The question I’ve always had about George Tenet — seen this evening on “60 Minutes” getting feisty with Scott Pelley — is this: How exactly did he, a Clinton-appointee running the goddam CIA, pass muster with Dick Cheney and hang on into the Bush 43 administration? I mean, here was a crowd gone obsessional with doing everything the opposite of Bill Clinton. North Korea? No talking and no deals! Measured fiscal prudence? Gargantuan tax cuts for the Top 1%! And every disposable FOB anywhere in Washington … overboard! But they leave Clinton’s guy running the CIA? The Coast Guard, maybe. But the CIA is one job where you want an unequivocal Kool-Aid partisan, like, uh, Porter Goss.
From what I’ve read Tenet plays the man’s man game pretty well. He is cocksure and smokes a good cigar. But someone like Cheney had to have some kind of deep assurance that Tenet was not going to be a problem, either with him or with the Richard Perle-Paul Wolfowitz crowd squeezing the Iraq alarm even before 9/11, to survive the Clinton cauterizing going on everywhere else in the federal bureaucracy.
But here is Tenet now selling his version of history. Granted, it is a version pretty much lacking in surprise and neatly in step with everything else we’ve learned — and Condoleeza Rice, Cheney and Bush continue to deny, to their further utter marginalization.
I’m all for public officials stepping up and admitting they screwed up — even if they do it by way of fulfilling a $4 million book contract — but the primary strike against Tenet, which maybe he’ll answer better when he testifies before Congress, is why he didn’t step up and scream, “Bullshit!” two years ago, when he realized that either Cheney, Bush, Rice or Andy Card had sold him out to Bob Woodward.
If he stays as combative as he was with Pelley it’ll be one of the more interesting book tours in recent years. (Must check to see if he’s doing Stewart).
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