[Peter Read is research professor in the department of history at the University of Sydney.]

LAST week marked a week for which some of the Stolen Generations have waited all their lives. The 1997 Bringing Them Home report polarised the nation. Prime minister John Howard's strong refusal to give an apology continued for the life of his government. An apology, promised first by Kim Beazley, later by Kevin Rudd, finally occurred in the federal Parliament last Wednesday.

Keith Windschuttle is one of the few historians to question seriously the accepted account of how Aboriginal children were removed in large numbers under fundamentally racist policies.

In these pages recently, while acknowledging some biological assimilation programs as obnoxious, he attacked my portrayal of events in NSW. He wrote, "Don't let facts spoil the day", but as usual his too-hurried research lead him into error.

What was happening in southern Australia? Conscious from the 1870s that the part-Aboriginal population was rapidly increasing, Victoria and NSW were trying the policy of the "designated reserve" from which Aboriginal people either could not or would not want to leave. But by the first decade of the 20th century it was clear that the policy was failing. Arable land in southern Australia was wanted by new settlers, the harsh regimes of some reserves were causing the residents to vote with their feet.

So a new policy, an exact opposite to the first, was evolving by 1910. This was progressively to reduce and ultimately to close the reserves by expelling the adults and removing the children. That is the context in which Robert Donaldson, the Protection Board's chief inspector from 1916, uttered the notorious words: "There is no difference of opinion as to the only solution of this great problem: the removal of the children. In the course of the next few years there will be no need for the camps and stations; the old people will have passed away, and their progeny will be absorbed in the industrial classes of the colony."

That was the context of a new policy which Windschuttle ignores, the reason why Aboriginal schools were created only up to 1918 and the reason why the removal rate of children accelerated after that time.

Windschuttle, on the basis of his rushed reading, asserts that not many babies were taken. But babies were commonly directly removed from stations without being listed on the files that Windschuttle uses. Nor does he consider the children born to unmarried Aboriginal mothers in public hospitals in the major cities. Such mothers had virtually no chance of keeping their children, but how many such babies were lost to the Aboriginal people in this way are unknown. Joy Williams, who developed a mental illness while a state ward and subsequently sued the NSW government, was one of them. Born in Crown St in 1942 to a stolen generation mother, she was immediately transferred to the Bomaderry home for Aboriginal babies. She has no record in the files that Windschuttle consulted.....

You say your book, Day of Empire, is a warning. How so?

I'm suggesting that, ironically, the secret to becoming a world "hyperpower" is tolerance. If you look at history, you see great powers being very tolerant in their rise to global dominance. So there is a sort of warning for today's hyperpower—the United States. The secret to our success for over 200 years has been our ability to attract the best and the brightest from all over the world. We can't just let every immigrant in. But it's important to not take a turn toward xenophobia and want to shut down the borders or root out certain groups, because history shows that that's always been the trigger of backlash and decline.

You give several examples of the rise of hyperpowers—nations that are unsurpassed militarily and economically— including the Roman Empire, the Tang dynasty and the Dutch Republic. But not everyone thinks of the Roman Empire as tolerant.
I'm not talking about tolerance in the modern human-rights sense. Rome had massive amounts of slavery; women had no rights. People were shredded at gladiator games. But the Romans were tolerant in the sense that they were indifferent to skin color and religious, ethnic or linguistic background. People of different ethnicities and religions were accepted into the Roman army and were able to become Roman citizens. The Romans thought of themselves as the chosen people, yet they built the greatest army on earth by recruiting warriors from any background.

But didn't the notion of tolerance change?
Of course. Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn't just by conquest. It's through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants.

You say modern America has a lot in common with the Mongol Empire. What about the United States would Genghis Khan endorse?
Genghis Khan decreed religious tolerance for all of his conquered peoples. So I think he definitely would approve of our constitutional protections of freedom of religion. I think he would also approve of the way the U.S. has been able to attract talented people from all over the world. The Mongols themselves had little technology, not even enough to bake bread. The only way they were able to conquer the great cities of Eastern Europe and the Middle East was by using Chinese engineers who knew how to build great siege machines. The parallel is that the U.S. was able to win the race for the atomic bomb because it was a haven for persecuted scientists from Nazi Europe....

In Philip Roth's latest book, Exit Ghost, Amy Bellette has to be hauled out of the New York Public Library kicking and screaming. Her lover, the fictional writer E.I. Lonoff, isn't represented among a display of America's best authors, and Bellette is furious--not only at his absence, but also at the authors included instead. More than anything, Bellette is enraged by the cost of political correctness. "It started with the colleges," she later says, "and now it's everywhere. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, but not Faulkner."

This complaint is shared by Lewis Lapham, the legendary former editor of Harper's. In 2006, Lapham carped to a newspaper interviewer that in American universities, if a text doesn't reach "a politically correct standard on one or more of [the issues of race, gender, or class], it doesn't exist." But the social forces causing the degradation of literature to social commentary don't stop there. They extend from the news Americans receive to the government's selective disclosure of information. And there, the consequences are cause for alarm. "The people selling the great research on the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq certainly did not tell the truth," Lapham said. "It's advertising. ... That's the result of the politicization of research."

Lapham's zeal to combat the creeping debasement of truth in the culture, combined with his passion for history, drove him to leave Harper's after nearly thirty years and found Lapham's Quarterly. The Quarterly is billed as a historical journal and looks something like The Paris Review. Each issue, Lapham chooses a single theme--it premiered with "war" in November, "money" follows in March, and "nature" is slotted for the summer--and assembles a set of relevant texts. The material is wonderfully eclectic: Not just the stuff of history books, but pop-culture lists, CIA assassination manuals, and vintage memorandums proposing, for instance, a way to demoralize the Cuban people by spreading unflattering photos of an overweight Fidel Castro. This scrapbook of "literary narrative and philosophical commentary, diaries, speeches, letters, and proclamations" as Lapham describes it in his preamble, is essentially a 172-page expansion of the Harper's Readings section, itself a Lapham innovation from the start of his second term as editor in 1984. There's also some new content: four essays in the back by contemporary historians, each about 2,000 to 3,000 words long. But for all those essays, the journal's clearest message is this: Its editor's interest, and his genius, lies not in editing, but in curating.

Lapham seeks to provide readers with a more complete portrait of current events by using historical documents to reveal how we got here. The issue dedicated to war, and more specifically to the abhorrent (in Lapham's view) war in Iraq, presents excerpts including Henry V heroically landing on the beaches of Normandy, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and an excerpt from the Bhagavad-Gita about the "sacred duty of a warrior." Lapham wants both to offer literature on its own terms and to stimulate the reader's own thoughts. But he does this with the supreme confidence that after reviewing the texts, a reader will come to his same conclusions. Lapham might detest the use of literature for social commentary, but in Lapham's Quarterly he practices just that, in its most developed form--disguised in the words of others....

"This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War," the roundly acclaimed new book from Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust, is also a fast-rising bestseller.

With 35,000 copies sold since early January, the scholarly book has vaulted to seventh on the New York Times nonfiction list and recently climbed to 30th on the Amazon.com bestseller list, mainly populated by works of pop-culture icons John Grisham, James Patterson, Stephen King, and an array of self-help guides.

Those are strange bedfellows for a book academics hail as a major historical breakthrough. That is a clear sign that Faust's work has accomplished the rare feat of bridging the steep divide between the ivory tower and mainstream readers. Its commercial success has caught the eye of publishers and academics alike, who say its brisk sales and widespread public attention are strikingly rare for an academic, and nearly with out precedent for a sitting university president.

Knopf, the book's publisher, said it had returned to press six times to meet the unexpected demand, with 50,000 copies now in print.

