Frank Rich.

• Author: VanDeCarr, Paul
• Position: Interview

How fitting that Frank Rich's new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, should have reached the New York Times bestseller list--quickly landing in the top ten of hardcover nonfiction. Which is to say, it's the bestselling true story of an even better sold false story. Rich shows how the Bush Administration created what amounted to an elaborate stage play--complete with set design ("Mission Accomplished") and fake reviews (Jeff Gannon)--and how the audience, so to speak, abandoned the show in increasing numbers as the plot became less and less believable.

Stagecraft is among Rich's areas of expertise. He was named chief theater critic of the Times in 1980, and in 1994 he became an op-ed columnist for the paper, exploring the intersection of culture and politics. Before joining the Times, he worked as a film and television critic for Time magazine and as a film critic for the New York Post. He is the author of Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993, and Ghost Light, a childhood memoir, as well as co-author, with Lisa Aronson, of The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson. Happily, his new book is not a rehashing of his columns, but rather a cohesive account of how the story was peddled; it reads both as a timely political document and as an engrossing work of history.

The anger and hatred with which some people regard the President--this or any other--may be proportional to the power he wields. For critics of President Bush, reading The Greatest Story may provoke a resurgence of the animosity that his actions over the past several years inspired, only in diluted form now that the midterm elections have rendered him more of a lame duck.

But The Greatest Story is not just about what the Administration did or did not do. It is also about how the press and the broader culture allowed it. In the introduction, Rich cites "what may have been the single most revealing paragraph anyone has reported about the Bush Administration." He is referring to a passage from Ron Suskind's article in The New York Times Magazine two weeks before the 2004 election, in which a Presidential aide speaks derisively about journalists and their "reality-based community." The aide goes on to say, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.... We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

I spoke with Rich by phone the Sunday after the midterm...