Former Alcoa CEO and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has been trying to make a big splash with his "tell-all" disclosures for Ron Suskind's new book about the Bush administration, and subsequent interviews on 60 Minutes and elsewhere.
John Fund of The Wall Street Journal has him pegged in terms of motivation.
Mr. O'Neill may have been a team player during his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, but his tenure as the successful head of Alcoa, the aluminum company, seems to have instilled in him "CEO disease," the inability for someone who runs a large enterprise to adapt and subordinate a large ego to the interests of a group.Far from being a truth-teller, Mr. O'Neill comes across in Mr. Suskind's book as a vengeful Lone Ranger, someone bitter because his advice was spurned but who stubbornly chose to stay in the job anyway. "He could have resigned quietly on principle," one White House aide told me. "Instead we had to push him out."
Mr. O'Neill may like to see himself as a contemporary Cyrus Vance, who in 1980 left as Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State over principled disagreements on foreign policy. But instead he resembles Don Regan, the temperamental White House chief of staff who, after President Reagan fired him, went on to write a tell-all book embarrassing his old boss with revelations about Nancy Reagan's fondness for astrologers. The book made Mr. Regan look small and it didn't do much damage to Mr. Reagan's reputation. The same will be true of Mr. O'Neill's poison-pen recollections.
via WSJ's OpinionJournal
Power Line reports that the "smoking gun" document cited as proof of a sinister and unprovoked intention to invade Iraq and waved around last night on 60 Minutes was in fact something else entirely: a Cheney energy task force memo on the Middle East oil industry in general.
There is only one possible conclusion: Paul O'Neill and Ron Suskind are attempting to perpetrate a massive hoax on the American people.
The best response so far from the Bushies has been this barb from a proverbial unnamed source:
A senior administration official said O'Neill's "suggestion that the administration was planning an invasion of Iraq days after taking office is laughable. Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?"
Fact is, O'Neill was an unfocused washout as Treasury Secretary and his sourgrapes criticism means nothing. Michael Jackson will soon push this story into well-deserved obscurity.
Posted by Alan at January 12, 2004 10:02 PM