In his vivid and illuminating new book, "God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215" (Norton, $29.95), historian David Levering Lewis re-examines the 400-year era of Muslim rule in Europe, a period during which a sophisticated and tolerant Islamic empire conquered - and profoundly influenced - parts of a West that had fallen into barbaric tribalism following the collapse of the Roman empire.

Lewis, a professor at New York University, received the Pulitzer Prize for both volumes of his two-part biography of W.E.B. Du Bois and is the author of eight other books, including "King: A Critical Biography" and "When Harlem Was in Vogue." He spoke from his home in New York City.

Q: What drew you to this period?

A: In a previous book, "The Race to Fashoda," I wrote about the speed bump that the British empire encountered with Islamic fundamentalism in the 1890s. For 10 years the world's mightiest empire was simply stymied in the Upper Sudan. Well, I'm a citizen of the American empire, and I began to see that we were headed for similar speed bumps. I thought it would be useful to write a book - a short book - about Islam in Europe. So off my wife and I went to Morocco, and we arrived in Rabat on the morning of 9/11. A meditation of a time long ago suddenly seemed very pertinent.

Q: It was going to be a short book?

A: But that's not what happened. The post-9/11 culture made it more and more difficult not to write a larger book in which the inferences about then and now would be clearer. I wanted to connect the Iberian history, which is I think fairly well known, with what it meant on the other side of the Pyrenees in terms of the geopolitics and ideology of the Catholic faith. So I spent a lot of time tracing the bargains that arose between these Germans and the bishops of Rome.

Q: Was Europe, in a sense, created by Islam as much as by Christianity?

A: Cautiously I would say yes, and that's what I wanted to emphasize. The Renaissance is profoundly indebted to what I call the conveyor belt of knowledge coming out of Toledo. We would all applaud that, the maintenance and enrichment of the knowledge of Plato and Aristotle, the science of the academy of Athens, the Hindu [mathematics]. In the negative sense, Islam also becomes the template against which Europe compares itself, fights, profits. Finally, the kind of theocracy that emerges in Europe is directly a consequence of Charles Martel's victory over Islam at the Battle of Poitiers in 732....

[Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His blog, “Altercation,” appears at www.mediamatters.org/altercation. His seventh book, Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, will be published in March.]

President George W. Bush used his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington last week to, once again, attempt to define his presidency as a long struggle against the dark forces responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. “Six and a half years ago, our country faced the worst attack in our history,” Bush said. “I understood immediately that we would have to act boldly to protect the American people. So we’ve gone on the offense against these extremists. We’re staying on the offense, and we will not relent until we bring them to justice.”

The Bush administration has continually used—and abused—this popular frame over the past seven years. As Philip Shenon writes in his new book-length expose, The Commission, Karl Rove began planning an electoral strategy based on strength against terrorism on Sept. 12th. Donald Rumsfeld, as we know, began planning an invasion of Iraq only hours after the towers came down. In so many ways, the Bush administration’s most disastrous policies—the invasion of Iraq, torture, wiretapping, Guantanamo, the unitary executive, and so on—were all enabled by the administration’s assertion that it had the unique ability to fight the good fight and prevent another terrorist attack.

But what if it was revealed that in the months leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, the administration had ample evidence that the attack was imminent, and was negligent in its response? What would become of the 9/11 presidency? The White House faced this very real problem in 2003 when public and congressional pressure forced Bush to sign a law creating a commission to examine the events surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks.

Philip Shenon, the New York Times reporter covering the 9/11 Commission, has since discovered the great lengths that the administration went to in order to neuter the findings of the Commission. Among his discoveries:

Vice-President Cheney consistently tried to kill the Commission, calling Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle early on and discouraging him from opening probes, saying they would be “a very dangerous and time-consuming diversion.” Many commissioners later suspected that he was the one directing then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez in stonewalling the Commission.
Philip Zelikow, who was hired as “executive director” of the Commission, meaning he would run the day-to-day operations, was a close friend and former colleague of Condoleezza Rice’s who spoke with her many times during the investigation despite his pledges not to do so. Shenon writes that it was clear to some investigators “that they could not have an open discussion in front of Zelikow about Condoleezza Rice and her performance as national security advisor.” Rice, you will recall, was the primary person responsible for briefing Bush about the dangers of a potential attack that were laid out in memos like the one he received in August 2001 in her presence entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S.”
All investigators and staffers on the Commission were originally forbidden to talk to the press or even to the commissioners themselves. Only Zelikow was so empowered, thereby allowing him to control all access to it.
Zelikow also received multiple phone calls from Karl Rove over the course of the investigation. When commissioners discovered this fact, Zelikow ordered his secretary to stop keeping a log of his phone calls. Records from the Government Accountability Office show continued, frequent calls from Zelikow to the White House. (He claims the conversations were strictly non-political and involved matters relating to the University of Virginia, where he is a professor.)
Zelikow did not disclose to the Commission that he was the secret author of a white paper outlining a defense for pre-emptive war, which many credit as one of the key intellectual justifications for the Bush administration’s misbegotten invasion of Iraq. Zelikow later tried to add wording to the Commission’s report linking Iraq to Al Qaeda, despite a continued lack of evidence that this was the case.
Zelikow also apparently failed to disclose to the Commission the full extent of his work on President Bush’s 2000 transition team.
It would be a neater story if the White House had actually placed Zelikow on the team in order to have its own mole there, given its concern about the likely outcome of the report. Yet Commission chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton apparently came to Zelikow on their own and hired him, apparently unconcerned with the myriad conflicts of interest his appointment could raise. According to Shenon, even then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card was surprised to hear Zelikow’s name mentioned as a candidate and was concerned there would be too much blowback to Zelikow’s hiring, given his administration ties. But Kean and Hamilton prevailed.

Zelikow was a historian and political scientist by training, and was deeply concerned with the historical record. He got the job of executive director in part because Kean and Hamilton were impressed by his idea that the Commission’s report shouldn’t collect dust on a shelf like many government reports, but rather should be written in plain English and sold as a work of popular history in bookstores across America.

When I was working on my doctoral dissertation, which later became the book When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, I found Zelikow’s work on the Cuban Missile Crisis to be first rate, both from an intellectual standpoint and that of a writer. I wondered about his appointment to the Commission, knowing not only that he was a close friend of Rice’s, but also that he was her co-author in a study lauded by the first President Bush about U.S. policy toward the breakup of the Soviet Empire.

As I wrote in The Book on Bush, published in early 2004, “Formerly a member of George H. W. Bush’s National Security Council staff, as well as a member of President George W. Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Zelikow was also co-author with Condoleezza Rice of an admiring study of their ex-boss’s—and the president’s father’s—handling of the end of the Cold War. Without casting any personal aspersions on Professor Zelikow, who is also a first-rate scholar of the Cuban missile crisis, it is hard to imagine that anyone could conduct a thoroughly honest and potentially damning investigation of his friends and former colleagues. In October 2003, a group of families of September 11 victims wrote to the commission co-chairs asking that Zelikow recuse himself 'from any aspect of national security and executive branch negotiations and investigations' because of his past connections to the National Security Council and to key Bush administration officials.”

This didn’t happen, of course, but at the time, I imagined that if he was good enough for the other commissioners, he deserved the benefit of the doubt as both a scholar and an individual.

Shenon’s careful study calls all of those judgments into question. Shenon shows a man operating not as a historian or honest broker, but as a politician working under the protective cover of an independent scholar. And the result is that we are still living in the shadow of a 9/11 presidency, with all the catastrophic implications that entails. And much of the historical record of the tragedy of that day remains lost to us, forever, with no hope of recovery.

Addendum
Letter of Response from Philip Zelikow

Philip Zelikow wrote me in response the above article and during the course of our exchange, made the following points in response to it. All the words are his but are lightly edited by me for the sake of clarity and continuity:

Philip Zelikow

Professor Alterman:

I saw your article on the Shenon book posted on the site of the Center for American Progress.

