John Dean was the White House Council for President Nixon. It was his testimony before Congress that blew the hole in the Whitehouse's secretive stonewalling about the Watergate break-in. That case ended in resignation for Nixon and jail terms for a handful of his henchmen. So when Dean sets out to compare the Bush Whitehouse with the Nixon Whitehouse, at least the point of comparison, is based on first person experience. The rest is based on painstaking research.
The book's thesis is that the exteme level of secrecy exercised by the executive branch under Bush is dangerously corrosive to the liberties of Americans and to the Constitutional form of government we enjoy. Framers of the Constitution understood that the flame of liberty is fed by the fresh air of truthful information. Choke off that flow and the flame quickly dies, suffocating with it all those nearby. This is the reason for having a free press, for having freedom of association, for having elections. This purpose is subverted when the executive either systematically misleads Congress and the electorate or systemmatically shields them from essential information. James Iredell was one of George Washington's picks for the supreme court. He expressed their views when he asserted "The President must certainly be punishable for giving false information to the Senate." (p 155)
I imagine many people who start reading the book will be inclined to react as I did "Secrets and half truths .. so what? It's just standard fare for politics." But if democracy is to produce good policy we must expect much better than what we have recently gotten used to. And the Bush Whitehouse's practices in secrecy and falsification lie in a completely different league from anything that could have heretofore been imagined. The Bush Whitehouse's primary business, Dean argues, is to manufacture perceptions that belie its actions. (Government by misdirection is an art pioneered by his father under Reagan with the 'War of the Winter Club" - a war waged against a small nation during the lull between football and baseball season, and parodied in the movie "Wag the Dog") At one point Dean suggests that simply documenting all the falsity manufactured by the Bush administration would require a book of many hundreds of pages longer than this one. And he gives an online reference of a non-partisan group that has done just this.
The first chapter compares Nixon and Bush. Nixon was more paranoid - almost pathologically so. But his legislative record makes him look, in comparison to Bush, like a sociallist. Nixon worked hard and mastered vast amounts of information, and had a keen grasp of international and national politics. Bush is by comparison a quickstudy. But according to Dean he never exerts himself and therefore is essentially clueless about any area of inquiry outside those of 'spin' and baseball.
The next chapter is about 'Stonewalling' It makes the point that there are issues about Presidents and Vice Presidents that the electorate ought to know and have generally known about others in the same offices, but which Cheney and Bush have obscured. The issue of Cheney's long history of heart trouble - not the least of which was a heart attack during the Florida recount that Bush information officers denied ever taking place - is one instance. The case of how Bush accumulated his small fortune through a scheme that materially misrepresented the financial structure of the deal, defrauding the taxpayers and sports enthusiasts of Arlington out of tens of millions of dollars, TX is another. Since the issue of privacy and how much of it one needs to give up to serve in public office is an unsettled issue, this may be the weakest chapter in the book. Still, Dean raises some questions that need answers.
Dean starts chapter three with the story of Bush's illegal treatment of his own gubernatorial papers as Governor of Texas. State law requires them to be disclosed and catalogued. He sent them to his father's Presidential library and claimed they were beyond reach. In the end the rule of law prevailed, but the whole ordeal took years to sort out. It is a case where Bush intentionally, knowingly, openly, blatantly broke Texas law.
Any of these issues and several more are considerably more serious than the 'Whitewater' scandal that embroiled the Clinton Whitehouse. Yet there is no ongoing work to resolve their legal status. Still, these are small potatoes compared to the most eggregious abuses. The big issues involve 9/11 and Iraq.
The illogic of the Whitehouse's obsession of Iraq is illustrated most laughably by the shopworn story about the Rumsfeld Proposition . Early on September 12th 2001 Rumsfeld proposed as a response to 9/11 that we bomb Iraq because it at least has some 'good targets.' Or by Bush's telling counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke to find links between Saddam and the twin towers incident. Everyone in the Whitehouse knew there were none. But this version of the truth was inconvenient. It did not support the conclusion that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld held when they entered the Whitehouse nine months earlier - that America ought to invade Iraq and install a puppet government.
Dean argues that this obsession with Iraq was not simply some personal vendetta against Saddam; it was the implementation of Cheney's radical neoconservative agenda. In this view of the world the US is the singular and supreme Imperial power. Being able to topple governments and install puppets to do our bidding is the means to ultimate, unstoppable, and unchallengeable American hegemony. Installing a puppet in Iraq was just the first step. Iraq was about the oil, yes. But it was much, much more. It was about RULING THE WORLD.
