Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power Paperback – Bargain Price, October 31, 2006
* Features a new chapter for the trade paper edition
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSt. Martin's Griffin
- Publication dateOctober 31, 2006
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.99 x 8.27 inches
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Mapes musters a controlled, readable narrative about the story that became her professional undoing…the story…builds by increments (including) the memos themselves, and how they mesh--in ways large and small, in nuance and substance--with Bush's official Guard records."--The Washington Post Book World
"It's an illuminating look into journalism and the challenges reporters face in an era of blogging, instant Internet analysis, corporate ownership and network news starts."--The Buffalo News
"In…TRUTH AND DUTY, [Mapes] comes across as the kind of rip-snorting rodeo rider of the news I would have killed to work with as an editor. Her gallop through such Mapes-produced '60 Minutes II' scoops as securing Karla Faye Tucker's death row interview or tracking down Strom Thurmond's black illegitimate daughter or exposing the atrocities of Abu Ghraib gives us a heart-racing glimpse of a resourceful TV pro in her fearless prime."--Tina Brown
"TRUTH AND DUTY is a plainspoken…oftentimes sympathetic look at how the National Guard story came to be and why it fell apart."--The New York Observer
From the Back Cover
A riveting play-by-play of a reporter getting and defending a story that recalls All the President's Men, Truth and Duty puts readers in the center of the "60 Minutes II" story on George W. Bush's shirking of his National Guard duty. The firestorm that followed that broadcast--a conflagration that was carefully sparked by the right and fanned by bloggers--trashed Mapes' well-respected twenty-five year producing career, caused newsman Dan Rather to resign from his anchor chair early and led to an unprecedented "internal inquiry" into the story…chaired by former Reagan attorney general Richard Thornburgh.
"…trenchant…"--Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Truth and Duty examines Bush's political roots as governor of Texas, delves into what is known about his National Guard duty--or lack of service--and sheds light on the solidity of the documents that backed up the National Guard story, even including images of the actual documents in an appendix to the book. It is peopled with a colorful cast of characters--from Karl Rove to Sumner Redstone--and moves from small-town Texas to Black Rock--CBS corporate headquarters--in New York City.
"…unflinching…"--Vanity Fair
Truth and Duty connects the dots between a corporation under fire from the federal government and the decision about what kinds of stories a news network may cover. It draws a line from reporting in the trenches to the gutting of the great American tradition of a independent media and asks whether it's possible to break important stories on a powerful sitting president.
"…illuminating…"--The Buffalo News
www.truthandduty.com
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I woke up smiling on September 9, 2004.
My story on George W. Bush's Guard service had run on 60 Minutes the night before and I felt it had been a solid piece. We had worked under tremendous pressure because of the short time frame and the explosive content, but we'd made our deadline and, most important, we'd made news.
I was confident in my work and marveled once again at the teamwork and devotion of so many people at 60 Minutes. They really knew how to pull together to get a story on the air. I was also deeply proud of CBS News for having the guts to air a provocative story on a controversial part of the president's past.
By the end of the day, all of that would change. By the end of the month, I would be barred from doing my job and under investigation. By the end of the year, my long career at CBS News would essentially be over, after a long, excruciating, and very public beating.
But this morning, all that was unimaginable. I was just eager to get into the office and get the reaction to the story. I raced to the hotel room door and pulled The New York Times and USA Today off the floor, curled up on the sofa, and read the front-page coverage of our story. Online, I checked The Washington Post and saw that there, too, it was front-page material.
It deserved to be, for a number of reasons.
Dan Rather and I had aired the first-ever interview with former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes on his role in helping Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard. Getting Barnes to say yes had taken five years and I thought his interview was a home run. Finally, there were on-the-record, honest, straight-ahead answers from a man who intimately knew the ins and outs of the way Texas politics and privilege worked in the state National Guard units during the Vietnam War. Ben Barnes's version of events was crucial to understanding a significant chapter in President Bush's life from thirty years ago, an important key to unlocking the questions many Americans had about the man in the White House.
What had George W. Bush done during the volatile Vietnam years? Who was he back then, really? Was he a young man who volunteered to pilot fighter jets off the country's coastline, a brave young flier ready and willing to risk his life in the skies over Vietnam?
Or was George W. Bush--like so many well-connected young men in the Vietnam era--simply doing whatever he could to avoid fighting or flying anywhere near the jungles of Southeast Asia? Did he complete his service in the National Guard or walk away without looking back simply because his family's status meant that he could?
Did he do his duty? Did he tell the truth about his time in the National Guard?
Our story on September 8, 2004, also presented never-before-seen documents purportedly written in 1972 and 1973 by Bush's then-commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. Killian died in 1984 and his important testimony on Bush's service had not been part of the years of debate that raged over whether the president had fulfilled his Guard duties.
