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Making history – one way or another

Thursday, March 20, 2008

IT'S A COMMONPLACE that “journalism is the first draft of history”, and for some journalists that means trying their damnedest to get things right - and as fully contextualized as possible. For many more it’s an excuse to attempt no more than an extremely rough draft.

For the minions of what I’ve previously called “legacy management” in the Bush White House, it’s naturally a chance to spin desperately, in order to get the future’s history books stacked in this sinking President’s favor.

 

All their spinning skills were called into force yesterday when the Commander-in-Chief (increasingly a title to provoke bitter jokes, in the nation’s current rudderless circumstances) had to perform at The Pentagon, and they labored mightily to portray as some kind of grand celebration that grim appointment with history - a date that many media outlets had been alluding to, in a familiar, nearly off-hand but of course accurate manner, as the day when “the war enters its sixth year”.

 

These speechwriters’ presidential text was fine-tuned to match a martial flag-draped visual backdrop that evoked heraldic glory (above left) - less literal, after all, than the too-easily-contradicted MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner of four years and ten months ago. The Iraq war was carefully cased in terms that aspired to the gravitas of great leadership – well-scripted terms like:

 

“The battle in Iraq is noble, it is necessary, and it is just”.

 

And the same lackeys could be confident, through their pool-coverage agreement with Washington's newsies, that their soundbites and supportive imagery would be effectively stenographed and conveyed, as officially provided, out to the great American public.

 

But you can’t control everything, as press officers and publicists everywhere know all too well. And a much deeper impression was probably conveyed, as it often is, by the very “package” itself – to use the term of art often employed by handlers for the important person they handle.

 

 

 

**DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY FRIDAY ON WHDD - ROBIN HOOD RADIO**
LISTEN TO THE MEDIA BEAT PODCASTS by clicking HERE

 

 

AND IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT SETTING, IN FACT AT A WHITE HOUSE conference-table last week (above right) it was indeed the package George W Bush himself who committed to history some less well-crafted phrases than in his Pentagon address, while connected by video-link to troops and civilian reconstruction personnel serving in Afghanistan.

 

So far no electronic recording of this exchange has surfaced. But the Reuters news agency was allowed, in the person of its often incisive reporter Tabassum Zakaria, to observe the video-conference, and her verbatim report of some of the President’s informal remarks has inevitably been ricocheting around the blogosphere ever since.

 

But not so much, oddly, around the mainstream media. I’ve been surprised to see the New York Times not take the subject up. Sometimes the Old Gray Lady can be too much of a home-town newspaper, even while affecting to be the national journal of record. It looks like reporting on the Chief Executive of just a single state - New York - took a greater priority. The Washington Post, meanwhile, did devote attention to these Presidential declarations, though mainly on its websites rather than in print.

 

For the significance of that Afghanistan message from Bush does lie in the specific expressions he used. Evidently veering off his prepared notes (none-too-subtly concealed from the camera by a small wedged-shaped escritoire) the President said to his audience in the field:

 

“It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic in some ways, you know, confronting danger”.

 

Bush’s verbally hesitant but clear effort to heroicize and even, yes, romanticize his Administration’s badly messed-up mission in Afghanistan was compounded by an extra claim he voiced that was simply preposterous, given his actual record when he was a young, military-age man. He really did offer this humdinger:

 

“I must say I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy to succeed”.

 

Tell that to the Air National Guard of Texas.

 

One small point of detail, regarding the technical handling of this video link-up. The President held the remote control himself, enabling him to adjust the volume at which those out in the real world could speak to him, or even to mute them completely. How telling, about this entire Presidency.

 

 

ANOTHER - ALBEIT SUPPOSEDLY “LIGHT-HEARTED” - EFFORT to massage history cannot be blamed on some ill-judged ad-libs from a “loose cannon” of a president  -  to use my own graceless word-choice. 

 

Bush’s performance at the annual Gridiron Spring Dinner of the White House press corps on March 8th was obviously the collaborative work of many handlers and writers - and even musical accompanists – and it was every bit as jaw-droppingly perverse as the video-conference’s PR disaster (perhaps even more so). Thanks to YouTube.com, this garish event has gotten wide public circulation, though not in the most pristinely recorded form.

 

One imagines that the person who captured these images and sounds (click here) was anxious at the time to conceal their three-and-one-half-inch Canon Elph digital camera, since the shooting angle captures mainly the Renaissance Hotel ballroom’s ceiling. But the audio track brings us pretty clearly some extraordinary lines of Bush blitheness.

 

To the tune of the old Tom Jones’ hit “Green, Green Grass of Home”, the imminent retiree, wearing of course a cowboy hat, is heard dreaming of the “brown, brown grass” of - where else? - Crawford, TX. He jokes about the “fuss you [the press] made of Harriet [Meyers, the evasive former White House counsel] and Brownie [the infamously useless “heckuva” Federal Emergency chief Michael Brown].

 

And the dreamer goes on to imagine, with a shade more respect (barely) for rhyme-making than for the US Constitution:

 

“Dick Cheney is strolling
With documents he's been withholding”

 

And then…

 

“Down the lane I look and here comes Scooter [Lewis Libby, of course]
Finally free of the prosecutor”.

 

I really cannot wait to see how another generation’s non-involved historians will assess such scarcely-believable source material.