NR GOES TO WAR
Freeman, Neal B.
llrll ( ()itS T() EVOLVED INTO A USEFUL MECHANISM, the National ~eview Board of Directors. We knew early on that there would be no such :hing as a free dinner. After the meeting and...
...security interests...
...It gave me a chance to go out the way I came in--with my man Bill...
...I pulled an O'Sullivan...
...Novak had opened doors and offered friendly counsel...
...On each and every point Novak had been right and his opponents had been wrong...
...Never underestimate the power of clich6 to sweep all argument before it...
...In opinion journalism, you would hope that the quality of opinion would count for something...
...He rarely imposed his view at the outset of discussion, preferring to hear from others before refning and declaring his own position...
...Neal B. Freeman, chairman of the Blackwell Corporation, resides in York, Maine...
...I had deep reserves of affection for the magazine and for my band of brothers and I just didn't have it in me to tell Bill I was quitting...
...As Sir James's presentation rolled on I found it less and less compelling...
...We were marching to war after all and as soon as American boots hit Iraqi soil, there would be no more debate, no more policy differences...
...The interpretation swings freely in the Beltwaybreeze...
...The latter pieces for the most part skipped over the work product and dwelled speculatively on dark motivation...
...The evening that lives in memory featured Sir James Goldsmith who was at the time (roughly speaking) the richest man in the world and (not so roughly speaking) the most pontifical man this side of Rome...
...A fourth was the only private entity I'm aware of whose employees came under attack in all three 9/11 buildings--a clandestine office in one tower, a protective service post in the other tower, civilian contractors at the Pentagon...
...What struck me was that, over the course of the 18 months between 9/11 and the invasion ofIraq, I never encountered a single professional who knew that the case for WMD had been established...
...Unpatriotic...
...After the meeting and the ,eception, after the Beef Wellington and the souffle, ~ven after the good cigars of suspect provenance, the ~vening would still be young and dangerous...
...A special guest would appear, drawn from Bill's wildly eclectic circle of Reflections on conservatives and the arguments for going into Iraq...
...When I put down my copy ofNR, I felt a genuinely new sensation...
...Fred Barnes, John Fund, and Kate O'Beirne, among others, are in his debt...
...All of the moral capital we had accumulated over the years, all of the credibilitywe had earned by weeding out the Randians, the Birchers, the racists, the anti-Semites, and the 24-hour nutbars-all of it was used to leverage an ad hominem attack on one of our oldest friends...
...I can remember serving on one of those "special committees" with Joseph Donner, a savvy Wall Streeter who had acquired a Ph.D...
...I wondered then and wonder still how so many people--all of them bright and journalistically trained people-could have been so trusting of secondary and partisan sources...
...2) that JUNE 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 31 NR G O E S TO W A R the occupation of Iraq might not be a "cakewalk" (in the neocon phrase of the day...
...A ND SO WE CAME TO 9/11...
...It being the closing weeks of the NFL season those events, whatever they were, had escaped notice...
...In an overwrought phrase that I regretted instantly, I characterized the decision to invade Iraq as "stupid, dangerous, and hubristic...
...Neal Freeman...
...A few days later we would open the newspaper to find Bill's elegantly synthesized position on the issue of the day...
...called "Unpatriotic Conservatives...
...But when the finances of the magazine took a Dickensian turn, as they did from time to time, the N_R Board was there, pre-briefed, bonded to the enterprise, and readyto heave to...
...For the first time in my long association with the magazine, I was ashamed...
...That estimate proved to be durable...
...Even Saddam's long tenure offered no evidence to the contrary...
...The young officer had informed his Colonial Secretary (Winston Churchill, as it happened) that the sprawling territory that would one day be called Iraq was in fact three distinct entities with natural capitals in Basra, Mosul, and Baghdad...
...On that unforgettable Tuesday morning, a series of ugly events occurred...
...more crassly) that we had no choice but to protect the flow of oil...
...Over the years, I had served on the boards of a number of defense contractors all of which did classified work...
...The notion that we invaded Iraq for "lots of reasons"--like so much else in the discussion of Iraq-misses the point...
...There were no takers for my brief...
...T HAS BECOME FASHIONABLE in recent months to say that the U.S...
...The American people were and are viscerally opposed to the idea of pre-emptive war...
...Even Saddam's long tenure offered no evidence to the contrary...
...I hung in the re because I had enj oye d a great run with the magazine...
...Robert Novak was "unpatriotic...
...Now, with a 180 -degree whiplash, the Bush administration began to rumble about "regime change" and "going it alone," and "building a democratic Iraq...
...By January of 2003, as we rolled up the ramp to war, I was the only director who spoke against the invasion...
...Now and then, we got the night off...
...Over time, the data record stands motionless...
...In what way had Robert Novak--U.S...
