By HAROLD J. REYNOLDS (SCARSDALE, NEW YORK USA)

In the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, 2,750 persons were murdered and, of these, only 292 whole bodies were found. A fierce inquiry into the cause of the horrific slaughter was expected, but the dead had died eight months into the presidency of George W. Bush. Where widows saw lost husbands, Karl Rove saw the loss of Bush's presidency. When the widows and others clamored for an inquiry, Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney, and Speaker Dennis Hastert, strongly fought to block it, but their supporters in Congress, whose political necks were on the line, could not risk the opposition of the widows. In November, 2002, Public Law 107-306 established, and poorly funded, the 9/11 Commission, five Republicans and five Democrats, to inquire into the causes of the attacks. In July, 2004, the Commission released its report. Philip Shenon of The New York Times covered the Commission's work. His Pulitzer worthy book, The Commission, written in crisp, swift moving prose, is the result. It should be given to high school students in order that they may watch truth struggle with political hypocrisy even on the graves of the 9/11 dead. They might be surprised by what they see.

They will see a report that was based only on facts and opinions unanimously found and held, encouraging trades between Commissioners, which actually occurred, and effectively inhibiting dissents. They will see a report that holds no one personally accountable, in short, a lockstep report shaped by politicians and handed down during an intense presidential pre-election period.

They will see a Commission that compromised its duty to state the evidence that 9/11 was caused by America's identification with Israel. Too controversial, said the Commissioners off stage. (Ernst R. May [noted historian and Senior Adviser to the commission] When Government Writes History, A Memoir of the 9/11 Commission, May 23, 2005, The New Republic 33-34.). Surely, in the absence of a supervening cause, it is the duty of this nation to protect the lives of its people by refraining from its identification with any nation that will cause terrorist attacks on it. Such an issue was before the Commission. It hardly lay in anyone's mouth to claim that because it would generate controversy the issue should not be laid before the people.

An archery award should be given to Shenon for his descriptions, among others, of the mind-boggling failures of President Bush, the incompetent Condoleezza Rice, the CIA and FBI, to track and keep under surveillance the 9/11 hijackers, some of whom were seeking big craft flying lessons in the United States. With an equal eye for telling details, Shenon describes counter terrorism Richard Clarke's now historic memorandum of September 4, 2001 that virtually shouted to Rice that a 9/11 type attack was actually imminent. One reads with fixed attention the Department of Transportation's ignorance of terrorist warnings, the FAA's ignorance that the State Department had a watch list, the FAA's failure to alert our Aerospace Defense Command that a passenger plane had been commandeered, the outright lying of generals concerning military reaction to the hijacked planes, the CIA's 150-foot butcher sheet scroll listing minutely the CIA's antiterrorist efforts against Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11, the CIA's plans to kill Bin Laden in the 1990's, and the neanderthal computer equipment of the FBI, including its lack of an email system on 9/11. Shenon believes that FBI Director Louis Freeh's best gift to the FBI was his leaving it in June, 2001, else, writes Shenon, had Freeh been the Director on 9/11 the Commission might have dismantled it, treating Freeh responsible for the FBI's condition during his tenure in 1993-2001. However, Freeh had a full plate with President Clinton's numerous scandals, to say nothing of the moral revulsion had for Clinton by the intelligence services and the Pentagon.

For dramatic lying, an award to Cheney might be given for denying that on 9/11 he had unlawfully authorized the shooting down of passenger planes that were disobedient to military orders. Necessity, according to Shenon, tempers faulting Cheney. Therefore, for lying long and on a panoramic scale, the lying medal, with a cluster diamond heart pendent, should go to George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence, for his world class dysfunction to recall his conversations with Bush and facts such as a written directive to the CIA to kill Bin Laden.

For quick thinking by a patriot, the prize should be extended immediately to Henry Kissinger, first chairman of the commission. He met with the 9/11 widows who, he must have thought, had just come from a soccer game. Instead, they demanded that he make his client list public. When they asked whether he had Saudi clients, or clients named Bin Laden, the frightened Kissinger, Shenon reports, nearly fell to the floor from his couch. Kissinger resigned the next morning, sixteen days after his appointment.