I appreciated your kind words about my scholarship and your initial tendency to give me the “benefit of the doubt” until you read Shenon’s book.

Rather than make a defensive argument to you, my only request is that, as a scholar, please check out some of Shenon’s charges before you repeat them.

To do that, you can check the February 11 edition of Steve Aftergood’s “Secrecy News” web bulletin, put out by the Federation of American Scientists, which provides quite a bit of information and links to more, plus Aftergood’s personal evaluation of the underlying data (he did some homework).

In addition, I invite you also to check either with former commissioners or former staff members of the Commission whom you respect, and check out the charges. In a staff full of individuals with former government service (many more with Democratic administrations or Democratic Hill staff in fact—and I led the hiring), it was also important to design a fact finding and writing process in which anyone—including me—had to subject their views to peer review and consensus argument. I designed that process to offset anyone’s potential biases, including mine, and I believe it worked.

[Insert from a second letter]

Mr. Shenon’s past reporting has indeed had problems—he was, for instance, the main press outlet in 2005 for the “Able Danger” claims then being promoted by former Congressman Curt Weldon, claims which several investigations have now shown were indeed baseless. (Contrast, if you are interested, the more sober reporting on that by Dan Eggen of the Washington Post, whose reporting was confirmed by subsequent inquiries.) There were other problematical episodes commissioners and staff were aware of during the course of the Commission’s work.

… Also, because there have been mistaken statements made by others on this: I played no part in drafting the statement the former commissioners issued last week. I also played no part in drafting the letter Slade Gorton prepared for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Nor was I the drafter of the talking points prepared for commissioners (quoted in brief part in my message to you). My former deputy, and Hamilton staffer, Chris Kojm held the pen on that last document.

Also, several other former staffers are concerned about other specific errors and mischaracterizations in the book (including its stories of arguments about how to handle the Iraq-Al Qaeda issues) and have told me they are preparing a collective response of their own to set the record straight. But I have not been part of their drafting process and do not know how soon they will post their additional information.

[end insert]

These are very grave charges, which will be read by many of my colleagues and students. Again, I’m not trying to pick a fight. I just rely on respected scholars like you, whatever their political orientation, to check out such serious claims before they repeat them. As you’ll see, I’ve done what I can to empower people to do that.

Philip Zelikow
White Burkett Miller Professor
Department of History
University of Virginia

A French historian writing a book on the ties between his country and the erstwhile kingdom of Kapurthala, today expressed "unhappiness" at the dilapidated condition of several historical buildings.

Jean Marie Lafont, who along with four others, on Thursday visited this town famous for its French architecture, said they were impressed to see the old monuments but "unhappy" over their dilapidated conditions.

Comparing the old monuments, especially the Jagatjit Palace, which is a replica of the Palace of Versailles, he told reporters, "The Palace in France has been declared a national monument and is more well maintained. The government should maintain these historical buildings for future generations."

Lafont visited the Jagatjit Palace, which now houses Sainik School Kapurthala, district courts complex, Shalimar Garden, Gole Kothi and Old Rest House.

MONEYWEB: You're with the Moneyweb Power Hour and it's a warm welcome now to the former professor from UCT and from Stellenbosch University, Hermann Giliomee, one of our great historians in South Africa. Hermann, you wrote a piece last week for Die Burger and Die Beeld newspapers, and it's elicited a whole lot of interesting reaction. Let's just go back to it a little bit. As a historian you've been looking at South Africa and saying that we're now in the third major crisis of modern times, the first being the 1929 depression, and the other one between '85 and '90, which we all remember so well. I don't know how many people would understand, being right in the middle of it, that it's quite as serious as it is at the moment. How are you making this distinction?

HERMANN GILIOMEE: Well, I suppose one looks at some indicators. One looks at public confidence, one looks at the way in which the world assesses South Africa, and I think there's quite a lot in common between these three crises. The only thing is that at this particular time people still try and see the various crises like electricity, water supply, crime, corruption, as distinct crises - they don't see it as one general structural crisis.

MONEYWEB: So overall, and the big question that's elicited so much debate is, you believe South Africa can get out of it?

HERMANN GILIOMEE: Well, I said "can", ja. Usually when people discuss the article with me, they say to me, "you said to me we will". I said, no, we can. And if I look at the previous crises, the 1929-33 and '85-'90, people were actually more gloomy than now. They were feeling to a much greater extent, you know, that things are out of control, that they don't control their own destiny any more. And everyone was sort of - we used to joke in the '80s about South Africa, that the problem with the South African crisis is that there's no solution, you know. And then suddenly, you get really wise statesmanship, Hertzog and Smuts coming together in '33, and taking some crucial economic measures. And then within a year, the whole climate changes, and then again in '85, '86, how many people said, look, there is no hope whatsoever for South Africa. I remember one night at a cocktail party I made a joke. They said, "Oh, what leader in the National Party is able of making this major move?" - and I said De Klerk, and everyone burst out laughing.

MONEYWEB: Well, he certainly did it with the help of Mandela, and we turned that around. But why has it happened so quickly? Hermann, I left South Africa to go and do some business in Canada in early January, everything looked fine. I came back three weeks later and it was depth of depression.

HERMANN GILIOMEE: Ja, South Africa is like that. It is really a roller-coaster, and I think that 10 years of a fair degree of stability and economic growth has simply made us forget that we live in South Africa, and that South Africa does almost with a certain degree of regularity hit these major crises because of the strange nature of our economy, the strange nature of our population composition, and so on. And the worst things happen when things go so well. In the late '90s, we should have been much more alert to the power accumulation in the centre, but because it went so well we didn't worry about it. But in fact it was at that stage when we should have kicked up a major row and said, look, all the institutions of democracy are being eroded.

MONEYWEB: So it's partly our own fault?

HERMANN GILIOMEE: I think the whites in South Africa - it's almost as if they feel that they are entitled not to be confronted with such a major crisis. But also this one, particular one, the biggest mistake would be to deal with it in a piecemeal way. What we have is really the major loss of capacity on the part of the state. Now, to some extent it forces us to try and exist outside the state, but the major thing is that this is one single interconnected crisis, and it doesn't help if the CEO of Anglo American, what's it, Carroll....

Two books offering new insights into the lives of three of the Civil War era's most compelling figures will share the 2008 Lincoln Prize, which is endowed by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman and administered by Gettysburg College.

For their books about Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Robert E. Lee, the winners are James Oakes, a professor at the City University of New York, for "The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics," and diplomat/historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor for "Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters." Each author will receive $20,000 and a bronze replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens life-size bust, "Lincoln the Man." An honorable mention and $10,000 prize will go to Chandra Manning, a professor at Georgetown University, for his book "What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War." A formal ceremony will take place April 1 in New York City. The Lincoln Prize is one of the nation's most generous awards in the field of American history.

"It is a rare moment in American history when three such iconic figures are illuminated in studies of such power and originality," said Gilder and Lehrman in announcing the prize Feb. 12. "With the works for which we honor them, James Oakes and Elizabeth Brown Pryor have made major contributions to our understanding of leaders who - by their writing, political leadership, and military genius, and by either their capacity for, or resistance to, change - altered the way America regards both itself and its people. We are proud to recognize and celebrate these superb literary and historical achievements."

"So much has been written about Lincoln, Lee, and Douglass that it is difficult to imagine the appearance of new contributions of unmistakable significance - much less the arrival of two such signal achievements in a single year," said Gettysburg College Prof. Gabor Boritt, who serves as chair of the Lincoln Prize. "Moreover, these works possess not only originality of thought and depth of research, but elegance of writing. The fine books by Oakes and Pyror have made a significant impact on the field - as has Chandra Manning's stunning examination of Civil War soldiers' attitudes toward slavery and emancipation - and they all richly deserve the honors they have earned."

