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The
Silent President
Published: April 12, 2004 (The New York Times)
President Bush was asked,
during a very brief session with reporters yesterday,
about the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo he received
on domestic terrorism. He responded with the
familiar White House complaint about lack of
specificity in the C.I.A.'s warnings - although the
memo mentioned a plot, possibly involving hijacked
planes and New York City. The most striking thing
about the president's comment, however, was his
bottom line: that he did everything he could. Over
the last few weeks we have heard lawmakers and
officials from two administrations talk about their
feelings of responsibility, about how they
compulsively re-examine the events leading up to 9/ll,
asking themselves whether they could have done
anything to avert the terrible disaster that day. It
is beginning to seem that the only person free of
that kind of self-examination is the man who was
chief executive when the attacks occurred.
No reasonable American
blames Mr. Bush for the terrorist attacks, but
that's a long way from thinking there was no other
conceivable action he could have taken to prevent
them. He could, for instance, have left his vacation
in Texas after receiving that briefing memo entitled
"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." and rushed
back to the White House, assembled all his top
advisers and demanded to know what, in particular,
was being done to screen airline passengers to make
sure people who fit the airlines' threat profiles
were being prevented from boarding American planes.
Even that sort of prescient response would probably
have been too little to head off the disaster. But
those what-if questions should haunt the president
as they haunt the nation. In all probability, they
do and it is only the demands of his re-election
campaign that are guiding Mr. Bush's public stance
of utter, uncomplicated self-righteousness.
•
It is time for the president
to drop his political posture and reassure the
country that his first and foremost concern is not
his re-election but the safety of Americans at home
and abroad. Instead of passively noting that it is
the job of the 9/11 commission to figure out whether
anything could or should have been done differently,
he must demonstrate that he is asking those
questions of himself. Instead of preparing - as the
administration seems to be preparing - to blame the
C.I.A. and F.B.I. for everything that went wrong, he
needs to ask whether the structure of the Bush White
House itself is part of the problem.
Perhaps no other
administration would have responded differently to
the skimpy document Mr. Bush received in August
2001. But most other presidents did not limit
critical briefing papers to little more than a page,
give political advisers such a prominent place in
the White House and so dramatically restrict the
number of policy makers who had access to the Oval
Office. All of Mr. Bush's recent predecessors had at
least one of those flaws, but no one else had them
all.
The "fact sheet" the White
House released over the weekend along with the
August 2001 briefing memo hardly shows any
rethinking of the way Mr. Bush operates his
government. It is instead an extraordinary exercise
in bureaucratic excuse making and misdirection. It
says that the notion that Osama bin Laden wanted to
mount an attack on the United States was familiar
information and "publicly well known." It said the
presence of Qaeda agents in the United States was
equally old news to the F.B.I. and the intelligence
agencies. It makes it sound as if everyone knew
about Osama bin Laden's danger to America except the
inattentive president.
Condoleezza Rice, the
president's national security adviser, gave a
bureaucrat's hedged responses in her appearance
before the 9/11 commission. The public needs to hear
a leader's candid answers from President Bush, who
so far has agreed to appear before the commission
only in private and in the company of the vice
president.
This is not a time for more
secrecy and presidential isolation. Mr. Bush is
asking Americans to simply take his word for the
need to stick to an increasingly bloody and chaotic
mission in Iraq that he won't even define clearly. (When
asked by NBC's Tim Russert yesterday what Iraqi
leaders the coalition planned to hand over the
government to on the target date of June 30, the
American proconsul Paul Bremer III chillingly began
his answer with "That's a good question.")
Mr. Bush needs to speak out
fully in public, both about 9/11 and about Iraq. He
is chief executive of a country that once trusted
him to lead in perilous times. The public supported
his decision to go to war in the Middle East because
most Americans believed his judgment was sound. That
kind of faith is not just what he needs to win an
election in November. It is what he needs to run the
country, and he is in grave danger of losing it.
Neither administration officials nor political
advisers nor the White House spin team can hold on
to the country's ebbing confidence. The president
must do this himself, and quickly. |
