Not that I'm criticizing: I've used that technique myself in two novels.
Still, let's not be too hard on Kroft. In American political culture, the president's word is never to be called into question, and especially not during a Presidential Soulful Chat in the Roosevelt Room. Imagine the reaction -- the calls, the emails, the outcry -- if Kroft had pulled the president up short and said, "Wait a minute, Mr. President. Are you telling me that you sent two helicopters of men to raid a place when after several months of hi-tech surveillance no trace of Osama bin Laden had been found? You sent those men on the strength of a story about a bin Laden courier?" That would have been Kroft's last 60 Minutes segment.
Steve Kroft knows how to read the landscape. His job was to pour the syrup, and he had an XL bottle of it:
KROFT: Was it hard keeping your focus?PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yes. Yeah.
KROFT: Did you have to suppress the urge to tell someone? Did you want to tell somebody? Did you want to tell Michelle? Did you tell Michelle?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know one of the great successes of this operation was that we were able to keep this thing secret. And it's a testimony to how seriously everybody took this operation and the understanding that any leak could end up not only compromising the mission, but killing some of the guys that we were sending in there.
What a sweet, cuddly man, our president is -- Kroft too, since he let Obama dodge the question about Michelle. And that bit about "keeping focus" -- that speaks for itself. Can you imagine Kroft asking a dishonest stock broker if it was hard keeping his focus while robbing a 70-year-old lady of her pension?
And then there was the nonsense about the dead bin Laden photos circulated in the White House and deemed too ugly for public release. And here the exchange between Kroft and Obama truly smells of collusion:
KROFT: Did you see the pictures?PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yes.
KROFT: What was your reaction when you saw them?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: It was him.
That was Obama's reaction? What an odd thing to say. If you had asked me about my reaction to a photo of a dead man shot in the head, I would have said, "Horrible. It made me sick." And if Abbottabad had been a real raid -- fully, not to say easily, documented -- and if there were no question that they had taken bin Laden, that is roughly what Obama would have said.
Yet Obama's "reaction" was to use the question to insist it was really bin Laden. Which says to me that it wasn't. Apart from the gaps in the official story is the evidence that points to the probable death of bin Laden at the end of 2001. But skepticism, in American political culture, has to await other venues and other days. Kroft said nothing; Obama had made his point.
And Obama, who knows a thing or two about making a good impression, continued to make hay while the 60 Minutes sun was shining:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: That's not who we are. You know, we don't trot out this stuff as trophies. You know, the fact of the matter is this was somebody who was deserving of the justice that he received. And I think Americans and people around the world are glad that he's gone. But we don't need to spike the football.
Which he himself had just spiked, with Steve Kroft's help.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
