'Chain of Command' is full of detail but lacking in style
Seymour Hersh has never won journalism's highest honor. But there's more to life than having Robert Redford play you on-screen.
Since cracking the My Lai massacre coverup 35 years ago, Hersh has collected a Pulitzer and other awards while patenting a rival form of investigative reporting to that of his movie-immortalized colleague Bob Woodward. Where Woodward gets face time with the highest-ups, Hersh, a reporter for The New Yorker, scours the middle levels of the bureaucratic piping, scraping scoops off staffers in the Pentagon, State Department, and Congress.
In "Chain of Command," he adds some new details to his magazine exposs of the last three years on the Bush administration's foreign policy. The down-to-the-wire results of the presidential election suggest that at least a few voters agreed with his scornful conclusion:
"There are many who believe George Bush is a liar, a President who knowingly and deliberately twists facts for political gain. But lying would indicate an understanding of what is desired, what is possible, and how best to get there. A more plausible explanation is that words have no meaning for this President beyond the immediate moment, and so he believes that his mere utterance of the phrases makes them real. It is a terrifying possibility."
That indictment is backed by diligent reporting. Hersh's chapter on torture at the Abu Ghraib prison, for example, should shame into silence those cheerleaders who defended the administration in that matter. But to paraphrase Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "Chain of Command" is a long, hard slog of a read, blunted ultimately by the staleness of its main themes.
To his credit, Hersh describes the hellishly complicated dilemmas facing the administration, his disdain for Bush notwithstanding. From our friends to our foes, the Middle East is riddled with repressive, corrupt governments that make choosing sides an exercise in lesser-of-evils calculus. Of Iyad Allawi, the US-backed prime minister of post-Saddam Iraq, a former CIA officer tells Hersh, "His strongest virtue is that he's a thug."
While the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction embarrassed Bush, Hersh reports that even United Nations inspectors believed the dictator possessed more chemical weapons than he did, due to a suicidal lie Saddam told the UN. Unwilling to admit that he used so many chemical warheads during the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s, Saddam deliberately left the impression that he retained more weapons than he actually had.
Unfortunately, Hersh's skills at dogged, balanced reporting exceed his literary ones. Lawyers seeking to denude investigative reporters' prose of libelous statements tend to bleed away any vibrancy, and the reporters themselves don't obsess over style. David Halberstam, who challenged the official line in an earlier war, once said that a good story told itself and didn't need great writing. And Halberstam is Hemingway next to Hersh, who was a wire hire early in his career and learned the just-the-facts-ma'am writing that lards "Chain of Command" with attributions, abbreviations, and other details. While establishing bulletproof authority, the book undeniably drags in places.
A reader might overlook the pacing if the substance were fresh. But thanks to Hersh and others, we all know that Abu Ghraib was a sewer, that the administration tragically low-balled the number of troops needed to pacify occupied Iraq, and that allegations of Iraq's shopping at a nuclear yard sale in Niger were a fraud. (Hersh's chapter on that last topic is interminable.)
"The Bush Administration continues to wage a war in Iraq by means that ensure that it cannot win" because its methods aren't dredging up usable intelligence, Hersh writes. That's provocative, sure. But former CIA director George Tenet told the nation months ago that our crippling lack of human intelligence would take years to rectify. Hersh himself quotes a three-year-old article from The Atlantic in which a CIA officer noted that our spies aren't infiltrating Islamic fundamentalist groups in primitive living conditions: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
"Some of what [Hersh] wrote is now part of the received wisdom . . . so it is worth remembering that much of it was highly controversial when his stories were first published," New Yorker editor David Remnick notes in his introduction to the book. Translation: A lot between these covers will have you wishing the book were more than a compilation of previously published pieces.
