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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, JULY 16, 2018
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
Founded in 1873
JEREMY FELDMAN
Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM
Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
CARL EARL
Systems Manager
EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK
Press failed its duty; nation went to war
D
onald Trump isn’t the first president
to obliterate the truth, and he won’t be
the last.
In the prelude to the U.S. invasion of
Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush and
his administration unleashed a full-scale
propaganda campaign, seeking to convince
the American people that Saddam Hussein
possessed weapons of mass destruction and
that war was necessary.
The claims weren’t true. There were
no WMDs. The U.S. had no evidence of
them. The American press
swallowed the lies, failed
to ask tough questions and
abrogated its duty to deter-
mine the truth, except for a
few determined reporters at
Knight Ridder Newspapers.
JIM VAN
“Shock and Awe,” a
NOSTRAND movie that opened Friday,
tells the story of those jour-
nalists — Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel,
Joe Galloway and John Walcott.
It dramatizes an ugly chapter in the history
of journalism.
WHERE TO WATCH
“Shock and Awe” opened Friday in limited
theaters nationwide. None are in Oregon.
The movie is available on demand through
iTunes, DirecTV and most cable systems,
including Charter here in Astoria.
Go to bit.ly/shock-and-awe-timeline for a
multimedia timeline of events portrayed in
the movie, and links to the original stories by
Knight Ridder reporters.
AP Photo/Jerome Delay
Voices lost in the tumult
It’s impossible to fully describe the herd
mentality that gripped the media in the year
and a half between the terror attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, and Operation Iraqi Freedom in
March 2003.
I had a front-row seat to witness that
history. I was a web editor for Knight Ridder
Digital who was called to D.C. to manage
the company’s online coverage of a war that
seemed to be preordained.
President Bush had proclaimed to the
world after Sept. 11, “Either you are with us,
or you are with the terrorists.” The leading
newspapers and cable networks took that
mantra to heart.
They breathlessly parroted every morsel
and scrap of disinformation fed to them by
the government spin masters. They jostled
for seats in the administration’s coveted inner
sanctum and served as dutiful stenographers
for every dubious claim. Judith Miller of the
New York Times was a notorious culprit.
Vice President Dick Cheney and the other
neoconservatives in the administration would
spoon-feed her “scoops,” then cite her stories
at press conferences and on the cable talk
shows.
Those who questioned the administra-
tion’s WMD claims — as Landay, Strobel,
Galloway and Walcott did — were branded
as unpatriotic or worse, by both the public
and their peers. Their voices were drowned
out by a growing crescendo of war drums in
newsprint and on the airwaves.
Some of Knight Ridder’s own newspapers
A government building burns March 21, 2003 during heavy bombardment of Baghdad
by U.S.-led forces. The phrase ‘shock and awe’ described the Pentagon’s strategy of
hitting the Iraqis hard enough to stun them into quick surrender.
Saddam, who had remained in power despite
his 1991 defeat in Operation Desert Storm by
Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush.
We knew that professional government
analysts saw no evidence of WMDs — our
reporters, with decades of contacts in the
intelligence community, were talking to them.
And we knew that officials in power
were blatantly lying to the American people.
Somewhere between the analysts and the
White House, evidence was fabricated or
cherry-picked to support the administration’s
campaign, led by Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to oust Saddam
and plant a democracy in the Middle East. To
this day, Bush’s defenders insist he was the
victim of bad intelligence. A more accurate
description would be bad fiction.
The result? An unnecessary war that
has killed more than 4,400 Americans and
wounded almost 32,000. Hundreds of thou-
sands of Iraqi dead and millions displaced. An
entire region destabilized, with Iran and ISIS
left free to run amok. And it’s not over — 11
U.S. soldiers have died there this year.
A hard lesson
Vertical Entertainment
Actors James Marsden, left, and Woody Harrelson portray Knight Ridder reporters War-
ren Strobel and Jonathan Landay.
refused to run their stories. When questioned,
editors expressed disbelief in their reporting,
often with some lame variation of “The New
York Times isn’t saying that.” In one telling
scene from the movie, Walcott asks one of
those editors, “The truth doesn’t sell papers
anymore?”
Fabricating the evidence
We knew that President Bush ordered
the Pentagon to begin drawing up plans for
the Iraq invasion in early 2001, shortly after
he took office. The attacks later that year on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
provided a convenient pretext for toppling
In an historic mea culpa, the New York
Times later apologized to readers for its
prewar Iraq coverage and disavowed Miller’s
reporting — much too late to avert the trag-
edy. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell
has said he was duped into making the case
for the war in front of the United Nations.
But many Americans still believe that
Saddam had nuclear, biological and chemical
weapons programs, though none has ever
been found.
The movie underscores the importance
of fearless journalists who are willing to tell
truth to power. They are part of the checks and
balances on which this country was built.