Oakes is graduate school humanities professor in the history department at the City University of New York. He is the author of "The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders" and "Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South." He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, and has written many scholarly articles, encyclopedia entries and book chapters. The Lincoln Prize jury commended Oakes for using a "new comparative framework to analyze the careers of the wartime president and the nation's most important black leader."

Pryor, author of "Clara Barton, Professional Angel," has enjoyed distinguished careers as a historian and senior diplomat in the American Foreign Service, most recently working as senior advisor to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe of the United States Congress. The Lincoln Prize jury praised her for "tackling a familiar subject in an unconventional way," adding that the book "captures Lee's central importance and the far-reaching impact of his decisions in a way that no other scholar has accomplished."

Manning, who has taught at Harvard and Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., is currently a professor of history at Georgetown University. "What This Cruel War Was Over" is her first book. Calling it "a signal contribution to Civil War literature," the Lincoln Prize jury said her book "shows that slavery was not only central to understanding the causes and consequences of the Civil War but is equally vital to understanding why and how the soldiers fought."

Gilder and Lehrman, together with Gettysburg College Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies Gabor Boritt, established the Lincoln Prize in 1990. The Gilder Lehrman Institute has amassed one of the nation's greatest private collections of American historical documents and devotes itself to education by supporting magnet schools, teacher education, curriculum development, exhibitions and publications. The three-member Lincoln Prize jury - comprised of University of Alabama professor George C. Rable; Loren Schweninger, professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; and Colby College professor Elizabeth Leonard - considered 120 submissions.

Past Lincoln Prize winners include Ken Burns in 1991 for his documentary, "The Civil War," James M. McPherson in 1998 for his book, "For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War" and Doris Kearns Goodwin in 2006 for her book, "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln." Last year's winner was Douglas Wilson for his book "Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words."

Gettysburg College is a highly selective four-year residential college of liberal arts and sciences with approximately 2,600 students. It is located on a 200-acre campus adjacent to Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania. The college was founded in 1832.

[HNN Editor: This is a review of the Philip Shenon's new book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. The book focuses on the role historian Philip Zelikow played as executive director of the 9-11 Commission. As we reported in early February when news of the book first broke, Zelikow has had a difficult relationship with both Shenon and Max Holland, the author of this review. Zelikow and Shenon crossed swords during the 9-11 investigation and has had a long-simmering fight with Holland stemming from the time both served at the the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. The Zelikow/Holland dispute played out on the pages of HNN in 2005 when Holland criticized the Miller Center's transcription of the Kennedy tapes. (Zelikow served as director of the Miller Center; Holland was a research fellow with the Presidential Recordings Program.) This week several key people leaped to Zelikow's defense, as noted by Secrecy News.]

The citizens who lost beloved ones on September 11, 2001 were once like most Americans: politically disengaged if not disenchanted, preoccupied with family and friends, earning a living, and life’s pleasures. On 9/10, a majority of them would undoubtedly have been hard pressed to name George Bush’s national security adviser. “Is it Colin Powell?” But her identity hardly seemed to matter outside the beltway until precisely 9:03:11 AM on September 11. At that moment a second passenger jet crashed into the World Trade Center, and it instantly became apparent that the federal government had failed miserably in a most fundamental obligation.

    There are a hundred different ways to write about 9/11’s impact, but surely one of the most revealing is the unwanted civics lesson the bereaved families received after the terrorist attacks. For many of them, their last exposure to how federal government worked was probably a high school class, and they only dimly remembered “how a bill becomes law.” But they naturally wanted answers and accountability from their government in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Why had fathers, sons, and brothers, mothers, daughters, and sisters—non-combatants all—been killed, most of them pulverized beyond recognition, for the crime of showing up on time?

    What these families received instead of prompt answers was an advanced and protracted course in high-stakes Washington politics. To denizens of the nation’s capital, who have devoted their lives to working in or covering government, none of this came as a particular surprise. To the families, particularly the so-called “Jersey Girls” who spear-headed the search for answers and accountability, it was in many ways a bitter education.[1]

    This clash is at the heart of Philip Shenon’s book on the 9/11 Commission. Shenon, who was the lead reporter on the panel for The New York Times, has written an account of the commission’s 20-month investigation from start to finish. In the process, The Commission unavoidably lays bare the difference between what we are taught to think about how the government works, and the actual, often deflating, reality. After reading it, one cannot help but think back to Attorney General Janet Reno’s response to the 1993 debacle at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Reno did the unimaginable: she promptly took responsibility for a decision that turned out to have terrible consequences. But her public contrition was the exception that proved the rule. In Washington, the single hardest thing to do is to get a government official or agency to own up to a mistake—the finely-honed strategies of avoidance would tax the imagination of any great novelist.

    Shenon skips the first semester in the education, i.e., the protracted political wrangling that lasted more than a year before President Bush reluctantly signed the legislation creating the commission on November 27, 2002.[2] The White House’s opposition was comprehensible if untenable, and almost certainly reflected the then-dominant mentality of Vice President Dick Cheney. Experienced Washington hands know that commissions tend to take on a life of their own and can be unpredictable. Besides, any bipartisan commission would be an irresistible vehicle for Democrats bent on making the Bush administration bear the lion’s share of responsibility for 9/11. And if they succeeded, George Bush could presumably kiss good-bye his chances of being re-elected.

    Shenon’s basic argument, however, is that rather than becoming an instrument of Bush’s demise, the commission helped reelect George Bush. As the panel’s general counsel, Daniel Marcus, a liberal Democrat, put it to Shenon, the August 2004 final report, by “pulling its punches” to achieve unanimity, mainly served to remind Americans of a dire threat to their security and well-being.[3] It thus played into the hands of the White House’s re-election strategy, which was to depict George Bush as far more reliable and steady than John Kerry in the face of this existential menace.

    At least one commissioner, though, former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey (D), takes strong exception to the view Shenon posits. Kerrey argues that the 9/11 Report provided plenty of fodder for the Democrats’ 2004 nominee, and that the real problem was John Kerry’s failure to exploit fully what was in the final report. Rather than harp on the warnings that went unheeded inside the White House, Kerry stupidly (from a political point of view) concentrated on trying to express more enthusiasm for the report than did the White House, which abruptly decided it liked the final document after all. Kerry was also content with trying to outbid Bush in terms of the haste with which a Democrat would implement the panel’s recommendations.

    Bob Kerrey may have a point. Any Democratic nominee with a sure instinct for the jugular—say, John F. Kennedy, who based his 1960 campaign on a non-existent “missile gap”—might easily have turned the 9/11 Report to partisan advantage. That John Kerry did not says more about his political instincts than about the report.

    Shenon ignores this nuance, perhaps because it clashes with his major theme, which is a very dramatic one: that the commission’s ability to report the truth was neutered and neutralized by an executive director, Philip Zelikow, who was allowed to serve despite deep conflicts-of-interest, as well as surreptitious ties to the White House, including with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Although there are other revelations, the book’s axis of criticism is almost entirely about Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor and former director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Shenon’s book is a blistering critique of Zelikow’s performance, and a not-very-veiled criticism of the commission co-chairmen (Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton) who hired him in the first place, and then allowed Zelikow to stay on even after his multi-faceted conflicts-of-interest were fully revealed under oath.

    Kean and Hamilton’s seeming obliviousness to appearances, which can be more important than private realities when the political and historical stakes are so high, certainly gnawed at the 9/11 relatives, several of whom called for Zelikow’s resignation or recusal from the most sensitive aspects of the inquiry about half-way through the commission’s term. In this regard, Shenon’s critique closely parallels the perspective of these 9/11 families, who believe the investigation they had to fight for tooth and nail was fatally compromised after Zelikow assumed the commission’s most important job.

