The Ming Report

WHAT PRICE LOYALTY

January 14, 2004 - When Paul O’Neill sat down to talk candidly to a Wall Street Journal reporter he knew that he was talking for publication. The former CEO of Alcoa was not a naïf before he became Secretary of the Treasury for George W. Bush and when he was discharged for speaking his mind any vestige of political naivety that he may have harbored when he accepted the appointment had to have been crushed. He was surely no longer a political naïf when he sat down for the series of interviews that became the sensational book that now either delights or depresses political readers inside the Beltway – depending on their partisan point of view. Promotional cuttings from Ron Suskind’s book, The Price of Loyalty, paint a stark description of the way that the highest level of the Bush Administration operates.

Pre-publication excerpts from the book have excited a frenzy of comment from Administration loyalists seeking to discredit the former Cabinet Secretary. Claims that as a member of the Cabinet he was ignorant of the intelligence flowing into the Administration have alternated with impugning the Secretary’s integrity and questioning his loyalty. I have not read the book nor have the talking heads making the rounds of the talk shows as the Bush Administration circles the wagons. I don’t know, nor do they, whether the book as a whole is reflected in the quotations lifted from it. But the controversy surrounding it raises a basic question as to the proper role of a cabinet secretary.

To whom does a member of the President’s cabinet owe a duty of loyalty? When a person, whether that person is Paul O’Neill, Christy Whitman, or Colin Powell, accepts the responsibility of heading a Department of the government is that person expected to serve the political agenda of the President who made the appointment or, in the final analysis, is that person responsible to the Nation as a whole, to provide the best counsel and the best information to the President in the national interest whether that opinion jibes with the President’s preconceived notions or not.

Secretary O’Neill is criticized because when he found that he could not toe the party line with respect to the third Bush tax cut he did not resign. He elected to soldier on and continue to provide the best advice that he could in the national interest. When he was told to go he refused to provide the kind of window dressing that Ms. Whitman had given to her departure, a thirst to return to private life.

When we look at Secretary O’Neill and his candid revelations as to the manner in which the Bush Administration operates, even as he says that he will probably vote to re-elect the President we should remember his dedication to the national interest instead of a partisan interest. We should remember that he saw his first loyalty to the American people and thank him for his dedication to the national interest. We can only hope that this time somebody listens.