In July 2004 the 9/11 Commission achieved one of the most unlikely literary successes in American history. No one had doubted that the final report of the independent commission would make political and cultural waves. Few, however, had anticipated the degree to which the American public would embrace the tone, style, and even artistry of the report's prose. Within hours of the release of the authorized edition of the 9/11 Commission Report, published by W. W. Norton and Company, professional and lay reviewers began an ongoing and vigorous conversation about the document's literary merits. In no small part, the celebration of the “engaging” and “readable” narrative contributed to the Report's astonishing sales. Although government websites made the report available as a free download, Norton's ten-dollar edition climbed the paperback charts and within days established itself as the number-one seller on Amazon.com. By mid-November Norton had sold nearly 1·2 million copies.Footnote 1
Why did the Report's literary qualities command such attention during the summer and fall of 2004? And what can the Report teach us about the American reading public at the beginning of the twenty-first century? The answers to these questions lie in the diverse and complex ways in which readers responded to the commission's work. I want to suggest that the literary achievement of the 9/11 Commission Report rested not only in its clarity, but also in its elusiveness. By standing beyond the generic conventions of both popular literature and bureaucratic prose, the Report at once invited and challenged classification. It demanded that readers train their interpretative powers not only on the accessible language of the commissioners, but also on the wounds behind that language. In American literary history, few bestsellers have required so much of the reader, or illustrated so clearly the public's hunger for literature as a means of shaping national identity.
THE ORIGINS OF THE REPORT
Before the Report could reach the public, the 9/11 Commission first had to overcome numerous obstacles, both political and bureaucratic. President George W. Bush initially opposed the creation of any independent commission to examine the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. For a period of about ten months, as workers cleared the crash sites and the national economy struggled to recover, the President argued that congressional intelligence committees should handle any and all official probes. But this position frustrated the families of 9/11 victims, and suggested to many Americans that the White House had something to hide. At last capitulating in the fall of 2002, Bush pledged to support an independent “focused inquiry” into the events leading up to the attacks. A congressional study had already explored US failures in intelligence, but had not investigated broader issues such as airport security, immigration, border control, and the defense of state and local communities. The independent commission would study these issues as well.Footnote 2
In November, both Congress and the President approved legislation for the creation of the 9/11 Commission. Formally named “The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States,” the new panel was granted subpoena power, a three-million-dollar budget, and eighteen months (beginning 27 November 2002) to produce its final report. Comprising five Republicans and five Democrats, the bipartisan panel assembled a large staff to assist with research and writing. Yet despite the initial optimism surrounding it, the commission almost immediately suffered setbacks. The original vice chairman, former senator George Mitchell, stepped down in early December 2002. His departure was followed soon after by the resignation of the commission chairman himself, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Both men cited potential conflicts of interest as their reason for resigning. Former representative Lee Hamilton replaced Mitchell, and Bush named former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean as the new chair of the commission.
The media and the public both groused over the slow start. Precious weeks slipped away while Kean awaited security clearance and while his colleagues deliberated on how best to proceed with their work. As one staff member later recalled, pundits soon took to debating whether the panel “would even get its Warholian fifteen minutes of fame.” But once the commission began its investigation, the panel's energy and meticulous methods earned the growing support of the American people. Over time the commission studied millions of pages of classified documents, conducted numerous public hearings, and interviewed well over a thousand people from at least ten nations – including high-ranking officials from two US administrations.Footnote 3
In some respects the public became the most important advocate of the panel, championing the commissioners' words and actions. The earlier report of the House and Senate intelligence committees had revealed that US officials did not act on warnings, received during the late 1990s, that Arab terrorists planned to strike the World Trade Center with an airplane. Shocked by this revelation, and eager to uncover the full chain of events leading to 9/11, the public fumed whenever the commission encountered obstacles and closed doors. In October 2003 Kean threatened to subpoena intelligence documents that the White House wished to protect from scrutiny. The situation sparked outrage from American citizens nationwide, helping to persuade the administration to cooperate. Similarly, the public threw its support behind the commission's request for an additional eleven million dollars to carry out its work, and again when it asked for more time to complete the final report. In both cases, the White House bowed to public pressure and backed the commission's appeals. The deadline for the final report was moved back two months until July 2004, an impressive achievement in light of Republican concerns that the delay might influence the general election just four months later.
Soon after the release of the 9/11 Commission Report on 22 July 2004, Bush called for Congress to implement some of the panel's most noteworthy recommendations. Seeking an “integrated, unified national intelligence effort,” the president urged lawmakers to create the position of director of national intelligence. The director would oversee domestic and foreign intelligence and advise the President on issues of counterterrorism. Bush also backed the recommendation, raised in the Report, that the government establish a national counterterrorism center. Critics of these recommendations argued that such steps would bog down US intelligence agencies rather than streamline counterterrorism efforts. But the popularity of the commission made its suggestions attractive, and both Democratic and Republican leaders aligned themselves with the commissioners.
The Intelligence Reform Bill, passed in early December 2004, reflected widespread faith in the commission. And although unrealized by many, political support for the bill also reflected the public's embrace of the Report as a literary document.
