This entry was posted on 8/19/2007 3:12 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
Recently, the Washington Post reported that the eagerly-awaited report from General Petraeus on the "truth on the ground" in Iraq would actually be written--not by Petraeus at all--but by the White House. In fact, so eager is the White House to control the information they want the world to hear about this war that they even attempted to prevent Petraeus from making a public report to Congress, preferring instead for him to meet behind closed doors with a select few from high-ranking committees, under the veil of secrecy. For security purposes, don'tcha know.
I know all about ghostwriting. I once wrote a book that way, so let me enlighten you on how it is done in truth and how this White House is likely to do it. It all has to do with presentation.
A few years ago, I had the privilege of writing a true-crime, called Faces of Evil, with a forensic sketch artist from the Houston Police Dept. by the name of Lois Gibson. It is to Lois's credit that she insisted I be given a co-author by-line rather than doing what most non-writer professionals do with memoirs, which is have it ghost-written. Since I'd published ten thrillers under my own name by that time, she felt it would actually help sales for people to know I'd helped her write it.
Lois is a gifted artist and has had a very long and distinguished career, having helped bring down more than a thousand murderers, rapists, and child-molesters in her years with the Houston PD and consulting with the F.B.I. and John Walsh's landmark program, America's Most Wanted.
But she couldn't write worth a damn, and she'd be the first to tell you that.
She did, however, collect a great deal of documentation on the crimes we chose to write about, which she provided to me, along with copies of her sketches and contact information for the investigating detectives and sometimes, with their cooperation, the victims themselves, if they survived.
Then, she would send me voluminous e-mails detailing her own experience with and memories of working with victims and detectives on these cases.
When I say, "voluminous," I'm not kidding. A bit of a compulsive talker in real life, she would send pages and pages of run-on sentences with very few paragraph breaks. When I told her of the necessity of including details so that I could bring the scene alive for our readers, she sent DETAIL--I mean, the pattern on the carpet, the outfit she was wearing and why she chose those clothes that day, and on and on. She wrote with an urgent sort of stream-of-consciousness style, and would go off on tangents as memories were provoked, that may or may not have had anything whatsoever to do with the case at hand.
Lois trusted me, my talents and training and skills, to take the jumbled mess and put it into what we called "writerly words." I would cut out huge portions of narrative that were irrelevant to the story at hand, ask questions to clarify what was relevant, conduct extensive interviews with detectives to flesh out the story, and apply my skills as a suspense thriller author to turn her rambling remembrances and my interviews with the detectives involved as well as dry crime reports and spotty newspaper articles into a rip-roaring collection of tales and--we think, anyway--a damn good read.
Sometimes, even though I was writing in Lois's voice, I would give to her my own experiences--say, a book I'd read that had a profound influence on me and that was relevant to a particular case--and present them in the narrative as Lois's own experience. (Never anything specific to the case itself; only personal observations.) This was done with her full cooperation.
Interwoven into the narrative was Lois's own inspiring story, how she overcame a vicious rape as a young woman and turned it into the defining moment of her life, using her empathy and her own experience to draw out victims of violent crime and encourage them to talk about the worst moment of their lives. She was often able to get far more information from them than they had divulged to detectives, and the investigators came to regard her as an invaluable tool in the investigation. All the detectives with whom I spoke had the greatest respect and affection for Lois.
But oh, what a challenge my job was as ghost-writer. Of course, it was my intention from the start to honor and bring respect to the victims, and to also spotlight dogged detective work in solving their cases, but when it came to Lois, it was my job to present her in the most positive light I possibly could.
For example, in one of the cases we highlighted in the chapter, "Some People Just Need Killin'", Lois had been called to the Intensive Care hospital bedside of a fine police officer by the name of Paul Deason, who, on a routine traffic stop at two in the morning, had been shot in the face and the back by his assailant, then run over, then dragged beneath the car for sixty feet.
This brave man had then staggered to his feet, made it back to the patrol car, radioed in his attack, and stayed conscious until officers arrived so that he could give them a description of the suspect and his vehicle. He was not expected to live through the night, and Lois had to hold her sketch pad upside down over the bed to show him the sketch as he drifted in and out of consciousness, communicating by eyeblinks.
The resulting sketch was so miraculous that you'd have to see it to believe it, because it's almost an exact match to the suspect's mug shot, and a vicious killer was consequently taken off the streets. (He'd been speeding in the first place because he'd just tried to murder a young woman who had escaped his clutches.)
In her e-mail to me, Lois opened her narrative with about three pages about how she is a sleepwalker, how sleepwalking runs in the family, and how, on one sleepwalking incident, she'd accidentally sat on a fork in her son's room. (Don't ask.) The puncture wound had gotten severely infected, and when she went to see the doctor, he warned her that she needed absolute bedrest or that they would have to amputate the leg. (This is what she said.) In the elevator on the way out of the building, she was paged about Deason's case. Of course, she went to his bedside rather than home.
Now, I'm not saying that Lois didn't exhibit a fair amount of heroism herself in ignoring her own pain by doing the Deason sketch. But the way I saw it, this rambling tale completely deflated the unbelievable courage and incredible heroism Officer Deason himself had displayed in unimaginable circumstances.
