A White House Forgery Scandal?

Suskind: "Well, he seems not to remember it. You know, that's at least what he claims. (Chuckles) The fact is that a lot of people know about this. . . . In this book, Meredith, instead of going to George I went to all the people around George, close to George, who remembered because they were involved in the thing and they remember what George said to them."

And There's More

As Allen writes in the Politico:

"-- Suskind reports that Bush initially told Cheney he had to 'step back' in large meetings when they were together, like those at the NSC [National Security Council], because people were addressing and deferring to Cheney. Cheney said he understood, that he'd mostly just take notes at the big tables and then he and Bush would meet privately, frequently, to discuss options and action.

"-- Suskind contends Cheney established 'deniability' for Bush as part of the vice president's 'complex strategies, developed over decades, for how to protect a president.'

"'After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House, Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president shouldn't know -- things that could be illegal, disruptive to key foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive.

"'The key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he'd authorized. The whole point of Cheney's model is to make a president less accountable for his action. Cheney's view is that accountability -- a bedrock feature of representative democracy -- is not, in every case, a virtue.'"

Excerpts

In his prologue, Suskind writes about the dilemma "that would come to define America's posture in the world: Bush's powerful confidence in his instinct. It might be called a compensatory strength, making up for other areas of deficit. He's not particularly reflective, doesn't think in large strategic terms, and he's never had much taste for the basic analytical rigors embraced by the modern professional class. What he does is size up people, swiftly -- he trusts his eyes, his ears, his touch -- and act. . . . [His] headlong, impatient energy fueled his rise. . . . It's how Bush -- like many bullies who've risen to great heights -- became the president. Once he landed in the Oval Office, however, he discovered that every relationship is altered, corrupted by the gravitational incongruities between the leader of the free world and everyone else. Everything you touch is velvety, deferential, and flattering. To fight this, presidents have been known to search furiously for the real, for the unfiltered, secretly eavesdropping on focus group sessions far from Washington, arranging Oval Office arguments between top aides -- a Gerald Ford trick -- or ordering policy advisers, as Nixon often did, to tell them something the advisers were sure they didn't want to hear. These men, even with their overweening confidence, embraced a unique kind of humility, recognizing they were in a bubble and fearing they would make historic mistakes.

"Bush, with his distaste for analysis and those who contradict him, didn't go down those paths, and he seemed unconcerned, unlike other presidents, that isolation would prompt errors in judgment. . . . [He was a] man who trusts only what he can touch placed in a realm where nothing he touches is authentic.

"It's a diabolical twist worthy of Sophocles or Shakespeare. Either would have written it as a tragedy. Because, over the years, the bullying presence of Bush -- making things personal without hesitation or limits -- became the face of America. . . . After eventful years and Bush's re-election, the nation and its leader became inseparable, as America, itself, was viewed as angry, reckless, petulant and insecure, spoiled and careless, with a false smile that concealed boiling hostility."

Suskind also writes about a longtime U.S. intelligence official despairing over the loss of intelligence that came as a result of the military campaign in Iraq, "as anti-American sentiment became the currency of global opinion and terrorist recruitment skyrocketed. . . .

"This state of affairs is untenable -- a loss of intelligence capability that will end in disaster -- and he thinks about why, about how America went from a country that people wanted to help in its time of need to one they'd just as soon see humbled. And each time he goes through this exercise, he comes back to Iraq and the suspicions of so many, in the United States and abroad, that we went to war under false pretenses. He thinks it's the key reason the United States has lost its moral authority in the world. People -- at the agency and around Washington -- dismiss it, the whole mess, saying it's all past tense, let it go. But he knows more than they do -- more than all but a dozen people, maybe fewer, inside the U.S. government, with two of them being Bush and Cheney. He knows there was a secret mission a few months before the war -- a top-drawer intelligence-gathering mission that the United States was involved in -- that found out everything we later learned. That there were no weapons. And we knew in plenty of time.

"But what he knows -- this troubled public servant -- is itself only a glimpse of something much larger, and still submerged. It is a violation of American principle and law that lies, quiet and sure, beneath the country's misfortunes. . . .