By Larry Olmstead

The most amazing book I have read was “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” written by Robert McNamara, who as U.S. defense secretary helped prosecute that war. What stood out was its clarity and forthrightness in detailing the author’s complicity in what then stood as the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the nation’s history. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., praising the 1995 book, wrote: “Can anyone remember a public official with the courage to confess error and explain where he and his country went wrong?”

Contrast that with the Bush Administration and the internal finger-pointing that is hitting new lows with the publication of former CIA director George Tenet’s book, “At the Center of the Storm.” You know something is amiss when a guardian of the nation’s top secrets is writing a tell-all book, but put that aside for a moment. What is alarming is the administration’s failure to grasp a concept fundamental to good leadership – accountability.

Why didn’t the events of Sept. 11, 2001 result in the immediate resignations of the directors of the CIA and the FAA? If the simultaneous hijacking of four airliners and their use as missiles against the World Trade Center and Pentagon did not constitute a massive failure of intelligence and airline security, what would? That has turned out to be emblematic of an administration where no one is responsible for anything that goes wrong. Tenet is right to fault the administration’s zeal to attack Iraq, and to point fingers at Vice President Cheney and hawks like Paul Wolfowitz, who despite his wrong-headedness on Iraq was named head of the World Bank, where he has been a laughingstock. What Tenet and others miss is that leadership begins with the ability to look first in the mirror – to evaluate and judge your own performance. Leaders hold themselves accountable.

Hey, George Tenet – and Colin Powell and others – 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq happened on your watch. Ariana Huffington writes of the late-blooming dissenters: “Each story shares the same fatal flaw. It requires that the remedy that was readily accessible – resignation – did not exist.”

Schlesinger called McNamara’s book brave, honest and honorable. History will not be so kind to Tenet and his fellow blame-deflectors. Writes Huffington: “The honorable train left the station a long time ago, and Tenet wasn’t on board.”