9/11 Report Up for National Book Prize

The instructions from the “front office” -- a core group of editors -- were straight out of a college expository writing class: Divide complex sentences in two. Remember that clear, plain prose is a virtue. Don’t get bogged down in nuance or detail; the overarching story is everything.

But this was no classroom or dormitory cram session. The writers were staff members of a government commission, a type of body typically known for bad writing and vicious partisanship. And they were producing an official report -- by definition a sober, soporific, dust-gathering tome.

But from its release July 22, “The 9/11 Commission Report” was a bestseller. Now, the 567-page volume is a finalist in the nonfiction category of the prestigious National Book Awards. And a town of wonks who crave jargon and thrive on acronyms is buzzing over one simple question: Who wrote it?

“It’s a mystery,” quipped Philip D. Zelikow, a University of Virginia historian who served as the commission’s executive director. “I know somebody did, and I’ve been looking for him.”

Zelikow, who acknowledges steering the project, insists that the writing was a group effort, a collaborative attempt to explain the horror and nuance of an international conspiracy in a way that was “readable but not dumbed-down.”

Initially, he said, some members of both the commission and its staff were skeptical about writing for the general public instead of the inside-the-Beltway crowd. But their concerns were allayed by the power of the report’s narrative.

From the beginning, the emphasis was on accessible writing -- on producing not a report, but a book.

“Our commissioners all believed that our mandate was not just to report to the president and the Congress, but to the public,” said Daniel Marcus, the commission’s general counsel. “Phil used to say that he hoped not just college professors but high school teachers would assign the book. The balance was clarity and succinctness on one side, but on the other side to make it interesting.”

When Zelikow was first asked by commission Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton to direct the staff, he reached out for advice to his mentor and eventual co-author, Harvard historian Ernest R. May. According to May, the two agreed that the job would be worth their effort if the report had a lasting effect on the public.

They devised an outline and finalized it with the commissioners. In the original outline, May said, the two proposed opening with “a grabber, and then going into Chapter 2.”

But, he said, “the commissioners argued about this. Their idea was a full chapter describing what happened on 9/11.”

May, who has written several books, including one with Zelikow about the Cuban missile crisis, said he was “certain now that they were right, though I resisted them at the time.”

Topics were divided among teams of staff members. Team leaders got an outline of the areas to be addressed in their sections. Commission senior counsel Dietrich Snell -- a deputy attorney general in New York state and, according to insiders, a skilled writer -- was assigned the chapters dealing with the terrorist plot.

“We tried to write the story from the standpoint of the terrorists, from the inception of the conspiracy,” said Snell, who helped prosecute Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, convicted in the 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Center. Snell and his team of six started drafting Chapters 5 and 7 in April, even while preparing for hearings in June and publication in July.

A lot of material was left on the cutting-room floor. “If many staffers had had their way, the report would be twice as long, and it’s already 300,000 words,” said Zelikow. “We’re not the last word on 9/11. But if you write the first words, well, the whole quality of the debate is different.”

The emphasis on what Zelikow called “concise and direct writing” was honed to the collective mind-set when the staff wrote topic summaries, read out loud during televised hearings.

“This process of drafting and redrafting and debating with groups of staff resulted in everybody kind of internalizing the idea that they were telling the story,” said May. “Mostly the front office had this narrative bent. We had to keep after them: ‘You’re telling the story, not making the case.’ ”

The publishing professionals at W. W. Norton & Co. were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the prose. Norton published the book on a rush basis and then printed additional copies -- expensive endeavors. More than 1.5 million copies are in print.

“It’s very unusual to have a government commission exhibit exceptional writing,” said Louise Brockett, a Norton spokeswoman. “It was an extraordinary collaboration.”

Zelikow, who has been invited to attend the awards ceremony in New York on Nov. 17, said he was delighted that the writing had been recognized by the literary community.

“They’re honoring the quality of the work even though it doesn’t have a face,” he said. “It calls attention to group writing as a craft. It’s really, really hard.”

The only clue to authorship is the list of more than 80 staff members in the front of the book -- many of whom report that since the National Book Awards nomination, friends have called to offer congratulations.

The recognition, Zelikow said, “is a good thing for others in government who will have to write such reports in the future.”

And, he might have added, for those who want to read them.

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Times staff writer Doyle McManus contributed to this report.