THE RECEPTION OF THE REPORT
Initial sales of the Report mirrored the kind of reception typical of long-awaited novels, popular children's fiction, and celebrity biographies. When several bookstores across the nation announced that demand for the book had exceeded supply, commission member Timothy J. Roemer may have felt vindicated for remarks he had made one year before. The former representative had then called the earlier 9/11 Congressional Report a “well-written narrative” and predicted that it would “be summer reading for adults the way Harry Potter is for kids.” The Congressional Report had not met with such a response; the 9/11 Commission Report surely did. Over 150,000 copies of the Report sold on the day of its release, encouraging Norton to order more than 200,000 additional copies beyond the first run of 600,000.Footnote 4
Journalists spread word of the report's brisk sales and applauded the writing of the commissioners. Like many other news magazines, Time argued that the book deserved its bestseller status: “The commission has produced one of the most riveting, disturbing and revealing accounts of crime, espionage and the inner workings of government ever written.” The magazine suggested that while the public would appreciate the Report's insights into terrorism and American intelligence, what would most “enthrall readers” was the powerful narrative itself. Similarly, Publishers Weekly Reviews praised the Report for its “plain language,” “unerring pitch,” and “absolutely compelling narrative intelligence.” “Without trivializing any of the events or diminishing the people involved,” the journal proclaimed, “it reads like a Shakespearean drama.” Network and cable news personalities also extolled the literary qualities of the Report, and some took it upon themselves to promote the book's accessible language. Chris Matthews, the host of the MSNBC program Hardball, praised the Report well into September 2004, asserting repeatedly that it was “beautifully written.” Such accounts met with a wide audience, and likely assisted the commission in its efforts to reach the public.Footnote 5
Even the authors might have been surprised when commentators declared their work to be of enduring literary value. “We wanted it to be something that would be a compelling read,” commissioner Slade Gorton explained, “but the most important thing was accuracy.” The document's commitment to detail was widely celebrated, and Gorton and his colleagues were undoubtedly pleased when the media trumpeted their conclusions about how to improve faulty US intelligence and homeland security. But the legacy of the report arguably had more to do with its language than with its facts and conclusions. Even those reviewers who challenged the commission's findings usually found reason to praise its literary accomplishment. Such was the case with Richard A. Posner's “The 9/11 Report: A Dissent,” published in the 29 August New York Times Book Review. Although he concluded that the “commission's analysis and recommendations are unimpressive,” Posner began the review differently: “And the execution [of the Report] was in one vital respect superb: the 9/11 commission report is an uncommonly lucid, even riveting, narrative of the attacks, their background and the response to them. … The prose is free from bureaucratese and, for a consensus statement, the report is remarkably forthright.” Posner finished by saying that although “there could not have been a single author, the style is uniform. The document is an improbable literary triumph.” As this assessment suggested, the narrative strengths of the Report stood among the signature accomplishments of the independent 9/11 Commission. And the literary establishment took notice. Less than two months after the official close of the commission on 21 August 2004, the report was named a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Although some critics objected to the nomination, citing it as inappropriate for both political and literary reasons, many writers and journalists applauded the selection. Ultimately the Report did not win the award, but its candidacy surely overshadowed that of any other nominee, in any category.Footnote 6
Certainly other books attempted, both before and after the publication of the Report, to examine the events of 9/11 and to assess their aftermath. Among the more notable early works were Richard Bernstein's Out of the Blue: A Narrative of September 11, 2001 (2002), the German news magazine Der Spiegel's account Inside 9-11: What Really Happened (2002), and William Langewiesche's American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center (2002). Dozens of other books testified to American courage and patriotism on 9/11 and in the days immediately afterward. Still others offered accounts by eyewitnesses at Ground Zero, or published collections of photographs. Among those books appearing in print after the publication of the 9/11 Report, some took the commission to task. For example, David Ray Griffin's The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005) suggested that the panel deliberately concealed facts that would hurt the Bush administration and the reputation of US intelligence agencies. Yet no earlier or later work rivaled the 9/11 Commission Report in popularity, a fact owing to the commissioners' unparalleled access to classified information and, especially, to the Report's authoritative status as the only independent study sanctioned by the US government.Footnote 7
Only non-textual accounts of 9/11 truly competed with the Report for the public's attention, most notably in the forms of photography and film.Footnote 8 Although later preserved in book format, the exhibition Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs began in two SoHo storefronts “twenty blocks north of Ground Zero” in New York City. The exhibit's website described the origins of the commemorative project: “[Anyone] and everyone who has taken pictures relating to the tragedy was invited to submit their images to the gallery, where they were digitally scanned, printed and displayed on the walls alongside the work of top photojournalists and other professional photographers.” The thousands of unframed photographs drew well over 100,000 people to the exhibit in the first two months of its opening. Co-founder Michael Shulan attributed the success of the project to the fact that the public had itself contributed to the commemorative effort. “Right from the beginning we thought that as many people as possible should not only have the opportunity to view these photographs, but also to add their own to the exhibition.” He explained that in the days following 11 September
it seemed that everyone in New York had a camera, and since we put out a call for pictures we [were] inundated with slides, negatives, prints, and digital files. We are displaying as many of them as we can, and are adding all of them to what clearly will be the largest archive of its kind in history.