...3) that democratic values might not easily take root in the sands of the Middle East...
...I had a history with Novak...
...And where, I might add, people tended to settle in for the long haul...
...Additionally, as a journalist I had produced for many years the PBS foreign affairs series, American Interests...
...The principal villain of the piece was, of all people, Robert Novak...
...more nobly) that humanitarian principle obliged us to free an oppressed people...
...I fooled nobody, of course, with the possible exception of Sir James Goldsmith, who at least on the subject of his own magnificence could occasionally be fooled...
...A fifth company ran supplies to America's unacknowledged allies in sundry twilight struggles...
...The historical record has now confirmed that judgment...
...A S AMERICA WENT TO WAR, NR gave its warm e n - dorsement to the invasion but then--rather than rallying reluctant conservatives to flag and cause--it turned abruptly to the settling of intramural scores...
...Along with the rest of the commentariat, right, left, and center, they seemed to take it as a given that Saddam had built a serious WMD arsenal...
...Finally, as a resident of northern Virginia's high-tech corridor for 20 years, I rubbed elbows with members of "the community" all week l o n g - a t the gym, at school events, at overpriced coffee bars...
...Bill as the controlling shareholder would call the shots and the rest of us would say more or less with one voice, "Attaboy, Bill...
...by Neal B. Freeman friends...
...With great respect, Senator, we know now exactly what you knew then...
...In the absence of a threat, pre-emptive war looks to them very much like naked aggression...
...I was at first opposed to the Iraq invasion based on my skepticism about the presence of weapons of mass destruction...
...For making these points unabashedly, Novak had, in the judgment of NR's author, revealed his true feelings and base motives...
...It's important to remember that WMD was not just one of a cluster of fungible "reasons" for war...
...Novak's many friends chimed in and the editors agreed...
...It depends on whether or not we attend to twelve straightforward axioms...
...Less than a year earlier, George Bush had been elected President on a foreign policy platform with three planks: (1) that the U.S...
...intelligence has been changed over the past three years...
...John O'Sullivan, the onetime editor of NR, was, like many Brits, born glib...
...In my eyes, the original felony had been compounded by the "apology...
...The other giant in town was my old Washington Star colleague James Jackson Kilpatrick, but Kilpo was not by temperament a teambuilder...
...In Washington at least, 9/11 did seem to change everything...
...military...
...I caught a fewwinks...
...Rereading some of Novak's columns, I concluded that he had made a plausible case and a wholly responsible contribution to the public conversation...
...In the course of an average week, I talked to a score of sources professionally engaged in matters of national security--defense, diplomacy, intelligence...
...The author, David Frum, seemed to be an odd choice as lead investigator for NR's Committee on Un-American Activities...
...The case against Novak focused on the four pillars of his reportorial skepticism about Iraq...
...I should note that the subject of Afghanistan was quickly put to one side...
...But in those poisonous days, truth was no defense...
...Another statement that has been swapped-out by the fashionable in recent months, most famously by Sen...
...He owned the stock and we were all theological capitalists...
...I should have known something was afoot when the process dragged on for some weeks...
...In the absence of a threat, pre-emptive war looks to them 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006 NEAL B. FREEMAN very much like naked aggression...
...It was more interstitial and suggestive...
...His natural mode Those who remained were ushered into Bill's inner circle, which was always a fun place to be...
...It has been said, variously, that we were seeking to establish an island of democracy in an unstable region...
...The other form is human interpretation, an attempt to tell the customer what the data mean...
...Army veteran, indefatigable Cold Warrior, truebelieving supply-sider, the man on whose shoulders so many NR editors stood-in what way had Robert Novak suddenly become "unpatriotic...
...In the dialectic of the magazine, he rarely advanced thesis or counterposed antithesis...
...and (4) that global terrorism might not be deterred by the invasion of the U.S...
...In the issue immediately following the invasion, NR ran a long cover story excoriating what it The American people were and are viscerally opposed to the idea of pre-emptive war...
...E Buckley's dinner table...
...Lawrence's dispatches...
...There are worse ways to run a political movement...
...We would talk about Iraq...
...I will admit that the cover line had arrested my attention...
...I instigated a campaign to pressure NR to print an apology...
...Most of the time, to be sure, the NR Board was corporate in name only...
...Roused from deep slumber, he could deliver, between yawns, six chiseled paragraphs on the similarities between Gladstone and Disraeli...
...more tendentiously) that we were manipulated into advancing Israel's interests...
...I stayed in touch with these people...
...For all involved, I suspect, that last pre-war evening was difficult...
...As noted, I shared his view on #1...
...Most of what I knew about #2 and #3, which was not much, came from my reading of T.E...
...2) that the U.S...
...In that special moment I guess I admired Bill almost as much as I hated myself...
