By Moe White

Last week I was listening to radio personality Bill Press’s talk show. The subject was the failed Dec. 25 “underwear bombing,” and Press was lambasting President Obama for not firing the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair. He fulminated that Blair’s office was created specifically to pull together information from all the different spy agencies — CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, and the rest of the alphabet. “That’s his job!” said Press. “That’s why his job exists! And he didn’t do it!” To Press, Blair failed miserably at doing the one thing he’s hired to do, so he should be fired. And Press is a pro-Obama liberal!

And I thought to myself, “Wait a minute. For all I know, we’ve stopped fifty other guys trying the same thing over the past year.” Maybe not. Maybe only one, or a few, or maybe a hundred. And if we have, there’s no way we’d know anything about it. That’s because spying, or secret agent work, or successful interference with an enemy’s operations, succeeds ONLY as long as it’s secret. If we learn about it, so does the enemy, and therefore they change their tactics, putting us back at square one!

The next day I read an Associated Press story about a study of young American terrorists — the ones who are born or naturalized here and grow up here. According to the study, 70 percent of the conspiracies they hatched were discovered by law enforcement agencies before anyone got hurt. I didn’t know that; all I knew about were a few of the other 30 percent — like the Virginia-born boys who went to Pakistan, or the Army Major who went on a rampage in Texas.

Except when a capture becomes public before the fact, like with the Virginians, or after the massacre, as in Fort Hood, the only way we find out about successful operations is if someone in authority says, “We’ve stopped thirty-eight plots in the past six months.” When we hear that, we have to take it on faith — and on the realization that, sure enough, we haven’t been bombed or had planes taken down or had the water supply contaminated.

That’s what Dick Cheney used to do. Every once in a while he’d come out of some undisclosed location in his Darth Vader guise and hint that “our” secret teams were discovering scores of “their” secret plots and nipping them in the bud. And he’d raise the “terror” codes from yellow to orange just before a crucial mid-term election or Senate vote to ensure the Republicans won. Or, from time to time, he’d lower them, with a reminder that all we needed to do to stay safe was trust him — and give up our freedom, cede him our privacy, hand over our liberties, in order to feed his paranoia and satisfy his hunger for power.

Well, we threw that mindset out of office a year ago. We chose a more positive worldview, a mood of hope. So maybe we need to step back and give Dennis Blair a break. Let the president and his team look into this failure, figure out what went wrong, and — using all sorts of inside, secret information that we have no access to — decide what needs fixing and whether Blair is doing a good job or not. The president doesn’t want an incompetent (“You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie”) in that office, and I think we can trust him to get the man out of there if he’s no good at fulfilling his responsibilities. On the other hand, if he is good at it, we probably won’t ever know — we’ll just sleep soundly in our beds.
My conclusion is that, at least in the field of national security, our failures are made public, while our successes, by necessity, are hidden from the world. How different that is from our daily lives!

Or is it? Aren’t we all judged by what goes wrong rather than what we do right? It’s no news when a community volunteer continues volunteering, or a businessman grows his business and hires more employees. But when you learn that the businessman went to prison as a young man, or the volunteer embezzled funds from an employer twenty years ago, that’s news. The elected official caught cheating on his taxes, the pastor with a mistress, the judge with a long history of covered-up speeding tickets — they’re all fodder for endless unpleasant news coverage.

On the flip side, there’s the occasional “bad” guy with a string of offenses from teen years through his forties, who is redeemed by a good deed — pulling a drowning woman out of the river, saving a child from a burning building, or just living straight for the rest of his life. But those stories show up in the religion or human-interest pages of newspapers, not as television news features (unless a TV movie is made about it).

News coverage drives a lot of the cynicism and doubt among the population, just as the bad apple — a dishonest public servant or pedophile priest — ruins the whole bushel in the public mind. But I look at Italy, with its 61 governments in the 65 years since the end of World War II; and at the South American coup-ocracies of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s; and at California with its recalls and initiatives; and I wonder, are we going down that path, where the loudest, most strident voices in the media and political spheres can delegitimize an elected government after less than a year in power? Do we want our new administration to face its Waterloo before the first anniversary of its inauguration? Is it in our national interest to follow the Viet Nam path: “destroy the country in order to save it?”

I’m in favor of returning some balance to news coverage and helping the public regain its trust in our elected officials. Yes, there are always going to be those who abuse that trust, and there’s good reason for some cynicism. In this, I vote with Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

But unless we want to Balkanize America, we need to give the Obama administration continued support — including when we disagree with it — and to give officials the benefit of the doubt. They love our country as much as we do, and they are doing everything they can to protect us from international threats, a still tottering economy, and terrible inequities in incomes, health, wealth, education, opportunity, and other measures of equality. Let’s cut them some slack!