These documents appeared to show that Killian had not approved of Bush's departure from the Guard in 1972 to work on a U.S. Senate campaign for Republican Winton Blount in Alabama. They showed that Killian had ordered Bush to take a physical that was never completed and that Killian had been pressured from higher up to write better reports on Bush than were merited by the future president's performance. The Killian memos, as they came to be called, turned on its head the version of George W. Bush's Guard career that the White House had presented. These new memos made Bush look like a slacker, not an ace pilot.
I had spent weeks trying to get these pieces of paper and every waking hour since I had received them vetting each document for factual errors or red flags.
I worked to compare the new memos with Bush's official records, which I had received since 1999. They meshed in ways large and small.
Furthermore, the content, the essential truth of the story contained in the memos, had been corroborated by Killian's commander Gen. Bobby Hodges in a phone conversation two days before the story aired. On September 6, he had said the memos reflected Killian's feelings at the time and this was what he remembered about how Killian had handled Bush's departure from the Guard.
We had a senior document analyst named Marcel Matley fly to New York to look at all the documents we had, the official documents that had been previously released by the White House as well as the "new" ones. After examining them for hours, blowing up signatures and comparing curves, strokes, and dots, he gave his best opinion on their authenticity. Since the documents were copies, not originals, he could not offer the 100 percent assurance that came by testing the ink or the paper.
But he said he saw nothing in the typeface or format to indicate the memos had been doctored or had not been produced in the early 1970s. The analyst also vouched for the Killian signatures after comparing them with a number of other Killian signatures on the photocopied official documents. A second analyst, Jim Pierce, agreed with Matley after examining two of the new documents, one of which had a signature. Pierce came to this judgment after comparing our memos to the official records and signatures.
I felt that I was in the clear, that I had done my job, and that the story met the high standards demanded by 60 Minutes.
I called my husband and son to say good morning, just as I had done every morning in all the years past when I was out of town. As always, my husband told me my work had looked great and my seven-year-old boy told me to come home as fast as I could and to bring him a surprise. It was our ritual.
I was staying at my favorite home away from home, The Pierre, a grand old New York hotel. Without my CBS discount, I never would have seen the inside of the place.
The Pierre is also quiet, close to the office, and sweetly old-fashioned. Old-fashioned enough that Kitty Carlisle apparently still goes there often for "highballs," according to the staff, along with a male friend and their respective nurses. I once ran into her in the ladies' room, looking like she had just stepped off the set of To Tell the Truth, mink capelet and all.
The elevator operators and doormen were older, too, and they were kind, always looking out for me. They knew me because of my regular visits and irregular hours, and comfortingly clucked over how hard I was working when I stayed there.
On this trip, they had seen me leaving very early and coming in very late for the past few days. I had been staggering out to catch a cab to work by 9:00 a.m. and arriving back exhausted at about 3:00 a.m. after the bar had closed and the hotel was buttoning up for the night. By the time I arrived, there was often no one in the lobby except a bellman, me, and perhaps a gaudily dressed female guest or two.
I often wondered what those women thought I did for a living. Disheveled and limping, straggling along with a heavy briefcase full of files, I entered the hotel lobby each night looking like a failing hooker for that small subset of customers who preferred exhausted, unkempt professional women.
On this morning, though, my energy was back. I was exhilarated by another success.
When I got to work, my mood was reinforced. I made rounds to thank the video editors who had worked so hard to get the story put together in time for air. Their jobs are not for the faint of heart or for people who panic when time is short or the workload is overwhelming.
I ran into other producers and correspondents and collected hugs and kisses and congratulations. There were jokes about what we would do as a follow-up. Dan and I had broken the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story in late April. Now this. My team, the people at 60 Minutes, and Dan all felt like we were on a roll.
The new executive producer of the Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes, Josh Howard, gave me a hug and congratulations, following up on a flattering e-mail he had sent me around midnight the night before: "I was just sitting here thinking about how amazing you are. I'm buckled in, ready to see where you'll take us next. Let's go!"
There was no hint of what was to come, no whiff of doubt about the work we had done on the story.
I saw CBS vice president Betsy West standing in the building's eighth-floor lobby, waiting for the slow, unreliable elevators, and we laughed at how awful the previous night had been, how hurried and harried we were, trying to get the story on. There had been shouting and impatience and flashes of anger. She laughed and said, "That's as close to the sausage making as I ever want to get." I told her that we'd gotten sausage all over us and that was as close as I ever wanted to come to missing my deadline. We both felt good about the story and agreed that it had looked polished on the air, in contrast to the carnage left behind in the editing rooms and the offices where we had done our scripting.
This behind-the-scenes chaos was not particularly unusual in television news. For fifteen years at CBS I had pushed back against deadlines to perfect a script, to change a shot, to make a story better. I had never missed a deadline, never put on a story that I did not feel comfortable with.
