The Need to Know
What happened on September 11, 2001 should be no one's secret
by Alan Bisbort

Feb. 20, 2003 - HARTFORD (apj.us) -- Ten weeks after President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, William Manchester was asked by Jacqueline Kennedy to write the chronicle of the events of late 1963. He did not solicit the job and he'd never met Jackie Kennedy. He had met JFK once, for three and a half hours in 1961, while working on his book Portrait of a President.

The opportunity to write the book that the president's widow requested, and that his nation practically demanded he write, caused a major disruption in Manchester's life. He was in Germany at the time, knee deep in his research for what would comprise his monumental Arms of Krupp. But, always a U.S. Marine (his Goodbye, Darkness is among the greatest World War II combat memoirs), a sense of duty kicked in when his democratically-elected Commander in Chief was slain. Manchester put Krupp aside and began trying to figure out what happened on November 22, 1963. For two years, he set up an office at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and worked 12- to 15-hour days, conducting his own completely independent investigation.

In the resulting 350,000-word book, "The Death of a President" (1967), he wrote:

"I cannot pretend to be aloof, though I have certainly tried to be objective...Yet it was imperative that this chronicle be laid before the generation of Americans who suffered through those days. I believe President Kennedy would have wanted them to know precisely what happened...My relationships with all the principal figures were entirely professional. I received no financial assistance from the Kennedy family. I was on no government payroll. No one tried to lead me, and I believe every reader, including those who were closest to the late President, will find much here that is new and some, perhaps, that is disturbing. That is my responsibility.

Manchester's mission was a noble one and the job he did a masterful one. And posterity will thank him for it.

We need a William Manchester to emerge from within our midst right now, someone with impeccable credentials, a bloodhound's nose, a pit bull's doggedness, and the old-fashioned honesty of Abe Lincoln. Not a lapdog "reporter" like Frank Bruni or Bob Woodward with one eye on the Bestseller List and a brown nose firmly implanted between the butt cheeks of the power brokers. We need a new William Manchester.

Mr. Manchester lives only 17 miles from where I sit in Connecticut, but he is hobbled by illness and, in fact, is having trouble completing his monumental trilogy on the life of Winston Churchill. Were he to be getting around more easily these days, I would risk public humiliation by going to his house, getting on my knees and begging him to do for the families of Sept. 11, 2001 victims what he did for an entire grieving nation in The Death of a President.

As it is, we will never know what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, nor will we ever know what happened in the preceding months that allowed something this heinous to occur on American soil. We will never know this, that is, if we rely on the government. My capacity to believe anything generated by the Bush Administration or by anyone hired or appointed by the Bushes or by this present craven and declawed Congress is nil. My patience with all of America's political crowd, including the loathsome pundits, is worn more thin than my hairline.

No. We need a fresh set of eyes and some people who are willing to come forward and talk, without fear or favor. We need, perhaps, a person from another country, who is not whipped by the ill winds of America's grotesque partisan charade of public governance. Someone who has not drunk from the poisoned well of America's shattered ideals about smooth and democratic transitions of power.

Goddamn it, we need the truth about September 11, 2001, while memories are fresh and the paper trail has not been shredded by those culpable.

How is it that there can already be two promised probes of the Space Shuttle disaster of a few weeks ago and we are still waiting, a year and a half later, to find out how it was that 3,000 American citizens lost their lives to a terrorist attack?

We need to know what happened on Sept. 11, 2001 and we need to know sooner rather than later. We need to know how that event has led to all the other madness that, to many of us, is destroying everything that America once stood for. We need to know before we go into another country and kill half a million of their civilians -- as the Pentagon has estimated will be the possible "collateral damage" of the "Shock And Awe" assault on Baghdad. We need to know why America's children will die so some dickhead can fill up the gas tank of his Hummer.

And here's something else we need to know. We need to know why John Ashscroft is, under the guise of tightening security (an excuse made easy by Sept. 11, 2001), wiping his ass daily on our Constitution and all we do is stare dumbly at the tube. We need to find out why we have become such a nation of sheep, how we can so easily throw aside all that has separated us from every other nation on earth these past 227 years: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly (which Bush tried to deny the antiwar protesters in New York City last weekend), due process of law, a free press, the separation of church and state, a reverence for the natural world, the environment and public health and welfare.

We need to know why we really were put on an Orange Terror Alert just prior to the disgraceful Duct Tape Dictum was made by the increasingly absurd Tom Ridge. We need to know why George W. Bush is still persisting with his plans to invade Iraq. We need to know why the corporate media continues to portray millions of Americans who disagree with this president as "pro-Saddam".

Maybe the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 could not have been prevented. But, unless we get a full and fair and open investigation, then, no matter what any of the self-appointed experts say, we will always believe that this attack could have been prevented had someone else had their hands on the wheels of state of this nation.

Someone elected for and by the people.

Alan Bisbort is a columnist for the Hartford Advocate. His most recent book, coauthored with Parke Puterbaugh, is California Beaches, the 3rd edition (Avalon/Foghorn Outdoors).