Stonewalled in the White House press room

Our nation has arrived at a critical historical tipping point. Although the decisions we make on Tuesday will have a crucial bearing on our future, an equally important question is whether our political leaders, whomever they may be, will undertake to speak truthfully to us as citizens, or whether facts, reason and civil discourse will be trumped by lies, illogic and spin. At stake is not simply which political party prevails but also whether the people and their elected representatives can keep each other sufficiently in touch with reality to enable our democracy to produce rational and wise decisions.

Glenn W. Smith’s “Unfit Commander” is a polemic decrying President Bush’s shortcomings as a truth teller. By systematically recounting what is known about Bush’s National Guard record and how this elusive story has been handled by his media specialists, Smith -- a former journalist and currently executive director of Texans for Truth, founded “to help Americans understand the falsity of George W. Bush’s claims to an honorable military past” -- exposes the abyss that is opening between reality and fantasy in this nation’s representation of its leaders and important public issues.

The book begins with an informative but hardly impartial introduction, which is followed by a trove of documents bearing on the president’s military service during the Vietnam War. We learn that instead of going to Vietnam, Bush -- through Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes and other friends of his father, then a U.S. congressman -- managed to get assigned to the Texas Air National Guard; that he declined to volunteer for overseas duty; and that over the next four years, though becoming an enthusiastic and able F-102 pilot, he ultimately seemed to lose interest in the Guard and essentially absented himself from service.

After receiving permission to transfer to Alabama’s 187th Tactical Recon Group to work on Winton Blount’s 1972 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Bush failed to show up for a required physical exam and was grounded. Although, according to Guard records, he continued to be paid, “[n]o other credible witness recalls Bush fulfilling his obligations to the National Guard in Alabama,” Smith reports. In 1973, he was permitted to transfer to Boston, to attend Harvard Business School. But, here, too, there is virtually no evidence of his having shown up at any base. Despite agreeing in 1968 to a six-year service obligation, he was released eight months early, with an honorable discharge, on Oct. 1, 1973.

Besides Bush’s dubiously honorable service record, Smith’s book highlights two other important issues: First, the media’s failure to get to the bottom of the story (“[W]hat may be the most troubling aspect of this mini-scandal is how easily the press were distracted from the real story of Bush’s military service,” Smith writes); second, the lengths to which the public relations apparatus of the White House has gone not only to keep it under wraps but to spin a web of obfuscation around it.

The most telling documents in “Unfit Commander” are not those detailing Bush’s “spotty service record” but the transcripts of the tragicomic press briefings in which reporters valiantly and persistently questioned White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan about the president’s time in the Guard. Their queries were repeatedly rebuffed by McClellan, whose relentlessly “on-message” answers always avoided a direct “yes” or “no” response: “We’ve released all the information we have related to this issue,” or “The president fulfilled his duties [and] was honorably discharged” or “What I think we’re seeing now is just politics.” The transcripts read almost like a press briefing in the People’s Republic of China.

One would like to think that if the American public could witness such political reality shows it would be outraged by the tawdry spectacle of a public servant defending a presidential myth with evasion, hyperbole and outright distortion. Alas, such exchanges rarely make it into the media -- especially onto television, where most Americans get their news. If this is a commentary on the sorry state of governmental responsiveness, it is also a commentary on the media’s refusal to convey any real sense of how this White House has stonewalled the legitimate questions of reporters.

The result has been that our government and an increasing number of its citizens now live in a virtual world, where disinformation, wishful thinking and lies have shrouded reality in a cloth of fantasy. That a democracy cannot function when its citizens are deluded is well known. The deeper question raised by “Unfit Commander” is: Are we as a nation still committed to the idea of an active and independent press serving as a watchdog over government power? “The presidency of George W. Bush,” Smith concludes, “has come to exemplify an unhealthy and undemocratic trend in our country, a trend that has us accepting the Imaginary over the Real, the fables of propagandists and ideologues over the evidence of our own eyes.” *