“Today the press is under attack like never
before, and democracy cannot survive without
a free and independent press,” said Rob
Reiner, the movie’s director, who portrays
Walcott. “I hope Shock and Awe can serve
as a cautionary tale of what’s at stake for the
survival of self-governance.”
Jim Van Nostrand is editor of The Daily
Astorian.
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Strange literary bedfellows
P
hilip Roth died in May at the age
of 85, only a few months after
the death of Ursula K. Le Guin,
the former Cannon Beach resident and
author of world acclaim.
Until their deaths, Roth and Le Guin
had been the only living authors in the
Library of America, a series “preserving
the words that have shaped the American
canon.”
Both Le Guin and Roth would likely
be uncomfortable with their sudden liter-
ary synchronicity.
In so many ways
they were polar
opposites: Le Guin a
product of the Pacific
Northwest; Roth, of the
East Coast.
Le Guin was the
R.J. MARX daughter of academics,
raised in Berkeley,
California; Roth, from a middle-class
family in the shadow of Newark, New
Jersey.
Roth’s fiction took place on earth; Le
Guin’s in other worlds.
Le Guin spent a long domestic life
with her husband Charles and raised a
family. Roth’s serial relationships were
fitful and occasionally troubled — his
former wife, the actress Claire Bloom,
wrote a savage accounting of their years
together. He had no children.
In many of Le Guin’s novels, she
imagines a world without gender.
Philip Roth’s voice is fixated on the
roots of his desire.
In later years, Le Guin confronted the
divide between herself and Roth with
a painful assessment: “He’s an awfully
male writer,” she told Literary Hub, the
Ursula K. Le Guin
Grove Atlantic literary news source. “It’s
sort of like he doesn’t want me in his
world.”
No labels
But it is their moment in time, in
America, their passion for writing and
uncanny ability to confound critics that
ultimately make Roth and Le Guin part
of a literary quilt.
Each found their voice and connected
with the public in decades-long careers.
Their breakout novels — “Portnoy’s
Complaint” and Le Guin’s “Left Hand
of Darkness,” came out the same year,
1969.
Le Guin was an unfashionable
outsider from the East Coast literary
establishment. Both bristled at labels
“Don’t shove me into your pigeon-
hole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all
over,” she said in a 2014 interview.
Le Guin and Roth both viewed the art
of storytelling with reverence, as prolific
and highly regarded authors of essays
and criticism.
The two authors each retreated from
fashionable literary salons. Roth lived
and wrote in a wooded rural town in
Connecticut 100 miles from New York;
Le Guin, in Portland and Cannon Beach.
Each often used their remote locations
as backdrops for their fiction: Roth paint-
ing bucolic New England; Le Guin, the
grandeur of the Oregon Coast.
In a 1973 essay, Salman Rushdie
ascribes to each a shared literary device,
the power of allegory: Roth, in “The
Great American Novel”; Le Guin in “The
Left Hand of Darkness.”
Le Guin and Roth shared a kooky
love of language and lingo, sometimes
made up. Their love of words extended to
tongues new and old: Le Guin’s Hainish
and the Hardic tongue of Earthsea. “Have
you no harekki on Gont?” asks a charac-
ter in “A Wizard of Earthsea.”
Compare Roth’s Yiddish, “Kish mir in
tuchis” — which means what it sounds
like.
Voices for freedom
Le Guin and Roth came from a gen-
eration of progressive politics, secular
outlook and rigid work ethic.
Intensely political, they pressed
boundaries and hailed free expression.
Roth perceived the daily repression of
Eastern European regimes, where writers
feared for their safety and viewed their
example as a cautionary tale, identifying
abusive political power “as immoral
coercion.” He helped bring writers like
Milan Kundera and Bruno Schulz from
behind the Iron Curtain to American
readers.
Le Guin loathed intolerance, totalitar-
ianism and repression. “Only fear rules
men,” a Le Guin character states in “The
Left Hand of Darkness.” “Nothing else
works. Nothing else lasts long enough.”
Le Guin’s greatest moments in public
life came from the podium. At the 2014
National Book Awards, she delivered
a speech that resonated to not only the
world of publishing, but politics, society
and letters.
She urged an ascendancy of writers
who can “remember freedom — poets,
visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”
Both Le Guin and Roth were honored
by the National Book Foundation with
its Medal for Distinguished Contribution
to American Letters, an honor bestowed
on Saul Bellow, Joan Didion, Toni
Morrison, Ray Bradbury, John Updike
and Stephen King.
Neither received the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
Is there a nexus between them? Does
there need to be one?
Roth supplies a better understanding
of appreciating great authors in his essay,
“Writing American Fiction” — “There
seems to me little, in the end, to prove
an assertion about the psychology of a
nation’s writers, outside, that is, of their
books themselves.”
R.J. Marx is The Daily Astorian’s
South County reporter and editor of
the Seaside Signal and Cannon Beach
Gazette.