The Bush Family of Secrets: Truth or Reconciliation?
Russ Baker
3.18.2009
They are really coming. Official investigations of the George W. Bush administration are on the way. Karl Rove and Harriet Miers have just agreed to
limited testimony before the House Judiciary Committee,
which is looking into the seemingly politically-motivated firings of seven
U.S. Attorneys. Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Patrick Leahy, his senate
counterpart, have additional potential improprieties in their sights, and they are
not alone. The Senate
Intelligence Committee has already declared its intent to scrutinize CIA practices
related to terrorism suspects. And that’s just for starters. We may soon become
accustomed to powerful figures squirming as cameras flash, being asked about
everything from war to Wall Street.
Politicians will appear heroic. The media will get a hot story they won’t have
to do a bit of digging for. And the rest of us? Some insight, perhaps, into
the power-grabbing, lies and greed of the last eight years.
But beyond that, the historical record of official inquiries, is not, on balance,
reassuring. Think of the 9/11 panel, the Iraq inquiry, the Warren Commission, the interminable and confusing Iran-Contra
hearings. Only rarely does such a probe produce useful results. More often
the public is benumbed by an unfathomable depth of detail and a perplexing array of
claims. The best material often is withheld for one reason or another. The
recommendations typically end up watered
down or ignored.
Worst of all, the public gets a vague sense that the problem has been taken care of
because – well, weren’t there those big hearings?
By all means there should be hearings. But for the media, commissions can too
easily become a cop-out – an excuse for sitting in the audience and serving as
stenographer for other peoples’ accusations. The "news" becomes what
someone says, rather than whether what they say is true or not. And the criteria for
newsworthiness becomes whether there are sensational revelations—which often are not
accompanied by broader context.
And thus we likely would see more of the appalling journalistic performance we
witnessed during the presidency of George W.
Bush – the reluctance to question the official story in case after case,
from Weapons of Mass Destruction
to the neutering of regulators charged with keeping an eye on bankers and brokers.
(We’ve seen how well the deregulation of the financiers worked out.)
Why did the media perform so badly? Recently, budgets for inquisitive journalism
have been slashed. But for years, news organizations were producing huge profits,
and even then, genuine reporting – as opposed to high level stenography –
got short shrift. Digging to the root cause of problems requires a commitment of
time and resources that taxes the bottom line and angers the influential.
There’s a natural tendency to leave it to someone else – and hope a
Congressional
commission comes along to fill the void.
The most frustrating thing is that we never seem to get around to asking the bigger
questions about how we got into this mess in the first place. The very idea that we
would even need Leahy’s proposed Truth and Reconciliation
Commission for a president we elected twice is on its face absurd. It also
suggests that there may be more to the story. And in fact, there is. George W. Bush
and his astonishing performance cannot be understood as an isolated occurrence. In
truth, he was less the bumptious rebel we cathartically laugh at in Oliver Stone’s W. and Will Ferrell’s Broadway hit than a
leading man in a much grimmer, long-running saga.
It is not insignificant that someone named George
Bush has been president or vice president for 20 of the last 28 years. Even
before that we saw George the elder serve as UN ambassador, envoy to China,
and CIA director. Prior to that, came George W.’s grandfather, investment banker and two-time senator Prescott Bush. All three
generations labored assiduously to skew public policy toward the interests of
America’s wealthiest people and their allies among oilmen, defense contractors,
and bankers. Two of those generations’ agendas were obscured by a veneer of
patrician civility. Only George W.’s transparent indifference to the harm he
caused has forced us to begin peeking behind the curtain.
This pervasive enterprise has been a barely-buried dimension in our national life:
the big picture that somehow never quite makes it to the front page or to TV and
computer screens. It should have informed the daily reporting of the last eight
years, not been consigned to a special commission process that will flit briefly
across America’s collective consciousness and then be forgotten.
Official inquiries are not, in and of themselves, a bad thing. But Congressional
committees, or commissions, are unlikely to produce the kind of in-depth
revelations, and bracing public discussion, that we so desperately need. Getting to
the bottom of what ails our democracy requires the exposure of long-hidden facts in
meaningful historical context, and for this we need a new commitment to journalism
that matters, that tells people the way things really are and how they got
that way.
# #
Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative
reporter. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New
York Times, the Washington
Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing
editor to the Columbia Journalism Review.
He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit
investigative news organization, operating at whowhatwhy.com.
Information on his new book, Family of Secrets: the Bush Dynasty, the
Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their
Influence Means for America, may be found at www.familyofsecrets.com