(( It is sad to think about how little some of our leaders learn from history. It was, after all, the CIA who installed the Shah of Iran using violent and unlawful means and justifying them on the basis of access to oil. Since then the shah has been toppled and Iran has an elected government of the sort we appear to be setting up in Iraq - one run by Shiite moslems and based on Islamic law. Is this the outcome Cheyney and his neocon pals are aiming for? If so, then the war was nothing but a very expensive and cynical re-election campaign. If not, what was he expecting? His own crown? One is tempted to wonder out loud whether Cheyney's visions of grandeur are not pathologically delusional. Or am I the only one who's been watching too much 'Pinky and the Brain?' ))
It was in justifying this war to the American people that the Bush Whitehouse commited its most eggregious crimes. For example, Dean reconstruct's Colin Powell's presentation to the UN security council regarding Iraq's WMD. He discusses something like a dozen slides that Powell knowingly misrepresented, turning mere water trucks into weapons of mass distruction. And representing as current stockpiles, photos of arms once in Iraq but known and documented to have long since been destroyed under the auspices of weapons inspectors . It is not that the Bush administration was merely mistaken about WMD. It is that they intentionally fabricated a case in order to further a hidden agenda.
This, by any standard, is an impeachable offense. For it sold Americans a war based on a premise known to the President to be false. And this was not any old war. This is the first war in the history of the United States to be started as a preventitive war, which is illegal under international law, rather than a preemptive war, which legal under international law (p 133). Clearly, using fraudulent means to drag America into an illegal war ought to be an impeachable offense. Perhaps it ought to be a capital offense, for at its core it is a conspiracy to kill people for reasons judged by the perpetrator to be unacceptable by his society.
Speaking of capital offenses, Dean also presents the Valerie Plume incident in which a Whitehouse Staffer committed an act of treason - revealing the identity of a spy is a treason. The reason, of course, was because her husband published an Op-Ed piece in the NYT demostrating that Saddam really was not engaged in buying 'yellowcake' the raw material from which nuclear fuel and bombs are manufactured as the Bush Whitehouse had publically asserted.
Dean's writing is clear. His argumentation exacting. His documentation is painstaking. His credentials are sparkling. This is a must-read book. It explains the facts clearly. And it connects the dots extremely well. Far beneath the surface, it also explains why I have been feeling a kind of yearning for the 'bad old days' of Nixon and the Cold War. Back then the press actually tried to get the story right. Politicians tried to act civilized. There was a commonly held notion that policy was important. There was debate about issues and policies. We were not obsessing over winners and losers. Spin, if it existed was subtle. Framing was not ironic. And Nixon, for all his paranoia and megalomania, really worked hard to understand the world and sometimes do the right thing.
I started the book skeptical that one could prove the current situation 'worse than Watergate.' I came away from the book thinking "saying it is worse than Watergate is like saying Katrina was a 'spot of bad weather.'" Democracy would almost certainly have survived were the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Nixon Whitehouse not revealed and prosecuted. If, however, the Bush standard for fraud, secrecy, vindictivenss, and deception is what we can expect of the Presidency from here on out, and the erosion of standards continues at the same pace, there is no question in my mind that the flame of liberty will be snuffed out in my own lifetime.
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.
Frequently bought together
This item: Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush
$9.98
Get it as soon as Monday, Nov 11
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
+
$13.87
Get it as soon as Monday, Nov 11
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Total price: $00
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Choose items to buy together.
Customers who bought this item also bought
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
- Conservatives Without ConscienceHardcover$10.28 shippingGet it as soon as Monday, Nov 11Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
- Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial BranchesHardcover$10.21 shippingGet it as soon as Friday, Nov 22Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
- Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His FollowersHardcover$10.21 shippingGet it as soon as Monday, Nov 11Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
- Holding the Line: Inside the Nation's Preeminent US Attorney's Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice DepartmentHardcover$10.28 shippingGet it as soon as Wednesday, Nov 20Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
About the author
Top reviews from other countries
M5M
This is an excellent book. The only downside is that it was ...
Reviewed in Canada on June 20, 2016Margaret Blake
Bought for my husband, well written, food for ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 3, 2016
