Alex Wright

The Bush files

February 9, 2004

"Transparency" is the central theme in The Price of Loyalty, Ron Suskind's account of Paul O'Neill's troubled tenure in the Bush White House.

During his decades in Washington government (and later as chairman of Alcoa) O'Neill had formed a conviction that good government was open government. He abhorred the kind of closed-door, cabalistic culture that would become the hallmark of the Bush-Cheney regime. Needless to say, O'Neill and the Bush White House were not, as they say in HR, a good fit.

As an "experiment in transparency," Ron has posted facsimiles of some of O'Neill's private White House files, invoking former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman. O'Neill and Suskind have turned the klieg lights on one of the shadowiest administrations in American history. Some of these documents are nothing short of incendiary: planning for the Iraq war in the first 10 days of the administration, O'Neill's opposition to the second Bush tax cut, and accounts of former EPA secretary Whitman being shut out of crucial meetings on global warming and the Kyoto accords.

These documents not only tell a damning story of a secretive regime, they also open up an intriguing window into the real-world, human machinations of federal government. Here we find not just officious-sounding governmentspeak, but the kind of personal marginalia that gives us a glimpse into what was really going on, as when O'Neill scrawls his frustration on a memo from White House economic advisor Larry Lindsey: Larry: This is bureaucratic chicken----. You must have something better to do with your time than send me memos such as this one. It's somehow heartening to know that even Cabinet Secretaries can get riled up like that.

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