Ron Suskind, who exposed the ruthless internal operations of Team Bush, tells Salon that many Republicans, too, are frightened by the White House's "kill-or-be-killed desire to undermine public debate based on fact."
By Eric Boehlert
Believe it or not, Bush aides once welcomed reporter Ron Suskind into the West Wing, invited him to attend some meetings, gave him lengthy interviews and even found him his own desk to work at inside the White House. That was back in early 2002, when Suskind, who had won a Pulitzer Prize while working for the Wall Street Journal, was profiling Karen Hughes for Esquire magazine.
Today, Suskind may rank near the top of the administration's enemies list of least favorite journalists. Through a series of revealing magazine profiles as well as a bestselling book, "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill" (published earlier this year), Suskind has pulled back the White House curtain perhaps more effectively than any other reporter. And the portraits Suskind has painted of Bush and his advisors are not at all flattering, though they are reality-based.
Suskind's latest article, "Without a Doubt," appeared in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, and it is arguably the most damning of all. It made headlines when the Kerry campaign seized upon a remark Bush reportedly made to top donors, quoted in the article, during a closed-door lunch in September, promising that after his swearing in in January he would "come out strong with ... privatizing of Social Security." The Bush campaign denied the quote, labeled it a fabrication, accused the Times of practicing "Kitty Kelley journalism" and attacked Suskind as a partisan hack, even including his picture and voter registration information in an e-mail blasted to the national press corps as a combination of preemptive intimidation and inoculation.
(snip)
Fair enough. You seem to have luck with Republican sources, and specifically with those from Bush's faith-based community and his advisors. Do you think they're among the most disillusioned?Absolutely. They're among the most disillusioned because it comes from a direct, personal experience with the president of the United States.
So they thought there was a connection with Bush. They thought there would be a follow-through, that he meant what he said during the 2000 campaign?They thought a whole variety of things, and then they saw what "is" is. And some of them were troubled by it, and some of them have been, frankly, frightened by it. These are Republicans who in significant numbers have been coming to my office. One of the jokes is that my office is now the government in exile for Republicans. They come because they're concerned -- not as members of a political party but as American citizens. That's what they say over and over. And they take not insubstantial risks to come.
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http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/20/ron_suskind/index.html