Stonewalled in the White House press room
By Orville Schell
The Los Angeles Times Book Review
October 31, 2004
Our nation has arrived at a critical historical tipping point.
Although the decisions we make on Tuesday will have a crucial bearing
on our future, an equally important question is whether our political
leaders, whomever they may be, will undertake to speak truthfully to us
as citizens, or whether facts, reason and civil discourse will be
trumped by lies, illogic and spin. At stake is not simply which
political party prevails but also whether the people and their elected
representatives can keep each other sufficiently in touch with reality
to enable our democracy to produce rational and wise decisions.
Glenn W. Smith's "Unfit Commander" is a polemic decrying President
Bush's shortcomings as a truth teller. By systematically recounting
what is known about Bush's National Guard record and how this elusive
story has been handled by his media specialists, Smith -- a former
journalist and currently executive director of Texans for Truth,
founded "to help Americans understand the falsity of George W. Bush's
claims to an honorable military past" -- exposes the abyss that is
opening between reality and fantasy in this nation's representation of
its leaders and important public issues.
The book begins with an informative but hardly impartial
introduction,
which is followed by a trove of documents bearing on the president's
military service during the Vietnam War. We learn that instead of going
to Vietnam, Bush -- through Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes and other friends
of his father, then a U.S. congressman -- managed to get assigned to the
Texas Air National Guard; that he declined to volunteer for overseas
duty; and that over the next four years, though becoming an
enthusiastic and able F-102 pilot, he ultimately seemed to lose
interest in the Guard and essentially absented himself from service.
After receiving permission to transfer to Alabama's 187th Tactical
Recon Group to work on Winton Blount's 1972 campaign for the U.S.
Senate, Bush failed to show up for a required physical exam and was
grounded. Although, according to Guard records, he continued to be
paid, "[n]o other credible witness recalls Bush fulfilling his
obligations to the National Guard in Alabama," Smith reports. In 1973,
he was permitted to transfer to Boston, to attend Harvard Business
School. But, here, too, there is virtually no evidence of his having
shown up at any base. Despite agreeing in 1968 to a six-year service
obligation, he was released eight months early, with an honorable
discharge, on Oct. 1, 1973.
Besides Bush's dubiously honorable service record, Smith's book
highlights two other important issues: First, the media's failure to
get to the bottom of the story ("[W]hat may be the most troubling
aspect of this mini-scandal is how easily the press were distracted
from the real story of Bush's military service," Smith writes); second,
the lengths to which the public relations apparatus of the White House
has gone not only to keep it under wraps but to spin a web of
obfuscation around it.
The most telling documents in "Unfit Commander" are not those
detailing Bush's "spotty service record" but the transcripts of the
tragicomic press briefings in which reporters valiantly and
persistently questioned White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan
about the president's time in the Guard. Their queries were repeatedly
rebuffed by McClellan, whose relentlessly "on-message" answers always
avoided a direct "yes" or "no" response: "We've released all the
information we have related to this issue," or "The president fulfilled
his duties [and] was honorably discharged" or "What I think we're
seeing now is just politics." The transcripts read almost like a press
briefing in the People's Republic of China.
One would like to think that if the American public could witness
such
political reality shows it would be outraged by the tawdry spectacle of
a public servant defending a presidential myth with evasion, hyperbole
and outright distortion. Alas, such exchanges rarely make it into the
media -- especially onto television, where most Americans get their
news. If this is a commentary on the sorry state of governmental
responsiveness, it is also a commentary on the media's refusal to
convey any real sense of how this White House has stonewalled the
legitimate questions of reporters.
The result has been that our government and an increasing number of
its citizens now live in a virtual world, where disinformation, wishful
thinking and lies have shrouded reality in a cloth of fantasy. That a
democracy cannot function when its citizens are deluded is well known.
The deeper question raised by "Unfit Commander" is: Are we as a nation
still committed to the idea of an active and independent press serving
as a watchdog over government power? "The presidency of George W.
Bush," Smith concludes, "has come to exemplify an unhealthy and
undemocratic trend in our country, a trend that has us accepting the
Imaginary over the Real, the fables of propagandists and ideologues
over the evidence of our own eyes."
Orville Schell is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC
Berkeley.
Unfit Commander
Texans for Truth Take On George W. Bush
by Glenn W. Smith
ReganBooks: 370 pp., $24.95
Available online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