So I took Lois's narrative, and I reduced her entire rambling preface to one sentence: "A freak accident at home had left me with a serious puncture wound in my upper thigh."
The rest of the chapter detailed the horrendous attack on Patrol Officer Deason--who, by the way, recovered fully and continues to protect and serve the good citizens of Houston to this day--the high drama of the hospital sketching session, in which Lois had to bulldog her way through physicians who didn't want to allow her into his room, and the pursuit and capture and adjudication of Deason's attacker, a scumbag by the name of Donald Eugene Dutton.
As I wrote each chapter, Lois always read the work in progress--as did the detectives in each case--and again, to her credit, she suggested very few changes to work I had done. Those changes nearly always had to do with small details. She never questioned me when I cut out chunks of her e-mail; she trusted me to know what I was doing. And in the long run, we had a book of which we could both be proud.
Now, I'd like to say that the White House intends to rewrite Petraeus's report because he's not that good of a writer, but since the man has a PhD., I think we can rest assured that is not the problem here.
What the White House intends to do is much like what I did with Lois's wandering rambles down memory lane; whereas I attempted to put Lois in the best possible light and make her look as good as I could without sacrificing truth in the process--the White House intends to MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK AS GOOD AS THEY CAN, to SHED THE MOST POSITIVE LIGHT possible on the report as originally presented to them by the general.
Truth will, no doubt, be sacrificed along the way.
The word is that the White House has been rendered uncomfortable by Petraeus's own comments to the media, in which he's had the audacity, for example, of claiming that he considers the Congress to be a co-equal branch of government to the executive branch "at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue."
We can't have that, now can we?
So what the White House intends to do is take the bare facts of his report, and first, weed out uncomfortable truths they don't want publicized.
They will do this by proclaiming that those facts are TOP SECRET and that it would JEOPARDIZE NATIONAL SECURITY to reveal them.
Then they will take any and all claims of success--no matter how spotty or paltry--and play them up with all kinds of glowing "writerly words," taking a bare-bones, dry report of mixed results and rendering into a rip-roaring page-turner of GLORY AND SUCCESS, amen.
Anything they truly don't want the public to see, will simply disappear, much like Lois's sleepwalking story. It won't be relevant, you see, to what they want to accomplish, which is brainwash the public and, by extension, Republicans in congress who have grown restive and threatening of late.
Because they know that we're on to them now, they will actually permit tiny smidgeons of bad news to be included, here and there--but only QUALIFIED bad news, that can be "updated" later on because, really, we can't know exactly how well the surge is doing just yet, can we? We must wait until right before the presidential election, and then declare victory in the way best positioned to help the Republican candidate and smear all those hateful unpatriotic Democrats who said it couldn't be done, eh?
But we won't start pulling out, of course. Not more than a brigade here or there. Because we will know that if we start pulling out in force, the civil war we've been babysitting will break out much like kids misbehave when the teacher leaves the schoolroom, which will then expose us as the frauds we really are. Much better to put it off until Jan. of '09 and let the next guy lose this war. Then HISTORY will show it really was not our fault, was it?
Like the title of a new book puts it: Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Us.
Petraeus will testify in public because Congress and the American people will insist upon it. And he will present the report that the White House has written. When asked questions, he will give the answers they want him to give.
Then the administration and their hacks at FOX and O'Reilly and Rush and all the rest of Satan's minions will go on and on about how the "generals on the ground" have stated, once and for all, in their report that we are indeed WINNING THE WAR.
Mission accomplished, eh?
The beauty of having a ghostwriter for your own life story is that they can make you look so much better than you really present yourself in your own self-narrative. They can literarily air-brush the fault lines and moles and pock-marks and make you look, well, heroic. Much like the planners for Bush's campaign commercial that never got to air--the actual "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier flightsuit hero-moment--deliberately timed it so he would be presenting his speech beneath the banner printed up by the White House during what advertisers call "the golden hour"--that moment just before sunset when golden light haloes everything. Almost angelic.
Damn shame they didn't get to use it in 2004, huh?
When the White House ghost-writes Petraeus's report, you can expect the same kinds of ringing endorsements we've gotten from journalists and congresspeople who've gone on tightly-controlled one-week "credibility" excursions to Iraq, where the DoD acts as travel agent and generals as guides for the tourists, taking them only to the spectacular photo-op sights and keeping them well clear of the slums.
The big question is: When the "book tour" publicity jaunt gets underway in September and Petraeus makes the rounds of the talk shows and press conferences and Bush holds up their "book" and beams--how will the "media," and moreso, the public receive this fandango?
For one thing, will they persist in referring to it as "The Petraeus Report"? Or will they refer to it factually, as "The White House Report"? Because by using the original term, they are saying, in effect, that Petraeus wrote that story without a White House ghostwriter, which will infuse it with that much more heft and weight.
Will they rave on and on about the glorious patriotic story, its twists and turns and adventure? Or will they ask to see the source information; will they dig down to the bare facts, the unvarnished truth, the un-ghostwritten part? The wandering around in the dark and sitting on a fork part?
And if they DO dig down...and recent history holds out little likelihood of it...but if they do...What, then, will they find?
What is going on in the parts of Iraq that the "tourists" don't see?
What is the truth that the White House wants to gloss over, cover up, delete, and obscure?
Why can't General David Petraeus, PhD, write his own damn story???