Philip Zelikow, the Commission's executive director, dubbed by the staff the White House mole, was the iron handed ruler, and micro watcher of the work of the investigators who despised him. He had been part of Bush's transition team, author of Bush's paper supporting pre-emptive war, co-author of a book with Condoleezza Rice, and, from the Commission, secret communicator with Rice and Rove. He was a walking hotbed of conflicts of interest, a fact that did not stop the Commission's chair and vice-chair from stating publicly that they did not detect in Zelikow any conflict of interest, an opinion that arched the eyebrows of the Commission's staff. When appointed Secretary of State, Rice appointed the grateful Zelikow her counselor, a job that he had always wanted, presumably even as he sat in the Commission's office.

The granting of the Master Criminal award would unquestionably attract high school students to Sandy Berger as a recognizable class mate. He had been President Clinton's national security adviser and was Clinton's liaison with the Commission. In October, 2003, Berger, tasked by Clinton, went to the National Archives to examine classified national security papers of the Clinton administration copies or notes of which could not be made and taken from the archives. On a prior visit, he was seen walking to the men's room with papers rolled around and sticking out of his socks. On his October visit, however, the archivists, having set a trap, caught him. For his life of archival crime, Burger netted a misdemeanor conviction, a three-year loss of security clearance, and a $50,000 fine.

In November, 2004, Bush was re-elected with the help of the Commission's report, for it made the nation mindful of the threat of another 9/11 attack and, in connection with that attack, no fault was found by the Commission in Bush. And so Rove had his presidency, and the widows were left with no one held accountable.

Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. Little, Brown and Company New York 2007 $29.00

Reviewed by Harold Reynolds

Jeff Garth and Don Van Natta have labored hard to produce Her Way, their portrait of a cold, severe, dominating, power-obsessed Hillary Clinton. In a note posted at the beginning of the book, they complain that Hillary is reachable only through her loyal intermediaries who are fearful of retribution by her should they speak to the authors. The authors apparently believe that, had Hillary been deranged enough to speak to them, they would have laid even more before us. Nevertheless, those self-flaggelants who read Her Way from beginning to end, however small their number, will be grateful to the authors for their 483 pages of plain, reportorial prose, untouched by literary merit, colorless like the Hillary they repeatedly describe, the text as lively as a baggage receipt. To all others, take caution: do not read the book while seated in a rocking chair before an open fire. After a hundred or so pages you may reach the tipping point and end up as an index number in the Surrogate's Court.

Hillary is born in 1947 on page 14 and in 8 pages enters Wellesley where, as if genetically programmed, she becomes a whirlwind of political activity, president of the student government and, as senior student speaker at her 1969 commencement, gains national attention by turning, without forewarning, upon the invited speaker, hapless U.S. Senator Edward Brooke, calling him to account for his failure to speak on Vietnam and civil rights.

Yale Law School follows in 1969. Hillary develops an all consuming interest in children's rights, falls in love with fellow student Bill Clinton in 1970, and lives with him in 1971. Graduating in 1973, she becomes at 26 one of 43 staffers of the House Nixon impeachment inquiry. She joins Bill in Arkansas in 1974 where, in their mid-twenties, they enter, say the authors, into "a secret pact of ambition to capture the presidency for Bill" and "to do whatever it took to win election and defeat their opponents. Bill would be the project's public face, of course. And Hillary would serve as the enterprise's behind the scenes manager and enforcer". They are married in October, 1974, by a Reverend Nixon, proof, perhaps, of God's dark sense of humor.

Reaching into the trash basket of history, the authors call on stage names mercifully now only cardboard pop-ups in memory: Jim McDougal, White River, Madison Guaranty, Rose Law Firm, righteous Kenneth Starr, smiling Monica Lewinsky and her historically famous semen-stained dress, Hillary's billing records, Paula Jones, the tragic suicide of Vincent Foster, the masked right wing conspiracy, humble Bill and his White House fly act, and, most of all, those justice loving people who, if it meant only their holding of a spike in place, were enfevered to bring the judgment of God down upon the Clintons. Looking back, few can recall the why of it all. Many, indeed, today may wonder in a free moment over their lack of compassion for the Clintons as they were tracked, trapped, and tormented.

