The Kean Mutiny
Commentary: How the mild-mannered chairman of the 9/11 commission refused to be George W. Bush's patsy.
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"Could you pretend for a minute that I'm the president?"
Tom Kean didn't laugh. He recognized the voice of Andrew Card, George W. Bush's chief of staff. Card said the president needed to replace Henry Kissinger, the chairman of the 9/11 commission who was resigning, just days after being appointed, amid conflict-of-interest allegations. "Would you do it?" Card asked.
"Yup." With that one word, the web of denial and deception that surrounded the colossal failure of the nation's leadership to defend America against a terrorist attack began to come apart.
For if Bush had expected Kean -- the former Republican governor of New Jersey and, like Bush, the scion of an East Coast patrician family -- to provide cover for the White House, he was in for a surprise. "Some people mistake his good manners for weakness," says Al Felzenberg, the commission's spokesman, who has known Kean for more than 30 years. Kean proved to be everything that Kissinger wasn't: committed to openness, determined to pry out the administration's secrets, and, most of all, willing to learn, from the weight of the evidence, that the White House version of 9/11 -- that "everyone was at fault, so no one was at fault" -- was patently false. Under Kean's leadership, the commission excavated enough truths to flood bookstores and computer browsers with a scorching 500-page report that lays bare the shocking lack of preparedness on the part of America's leaders to protect the nation against foreign attack. "They stood up to the administration when the Bush folks were about to submarine them," says Senator Bob Graham (D–Fla.), who chaired an earlier congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks.
Kean has a simple explanation for why he took his mission to heart: He's from New Jersey. The state lost 691 residents on 9/11, one-quarter of all the victims in the World Trade Center. Several of Kean's friends were killed; his tennis partner of 20 years was on United Flight 93, the plane that would have crashed into the White House or the Capitol had the passengers not wrestled the hijackers to the ground. As Kean would learn in the course of the hearings, it was an act of courage and common sense not displayed by anyone in the nation's leadership that day.
Three weeks after 9/11, Tom Kean had risen to the pulpit at a memorial mass at the cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. "I remember looking out and seeing women holding infants who'd been born after their husbands were killed in the towers, and others who were pregnant," he recalls. "It was so emotionally overwhelming, I almost couldn't speak."
Within a week of agreeing to chair the commission, he met with representatives of the families, including the four widowed "Jersey Girls" who had pushed relentlessly for an independent investigation, and who had personally grilled Kissinger about his refusal to disclose his list of foreign clients. They had one urgent plea, Kean says: "It's got to be transparent. Don't just go and hide in a dark room. You've got to share everything with the American people. I said, ‘We will.'"
He was true to his word. In 12 public hearings over a period of 15 months, the country's political leaders and intelligence chiefs were called to account and bureaucrats fumbled for excuses. And the whole spectacle was televised -- even as the administration tried everything in its power to kill off, tie up, delay, and ignore the commission's search for the facts.
