Not the President's Men (Page 2)

Now comes The Greatest Story Ever Sold, and though it's a letdown, you can still see him sweating. To his credit, this is a proper book, not a lazy recycle bin for old columns, like Dowd's Bushworld or Krugman's The Great Unraveling. While it's partly cobbled together from earlier work, he clearly wants it to be more than just a collection of opinions (although his crushing verdict on the Bush Administration colors every line). No doubt thinking legacy, he wants it to have some gravitas, some heft.

On the book's second page, Rich alludes to Colbert's celebrated notion of "truthiness"--in which emotional plausibility trumps demonstrable fact. This led me to think Rich might explore one of the most deliciously ironic twists of contemporary culture: After years of shrieking about postmodern relativism in the modern university, especially its literature departments, today's conservatives now embrace the same thing when it comes to politics. Talk about breaking the connection between signifiers and referents. With his disdain for "reality-based" behavior, Karl Rove makes Jacques Derrida seem as stodgy as Andy Rooney.

But rather than set off on such conceptual flights--this is distinctly not a book of ideas--Rich takes a steadfastly prosaic approach. Weaving together the whats and whens of previously reported stories, he painstakingly describes the Bush Administration's constant mangling of the truth between September 11, 2001, and "Heckuva job, Brownie," even offering a handy seventy-eight-page timeline compiled by his crack researcher Joel Topcik. At times this narrative is arresting, albeit in a perversely nostalgic way: I was happy to be reminded of such foul propaganda flourishes as the trumped-up Ramboism of Jessica Lynch or the mythologized friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman.

Still, as I know firsthand, such pop moments never burn brighter than in a column (where Rich handled them splendidly). Strung together in a book such events quickly feel stale, ephemeral; tweaking "Mission Accomplished" is a mission long since accomplished. Indeed, anyone likely to read this book can already recite the long list of Administration malfeasances like fans at a Neil Diamond concert singing along with "Sweet Caroline." For those of us who love hating Bush-spin, there's nothing here as juicy and new as Thomas Ricks's tale in Fiasco about that splendid Baghdad afternoon in the summer of 2003 when select prowar reporters, including the Rich Man's Orwell, listened to Paul Wolfowitz hail the Coalition's astounding progress--as they sat safely ensconced in the Green Zone eating lamb off a banquet table lit by candelabras.

Oddly for a onetime reviewer, Rich gets so caught up in Bush's shock-and-awe showbiz that he doesn't spend enough time explaining why it worked--why this particular spin spun so well. He can't tell us how the Administration came up with its precise PR moves, why Richard Clarke's gripping (and widely seen) TV appearances produced so little traction or what made the public buy into (if it did) the Swiftboating of John Kerry. Too often, detailed analysis is replaced by the sociological shorthand that, as I know from my own weakness for such generalizations, is the crystal meth of the culture-crit business. Is it really true to say that "during the 1990s boom, the citizenry had become addicted to instant gratification"? Is Rich describing himself here? (If so, I'd love to hear about it.) Is he talking about readers of those Times articles about $20,000 settees? Or is he referring to some supposed horde of ADD people out there bedazzled by Hummers and Ann Coulter's Girls Gone Wild conservatism?

Even the treatment of pop culture feels pro forma. I kept wanting Rich to cut loose, to riff on why, for instance, Tillman's story proved such an effective piece of demagogic mythology (literal brotherhood, ideas of masculinity, modern football as high-tech combat) or why this particular player (a guy who craved contact and thought in absolutes) would be the perfect gladiator for a so-called "war on terror." While it may be true that Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is "the best early take on the forty-third president," I wanted Rich to at least notice that the novel's villain, Charles Lindbergh, is the one who opposes fighting Fascism overseas but promises an isolationist homeland security. This is exactly the opposite of Bush, who, Rich provocatively but unconvincingly argues, was led by Rove into toppling Saddam as a way of winning the 2002 midterm elections. But once they'd won, why invade?

Like many other books appalled by media coverage of Bush, The Greatest Story Ever Sold rightly knocks Bob Woodward for prizing his sources so highly that he treats them with kid gloves. This makes it all the more disappointing that Rich, who doesn't depend on such sources, is himself so cautious about the paper of record's role in the decline and fall of truth. He slams Judith Miller for her lousy WMD-scare reporting, but heck, she's already been cut loose. I kept waiting for the necessary dissection of his stablemate Friedman, the country's most vaunted foreign policy columnist, whose liberal-hawk cheerleading provided Bush & Co. with invaluable ideological cover--he helped them sell their story. True, Rich shows us the Times's public editor smacking the editors for giving Miller's stories front-page play while more nuanced, questioning articles were "interred on Page B10." But this book should be giving us Rich's inside analysis of exactly how that happened at the place where he's been working for the last quarter-century. Why didn't he go upstairs, do some reporting and give us something new? After all, he seems uniquely situated to provide such firsthand knowledge. He's one of the Gray Lady's fair-haired boys. It's not for nothing that The Greatest Story Ever Sold received a gaudy cover review in the Times Book Review.

Of course, merely to say this is to understand Rich's unwillingness to pounce on Friedman or anatomize why the Times covered Iraq so feebly when it made a real difference. He's pleasurably ensconced in a powerful institution that not only pays him handsomely but makes him a national figure. (Lest I appear to be on a high horse, let me add that I don't bite the hand that cuts my checks either, except in those happy cases when a sharp nip will let us all revel in our own integrity.) Unlike far too many of his colleagues, Rich is shrewd enough to know that if his work ran in, say, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and not the Times, he'd be no better known than... whoever the columnists are there. His power actually belongs to his spot on Pundit Park Avenue.

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