    Shenon goes to some pains to refute the most extreme interpretation of Zelikow’s hiring: that he was a “mole” emplaced by the White House to thwart the issuance of a devastating report. In fact, his name was put into play by former Senator Slade Gorton (R-Washington). Zelikow then quickly dazzled the co-chairmen, Tom Kean (R), a former governor of New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton (D), a former Indiana congressman, who were responsible for hiring an executive director. One measure of the suspicion generated by Zelikow’s appointment, however, is that this “mole” allegation is widely circulated and given credence (particularly on conspiracy-oriented websites) despite its falsity.

    Shenon’s portrait of Zelikow is depressingly familiar to anyone who has worked under him, as I did.[4] A lawyer and foreign service officer before entering academia, Zelikow has many of the traits once ascribed to a young Henry Kissinger, minus the accent and Central European charm. Zelikow is routinely described, and rightly so, as having a keen and quick mind. He speaks in complete paragraphs, and has a striking capacity for boiling down a complicated problem, conveying its essence, and proposing a solution. He is also, as Shenon depicts, tightly wound, arrogant, unctuous, and prone to bullying. Kissinger himself probably summed up Zelikow best when Kean asked him what he thought about appointing the University of Virginia professor. “[Zelikow’s] one of the most brilliant men I know,” Kissinger responded. “But you will not like him. Nobody does.”[5]

If for no other reason, Shenon’s book is valuable because it finally provides a coherent explanation for how the 9/11 panel came to have an executive director who simultaneously oversaw the investigation and was a subject of it—an unprecedented situation. According to Shenon, Zelikow minimized, to a point of disingenuousness, the exact nature of his activities until (or so the commissioners thought) it was too late to fire him. Kean and Hamilton, of course, knew and appreciated from the outset that Zelikow was a friend and former colleague of then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, one of the principal officials whose conduct would be scrutinized. Zelikow had served with her on the National Security Council (NSC) under Brent Scowcroft during the presidency of George Bush’s father, and they had written a book together about German reunification. The commission co-chairmen were also aware that Zelikow’s connections were not just past but current; Bush had appointed him to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), one of the most sensitive advisory posts an administration “outsider” can hold.

    According to Shenon, however, Zelikow failed to disclose on his résumé several more egregious conflicts-of-interest, including the critical fact that as a member of Rice’s transition team in 2000-01, he had been the architect responsible for demoting Richard Clarke and his counter-terrorism team within the NSC. As Shenon puts it, Zelikow’s reorganization plan “laid the groundwork for much of went wrong at the White House” in the months before 9/11.[6] There was also the fact that Zelikow had secretly authored, at Rice’s request, the Bush administration’s post-9/11 national strategy paper released in September 2002, a doctrine that justified unilateral and pre-emptive attack whenever Washington felt threatened.[7] Given his other entanglements, Zelikow’s role on the transition alone was probably sufficient to disqualify him from serving as executive director, and this latter involvement compounded the problem. It was as if J. Lee Rankin, Zelikow’s equivalent on the Warren Commission, had written a book with J. Edgar Hoover, frequented Jack Ruby’s burlesque joint, and donated money to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee before November 22.

    Shenon quotes Kean as saying he “wasn’t sure” that he knew anything about Zelikow’s work on Rice’s transition team before he agreed to hire him, but when he did find out he found it “worrisome.”[8] Hamilton, for his part, told Shenon, “I think I did [know], but I don’t think I’d swear to that.” In any case, Hamilton admitted that he did not know any of the “details” of what Zelikow had done during the transition.[9] Zelikow, meanwhile, has provided various explanations whenever this issue has arisen. He has claimed, despite the absence of these entanglements on his résumé, that Kean and Hamilton knew all about his past work with Rice because he told them orally. They have no clear recollection of that. Zelikow has also insisted that his transition role was so widely and even publicly known that Kean and Hamilton could not have been unwitting.[10] Lastly, Zelikow has attempted to defuse the extremely sensitive matter of his loyalties, by telling Shenon, for example, that “I don’t think Tom or Lee or I anticipated the extent to which the commission’s work would be used as a partisan battlefield.”[11] It was this kind of patently false and dismissive remark that used to infuriate the Jersey Girls. They knew better at this point in their crash education.

    In October 2003, as word of Zelikow’s conflicts spread, the 9/11 relatives’ umbrella group, the Family Steering Committee, released a statement demanding Zelikow’s resignation or recusal from the part of the investigation involving the NSC. Shaken by the demand, Zelikow decided on a pre-emptive strategy: he told Kean and Hamilton that he wanted to describe the exact nature of his pre-commission activities under oath. But even before Zelikow’s examination by general counsel Daniel Marcus, the co-chairmen made clear they wanted to keep the indispensable Zelikow in place, eight months into the investigation. Marcus was instructed to do what needed to be done on the recusal front, and “make it work.”[12]

    The upshot was that Zelikow was recused from that part of the investigation dealing with the NSC transition, and was barred from participating in interviews of senior Bush aides. The decision reportedly angered Zelikow, but he nonetheless accepted these limitations. Thereafter he would represent his recusal as voluntary, taken at his own initiative because of his integrity.[13]

Zelikow, rather than tread lightly on those areas where his conflicts were manifest, is depicted by Shenon as inserting himself energetically into the most politically-charged areas of the investigation, and arousing suspicion that he had a bias in favor of the Bush administration. According to Shenon, Zelikow acted as Rice’s in-house advocate, repeatedly putting the best spin on her activities in the months leading up to the attacks, especially in comparison to those of the other key officials involved, such as counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke and CIA Director George Tenet. Certainly Zelikow was hardly the only staffer to harbor a point of view. But few were as manifest about their biases, and there was only one executive director. The investigation was divvied up into 10 teams, and there appears to be a direct correlation between the frequency of Zelikow’s interaction with any given team, and the degree to which its members ended up disturbed and angry.

    In an early response to Shenon’s embargoed book, after some of its disclosures had been first revealed on Washington DeCoded, Zelikow told ABC News that he didn’t think most of the 9/11 commission staffers would criticize his leadership. Out of a total of 85, Zelikow said, only about six were disgruntled, and given the circumstances “that was a pretty low fraction.”[14] Thus, Shenon’s book was not representative because he relied primarily on the recollections of these malcontents. But one staffer told Washington DeCoded that when Kirsten Lundberg wrote up a case study on the 9/11 Commission for Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Lundberg was taken aback by the harsh reviews of Zelikow that poured forth, often unsolicited, from almost every staffer she interviewed.[15] Lundberg confirmed, when interviewed, that criticism of Zelikow was not limited to a few malcontents. But she also said that virtually every staffer leavened their criticism of Zelikow’s management with praise for the other qualities he brought to the undertaking.[16]

    Zelikow refused to be interviewed in person for Shenon’s book, insisting instead that all questions be submitted in writing via email, which was also the way he answered them. This arrangement has led to an unusual circumstance, whereby the curious reader has instant access to the raw information that Shenon gathered for his book. Both Shenon and Zelikow have made the exchange available; Shenon on the book’s website, while Zelikow began distributing his version of the email compilation to interested journalists and others once word of the book began to seep out.

    From these emails, it’s possible to juxtapose Shenon’s account with how Zelikow attempted to characterize his role when the commission’s work rubbed up against the Bush administration’s rationale for the invasion of Iraq. In a way, this was an issue even more sensitive than the Rashômon-like problem of how the White House performed in the months prior to September 11. Specifically, the issue here was what role the commission would play with respect to the White House’s assertion of a meaningful link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s security services.

