The how behind a power grab

IN a media world where frightened editors worry about ever-more fickle readers, viewers and Web surfers, it takes a courageous journalist to approach the boss with an idea for a story on political “process.” Today’s news must be hot and a pitch for a story on a vague, bland concept that doesn’t instantly translate into “hits” takes some amount of guts, believe it or not.

Still, despite the demands of the news business, process is important. Often it’s everything, as John W. Dean shows in his thoughtful, enlightening new book, “Broken Government.”

Think of policy as the idea. Process is how the idea is carried out. Process, as Dean explains, is how things happen, how an idea starts in an obscure White House office, winds its way through the bureaucracy and ends up permitting the alleged torture chambers of Guantanamo Bay or leading us into a war that now seems endless. But it’s hard to sell a story on the meandering road between the conception of a policy and the moment it begins to affect all our lives.

Dean knows process. As the young counsel to President Nixon, he was part of the clumsy process of attempting to cover up Watergate. Then, turning against Nixon, he warned the inner circle about the cover-up and testified about it to a Senate committee. That forced him to experience the process of congressional oversight. His involvement in the cover-up also cost him a stint in custody for obstruction of justice -- and immersion in the process of the criminal justice system.

Dean says process bores the high-profile pundits who have an outsized influence because of their frequent television appearances. He cites examples of how David Corn of the Nation, Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report, Joe Klein of Time and the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes have all dismissed stories about process, even, in Barnes’ case, something as interesting as Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret meetings with energy executives to write a new national energy policy. Although Dean praises some journalists and a few papers -- the Los Angeles Times among them -- for trying to find out how things work, he seems to think their efforts are lost amid the negativity of the more famous talking heads.

The pundits, who must be hot to be called back to a show, have turned televised political coverage into something resembling ESPN’s “SportsCenter.” This has influenced the news executives who design their products on the basis of focus groups, reader and viewer surveys, and what they themselves see on television. So when reporters try to sell a story on process, they are often up against a harried, pressured editor who doesn’t care how the Federal Communications Commission reached a decision or what’s going on behind the scenes in the pollution cleanup dispute at the Port of Los Angeles. Desperate, a talented journalist will reach deep into a bag of tricks and pull out a few colorful characters and hot examples to illustrate process, bring it home to the reader or viewer and eventually get the story on the air, in print or on the Internet.

The most valuable part of Dean’s book is his analysis of a concept -- namely, the unitary executive theory -- and his description of the process through which it would drastically change our government and sidestep the U.S. Constitution. The unitary executive is a simple idea. The president would control all federal agencies, including traditionally independent ones such as the Federal Reserve. Strong limits would be placed on Congress and the judiciary. The president would become someone along the lines of a monarch, one not as cruel as Ivan the Terrible, perhaps, but dictatorial in a more presentable way, more like Kaiser Wilhelm II of World War I Germany.

Such un-American ideas, long bandied about in conservative circles, were, before 9/11 reduced to action memos written by lawyers unknown to the public. Among them were John Yoo, a conservative legal scholar in the Justice Department, and David Addington, then Cheney’s legal advisor and now his chief of staff. These men were tools of Cheney who, Dean notes, was determined to restore power that he felt had been taken from the presidency after Watergate.

Alberto R. Gonzales, the recently resigned attorney general, was another major Cheney tool, and I would have liked to have seen more about him in the book. As White House counsel and then head of the Justice Department, he approved of assaults on the Constitution, including interrogation bordering on torture, secret detention centers and domestic eavesdropping. Gonzales stonewalled when questioned about them by a Senate committee.

The massive gathering of presidential power is a tough story to track, especially because of the secrecy that Cheney and President Bush imposed on the White House, the Justice Department and other federal agencies. Making it even harder was the refusal of the Republican-controlled Congress elected in 2002 to exercise its oversight duties.

Yet some reporters followed the twisting secretive process. They dug out the bureaucratic details. They cut through the evasions. They searched out and described the obscure policy architects and the quirky intelligence and conservative intellectualism they shared. Most important, the journalists got their stories in the papers, on the air and on the Internet. On the Web, they were amplified by the opinions, analysis and, occasionally, the reporting of the bloggers -- a community fascinated by process. When the Democrats took control of Congress after the 2006 election and restored congressional oversight, such journalistic digging supplied them with ammunition.

Dean correctly notes, however, that neither elections nor a vigilant media will stop the conservative drive toward a monarchical presidency. President Bush is ensuring the drive will continue after he leaves office. He is doing this with conservative appointments to the Supreme Court and appellate courts, following the pattern laid out by Nixon. “All presidents have nominated Supreme Court justices and other federal judges who, to varying extents, have shared their political or judicial philosophy,” writes Dean. “But before Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign no presidential candidate had made the judicial philosophy of a potential candidate for the Supreme Court a major issue in his platform.” From then on, says Dean, Republican presidential candidates and conservative senators have made a sustained effort to appoint their kind to the court.

There is a fine line between policy and process. In past Supreme Courts, the process of reaching a decision was important and quite fascinating, as when Chief Justice Earl Warren fashioned a 9-0 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, ending school segregation. Policy and process were intertwined as Warren sought to reconcile his colleagues’ views. But there’s no such process with the Bush judicial appointees whose minds seem to have been made up in law school if not before. They, Dean points out, are vetted by Bush aides to ensure they will “please the ultra conservative base of the GOP.” What distinguishes the current Supreme Court, although Dean might dispute this, is an absence of process.

But this is a minor criticism I have with Dean’s book. His analysis, based on research as well as his own unique experience, gives readers of “Broken Government” a close look at how the Bush administration is consolidating presidential power in dangerous ways. Dean has brought a complex and important subject to the public’s attention. I hope the talking heads and editors pay attention too.

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Bill Boyarsky, a former city editor and columnist for The Times, teaches journalism at USC and is the author of the forthcoming “Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics.”