The debate about the teeth

And now, a little politics. This evening Ron Suskind came in to talk about his book, Paul O’Neill and Bush. I don’t know if the book is big in England, but it’s the warts and all recollections of O’Neill, Bush’s treasury secretary who was fired in late 2002. It gave us the big quote, that Bush in meetings is “a blind man in a room full of deaf people."

Suskind came into class pretty much on time. Dressed in a blue suit, stripey shirt and blue tie. He was small, tightly packed and robust, and he was full of indignation. He sat in one of those university chairs (like these here), plastic as anything with the handy elbow table for taking notes. Suskind boxed himself into the chair and leaned hard against the foldable table: when he was vigorously making some point or another he would lean right forward, chest against the table, and tip the whole chair-table combine down on its front legs, using the table to keep him in place. Sometimes he would tap and whack the table. Thinking back, it was a great piece of furniture for him, and he used it.

Suskind used to work at the Wall Street Journal and wrote a huge book called "A Hope in the Unseen" before he became the terror of the Administration. Then he wrote an article about Karen Hughes, Bush’s former svengaless, for Esquire. Bush called her “High Prophet.” I’m not going to say much more, just give you some Suskind. He was a performer. At first, I thought this was pantomime, he was hamming, but after a while, the rhythms worked their way, and his voice rose and fell and he told us open-mouth stories of how he put the book together and made his moves. The book is based on 19,000 documents that passed through O’Neill’s hands during his two years at the White House, and the transcripts of high level Bush meetings, which were given to Suskind by a cabinet minister, a true deep throat. Suskind is getting sued all over the shop by the government, but he keeps releasing documents on his website.

The debate about the teeth is how Suskind describes the Bush White House’s attempts to control news and the media. They’re powerful, they don’t allow leaks, message message message is relentless – if you break the rules you get fired. But they are cocky too. They’re action men. “Perception lags reality,” according to Ari Fleischer, Bush’s former spin man. Which is scary. The debate about the teeth is that when you make the Bushmen over-reach in your direction, if you make them snarl and show themselves to be huge, then you see how awful they are. You see their fangs.

“We’re up against a pig science,” he said, “a pseudo science of media management. And they’re winning…. No one’s getting anything, they think, you fourth estate people, you’re a special interest, you’re like the prescription drug people…”

One Bush aide met Suskind after another damaging article in Esquire and started a sentence referring to him and his type as “you in the reality based community…”

Suskind still gets calls from big fish in the administration, sizing him up, seeing if they can flip him, or get the documents back after O’Neill gave them to him. He also takes calls from other whistleblowers and angry Bushels. “The phone is ringing off the hook,” he said, “and it’s Republicans calling. They’ve read the book. They read it under the covers with a flashlight, it’s like porn for these guys… and they can no longer stay in the shadow of denial, when they read this, they need to talk to someone, and they call…”

O’Neill’s big thing is the lack of process in the White House. He would meet with Bush and Bush wouldn’t say anything, just let him talk for an hour and leave it at that. There was no fact-based apparatus. Suskind said O’Neill was trying to run a treasury department and there wasn’t even a wall to knock his head against…

“The world was upside down and he was scared. And then 9/11 happens and he runs into ideologues in the hallways and he gets really scared. The tax cuts had a mystical quality about them… he would ask ‘How do we know this is going to work? Do you want some numbers on that?’ And they’d say, ‘No, we’re good,’”

And now Suskind is up against the Feds. They tried to get him on the espionage act, saying that documents he used should have been classified, even though they weren’t. Suskind thinks his phones might be tapped, he just doesn’t know. And all the time the book is in the shops, and it’s selling. Even I’m going to get it.

“They want to kill me and they want to kill Paul,” said Suskind, at the end, “They want to kill public dialogue, it’s the American ideal, informed consent and they want the opposite, they want uninformed consent.”

And with that, it was time to finish. The Suskind show was over and people got up, a little elated. And as the class mingled he called out on more thing.

“Fight well. Bring back bodies.”