Beyond American cities and communities, the Here Is New York exhibit toured such European and Asian cities as London, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, Dublin, and Tokyo.Footnote 9
While such displays prompted reflection, Michael Moore's documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) offered viewers an angry and highly controversial interpretation of 9/11 and of America's subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Fahrenheit 9/11 portrayed the Bush administration as corrupt, self-serving, and negligent. Moreover, the film argued that the US invaded Iraq without just cause, primarily to draw attention away from Bush's failure to protect America from the operatives of al Qaeda. Moore's accusations were legion, including the claim that Bush's post-9/11 decisions were often informed by his family's longstanding friendship with Saudi Arabian leaders, and especially by the personal fortune that friendship helped secure. But the film's most powerful moments portrayed wounded and dead American soldiers – and their grieving families – as casualties of an unnecessary and immoral war.
A work of satire and outrage, Fahrenheit 9/11 was met with much of the same. Defenders of Bush, and those supporting the war in Iraq, ridiculed the film and its director as disingenuous and manipulative. Ultimately, the documentary's high profile in the months leading up to the release of the 9/11 Commission Report reminded the public of the centrality of 9/11 to any discussion of war in the Middle East. And far more than other popular attempts to interpret the terrorist attacks on American soil, Fahrenheit 9/11 divided the public along political and ideological lines.
In its style and message, the 9/11 Report had little in common with Moore's film. Although the Report did at times accuse individuals and agencies of failure, it did not thrive on condemnation. Nor did the commissioners envision their text as one that would advance a clear message from start to finish, as had Fahrenheit 9/11. Rather, the effect of the Report was far closer to that of the Here Is New York exhibit arranged by Shulan and his peers in SoHo. Many readers, left to ponder the book's seemingly endless array of facts, personalities, and historical contexts, felt prompted to reflect rather than to denounce. No doubt this effect stemmed in part from the commission's own reluctance to place blame for the attacks at the door of the President or any particular agency. But the reflective tone of the work also derived from its careful use of language, and from the active role it offered the reader to play in the narrative.
THE DEBATE OVER LITERARY GENRE
In order to understand the literary success of the 9/11 Commission Report, one must consider the different and sometimes competing reasons for its acclaim. Quite clearly, many readers approved of the report's language simply because it ran contrary to expectations for writing produced by committee. Readers typically expect clear and precise language to characterize the voice and consciousness of a single individual, and so it was surprising that the collective voices of ten commissioners – and a small army of staffers – had produced anything so rhetorically sound or affecting as the following passages:
It is the story of eccentric and violent ideas sprouting in the fertile ground of political and social turmoil. It is the story of an organization poised to seize its historical moment. How did Bin Ladin – with his call for the indiscriminate killing of Americans – win thousands of followers and some degree of approval from millions more?
What should Americans expect from their government in the struggle against Islamist terrorism? The goals seem unlimited: Defeat terrorism anywhere in the world. But Americans have also been told to expect the worst: An attack is probably coming; it may be terrible.
With such benchmarks, the justifications for action and spending seem limitless. Goals are good. Yet effective public policies also need concrete objectives.
Soon after reading these and other well-crafted passages, commentators expressed their admiration for the language publicly, declaring the writing “exceptional for a report produced by a government committee.” John Updike probably went the furthest in this regard when he drew a remarkable comparison: “Of all the translations into English, the one most read and universally admired is, of course, the King James Bible (1611), our language's lone masterpiece produced by committee, at least until this year's ‘9/11 Commission Report.'” Even if Updike delivered these words with tongue in cheek, his comment revealed how swiftly the Report achieved a central position within American letters and redefined expectations for collaborative writing.Footnote 10
Not everyone believed that the document truly represented the work of multiple authors, however. Some members of the press suggested that one or two persons on the commission staff may have been responsible for the lucid and decisive prose, noting that the Harvard professor, historian, and author Ernest R. May served as a senior adviser. Yet the commission staff, while noting the contributions of wordsmiths such as May and executive director Philip Zelikow, maintained that the language resulted from a collective effort. Alvin S. Felzenberg, who served as deputy for communications, explained that each chapter benefited from the work of seven to twelve people. “We took great care with every paragraph,” he said of the challenging effort. “It was a long, arduous process to get it to the point where it tells an engrossing story – of opportunities missed in some cases, of tremendous courage and foresight in some cases, filling in details that were not always known or dispelling misconceptions.”Footnote 11
May seconded the deputy's observations in a May 2005 memoir published in the New Republic. “Zelikow and I were the architects of the report,” the historian acknowledged, “but it had many, many authors.” Describing the philosophy that guided the commission, May emphasized time and again that all sought to produce a powerful “historical narrative” that would be “accessible now and a generation from now.” The goal of “writing history [rather than] a conventional government report” influenced the staff's sense of purpose during the revision process. Wary of excessive details and bulky paragraphs, “drafters shift[ed] into footnotes language that interfered with the narrative flow. Everyone became a storyteller.”Footnote 12
May's account underscored another reason behind the popular celebration of the Report – its frequent departures from the opaque, dry, and tedious language common to government documents. Felzenberg, May, and their colleagues understood that in order to craft an “engrossing story,” they would have to employ language not typically found in official documents sponsored by the state. Consider this excerpt from the US government's Jamestown 400th Anniversary Coin Act, published one month after the commission's report:
Limitation. – Notwithstanding subsection (a), no surcharge may be included with respect to the issuance under this Act of any coin during a calendar year if, as of the time of such issuance, the issuance of such coin would result in the number of commemorative coin programs issued during such year to exceed the annual 2 commemorative coin program issuance limitation under section 5112(m)(1) of title 31, United States Code (as in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act). The Secretary of the Treasury may issue guidance to carry out this subsection.