There was nothing more important to me, or to any of us at 60 Minutes, than getting the story right, no matter how limited the time or how tough the topic. I had a well-earned reputation for being able to "crash," to get a story on quickly and competently.
For whatever reason--probably because I grew up in a large, loud, distracting family--I was able to focus when others couldn't. I could keep writing when the room was full of people yelling at the top of their lungs...
Product details
- ASIN : B001G8WQI4
- Publisher : St. Martin's Griffin (October 31, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- Item Weight : 12.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.99 x 8.27 inches
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
The book, however, does not do a good job of explaining why the mainstream media did not criticize CBS News and its parent company Viacom, Inc., for covering up President Bush’s immoral conduct as a young man by apologizing for the story and firing Ms. Mapes. It is understandable that Republicans would support the outrageous behavior of Viacom/CBS, especially just before Bush’s re-election in 2004. But why did Democrats not castigate Viacom/CBS for what it did.
My theory is that what Viacom/CBS did discredits the entire economic and political system in the United States. As the book explains, the president of Viacom, Sumner Redstone, was formerly a liberal Democrat and was proud of the fact that he was on “Nixon’s enemies list.” However, Redstone publically supported George Bush’s re-election in 2004. The federal government regulates Viacom and it was in his financial interests to vote for the party in power. This reminds me of Gabriel Kolko’s book, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 , about the Progressive era from 1900 to 1920. According to Kolko, it was businessmen who promoted and supported the regulation of business during this era.
Justice and morality concern the Ten Commandments and following one’s conscience. Morality applies to families and justice applies to governments. It was not unjust for Mr. Redstone to vote for Bush because a lot of people voted for his Democratic opponent for selfish reasons. Nor was it immoral for Sumner to vote for a Republican because you can only behave immorally to your family. Likewise, it is not unjust or immoral for politicians to lie to the American people. However, it is immoral for someone not running for political office to lie to the American people and fire someone for doing their job.
Political capitalism in the United States is fundamentally just because it provides its citizens with law and order and elaborate system of property rights. However, a large part of political capitalism in the United States is unjust because some people benefit at the expense of others. In many governments, it is government officials and their supporters that get high incomes at the expense of its citizens. The immoral conduct of Viacom/CBS brings to mind the unjust aspects of the American political economy. Democrats and Republicans prefer to pretend Viacom/CBS News did nothing immoral.
Another example of this kind of nation wide cover up of embarrassing behavior concerns an article published in the American Journal of Physics abut biological evolution (“Entropy and evolution,” Am. J. Phys., Vol. 76, No. 11, November 2008 ). The article explicitly criticizes a Christian apologist and disseminates misinformation about evolutionary biology to do this. This anti-religion pseudoscience disgraces every physicist in the United States. But everyone covers up this mistake because the idea that a peer-reviewed physics article touching upon religion could be absurd is too embarrassing.
The book is witty and amusing, yet also completely honest. Something President Bush has never been with regard to his truncated National Guard service.
I am a graduate of the United States Naval Academy. Upon graduation I was committed to serve my country for five long years as a nuclear submarine officer. Five years. Six deterrent nuclear submarine patrols. 1,826.21099 days of dedicated service. Not one day, not one hour less. I did not have the option to skip town a year or two early with the excuse that I needed to work on some political campaign. I would have been punished for going AWOL. I was completely accountable for my military service commitment. Mr. Bush was not held accountable. He somehow served his country significantly less than required.
This is the crux of Ms. Mapes story on CBS. Yet, instead of focusing on THIS story, the right-wing bloggers and conservative spin doctors spent HUGE amounts of time and money discussing typewriters and fonts.
Such diversionary tactics make me disheartened and angry.
Ms. Mapes also does an excellent job of describing the way she was completely abused by her employers, put on some ridiculous mock trial facilitated by an inappropriate, biased investigation team comprised of people with absolutely no television news experience. She was then very publicly fired such that she was basically the sole scapegoat for this entire debacle. As if Ms. Mapes single-handedly wrote, produced and aired this National Guard story completely by herself...without any supervision, CBS news organization/team, or leadership.
In my books, Ms. Mapes is the hero when it comes to seeking the truth and doing her duty. And the current President Bush and his minions are ever the cover-up artists. Covering up the truth and side-stepping their duty. This has been proven time and time again to be the case. So sad.
I know Ms. Mapes will land on her feet and may she continue to seek the truth and hold our government leaders accountable for their words and actions.
Top reviews from other countries
Il contenuto è intenso, ingaggiante, stimola alla riflessione su quanto sia delicata la libertà di espressione e di cronaca. Una lettura formativa, indipendentemente dal nostro eventuale pensiero politico. E poi, testimonianza della nostra storia contemporanea.