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

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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)
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From The Washington Post

Throughout George W. Bush's presidency, no columnist has been more perceptive than Frank Rich of the New York Times. A longtime film and drama critic, Rich, for the past decade, has used his insights into performance and stagecraft to explain a political culture increasingly dominated by simulation and spectacle.

Exploring the news each week through the lens of pop culture -- the film "United 93" or the TV show "24," for example -- Rich teases out implications that escape straight-news pundits. The technique allows him to illuminate not only the submerged political currents of mass entertainment but also the theatricality of Washington politics today.

Now Rich has written The Greatest Story Ever Sold, a gripping, witty and devastating indictment of President Bush's reliance on public relations to market his Iraq and counterterrorism policies. Future historians will turn to other works -- by James Bamford, Thomas E. Ricks, James Risen, Ron Suskind and Bob Woodward -- to understand White House and Pentagon decision-making after 9/11. But Rich's overview will be indispensable for grasping how Americans experienced the events of these years.

For those who have largely opposed Bush's policies, reading Rich's book summons up familiar feelings of outrage and helplessness. Those readers who have tipped from being Bush supporters to critics may gain some wisdom into why they were originally led astray. And even die-hard Bushies may appreciate this volume as a shrewd study in the history of political PR -- if, that is, they can get past Rich's wry, withering tone.

As in his columns, Rich uses cultural touchstones such as Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America and the movie "Chicago" to help us see how populist demagoguery works or how a huckster can con a press pack. But the book's core is a survey of the White House spins and shams since 9/11, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" scare tactics, Colin Powell's Adlai Stevenson impersonation at the United Nations and, of course, Bush's May 2003 "Mission Accomplished" declaration on the flight deck. Rich deftly arranges these and other public moments alongside cases of secret government propaganda -- the payola to working journalists, the fake "video news releases" slipped into local TV news shows -- to construct a persuasive picture of an administration bent on creating "our own reality," as one Bush aide famously put it.

Rich does let a few people off the hook. He's too easy on Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who, while fashioning himself as the second coming of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, has abetted the president's anti-press campaign by jailing one reporter for not playing ball and threatening others.

In my view, Rich lays too much blame for the free hand that Bush has enjoyed at the door of the Fourth Estate. Rich doesn't go as far as some other recent books that lambaste reporters as lapdogs, but he laments that "there was only sporadic digging into the war-ennobled administration by mainstream journalists" and that TV news "barely raised any questions at all."

Obviously, individual outlets, including the New York Times for which Rich writes, erred badly in overplaying claims about the menace Saddam Hussein posed. Some Washington correspondents went native, identifying too closely with insider sources. The tabloid tenor of most broadcast news -- about which Rich has written brilliantly -- fanned Americans' crudest urges.

But Rich's well-researched narrative testifies to the dogged, independent-minded reporting that -- despite this oppressive climate -- revealed official mistakes, lies and violations of law. In recounting the long trail of administration deceptions and blunders, Rich credits the reporters at The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal who discovered them. He cites scoops from outlets as diverse as Roll Call, the National Journal, the Smoking Gun, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Even the generally abysmal TV news shows did some worthy investigation, he tells us: CBS News exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and anchors such as Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel grilled Bush and other evasive heavies at key moments.

What The Greatest Story Ever Sold illustrates is that most Americans did not back the Iraq invasion because they were credulous, though many were, or even because the administration was dishonest, though it was -- reprehensibly so. In the end, notwithstanding the hype, the truth wasn't all that hard to see; even Bush's misleading claims that Saddam Hussein was about to acquire nukes were debunked on the front pages, as Rich points out, before the invasion began. Yet most citizens, despite access to evidence, chose to follow the president anyway. Rich doesn't get into why they did so, but I think the reasons boil down to a widespread popular desire to exorcise post-9/11 feelings of shame and vulnerability with the nationalistic pride achieved through the exercise of military might.

Many people who might have supported the Iraq war under different circumstances remained intractably opposed because they believed Bush hadn't proven that Baghdad was making nuclear weapons or working with al-Qaeda. They held this view because, among other reasons, in the months and years after 9/11, they were reading the smart, critical and blessedly spin-proof writings of Frank Rich.

Reviewed by David Greenberg

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (September 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159420098X
• ISBN-13: 978-1594200984
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (148 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #197,529 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

101 of 115 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

352 of 435 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

59 of 71 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 (REAL NAME)

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.