"Yes Men: What happens when the president's advisers don't speak up."

Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and President Bush
cringe as Bob Woodward holds his finger to the wind.
Illustration by Philip Burke via Vanity Fair

Josiah Bunting III reviews Bob Woodward's A Secret White House History 2006-2008 in the Book World section of today's Washington Post. I want to quote extensively from the review because it makes important points with respect to the use of knowledge in governmental decision making:

(I)t is a study of what happens when men and women, charged with leading the country in wartime or with counseling those who lead, do not tell each other what they really think. White House advisers are faithless to their responsibilities if they withhold their conclusions and convictions from those they serve, or from their colleagues. It is a toxicity that, by Woodward's account, infected the whole grim process......

Here are earnest, ambitious, tired (the pace of work is unremitting and furious) people trying to make sense of the war the country is prosecuting and why their strategy is not working. Many feel constrained from speaking freely by rank and hierarchy. Specialized expertise seems to have trumped the judgment provided by experience and common sense......

Inevitably, many readers will wonder how other presidents would have handled this war; in this, the sixth year of U.S. ground combat in Iraq, accounts of earlier wartime administrations have new resonance. Two spring readily, and uneasily, to my mind. As Doris Kearns Goodwin makes clear in Team of Rivals, Abraham Lincoln presided over a famously contentious wartime cabinet: Outspoken counsel was expected, even demanded. And in his biography of Gen. George C. Marshall, Forrest C. Pogue recounts the advice that Marshall received from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau about how to deal with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "Stand right up and tell him what you think," Morgenthau said. "There are too few people who do it, and he likes it."

Comment: I think Bunting is right about the importance of those around the president being frank about their positions and indeed arguing them seriously. I also think it is harder to do so than most people might think.

My year in the White House, long ago, was in a much less complex time and role that Woodward described, but I can attest that the pace of work it fantastic and people are tired. When you have a chance to affect U.S. national policy which in turn affects the whole world, you tend to take the extra step; everyone around you does as well, and the the result is a tremendous work ethic.

It is a platitude that it is hard to tell truth to power. You might think that is due to people protecting their careers by avoiding annoying the boss (or the boss' boss' boss). That is true, but there are other problems as well. I think you actually tend to believe the things the "Alpha dog" in the pack believes. It is also hard for a regular person to stand up to the egomaniacs that often inhabit the higher ranges of our government. Then of course, a reasonable person confronting a situation as complex as that in Iraq or Afghanistan should feel uncertainty about his/her conclusions and diffidence in their presentation is a form of communication about that confidence level. JAD

I also note in the article the following:

Woodward states few conclusions directly. He describes the symptoms in detail, but hands off to his readers the burden of diagnosing what went wrong. Moreover, he rarely mentions the heavy costs of misjudgment: Two continents away, 19-year-old Americans were dying while grand strategy was being debated around conference tables in air-conditioned rooms in Washington. (emphasis added)

Comment: How about the tens of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have died, the millions who have been forced to leave their homes and take refuge from the violence, the sickness, injuries and suffering of tens of millions of these people? The chauvinism of the author in assuming that only the young American soldiers are worth considering is both breathtaking and all too frequent in American thinking. JAD