“Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard. But that doesn’t matter, because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your forgiveness.”
I haven’t yet even seen the video, and I’m way behind in my reading so I don’t really know what people are saying out there about Richard Clarke’s extraordinary testimony yesterday before the 9/11 Commission. But just reading those words in newspaper reports made me think that the words of the former head of counterterrorism will go down as one of those defining moments in American public life, like the Army-McCarthy hearings’ “Have you no decency, sir, at long last” or the Watergate hearings’ “What did the president know and when did he know it?”
Because Clarke’s words exposed a deep emotional vacuum in the Bush administration’s handling of 9/11. Bush and his team won widespread acclaim for their bullhorn-toting, Bible-waving, smart-bomb-dropping reaction to the terror attacks. And each of those responses had its place, accomplished something in the long process of coming to terms with the death and destruction of that day. But the Bush approach, with its macho swagger punctuated by interludes of lower-lip-biting moments of silence for our collective loss, has never fully satisfied the national psyche.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t recall a single instance when a leading Bush official — someone on the order of a cabinet secretary or above — looked the American people in the eye and either apologized or admitted error. They don’t know how to do it. Admitting mistakes is not in their playbook. Apologies are for wimps and Democrats.
Now Clarke, neither wimp nor Democrat, has done both these things, in simple, direct words — words that, I think, the 9/11 family members and their wider network of friends, relations and sympathizers, a circle that ripples out to include just about all of us, have wanted and needed to hear from someone in a position of responsibility for so long. By uttering these words, Clarke indirectly but boldly underscored their absence from our government’s vocabulary in the entire two-and-a-half-year span of days since 9/11. His action placed Bush’s failure in stark relief. Further, it reminded us that despite the incomparable magnitude of the 9/11 attacks, not a single Bush administration official has resigned, or been asked to resign, to take responsibility for what happened.
It was fear of just such a moment, I think, that led Bush to oppose the formation of a 9/11 commission in the first place. And it is the resonance of the moment with so many other Bush failures that gives it its power. This is an administration that (as Josh Marshall has eloquently argued) does not know how to say “This was our fault.” I’m not saying we can or should blame 9/11 on Bush. But the Bush administration’s habit of finger-pointing — whether talking about the stagnant economy (not the fault of our insane tax policies!), the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (not the fault of our blindered policy-making!) or any other issue of national significance over the past four years — has escalated from a bad habit into a scandal. The stonewalling of responsibility has made it impossible for the nation to figure out what went wrong and make the changes we need to insure it never happens again.
Someone in the executive branch had to stoop down, pick up the famous Harry Truman motto that Bush never seems to have heard, and take its words to heart. That it took a resigned official to do so, and that his doing so evoked an extraordinary barrage of personal assault from the vice president and other Bush officials, is one last stinging reminder that, in the Bush administration, no one’s desk bears a “the buck stops here” plaque. Yesterday, Richard Clarke finally stopped the buck.
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