Transfixed by the Clinton's 1974 "secret pact" to gain the presidency, the authors excitedly report that in 1993 the Clintons planned two terms for Bill and, later, two for Hillary. For proof they offer purported statements of Leon Panetta and Taylor Branch. Panetta, Bill's former presidential chief of staff, has issued no statement in support , while Branch, a much respected historian and author, denounced their story as "preposterous". (Michael Tomasky, Can We Know Her?, NY Rev. Books, July 19, 2007, pp. 14, 15) Rare the reader who does not laugh at the authors' boasting of their alleged "discovery" of a "secret pact" the rumors of which had long travelled the rounds of Washington. (Jennifer Senior, NY Times Book Rev., July 15, 2007, 8, 9)

Following the book's publication, Van Natta said "...we don't make any judgment that it's a bad thing or a good thing. We simply report this. This is news." (MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, June 12, 2007 edition) Their "news", however, is that Bonnie and Clyde have been planning a long time to come to town and strong arm anyone barring their way into the White House.

Her Way accelerates with details of Kenneth Starr's unyielding pursuit, Hillary's incredible power over national policy issues, her disastrous handling of her health care plan, Bill's outrageous pretense of ignorance of the Rwanda genocide (erroneously measured by the authors as "a few weeks" instead of three months), and the Clinton's low bred fund raising activities (Want a White House cup of coffee for big bucks, or do you have bigger bucks for a sleep over in Lincoln's bedroom?). Particularly revealing is Hillary's back stage maneuvering for a New York Senate seat while a simple, good hearted America saw her only as the icon of a grieving, loyal wife, defending a repentant husband caught in his adulteries and perjuries, to say nothing of his wholesale, bold face lying to the entire nation. There is mordant humor to be found in the failed impeachment proceedings, the Starr Report's overly detailed descriptions of Bill's sexual conduct, that must have made the Clintons run for cover, followed surprisingly by the public's warm hearted support of Bill and the public's acknowledgment that Hillary, after all, actually had human feelings. Still, Bill hardly looked attractive leaving office after dealing with the substantial risk of a federal indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice, to say nothing of his issuance of 140 scandal tainted pardons as he fleet footed it down the White House steps.

It was a good point in Her Way to turn the camera on Hillary in the Senate where she has sat supported by both her staff and her unequalled personal political organization, oiled and fired 24/7 to win her the presidency. Here are areas of interest to the uninformed reader, areas that disclose fault lines in Hillary's character. The authors succeed in revealing her dead-pan skill for marketing her history of major mistakes with a certain fondness for tempering discretion with deceit. For example, they zero in on her reckless failure to read the entire National Intelligence Estimate that made war against Iraq less lawful than Bush claimed. They point to her adoption of Bush's false claim of an Al Quaeda-Iraq relationship and its tie to 9/11. She was so anxious to show her capacity for military leadership that she didn't do the due diligence required for dealing with the one decision that she considered the most important in her life.

She appeared before the Council of Foreign Relations mouthing Bush-like statements but, as the war turned about, and the prospect of the presidency began to whet her appetite, she mischaracterized the intelligence available to her in the National Intelligence Estimate and, the authors argue, twisted the meaing of the war resolution in order to blame Bush for having misled her to support the war he planned. Howevermuch Her Way fails as a biographical work of literature, it hits its target here, for

a weakness to dodge truth instead of admitting major error is fatal to any candidate for the presidency. It leads people to live daily in the light of false dawns, a curse no nation deserves.

                                 Grand Illusion

              The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11

By Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins HarperCollins New York, N.Y. 390 pages $25.95

              Why is that fireman with helmet of thorn

               Tapping on Giuliani's window since 9/11 morn?

Rudolph Giuliani was sworn mayor in 1994 within a minute's walk of the World Trade Center bombed in 1993. Reviewing Giuliani's mayoralty in 2000, Wayne Barrett, one of America's great investigative journalists, saw Giuliani as a cruel, unstable, destructive hypocrite, a man judged by the press to be barely human and inwardly empty. Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani (2000)

In September, 2001, the arc of Giuliani's political life was in the descendant; his second marriage had crashed publicly and his senatorial plans had been aborted by prostate cancer. With an eye on the approaching end of his mayoralty, he had begun planning a consulting business, a natural refuge for unskilled, former office holders.

