Morris Calls for Heads to Roll

I love Dick Morris. He speaks his mind, he speaks about the facts, and his intimate knowledge of the Clinton's has proved to be an enormous boon in learning why America suffered the attacks on 9/11.

Dick Morris doesn't mince words when it comes to discussing the shortcomings of his former boss, Bill Clinton, or the treachery of the 'Hollywood apologists.'
Insight on the News
Byline: Paul Rush, INSIGHT
September 2, 2003

Political guru Dick Morris is variously blamed and credited for having guided President Bill Clinton's victories over George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996. Time magazine once called him "The most influential private citizen in America," and there is no doubt that Morris remains influential. In his new book, Off With Their Heads: Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Business, he levels well-aimed shots at his former boss Bill Clinton, among many others, and hits his target.

Morris has no sympathy for those he says have done their best to draw America's focus away from terrorism and national security: the New York Times, and print and broadcast media in general, for example, and the "Hollywood apologists" who seem to delight in trashing the country that has given them wealth and celebrity. He also indicts those he says have helped to make the United States vulnerable to international terrorism, including France and Bill Clinton.

Morris says France has been a captive of anti-Semitism and historical appeasement for so long that it now suffers from the Stockholm syndrome. Until French veto power in the United Nations is revoked, he argues, the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia should bypass the U.N. Security Council and make decisions on their own at a "three-sided table in the Oval Office."

In the second part of his book, Morris calls out those who, in his opinion, have defrauded and imperiled Americans from within: "Nursing-home nazis," big tobacco and the greedy governors who stole the monies from the tobacco-lawsuit settlements to prop up ill-advised spending schemes.

Picture profile interviewed Morris at his colorful Manhattan apartment where his always direct and animated conversation confirmed his reputation for passion and political savvy.

Insight: In your new book, Off With Their Heads, you say that President Clinton failed to deal effectively with several of the issues leading up to 9/11 because he had inhibitions about using military force. What impact does inexperience with military service have on a president?

Dick Morris: I don't think military service is particularly important for a president. [George W.] Bush didn't have much, and I don't think his lack of military experience should have inhibited Clinton. But, because of the draft-dodging accusations, he just way, way overreacted.

I cite four things that Bill Clinton could have done to avert 9/11. The first was when FBI Director Louis Freeh came to Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing and said we ought to loosen the rules of engagement so that we can investigate anyone who's a member of a terrorist group even if we can't tell a judge about some imminent act of violence.

Clinton and [Attorney General Janet] Reno said "No." Then we arrested Zacarias Moussaoui, and we could not access his computer because those rules had not been changed. His computer had a lot of the 9/11 plans on it, but even though we had it sitting in an FBI office for a month we couldn't access it to uncover the plot to fly those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. So that's one.

Q: You also proposed to Clinton an idea about driver's licenses?

A: Right. I suggested to the president in March of 1995 that the driver's licenses of immigrants be made to expire when visas do. But he refused, saying it would imperil his political base by offending Hispanic voters.

The fact of the matter is that when hijack leader Mohammed Atta was arrested for driving illegally, four months before 9/11, it was found that he didn't have a valid driver's license. But, the traffic cop who checked couldn't access the FBI computer or the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] computer to discover that Atta was here illegally and was on a terrorist watch list. So Mohammed Atta stayed in the United States; otherwise, he would have been back in Saudi Arabia on 9/11.

Then there was Clinton's inability to investigate aggressively the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which meant that it wasn't until 1996 that we learned it was a [Osama] bin Laden operation. So when the Sudan offered us bin Laden in 1995, we had no grounds to hold him, so we said basically, "Osama who?" Had the first World Trade Center bombing been a fast-tracked investigation, as it should have been, we would have known who and what he was by then.

Finally, I cite the refusal to impose those air-safety measures federalizing the security personnel, X-raying baggage, requiring photo IDs for passengers. Clinton was considering doing this in the summer of 1996 after loss of the TWA 800 flight, but then he backed away because of political pressure from the airlines.

Q: You suggest that Clinton passed the threat from terrorism to the Bush administration like a "ticking time bomb." What could President Bush have done to prevent the attacks of 9/11?

A: Even if Bush had known that 9/11 was going to happen, there is no way he could have prevented it because, for one, he lacked the necessary security infrastructure at the airport. That, I think, is a fairly damning indictment on Clinton.

A lot of people say to me, "Why are you turning on Bill Clinton?" Well, it's a little bit like Calvin Coolidge. You may really have enjoyed life during his presidency from 1923 to 1929, and thought he did a great job, but when the stock market fell apart [under Herbert Hoover] in October of 1929, maybe you had to reassess whether Coolidge had a good presidency. So when the Trade Center towers came crashing down, what had to me seemed to be a relatively minor policy disagreement that I had with Clinton at the time [about security against terrorism] loomed very, very large.

Q: Your book also describes Clinton's problems with former President Jimmy Carter. Indeed, you criticize Carter for going to North Korea while Clinton was considering imposing sanctions against that country. How similar do you think that was to the way Clinton behaved publicly in speaking out against Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war?

A: Not similar at all. Clinton criticized Bush about the war in Iraq, which was appropriate. He is, after all, an American politician. But Clinton didn't fly to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein. Carter's intervention during the Clinton presidency by flying to North Korea was completely inappropriate, unauthorized and in contravention of American policy. Clinton was about to impose sanctions on North Korea, and Carter killed that initiative.