Surely the legal language of the Coin Act served a different purpose than any language contained within the 9/11 Report, but the comparison goes a long way toward explaining why the Report exceeded expectations for a government document and hence delighted the reading public. “For sheer readability,” The Economist declared, “the commission has produced something to be emulated by all future government reports.”Footnote 13
Yet if most readers agreed to celebrate the prose of the commissioners, few agreed on how to interpret it. A sampling of responses from the “Customer Reviews” section on Amazon.com, the web-based bookseller, can help demonstrate the different ways in which Americans understood and engaged the Report. Early reviews, written in the days immediately following the release of the document, dwelled on its accessible language and narrative. Writing from Texas, one reader described the Report as a “well written version of what could have been a badly phrased, awkwardly written, below-average government document.” A reader from Richmond, Virginia agreed: “I bought it at my local bookstore and have found it riveting reading – much more so than the rather bland summaries in the newspapers.” Within days, reviewers began to associate the nonfiction Report with works from other literary genres. One Floridian compared the Report to a page-turning novel: “When I first heard of the 9/11 Commission Report, I thought it would be a long, dull read. I was completely wrong. [It's] a fascinating piece of work that reads much like a novel. I couldn't put it down.” Some reviewers complained that the Report read enough like a suspense novel that they expected it to contain more elements of genre fiction than it did. Such remarks in turn sparked outrage from others, such as a reader from Dallas who took his fellow reviewers to task:
I fail to understand any review that [criticizes the Report by saying that] it's missing “James Bond” or not “Tom Clancy” enough, or not a spell-binding mystery. This is HISTORY. This is the RECORD of the deaths of 3000+ people. A review with those types of comments either results from a sick sense of humor or a serious misunderstanding of this book's purpose.Footnote 14
Not all readers found it necessary to distinguish between a work of history and a work boasting the narrative power of an entertaining novel. “Compared with other similar endeavors,” commented a reader in August 2004, “the 9/11 Commission Report emerges as an important historical document. … [It is] chilling as well as informative – portions of it read like a mystery novel.” A reader from New York State hastened to explain that although the report read like a novel, everyday Americans had not actually treated it like one:
On vacation I like to take an informal survey of what people are reading at the beach or by the pool. I am not seeing copies of this report under umbrellas, and this is no doubt owing to the solemnity of the topic. Vacations are after all a chance to “get away.” But I am anxious to say that this is a riveting narrative which you should pick up and will not likely want to put down.Footnote 15
While the majority of lay reviewers approved of the style of the Report, some worried that its novelistic qualities were detrimental to its accuracy. “[Having] written many technical reports,” a reader from Minnesota observed,
I believe I know what to look for when I read one. The attempt to make the report readable results in the use of conversational language which, of course, is not really adequate for describing events and their causes in a truly precise way. Thus, in far too many instances the reader must interpret statements that should be more specific. For example, the report states that a particular document “was read by a tiny number of people.” I have no idea how many people make up a ‘tiny number’ in this context.
Using a far more sarcastic tone, a Californian quipped, “Well, on the bright side, the ghost writing isn't bad. With all the money the war party is making on 9/11, they can certainly afford a world-class scenarist. So how do you give it five stars for fiction?”Footnote 16
Of those readers who posted a review on Amazon.com, a handful found the style of the Report troubling, and even offensive. One such reader wrote from Chicago to say, “I find it curious that so many of the 5 star reviews praise the readability of the report, comparing it to an engaging novel, and that this is a good thing.” He or she went on, “It doesn't seem to me like this is a good thing,” and continued,
It seems that the writing style was premeditated to condition the reader to view the facts in a controlled context. It plays on the strong emotions that the memories of that day invoke, which is inappropriate considering the subject. … It leads the reader to certain conclusions that might not have been reached had the information been presented subjectively.”
The reviewer summed up by attacking the report's narrative style: “It is my opinion that the writing style, novelesque in its approach, was inappropriate, condescending (in assuming that we need the information presented like a child's novel in order to understand it), and misleading.”Footnote 17
While most readers discussed the Report in terms of a thriller, mystery, or suspense novel, some believed it to have more in common with works of highbrow literature. A reader from Alaska numbered among these reviewers, noting, “When our book group chose to read this for our next discussion I could not figure it – since our group usually reads great literature. I was surprised at reading it to discover that it was good literature at least.” The Alaskan finished the review by noting, “I have become interested in reading more reports if they are as well done as this. Once again, the members of my book group get me to read something I never would have read otherwise, but the experience was well worth it.”Footnote 18
Just as lay reviewers did not agree on how to characterize the language of the commissioners, professional reviewers reached no clear consensus. One of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking essays on the document was Philip Kennicott's 1 August article for the Washington Post. In his role as a culture critic, Kennicott attempted to characterize the nature and tone of the writing:
The report's sentences are lean and simple, all the more so as the anonymous authors approach pivotal moments of decision, failure or tragedy. … The dominant tone is wise and sad, not angry. Rhetorically, the knowing shake of the head trumps the angry clench of the fist.
