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“It Reads Like a Novel”: The 9/11 Commission Report and the American Reading Public

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2007

CRAIG A. WARREN
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Abstract

When published in July 2004, the 9/11 Commission Report surprised readers with its accessible prose and narrative power. The report won the respect of the American public as much for its literary qualities as for the findings of the 9/11 commissioners. This article argues that the success of the 9/11 Report depended on its ability to challenge literary classification, and to bring down the walls between personal and national experience. More effectively than any other literary work of its era, the 9/11 Report wed the fortunes of a weakened American government to those of a wounded citizenry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , December 2007 , pp. 533 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004); http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/index.htm; Associated Press, “Tuck, Boyle Win National Book Awards,” CNN.com, 18 Nov. 2004, http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/books/11/18/nationalbookawards.ap/.

2 See US Government, The 9/11 Congressional Report: Report of the Joint Inquiry into Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 – By the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (July 2003).

3 May, Ernest R., “When Government Writes History: The 9-11 Commission Report,” New Republic, 23 May 2005, 30Google Scholar.

4 Frank Davies, “U.S. Report on 9/11 to be ‘Explosive,’” Miami Herald, 10 July 2003; Heidi Benson, “9/11 Report Creates a Stir in Bookstores,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 Aug. 2004, A2.

5 Carney, James, “If You Don't Have Time to Read It … ,” Time, 2 Aug. 2004, 60Google Scholar; Review of The 9/11 Commission Report, Publishers Weekly Reviews, 16 Aug. 2004, 56; Hardball, MSNBC, 8–15 Sept. 2004.

6 Benson, A2. Posner, Richard A., “The 9/11 Report: A Dissent,” New York Times Book Review, 29 Aug. 2004, 9Google Scholar; Heidi Benson, “‘The 9/11 Commission Report’ Is a Compelling Read. But Does it Deserve a Literary Reward?,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12 Nov. 2004, E1. Kevin Boyle won the 2004 National Book Award in Nonfiction for his work Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004).

7 Richard Bernstein, Out of the Blue: A Narrative of September 11, 2001 (New York: Times Books, 2002); Der Spiegel Magazine, Inside 9-11: What Really Happened (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2002); William Langewiesche, American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005).

8 Tellingly, the success of the 9/11 Report prompted both the NBC and ABC television networks to adapt the book for competing television mini-series. NBC ultimately canceled its project, citing ABC's progress on the rival program. ABC shot most of its six-hour, $40-million series in Toronto, and cast several film and television stars in leading roles. The race to translate the Report to film reflected the work's narrative integrity and name recognition – qualities highly prized by network and studio executives intent on adapting bestselling literature for the screen. See “ABC Finds Heroes for its 9/11 Miniseries,” Variety.com, 28 July 2005, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117926637?categoryid=1878&cs=1; and Jim Slotek, “9/11 Miniseries Filming in Toronto,” Jam! Showbiz: Television, 27 July 2005, http://jam.canoe.ca/Television/2005/07/27/1148853.html.

9 Michael Shulan, “Images of Democracy,” Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs, http://hereisnewyork.org/about/democracy.asp; “About Here is New York,” Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs, http://hereisnewyork.org/about/; Shulan, “Images of Democracy,” http://hereisnewyork.org/about/democracy.asp.

10 9/11 Commission Report, 48, 364. Aaron Mannes, “The Book on 9/11: The Usefulness of the 9/11 Commission's Report,” National Review Online, 3 August 2004, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/mannes200408030840.asp. John Updike, “The Great I Am: Robert Alter's New Translation of the Pentateuch,” The New Yorker, 1 Nov. 2004, 100.

11 Benson, “9/11 Report Creates a Stir,” A2.

12 May, 30. May suggested that, to some extent, “the concept of the report as a narrative history influenced the recruitment of staff. … Zelikow recruited others qualified to work on the kind of report we had envisioned.” The staff ultimately included published historians, avid readers of history, and at least one member who had prepared historical case studies “for classroom use.”

13 108th United States Congress, Public Law 108-289, “An Act: To provide for the issuance of a coin to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement,” 6 Aug. 2004; “The 9/11 Commissions' Report is a Runaway Bestseller,” The Economist, 7 Aug. 2004, Books & Art section.

14 “Customer Reviews,” The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Authorized Edition) (Paperback), by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0393326713/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/103-2170404-1563866?%5Fencoding=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&n=283155.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Philip Kennicott, “A Novel Approach,” Washington Post, 1 Aug. 2004, B01.

20 Elizabeth Drew, “Pinning the Blame,” New York Review of Books, 51, 14 (23 Sept. 2004), 6–12; Review of The 9/11 Commission Report, Publishers Weekly Reviews; 56, Crampton, Thomas, “If 9/11 Report Wins Award, Will 90 Authors Rise?” New York Times, 24 October 2004, 21Google Scholar.

