The bard of the anti-Bush set may have the last laugh

Week after week, Frank Rich musters more moral outrage (and more relevant facts) on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times than any other columnist on that paper. His new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, is a compelling account of the "decline and fall of truth" during the Bush administration and a runaway bestseller. Next Tuesday, when America goes to the polls, we will finally learn how many of our fellow citizens have absorbed Rich's views on Iraq—and the consequences of Republican control of all three branches of the Federal government. This week, Rich took time out from his cross-country book tour to talk with author Charles Kaiser about everything from Bob Woodward's belated criticism of the Bush administration to Jon Stewart's indispensable role in keeping the record straight.

CHARLES KAISER: Now that you're on book tour, you're no longer in the blue-state bubble of Manhattan. Have you been getting any flak from the war defenders that populate the heartland?
FRANK RICH: Bizarrely, the only flak I got from a war defender—"You don't talk enough about how Saddam Hussein was himself a weapon of mass destruction"—was at the Barnes & Noble on New York's Upper West Side! What I've found everywhere else—whether in Seattle or Kansas City, though Houston is yet to come—is a tremendous sense of frustration at having been misled and lied to about the Iraq war, an appetite for harder-hitting media that can be trusted, and concern about whether the Democrats will be any better at leading the country out of the morass. Increasingly—and I've noticed this in e-mail communications from readers of the column as well—some of those who are most anguished are parents with children heading to or returning from service in Iraq.

There have been a number of books written about the war in Iraq. In your opinion, is there one in particular that explains the method to the madness of the Bush administration?
I say in the opening of my book that I think the single most important paragraph written about the war in Iraq, even though it isn't specifically about Iraq, was written by Ron Suskind for the New York Times Magazine. I feel that is the Rosetta stone of the administration.

[From The Greatest Story Ever Sold] Ron Suskind, writing in the New York Times Magazine two weeks before the 2004 election, recounted a conversation with a presidential aide who spoke sarcastically of journalists and their "reality-based community." The aide, who sounded uncannily like Karl Rove, informed Suskind with great condescension that a "judicious study of discernible reality" is "not the way the world really works anymore." The aide explained: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

This was said in the summer of 2002; it was not said the summer of '04. The summer of '02, we now know, is when they were getting ready to sell the war in Iraq.

It's when they "rolled out the new product."

Exactly. And it was also the summer of '02 when Cheney started talking about Saddam going nuclear. Then, on September 8 of that year, the Times ran the front-page aluminum tube story. That was the beginning of the roll out—that's when four administration officials fanned out to the Sunday morning talk shows and repeated language from that piece: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." The Downing Street memo—when the head of British intelligence reported back to the Blair government that the administration was determined to fix the facts and intelligence—that was in late July of '02. It was also around then that the administration set up the White House Iraq Group (WIG) to sell the war. The interesting thing about WIG is that, while it contained a couple of policy people, like Scooter Libby, it was mainly comprised of salesmen—Karen Hughes, Mary Matalan, Karl Rove, and Andy Card. It was so blatant; it was like they were selling Cheerios.

So that this aide said this to Ron Suskind at this time, makes it to me probably the single most important paragraph written about the war, because he was referring to events that were happening offstage. The thing about the Iraq war is, if nothing else, it's produced a shelf full of interesting books.

Can you give us a reading list?
Sure. But I don't want to leave anything out: Pretext for War by James Bamford, The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, The Rise of the Vulcans by James Mann, Fiasco by Thomas Ricks, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind, and Blind Into Baghdad by James Fallows. And then, of the liberals who supported this war, the only one who, in my view, successfully fessed up to it and did the reporting to redeem himself is George Packer—The Assassin's Gate.

Chandrasekaran is the one who explains that during the first year of the occupation, the Green Zone only employed people who had worked for the RNC.
Right.

What about Bob Woodward's book?
State of Denial fills in some very interesting details on a story that Bob Woodward seems to be among the last of major journalists to figure out.