On September 11^th, Giuliani was at breakfast in a midtown hotel when two planes that had just flown overhead made him speed downtown to a Hell where he would see men and women, not long from their breakfasts, holding hands and jumping to their deaths from the flames of the110-story towers of the World Trade Center. There 2,150 would be killed in the Twin Towers alone. Three hundred forty-three firemen would die. We, transfixed by our television screens, stunned by what it all portended, would be calmed by Giuliani's words, credit for which, few know and let history note, belongs to Michael Cohen, a psychologist expert in handling crisis communications who was summoned the night of 9/11 and early the next morning carefully instructed Giuliani on what to say and not to say to the public, after which Giuliani appeared before the media and spoke to us.

And so it was that Giuliani, for a brief moment in our extremity, became us, and we, him. Thus out of 9/11 arose the myth of Giuliani, a myth exhaustively challenged in Grand Illusion, by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, who by daunting proof show that the myth of Giuliani arose out of a Hell in the creation of which he himself had had a hand, a myth from which he now profits, for he travels the nation, self-declared expert on terrorism, redemptor of New York City, receiving tens of millions in his expanding consulting business, eagerly seeking the Presidency with a genuinely commercial smile. If the facts in Grand Illusion are true, a beguiled public may see that their mythical Giuliani is a quick change artist given to the practice of an economy of truth.

Though Giuliani claims to have been obsessed with terrorism almost eight years prior to 9/11, and to have held many meetings concerning it, we know of no one with whom he shared his obsession and no one who recalls having met with him about it, though it was their business to do so. Giuliani had acted during those years as if the 1993 bombing had never happened. As John Miller, an acute City Hall observer of Giuliani, said of Giuliani's claims, "Hello, history. Give me rewrite."

When Giuliani claims that the police and fire departments had been prepared prior to 9/11 to act in coordination in a terror attack, we wonder first over his memory, and then over his integrity, for the operational chiefs of those departments do not recall it, to say nothing of the 9/11 Commission's finding that as of 9/11 those departments "were not prepared to comprehensively coordinate their efforts in responding to a major incident." As Giuliani must recall, the city did not even have a formalized Incident Command System. Bizarre as it sounds, the city on his watch actually suffered from mutually antagonistic fire and police departments, an ongoing scandal in itself . If the police and fire departments had had a joint post, the fire chiefs would have received the police helicopter warnings of the imminent collapse of the South Tower and many lives would have been saved in those nine minutes.

On 9/11, there was no central command position to control our reaction to the attack, for, mysteriously, Giuliani, against all advice and in a highly questionable exercise of judgment, had insisted that the Office of Emergency Management be located within walking distance of City Hall in the predictably targeted 47-story 7World Trade Center, 23 floors over a Con Ed substation and its 106,000 gallon fuel tank, the world's first bunker in the sky that was instantly evacuated on 9/11 and that collapsed, leaving the city without any command center and, as the 9/11 Commission noted, without any "backup site". Picture the mayor stumbling through a choking, blinding chaos looking for his police commissioner, the learned Bernard Kerick, who in the police department had never been higher than a third grade detective, thereafter chauffeur and bodyguard to Giuliani, later to be unforgettably recommended by Giuliani to President Bush as the head of Homeland Security and overseer of its billions of dollars, such is the nature of chance and opportunity in our wonderful democracy. Giuliani looked too, for his politically selected fire commissioner, Tom Von Essen, once head of the firefighters union who had never achieved any rank above that of a uniformed fireman but had thoughtfully delivered firefighters as political campaign workers for Giulianni in 1993. As fire commissioner, Von Essen failed to create a substantial plan for the handling of high-rise fires. These intellectual stars wound up in Giuliani's post-9/11 consulting business.