...Robert Novak "hated" America...
...And thus was set the agenda for every Board discussion from the fall of 2001 through the summer of 2004...
...I f you happen to reside in Kohler, Wisconsin, I suppose that the chat turns to sinks and tubs...
...It was a i There was only one "reason" that permitted the President to take the country to war: the presence of weapons of mass destruction...
...I rehearsed my old arguments and added the prudential point that we should husband our resources to meet the realthreats in Iran and North Korea...
...The administration's stated preference for democracy was based on the asseveration that democracies don't attack other countries...
...As the applause died away, WFB, who misses nothing, cleared his throat polysyllabically and announced, "Uhhhhh, responding for the United States...
...What I had in mind was a brief, boxed editorial saying, basically, "We made a mistake and we regret it...
...Pick your axe and grind it...
...In the early rounds of the running debate, I would guesstimate that sentiment ran three-to-two in favor of the Iraq invasion...
...recently naturalized, Frum had spent most of his life as a Canadian...
...My own response to Novak's reporting was mixed...
...Along about axiom #3, I nodded off...
...I recall the phrase only because it was tossed back at me repeatedly in the early months of the war, as if it had been memorialized on a plaque in the Hall of Crazy Sayings...
...What information I had was not first-hand and dispositive...
...By the time that Reagan came to town, Novak was the most important conservative journalist in the nation's capital--as important to the D.C...
...Hell, Bill and our little gang had repainted the map of the known world...
...It was the cruelest cut you could inflict on a conservative of a certain age...
...In Vienna and Reston you talk shop, too...
...In the course of an afternoon, Joe dashed off a turnaround plan for which Booz Allen would have charged six figures...
...Over time we got used to it, but you never really forgot your first turn in the barrel at Wm...
...And to my knowledge not a single datum of U.S...
...I spent a lot of seat-miles with these people...
...I hope not to confuse the term "data" with the broader term, "intelligence...
...These assessments vary widely in quality, ranging from brilliant analysis and actionable extrapolation to bureaucratic cant and partisan spin...
...network as WFB was to his in New York...
...I wrapped up briskly with, "I think we can all agree that Sir James's axioms speak eloquently for themselves...
...I got to my feet, launched a few dozen words in search of a coherent idea and, finding none, did what we all had learned to do in circumstances of last resort...
...You never knew who might show up...
...I probably pressed too hard against the carefully tended fences of collegiality...
...in German history in his spare time...
...At the operational level, the Board regulars became NR's ready reserves...
...Jay Rockefeller of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is this: "If I knew then what I know now, I would have opposed the war...
...I wasn't asking for any rending of garments...
...By far the greatest benefit of these dinners, however, was the opportunity to calibrate NR's center of ideological gravity...
...I had flown in on the redeye and, after a long day of back-to-back meetings, had consumed at least my share of Bill's nice Bordeaux...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006...
...Henry Kissinger, the great columnist Murray Kempton, liberal activist Allard Lowenstein, convicted killer Edgar Smith...
...It was the estimate of Lawrence of Arabia that the three Ottoman provinces could be held together only at the point of a gun...
...Asked by Bill to suggest how the fraying AngloAmerican alliance might be repaired, he bounced to his feet and declared, "It's really quite simple," by which he appeared to mean that we were unlikely to grasp its complexitywithout benefit of his navigational services...
...In my own case, I was asked to assess the "recent events at NATO headquarters...
...I thought then and I think today that ifNR had opposed the invasion it could have made a decisive difference within the conservative movement and, radiating its influence outward, across the larger political community...
...Eleven people spoke in favor, with the rest in tacit concurrence...
...He acknowledged the applause with a Windsorian wave and sat down, his face a rictus of frozen satisfaction...
...That estimate proved to be durable...
...At the end of most of those evenings, with his thoughts neatly gathered, Bill would say goodnight, go upstairs, and write a column, sometimes spiced with unattributed quotes from his dinner guests...
...As the dinners evolved, then, theywere rarely the occasion for issuing encyclicals in matters of conservative faith and almost always a convocation of the likeminded in pursuit of fresh doctrine...
...To even close readers of the magazine, it no doubt seemed that the magazine spoke with the distinctive and authoritative voice of WFB-the one man in our one-man, one-vote editorial regime...
...Taken together, these JUNE 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 29 NR G O E S TO W A R three planks added up to a conventionally conservative approach, a platform that had been roundly endorsed byNR...
...There have been additions and reassessments as information accumulated, but the veracity of the data file at the time of the Senate vote has not been challenged in any material respect...
...He can reached at neal~eeman@blackwellcorp.com...
...At any noment the host might ring his goblet and call on one )f us to declaim on some obscure issue that then mgaged him...
...was synthesis...
...In his columns and television appearances he had opined: (1) that the case for WMD had not been made...
