Where Does the Buck really Stop?

By Jules Witcover
Tribune Media Services
   WASHINGTON — President Obama’s pro-forma acceptance of responsibility for the latest failure to connect the dots in national security acknowledges Harry Truman’s famous declaration that the buck always stops at the desk in the Oval Office.

In purely political terms, its invocation invites voters if they choose to take out their wrath or disappointment on the president in the next election. But the mea culpa can also win support for the contrite leader who volunteers it, as the young President John F. Kennedy found in his first weeks in the White House.

In a news conference after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by U.S.-supported exiles in April 1961, JFK observed that, “there’s an old saying that victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” Researchers never could find the genesis of that “old saying” and Kennedy reportedly later admitted he made it up.

In any event, this particular “orphan” actually saw his public approval go up after taking the blame for the Bay of Pigs, which actually had been planned in the previous Eisenhower administration. Just prior to the invasion Kennedy had 78 percent support in the Gallup Poll, and it rose to 83 percent thereafter.

As for the validity of JFK’s “old saying,” there’s contradictory evidence in history that a president who suffers a defeat always bears the brunt of the ensuing criticism. Many histories of the Bay of Pigs fiasco have fingered the Joint Chiefs of Staff for cooking up an inadequate invasion plan, as well as charging that JFK got cold feet in failing to send air support to the overwhelmed exiles.

Later, while publicly taking the blame, Kennedy privately castigated the CIA and heads rolled both there and at the Pentagon. The generals never quite regained his early confidence or at least reliance on them, and in the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis he rebuffed the most belligerent advice from the likes of General Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the United States Air Force.

In the latest case of the buck formally stopping at President Obama’s desk, and his mea culpa for the failure to connect the dots in the near miss at the Detroit airport, he is clearly not an “orphan” either. While no single culprit or even a few others have been identified, the president’s orders for quick improvement are an acknowledgment not simply of “systemic” failure, but of human ineffectiveness.

Obama’s quickness in declaring there will be no finger-pointing at blame in his administration is a noble gesture. But it isn’t likely to silence critical questions, and not only from Republican critics, about how nobody recognized the glaring red flags in this case and acted on them.

The presidential orders for filling the gaps in the hugely difficult task of sorting out wheat from the chaff of millions of informational tidbits seem mostly in the realm of analytical belt-tightening. Long after the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission on connecting the dots were made, the system should have been adequately upgraded by now.

The Christmas Day near miss, however, has been a stark reminder to the country that for all the focus on the war in Afghanistan, America’s most legitimate adversary remains al-Qaida. And this latest incident has underscored that the terrorist threat from al-Qaida has spread well beyond the main military front in the Afghan-Pakistan region.

What is now being identified as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula broadens the challenge of keeping this country safe, and further validates Obama’s decision in going forward in Afghanistan to identify al-Qaida as the prime target there and wherever else it exists.

It’s obvious that more attention now must be paid to Yemen, from which the so-called underwear bomber came, and to bolstering supportive governmental elements there. But the United States can’t be diverted to any new nation-building missions.

If nothing else has been achieved by Obama’s taking responsibility for the close call on Christmas Day, he has emphatically rebuffed former Vice President Dick Cheney’s ludicrous charge that he has been “trying to pretend we are not at war” against terrorism.

Jules Witcover is a columnist for Tribune Media Services and he can be reached a juleswitcover@earthlink.net. His latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, “Very Strange Bedfellows,” has just been published by Public Affairs Press.

Where Does the buck really Stop?

By Jules Witcover
Tribune Media Services
   WASHINGTON — President Obama’s pro-forma acceptance of responsibility for the latest failure to connect the dots in national security acknowledges Harry Truman’s famous declaration that the buck always stops at the desk in the Oval Office.

In purely political terms, its invocation invites voters if they choose to take out their wrath or disappointment on the president in the next election. But the mea culpa can also win support for the contrite leader who volunteers it, as the young President John F. Kennedy found in his first weeks in the White House.

In a news conference after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by U.S.-supported exiles in April 1961, JFK observed that, “there’s an old saying that victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” Researchers never could find the genesis of that “old saying” and Kennedy reportedly later admitted he made it up.

In any event, this particular “orphan” actually saw his public approval go up after taking the blame for the Bay of Pigs, which actually had been planned in the previous Eisenhower administration. Just prior to the invasion Kennedy had 78 percent support in the Gallup Poll, and it rose to 83 percent thereafter.

As for the validity of JFK’s “old saying,” there’s contradictory evidence in history that a president who suffers a defeat always bears the brunt of the ensuing criticism. Many histories of the Bay of Pigs fiasco have fingered the Joint Chiefs of Staff for cooking up an inadequate invasion plan, as well as charging that JFK got cold feet in failing to send air support to the overwhelmed exiles.

Later, while publicly taking the blame, Kennedy privately castigated the CIA and heads rolled both there and at the Pentagon. The generals never quite regained his early confidence or at least reliance on them, and in the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis he rebuffed the most belligerent advice from the likes of General Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the United States Air Force.

In the latest case of the buck formally stopping at President Obama’s desk, and his mea culpa for the failure to connect the dots in the near miss at the Detroit airport, he is clearly not an “orphan” either. While no single culprit or even a few others have been identified, the president’s orders for quick improvement are an acknowledgment not simply of “systemic” failure, but of human ineffectiveness.

Obama’s quickness in declaring there will be no finger-pointing at blame in his administration is a noble gesture. But it isn’t likely to silence critical questions, and not only from Republican critics, about how nobody recognized the glaring red flags in this case and acted on them.

The presidential orders for filling the gaps in the hugely difficult task of sorting out wheat from the chaff of millions of informational tidbits seem mostly in the realm of analytical belt-tightening. Long after the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission on connecting the dots were made, the system should have been adequately upgraded by now.

The Christmas Day near miss, however, has been a stark reminder to the country that for all the focus on the war in Afghanistan, America’s most legitimate adversary remains al-Qaida. And this latest incident has underscored that the terrorist threat from al-Qaida has spread well beyond the main military front in the Afghan-Pakistan region.

What is now being identified as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula broadens the challenge of keeping this country safe, and further validates Obama’s decision in going forward in Afghanistan to identify al-Qaida as the prime target there and wherever else it exists.

It’s obvious that more attention now must be paid to Yemen, from which the so-called underwear bomber came, and to bolstering supportive governmental elements there. But the United States can’t be diverted to any new nation-building missions.

If nothing else has been achieved by Obama’s taking responsibility for the close call on Christmas Day, he has emphatically rebuffed former Vice President Dick Cheney’s ludicrous charge that he has been “trying to pretend we are not at war” against terrorism.

Jules Witcover is a columnist for Tribune Media Services and he can be reached a juleswitcover@earthlink.net. His latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, “Very Strange Bedfellows,” has just been published by Public Affairs Press.

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