21 David Kipen, “Report's Weight is in its Details: 9/11 Report is More a Cautionary Tale than a Thriller,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 Aug. 2004.

22 David Johnston and Douglas Jehl, “Report Cites Lapses across Government and Two Presidencies,” New York Times, 23 July 2004; “The al-Qaeda Code: The 9/11 Commission's Report is a Runaway Bestseller,” The Economist, 5 Aug. 2004; Jana Kraus, review of The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, MostlyFiction.com, 16 Sept. 2004, http://mostlyfiction.com/adventure/ncta.htm.

23 Kurt Nimmo, “9/11 Whitewash Commission Report: A Great Fantasy Novel,” Another Day in the Empire, 24 July 2004, http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/index.php?p=252; Bev Conover, “The 9-11 Commission Report: The Greatest Whitewash since the Warren Commission's Report,” Online Journal, 26 July 2004, http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/072604Conover/072604conover.html; Benson, “‘The 9/11 Commission Report’ Is a Compelling Read,” E1.

24 Angela K. Brown, “Taking Note of 9/11 Report, Bush Considers His Options,” 27 July 2004, Associated Press; Elias Davidsson, “An Unresolved Mystery: The Mass Murder of 9/11,” Centre for Research on Globalisation, 29 July 2004, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/DAV407A.html.

25 The Pentagon Papers (abridged), ed. George C. Herring (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993); Watergate Hearings, New York Times editors (New York: Viking, 1973); Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976); The Starr Report: The Findings of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr on President Clinton and the Lewinsky Affair (New York: PublicAffairs, 1998).

26 Attica: The Official Report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica (New York: Bantam, 1972). The report was nominated for the 1973 “Contemporary Affairs” category, but did not win the award.

27 For an editorial that criticized the American public for not viewing the events of Attica as a national tragedy and failure, see Kaufman, Irving R., “The Root of the Prison Mess: A Societal Failure,” letter to the editor, New York Times, 17 Oct. 1972, 40Google Scholar.

28 Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Earl Warren, Chairman (US Government Printing Office: Washington, D.C., 1964).

29 Scobey, Alfredda, “A Lawyer's Notes on the Warren Commission Report,” American Bar Association Journal, 51 (Jan. 1965), 39–43Google Scholar; Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 459, ix.

30 9/11 Commission Report, xv, 3, 5. William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily,” Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1950).

31 Ibid., 339; italics added.

32 Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 458, 443; DeMott, Benjamin, “Whitewash as Public Service: How The 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation,” Harper's Magazine, 309 (Oct. 2004), 45Google Scholar.

33 On the perceived decline of the nation-state, see especially Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation-State, trans. Victoria Elliott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); and Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (New York: Free Press, 1995).

34 Paul A. Cantor, Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001), 121, 120, quoted in Nick Gillespie, “Gilligan vs. Homer Simpson: Pop Culture Gets Globalized,” interview with Paul A. Cantor, Reason.com, http://www.reason.com/0202/cr.ng.gilligan.shtml, quoted in “Conversation with Professor Paul A. Cantor,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture: 1900 to Present (fall 2004), http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2004/cantor.htm.

35 It is of course true that the 9/11 Report itself remarks on government failures, particularly the shortcomings of US intelligence and security agencies. Such analyses may indeed cause readers to lose faith in the government. Nonetheless, the document is more revealing of bureaucratic incompetence than of the corruption or illegal activity of officials. The 9/11 Report therefore differs from works like the Starr Report and the published Watergate documents, which at times present the government as criminal and duplicitous in nature.

36 In fact, cynics found reason to object when they discovered that the first edition of the 9/11 Report lacked a formal index. As had been the case with the un-indexed 26 volumes of data from which the Warren Report was culled, the missing reference tool persuaded some readers that the authors meant to conceal important facts or, at the very least, make the lengthy text extremely difficult to parse. Defenders of the Report countered that the absence of an index merely reflected the commission's tight deadline.

37 9/11 Commission Report, 361. Near the end of his first term, and well into his second, President Bush and his supporters defended the Patriot Act – a collection of anti-terror measures designed to safeguard America – against claims that the legislation trampled on the civil liberties of citizens. Related controversies emerged regularly. During the winter of 2005–06, for example, Bush argued that he had not broken the law in approving a National Security Agency program to monitor, without a court order, the private conversations of US citizens. Although many Democrats condemned the eavesdropping program, public opinion was mixed. See Dan Eggen and Charles Lane, “Hearings Demanded on Domestic Spying; Lawmakers Criticize NSA Eavesdropping,” Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2005, A04; and “Bush on Iraq: ‘We're Doing the Right Thing,’” CNN.com, 11 Jan. 2006, http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/11/bush.kentucky/index.html.