Dupe - please delete

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2549-2004Apr10?language=printer

In her testimony before the Sept. 11 commission on Thursday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice gave glimpses of the inner workings of the Bush White House that were extraordinarily revealing for this highly secretive administration.

Anyone who listened closely during her three hours on the stand could glean much about the strengths and weaknesses of this White House, a place where few outsiders have gained a clue about how it operates.

What emerged was a picture of an organization with great discipline and a strong belief in orderly structures and articulated concepts and policies. But it is also a top-down bureaucracy, with little capacity for hearing variant viewpoints or testing its theories against the practical wisdom of front-line operatives.

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What is missing from the story, as it has emerged so far, is any sense that Bush himself was reaching down below the top levels of the White House staff or the intelligence agencies, trying to inform himself of what was happening down in the trenches. It is an open secret in Washington that he is indifferent to much of the daily work of the domestic departments. But it is striking that he seems equally passive on matters of national security, letting information filter up to him through the White House bureaucracy.

John Kennedy was famous in his time for picking up the phone and asking desk officers deep in the State Department or smart congressional staffers what they knew about something of interest to him. Kennedy was a journalist at heart, not, like Bush, a Harvard Business School grad. That kind of curiosity is as important to the presidency as the most well-organized staff system.