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For appearances' sake

Thursday, January 11, 2007

The President’s speechwriter, William McGurn, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, avoided that weasel word, the imprecisely-used “test-the-waters” term surge, in his final text for last night’s primetime address to the nation. Another perhaps lesser offense was avoided, too, in the homestretch of preparations for the broadcast.

I would have been high in the ranks of those taking offense, if the earlier choice of venue for George W Bush’s announcement of some new tactics for Iraq (no-one surely believes it qualifies as “a strategy”) had not been changed - the switch being from the White House’s Map Room to the largely inoffensive Library on the ground floor.

 

I happen to be something of a cartophile, as is reflected a bit in this website’s design. And like many of my kind - and others too - I object to the ever-growing and sloppy use of map imagery in the presentation of government policies. (Have you ever heard a worse label, for instance, to stick on international efforts to achieve Israeli-Arab peace than “The Roadmap”?) And to employ the Map Room, with the deep resonances that derive from its former function as Franklin D Roosevelt’s Situation Room when he was directing World War Two, would have looked presumptuous and been counterproductive, the White House’s appearances unit decided.

 

Dead right, I would say.

 

[To fellow-cartophiles, I should point out that we missed the chance of seeing a colonial survey of America on the Map Room’s east wall that was drawn up in part by Thomas Jefferson’s father. Reflecting a previous Administration’s approach to international friendship, we must assume, it’s actually a French publication of the map, from 1755.]

 

The broadcast’s eventual setting was touted unattributedly to reporters by Communications Director Kevin Sullivan’s team as a more “relaxed” environment, conducive to “a conversation with an anxious American public”. The soft gray and rose tones of the Library’s late-Federal period decoration were expected to help in this vital mission.

 

Please don’t think for a moment I’m over-interpreting matters here, or going into too much detail. These careful backdrop choices are among the important responsibilities of the Deputy Director for Production (did you know the White House made “productions”? Of course you did; I’m sorry.)

 

The man reveling in this job-title has been Scott Sforza, formerly a producer for ABC’s Good Morning America, who infamously helped design the television set for U.S. Central Command's press briefings in Qatar at a cost of $250,000, and perhaps more infamously choreographed the President’s “Top Gun” landing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, with that (now so greatly regretted) “Mission Accomplished” banner.

 

The craft of Sforza, Sullivan and the others is often referred to as that of “smoke and mirrors”. But I wonder if the team actually knew about the silver-plated Argand lamps on the Library’s fireplace mantel (picture above), a gift to George Washington’s Secretary for War, General Henry Knox. Washington liked them especially because they gave extra light through a clever Swiss design. He said in fact that they “consume their own smoke”.

 

 

THE FOG OF WAR AND THE TERROR OF ITS REALITY were joltingly conveyed elsewhere on the day of  Bush’s low-modulated rhetoric as he called - if perhaps you didn’t notice - for “sacrifice” in the year ahead (only one year?). I guess many of us wonder if he has much acquaintance with sacrifice.

 

The jolt came in a remarkable contribution to Morning Edition on National Public Radio from an upstate New York National Guard officer who is embedded with the Afghanistan National Army as a trainer.

 

Captain Benjamin Tupper lives with his Afghani unit and “training” involves him often leading it into battle. But on this occasion his spoken reflection was about hearing the sounds of a fatal night-time firefight coming over the force’s radio while he was back in base and his colleagues were on patrol.

 

He calmly described the depth of his visceral reactions – and his openness, the immediacy of his word-picture, conveyed (to me at least) much powerful emotion. My gut clenched and my eyes welled – as they had just once before recently, reading an almost unbearable New York Times report in November from correspondent C J Chivers when he accompanied a US Navy medic attached to a Marine platoon, and they came under mortal, armor-piercing fire near Karma in northwestern Iraq.

 

To bring us closer to the reality of war Captain Tupper, a lifelong listener to the university station WAER in Syracuse, and still a listener in Afghanistan via the internet, had decided to click on the “Submissions” section of www.npr.org – and he submitted an essay, as hundreds of visitors do. After the ME team focused in on his written offering, Tupper recorded it as a voice-piece at the station to which he’d been so loyal, when he was home recently for some R&R.

 

Now that he’s back in the thick of anti-Taliban action, NPR spokesperson Andi Sporkin told me: “We are hoping he might be able to record more from Afghanistan.  We’ve had incredible response.”

 

I am not surprised.

 

 

I SIMPLY HAD TO RETURN TO THE ADMINISTRATION’S MEDIA team, after considering Cpt Tupper’s experience.

 

It turns out Communications Director Kevin Sullivan looks to neither battle nor his historic surroundings when seeking reference points for his work.

 

He used to be communications director for the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, and just this week as he prepared the Iraq message, he was reported by his old hometown newspaper as believing it's the world of sports that provides many parallels for his current White House duties. “A lot happens at night and on the weekend”, he told the Dallas Morning News. “Lots of crisis communications opportunities. There are wins and losses, too. You have that in common.”