The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina [Hardcover]

Frank Rich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 19, 2006

New York Times columnist Frank Rich examines the trail of fictions manufactured by the Bush administration from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, exposing the most brilliant spin campaign ever waged.

When America was attacked on 9/11, its citizens almost unanimously rallied behind its new, untested president as he went to war. What they didn't know at the time was that the Bush administration's highest priority was not to vanquish Al Qaeda but to consolidate its own power at any cost. It was a mission that could be accomplished only by a propaganda presidency in which reality was steadily replaced by a scenario of the White House's own invention-and such was that scenario's devious brilliance that it fashioned a second war against an enemy that did not attack America on 9/11, intimidated the Democrats into incoherence and impotence, and turned a presidential election into an irrelevant referendum on macho imagery and same-sex marriage.

As only he can, acclaimed New York Times columnist Frank Rich delivers a step-by-step chronicle of how skillfully the White House built its house of cards and how the institutions that should have exposed these fictions, the mainstream news media, were too often left powerless by the administration's relentless attack machine, their own post-9/11 timidity, and an unending parade of self-inflicted scandals (typified by those at The New York Times). Demonstrating the candor and conviction that have made him one of our most trusted and incisive public voices, Rich brilliantly and meticulously illuminates the White House's disturbing love affair with "truthiness," and the ways in which a bungled war, a seemingly obscure Washington leak, and a devastating hurricane at long last revealed the man-behind-the-curtain and the story that had so effectively been sold to the nation, as god-given patriotic fact.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This blistering j'accuse has vitriol to spare for George Bush—calling him a "spoiled brat" and "blowhard"—and his policies, but its main target is the PR machinery that promoted those policies to the American people. New York Times columnist Rich revisits nearly every Bush administration publicity gambit, including Iraqi WMD claims, Bush's "Mission Accomplished" triumph, the Swift-boating of John Kerry and the writing of fake prowar letters-to-the-editor from soldiers. He uncovers nothing new, but his meticulously researched recap-cum-debunking—complete with appended 80-page time line comparing administration spin to actual events—builds a comprehensive picture of a White House propaganda campaign to bamboozle the public, smear critics, camouflage policy disasters and win the 2002 and 2004 elections through trumped-up security anxieties. Along the way, he pillories a sycophantic media (Bob Woodward gets spanked hard), spineless Democrats and an infotainment culture that happily accommodates the Bush administration's erasure of the line between reality and fiction. Sometimes Rich's critique of Republican politics as cynical image-manipulation goes overboard, as in his "wag the dog" theory of the Iraq war as a Karl Rove electoral maneuver; more often, though, it's on target. The result is a caustic, hard-hitting indictment of the Bush administration, timed to make a splash in the upcoming election campaign. (Sept. 19)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

New York Times columnist Rich offers few revelations, but the weight of all the things already published about the war in Iraq and the rationale for going to war provides a staggering indictment of the Bush administration's penchant for "truthiness" and public-relations glitter rather than substantive policy. Rich's analysis is acidly pointed as he reviews the litany of half-truths told by the Bush administration in the lead-up to the war and since then. Faced with the prospect of an FBI whistle blower disclosing the administration's incompetence in recognizing terrorist threats before 9/11, the administration launched a stream of PR distractions: Bush's Top Gun appearance on a carrier with a banner announcing "Mission Accomplished," the false packaging of Private Jessica Lynch, the blustering about uncovering administration leakers when Valerie Plame was publicly revealed as an undercover agent. Rich maintains that Bush himself was behind the leak. By the time Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the PR spin machine that had sustained the president since 9/11 was in undeniable tatters. Rich offers a time line of events and commentary that makes the case that the government has played fast and loose with the facts regarding Iraq for political advantage. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; First Edition edition (September 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159420098X
• ISBN-13: 978-1594200984
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (153 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #555,346 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

119 of 140 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but Disappointingly Superficial (by Someone Who Actually Read the Book), September 22, 2006

By 

Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (Hardcover)

Unlike the obvious majority of one-star "reviewers" of THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD (who have probably never read a book containing more than fifty words to a page), I read and thoroughly enjoyed Frank Rich's story of the Bush II Administration's use of half-truths, misdirection, staging of alternate realities, and general truthiness to promote a disuniting agenda and hide its astonishing incompetence. As a long-time drama critic turned weekly op-ed columnist for the New York Times, who better to critique the overweening theatricality of a Presidency predicated on its own supporters' willing suspension of disbelief and acceptance of image and symbols over content and truth?

Mr. Rich's approach in THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD is disarmingly simple - retell the chronological story of the Bush II Presidency, focusing on the manner in which the Administration presented and sold its case to the American public. What emerges, of course, is a pattern of deceptions and staged events that have resulted in a failed Presidency (with approval ratings rivaling those of Nixon after Watergate), a country more polarized than ever, and a lower American standing in the world than at any time in our history. What also emerges, however, is a portrait of the mainstream media that for far too long acted as the President's lapdog, cowed by the aftershocks of 9/11 ("watch what you say!"), panic-stricken over the notion of seeming traitorous simply by asking a question, and fawning obsequiously over the Bush Administration out of fear of losing their vaunted access (failing to recognize the irony of their being used as tools of the Administration's propaganda program).

