Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent Read Free

Washington to Stonewall Jackson to Douglas MacArthur believed that, too.
When did that become controversial?
I thought.
    Roston went on. “You’ve said that the majority of the people in America didn’t vote for Bush, but God put him in there.”
    In my head, I’m thinking,
Come on, Roston, the entire left wing of America believes that the majority of the people didn’t put George W. Bush in the White House. Bush “stole” the election, remember?
    But I said, “Yes, sir, I believe that.”
    Roston continued, “You’ve said that this is a Christian nation.”
    “Well, that’s just a historical fact. It also happens to be an English-speaking nation. Those are just facts of our country’s history.”
    “You’re an evangelical,” Roston said.
    It was an accusation. His tone would have fit easily with “You’re a Nazi,” or “You’re a Klansman.”
    “Yes, I’m an evangelical.”
    “You’re a public official now. You’ve cast this war in religious terms. And you’re the man who is being held accountable for finding these high-value targets who are Islamic leaders.”
    “That’s just not true. You’re just wrong on that.”
    The truth was I would’ve been much happier if he had been right about the HVT part. I had chased HVTs all over the world, and I was good at it. I would’ve enjoyed hunting bad guys a lot more than pushing paper. But there was no way I would tell him that because it had become crystal clear that Aram Roston of NBC News was going to report the story he wanted to report, no matter what I said.
    I decided I’d better at least make it official.
    “Tell you what you need to do,” I said. “You need to call the public affairs office.”
    Again, he appeared not to have heard me. “I’d like to come interview you.”
    “You need to call public affairs, and if they clear it, I’ll sit down and have a talk with you.”
    He would keep agreeing to talk to public affairs, but would then ask another question.
    Again and again, I repeated, “Look, you need to call public affairs. You need to get them involved in this, and then I’ll talk to you.”
    We hung up. But the next day, Cambone’s military assistant walked into my office and sat down across from me. “Aram Roston called again,” she said. “He still wants to come and interview you. He says the story is going to air tonight on NBC.”
    “Has he talked with public affairs?”
    “I asked him if he had. He said no.”
    Of course he said no
, I thought. I wondered if Roston was playing an old reporter’s game: put in a couple of calls, but don’t take the steps that would actually result in a real interview.
    “Tell him to call public affairs and I’ll be glad to talk to him,” I told Cambone’s assistant.
    But, of course, Roston never did call public affairs. That would’ve ruined the story—which, I would learn by sundown, had already been written.

4
    SINCE MOVING into the E Ring, I’d kept pretty late hours, so it wasn’t unusual that I was still at the office when the
NBC Nightly News
aired. My office opened off an administrative area where the deputy undersecretaries’ secretaries had their desks. They had a television bolted to the wall out there that was usually tuned to the news. At six-thirty, I stepped out of my office to see what Aram Roston had managed to cobble together. Tish Long, the civilian deputy undersecretary for policy and resources, was already standing there, looking up at the set.
    In a segue from international coverage, Tom Brokaw said, “Back in this country, there’s a strange new development in the war on terror involving one of the leaders of a secretive new Pentagon unit formed to coordinate intelligence on terrorists and help hunt down Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and other high-profile targets.”
    Secretive new Pentagon unit?
I rolled my eyes at Tish. Calling the new undersecretary job a “secretive new Pentagon unit” was like calling a new variety of apple a “mysterious