Five Minutes With: Ron Suskind

By Graham Webster, Campus Progress
Thursday August 24, 2006

Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Suskind is at the top of the bestseller lists again with his new book "The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11," which explores how intelligence is gathered (or not gathered) on terrorist threats and how the Bush White House forms policy. He tells us that the U.S. at one point had a source inside al-Qaeda, and he details potential threats both thwarted and still out there. He uncovers the clumsy cooperation between security agencies, and writes about how the CIA urged President Bush to move troops to catch Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. In the decade since he won a Pulitzer for his reporting for The Wall Street Journal, Suskind has been a writer for The New York Times Magazine and wrote “The Price of Loyalty,” the bestselling book on Paul O’Neill and the Bush White House. And, in 2004, introduced a new buzz-word to U.S. politics: "the reality-based community." Campus Progress sat down earlier this month to get real with the man himself.

So the new thing for you now is “The One Percent Doctrine.”

Yep, though I am the person who started the "reality based community" conversation. That thing has really taken off. That thing has great legs. People use that as t-shirts, people put it at the top of their websites.

So, how hard is it to get to the “reality based community” from inside Washington?

It is very difficult in this era, but it’s gotten easier in the past couple years as more and more folks have retreated from illusion and from "message" and essentially said we need to take ownership of these big sweeping public debates in which so much is at stake. That means we have to be reality based.

In writing this book, you depended on dozens of anonymous sources. When you have to deal with so many people who can’t speak on the record, how do you balance that need against the need of your readers to believe you?

My goal in a book like this is to truly be mindful of the fact that many of the sources in this case are taking significant risks in helping me, figure out what the whole elephant looks like, not just the trunk or the tail. In this era, they simply need to be protected. There could be issues of prosecution. So what I do is cross-reference everything they say with many, many other people. There are more than one hundred key sources, and of course I talked to many more people than that in the book. What I tell them all is that I’m going to be checking this out with many, many folks who have pertinent knowledge, first hand knowledge in most cases, and I’ll be coming back again and again. The facts emerge and they have a way of being stubborn, of being sticky and not going away.

The key is to make sure that the disclosures are air-tight and bullet-proof. And when that occurs I think the reader understands, in this era certainly, that I am not going to be able to say exactly who told me what.

When you were talking to these dozens and dozens of sources, did you ever run into people you felt were trying to lead you astray for their own purposes?

You know, you can pick that up as an investigative reporter pretty quickly. The fact is that I’m always on the lookout for that, and if you talk to enough people in enough different areas, you’ll find that they will at some point settle on the things that everyone knows from their firsthand knowledge, and that’s what goes in the book. When you work two years on a book, you’ve talked to enough people that you end up slicing off that fat and leaving yourself with the lean.

How do you respond to the criticism that this sort of book makes America less safe, it empowers the terrorists?

One of the key guiding principles for this book was to ask every person involved, the first question, “Will anything you’re telling me, or about to tell me, hand a card from our hand over to the terrorists, in any way empower or advantage them?” Only if the answer to that was no we proceeded.

It’s odd to have a secret war, that’s a conflict, a kind of an oxymoron. Wars tend to be public things, with troops moving and casualty reports and correspondents traveling with the battalion. In this case we’re fighting a new kind of war that’s largely conducted in secret. I think everyone I talked to agreed—virtually every single one of them—that the American public ought to know at this point something the terrorists knew several years ago. At this point, the folks involved in the fight, mind you, who are helpful people who live day and night to try and defeat the enemy that we’re fighting, felt that the American public would be empowered by knowing these things that the terrorists already know.

Did you find that your sources tended to be more disgruntled or more disaffected members of the intelligence community, or did you have people who felt that the administration was doing a great job?

I think that it’s a mix. There are many of the folks I talked to who actually have quite a bit of affection for the president, the vice president—some obviously not. But I think many of them were concerned that actions being taken at the so-called policy level or the political level were in fact making the battle against these ardent and violent terrorists more difficult, were undermining what had worked. I think that was a frustration I felt from many of the sources, even sources who had generally good feelings for the president.

When a book like this comes out, you hear a lot of accolades and a lot of criticisms. I’m curious what you think is the best positive response you’ve heard and the most incisive criticism that would make you examine how you do another book.

The book has gotten very positive reviews, and that’s very heartening for a writer, and actually from across the political divide, which I didn’t necessarily expect. I think a lot of that is because of the fact that there are just so many disclosures in the book that allow people essentially to have an anchor for the often gusty, angry, and bitter partisan debates that blow across the landscape in this era. I think the comments that most heartened me were reviewers who said "this allows us to have a productive debate as to what’s really happening in this war on terror."

In terms of the criticism, there are going to be imperfections in a project like this, where it is so difficult to have people stand and speak. It takes a kind of courage to do that, in this era. I think there is a kind of self-selection that sometimes occurs as to people who will express that courage. As some reviewers have pointed out, it inclines the reporting towards people who are angry or disgruntled. That’s the criticism that certainly I always was watchful for in terms of the reporting of the book. [I worked] to find folks all across the terrain with all sorts of different views and inclinations to cooperate with the project.

What would you say to young people about working in the modern political system?

What I say to people is that, young people, especially—there is an enormous amount of information out there, and to be an informed consumer of it.

The folks that are in their teens and twenties now didn’t grow up the way I did. I am a baby boomer—you know the much reviled baby boomers—but I think what was different was that we grew up in an age in which the idea of mass behavior, mass opinion, was kind of new, promoted by the new technologies that were coming online. Pretty much everyone tried to do everything with a big giant group or not at all. Younger folks are much more ready to move in their own direction, to essentially outfit their own little speedboat in ways they find appropriate and sensible. I think that’s an advance, an advance in terms of creativity and innovation.

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