This was the first of eight separate wartime inquiries, culminating in a joint congressional investigation in 1946 that ran to 40 fat volumes. Only six weeks after the attack, a special presidential commission on Pearl Harbor chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts issued a stinging report that left FDR muttering. The night he received it, he gave the bulk of it to the Sunday newspapers.
Sixty years later, we took a giant step backwards. The terrorist attacks were so traumatizing that the country took temporary leave of the basic curiosity and accountability that are central to any democracy. I can understand why there was no immediate inquiry. The FBI and CIA were bracing for further attacks, and taking the testimony of senior officials would have posed a major distraction. But how about now? How could President Bush have gone eight months without appointing an independent commission like FDR’s, or the one President Reagan named after the space shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986? The astounding thing is that until last week there was no clamor for it.
The only explanation I can think of is that after 20 years of finger-pointing and blame gaming on trivial public issues, Washington was afraid to assign responsibility for something serious. There’s also the lethal combination of shameless Republicans and wimpy Democrats. In February, Vice President Dick Cheney warned Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle that if he held public hearings, administration officials might not show up. He threatened to say the Democrats were “interfering with the mission” (not-so-subtle code for “unpatriotic”). When Daschle mildly suggested that Congress should be consulted more, House strongman Tom DeLay called this infinitesimal deviation from the Bush party line “disgusting.”
Now we know the deal. Use a September 11 picture of Bush to raise money for the GOP–totally legit. Insist on a basic wartime accountability that goes back to the Continental Congress and George Washington–“disgusting.”
Soon enough, the GOP will have to come around, probably by focusing on the Clinton Administration, too. Which would be just fine. Even accounting for the excesses of hindsight, neither Clinton nor Bush responded aggressively enough to terrorism. CIA Director George Tenet (now in Sen. Richard Shelby’s crosshairs) and former FBI director Louis Freeh (until now protected on Capitol Hill because of his anti-Clinton credentials), will take some hits. So will Attorney General John Ashcroft, who last summer cut the FBI’s request for an increase in its anti-terrorism budget by $58 million at the same time he was so worried about his own personal safety that he switched from flying commercial to government planes.
Some will insist these and other officials are being scapegoated, like Gen. Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel after Pearl Harbor. But Short and Kimmel deserved to be forcibly retired, even if they were also right that too much blame was being shifted to them from where it belonged–in Washington. There was no FDR conspiracy to let the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, just plenty of missed clues and unconnected dots in the capital.
Delving into the dots was messy then and will be messy now. It will consume the time of people who need to fight a war. But consider the alternative. In 1964 President Johnson told the country that American forces had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin and he needed a congressional resolution giving him a free hand to fight. Sounding like Bush and Cheney, he said Congress should shut up and trust him. So after just 40 minutes of hearings, the resolution went to the floor. Only two senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, voted against it. That victory turned out to be a disaster in disguise. Within two years, Sen. William Fulbright was holding hearings that went much worse for LBJ. A little openness at the beginning of the process would have saved him big trouble down the road.
The worrisome thing now is that Incurious George apparently doesn’t want to know much about his own government. He doesn’t see how tough questions might help prevent another attack or serve a patriotic end. He doesn’t grasp that public accountability would serve his ends by forcing the bureaucracy to change faster. We’ve learned that the best way to permanently alienate the president is to criticize any facet of the war on terrorism.
When Senator Harry Truman ran vigorous, critical hearings investigating war profiteering during World War II, he ended up on the Roosevelt ticket in 1944. Today Truman would get a ticket to oblivion.
