Barton Gellman Quotes
The funny thing is that Dick Cheney has done more than anybody in the White House for quite a long time to throw up roadblocks against future historians.
Gellman, Barton. "Interview: Barton Gellman." Frontline, PBS, 2008.
The Senate was investigating a scandal where the George W. Bush White House had induced the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, to fire 8 of their own political U. S. Attorney appointments because they had or were investigating/prosecuting Republican politicians for corruption or not prosecuting Democrats vigorously enough. Gonzalez took the responsibility for the firings but did “not remember” why each had been fired nor was there any record in the Justice Department indicating any shortcoming with their jobs. The White House political operatives refused to testify under oath citing “Executive Privilege.”
The George W. Bush White House which had tried to keep secret things that no other administration in history had attempted found itself in the position where it was leaking secret classified information. A Key staff member of the administration was indicted for covering up their leaking activities of secret material.
He served Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes
Taken from the Nixon Tapes of June 14, 1971. This quotation illustrates the mental set of the Nixon White House where the President must be seen as infallible and obeyed without much questioning. After Nixon, that view did not surface again in American politics until the George W. Bush Presidency. The Federal Courts were not very sympathetic to the Haldeman assertion and allowed the publication.
That is one view—the one tried the most frequently by Presidents who by their own estimates didn’t get a responsive civil service working to his priorities. Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson had great cooperation from their civil servants; they instead appointed very competent people with strong senses of fairness and leading personnel. Ronald Regan tried both techniques. He used Wilson’s technique in his Education and Justice Department where there was slow-rolling and dissonance when his appointees tended to be ideologues with little or no outstanding professional competence in the fields they supervised. However, his military and State Department bureaucracies was very responsive to his appointees who were excellent leaders.
_0_PostageStamp_47x47.jpg "Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen gives an interview to John Dickerson during the CBS news program Face the Nation in Washington, D.C., July 5, 2009. During the interview, Mullen discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, North Korea's recent missile tests and his recent visit to Russia. (DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley, U.S. Navy/Released)"){kind=small}
Barton David Gellman (born 1960) is an American journalist and bestselling author known for his reports on the September 11 attacks, on Dick Cheney's vice presidency and on the global surveillance disclosure.
