Bush Whacked
Gandalf Grey
Bush whacked
By ROGER MORRIS
Saturday, January 24, 2004 - Page D9
Having witnessed several disturbing conversations among senior officials of
the Tsarist regime in late 1916, on the eve of revolution, the French
Ambassador in St. Petersburg drew the natural if rather undiplomatic
conclusion. "I am obliged to report," Maurice Paléologue cabled his
government, "that, at the present moment, the Russian Empire is run by
lunatics."
There is something of the same message, if not the air of impending
overthrow, with this quasi-memoir of Paul O'Neill, treasury secretary during
the first two years of the presidency of George W. Bush. Based on extensive
interviews with O'Neill, along with his voluminous personal notes and
private papers as well as some 19,000 documents and Wall Street Journal
reporter Ron Suskind's own collateral interviews, the book is by far the
most intimate, authoritative and honest account we yet have of the innermost
circles of the present administration -- and is likely to remain so for
years to come. In all that, it is also a chilling and sad tale. M.
Paléologue would have understood.
O'Neill's is a classic American story of public service and private-sector
success. Of working-class origins in sometimes harsh deprivation, he was a
bright, indefatigable young man who laboured through a postwar economics
degree at obscure Fresno State University, and by chance got a job in the
Veterans Administration in 1961. With his gifts and conservative bent, he
rose swiftly to become a ranking budget official in the presidencies of
Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, leaving Washington in 1977 to become a CEO at
International Paper and then Alcoa, where he led a company renaissance that
became corporate legend.
Along the way in government and business, he had made friends among once and
future Republican barons like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, as well as
senior men around the first president Bush. By late 2000, with a $60-million
fortune and a reputation for fiscal expertise, towering integrity and
fearless candour, looking born to the boardroom or GOP cabinet table, the
prestigious, white-haired O'Neill seemed a ready selection for Treasury.
With the new president knowing almost no one (and nothing) in the field,
O'Neill was in any case the odds-on choice of Vice-President Cheney, and
thus the appointee. For the regime as a whole, the inclusion of a man of
such character and experience in the inner circle was a horrendous mistake.
Meticulously if often incredulously recorded, it is all here: a case history
in the chaos theory of an administration even worse than its critics have
imagined. "Go find me a way to do this," Bush blithely intones after a crude
but confected National Security Council meeting effectively settles on an
invasion of Iraq just 10 days after the inauguration and more than seven
months prior to 9/11.
As to O'Neill's alarm and disgust, they careen in the same way toward crony
tax cuts for the wealthy and calamitous budget deficits. Cheney waves aside
any question with the old, painfully discredited myth that "Reagan proved
that deficits don't matter," or the blatant claim of spoils: "We won the
mid-term elections, this is our due."
Presiding over it all, of course, is the Incurious George, whose relentless,
unquestioning ignorance and lack of self-awareness O'Neill finds shocking,
especially by comparison to what he had seen before in the Oval Office with
Nixon's high intelligence, Ford's mastery of the issues, the elder Bush's
relatively judicious balancing of views. The portrait is ugly not only for
an American leader's consummate, unconscious incompetence, but for the
flashes of mean spirit as well. "You're the chief of staff," Bush typically
humiliates his ranking White House assistant. "You think you're up to
getting us some cheeseburgers?" It's a habit all the more repugnant when set
against an equally frequent oily ingratiation with visitors and politicos.
Not even the Bush dynasty escapes. At one point in the frightening wake of
9/11, the cast is at Camp David, discussing comfort food. Someone asks the
president what home-cooked dish he enjoyed most as a child. "You got to be
kiddin.' My mother never cooked," he says of the matronly Barbara. "The
woman had frostbite on her fingers. Everything right out of the freezer."
Occasionally, and only rarely, by O'Neill's account, Bush manages something
more than policy-making silence, personal bile or oil. "Haven't we already
given money to rich people," he asks in typical puzzlement at one of the tax
deliberations. "Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?" But the
fugitive question is soon erased by the near-hypnotic mantra of the cunning
right-wing political adviser, Karl Rove. "Stick to principle," Rove tells
the president. "Stick to principle," and Bush retreats to docile submission
to some neoconservative or campaign orthodoxy as if he were a character in
The Manchurian Candidate.