Also interesting about North Korea is the report of the underground building [to develop nuclear weapons] in North Korea, from the Washington Post and New York Times, which is quoted in my book. That was revealed on Aug. 18, 1998, and obviously the reason Clinton didn't pursue the North Korea situation is that he was one week away from the grand-jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky case. He wasn't about to admit to the American people that he had been fooled and conned in the deal to keep North Korea from going nuclear that he had presented as the major foreign-policy achievement of his administration, so he suppressed that information and he instead certified to Congress that everything was going just fine.

Q: Do you think it was mostly political?

A: Oh, I think it was entirely political. I think that had Clinton not been fighting on the impeachment front he would have been much more aggressive with North Korea. But he couldn't afford to do it politically. Now, whether you blame Congress for the impeachment or Clinton for his conduct it's clear that the breaking of that treaty by North Korea was made possible by Clinton's preoccupation with impeachment.

Q: You also address the subject of how the media treat Bush and how they treat Clinton by saying that Clinton is brilliant and Bush is stupid. From where does that come?

A: Bill Clinton spent a lot of time telling America how bright he was. That was a big part of his image-building. Now it happens to be completely true that Bill Clinton is the brightest single human being I've met in my life. He's the only person I've ever spent time with where I have to race hard to catch up with his thinking. But there are many different kinds of intellect, and I'm not sure that Clinton's is always the best one to have.

I have to say this about President Bush. I've been in the White House and I've seen how it works. The media are under the impression that the White House is run by the staff. The fact of the matter is that the White House is run by the president, and the decisionmaking process there is such that the president rolls over in bed, thinks about it and comes up with a conclusion by morning.

It's not the West Wing, it's the East Wing. And it's not a daytime occupation, it's a nighttime occupation where he thinks about stuff. And you could not possibly have the level of sophistication and brilliant politics that goes on in the Bush administration without having a brilliant president. You couldn't possibly have that.

I believe the key to understanding the difference between the way Bill Clinton would have dealt with 9/11 and the way Bush dealt with 9/11 is that Clinton suffered from paralysis by analysis. To a certain extent Clinton saw everything in relativistic terms, where there is no black and white about it, whereas the Bush judgments about good and evil are fairly simplistic - and in this case fairly accurate.

Q: In your "apologists" chapter, you criticize a lot of the Hollywood crowd and other elites in literary and academic fields. It's hard to believe that their conduct surrounding the Iraq war wasn't a "rooting for America to fail."

A: Oh, I think it was. It illustrates how out of sync with authentic American values and priorities they are. There was a sort of Vietnam-era desire to see America fail. It was much like rooting for the Viet Cong, and there was a huge amount of it. There's this Hollywood inspeak. I was just watching Bill Maher do it on HBO, and it turns your stomach. It absolutely makes you want to throw up. But let me say, too, that I think it is as ridiculous for "secretary of energy" Barbra Streisand to present herself as an outspoken public figure as for Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for governor. I think it's just as bad for Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn to take strong positions on foreign-policy issues as it is for Charlton Heston to head the NRA [National Rifle Association].

Now, when I say that, everybody says, "What about Reagan?" And the answer is, "Yeah, what about Reagan?" Ronald Reagan was a union leader; he spent all of the fifties as a spokesman for General Electric, talking about a million different public issues. He nominated a guy for president of the United States at the 1964 Republican National Convention. He became a political leader during the decade of the sixties, and then ran for governor of California. Schwarzenegger has had none of this preparation. I think it's ridiculous for us to take theatrical personalities seriously.

Q: You spend 50 pages talking about the intentional failings of the New York Times, yet you don't advise readers to vote with their wallets.

A: You can't not read the New York Times. It's too influential, too important, and it devotes too much to in-depth coverage. So you have to read it. Just like you have to read a bunch of other sources. In my opinion, every day, a well-read person in the United States who follows politics has to read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times (mainly because there is no other organ that presents the Republican point of view), the Wall Street Journal, and then at least look at various other articles in the USA Today, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times and a bunch of other organs.

Q: How much responsibility do the writers of the New York Times bear personally for what appears under their names? How involved do you think they were in planting the bias in their articles that you cite?

A: I can only relate to the final product, but I believe that the way the paper was run under Howell Raines, the editors said, "We want an article of roughly this length, on roughly this page, that says this. Now go find it for me."

Whenever you'd talk to a New York Times reporter there would always be a supposition to the story, and they eventually would trot out the supposition and get you to comment on it. If you affirmed it, you'd be in the article, and if you disagreed you wouldn't be. Instead of just saying, "Tell me what the facts are about this situation," the bias, the lean, the journalistic political purpose to the story was predetermined. And it's a damn shame. The New York Times assumed the role of being the unbiased and detailed source for national and international news and then just basically gave it up.

Q: You say that when you watch the TV news channels you're basically watching them report from the New York Times, and you provide a long list of examples. Are there any news stations, cable or network, whose coverage stands out as different from the rest of the pack?

A: Obviously, Fox News does. But, of course, you have to take what Fox News says and average it with what others say to come to your own point of view. The nice thing about Fox News is that it does always provide both sides of the point of view. In other words, it doesn't itself have a position. Fox News never says, "This is what we're for." They present the different points of view, and I think that's effective, because at least they permit divergent points of view to come in, from the left and the right.

Q: Do you think there eventually will be a trend toward unbiased coverage, or will it continue the way it has been going?

A: No, no. There is a strong trend toward it. Look at how every single TV network is losing ratings except Fox News, whose ratings are dramatically improving.

Q: Will the others get the point and follow Fox?

A: They won't. They'll just die. I think we're five years away from the death of network TV news. In five years, the networks will be purely entertainment. By the way, that's not a crazy opinion. It's simply a straight-line projection of the audience loss they've suffered during the last 20 years.