In the # 1 spot on Vanity Fair's "Most Popular" is an article from their February 2009 issue, Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House. It is a disturbing, chronological narrative of the Bush Administration by a cast of people from both inside and outside the government. We will all be haunted by the past 8 years for ages to come, but our storytellers have the horror of personally owning a part of that history.
We start on January 20, 2001 with our writers setting the stage with a recap on the disputed election results, Bush's election promises and the first official act- a moratorium on President Clinton's parting regulations on the environment, food safety, and health. The article is then turned over to the voices of crisis past:
Larry Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: We had this confluence of characters—and I use that term very carefully—that included people like Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and so forth, which allowed one perception to be "the dream team." It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin–like president—because, let’s face it, that’s what he was—was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire. What in effect happened was that a very astute, probably the most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur I’ve ever run into in my life became the vice president of the United States.
He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush—personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum.
(An aside: During an NPR interview on May 10, 2007, 2 years after leaving the Bush Administration, Wilkerson proposed impeaching President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.)
The narration is riveting, but the most fascinating and revealing features of the article is the photography by Annie Leibovitz. She captured the Bush Administration early on in photos where the MSM failed after 8 long years. The front page kicks off with a grim-faced group portrait of Bush and his early inner circle. Individual portraits of the core clan are interspersed throughout the the 14-page article: In-your-face Bush, creepy, earless Karl Rove, reptilian Rumsfeld (the caption alone is worth a journey over to the site), evil-eyed Condi Rice and the best of all, Dick Cheney, with a pool of blood in the bottom of his left eye. (That portrait will be famous someday.)
The narrators walk us through 9/11, with an interesting comment from the 2nd grade teacher who shared her classroom with Bush on that awful morning, the lies and manipulation leading up to and through the wars, torture, rendition, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, reelection, Katrina (which Don Barlett called the "final nail in the coffin"), and to the very bitter end-the our collapse of our economy.
The voices:
Dan Bartlett (WH Comm. Director, later Counselor to the President)
Joschka Fischer (German Foreign Minister/Vice-Chancellor)
Lawrence Wilkerson (Top aide, later COS to SOS Colin Powell)
Richard Clarke (Chief WH Counterterrorism Adviser)
Bill Graham (Canada’s Foreign Minister, later Defense Minister)
Rick Piltz (Sr. Associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program)
David Kuo (Dep. Director of WH Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives)
Noelia Rodriguez (Press Secretary to Laura Bush)
Mark McKinnon (Chief Campaign Media Adviser to George W. Bush)
Matthew Dowd (Bush’s Pollster & Chief Strategist 2004 presidential campaign)
Ari Fleischer (Bush’s first WH Press Secretary)
Ed Gillespie (Campaign Strategist, later Counselor to President)
Sandra Kay Daniels (Teacher at Emma E. Booker Elementary School on 9/11)
Mary Matalin (Assist to President & Counselor to VP)
Michael Brown (Director of the FEMA)
Scott McClellan (Deputy WH Press Sec., later Press Sec.)
Jesselyn Radack (Ethics Adviser at DOJ)
Robert Dallek (Presidential Biographer)
John Bellinger III (Legal Adviser NSC, later Legal Adviser to SOS)
Gary Berntsen (C.I.A. Intelligence Commander at Tora Bora)
Margaret Spellings (Bush’s Domestic-Policy Adv., later SOE)
Jack Goldsmith (Legal Adviser DOD, later head of the Justice Dept. OLC)
Bob Graham (Senator Florida (Dem), Chairman of the Senate Intel Committee)
Rick Piltz (Sr. Associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program)
Luis Moreno-Ocampo (Prosecutor of the Int'l Criminal Court)
Paul Pillar (C.I.A. Nat'l Intel Officer for the Near East & South Asia)
Sir Jeremy Greenstock (British Ambassador to UN, later the British Special Rep. in Iraq)
Hans Blix (Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector for Iraq)
Alberto Mora (Navy General Counsel)
Jay Garner (Ret. Army General & 1st overseer of the U.S. Admin. and Reconstruction of Iraq)
Kenneth Adelman (Member of Rumsfeld’s Advisory Defense Policy Board)
Charles Duelfer (U.N. and U.S. Weapons Inspector in Iraq)
Michael Merson, M.D. (Int'l Aids Researcher, evaluated relief program)
Lee Hamilton (Former Indiana Congressman and Vice-Chair of the 9/11 Commission)
Mark McKinnon (Chief Campaign Media Adviser to George W. Bush)
Kishore Mahbubani (Singapore’s Former Ambassador to U.N.)
John le Carré (Novelist and former Intelligence Officer)
Anthony Cordesman (Nat'l-Security Analyst, former official at the Defense and State Depts)
Alan K. Simpson (former Senator from Wyoming, member of the Iraq Study Group)
David Iglesias (Former U.S. attorney in New Mexico)
Robert Shiller (Yale economist who warned of a housing bubble)
John C. Dugan (Comptroller of the currency)
Henry Paulson (Secretary of the Treasury)
Jake Boritt (Filmmaker and Gettysburg tour guide)
The last entry is from Matthew Dowd:
You know, the headline in his presidency will be missed opportunity. That is the headline, ultimately. It’s missed opportunity, missed opportunity.
Missed opportunity? That is one cold headline. The Bush administration perpetrated one catastrophe after another, killing hundreds of thousands and leaving millions more helpless, hopeless, homeless and scared. It was not missed opportunity. It was a crime.