The obviously unfit chief executive, O'Neill relates, also lacks
"credibility with his most senior officials." But these are pictured as a
seamy lot as well: Cheney, a scheming "puppeteer" who mongers irrelevant
wars, "slaughters" any mildly progressive initiative in economic or
environmental policy, and plays a banal Washington game of
leak-and-manipulate that succeeds only because of the mediocrity or
compromise of the rest of the government as well as the media; Secretary of
State Colin Powell, a hapless bureaucrat repeatedly outmanoeuvred by the
zealots, and who "who may have been there, in large part, as cover," yet can
never muster the courage or conscience to resign and blow the whistle with
honour; Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet, who appears again
and again as a pandering bureaucrat of no independent intellect.
And, not least, there is National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, whose
manifest inadequacy for the job robs Bush and the rest of Washington of any
chance to check the worst political impulses or institutional bureaucratic
impositions that can capture a presidency at such high public cost. Suskind
tellingly recalls a fateful moment in 1998 at the family compound at
Kennebunkport, Maine, when the elder Bush introduced his ambitious son to
Rice, who with neoconservative extremist (now Deputy Defense Secretary) Paul
Wolfowitz began a foreign policy "tutorial" of the blithely uninformed
George W. It all leads to O'Neill's already well-known characterization of
the Bush policy-making process as "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
No less disturbing, though, is the veritable Hound of the Baskervilles
dimension in O'Neill's searing sojourn. As the abuses and atrocities,
political and intellectual, pile up, where is the barking? Where, one might
ask, are the Democrats, the loyal opposition, however humbled in their
minority status on Capitol Hill? O'Neill runs into flak from time to time
from the other side of the aisle. But in some ways, the most revealing
aspect of his revelations is how very little his outrage was, and is,
mirrored -- how craven the Democrats were and remain -- in the face of a
governing malfeasance and arbitrariness in which O'Neill's knowledge may be
unusually intimate and impressive, but is hardly unique.
Most of Washington, even his ostensible supporters, is well aware that Bush
may be the least ade-quate president in the modern history of the republic,
whatever the superficial success of the White House's political imagery and
manipulations. But as O'Neill and Suskind leave no doubt, the Republicans
are wholly captive to their leader's apparent popularity as well as to the
disciplined, punishing right-wing constituencies behind the White House
handlers and neo-conservatives seeded throughout government. As are the
Democrats to their own compromise by moneyed power and constant pervasive
fear of the retributive rightist binges of a swing electorate.
In the end, fired by Cheney for his economic dissent and refreshing but
unwelcome outspokenness, O'Neill leaves Washington again, seeming in what he
tells and shares with Suskind more naïve than vengeful, more dismayed and
disappointed than truly outraged. One thinks of other books in this rather
exclusive genre of ranking officials turned whistle-blowers, of David
Stockman, the budget director who pulled back the curtain on the Reagan
fiscal fiasco, or Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who chronicled his woes in
the Clinton regime.
Yet there is something in all of them, O'Neill included, that borders on the
disingenuous. Do these intelligent, sophisticated, much-travelled men not
really understand what awaits them in high office? Having left Washington in
1977, but being in and around the corridors of power often since, was
O'Neill really oblivious to the culture of corruption and complicity that
American politics and governance have become under the growing tyranny of
money and special interests? This tyranny, already well established in the
1960s and '70s, is one that O'Neill and his fellow corporate CEOs all but
uni-formly propagated to the end of the 20th century.
But taking O'Neill at face value at least gives us mild hope. His (and
Suskind's) act of courage in this book is historic. If his shock is real --
however naive or uninformed he was to begin with -- it just may signal
something wider in at least some precincts of the corporate oligarchy, who
ride the back of a nativist, know-nothing tiger in their alliance with the
fundamentalist GOP, and whose considerable power might yet be marshalled to
pull the Republicans, and the nation, back from an extremist abyss.
In that sense, The Price of Loyalty may be truly ironic. How fascinating it
would be if the cleansing of Washington were begun not by the forlorn
Democrats -- watching the self-destruction of Howard Dean and the anointing
of the domesticated Senator John Kerry -- but by America's O'Neills,
educated at last.
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"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator." - GW Bush 12/18/2000.
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that
we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
---Theodore Roosevelt
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of
Iraq."
-- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,