The “60 Minutes” segment with former Treasury Secretary John O’Neill was great. Granted, O’Neill is a loose cannon who’s likely out for a little pay back. So his account must be taken with a little skepticism. Still, most of what he says has been corroborated or at least is not inconsistent with what many other people have said. So I tend to accept the jist of what he says.
I took three things in particular from the “60 Minutes” piece:
(1) Bush’s lack of intellectual curiosity on policy:
At cabinet meetings, he says the president was “like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection,” forcing top officials to act “on little more than hunches about what the president might think.”
This is what O’Neill says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one meeting with Mr. Bush: “I went in with a long list of things to talk about, and I thought to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening . . . . As I recall, it was mostly a monologue.”
He also says that President Bush was disengaged, at least on domestic issues, and that disturbed him. And he says that wasn’t his experience when he worked as a top official under Presidents Nixon and Ford, or the way he ran things when he was chairman of Alcoa.
How can Bush sit in an hour-long meeting with the treasury secretary and not have questions? I have no policy-making responsibilities at all, yet pure curiosity would prompt me to ask plenty of questions if I had access to someone of O’Neill’s stature. What’s more, it doesn’t say much of the “moral clarity” of our leader if his cabinet members are leaving meetings unclear of what Bush thinks about things.
(2) Iraq. Most of the media buzz has centered on the revelation that planning to invade Iraq began immediately after inauguration, not as a response to 9/11 terrorism. I found this nugget similarly interesting:
During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist: “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I’m going to prevent that.”
“The thing that’s most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the very first, the administration had said ‘X’ during the campaign, but from the first day was often doing ‘Y,'” says Suskind. “Not just saying ‘Y,’ but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the election.”
Not only that, but the fact that this reversal apparently went on with little debate. It’s almost as if the insiders all understood that the 2000 campaign had been a sham.
(3) O’Neill’s Naivete’:
“You’re giving me the impression that you’re just going to be stunned if they attack you for this book,” says Stahl to O�Neill. “And they’re going to say, I predict, you know, it’s sour grapes. He’s getting back because he was fired.”
“I will be really disappointed if they react that way because I think they’ll be hard put to,” says O�Neill.
Is he prepared for it?
“Well, I don’t think I need to be because I can’t imagine that I’m going to be attacked for telling the truth,” says O�Neill. “Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?”
Ha Ha, Paul. That’s a good one.