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CounterPunch
December
9, 2002
Bob Woodward
and the "Bush at War" Hagiography
by ROBERT JENSEN
Bob Woodward's latest travelogue through the minds
of the powerful, "Bush at War," has been widely praised
as a compelling account of the Bush administration post-9/11.
The book is, in one sense, quite an accomplishment:
Woodward manages to make the subject boring. He takes events
of incredible significance -- the 9/11 attack and the U.S. response
to it -- and weighs them down with so much trivia drenched in
naiveté that I found myself struggling to stay awake.
As I faded in and out of consciousness
while reading, I imagined the following, rendered in Woodwardesque
prose:
Robert Jensen walked into the conference
room with his dogeared copy of "Bush at War" and laid
it on the mahogany table next to the manila folder that held
the talking points he had rushed to finish before the  meeting. He knew the revisions, made
right up to the last second, had been hard on his staff, but
this was a meeting with the president, with all the principals.
Everyone knew what was at stake.
Jensen knew the president would expect
him to have answers, not just questions, about the importance
of the book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post's star reporter.
But, Jensen pondered, was Woodward really
just a reporter? Or had circumstances changed the once scrappy
guy from the metro desk who had broken the Watergate story wide
open? Was Woodward something more? A first-draft historian? A
meta-journalist? Jensen knew the president would want an assessment,
and he knew that he would be on the spot.
Bush leaned forward in his chair; it
was time for the meeting to start.
There was only one item on the agenda
for this meeting: assessing this bestseller that was flying off
the bookstore shelves across America. Bush wanted to know: What
was the fallout for the war? Did the American people understand
the task his administration faced? Was Woodward's book going
to derail the strategy the president had approved? It was a good
strategy, all the principals agreed. But where were the weak
spots? The president needed answers, and -- as always -- the
president wanted them now. And he wanted a hamburger. The steward
on duty was dispatched. National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice suggested they get started.
Around the table were Vice President
Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Director of
Central Intelligence George Tenet, and White House Chief of Staff
Andrew Card. And, of course, Condi. She had been nervous about
the meeting, worrying that the attention being paid to "Bush
at War" was distracting the president. He was being pulled
in different directions, and it was her job to keep him from
being pulled apart.
After the last National Security Council
meeting, her job was getting harder. Rumsfeld had proposed that
the next phase of the war on terrorism should be a massive attack
on Cuba to expand the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay to the whole
island -- a three-day air campaign followed by boots-on-the-ground.
Cheney had liked the plan, and Tenet had said his paramilitary
teams were ready to work with the Special Forces units that would
take the lead.
Powell had been visibly shaken by the
proposal. He had known Rumsfeld was itching to expand the war
quickly, but he couldn't believe the secretary of defense would
push for a strategy that rash. Powell had no doubt Castro had
links to al-Qaeda, but he thought the case needed to be nailed
down. He didn't trust the HUMINT (human intelligence) coming
from the CIA that suggested Castro and bin Laden had once ordered
camping gear -- including, crucially, a two-burner propane stove
-- from the same web site. Did they have the SIGINT (signals
intelligence) to back it up? How could he take such sketchy evidence
to foreign leaders? Sure, the British would buy it, but it would
be a hard sell everywhere else. The French likely would block
a Security Council resolution. Powell was putting out the fires
in his mind before Rumsfeld could finish the proposal. Castro
needed to go, but was this the way? Powell had been skeptical
from the start.
Meanwhile, Bush had moved on: "Yes,
we can do Cuba. And we should. Castro is evil. He has done evil.
He is an evildoer. So let's do it. I want something on paper
in three days. All options laid out, with minimal civilian casualties.
Remember, we do good, not evil."
Bush had ended that meeting by looking
straight at Rice: "Now, what about Woodward's book?"
The principals weren't eager to take it on, but Rice knew the
president wanted to confront it head on.
That's where Jensen came in. He came
into this without connections to any of the principals. He could
lay out the case and let the others react. Rice knew it would
be touchy, but she had to take the chance. She scheduled Jensen
for the next NSC meeting.
