Jersey hustler

[rusty charly]

Until very recently, Tom Kean Sr. was one of the most admired figures in American public life, having garnered praise for bipartisan fairness and dedication as co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission. As governor of New Jersey and later as president of Drew University, he enjoyed friendships and support across party lines, building his reputation as a gentleman and statesman who cared more for policy than politics. He seemed to have achieved great popularity for the best of reasons.

But now, in the aftermath of "The Path to 9/11" -- the heavily fictionalized and politically distorted docudrama that he served as a paid advisor for and publicly defended -- it is becoming sadly obvious that his integrity was overrated. For money and a moment of Hollywood glitz, he sold out what should have been the crowning achievement of a career in public service.

By signing up as an "executive producer" of the ABC miniseries -- for a fee he still refuses to disclose -- Kean rented his good name to a right-wing Hollywood cabal seeking to malign Bill Clinton and exonerate George W. Bush, with blatant disregard for the facts uncovered by the commission at taxpayer expense. He still has not explained why he never asked the producers to honor the bipartisan nature of the commission's work, which they might have accomplished by hiring a Democratic commissioner to vet their script. He has not explained why he approved a script and a movie that simply invented (and sometimes improvised) scenes to tar Clinton and to puff up Bush. Nor has he explained why he, as an educator, promoted this confection of historical fraud to high school teachers across the nation.

Thanks to his supposed probity, Kean became the leading witness for the purportedly benign intentions of the film's producers. Back in July, after ABC screened "The Path to 9/11" for members of the Television Critics Association, he fielded the critics' questions on a panel that included scriptwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh, director David Cunningham and producer Marc Platt. According to the July 19 transcript of that session, he repeatedly made false and misleading comments to bolster the production's credibility.

Asked whether he was "totally happy with the miniseries" or whether there was "anything you'd still like to change about it," Kean replied: "Little changes here or there maybe, but, look, the spirit of this is absolutely correct. This is the story of how it happened." He went on to say that he and Nowrasteh had been "talking almost since day one," while Platt lauded him as "the guardian of accuracy ... we stayed accurate in our dramatic portrayal and that we communicated the true events and the essence of the report, the essence of the events as they occurred."

While Kean also claimed that he had corrected inaccuracies during filming, with the full cooperation of the producers, he took the opportunity during the panel discussion to reiterate the film's central falsehood. "I mean, we had chances during the Clinton administration to actually get bin Laden!" Kean exclaimed. "I mean we had him in our sights, and we didn't pull the trigger. We didn't pull the trigger. The CIA had him a number of times and didn't pull the trigger."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2006/09/15/kean/

Nowhere does the 9/11 Commission report make that bald assertion -- and as the controversy over the film escalated, Kean backed away from his confident assertions of "accuracy." In a conference call with journalists the week that the movie aired, he admitted that portions of the script had been based on sources other than the commission's report -- which meant that he and the producers had misled the public and the press from the beginning.