the terrorist threat, he did one of three things: a) limited his response to a law-enforcement investigation that focused on mid-level terrorist operatives while not touching the higher-ups and state sponsors who were behind the attacks; b) retaliated with pinprick military strikes that had no serious effect on their targets; c) did nothing.

In February 1993, when Clinton had been in office a little more than a month, terrorists bombed the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000. A few days after the explosion, when authorities knew it was the result of a bomb but did not know who had set it, ...