'The best presidential picture in years'

The leading man

George W. Bush (AP PHOTO)

May 1, 2003, was a picture-perfect day in southern California, a perfect day for cameramen to capture the perfect picture. The co-stars in this classic California drama were President George W. Bush and the American aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The president wanted to thank the sailors and airmen aboard the Lincoln for their service in the Persian Gulf during the war in Iraq. He could have done that from the Oval Office, but the visuals of that scene would likely not have captured the nation's attention. And on this particular day, grabbing the media spotlight was critically important, because the president had two other missions beyond expressing his gratitude to the men and women on board.

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The first was to rally support for his war in Iraq. It had been nearly a month since the regime of Saddam Hussein had collapsed, and things were not going according to plan. No traces of the much-ballyhooed weapons of mass destruction had yet been found. The great dictator himself was still at large. The country seemed to be spiralling into chaos. American soldiers and Iraqi civilians were being killed by well-armed and very stubborn insurgents, and there was little evidence that the Iraqi people were welcoming American troops as liberators. That had been one of the messages that Bush and others in his administration had delivered repeatedly to sell the war to the American people.

The second purpose of the president's trip aboard the Lincoln was to capture a quintessentially "presidential" moment, an iconic image of a strong, vigorous, triumphant commander-in-chief who had led his nation to victory over the evil despot, Saddam Hussein, an image that would live, if not necessarily for the ages, at least until the presidential election 18 months later.

The producer

The man responsible for creating that image was named Scott Sforza, a former ABC TV producer who, since 2001, had held the lofty title of special assistant to the president and deputy communications director in the Bush White House. Stripped to its bare essentials, Sforza's job was to manufacture images that make the president look good on television. When President Bush addressed the nation from Ellis Island on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in New York, Sforza rented three barges of giant search lights, the kind used in sports stadiums and rock concerts, put them in the water around the base of the Statue of Liberty, and pointed them upwards so that the entire length of the statue would be illuminated behind the president. He had performed similar magic when Bush spoke at Mount Rushmore in the summer of 2002, setting the cameras off to the side, so that the President's profile would be perfectly aligned with the four presidents whose images were already carved in stone on the mountain.

On a more mundane level, Scott Sforza was also responsible for creating the "wallpaper," the backdrop that would fill the television screen behind the president whenever he spoke. The wallpaper would usually feature many repetitions of that day's message - "Helping Small Business," "Saving Social Security," "Keeping Americans Secure." The purpose was to ensure that viewers would be exposed to the message, even if they were too busy or too uninterested to actually hear what the president had to say.

The photo-op aboard the Lincoln was the result of much advance planning. The Bush White House clearly did not invent the staged media event, but no administration has ever spent as much time, money and energy trying to get it right. Previous presidents in similar circumstances might well have flown to the carrier in a helicopter, wearing a business suit or flight jacket. But that was simply not good enough for the image-obsessed Bush White House. They had much bigger plans. Why take a helicopter when you can arrive on a jet fighter, and make it look like you've executed the tricky landing yourself? Why wear civilian clothes when you can wear a flight suit? In other words, why look like a president when you can look like Tom Cruise in the movie Top Gun?

And so Scott Sforza came aboard several days before the president was due to touch down on the Lincoln to work out the dozens of small details that would create a truly memorable photo op. Take the lighting, for example. Sforza concluded that the president would look best, look more heroic, in the more muted sunshine of the late afternoon then he would in the harsh light of midday. And so the event was scheduled for the late afternoon. And then there was the question of the ship's proximity to land. Originally, the White House had argued that a helicopter entrance would not have been possible because the ship was too far out to sea. But it turned out that the Lincoln had moved faster than planned, and on May 1, it was only 45 kilometers off the coast of San Diego, well within helicopter range. But nothing would be allowed to get in the way of the picture of the president, in full battle gear, landing mid-ocean aboard an S-3 Viking fighter jet. It simply required turning the Lincoln away from land, so the cameras would see nothing but sea and sky behind Mr. Bush, rather than the looming skyline of San Diego.

The photo-op

The visit to the Lincoln would consist of two parts, to satisfy the day's two objectives. Both would be covered live on America TV. The first, to capture the iconic visual image, to transform George Bush into Tom Cruise, involved setting the fighter jet down on the carrier's deck. Once that was accomplished, the president emerged from the cockpit wearing a green form-fitting flight suit, holding his helmet under his arm, looking for all the world like a man who had just landed a jet fighter on a moving aircraft carrier in mid-ocean. The photographers snapped their pictures, the cameras rolled. "I flew it," the president shouted to reporters as he strolled across the flight deck. And in fact, he had briefly taken the controls while in flight, but had played no part in the risky tailhook landing.

