I have just finished reading "The Price of Loyalty," Ron Suskind’s book on "the education" of Paul O’Neill, the first Secretary of the Treasury in the Bush Administration.
You remember that it created a brief stir earlier this year. Newspaper and magazine reports focused on O’Neill’s revelation that the White House was exploring war on Iraq even before 9/11 and his sense that George W. Bush was unresponsive, almost disengaged in meetings.
But there’s more. O’Neill describes an Administration where, in his view, ideology trumps the facts, particularly in economic policy. Where there are no systems set up for rational consideration of policy. No give-and-take discussion. And the Vice-President is brilliantly, quietly, in charge.
You may remember the White House response to O’Neill – ridicule. I get the sense he was a bit naïve, but given what the President and his men are trying to do to Richard Clarke, O’Neill’s impressions are worth reading.
Incidentally, there are a few pages on Saudi Arabia. In the aftermath of 9/11, O’Neill’s operatives set about tracing the financial backers of terrorism. There were a few successes, but their efforts to penetrate the Saudi Arabian connection ran into a stone wall.
In mid-November, 2001, O’Neill hobnobbed with representatives of "virtually the entire American power structure…" at a party at Prince Bandar’s estate. He remembers the Saudi emissary saying his nation was "doing everything possible to help America in these trying times."