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The
Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul
O’Neill by Ron Suskind Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Competent Early
reactions to Ron Suskind’s new book, The Price
of Loyalty, made it seem like Paul O’Neill was so bitter about being
fired as Secretary of the Treasury that he wrote a kiss and tell. I learned
more about O’Neill, and his decades of competence on public issues, by
reading this book, and more than I ever expected to learn about how issues
are vetted in the Bush White House. Partisans of all persuasions will find
something to like and to hate on the pages of The Price
of Loyalty. The scenes of meetings between O’Neill and longtime friend,
Alan Greenspan, are fascinating. O’Neill’s longtime friend, Dick Cheney,
comes off as villainous as expected. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of
Chapter 4, “Base Elements,” (pp. 123-127): A
few hours after her meeting with Bush, the EPA administrator was on the cell
phone, livid. “He went further in this letter than anyone could have
expected, even Hagel!” she said, incredulous. “It
just doesn’t make any sense,” O’Neill agreed. A decade of dialogue about the
evidence of climate change and a responsible inter-national response was
shattered, along with the hard work to find a middle ground between economic
progress and environmental good sense - a conversation that had been
progressing with sound results since Nixon created EPA. We just gave away the
environment, 0’Neill told Whitman. “For no good reason.” But
there is always a “good reason,” good enough for intent to flow to action.
And as O’Neill and Whitman regained their composure, they began to review
events, sifting for motives. What was clear was that the two of them,
moderates on this issue, and the wider, increasingly diverse environmental
community had been outmaneuvered . . . and
now bloodied. That last part was what left them slack-jawed. What was the
point of that? “When Christie told me that afternoon,
I was flabbergasted,” O’Neill recounted. “But then we started to think
through what process was at work. . . . For
whoever it was who called the shot on this whole mix of issues, the real
question is whether they had looked at the facts and made an informed
decision that all this stuff about global warming was a bunch of crap and
that we didn’t need to think about it. Or was it more narrowly based on
simply ‘The base likes this and who the hell knows anyway.’” The base likes this and who the hell
knows anyway. . . . The
sentence was a direct assault on the worldview shared by Whitman and
Greenspan and a wide community of policy pragmatists who began each morning
with hard-boiled questions and fresh cups of analysis, sure that discernibly
correct answers would be found up ahead ... and
that, in the end, being right mattered. O’Neill felt like a man discovering
that he has just bought swampland in It was different from what both of them
knew had just occurred. Whitman’s recounting of the Hagel
letter made it clear that there was not a balancing of competing issues and
interests: energy concerns and the thinly supported jeremiad by industry
lobbyists that the United States was in the early stages of an energy crisis
had eclipsed considerations about action on global warming. Period. Still,
there was the question of who had called the shot. Whitman and O’Neill swiftly arrived
at the same place: Dick Cheney. The letter’s brusque language, needlessly
offending environmentalists, sounded
like the Vice President. The pertinent conclusions—that energy production was
a first priority; that coal, the underappreciated national workhorse that
produced half of the country’s power, needed protection; that lifting the
burden of regulation was holy writ, and any carbon dioxide emission caps were
a constraint on free, unfettered, essential American commerce—were the
precepts Dick had encouraged in early meetings of the energy task force. His
energy task force. As for the execution, O’Neill said, it
was “the Cheney M.O., start to finish.” Could it be, O’Neill wondered for the
first time, that he had signed on to be the contrary voice, and odd-man-out,
inside a team of ideologues? It seemed, suddenly, that there were no
let’s-look-at-the-facts brokers in any of the key White House positions. A strict code of personal fealty to
Bush—animated by the embrace of a few unquestioned ideologues—seemed to be in
collision with a faith in the broader ideals of honest inquiry. He could
barely keep that thorny assessment and his old friend Cheney in the same
thought. For a wide
community of intellectual pragmatists, who had served Gerald Ford and George
H. W. Bush, and who formed the core of old-line, traditional Republicanism, a
query now took hold: Who is Dick, really? O’Neill eventually posed the question to
Roger Porter, whom he talked with a few times during late winter and early
spring. Porter, the domestic policy chief for the first President Bush and
professor of Harvard’s popular course on the American presidency, started to
get calls about this time from moderates in the Republican establishment. His
office at Harvard became a sort of confessional booth. The question was often
the same. “At the
start, there was a sense that Dick would be the pragmatic voice,” O’Neill
said, “handling a great deal, of course, and providing a wide avenue for
clear thinking and discussion—that he would be the guardian for sensible
policy and reasoned analysis. He had often filled
that role for other presidents. He was never one to take a position and dig
in, to be strident. Or so we all thought. We thought that we knew Dick. But
did we? About this time people first started to ask—has Dick changed? Or did
we just not know him before? Or, maybe, he can’t do necessarily what he
wants, because, after all, there is a President who is above him, and
we’ve overstated his power? In any event, Dick seemed to become
ideological—and not as attentive to deliberation and evidence—and people
started to wonder what happened.” O’Neill started to wonder about the
President. He found himself flipping through a
favorite book, Beyond Human Scale, co-authored by Eli Ginzberg, an expert, over the past fifty years, in
organizational theory and utilization of human resources, and an adviser to
nine presidents, and by George Votja. Near the
start of this short book—which looks at how huge organizations, such as the
U.S. government, major corporations, or the Vatican, often fail to provide
leaders with the honest brokers and sober analysis that they need to make
sound decisions—is an anecdote about John F. Kennedy’s first days in office.
After the new President reviewed a position paper on a particular issue, he
said to some advisers that he found it persuasive but added that “he didn’t
know whether the government of the The problem, O’Neill felt, was that
this President’s lack of inquisitiveness or pertinent experience—Jack
Kennedy, at least, had spent a decade in Congress—meant he didn’t know or
really care about the position of the “Administrations are defined by their
President,” O’Neill said. And, while it was already apparent to
many inside the administration that this President ceded significant
authority to others, he was “clearly signing on to strong ideological
positions that had not been fully thought through. But, of course, that’s the
nature of ideology. Thinking it through is the last thing an ideologue wants
to do.” Agree
or disagree with O’Neill and Suskind, reading The Price
of Loyalty will illuminate your views of life in Steve
Hopkins, February 23, 2004 |
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ă 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Price of Loyalty.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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