No president in the 20th century, not even Dwight Eisenhower, a legitimate five-star general, had ever been photographed wearing a military uniform. But this president was different. Michael Deaver, who had created so many compelling images for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, was suitably impressed. "Somebody's got a good eye over there," he told the New York Times two weeks later. "They understand they have to build a set. … They understand that what's around the head is just as important as the head." Chris Mathews, a host on MSNBC, called it "the best presidential picture in years." Mission one accomplished!

It was all an illusion, of course, but a highly effective one. The president was met with thunderous applause from the thousands of crew members who had gathered on the flight deck. Meanwhile, one commentator on the Fox News Channel gushed that First Lady Laura Bush "has a hottie on her hands — look how good he looks." Another advised contenders for the Democratic nomination that they had better be looking for something to do for the next four years, because "you're not going to be taking that man's job anytime soon." And even those commentators who took their journalistic responsibilities a bit more seriously were either too polite or too intimidated to point out that a younger George Bush had shown considerably less enthusiasm for flying fighter jets when he was called upon to serve his country as a member of the Texas Air National Guard, and there were no photo ops or political points to be scored. But it worked. A poll conducted in the week following the Lincoln visit found 59 per cent of those polled thought it was appropriate for the president to dress up in a flight suit and speak to the sailors on the aircraft carrier.

Part two of the day's mission came several hours later. The president, now wearing civilian clothes, stood on a raised platform on the flight deck. Behind him, serving as that day's "wallpaper" for the TV broadcast, was a massive banner that read "Mission Accomplished."

"My fellow Americans," he began, "major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." After much hooting and hollering from the troops, Bush then admitted that there was still "difficult work to do in Iraq," but said that the war on terror would be carried on to its inevitable successful conclusion. "It is not over," he concluded, "but it will not be endless."

The sequel

In the months that followed, as thousands of American soldiers continued to be killed and wounded in Iraq, the White House came under increasing criticism for a declaration of "mission accomplished" that was clearly premature. By the fall, with an election looming, the administration was even trying to separate itself from the banner, claiming it was the ship's crew that insisted on it. "I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff," Bush told reporters in October, adding, "They weren't that ingenious, by the way."

That banner continues to haunt the president, and today, nearly four years later, many people look back at that day aboard the U.S.S. Lincoln and declare it a public relations disaster, a major misfiring of the vaunted White House spin machine. The mission in Iraq has not been accomplished, combat operations are far from over.

But politicians don't usually spin for the history books. They spin for the short-term bounce in the polls. Their time horizon rarely extends further than the next election. And from that perspective, the photo op aboard the U.S.S. Lincoln did accomplish its mission. With Saddam Hussein still on the loose, and violence escalating in Iraq, Bush was looking to make Americans feel better about their president and his war. Eighteen months later, they re-elected him for a second term.

Of course, there aren't many people cheering for George Bush these days. An administration that had spun its way into Iraq, weaving fanciful tales of weapons of mass destruction and links between Saddam Hussein and international terrorism, is now paying the price for its sins.

When confronted with the ugly reality of life in Iraq today, and when measured against the unmet promises that precipitated the war, no clever communications strategy, no magical photo op, can salvage the Bush presidency from the ravages of history. That day aboard the U.S.S. Lincoln now looks like a microcosm of the entire war in Iraq; a boatload of spin, and very little pushing back on the part of the press.

Public relations and the war in Iraq

The role played by the PR industry in selling the war against Iraq has been meticulously chronicled by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton of the Center for Media and Democracy, a PR watchdog group based in Madison, Wis. Stauber and Rampton have co-authored two books about the war, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, and The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies and the Mess in Iraq.

The CMD maintains a very valuable database on the PR industry called SourceWatch, where you can find all kinds of valuable information about PR firms, think-tanks, industry-funded associations, etc. You can use SourceWatch to learn more about two firms that were heavily involved in the war propaganda machine. One was the Lincoln Group, which boasts that it "provides our clients with access to cultures that have historically been difficult to reach through traditional western communications." The second is the Rendon Group, which was involved with beating the drums for war in both the Gulf in 1990-91, and Iraq in 2002-03.

Sheldon Rampton talks about both companies and lots more in our interview.

The media and the mission in Afghanistan

At first glance, Bob Bergen is an unlikely person to be cast as a critic of the Canadian military. He is a research fellow with the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute in Calgary, and he is a fellow with the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary. Both of those positions put him at the centre of the Canadian defence establishment. But he is also a former journalist, which is perhaps why he has been so critical of the restrictions that the Canadian military has imposed on reporters embedded with Canadian troops in Afghanistan. You can read about his objections in an article, "Canadian military censorship hiding in plain sight," published last October, and in this excerpt from our interview.

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