Mr. Rich chronicles the Bush Administration's story from 9/11 to Katrina in great detail, hitting all the well-known low spots (aluminum tubes, uranium from Niger, Valerie Plame, WMD's, shock and awe, embedded reporters, Jessica Lynch, Mission Accomplished, "Kenny Boy" Lay, Jeff (hotmilitarystud.com) Gannon, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Abu Ghraib, Pat Tillman, Cindy Sheehan, Michael (heckuva job) Brown, etc.) and a few less publicized ones. The entire recap plays like the political equivalent of a year-ending "Top 100 Musical Hits" show, bringing back lots of (mostly bad) memories and connecting the dots across the first five or six years of George Bush's Presidency.

This chronological retelling is both a strength and a weakness in Rich's book - positive in its provision of perspective and recognition of patterns of failed behavior and outright disregard for all but a privileged few Americans, negative in being a mile wide but only an inch deep in its analysis. Rich is largely content to be a chronicler of events, a gatherer, sorter, and reporter of information already on the public record. He unearths nothing new in his story, demonstrates no inclination to interview the principals in these events, and offers precious little analysis or commentary of his own. Thus, for example, we revisit the pathetically premature and pompous Top Gun scene of Mission Accomplished (and the Administration's hilariously inept revisionist efforts to explain the "true meaning" of that sign), but we learn next to nothing from behind the scenes about how it was staged. This pattern of reporting the superficial, publicly-known aspects of each event haunts the full length of the book, making it sound at times more like an extended movie review than an analytical recap of actual current events. If anything, THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD proves convincingly that Mr. Rich does not have a reporter's chops.

In the final chapter, Mr. Rich offers his conjectures as to why the Bush/Cheney/Rove Administration engaged in such massive deception to initiate its war of choice in Iraq. He comes down unconvincingly on the side of purely political motivations, offering no new evidence for his reasons and conveniently ignoring the geopolitics of (and the Bush family's business connections to) Middle Eastern oil. All that having been said, THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD is nevertheless a worthwhile read, if only to put the first five years of the 21st Century - and the brazen truthiness of the Bush II Administration -- into perspective. For those who don't follow these stories closely, the full picture Mr. Rich paints will be eye-opening, perhaps even shocking in its scope and audacity. History will judge the merits of the Presidency, the media, and the American people of this era and likely find them all sadly wanting. It may well also find that they suffered collectively from the travails encapsulated in a hoary Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." Interesting, indeed.

On a final note, it is disappointing in the extreme that books like Frank Rich's are consistently swamped with personal attacks and angry, content-free, Limbaugh-like diatribes by so many chromosomally-deficient knuckle-draggers. Something is sorely missing in these poor right-wingers' lives that they have so little else to do but post trashy commentary from their trailer parks about books they've never seen, let alone read. Life out there in Kansas and the rest of blue state Jesusland must truly be a tortured trial.

359 of 444 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Painful insight from America's best columnist, September 20, 2006

By 

J. A Magill (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (Hardcover)

When Frank Rich sits at his type writer people in the White House shudder. And with good reason, for the New York Times columnist skewers them every Sunday with a combination of able research and wry wit. People taking pleasure in his Sunday columns will delight in this book. Those who detest him will likely have an aneurysm. Already, as can be seen among the reviews for this book, GOP attacks have either taken out their long knives to stab or tried to dismiss Rich as just another Bush Hater.

Such ad hominem attacks fail to reply to the care with which Rich approaches the topic or the strength of his argument. Seeing the Bush White House at its heart as arrogant and disdaining the constraints of tradition and law, the book traces a parade of failures and attempts to explain how time and again the administration can distract the American people from reality. In this Rich saves his greatest venom for his own peers in the media in general and at his own paper in particular. Why did they not challenge the White House when it made charges, often demonstrably false, such as Dick Cheney's recent claims never to have claimed Saddam was involved in 9/11? How did they give the government a pass on Afghanistan even as the US began shifting troops to Iraq leaving that country on the precipice of falling back into the hands of the Taliban? Remember how every prisoner at Gunatanamo was "the worst of the worst," and only now we know many innocent people remain in a legal limbo, turned over by bounty hunters in Pakistan to the US military, and even now remaining in captivity because the White House is loath to admit its mistake? Or how come the media does not question why terrorists become the most active in the summer and fall of even years?

At its heart, Rich blames the media's desire for access, its disinterest in analysis, and its fear of being painted as not patriotic. Since 9/11 the White House has succeeded in silencing those who offer any competing narrative to its own (remember Bill Maher's suggestion that we're deluding ourselves if we think cowards fly airplanes into buildings?) more interested in controlling the story than winning the war. As with the excellent history of Iraq "Fiasco" Bush partisans will not give this work a read, nor even consider the possibility of fault, let alone bad intentions. Even honorable men who shed blood in war for the country such as Senator's McCain, Graham, and Warner, find themselves under attack because disagreement for many of my fellow Americans now seems synonymous with betrayal. Those who reflexively revile works such as this one should take a deep breath and hear out his argument. A dose of his rational outrage would be a tonic for us all.

61 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book is Being Freeped!, September 21, 2006

By 

P. Hansen "From The West Coast" (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (Hardcover)

There are many one-star reviews here from the foaming-at-the-mouth crowd about a book they have not read. I was forwarded an email asking me to come here and freep (I hold an acct. at freerepublic)- some of these folks are the same people who wrote reviews about their favorite right-wing books and included comments FREAKING! out that the left hasn't even read, say, Ann Coulter. Sad really. Such hate and twisted hypocrisy.
Anyway--I really have read this book, and it is very well written. But then I don't consider Bush a true Republican, he is an extremist of another kind, and even people like Joe Scarborough are coming around to see this.