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Commander Michael K. Bohn, USN
(ret.) was “a career naval intelligence officer, 1968 – 1988, Mr. Bohn served the President twice.
During 1970-72, he was a Military Social Aide to President Nixon. He helped manage White House social
events ranging from afternoon coffees to Tricia Nixon’s wedding. During the second Reagan administration, Mr. Bohn was
the Director of the White House Situation Room. He organized the flow of critical information into the
White House and National Security Council throughout the Middle East kidnappings and international terrorism of the mid-1980s.
He wrote daily summaries of world events for the President, Vice President and senior White House officials.” In Vietnam, Commander Michael K. Bohn “served
in the Brown Water Navy, operating in the rivers of the Mekong Delta. He was an intelligence duty officer
and briefer for the Chief of Naval Operations, and Aide to the Director of Naval Intelligence. Mr. Bohn
also served aboard ships and at intelligence centers in San Diego, Honolulu, and Washington, DC. In 1984-85,
he was a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy research organization in Washington.” Commander Michael K. Bohn is the author of:
Nerve Center: Inside the White House Situation Room; The Achille Lauro
Hijacking: Lessons in the Politics and Prejudice of Terrorism; and, Money Golf: 600 Years of Bettin' on Birdies.
According to the book description
of Nerve Center: Inside the White House Situation Room, “The White House Situation Room is
arguably the most important facility in the most important building in the world. As the president’s intelligence and
alert center, it provides vital communication and crisis management capabilities to the chief executive and his advisers.
It can also be “an island of calm,” as a top adviser for Vice President Al Gore once described it. So little is
known about the Situation Room that, until the publication of Nerve Center, the American public’s knowledge of it is
almost entirely based on its portrayal by the entertainment industry.
Yet, as Michael K. Bohn points
out, Hollywood has failed to capture the real drama of the Situation Room. Numerous crises come alive in Nerve Center, from
the Vietnam War (when President Johnson made late night visits to the Situation Room wearing his pajamas and went so often
that he moved his Oval Office chair there), to the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, to today’s high-tech
war on terrorism. Created in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco by advisers to President John Kennedy, presidents, cabinet
members, and National Security Council staff members have all come to depend on the Situation Room. “I knew that I could
always rely on the Situation Room,” President Jimmy Carter recalled, “and it never let me down.”
Bohn, who served as director of the
Situation Room for the first President George Bush, has recruited numerous officials, including former and current staff,
to tell the colorful forty-year history of the Situation Room. In a final chapter, Bohn uses a fictional crisis to describe
how the Situation Room will evolve to help the president meet the challenges of an increasingly dangerous future.”
Publisher’s Weekly said of The
Achille Lauro Hijacking: Lessons in the Politics and Prejudice of Terrorism, “Bohn, who directed the White
House situation room under Reagan, relates the harrowing tale of one of the most spectacular terrorist acts of the 1980s and
its aftermath. In October 1985, Palestinian gunmen under the command of Abu Abbas commandeered an Italian cruise ship, murdered
the wheelchair-bound Jewish-American Leon Klinghoffer and tossed his body overboard. Negotiations yielded the perpetrators
safe passage in an Egyptian aircraft, but the U.S. intercepted the flight and the terrorists were put on trial in Italy. During
the crisis, Arab-American activist Alex Odeh appeared on television and seemed to justify Palestinian terrorism; his remarks
were quoted out of context. Police suspected that Jewish extremists were responsible for his subsequent murder. Bohn, a former
navy officer, juxtaposes the murders of Odeh and Klinghoffer, two Americans killed because of their differing affiliations
in a still-simmering conflict, in drawing lessons about the "politics and prejudice" of terrorism. He attempts to
understand the motivations and grievances of the terrorists, not to justify them but to encourage a more effective policy
for confronting terror. For Bohn, terrorism is "not just about good versus evil" but exists in a political and cultural
context; his book effectively illuminates the back-story of a gruesome example of it.”
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