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March-April 2007
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Cover Article
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Photograph by Robert Adam Mayer |
Frank Rich on West 43rd Street |
Scheduled for East Coast prime time on a Thursday, the night with the highest television viewership, Bush’s speech drew a large audience and played well with both the public and the drama critics of the political stage. “That was great theater,” gushed Morton Kondracke of Fox News; on Meet the Press, the Washington Post’s David Broder rhapsodized about the president’s “physical posture” that communicated “authority and command.”
Now compare these raves with the response of a professional theater critic who long ago quit reviewing Broadway plays and refocused his gaze on the dramas called “news.” Each Sunday, Frank Rich ’71, a New York Times theater critic for 14 years and a Times columnist since 1994, scrutinizes pseudo-events like the aircraft-carrier scenario in a quest to distinguish the smoke of real fires from the ubiquitous fumes of smoke-making machines.
In his recent book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, Rich describes Bush’s “May Day double feature” of carrier landing and speech, analyzing its elements using a theatrical vocabulary, like his mention of the “three-hour intermission” between the two components of what he called a Top Gun reenactment. There was costume: Bush emerged from the cockpit “draped in more combat gear than a Tom Cruise stunt double,” and the crew members in the official audience wore color-coordinated garb. There were set design and choice of props: a White House advance team supervised renaming the plane Bush flew—normally used for refueling—as Navy One, and painting George W. Bush, Commander in Chief on its fuselage. The Mission Accomplished banner “was positioned high up so that it appeared as a halo hovering above the president,” Rich writes.
Of course there was a written script, and cinematography, too. The president’s address began “precisely at dusk in the West—Hollywood’s so-called magic hour, much prized by cinematographers for the golden glow it bestows on any scene.” And while the uninitiated might have thought the Abraham Lincoln was far out to sea, those directing the show had simply positioned the carrier to evoke that appearance: “...if the camera angle had been different,” writes Rich, “it would have revealed the San Diego skyline, fewer than 40 miles away.”
Characteristically, Rich also mentions certain rather inconvenient facts that fell outside the camera angles. For one, Bush, was not officially announcing the end of the war, because, under the Geneva Conventions, doing so would require the release of more than 6,000 POWs. Second, Rich follows a line from Bush’s speech, “With those [9/11] attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got,” with his own observation that “...this war happened to be against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11,” a fact “largely overlooked in the excitement” of the victory celebration.
Another small thing: the “eagerly homeward-bound troops” aboard the Abraham Lincoln had their return to San Diego “stalled by a day to accommodate the pageantry of Bush’s tailhook landing”—a minor delay, perhaps, for troops whose “deployment at sea had already been extended from six months to ten, the longest by a carrier in thirty years, to help fill the maw of an understaffed war.” The networks’ editing rooms also omitted any untidy details of the president’s own military record, like his erratic attendance while serving in the Texas Air National Guard, where whatever flying he did was thousands of miles distant from military combat. And in the final analysis, Rich says in an interview, “The Top Gun image of victory trumped the reality that the insurgency was underway.”
Image wins out over reality more and more in the battle for attention and belief. Virtually every public event now arrives filtered through a lens, laptop computer, or recording device, and hence nearly all our daily news has been “produced” and woven into some kind of narrative. Old-fashioned, relatively unmediated reality at times appears obsolete. In this environment, Rich’s New York Times columns attempt to redress the balance as he rips holes in the scenery of the image manipulators to reveal stagehands frantically hauling on ropes, and drags unwelcome truths onstage. His column “derives from his unique experience,” says Bill Kovach, a former curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism who chairs the Committee of Concerned Journalists. “He sees politics as theater. His vision and his voice are the result of the skills honed as a theater critic who expanded his reach to broader cultural criticism and then narrowed it again to political criticism. One result of this grounding in theater is his need for a narrative: his approach can make greater sense of the political world than [those of] other columnists who treat everything as a distinct thing, separate and apart.”
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Photograph by Robert Adam Mayer |
Frank Rich, lit by a bounce card and a beauty dish reflector, in the New York Times editorial boardroom |
Regarding Iraq, says Rich, “There were two fictional story lines: the weapons of mass destruction, and a continuous effort to link Iraq with 9/11. Over and over again, Dick Cheney went on the air saying there’d been a meeting in Prague between an Iraqi official and [9/11 hijacker] Mohammed Atta. But there was nothing to it, no evidence of a meeting. Still, if you try hard enough, you can manufacture connections between anyone and anything. And the public will start to believe them if you don’t have an opposition party or an aggressively skeptical press. The biggest questioner of this phony link wasn’t Tom Daschle or Richard Gephardt, it was a fake news show, Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.”
“Why was their sales pitch so effective in sending the United States to war in Iraq?” Rich asks. “In September 2006, President Bush said that the war had nothing to do with 9/11—‘We never said that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks of 9/11.’ And they never did say that. But they said it in other ways: by the allusions used, and the linkages implied. They’re sending a message and pounding that message in with the tools of modern mass media. They do it in a very creative way. We need to understand the difference between what’s actually happening and the perception that is being sold by the people in power.”
Though his own political leanings are generally liberal, Rich is equally eager to expose hypocrisy, dissimulation, and phony images emanating from the political left; he’s a muckraker at heart. “If there was a day that Kerry lost the election, it may have come in August [2004], when he took reporters’ questions while posing against the macho landscape of the Grand Canyon,” writes Rich in The Greatest Story Ever Sold. “Asked if he still would have voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein if he knew then that there were no weapons of mass destruction, Kerry answered yes. Would Kerry have also answered that a Senator should have voted to authorize the Vietnam War even if he knew that the Johnson administration had hyped North Vietnamese attacks on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin? Hardly. His answer about Iraq was a moment of supreme intellectual dishonesty that sullied his own Vietnam past as surely as the sleazy Swift Boat character assassins had.”
In the 2000 presidential election, Rich gave Al Gore no easier a time. “Mr. Gore is repeating his familiar pattern,” Rich wrote. “It was not until years after his sister died of lung cancer that he stopped taking tobacco money and boasting of his tobacco farming so that he could tardily declare Joe Camel Public Enemy No. 1.” Earlier, he had noted, “Al Gore…may be the first public figure in history who has gone overnight from having the personality of a tree to that of a chainsaw mowing down anything in its path.”
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