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Jules Witcover
President Obama's pro-forma acceptance of responsibility for the latest failure to connect the dots in national security acknowledges Harry Truman's famous declaration that the buck always stops at the desk in the Oval Office.
In purely political terms, its invocation invites voters if they choose to take out their wrath or disappointment on the president in the next election. But the mea culpa can also win support for the contrite leader who volunteers it, as the young President John F. Kennedy found in his first weeks in the
In a news conference after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by U.S.-supported exiles in
In any event, this particular "orphan" actually saw his public approval go up after taking the blame for the Bay of Pigs, which actually had been planned in the previous Eisenhower administration. Just prior to the invasion Kennedy had 78 percent support in the Gallup Poll, and it rose to 83 percent thereafter.
As for the validity of JFK's "old saying," there's contradictory evidence in history that a president who suffers a defeat always bears the brunt of the ensuing criticism. Many histories of the Bay of Pigs fiasco have fingered the Joint Chiefs of Staff for cooking up an inadequate invasion plan, as well as charging that JFK got cold feet in failing to send air support to the overwhelmed exiles.
Later, while publicly taking the blame, Kennedy privately castigated the CIA and heads rolled both there and at the Pentagon. The generals never quite regained his early confidence or at least reliance on them, and in the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis he rebuffed the most belligerent advice from the likes of General Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the
In the latest case of the buck formally stopping at President Obama's desk, and his mea culpa for the failure to connect the dots in the near miss at the Detroit airport, he is clearly not an "orphan" either. While no single culprit or even a few others have been identified, the president's orders for quick improvement are an acknowledgment not simply of "systemic" failure, but of human ineffectiveness.
Obama's quickness in declaring there will be no finger-pointing at blame in his administration is a noble gesture. But it isn't likely to silence critical questions, and not only from Republican critics, about how nobody recognized the glaring red flags in this case and acted on them.
The presidential orders for filling the gaps in the hugely difficult task of sorting out wheat from the chaff of millions of informational tidbits seem mostly in the realm of analytical belt-tightening. Long after the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission on connecting the dots were made, the system should have been adequately upgraded by now.
The
What is now being identified as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula broadens the challenge of keeping this country safe, and further validates Obama's decision in going forward in Afghanistan to identify al-Qaida as the prime target there and wherever else it exists.
It's obvious that more attention now must be paid to Yemen, from which the so-called underwear bomber came, and to bolstering supportive governmental elements there. But the United States can't be diverted to any new nation-building missions.
If nothing else has been achieved by Obama's taking responsibility for the close call on
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Northwest Flight 253: Where Does the Buck Stop | Jules Witcover