Obama’s not the first former boss Leon Panetta blistered in a memoir

Everyone seems to be shocked, positively shocked, that former Obama CIA director and Defense Secretary  Leon Panetta would pay his former boss back by writing a memoir slamming Obama’s foreign policy operation and implying the president put political goals above foreign policy.

He’s said in interviews that Obama “created a vacuum” in Iraq that led to the emergence of the Islamic State, and he’s too much law professor, not enough the leader, and that he “avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.”

But it turns out that Obama is not the only former boss about whom Panetta has written a sharply critical book. In 1971, Panetta penned a take down of Richard Nixon & Co.  – “Bring Us Together: The Nixon Team and the Civil Rights Retreat”–  after serving as a senior aide to Secretary Robert Finch, who headed the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare. (Panetta had earlier come to Washington to work for California GOP senator Thomas Kuchel.)