George In The Jungle
Based on the reaction that has greeted that appearance, however, the former has not been happening. (We'll just have to wait and see how the book does.)
In a piece yesterday, Howard Kurtz wrote about his difficulty in finding a Tenet fan in the wake of the media blitz. "Somewhere out there, there must be someone defending George Tenet. I'm just having trouble finding that person (or persons)," he writes. Check out his piece for a roundup of the comments of the Tenet critics, who come from both sides of the political spectrum.
Kurtz adds this: "Whatever Tenet's strengths and weaknesses as CIA director, he quit three years ago. He accepted a presidential medal of freedom and then remained silent--until now, when he's peddling a book. If he felt so strongly about these intelligence issues, about the rush to war in Iraq, about the way he says he's been besmirched, why didn't he speak out before now? How does he justify having remained silent?"
(Tenet's defense, incidentally, was that he needed time to get his thoughts together. Quips Kurtz: "A lot of time, apparently.")
It's common for prominent figures to tie media tours to products they are trying to sell, whether they are books, movies, or even foreign policy. As "60 Minutes" Executive Producer Jeff Fager told me in Oct. 2005, "It's the way a number of stories are done these days."
When you're someone like Michael Jordan, who, according to Ed Bradley, only agreed to a "60 Minutes" interview to sell his book, there's little risk in that strategy. But when you're a political figure like Tenet, waiting to come clean until you've got something to hawk can damage your credibility.
Had Tenet sat down with Scott Pelley years ago, minus a book, and said almost exactly what he said on Sunday, he would likely have gotten a far more sympathetic treatment from the commentariat. As it stands now, conservatives are calling him an incompetent liar and liberals are angry that "Americans have to pay to get the truth about how their government failed them." Arianna Huffington sums up the emerging conventional wisdom: "[T]he honorable train left the station a long time ago, and Tenet wasn't on board."
With comments like that, one can't help but wonder if a shot at the bestseller list was really worth the price.