    The first episode concerned an interim staff report on the history of the State Department’s efforts to counter al Qaeda, which was drafted by Team 3’s Scott Allan, an attorney specializing in international law. When Zelikow returned the draft, according to Shenon, Allan was shocked to find that it had been altered in one direction: it now read so that it would surely be interpreted in public as supportive of the Bush administration’s unsubstantiated case. Allan was aghast, and a meeting was arranged between Zelikow and Team 3 to talk over the inserted language. Zelikow, at the outset, expressed “surprise” that anyone had gotten worked up about the changes.[17] With the entire Team 3 arrayed against him, Zelikow backed off, the language was re-jiggered, and when staff statement was presented to the commission in March 2004, it generated only modest attention.[18]

    When Shenon raised this episode with Zelikow in two separate emails, in March and September 2007, the former executive director gave somewhat contradictory answers. He claimed initially that the dispute had not been over the substance at all, but over whether Allan’s statement was the proper place to discuss the linkage. Zelikow admitted subsequently to being “argumentative about this [subject], since I resented any implication of [a] political motive.” He then went on to claim that he “was probably too defensive about the matter, and I was defensive on behalf of [Douglas] MacEachin too [emphasis added], since I have a high regard for his integrity.”[19]

    Zelikow was thus asserting that the language had been drafted principally by MacEachin, a well-regarded former deputy director of intelligence at the CIA, and that Zelikow had merely inserted it into Allan’s draft in a misplaced act of respect. (MacEachin was the head of Team 1, charged with writing a history of al Qaeda). But MacEachin, who came out of semi-retirement after 9/11 to write a crash, all-source history of al Qaeda for the CIA, had neither drafted nor proposed anything that resembled Zelikow’s insertions. Indeed, MacEachin was known within the commission as the most outspoken critic of any claim of meaningful collaboration between al Qaeda and Hussein’s Iraq.

    MacEachin also figured in a subsequent episode in which Zelikow displayed a skewed sense of history. Three months after Allan’s interim staff report, it was MacEachin’s turn to present Team 1’s findings before the commission. In keeping with a thoroughly-researched conclusion, the statement noted that while there were reports of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda, “they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship . . . . We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.”[20]

The statement was duly vetted by the so-called “front office.” Yet, when MacEachin actually presented the statement to the commissioners on Wednesday, June 16, it instantly created a media firestorm. The press picked up on the fact that the staff statement was directly challenging the Bush administration’s insinuations. When MacEachin returned to his office, he was bombarded by dozens of calls from reporters. In response to one query, which pointed out that the Bush  administration was claiming the opposite, MacEachin flatly asserted that he stood by the statement.

    When Zelikow eventually realized what was happening, and that the media was going to use the finding to impugn the White House, he exploded at the supposed temerity of the former CIA deputy director. You can’t do that! Zelikow screamed, according to one staffer. MacEachin refused to back down. President Bush and Vice President Cheney (the latter, in particular) then made a number of public statements reasserting a sinister connection. The following Sunday, Tom Kean, in an effort to dampen the still-raging controversy, pointed out to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that MacEachin’s finding was an interim report, but also vindicated MacEachin’s unyielding stance. Commission members “do not get involved in staff statements.”[21]

    Ultimately, the 9/11 Report stoutly affirmed and only elaborated upon MacEachin’s finding.[22] Yet when Shenon asked Zelikow about this celebrated judgment—the first indication that the commission would not simply parrot the administration line, vigorously advanced by Dick Cheney—in Zelikow’s recounting, all the accolades belonged to the commission’s executive director. As he explained to Shenon,

When we then came to judgment on how to describe the Iraq connection, I was the initial point person defending it, first to the commissioners and then to the American people . . . . I wanted to put myself behind that judgment and stake my integrity on it. I took some heat from folks like [William] Safire . . . . At the time, there was also a spectrum of views about these questions within the commission. But at that point I could look anyone in the eye—including any commissioner—and tell them, honestly, that we had looked hard and fairly at this, and there was simply no credible evidence of a connection between Iraq and 9/11.[24]

    Here, too, Zelikow’s account was an audacious rewrite of what actually happened. It seems fair to conclude that Zelikow has a supple relationship to the truth.

    While Shenon makes the case that Zelikow was widely perceived by the staff to have dual loyalties—or at least a loyalty to something other than the task at hand—gauging Zelikow’s exact influence is nonetheless difficult. No one exercised more day-to-day influence over the investigation, and had more of a hand in drafting the final report than Zelikow. But Shenon veers toward giving the executive director too much agency, falsely depicting him as the architect of the report and the main obstacle to the truth being told.[3] It makes for good drama but is simplistic and not accurate.

    For one, it ignores what might be called the “foxhole effect” that typically occurs among the staff. Working on a commission combines the urgency of a political campaign with a sense that everything hinges on getting it right. Whatever institutional loyalties existed prior to the commission tend to get subsumed by an increasing dedication to the task at hand. And when the worker bees are as talented as the 9/11 staff was, the notion of a single executive director wielding the kind of control suggested by Shenon doesn’t add up. Typically, the executive director becomes preoccupied with getting the job done, and simply doesn’t have the luxury of policing the report, much as he might want to.

     Another truth is that the formative die was cast by the legislation which set the terms for the bipartisan commission, and via the nature of the appointments to the panel by the White House and the congressional leadership from both parties. The panel’s essence was congenital bipartisanship, not nonpartisanship. At the point where the ownership, if not authorship, of the report was given to the commission, the nature of the panel dictated the lack of precise accountability that so disappointed the 9/11 families. Blame was spread so diffusely that everyone involved was responsible in some way, and, as a result, no one in particular was to blame.

If the commission was to hold together and deliver a unanimous bipartisan report that meant, by definition, a report with a “he said, she said” quality to it—especially when it came to sorting out what had happened inside the White House between Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice. The commission was bound to the Sergeant Joe Friday school of history—just the facts, ma’am, without analysis or common-sense judgments. Anything much beyond that would have split the panel down the middle, or very close to it. If one cost was to leave citizens feeling dissipated and amorphous after reading the report . . . well, that was a small price to pay for bipartisan unanimity. 

    These factors were beyond Zelikow’s control, though he surely played to them. But the decisive influence on the tone and content of the 9/11 Report was exercised by the commissioners, as it always is, even if the words were first put on paper by a staff with a far superior grasp of the source material. Shenon doesn’t exactly ignore these truths, but makes them appear relatively less important than Zelikow’s supposed ability to browbeat everyone into submission.

    Shenon could have made a more sophisticated argument: namely, that Zelikow, even while he was being loyal to the 9/11 mission by pushing for full disclosure of relevant documents, was essentially trying to get the Bush administration to act in its own self-interest. Zelikow likes to point out that “I was not a very popular person in the Bush White House when this [investigation] was going on. There’s a lot of carryover of that to this day.”[25] While that is true amongst the maximalist defenders of executive privilege, like Vice President Cheney, it also skirts the point.

    As Zelikow himself has been known to observe, there is actually no such unitary thing as “the White House” or  “the Bush administration.” Every presidency is like a “Medieval village,” with intensely competitive factions, shifting alliances, and backchannels of communication.[26] Zelikow, notwithstanding his abrasiveness, was in effect an external agent for those within the administration who advocated modest cooperation with a temporary commission that had the potential to do enormous harm to Bush’s chances for re-election. Put another way, Zelikow acted in the classic role of a expensive outside counsel: helping clients to act in their own best interests, even if they have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into doing it.[27] If the 9/11 Commission had not secured access to the President’s Daily Brief, apart from turning the report into a whitewash, the 2004 Democratic nominee would certainly have been able to paint the incumbent administration as obsessively secret and obstructionist, if not the perpetrators of a cover-up.

