Who is Ronald Kessler?
According to the jacket copy on his new book, A Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush, Kessler is "award-winning independent reporter who set out to find the real President Bush behind the two-dimensional public image."
Now I'm not exactly sure what they mean by two-dimensional (angry and stupid?), but I'm wondering if Kessler is really as even-handed as his book clearly wants him to be.
A check of his other books shows a lot of books about the CIA and spies. It also shows one about Palm Beach, a place we should all know well. It is described thus in Salon:
Despite its hype as "a powerful, seamless, juicy narrative that no novelist could dream up," Kessler's chronicle of so many leather-skinned paranoids on South Ocean Drive is the work of an overpaid lapdog...
In Kessler's nest of mummies, vipers, babes and moneybags, only one person emerges as a hero: Donald Trump, who bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985 and stunned the Old Guard by turning it into a country club that accepts anyone as a member -- Jews, blacks, you name it -- anyone, of course, who happens to have buckets of cash. Kessler seems to approve of this move, but it's as close as he comes to a democratic impulse. All 336 pages of "The Season" are tainted by his wide-eyed wonder at the glamour of it all. The fun comes in watching the Trumpster rile a crowd that ought to be first in line for the tumbrels, should such a glorious moment ever return.
This does not exactly sound like a man who should be writing a book on presidential character. But read on, Kessler gets even more partisan.
Perhaps more telling is a more recent Kessler book,
The CIA at War, described thus by Publishers Weekly:
But when current CIA director George Tenet-a "gracious" and "politically savvy" leader whose "integrity and outspokenness" started a "healing process" that made the agency "focused, aggressive and effective"-arrives on the scene, Kessler's objectivity departs. He dismisses criticisms of the CIA's pre-Sept. 11 performance and the controversy over intelligence claims about Iraq (Tenet, he huffs, "would never tolerate any attempts to influence the CIA's conclusions"). Instead, Kessler extols the agency's successes in "rolling up" terrorists and laying the clandestine groundwork for the invasion of Iraq, while downplaying awkward loose threads like the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction the CIA insisted were in Iraq. Kessler's uncritical endorsement of Tenet-and of President Bush, another "focused" leader who "gets" intelligence, unlike the inattentive Clinton-lacks the insight displayed in the rest of the book.
Uncritical endorsement of Bush? Sounds like Kessler isn't as apolitical as his book would have you think. In fact that last sentence makes him sound downright partisan.
Kessler on Joe Wilson:
Well, again, without saying where I get information, we have to keep in mind that Ambassador Wilson is a partisan in all this. In fact, he's mischaracterized his own report about the Niger situation. He's claimed publicly that he said that there was no base for the claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to get uranium there. But in fact his report was very inconclusive and he actually said a businessman told him that, yes, this report was true.
So he is definitely out to get the Bush people and we have to keep that in mind.
Oh, and he won a Polk. Just like O'Reilly.
Here's Kessler coming out against the 9/11 panel and in defense of Bush:
But those who propose a Cabinet-level intelligence czar to be inserted between the president and the FBI and CIA directors do not understand how President Bush has conducted the war on terror. In effect, he is the terrorism czar or CEO, meeting every morning with the directors of the CIA and FBI and reviewing potential threats.
One more Kessler quote to leave you with:
But, you know, the idea that we shouldn't have gone into Iraq because we should have won the war on terror first is like saying the FBI should win the war against organized crime and wipe out the mafia before it goes after kidnappers or people who defrauded the public at Enron.