Frank Rich - The Greatest Story Ever Sold

THE PENGUIN PRESS
New York 2006

THE PENGUIN PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2006 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Frank Rich, 2006
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rich, Frank.
The greatest story ever sold: the decline and fall of truth from 9/11 to Katrina / Frank Rich.
p. cm.
ISBN: 1-4295-2352-2
United StatesPolitics and government20012. United StatesForeign relations20013. DeceptionPolitical aspectsUnited States. 4. Spin doctorsUnited States. 5. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946Friends and associates. 6. Public relations and politicsUnited States. 7. Propaganda, American. 8. September 11
Terrorist Attacks, 2001Influence. 9. Iraq War, 200310. Hurricane Katrina, 2005. I. Title
E902.R53 2006973.931dc22 2006050309

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With love and gratitude
to the strongest alliance of all,
my axis of family
Alex, Nathaniel, and Simon

Introduction

PART ONE

MAKING THE SALE

ONE Home to the Heartland

TWO Dead or alive

THREE I dont think anybody could have predicted

FOUR You dont introduce new products in August

FIVE Mission Accomplished

PART TWO

BUYERS REMORSE

SIX We found the weapons of mass destruction

SEVEN Slam dunk

EIGHT Reporting for duty

NINE When we act, we create our own reality

TEN I dont think anybody anticipated

EPILOGUE The Greatest Story Ever Sold

Appendix What the White House Knew and When It Knew It: Time Lines of the Selling of the War

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

O N THAT CRISP blue Tuesday morning I got the news, as most did, by phone. It was my sister-in-law calling from her office in midtown Manhattan. She and her husband lived a block from the World Trade Center. Were okay, she said. What are you talking about? I asked. Turn on the television, she said.

Thus began a day unlike any other that Americans of postPearl Harbor generations had seen. In my shock, the only analogue I could summon was the assassination of President Kennedy, which happened on a similarly placid day, a Friday afternoon, when I was a junior high school student in Washington, D.C. Then, as on September 11, 2001, we knew we were experiencing some great yet, at some fundamental level, incomprehensible national trauma. Then, too, you could pick up the phone and not get a dial tone. Then, too, life in the foreground shifted into slow motionif it was stirring at allwhile the grave murmur of the network anchors continued without pause in the background. Then, too, we had to awaken to the reality that our country and our lives were in the hands of a Texas politician who up to that moment had not been counted among the more inspiring or impressive American leaders.

But there were some differences. Wed never before seen colossal towers with thousands of people in themperhaps people we knewcollapse into dust in real time before our eyes. When my wife and I briefly turned away from the TV screen to look out of our window, we saw the chilling sight of military aircraft hovering over the Hudson River. That was something else we hadnt seen before. We didnt have to be told we were at war.

The enemy, though long hiding in plain sight, was one about which we knew scarcely more than we did about Lee Harvey Oswald. We knew just enough to be afraid.

Although 9/11 was not yet known by that linguistic shorthand, it was a new morning in Americaa wake-up call, youd think, for a country that had become habituated to peace and prosperity and had had the luxury of devoting several years to obsessing about a presidents seamy sex life. But whatever else 9/11 was, we can see now that it was the beginning of a new national narrativea compelling and often persuasive story that was told by the president of the United States and his administration to mobilize a shell-shocked country desperate to be led. The story was often at variance with the facts that were known at the time, let alone with the facts that have come to light since. But it did have a slick patina of plausibilitythe element that the satirical television talking head Stephen Colbert would later label truthiness. The story was effective enough to take America into a war against a nation that did not attack it on 9/11.

This book is not intended to be a harangue about George W. Bush or the war in Iraq, though my views will certainly be evident. What it is instead is a critical retracing of the sophisticated steps by which some clever people in the White House, handed an opportunity and a mandate by the shocking events of 9/11, unfurled a brilliantly produced scenario to accomplish a variety of ends, the most unambiguous of which was to amass power and hold on to it. While the controversial policy choices made by the Bush administration are well known, equally important is the way it dramatized its fable to the nation and made it credible to so many, even when it wasnt remotely true. The chronicle of how a government told and sold its story is also, inevitably, a chronicle of an American culture that was an all-too-easy mark for the flimflam.

The synergistic intersection between that culture and the Bush administrations narrative is a significant piece of the puzzle. Only an overheated 24/7 infotainment culture that had trivialized the very idea of reality (and with it, what once was known as news) could be so successfully manipulated by those in power. In an earlier America, it would have been far harder for a White House to get away with so many hollow spectacles and misleading public statements for as long as it did. When future Americans look back on this period and ask, How did this happen? the cultural context of the early twenty-first century may explain at least as much as the characters and official actions that played out against that backdrop.