    Perhaps because Shenon does not pay sufficient attention to the commission’s elemental nature, the greatest deficit in the commission’s work—all but ignored in the hullabaloo about the final report—eludes him. Unlike most comparable efforts, virtually none of the paper trail forming the basis for the report was made available in supplementary volumes.[28] Citizens have not been permitted access to the documents that would allow them, at least, to go beyond the mere exposition of facts. It is enormously telling, but entirely in keeping with the panel’s essence, that the commissioners agreed to sequester the documents for five years, until at least January 2009—far too late to affect the 2004 campaign, and Bush’s effort at re-election, and just long enough to be a non-factor in the 2008 election, when it was easily presumed another Clinton would be a candidate.

    Even though Shenon’s book falls short of depicting the commission in full, it nonetheless is likely to have an impact. It may do for the 9/11 Report what Edward J. Epstein’s 1966 book, Inquest, did for the Warren Report—or more accurately, what Inquest did to the reputation of the Warren Commission. Epstein made skepticism of the Warren Commission’s probity mainstream and respectable, as his book inexorably drew attention to forensic irregularities that had been swept under the rug rather than frankly  explained. The poor decisions there were traceable to Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose self-regard was such that he did not think that due investigative process (such as an independent examination of the autopsy X-rays and photographs by forensic experts) needed to be followed. If Earl Warren and his fellow commissioners affirmed a fact, well, by God, the American public would surely accept it as true.

    But elision left the Warren Commission vulnerable to Epstein’s thesis: that the Warren Report was an exercise in delivering a politically palatable version of what happened, rather than the absolute truth.[29] The commission never recovered its reputation after the controversies that erupted in 1966—nine years before it became undeniable that the CIA had withheld information from the panel about its attempts to assassinate Castro.[30]

    The parallel with Shenon’s book is not exact; for one, there is not the outstanding question of “whodunit,” notwithstanding all the Oliver Stone-like conspiracy theories about the Bush administration. Still, the revelations contained in The Commission are bound to have a negative effect on the public’s perception of that panel. Few readers will come away from Shenon’s account of the inner workings believing that Zelikow did not taint the proceedings.

    Appearances beget perceptions which do become reality, yet Kean and Hamilton seem to have been curiously impervious to this truism. In their own account of the commission’s investigation, they made several, lofty-sounding remarks about avoiding the Warren Commission’s fate. Unfortunately, they failed to understand that the first ineradicable doubts about that panel arose from self-inflicted mistakes, not because it did not lay its hands on certain CIA documents.

The 9/11 commissioners (excepting Fred Fielding, who is now White House counsel) have issued a statement disputing Shenon’s portrait of Zelikow and defending their executive director’s integrity. This statement is nearly identical to the “Talking Points” Zelikow drafted and distributed to the media once word of Shenon’s book began to seep out.[31] Yet, the former commissioners, no matter what their private regrets now, have no other choice but to close ranks. They forever fused their report and reputations with Zelikow in 2003. And if, as one staff member laments, Shenon’s book means “we won’t even get our five years now,” Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton will have no one to blame but themselves.

    As for many 9/11 relatives, their parting lesson in the ways of the capital came when Zelikow became a principal officer at the State Department, shortly after Condoleezza Rice became secretary of state in 2005, despite having received the largest “no” vote of any nominee for that post since 1825.

    Zelikow’s appointment was not the only example of what Ralph Nader likes to call Washington’s “deferred bribe syndrome,” but it certainly was one of the more prominent. Little wonder that so many 9/11 relatives are cynical after the unsought civics lesson.

© 2008 by Max Holland

[1] Following 9/11, relatives of the victims eventually banded together to form the Family Steering Committee (FSC) to press for an independent federal investigation. The FSC was composed of 12 individuals who represented various groups that had been founded in the wake of the attacks, including the “September 11th Advocates” or “Jersey Girls,” as this group of four women (originally) was dubbed by the press. September 11th Advocates is now the primary organization for relatives who remain active.

[2] Although there was a joint congressional investigation soon after the 9/11 attacks, the interval between September 11 and the commission’s creation—442 days—far exceeded the amount of time that passed between comparable crises and the appointment of a special panel. President Roosevelt appointed the Roberts Commission nine days after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, for example, and President Ford appointed the Rockefeller Commission 13 days after the allegations about illegal domestic activities by the CIA appeared in print. Kenneth Kitts, Presidential Commissions & National Security: The Politics of Damage Control (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 139.

[3] Shenon, Commission, 413.

[4] From December 1998 to December 2003, I worked at the Presidential Recordings Project at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, which Zelikow ran before taking leave in January 2003 to work on the 9/11 panel. At Zelikow’s request, I agreed to be interviewed for a vaguely-described job with the commission. But that position never materialized, though subsequently, I gave an informal talk about presidential commissions to one of the teams. I have also been critical of Zelikow’s scholarship on the Kennedy presidential recordings.

[5] Shenon, Commission, 61.

[6] Ibid., 65.

[7] Judith Miller, “Keeping US No. 1: Is It Wise? Is It New?” NYT, 26 October 2002. Zelikow, who was interviewed by Miller for this article, coyly described the new doctrine as “aggressively opaque” but did not disclose his principal role in drafting it. Other analysts cited by Miller described the new strategy as the “Hertz doctrine” (as in “We’re No. 1”), because it advocated a kind of military superiority not even sustained during the Cold War. Shenon points out that Abraham Sofaer, a Hoover Institution fellow, was the very first outside witness to testify at the 9/11 panel’s first public hearing, which occurred just days after the Bush administration commenced the US invasion of Iraq. At that time, March 2003, it was not public knowledge that Zelikow had authored the strategy paper justifying pre-emption. Sofaer, a former State Department legal adviser, was an unabashed supporter of the new doctrine and even called on the commission to endorse it explicitly. Shenon, Commission,103-104.

[8] Ibid., 61.

[9] Ibid. Zelikow tried to make the case to Shenon that the recalibration of Clarke’s role represented continuity rather than a demotion. But that was decidedly not Clarke’s perception, and separate efforts by former Senator Warren Rudman (R-New Hampshire) to warn the president about the terrorist threat were also rebuffed. A contemporaneous remark by Zelikow suggests the mindset at the time. “The two words they [Rice’s NSC staff] use the most often are discipline and strategy,” Zelikow was quoted as telling The New York Times in an article about the new administration’s foreign policy. “It comes out of a sense that the Clinton people were too undisciplined, and they let events drive them . . . [the Bush team is] trying hard to recover choice.” David E. Sanger, “A New View of Where America Fits in the World,” NYT, 18 February 2001. Clarke’s subordination was not personal, in other words, but reflected Rice’s priorities and concept of how she wanted to run the NSC.

[10] “It was very well-known I had served on this transition team and had declined to go into the administration,” Zelikow told ABC after news of Shenon’s forthcoming book broke in Washington DeCoded. Justin Rood, “Ex-9/11 Panel Chief Denies Secret White House Ties,” ABC News, 30 January 2008. A Lexis-Nexis search, however, turned up only one news story from February 2001 (in The Washington Post) that described the NSC’s reorganization, and Zelikow’s assistance in “organizing the NSC along [Brent] Scowcroft’s lines.” The only mention of what might happen to Richard Clarke’s brief came in the article’s last paragraph. “Still up in the air is what to do with the NSC Office of Transnational Threats, initiated and headed under Clinton by Richard A. Clarke. Clarke has remained in place while the administration decides what to do with the office.” Karen DeYoung and Steven Mufson, “A Leaner and Less Visible NSC; Reorganization Will Emphasize Defense, Global Economics,” WP, 10 February 2001.

[11] Shenon, Commission, 61.

[12] Ibid., 169. Marcus, according to Shenon, was not certain that Zelikow had deliberately “blind-sided” the co-chairmen. But Marcus found Zelikow shockingly oblivious to his own conflicts, blinded by ego and ambition, and furious whenever anyone dared question his integrity.