Ultimately, he concluded that the commissioners had borrowed the language of one literary genre in particular:
This writing style is essentially that of America's busy industry of personal confessional. It is the tone of the trauma memoirist, the daughter writing about Daddy's alcoholism, the husband about the car accident that killed his children and left him in a wheelchair, the survivor about incest or abuse hidden under a cloak of shame and secrecy. … [Again] and again the language of this report returns to the memoirist's tone of tempered sadness.Footnote 19
Kennicott's assertions seemed to focus the observations of other commentators. In her 23 September review for the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew saw the document's “dispassionate marshaling of the facts” as part of “the power of the commission's remarkable report.” Publishers Weekly Reviews likewise remarked on the “grave resolve” and “grim but charged dispassion” of the authors. Others noted that portions of the Report had something in common with the writing of Ernest Hemingway, whose “iceberg principle” held that one might omit from one's prose all but a trace of feeling, thereby expressing emotion with dignity.Footnote 20
Yet while some viewed the Report's restrained language and handling of trauma through the lens the memoirist's “tempered sadness,” others looked to different literary genres for guidance. Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, David Kipen argued that the Report had been misclassified by some readers as a document that borrowed from the conventions of genre fiction. “Contrary to premature and perhaps cynically circulated rumor,” he asserted, “the report doesn't read like a thriller. … It borrows some thriller trappings – opening with a violent set piece, flashing back to introduce the individual conspirators, ending several of its chapters on a similar note of foreboding understatement – but most of that goes with the territory.” Kipen concluded that the report “resembles a thriller about as much as life does, which is to say only occasionally,” and put forward his own interpretation of the document's literary lineage: “What it really resembles is a laudably thorough legal brief. As a result, in both its numbing profusion of detail and its pious avoidance of style, some passing likeness to the work of John Grisham is hard to avoid.”Footnote 21
Kennicott and Kipen may have viewed the Report in terms of the memoir and legal brief, but the vast majority of commentators declared that the book “read like a novel.” And judging from their remarks, most readers associated the novel genre with narrative thrills and intrigue rather than with artistic achievement. Contrary to Kipen's view, David Johnston and Douglas Jehl of the New York Times wrote that the commissioners had applied “a tone that sometimes resembled a paperback thriller.” These journalists suggested that in “contrast to most government documents,” the findings of the Report “were presented in a dramatic, often gripping narrative style with chapter headings like ‘We Have Some Planes’ and [‘The] System Was Blinking Red.’” Similarly, The Economist noted the “crisp” prose of the Report and highlighted its use of thriller conventions:
The plot tracks the bad guys as they hop between exotic locations around the world and communicate in code. Their ringleader imparts the date of the attacks (9/11) to his headquarters in the shape of a lollipop and two branches. There is even a love story involving Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of the plane that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. As the tale unfolds, a sense of inevitability builds up. It is as if some awesome force kept misleading sleuths, even as it pushed the hijackers' improbable conspiracy to an inexorable conclusion. Several times during the narrative, the terrorists mess up and the agents get it right. No matter. The plot can have only one ending.
In its references to “sleuths,” “the bad guys,” and “a love story,” it may seem that The Economist meant to mock the commissioners for using the generic mainstays of plot-driven fiction. Yet the journal expressed its admiration for the plotting of the book (“as gripping as a thriller”), and lamented only that the abundance of names and details slowed the narrative and left the motivations of the terrorists obscured. Web journalists and bloggers likewise compared the style of the report to what one might find in a spy or detective novel. Like so many others, the reviewer for MostlyFiction.com declared that the commissioners had told the story of 9/11 in “a highly readable fashion,” and conflated readability with fiction. “The Report reads like a novel,” she assured her readers, “especially the 1st part – ‘We Have Some Planes.’”Footnote 22
The comparison of the Report to a novel did not go unnoticed by those readers critical of the 9/11 Commission or of the Bush administration. Some commentators appeared to revel in the fact that the Report had been compared to a work of fiction, asserting that the comparison applied to content as well as to style. Following the lead of Kurt Nimmo, the author–photographer–activist, a number of critics took to calling the report “a great fantasy novel” and referred to the commission as the “9/11 Whitewash Commission.” Bev Conover of the politically radical Online Journal argued that the Report lacked enough in the way of facts, insight, and credibility to deserve the label of fiction: “Yes, this shameful work of fiction goes on for pages in a thinly veiled indictment of Muslims, particularly brown-skinned Muslims, for the horrific acts that should be laid at the feet of the Bush administration.” In a related argument, Benjamin DeMott of Amherst College suggested that the engaging style of the Report helped protect those who failed to prevent the terrorist attacks. “On its face it's a narrative and easy to read, like any pop story of a murder or a catastrophe,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle,
It's a piece of writing meant for an audience that wants to be entertained. But that's not the purpose of this. The function of this report was to tell us how such a thing could happen and where blame should fall. The idea of getting rid of the concept of blame … is a betrayal of the natural concerns of the people who suffered the losses. They deserve to know how this happened.”Footnote 23
In the eyes of his detractors, President Bush only reinforced criticisms of the Report when sharing his own thoughts on the document in late July. “It reads like a mystery, a novel,” he told reporters. “It's well written.” Almost immediately some commentators complained (unfairly) that a mystified Bush saw the Report as a work of entertainment or make-believe rather than as a study of issues central to American security. Others suggested that the President was correct to compare the report to a mystery novel. “The Commission left large areas of inquiry shrouded in mystery,” asserted Elias Davidsson in an article for the Centre for Research on Globalisation: “[The] Commission has studiously disregarded a wealth of evidence, testimonials, contradictions, anomalies and questions.”Footnote 24