As for the hundreds of our dead firemen, they and their wives and children must haunt Giuliani, for he knew that they were equipped by his administration with notoriously ineffective"walkie-talkies" condemned as dangerous to firemen and public as early as 1990. They caused the deaths of those firemen and many others in the towers. The departmental brass did not know that civilians below the fires were told to stay in place after the chiefs had ordered full evacuations. One cannot but think that there was a glacial silence when Giuliani before the 9/11 Commission said that the command and control breakdown on 9/11 "was not a major problem", a breakdown in which fire chiefs relied on runners for messages. He even suggested before the Commission that it was "unpatriotic" to discuss mistakes. This from the mayor whose heroic firemen were sent to their deaths to extinguish fires that their superiors knew were uncontrollable. This mayor in his uniquely hidden eight-year obsession with terrorism never had room for a plan for handling mega fires in one of the largest citys on earth, no plan for aircraft striking the towers, no holding of even one multi-agency coordinated drill for a mega high attack, no systematic approach for the rescue of the 200 people trapped in elevators where they died. This the mayor who, as his myth widened, thoughtfully wrote a book entitled "Leadership", the leader who failed to inform workers at Ground Zero, and the public, of the hazardous toxicity of the air proved by the city's own test results.

         Grand Illusion marks the point at which Giuliani's political life should be over, when the piano player stops, the lights are turned out, and the fat lady sings.

By David Margolick, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, N.Y. 423 pages, $26.95

In his Pulitzer worthy Beyond Glory, David Margolick harrows the era of the Louis-Schmeling championship fights and, as on a grand screen, recreates it. No one will ever revisit it with something new. His transfixing story of two boxers in an America spiralling towards unprecedented war is written with a photogenic eye for the graphic detail and an ear with a precision that makes speech rise out of the page. Dickens would have loved this book.

In 1935, Jews dominated every aspect of boxing in America. Joe Louis, born in Alabama, a poor sharecropper’s child, entered that boxing world at 21 after the cigar chomping, meanspirited, buckdriven Mike Jacobs, who controlled boxing in New York, signed him. The press would eventually write of Louis that he was an illiterate, emotionless, good natured, stupid animal. In 1935, he mercilessly beat Primo Carnera and nearly killed Max Baer. In 1936, he dispatched Charley Retzlaff in 85 seconds but in June Louis was severely beaten by Nazi Germany’s Max Schmeling. In August, Louis whacked out Jack Sharkey and in September and October he took Al Ettore in 5 and Jorge Brescia in 3. In 1937, with an eye on champion Jim Braddock, the "Cinderella Man", Louis beat Bob Pastor and Natie Brown, and barnstormed through six states. In June, at 23 and the 12 to 5 favorite, he became world champion when he thrashed Braddock who, Damon Runyon wrote, was left on the canvas like "a frozen haddock". And then, in June, 1938, Louis wiped out Schmeling. Had he not done so, Beyond Glory would not have been written.

Now you have the names and dates, but here is how it all happened and how it all ended.

America in the thirties was anti-black, anti-Semitic, and deep in the Depression. Lynching blacks was not news, nor was their unutterable poverty. Segregation was the rule. Hitler was in power, terrifying Jews in Germany and in the United States, to say nothing of his view of blacks as subhumans. Into that mix, Max Schmeling stepped in New York and was soon cast by the Nazis as their global hero. For a time, his boxing manager was five foot two, Hells Kitchen bred Joe Jacobs who could say kaddish for his mother while eating a ham sandwich.

In 1935, the nation’s black communities exploded with joy when Louis at Yankee Stadium beat the Italian giant, Carnera. When shortly thereafter Louis almost killed Max Baer at the stadium, the 85,000 spectators went mad with excitement. Margolick’s description of Harlem going wild is only one of the book’s many displays of his literary skill, exercised repeatedly throughout the book by integrating with it the culled work of sharp tongued sportswriters who poured out copy like evangelists at tent meetings, in all giving the effect not of reportage but of voices naturalling speaking along with Margolick as he wrote.

In Louis’s 1936 fight with Schmeling, ninety per cent of black America favored Louis. as did boxing’s top fighters, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Baer and Braddock. When, however, Schmeling severely beat Louis , the nation was shocked. Nothing can equal Margolick’s description of that dismay, nothing coud be more compassionate than his detailed report of the broken heart of the crushed black community. Germany, of course, was unrestrained in its pleasure. Schmeling’s popularity there, now at its height, was in the service of the murderous Nazis who had politicized boxing.