Which medium has been most important to the telling of the truth about the war: mainstream print media, blogs, network news, cable news, or satirical journalism along the lines of Jon Stewart?
In the early days of the war, and the selling of the war, I think Jon Stewart played an invaluable role. Which is not to diminish what he's doing now. But he was the first person to do what television news should have been doing, which is go to the video clips and see what they said two months ago. And to look at what the Coalition of the Willing really is—the Coalition of the Piddling, as Stewart called it. I think you can't lump the mainstream together. We now know that Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau—now McClatchy newspapers—were on to the story ahead of most others. We also know that there were reporters at the Washington Post and the New York Times who were on to the story, but whose stuff was unfortunately downplayed, compared to the big-footing journalists who got it wrong on page one. There were people like [Walter] Pincus and [James] Risen and others who were on to it but went unnoticed.

I think there's nothing to be said for television news at all. And I'm talking about all of it. Now, again, since the war started to turn south, everybody has gotten with the program.

Before the war, why was the press so craven toward the Bush administration?

First of all, the post-9/11 reaction by journalists to rally around the president, to me, is human and understandable—and I felt some of it myself. Almost 90 percent of the country supported Bush. Ninety-four percent, certainly including me, supported the war in Afghanistan. And that's fine. We're human beings too, and we live in cities like New York and Washington that were attacked by a savage enemy. But at a certain point we have to return to the skepticism that is an important part of journalism. And that did not happen in a timely fashion. I also feel, as I say in my book, there was a kind of strange boomer mentality afoot: We're going to get on board with this war, because we're going to prove that we have balls—we're not just the generation that protested and got out of serving in Vietnam.

And that obviously applied to everyone who dodged the war, including Cheney, Bush, and others in the administration.
Absolutely. And I think there was an echo of this in the press. There was a kind of macho, swaggering quality to the hysteria about Iraq—if you look back on it now it seems absurd.

I argued in my book, 1968 In America, that the one positive effect of Vietnam was that it prevented us from doing anything similar to Vietnam for at least 20 years after it ended. To me, one of the most revolting things about the neocons was their conviction that we had to get beyond our Vietnam Syndrome. And it was this conviction that propelled us into this catastrophe.
That's certainly an explanation for Cheney and company. But I also feel a big component of this was just politics. They had a war that had actually been won in Afghanistan—or so we thought at the time.

They had a winning product.
They had a winning product in a midterm election year—

So they were adding to the product line—
This time with menthol.

Which is what you say at the end of your book.
Yes. And you cannot underestimate the fact that everything to sell the war was geared to get everyone to sign on to the war resolution in the context of the midterm elections. And indeed we're seeing a pathetic attempt to go back to that playbook with the midterms right now, in 2006. I don't think it's working, because things are just so bad in Iraq. But still, that was the hope.

There are now more than forty former generals and admirals who say publicly that the administration's torture policies are a catastrophe and have put American servicemen and women at risk for decades to come. And yet the Democrats are still unable to prevent the Republicans from painting themselves as the heroes of national security.

I don't think we'll know the answer to that until we have the results of the election. I would be foolish to make a prediction, but I do think there is at least some possibility that this is just playing to the bunker base—the 30 percent that thinks they're doing a great job in Iraq. If the Democrats do poorly, your question will be vindicated. But the polls certainly don't suggest that they will. Everything's up for grabs right now—including the Republican Party.

You wrote a column on October 15 called, "The Gay Old Party Comes Out". Given the Republicans' addiction to gay baiting, which you have frequently described, if you could prove that a closeted senior Republican was gay, would that be a story?

If people holding positions of power, who make an issue of people's sexuality in their politics, are discovered to be hypocrites, I see no reason why it shouldn't be reported, as long as it's reported in a legitimate fashion. As long as it's something that's sourced—not gossip, and not anonymous. And I think these are basically the rules the press are following now. Don't you think?

I think straight reporters in Washington are still incredibly nervous and uncomfortable with this subject.
Here's another example, one that doesn't involve homosexuality. George Allen [Republican Senator from Virginia] has now made, in my view, ridiculous use of fictional passages written by his opponent, Jim Webb, in novels that involve sex. So if he's claiming that fiction is in some way a manifestation of his opponent's views about sex, his own sex life, his attitudes towards women, etc., journalists should get Allen to open up his divorce papers. Because he's made it an issue. If he wants to make an issue of fiction, let's see the nonfiction about George Allen.

Photos, from top: Sam Bolton/PatrickMcMullan.com; Alex Wong/Getty Images for Meet the Press; Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images

Billboard photo courtesy of Charlie Rose

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