As its reviews suggest, it took no time at all for the conversation about the Report's findings to become a discussion of literary genre. And that discussion revealed a great deal about the public's psychological need to contextualize and interpret a great national trauma. Whether cordial or heated, the debate over the genre of the Report illustrated the diverse ways in which Americans had come to understand and make sense of the catastrophes of 11 September 2001. Some viewed the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC as an enigma, a mystery in need of a solution. Others viewed the events as an episode so devastating and shot through with personal sadness, pain, and guilt that to talk about it became tantamount to a confession. Still others remembered that day for its suspense and exhilaration, or for the tragic heroism of airline passengers and civil servants. And as witnessed by the surge of patriotism and religiosity following the attacks, many thousands of Americans remembered 9/11 as a religious or quasi-religious experience. Other interpretations were colored by anger, skepticism, and cynicism. There were those who remembered the tragedy as an inexcusable failure of American intelligence and defense, and who recalled that day as a national embarrassment. Moreover, a sizeable minority of Americans denied that some or all of the reported events occurred at all, and considered the “official” story of the attacks to be an outright fiction.
This array of responses not only sheds light on why so many readers disagreed about the literary genre of the 9/11 Commission Report, but also helps to explain the Report's landmark achievement as a work of state-sponsored prose. By employing the lucid and reserved writing style so often celebrated by readers, the commissioners seem to have freed the Report – in the eyes of the public – from the genre of the bureaucratic document. And that freeing in turn explained the popularity and impressive sales of the Report. Once it became clear that the book was not the stiff and cluttered document that the public expected, the Report became available to as many different literary interpretations as there were interpretations of 9/11 itself. It was suddenly and simultaneously a trauma memoir, mystery novel, espionage thriller, confessional, legal brief, episodic history, cautionary tale, and work of fantasy. While it is true that the Report borrowed from the conventions of many of these genres, it also refused to accommodate any one genre above all others. Few works of literature fit easily within the categories that scholars and booksellers promote, but it is nonetheless striking to see how flexible the report proved to be, satisfying the needs and interests of a diverse readership whose interpretations of 9/11 at times varied widely.
THE REPORT AS GOVERNMENT DOCUMENT
Ultimately, then, the commissioners' language liberated the 9/11 Commission Report from one set of literary expectations and hence made it available to complex and competing readings. This availability may well explain, by contrast, why Americans did not similarly embrace earlier government documents that attempted to investigate and account for national traumas. Granted, other works by or relating to the American government had earned a wide readership, among them the Pentagon Papers (1971), the published Watergate Hearings (1973), the so-called Church Committee Reports (1975–76), and the Starr Report (1998).Footnote 25 But none of these documents earned the same literary tributes as did the 9/11 Report, or excited the same long-lived analysis of vocabulary and style. The only other government document ever to be nominated for a National Book Award was The Official Report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica (1972), an investigation of the 1971 prison riots at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York State.Footnote 26 The Attica report – although praised for its clarity, and generally well-read in its day – nonetheless enjoyed smaller acclaim than the report on 9/11, in part because many Americans perceived the prison tragedy to be of limited scope.Footnote 27
Surely the most famous government report published prior to 9/11 was the 1964 Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Of all twentieth-century American tragedies, the murder of JFK probably loomed largest in the national psyche and created the most extensive cultural legacy. Yet the public never truly embraced the Warren Commission Report in 1964, and many writers and filmmakers have worked to discredit and even ridicule its conclusions ever since. It would be naive, of course, to explain the reputation of this earlier report simply in terms of its prose; to be sure, there existed numerous reasons why the Warren Commission failed to establish credibility with its readership. But it would also be careless to ignore the very real connection between the popularity of a government document and the clarity and accessibility of its language.Footnote 28
Some early reviewers of the Warren Commission Report held that its authors had, in fact, exceeded the literary expectations for a document produced by government committee. For example, one writer observed, “The report is thus the first of its kind to be simultaneously accepted as a scholarly historical presentation, a best-seller and a work of literature.” Its success “owe[d] much to the decision to treat the work not only as investigative but also historical, and to include on the staff experienced historians, whose point of view, approaching the issues from a different path, offered a symbiotic climate in which the story could be developed.” Yet for all the similarities between the duties and membership of the Warren and 9/11 Commissions (both staffs included talented historians as well as politicians and investigators), no one would argue that the prose of the Warren Commission gripped its readers with the same force as did the 9/11 Report. Probably one reason for the different public response is that the authors of these documents referenced themselves quite differently therein. The Warren Commission referred to itself in the third person, contributing to the stilted prose that sometimes bogged down the report. For example, in the “Recommendations” section, the commissioners stated,
While in accordance with its mandate this Commission has necessarily examined into the functioning of the various Federal agencies concerned with the tragic trip of President Kennedy to Dallas and while it has arrived at certain conclusions in respect thereto, it seems clear that it was not within the Commission's responsibility to make specific recommendations as to the long-range organization of the President's protection, except as conclusions flowing directly from its examination of the President's assassination can be drawn.