A chastened Louis turned about and toppled a line of fighters. Jews boycotted Schmeling. Nazis violently attacked Jews in America’s boxing world. Blacks refused to support the Jewish boycott because , they said, Jews had not supported blacks domestically. In the end, money called the shots and led to a Louis-Schmeling rematch after Louis devastated Jim Braddock and thus gained the world title, an event that triggered joy and violence in black America.

On June 22, 1938, with tens of thousands looking on in Yankee Stadium and the whole world listening to their radios, Louis nearly killed Schmeling in 2 minutes, 4 seconds, and would have done so had Schmeling’s trainer not rushed into the ring and stopped the fight. Margolick’s telling of that beating, blow by blow by blow, must be read to experience the force of his literary skill. I began to read it sitting and ended it standing. Cries of horror had rung out at that beating. A blow to the left kidney caused Schmeling to let out such a high pitched scream, heard through out the stadium, that someone said he sounded "like a stuck pig". The ensuing beating literally frightened spectators near the ring . In the end, it left Schmeling sitting in his corner, openly weeping. For almost 2 years, Louis, the presss’s "stupid animal", Louis, the South’s "nigger", Louis, the North’s "illiterate", Louis, whose boxing flaw Schmeling had bragged of discovering by watching movies of Louis boxing, that Louis had patiently hunted for Schmeling, at one point watching over and over movies of Schmeling boxing. As Louis in his soft, gentle drawl said, "Either me or him will drop early. They ain’t gonna be no decision. All the judges can stay home that night".

In 1942, Louis enlisted in our segregated army. He donated large sums from title defenses to army and navy relief funds for the taxes on which the IRS would hound him into mental illness. He lost his money in gambling, high living, and money schemes. He suffered humiliating boxing defeats, and wound up refereeing wrestling matches. With medication, he worked as a "greeter" at Caesar’s Palace. Left paralyzed by a stroke in 1977, he died in1981 at the age of sixty-six.

As for Schmeling, he served Hitler as a propaganda idol and as a paratrooper. He died seven months short of his hundredth birthday in 2005, having received in 1954 from James Farley, onetime New York boxing commissioner and Democratic Party chairman, the offer of a Coca Cola distributorship in Germany by means of which Schmeling became a multimillionaire, a member of the West German establishment, and a philanthropist. Coke, according to Margolick, "never wanted anything to do with Joe Louis, even in his prime." Schmeling claimed to have paid for Louis’s funeral.

And so the moral of this story is that there isn’t any moral, but there sure was a hell of a lot of action in Yankee Stadium the night of June 22, 1938, and a bagful of memories for everyone who waited for and watched that fight, and then went out on the town for the night of their lives.

On Sunday, September 11th, 2005, I met at a New York City hotel with several Kenyans - my good friend, the aged Kimani Ng'a Ng'a Maruge, brought here to attend at the Summit at the United Nations, Kimani's Kenyan grammar school teacher, Jane Obinchu, a Kenyan representative of Aidinternatinal, the NGO that arranged for Kimani's trip to New York, and an onlooking official of Kenya's ministry of education. In a hilarious meeting, during which a Kikuyu translation was made of my extended conversation with Kimani concerning our families, for I have known him and his family, Kimani made me a member of the Kikuyu tribe in recognition of the fact, he said, that I am his brother. As we all stood in the quietude of the lobby, Kimani blessed me from head to foot, and latterly, left and right, with swift flourishings of a tribal whisk which he then gave to me. I was given the Kikuyu name "Kamau", birth name of Kenyatta who was the first president of Kenya. I had taken an interest in Kimani's welfare, and provide money for him, because, among other things, he had been tortured by English soldiers in the 1950's when tens of thousands of Kenyans in the Mau Mau movement were rounded up like animals, imprisoned, hanged or by other means killed by the British government in concentration camps.On entering the hotel I did not expect to leave it as a Kikuyu. So one can see that benefactions can come out of nowhere unexpectedly.

Kamau (Harry) Reynolds