Bush Pitched the War, We Bought It

Authors and journalists face a strange dilemma today: on the one hand, the disastrous policies of the Bush administration and the proximity of the upcoming 2006 midterm elections are rich material for any writer. On the other hand, this temptation has saturated the shelves of Barnes and Nobles with books on Iraq and the Bush administration. Another book on the subject risks getting lost in the shuffle.

Fortunately, Frank H. Rich ’71, a former Crimson editor and current New York Times columnist, has penned a colorful, readable, and insightful new book.

Though Rich’s latest, “The Greatest Story Ever Sold,” comes out smack dead in between two other releases—Thomas Ricks’ fine “Fiasco” and Bob Woodward’s highly publicized bombshell, “State of Denial”—it hardly needs to worry about the competition. Indeed, while Ricks’ and Woodward’s works focus mostly on the administration’s handling of the Iraq War itself, Rich discusses something completely different—the current administration’s well-oiled propaganda machine.

Structured in two parts, titled “Making the Sale” and “Buyer’s Remorse,” respectively, Rich likens the book’s narrative to a two-act play. If this were a play, Rich—who was branded “The Butcher of Broadway” during his New York Times tenure as chief theatre critic—has just given the Bush administration the worst possible review.

Rich’s verdict? Like most Broadway productions today, the administration’s PR machine is full of glitz, lights, and spectacle, but at its core, it’s shallow, empty, deceiving and plays, for an unwitting and brainless audience.

Two warnings to the prospective reader. First, this book makes no claim of being a non-partisan, objective study. It’s as biased as the next Ann Coulter book. However, Rich’s research always holds up under scrutiny, unlike many of the spotty citations in Coulter’s works.

Second, unlike Woodward’s “State of Denial,” “The Greatest Story Ever Sold” doesn’t purport to divulge new and earth shattering revelations.

Rather, most of Rich’s examples of Bush administration propaganda—everything from its shameless parading of the Jessica Lynch rescue to the inherently staged nature of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” landing on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln—have all been reported before one way or another, whether through the New York Times or “The Daily Show.”

So what makes this book a must read? In the end, this is not so much a book about how poorly and incompetently the administration has managed to govern the country, but rather how the country as a whole—American citizens, journalists, the media, everyone—has forsaken real truths to settle for half-truths, or what comedian Stephen Colbert wittily called “truthiness.”

One of the Rich’s slightly more interesting observations is that Democrats would be equally tempted to take advantage of this new American mentality: “The Bush White House certainly did not invent this culture. It has been years in the making and it is bipartisan. But this administration was the first to take office after it was fully on-line and was brilliant at exploiting it to serve its own selfish reality-remaking ends.”

The media gets an especially bad whipping from Rich—not just the obvious suspect Fox News, but also other major networks and even Rich’s own employer—for becoming pawns in White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove’s PR game. Rich goes on to call the past five years, “an embarrassing era for the American news media.” He does, however, praise several journalists, including The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, who first broke the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, for continuing journalistic integrity in a period when it was sorely lacking.

It is strange that the “journalist” who gets the most mention and approval from Rich is not really a journalist at all, but a comedian who anchors a fake news show on a cable comedy channel. That Jon Stewart had more guts to point out the absurdities about the administration than MSNBC is a harrowing thought.

Rich writes, “With Jay Leno wearing a flag pin, a growing, if still small audience was identifying The Daily Show as one of the few reliable spots on the dial for finding something other than the government line.”

For me, the most interesting part of the book came at the epilogue, when Rich attempts to reason why the administration was so adamant in going to war. The reasons, Rich concludes, were for “Rove and Bush to get what they wanted most, slam-dunk midterm election victories, and for Libby and Cheney to get what they most, a war in Iraq for ideological reasons predating 9/11.” To think that almost 3,000 American soldiers (and even a larger number of Iraqi civilians) are dead just for those reasons is chilling.

In the end, what makes this book such a pleasure to read is Rich’s masterly ability to weave together many disparate elements into a coherent whole. Instead of just smattering random allegations against the current executive office, each individual incident becomes part of a larger, more sinister scheme.

Read the book and your blood will be boiling when you’re finished.

The Greatest Story Ever Sold
By Frank H. Rich '71
The Penguin Press HC
Out Now