In the Foreword, the authors began the report in the same distanced fashion, reflecting on the actions of “The Commission” since its inception on 29 November 1963.Footnote 29
By contrast, the commissioners of the 9/11 Report referred to themselves in a far more personal and informal manner. Rejecting the bureaucratic third person in favor of the democratic voice of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the authors chose “We” as the first word of the Preface. Thereafter, the commissioners carefully dropped “we” into the chapters and passages that followed, over time transforming factual reporting into a far more complex narrative. Although they never quite made use of the authorial “we” as can be found in works of fiction (William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” comes to mind), the authors nonetheless seemed aware of the power of the word to convey strength, community, and union. Within the body of the report, the first usage of the collective “we” appeared mid-paragraph, three pages into chapter 1: “We asked a screening expert to review the videotape of the hand-wanding [of five of the 9/11 terrorists], and he found the quality of the screener's work to have been ‘marginal at best.’” By page five, the “we” of the commissioners began to assume larger proportions. “We do not know exactly how the hijackers gained access to the cockpit,” they wrote. “FAA rules required that the doors remain closed and locked during the fight.” Here, “we” seemed to refer not only to the commissioners, but also to the Federal Aviation Administration and to the investigative community at large.Footnote 30
By the opening of chapter 11, the designation vacillated between the “we” of the commission and the universal “we.” The authors started the chapter broadly, in a paragraph that did not mention 9/11 but which instead referred to Pearl Harbor and other events “pregnant with conflicting meanings.” “In composing this narrative,” they began,
we have tried to remember that we write with the benefit and the handicap of hindsight. Hindsight can sometimes see the past clearly – with 20/20 vision. But the path of what happened is so brightly lit that it places everything else more deeply into shadow. … After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred.”
The authors hence built a consensus among themselves and their audience, drawing on collective wisdom and inviting the reader to join voices with the “we” of the commission. Rhetorically, this development helped bolster the authors' conclusions, now validated by the reader's implied participation and consent. Only then did the introduction to chapter 11 turn to 9/11 itself, and only then did it offer the following assertion: “We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.”Footnote 31
Yet if the 9/11 commissioners identified four categories of administrative and ideological failure, their critics fumed that they nonetheless refused to assign blame. Indeed, one might suggest that the 9/11 Report diverged from the Warren Report not only in its readability, rhetorical strategies, and rapport with the reader, but also in its failure to indict a particular agency or administration. The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone shooter in Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963, and found fault with two US agencies in particular: “The Commission believes that both the FBI and the Secret Service have too narrowly construed their respective responsibilities.” Had the FBI produced “a more alert and carefully considered treatment of the Oswald case,” the Secret Service might have been notified of the threat posed by the former Soviet defector and, perhaps, prevented the assassination. While few twenty-first-century commentators appeared eager to champion the Warren Report, many were hoping for similarly decisive conclusions from the 9/11 Report. Among mainstream critics of the latter, DeMott perhaps stood as the most outspoken and articulate. In an October 2004 Harper's article, the scholar took aim at the prose style of the commissioners, which he believed catered to “the nation's ever increasing hunger for the upbeat and the positive.” “The Commission's book comes on, bewilderingly, as a pop entertainment,” he argued, and he lambasted the report for its “constant flashing of cowboy quotations” and a “pop ambience [that] helps explain the huge sales.” At the end of the article – which largely denounced the commission for concealing and overlooking the political and moral failures of the Bush administration – DeMott explained why he believed the prose of the Report to be dangerous:
It encourages relaxation, discourages the student posture – the ambition to learn, understand, find solid ground for judgments. (This will be gripping, Reader, not taxing. Enjoy). The invitation to lighten up in itself evokes non-judgmentalism, not lesson learning, as the key to having a nice day.Footnote 32
Whether or not DeMott was correct to attack the Bush administration, I believe he oversimplified the style of the 9/11 Report and severely underestimated the public's response to the text. One of the most troubling arguments in his critique held that the book's “gripping” language dulled the mind, as if literature cannot at once engage the audience and provoke thought. No doubt there will always be those who wish to preserve distinctions among literary genres, and who will believe that a government document, should it bear any resemblance to popular writing, must be a work of compromised standards or disingenuous purpose. But the many careful responses offered by readers of the Report showed that the book had not slowed the nation's intellectual impulses, or its search for moral truth. Hundreds of book clubs met nationwide to discuss the Report, and, as noted above, Internet message boards witnessed prolonged discussions of the work's delivery and conclusions. Within this volume of commentary on the commission's work, there existed sophisticated thinking and rigorous analyses. To be sure, the many attempts to characterize the style and genre of the 9/11 Report revealed that Americans had received the document with a sense of responsibility and gravity rarely extended to highbrow literature, let alone to bestselling paperbacks. The public acknowledged the Report as a summons to look hard at the nation's wounds, and in doing so proved that literature continued to play a central role in defining, upsetting, and questioning America's national identity.
