WASHINGTON – Like no other time in recent memory, the American people have to be able to trust their leader. After all, President Bush is asking us to give up civil liberties to get back our security after the worst domestic crisis since the Civil War.
And Congress has handed him practically blank-check powers to prosecute a broadly defined and sustained war halfway around the globe, where the Afghanistan Principle – which holds that it’s easier to lie about events thousands of miles away – actually applies.
I shudder at the thought of Bill Clinton or Al Gore sitting in the Oval Office at a time like this.
But Bush has been no pillar of honesty.
The day after the Sept. 11 attacks, he let his spokesman tell the public a whopper that, unfortunately, has undermined trust in his leadership from the start of the crisis. To restore that trust, Bush must own up to the lie, no matter how embarrassing, and seriously consider replacing his spokesman, who has lost virtually all trust with the press corps.
As the crisis unfolded throughout the day on Sept. 11, the media criticized, reasonably, the president for not being more visible; for not at least pretending he was in charge of the situation; for not, at the very least, putting on a brave face to calm our fears as the nation’s financial center and political capital burned.
Except for a brief mid-day statement, Bush was essentially AWOL for nearly 12 hours. He finally returned to the White House to address, anemically, a rattled nation on television at about 8:45 p.m.
That day, despite a drumbeat of criticism from TV anchors throughout the day, the White House could come up with no good explanation for the president taking such refuge.
The next day was another story. Suddenly, they had an excuse.
“We have specific and credible information that the White House and Air Force One were also intended targets of these attacks,” said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer at the Sept. 12 press briefing.
Therefore, Bush had to lie low – or so the story went.
Fleischer claimed the American Airlines jet that rammed into the Pentagon, first headed for the White House. But it overshot it, he suggested, and doubled back to the easier target of the Pentagon.
The story smelled funny to reporters, who are paid to smell funniness, especially from government sources, even in a national crisis when we’re all supposed to be wrapping ourselves in the flag and rallying around the commander in chief.
For one, the White House would have known on Sept. 11 if the jumbo jet entered restricted airspace. So why didn’t the White House leak that information to reporters the same day?
Also, if the jet did enter restricted airspace, it more than likely would have been shot down by White House rooftop forces armed with surface-to-air Stinger missiles. At the time, the White House had already known about the terrorist hits on the World Trade Center, and would have been on the lookout for commercial jets flying off course.
The next day, Sept. 13, Fleischer juiced the story to blunt growing skepticism among the press corps, who argued that even some in the Pentagon doubted the official line.
“I wouldn’t have said it if it weren’t true,” he assured reporters.
As proof, he suggested that someone, presumably a terrorist, was able to call in a threat against Air Force One using a secret code name for the president’s plane on the day of the attacks. (That triggered speculation that perhaps there was a mole inside the White House.)
Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush adviser Karl Rove repeated the story in subsequent press interviews, giving it more currency.
But then the story began to completely unravel.
The Washington Post reviewed radar tapes showing that American flight 77 made a rapid, descending turn over northern Virginia, nearly completing a full circle before it slammed into the Pentagon. The plane never approached restricted airspace around the White House, and turned off a course toward the White House when it was about 10 miles away.
In other words, the main target of the flight’s hijackers was indeed the Pentagon, not the White House.
Then came reports that Bush administration officials could find no record of a phone call from someone lodging a threat against Air Force One. As it turns out, the threat simply never happened.
Challenged with the news, a testy Fleischer seemed to back away from his earlier claims.
Later, in off-the-record spinning, administration sources told reporters that White House staffers apparently misunderstood comments made by their security detail.
Uh-huh.
It’s now plain that the Bush White House fabricated a story in order to control political damage from the image of a president running for cover as hundreds of brave Americans gave up their lives to save victims trapped in burning buildings, and as millions more panic-stricken Americans watched their televisions in vain for their president to come on the air and assure them it was all right, that everything was under control, and to not worry.
But here’s what’s really galling. White House officials, presumably with the blessing of Bush, embellished the story with mumbo-jumbo about secret code words.
Yet now Bush is scolding Congress for mishandling intelligence information?
To be sure, we were all left raw and shaken by the heinous, unprovoked assault on our homeland. The president is no less human, and was perhaps no less frightened, than the rest of us.
But perhaps, above all, his job is to calm our nerves and allay our fears in times of crisis. Bush failed in that regard. And then he dispatched his spin doctors to cover for him.
OK, bygones.
But now Bush must lead us to victory in a war we’ve never fought before, one that’s fraught with land mines – literally – both at home and abroad. In this war, the home-front is the war-front, and the war-front is the home-front. He’ll need unflagging support and patience from Americans.
That won’t happen without trust.
Going forward, we must trust that Bush is leveling with us. No, we don’t need to know about troop movements and other sensitive military information.
But we do need to know that he’s telling us the truth about the success of our operations in Afghanistan, a war zone with a virtual media blackout.
Did we knock out Osama bin Laden’s terrorist nests? Did we knock off bin Laden himself? Give it to us straight. Don’t sugar-coat anything.
On the home-front, are we being told the truth about terrorist activities? Are they worse than we know? Is the threat from Arab immigrants bigger than we’re being told? Is the Muslim movement here more militant than Bush wants to say?
Conversely, are politicians needlessly scaring us with general warnings of future attacks, so they can cover their own keisters in the slim chance that we are attacked again?
Again, trust is key to the public supporting this long campaign to stamp out terrorism here and abroad.
Dealing as openly and honestly as possible with the media will go a long way toward engendering trust among them and, by extension, the public.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is a good model. He’s tough, and tends to be prickly at times, but you
nonetheless get the sense he’s dealing with you straight.
Fleischer, on the other hand, does not engender trust among the press corps.
In briefings, he is more often than not overly guarded, extremely defensive and short in his answers – and seldom helpful in shedding light on even run-of-the-mill topics. In handling sensitive matters, he has proven to be just plain dishonest – and arrogantly so – even as recent presidential flacks go.
If Fleischer’s stiff-arming of the press is a reflex response to their anti-Republican bias, he should realize that holding back information will only make them more suspicious, more cunning in their questioning and more spiteful in their reporting.
Bush would be better served by someone else in that critical hotbox.
There will be political blunders galore in this dicey war. They can’t be helped. The people know that. And they’ll forgive Bush for them as long as he follows through on his stated goal of finding, stopping and defeating “every terrorist group of global reach” – and as long as he’s honest about his mistakes in the process, and doesn’t try to cover them up.
It’s the human side of Bush that Americans like. We know he has a good heart and loves this great country. No one expects perfection.
But letting handlers like Fleischer and Rove over-handle him will only hurt him.
Be yourself. Be honest, Mr. President. And we’ll get through this together.
Postscript: I agree with the many Bush loyalists who have written me, that the president probably was just following the advice of the Secret Service in hunkering down all day. That is understandable. What isn’t understandable, and hardly excusable, is the elaborate lie that followed. That was extremely poor judgment. He should have just absorbed the criticism and moved on. Instead, he concocted a fantastical tale
that calls into question what he and his spokesman are telling you and me right now about the war. The cover-up is always worse than the original sin. When
will politicians learn? One other thing: I did not vote for Al Gore, I voted for Bush, although more against Gore, as I voted against Clinton both times. My job as a journalist is not to support who I vote
for, but to support the truth – no matter who it helps or who it hurts.
Related columns:
Are warnings political CYA (Cover Your Anthrax)?
Please, Mr. Bush, no Basrah this time
Let’s curb the kangaroo court of anonymous sources
Tim Graham