confRontAtion And consensus 355
chase. If your recommendations had been implemented, he asked Clarke,
“is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?
“No.”
Gorton followed up: “It just would have allowed our response, after
9/11, to be perhaps a little bit faster?”
“Well, the response would have begun before 9/11,” said Clarke.
“Yes, but there was no recommendation, on your part or anyone else’s
part, that we declare war and attempt to invade Afghanistan prior to 9/11?”
“That’s right.”^25
Gorton had deftly “punctured the political balloon,” Zelikow said. He
refocused the hearing on trying to determine what could have been
done—what could be done—to combat a disciplined, fanatical enemy that
views America as the “head of the snake,” the font of all evil. “I was glad
I had Slade in my foxhole,” Zelikow said. “He was statesmanlike, but he
was savvy, too.”^26
R12-shingeLi houR dAys, Gorton was always well-prepared for the hear-
ings and intensely interested in the staff’s research. In the space of 17
months, the commission sorted through two million documents, inter-
viewed more than a thousand people in 10 countries and heard 160 wit-
nesses during 19 days of hearings.
“He’s analytical rather than polemical,” Zelikow observes. “The way
he handled the questioning of Clarke was so deft. It didn’t involve any ad
hominem attacks. He was setting a standard that we’re going to really
take this seriously in a factual way and not just get caught up in political
name-calling.”
Gorton’s real influence, however, was behind the scenes, according to
Kean, Hamilton, Gorelick and Zelikow, who sums it up like this: “Basi-
cally, in a lot of small ways, Slade elevated the quality of the internal work
of the commission... .The commission was in some ways foreseen to be
a likely failure. It was created under highly political circumstances, and
the commissioners—five Republicans and five Democrats—were selected
in a highly political process. You had a powerful chair and vice chair and
a powerful staff, but it would have broken apart if you’d had a really frac-
tious, polarized tone among the commissioners. The situation was so in-
tense that there were constant dangers of that. Slade was a critical person
in mitigating and heading off that danger. These are the qualities that end
up deciding whether or not political institutions succeed. The essence of
political institutions—the reason they are called political institutions—is
they are places where power is shared. And whenever power is shared