Julian Borger
Commissions of enquiry have been part of the American political scene long enough to have accrued their own rituals, from the selection of well-connected pensioners, to the quickening drumbeat of leaks, to the orchestrated climax of publication day, when the grand conclusion is transformed into a product - and the ad-men move in.
In the case of the Iraq Study Group, the product is a road-map claiming to show the way out of Iraq, sold under the sort of slogan normally chosen by stockbroker firms trying to make themselves seem less fusty than they are. "The Way Forward - A New Approach" conveys the same mix of reassuring familiarity and calculating boldness.
Formally the report was commissioned by Congress as a barbed gift for President Bush, who accepted with all the grace he could muster. But the real market is the public. The 9/11 commission report became a bestseller, and the ISG clearly hopes to match those sales, to help generate the kind of momentum behind their ideas that makes them difficult to ignore.
The roll-out for The Way Forward is being handled by Edelman, a global public relations firm with a speciality in crisis management and the motto "Pioneer Thinking". Within an hour of the launch on Capitol Hill, Edelman went to work, splitting the panel into five matched pairs, each with a Democrat and a Republican.
The pairing process must have been painful for some - a fairly transparent measure of worth reminiscent of picking teams in school playgrounds. Someone has to be chosen last. Of course, James Baker and Lee Hamilton were the lead pair and they got the easiest gig - Larry King and his cotton-wool questions on CNN. The second most popular pairing appeared to be Leon Panetta and Larry Eagleburger. The others were stabled in Edelman's expensive offices - all wood, glass and thick carpets - where a line of journalists were ushered in a group at a time to hear inside details of how a consensus was forged.
My group was given Edwin Meese and Vernon Jordan. Neither is any stranger to commissions. Meese set up an ill-starred panel to investigate pornography in 1986 when he was Ronald Reagan's attorney general. It discovered there was a lot of it about, and had Playboy removed from the shelves, at least for a while. He also had some explaining to do over Iran-Contra.
Jordan is best remembered in recent years for his appearance before the Starr investigation which suspected him of trying to find Monica Lewinsky a lucrative job in New York on his friend Bill Clinton's behalf, in the hope of shutting her up.
Inside their cubicle, the pair went through the patter they must have repeated many times in the course of the day. "We've both been around this town a long time," Jordan said, comparing grey hairs and bald pates. He rued the loss of civility in Washington and promised the ISG and its bipartisan bonhomie marked the beginnings of comeback.
They gave the inside scoop on the president's reaction to the report that morning. He had not said much apparently but there were other clues.
"The body language said to me he was going to look at it with keen interest," Meese said, and Jordan could not have agreed more.
"Meese is right on target. The president was open, interested," he claimed. "His body language was aaaallll right."
And that was it. One Edelman employee signalled through the glass door to our minder that the next group of journalists had arrived and we were ushered out. As we left we saw another matched pair of panellists, William Perry and Alan Simpson, briefing another group of journalists in an identical cubicle next door. We peered in, attempting to decide whether our rivals were hearing anything controversial, and whether their duo was higher ranking than ours, and what that might say about us. It was hard to tell.
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