[Unwiseevove]

May 1, 2007

NYC

A Slam-Dunk of a Book Tour Comes to Town

By CLYDE HABERMAN

George J. Tenet, originally of Little Neck, Queens, returned to his hometown yesterday to peddle a book and, not coincidentally, himself.

Most human pursuits have their rituals. In New York, the country’s publishing capital, there are honored rituals for selling new books. They almost amount to sacraments.

One is the rollout interview. Few rites are more blessed than an appearance on the “Today” show. If “Today” goes hand in hand with an interview on “60 Minutes,” an author has as close to a ticket to heaven as he can hope for. That one-two combo — with, for added measure, a go-round with Larry King late last night — could make the prospect of success a slam-dunk.

Mr. Tenet understands slam-dunks.

He used to be the director of central intelligence, until he stepped down in 2004. He now has a book to market, “At the Center of the Storm,” published by HarperCollins. It is his version of how we ended up with some 3,000 Americans murdered on 9/11 and with more than 3,000 servicemen and women — plus many times that number of Iraqis — killed in a war of shrunken popularity.

For “Today,” Mr. Tenet went yesterday to the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center. The usual early-morning crowd had already gathered, a congregation of screamers praying for the cameras to catch them in full cry and with homemade signs held aloft: “It’s my birthday” and “Hey, Mrs. Steinberg.”

Some of the shriekers carried paraphernalia for a comic-book superhero. They had not turned out for retrospections of the national agony. They were waiting for the stars of a new Spider-Man film.

From 7:09 to 7:17, after teasers for later segments on dieting and on full frontal nudity in a “Simpsons” movie — a cartoon! — the nation’s former spymaster fielded questions. It was a low-key interview, done live by Tom Brokaw. Both men seemed as under-caffeinated as those at home trying to keep up while brushing their teeth or getting the kids off to school.

There was nothing like the coiled tension of Mr. Tenet’s taped interview with Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes,” broadcast on CBS the previous evening. In an introduction, Mr. Pelley described Mr. Tenet with words like “passionate,” “combative,” “apologetic” and “defiant.” After the show, some viewers might have tossed in “petulant” and “defensive.”

“People don’t understand us, you know,” Mr. Tenet said of intelligence gatherers. “They think we’re a bunch of faceless bureaucrats with no feelings, no families, no sense of what it’s like to be passionate about running these bastards down.”

“Hindsight is perfect,” he said at another point, after questions about pre-9/11 intelligence failings and his use of “slam-dunk” in connection to Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent stockpile of illicit weapons. “Walk a mile in my shoes.” “I wish I could reel the tape back.” “The only people that stand up and tell the truth are who? Intelligence officers.”

Another ritual of publishing requires that a controversial book be characterized as “tell-all” even if, as in this case, a more accurate description might be “tell-some.” As a fillip, there is, with Mr. Tenet, an unavoidable question of “tell when.”

He is the latest in a long line of government officials who built careers on the taxpayers’ nickel and then turned their résumés into multimillion-dollar book deals. All but lost is the fact that any information they possess belongs to the public; they were nothing more than temporary custodians.

A full-page newspaper advertisement for HarperCollins on the weekend said of Mr. Tenet that “the one man in a position to know what really happened has been silent.”

EXACTLY. He was silent even though his taxpayer-owned information might have influenced the elections of 2004 and 2006. Mr. Brokaw asked him about that silence.

“Well, Tom,” Mr. Tenet replied, “I chose to do my job in a way where you stay inside the system.” Until he had a book contract, that is.

Tell-all or not, his is unlikely to remain the last word. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hinted as much on Sunday, telling CNN that she will get her turn “when I have a chance to write my book.”

Great. We can then go through the rituals all over again. They might include another sacrament of publishing that we almost forgot: the book party. For Mr. Tenet, or Ms. Rice, the menu need not be elaborate. A simple pastry would do. Like yellow cake.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company