...As his career and influence waxed, he became a mentor to many conservative journalists...
...Bill found it all so hugely amusing that I entertained the idea of hating him, too...
...would not act as the world's policeman...
...Those who remained were ushered into Bill's inner circle, which was always a fun place to be...
...The editors of NR were unafflicted by such doubts...
...We would all be in it together...
...It was the only reason for war...
...Unspeakable death and destruction that produced terror and fear and, soon thereafter, the birth of a pernicious clich6...
...But for all his gifts of insight and expression, not to mention his hierarchical dominance, Bill was always factually hungry and intellectually humble...
...more colorfully) that the President was driven to avenge old man Bush...
...From time to time I have remindedNR editors that conservatism means that it's never too late to say you're sorry...
...My best guess is that it was an example of what psychologists call rational herding, which is the modeling of your beliefs on the beliefs of others whom you presume to be better informed...
...Think of Bode Miller, windmilling off course, and you have a sense of it...
...When in July of 2004 he announced to a hushed Board meeting that he was withdrawing as proprietor, my colleagues were stunned and disappointed...
...Frum was allowed to review his own performance and found it flawless...
...Sometime later I was shaken awake by a burst of applause...
...In our final meeting before the balloon went up in Iraq, I pleaded with my NR colleagues to reconsider their drum-beating for war...
...It would be our guys, right or wrong...
...When I would press them on this point at meetings, their impatience would show: "Oh please, he used them on his own people" or "Come on, why do you think he threw out the arms inspectors" or some other such non-responsive response...
...It was said and then repeated and then echoed and then chanted that "9/11 changed everything...
...About #4 1 was agnostic...
...ICONTINUED TO ATTEND BOARD FUNCTIONS, holding a | g r i n - a n d - b e a r - i t pose as the editors reported, early _lEon, how swimmingly the Iraq campaign was going and then, in a later analysis, how Rumsfeld's inept tactics were botchingWolfowitz's brilliant strategy...
...After 38 years on the NR Board, I ranked no higher than third in seniority...
...At t h e threshold level, it served to separate the women from the girls...
...would not engage in nation-building...
...Two of them had provided information that, it's not too much to say, proved vital to U.S...
...Right...
...invaded Iraq "for lots of reasons...
...For all the sense of estrangement between me and the magazine I now barely recognized, though, there was in the air a hint of reconciliation...
...I have to say that I was relieved...
...Not face down, gurgling-in-the-finger-bowl but chin-bouncing-offthe-chest, in the manner of the toy dog in the back windowof the car in front of you...
...There was only one "reason" that permitted the President to take the country to war: the presence of weapons of mass destruction...
...In the absence of a threat, even the argument from principle would collapse...
...A relieved audience seemed to be congratulating Sir James on his march across the dry plains of 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006 axiom...
...The reality was that he was, after only WFB himself, the most admired and influential conservative journalist in the country...
...Rational or otherwise, there was much herding...
...The first is d a t a - t h e hard artifacts of intelligence including pictures, voice intercepts, alphanumeric flies snatched from ocean-bed cables, and such like...
...Only i i It was the estimate of Lawrence of Arabia that the three Ottoman provinces could be held together only at the point of a gun...
...and (3) that the U.S...
...Call this 9/12 approach whatever you will-utopian, neoconservative, Wilsonian--it could not fairly be characterized as "conservative...
...What finally appeared was a lengthy "collection" of responses to the Novak piecesome blandly complimentary to Novak, others sharply critical...
...A S WILL BE APPARENT FROM THIS small episode, the Board dinner worked at several levels...
...straight-line projection of long-standing NR policy that we should respond to 9/11 with disproportionate force and to disproportionate effect...
...I f only in an attenuated way, I felt somehow complicit...
...He then proceeded to describe each axiom at impressive length...
...would be humble before the nations of the world...
...That is, while he may have been uncomfortable watching James Burnham and Frank Meyer batter each other-and their showdowns in my own staffdays could turn into draining Borg-McEnroe fivesetters--he was happy to learn from them...
...Back in the 1960s when I opened NR's Washington bureau, there weren't many established pressies who wanted anything to do with our little right-wing magazine...
...The impression created by the "collection" was that Novak was a controversial and deeply divisive figure within the conservative community...
...My remarks were brief, pointless, and canted sharply downhill...
...If there was reservation within the circle about the assault on Afghanistan, it was no more than quiddity...
...A third developed technology that, perhaps second only to nuclear weaponry, tipped the balance of terror against the Soviet Union...
...The latter comes in two forms...
...I f you want to perceive in this process a right-wing conspiracy resulting in a party line, be my guest...
...Aspirants who failed the ordeal by rhetorical fire tended to disappear, airbrushed from institutional memory...
Vol. 39 • June 2006 • No. 5