In a broader sense, the striking popularity of the Report spoke to the significance of 9/11 as a powerful historical and political phenomenon. During the 1990s many intellectuals saw the beginning of the twenty-first century as coinciding with the decline of the nation-state as the world's prevailing form of government.Footnote 33 Writing just before the terrorist attacks on America, Paul A. Cantor remarked that popular television and film portrayed the American nation-state as an institution in search of an identity. With the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of easily identified enemies, the federal government was “increasingly pushed out of its seemingly central role in American life and relegated to the margins.” The nation-state, seemingly lacking foreign threats against which to protect the public, was characterized by its “growing irrelevance in the lives of its citizens.” The events of 9/11, however, changed matters entirely. “People feel threatened again,” Cantor explained in an interview following the attacks, “and they're turning back to the nation-state, at least in the short term.” He pointed out that new television series focused on counterterrorist agencies: a striking departure from programs of the 1990s, such as the X-Files, which questioned the purpose of the American government in the age of globalization.Footnote 34
As a cultural and literary event, the 9/11 Report reflected this unique moment in early twenty-first-century American life. Indeed, few phenomena more clearly marked the return of the American nation-state as an essential institution within the popular consciousness. As the state's most prominent and thorough investigation of 9/11, the Report stood for more than an exhaustive analysis of a terrorist attack on American soil. It also represented the voice of a renewed federal government, once again empowered – by global circumstances – to occupy a central place within the lives of the American people. And because the independent commission stood apart from any particular administration or political ideology, the Report appeared all the more attractive to a public seeking comfort and guidance from its traditional source of protection – a strong and trustworthy national power. The commissioners therefore benefited from a political and cultural climate not shared by the authors of many earlier state-sponsored documents. The Pentagon Papers and published Watergate Hearings appeared in print at a time when millions of Americans already felt alienated from the federal government because of its divisive handling of the Cold War and numerous domestic crises. The Starr Report, by contrast, belonged to an era when the American nation-state seemed to have defeated its foreign enemies. Without urgent matters of national security to address, the government of the 1990s appeared to be reduced to investigating matters of decidedly smaller importance: the President's marital infidelities and procedural misconduct. Although written from different perspectives and for different purposes, all three of these widely read publications reflected the dishonesty, corruption, or illegal actions of government leaders, further distancing the public from the state.Footnote 35
Probably only the authors of the Warren Report met with an audience as receptive to the published narrative of a government panel as did the 9/11 commissioners. Like 9/11, the assassination of Kennedy produced an immeasurable degree of outrage and grief among the American public. Moreover, thousands of Americans in 1963 believed that a foreign nation (Russia, Cuba, North Vietnam) had guided the hand of the assassin, just as millions of Americans concluded in 2001 that a foreign state likely assisted the efforts of al Qaeda. Conspiracy theories abounded in the wake of 9/11 no less than after Kennedy's death, and in both cases the public eagerly awaited the official report of the government's appointed commission. This is not to say that those who purchased or downloaded a copy the 9/11 Report did so without a measure of cynicism toward the government.Footnote 36 But judging by public support for the commission during its struggles against bureaucratic obstacles, and considering the Report's unsurpassed sales on the first day of its release, one can surmise that the text faced a by-and-large earnest readership.
As the history of the Warren Report demonstrates, however, a receptive audience cannot alone make or break the popularity of a government document, or guarantee the acceptance of its findings and recommendations. Without the vision and narrative prowess of the commissioners and their staff, the 9/11 Report could not have resonated as strongly with so many Americans. Indeed, it took a great deal of political savvy for the commissioners to produce a government document that could be embraced by the very people whom that government had failed to protect three years earlier. Perhaps as much as from its careful use of language, the popularity of the 9/11 Report grew from its success in wedding the fortunes of a weakened nation-state – diminished by the end of the Cold War and a shift toward globalization – to the fortunes of a wounded citizenry still recovering from a devastating and unexpected national trauma.
In short, the 9/11 Report asked readers to recognize that the aims of the American nation-state were once again inseparable from those of its citizens. “Countering terrorism has become, beyond any doubt, the top national security priority for the United States,” the commissioners explained at the beginning of chapter 12. “This shift has occurred with the full support of the Congress, both major political parties, the media, and the American people.” By reaching out to their audience with plain and inclusive writing, the commissioners delivered an unmistakable message – that 9/11 not only changed the sound and rhythm of state-sponsored prose, but also closed the distance between the American people and their government. That message may have appeared naive or misguided as the “war on terror” raged on, and as anxieties grew over the Patriot Act and numerous governmental intrusions into the lives of private citizens. But there can be no doubt that the idea of a resurgent federal government struck a chord in thousands of Americans in July 2004. For that reason, the 9/11 Report will long remain an important document in American history. More than any other work of its era, it brought down the walls between personal and national experience, and heralded that the American nation-state would remain a potent force well into the twenty-first century.Footnote 37
