A look at what’s buried in Newsweek’s latest cover story.
Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham, is asking for reader reactions to this week’s (August 18 to 25th) cover story, so I thought I’d offer mine here. The cover story is “What Bush Got Right” by the magazine’s luminary foreign affairs thinker, Fareed Zakaria. I’m always interested in what Zakaria has to say but I’ve almost always been uneasy with what I sense is a manufactured voice. Zakaria’s rise has a lot to do with the post-9/11 emphasis in mainstream journalism to try to help Americans better understand our place in the world and how other peoples view and react to our attitudes and policies. Zakaria is a smart guy. But I often feel like he’s trying to sell me a used car; that his criticisms of American foreign policy come with the edges filed off them as part of an unspoken calculation not to offend the sensibilities of the readers of Newsweek, or the listeners of public television. His criticism often comes with a nervous grin, which suggests to me that he’s holding back to please, well, anxious gatekeepers like Meacham.
In this case, however, it turns out the problem starts not with Zakaria but with Meacham. The idea for this cover story (I kid you not) comes from what Meacham reports is his conversation on a flight from Nashville to New York with a “somewhat beefy man” who told him, “Well, I got an idea for you. Why don’t you put a picture of George Bush on your cover and say, HEY: HE’S NOT SATAN’–that would surprise folks.”
Well, Jon, it looks like you did the “somewhat beefy man” proud.
What you’ll see in Zakaria’s cover story is that the upside to Bush is that he changed his disastrous approaches to foreign policy in three areas (Iraq, China, North Korea), turning away from the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and John Bolton. We are to take heart, I suppose, that having set hair on fire that even Bush, at times, reaches for the fire extinguisher.
Buried four paragraphs from the end of this four-page long cover story, as an aside, is Zakaria’s devastating summary of what Bush has truly wrought:
“All this is not meant as a defense of George W. Bush. The administration made monumental errors in its first few years, ones that have cost the United States enormously. The shift in impressions about America’s intentions across important sections of the globe, the sense in much of the Islamic world that America is anti-Muslim, the vast and counterproductive apparatus of homeland security–visa restrictions, arrests and interrogations–are lasting legacies of the Bush Administration. Its dysfunction and incompetence have left a trail of misery in countries like Iraq and Lebanon, which have been destabilized for decades. The embrace of torture and other extralegal methods has violated America’s noblest traditions and provided little in return.”
Let’s stick with that last sentence because even though Zakaria softens it with the term “extralegal” (a nice buffered synonym for “illegal”) he’s actually dead on point in the bottom of his piece with what really matters.
And that’s my big problem with this cover story. Maybe the extraordinary and tragic collapse of American credibility on the most basic principles of the human enlightenment is not a story that Meacham feels comfortable teeing up for his readers. Perhaps he feels he would be stalked by one of Bill O’Reilly’s minions and accused of being unpatriotic. But that’s still what the story is. And while we’re on the subject, there are a myriad of other ways that Newsweek and other mainstream publications prefer to report on the lawlessness of the Bush Administration without offending their readers by taking it on directly. It’s fair game, for example, to report on how out of sorts the Democrats are in trying to confront a growing list of impeachable offenses. But apparently it’s not good decorum (absent Helen Thomas) for the White House press corps to question Bush, directly, on his “extralegal” activity.
I’ll grant that it is noteworthy, on the periphery of this disaster, that there are signs that the steel-toothed ideologues who’ve driven the country toward moral ignominy are now being consigned to a back seat. But to put that interesting footnote on the cover just because it’s a more palatable tale for the editor’s traveling companions is feckless at best, cowardice at worst.
Tim Connor
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