[13] “I recused myself,” Zelikow claimed. Zelikow email to Shenon, 18 May 2007. Indeed, Zelikow would assert that he “recused [himself] on transition issues very early on.” Ibid., 9 February 2007.

[14] Rood, “Ex-9/11 Panel Chief Denies Secret White House Ties,” 30 January 2008.

[15] Lundberg’s study was conducted while the intense experience was still very fresh in mind. It was not adversarial or investigative in nature, and it was sponsored by Harvard history professor Ernest May, a colleague of Zelikow’s brought aboard the 9/11 staff to help write the final report. Kirsten Lundberg, “Piloting a Bipartisan Ship: Strategies and Tactics of the 9/11 Commission,” Case Studies in Public Policy & Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 20 October 2005.

[16] Interview of Lundberg, 13 February 2008.

[17] Shenon, Commission, 323.

[18] Staff Statement No. 5, “Diplomacy,” 23-24 March 2004.

[19] Zelikow email to Shenon, 20 September 2007.

[20] Staff Statement No. 15, “Overview of the Enemy,” 16-17 June 2004.

[21] William Safire, “The Zelikow Report,” NYT, 21 June 2004. Safire primarily (and incorrectly) attributed the finding to Zelikow.

[22] The final report read, “But to date we have seen no evidence that these or earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.” 9/11 Report, 66.

[23] Zelikow email to Shenon, 15 March 2007. Shenon’s book actually attaches too much credibility to Zelikow’s version.

[24] Shenon, Commission, 393.

[25] Rood, “Ex-9/11 Panel Chief Denies Secret White House Ties,” 30 January 2008.

[26] Zelikow made this observation during a luncheon address before the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, 5 January 2008.

[27] It’s entirely possible that Zelikow only decided to accept the job as executive director after learning that he would not be leading an investigation that promised to doom the Bush administration by uncovering “smoking gun”-quality documents in the President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) or NSC records. In the Kennedy School case study, Zelikow talked openly about sounding out then chief of staff Andrew Card and Condoleezza Rice in December 2002/January 2003—before he agreed to take the job. Shenon’s emphasis on Zelikow’s alleged surreptitious communications while he was executive director may be misplaced, because the most important information exchange with Rice probably occurred earlier, in December/January. See Lundberg, “Piloting a Bipartisan Ship,” 9-10.

[28] Judging from their book, Kean and Hamilton (and their ghostwriter) were remarkably ignorant about the work of the Warren Commission. They wrote, “ . . . the Warren Commission convinced us of the need to clearly reference our sources. The Warren Commission . . . . had this problem: probably good conclusions, but the reader couldn’t tell where they were coming from. If we were going to write a definitive historical account, every fact and conclusion in the report had to be easily referenced to its source—which is why we ended up with two hundred pages of endnotes.” Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton with Benjamin Rhodes, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (New York: Knopf, 2006), 29. Not only does the Warren Report have 62 pages of notes in agate type, but that commission also provided all the referenced documents in 26 supplementary volumes, along with thousands more un-footnoted documents.

[29] Epstein’s conclusion read, “In establishing its version [emphasis added] of the truth, the Warren Commission acted to reassure the nation and protect the national interest.” Edward J. Epstein, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth (New York: Viking, 1966), 154.

[30] “For decades, the Warren Commission’s findings have been poked and prodded by conspiracy theorists, in large measure because the commission is not perceived as having had full access to the most secretive materials in the government.” Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 25. This assertion is both true and ahistorical. Also, it could easily be argued that the analogy Kean, Hamilton, and Zelikow used to justify the 9/11 Commission’s access to the PDBs was false. The Warren Commission was charged with investigating the murder of President Kennedy in lieu of a trial of the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. It was not tasked with investigating US foreign policy, either overt or covert, and had no obligation to do so until and unless Oswald could be tied to a hostile power. By contrast, the PDBs were part and parcel of the 9/11 Commission’s legislative mandate from the outset, and failure to gain access to them would have turned the 9/11 Report into a whitewash.

[31]Statement by the Former Commissioners, 8 February 2008; Zelikow, “Talking Points,” 1 February 2008.

Daniel Walker Hollis, author of the definitive history of the University of South Carolina from its origin in 1801 to the early 1950s, died Thursday at age 85.

When he retired in 1985, Hollis described to a writer for The State a 47-year “love affair” with USC, including 38 years on its history faculty.

Hollis was buried Sunday at Elmwood Cemetery and Gardens in Columbia.

His contribution for the ages was his two-volume history of the university, which was the first state-chartered, fully state supported college in the nation in 1801.

The two books are: “University of South Carolina : South Carolina College, Volume 1” and “University of South Carolina: College to University, Eighteen Sixty-Five to Nineteen Fifty-Six.”

Elizabeth West, the university archivist, said the books are “the standard” for researching the institution.

“Any time a student is researching the history of the university, I send them to the Hollis volumes,” West said.

Years later, I would tell my friends never to shirk their jury summonses. This is the most democratic experience you’ll ever have, I’d insist.

But when I first arrived at the Alameda County Superior Courthouse, located in what was the gritty area of downtown Oakland in the late 1980s, I had little desire to serve on a criminal trial. I simply assumed that no sane assistant D.A. would accept me as a member of a jury because I was a professor, a Berkeley resident, and a lifelong liberal activist.

Turns out I was wrong. The young assistant D.A., impeccably dressed for success, immediately established that I was a professor of American history at the University of California, as well as a liberal who had lived in Berkeley for decades. I was sure I would be home within the hour. Then, she looked me straight in the eye and asked, “If I can convince you that a person recklessly endangered people driving under the influence of alcohol, would you be willing to convict such a defendant?” I hesitated, thought about it for a long moment, answered truthfully, and said, “Yes, I would do that.”

Suddenly, I was serving on my first trial. As we listened to the witnesses’ testimonies, the evidence was overwhelming. The white-haired, elderly African-American man who now sat in the courtroom casually dressed in mismatched pants and jacket had left a party, driven his truck down a hill, careened across the street, and smashed into a telephone pole. Several neighbors had witnessed the spectacle. When the police arrived, he could not walk a straight line. The breathalyzer test made them wonder how he was able to stand upright. He wasn’t just driving under the influence. He was stone drunk.

As we filed into a stuffy, dim room to discuss the evidence, we sat around a long table that reminded me of the film Twelve Angry Men. But we were not twelve white men. The jury included ten individuals from ethnic and racial minorities. Half of us were women. One man immediately pointed at me and said I should be the forelady because I was a professor and probably knew how to do these things. The rest immediately agreed. I accepted, not sure I really knew “how to do these things.”...

After living with each other for two days, we returned to the jury box with the invisible bonds we had forged inside the jury room. The judge asked if we had reached a verdict. I stood up, looked at the rheumy eyes of the defendant, and reluctantly told the judge that we had indeed reached a unanimous decision.

The judge thanked us with considerable graciousness and, before he dismissed us, he acknowledged how hard this case must have been for all of us.

I had a queasy feeling as I left the courthouse. “He shouldn’t go to prison,” I muttered to myself. “He desperately needs help.” But then I thought of the kids who had been playing on that street and how his truck might have hit one of them instead of a pole.

I had missed a lecture and a seminar that week. But I knew I had been profoundly transformed by this experience. True, I had marched in endless protests for civil rights and against the Vietnam War and cast votes every year. But I had never experienced democracy in such a direct and profound way. I had sat with eleven other citizens for two days. Together we had wrestled with tough moral and legal decisions, and when we parted, it was with genuine affection and respect.

As I walked down the stairs of the courthouse, the assistant D.A caught up with me. “Why did you risk putting me on a jury?” I asked her. She smiled. “Because I believed you and, the truth is, it was my first trial.”