Now Rice was impatient to get it over
with. "Professor Jensen, please begin," she said.
Jensen explained that much of the furor
over the book had been about the access Woodward had been given
-- to notes from NSC meetings and to the thinking of the principals.
Had important intelligence sources been compromised? Jensen told
the president not to worry. There was virtually nothing of interest
about policy or strategy in the book. For all the breathless
prose suggesting that Woodward was revealing the real truth about
the planning for the war in Afghanistan, the book was empty.
It simply regurgitated the same claims about the war that the
administration had offered to the public at the time, only with
the pretense that Woodward had tapped into the real thinking
of the leadership.
Jensen assured the president that Woodward
seemed to believe that all the administration officials were
basically telling the truth. When they said the attack on Afghanistan
was about ending terrorism, Woodward apparently believed them.
There was no indication in the book that Woodward understood
the war was part of an imperial project to extend and deepen
the dominance of the United States, around the world and in the
crucial resource-rich arenas of the Middle East and Central Asia.
Jensen knew that wasn't the president's
only concern. What about Woodward's revelations of tensions among
key advisers, and the possibility some of those advisers had
cooperated with Woodward to gain political advantage? Had Woodward
punished Rumsfeld and rewarded Powell based on how much information
each had given? Was the book fair to Cheney? Jensen again assured
the president that Woodward was such a sycophant that even the
treatment of Rumsfeld, who was portrayed somewhat less sympathetically,
gave the impression that the secretary of defense was working
24/7 for justice and freedom. Jensen cut to the chase.
"It's a slam dunk," he told
the president, remembering that Rice had told him that Bush preferred
sports metaphors. "The underlying message of "Bush
at War" is that your administration is made up of decent,
hard-working folks who -- no matter what their differences in
personality, ideology or strategy -- in the end do what is best
for the country and the suffering people of the world."
Bush looked relieved, but there was another
question hanging in the air. Jensen knew the president wouldn't
ask it, but he knew it was his job to answer it.
"I know it doesn't matter to you,
Mr. President, but with your permission I would like to assess
the effect of the book on your approval ratings," Jensen
said.
Bush winced ever so slightly. He was,
of course, curious, and before 9/11 it might have been one of
his central questions. But 9/11 had changed the president, changed
the man. He knew political considerations mattered if he were
to succeed in pushing through his domestic agenda. But he also
knew that he couldn't think politically the way he once had.
He was the president in a new age, and he couldn't look back.
"Go ahead," Bush said. "But
make it quick. We have a war against terrorism to win."
Jensen wasted no words. "You come
out looking like a leader. A gut player who can think on his
feet. A man not afraid to push his subordinates but also willing
to trust their judgment. A man who, when the pressure is on,
isn't afraid to take chances, but who knows when to be cautious
when lives are at stake. A man who grew into the job but never
lost his Texas instincts."
And, Jensen said, "A man not afraid
to ask for a hamburger when he's hungry."
Bush smiled. "Where I come from,
a man's not a man if he's afraid to ask for a hamburger when
he's hungry."
That instantly changed the mood of the
meeting. Powell looked over at Rumsfeld, and the two laughed.
Powell quickly wrote on a note card -- "Let's get (Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul) Wolfowitz and (Deputy Secretary of
State Richard) Armitage and go get a burger tonight" --
and pushed it to Rumsfeld, who flashed a thumbs-up. Cheney, reading
their minds, said, "Put me down for take-out. I have to
get back to my undisclosed location." They all laughed until
they stopped.
Rice breathed a sigh of relief. Let the
boys go out for burgers -- they need to blow off some steam,
she thought. She was already sketching her evening: a salad and
brief walk to clear her head, and then back to work on Cuba.
She still had to nail down the number of fuel cylinders Castro
had ordered for the camp stove, and there were some disturbing
reports out of Prague that the Cubans had found a way to synthesize
plutonium from propane.
Robert Jensen
is an associate professor of journalism at the University of
Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective, and author
of the book Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream
and the pamphlet "Citizens of the Empire." He can be
reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
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