Two former Daily Editors returned to campus Monday night to share stories of tirelessly investigating government workings.

This time around, though, they weren’t talking about reporting on the ASSU.

Phil Taubman ‘70, associate editor of The New York Times and former Washington Bureau Chief, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran ‘94, assistant managing editor of the Washington Post and former Baghdad Bureau Chief, lectured about their experiences investigating Bush Administration missteps.

TAUBMAN

Taubman, who was Editor-in-Chief of The Daily in 1969, centered his talk on secrecy in Washington around a discussion of the story The Times ran in 2005 exposing the NSA’s warrantless surveillance activities.

“[Times reporters] James Risen and Eric Lichtblau came to me and said that the NSA is listening in on telephone conversations, without a court order,” Taubman said.

After the two reporters alerted Taubman, the Bush administration began to pressure The Times not to publish the story, as reporting progressed.

“If you don’t publish, there’s got to be a damn good reason not to. In this case, the reasons came immediately and forcefully, and we paid attention to them,” Taubman said. “They came starting with Condoleezza Rice, who said that if you expose this, Americans will die.”

Taubman and senior Times editors were convinced by Rice’s pitch in 2004, but a year later, they changed their minds.

“By the fall of 2005, our thinking had changed, and the main reason was that the reporting was complete by then,” Taubman said. “We had come to understand more about the operation.”

A new understanding that there was dissent within the Bush administration over the validity of the NSA program led Taubman and the Times editors to push forward and publish the story.

But first, the administration took one more try at killing the article.

“The culminating meeting was with the president himself, who asked [Executive Editor] Bill Keller and the Publisher Arthur Sulzberger to come to the Oval Office,” Taubman said. “He made a very forceful case that we should not publish it. Bill Keller caught the spirit of the meeting well — Bush’s message was: you print this, you’ll have blood on your hands.”

“We did publish it — Eric and Jim won a Pulitzer Prize for that story,” Taubman said.

The former Daily editor attributed much of the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy to the aftermath of 9/11.

“I’m not unsympathetic to the reaction in Washington to 9/11,” Taubman said. “There is an American tendency to shut down civil liberties and constitutional rights during crises. It’s part of a pattern, a xenophobic instinct in our society. It was compounded by 9/11.”

But Taubman suggested that while the actual crisis might have come to an end, the secret-keeping continues.

The journalist ended his remarks with a reminder for the audience — the war in Iraq has now gone on longer than World War II.

CHANDRASEKARAN

Chandrasekaran, who served as The Daily’s Editor-in-Chief in the fall of 1993, spoke of his experiences as The Post’s Baghdad Bureau Chief, the subject of his book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.”

The allegation leveled by Chandrasekaran at the Bush administration in his book, and in yesterday’s talk, is that a combination of poor hiring decisions and an insulated Baghdad headquarters led to a series of poor policy decisions that ultimately doomed American reconstruction efforts in the country.

“In many cases, the government just sent the loyal and the willing,” said Chandrasekaran of the personnel sent to manage Iraq. “They asked their hires some very blunt questions — ‘are you a member of the Republican Party,’ and ‘Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2004?’”

Chandrasekaran then detailed several examples of startlingly inept hiring decisions. Repeatedly, he exclaimed, “I wish I was making this up.”

The official charged with reopening the Iraqi stock exchange was Jay Hallen, a 24-year-old who had no previous securities experience, Chandrasekaran claimed. A 21-year-old White House intern was given an important post in the Ministry of the Interior.

According to Chandrasekaran, the ineffectiveness of Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority was compounded by the insulated home of the temporary government - the Green Zone.

“The Green Zone was Baghdad’s little America,” Chandrasekaran said. “Iraqi laws and customs didn’t apply in the green zone. Most of the CPA staff had never worked outside the U.S., more than half had gotten their first passport to travel to Iraq, and they needed the same type of bubble oil companies built in Indonesia and Nigeria.”

Chandrasekaran described the Green Zone as “a full-scale occupation by Americans sitting in the palace drinking beer and eating bacon.”

He also referenced one bureaucrat — given the senior most position in the healthcare reform group — who spent his time trying to establish a co-pay system and an anti-smoking campaign. This was in a country home to hospitals Chandrasekaran described as “the fifth circle of hell,” with people dying in the hallways.

Although he said several times that he does not have a solution, Chandrasekaran said that accepting the reality of sectarianism and embracing a federalist structure would be a realistic way to proceed.

When asked if the Bush administration’s missteps in Iraq stemmed from malfeasance, Chandrasekaran disagreed.

“I haven’t come up with any indication that they were actively pursuing any kind of divide and conquer strategy,” Chandrasekaran said. “This can be principally explained by general incompetence. It seems so outrageous as to be unbelievable.”

While Taubman and Chandrasekaran have come quite a long way from their humble beginnings managing writers in the Storke Publications Building, not everything has changed for the two editors.

According to Chandrasekaran, The Daily office and Baghdad aren’t too different from each other.

“Running The Daily gives you early insight in managing a lot of unruly people in a war zone,” he said.