O’Neill advises graduates to have fun

Former Treasury Secretary and Pittsburgh native Paul O’Neill, speaking at last year’s… Former Treasury Secretary and Pittsburgh native Paul O’Neill, speaking at last year’s University of Pittsburgh commencement, concluded with what might have seemed an odd note. After sketching the wide vistas and possible futures open to that year’s graduating class, congratulating them on their drive and dedication, and generally saying all the things you expect to hear at a graduation ceremony, though with an offhand eloquence more engaging than most of those he shared the podium with, O’Neill got to his real point.

He told us to have fun.

Admittedly, that’s a pretty easy sentiment. It’s easy to tell people to have fun when you’re successful, having spent twelve years as chief executive officer and chairman of Alcoa, the world’s largest aluminum manufacturer, then moving into the Bush cabinet in 2000. It’s easy to look back on a fulfilling life and career and recognize how much fun you really did have. It’s harder to be a college student in the audience, facing the deep unknown of your future, and think about all the fun times you’re going to have. First you have to unclench the white-knuckle grip on your diploma and realize, “Wait, he’s telling us we can have fun?”

Few speakers could have pulled it off, but O’Neill did it. He made me believe that all his accomplishments had been not just impressive, but enjoyable. That the Alcoa gig, sure, that’d provided a nice pile of walking-around money, but really, the fact is, he mostly just had a good time doing it.

Paul O’Neill spent 23 months as secretary of the Treasury, and judging from the excerpts of a new book about his tenure, he didn’t have much fun. After speaking honestly and openly about the third round of Bush tax cuts, which he saw as unnecessary and fiscally damaging, O’Neill was asked for his resignation. Vice President Dick Cheney, instrumental in O’Neill’s removal from office, suggested he claim he wanted to return to private life. With typical bluntness, O’Neill responded, “I’m not willing to say I want to return to private life because I’m too old to begin telling lies now.”

It’s that dedication to candor that’s making O’Neill and the book, “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, The White House, and The Education of Paul O’Neill,” by Ron Suskind, a lightning rod for political controversy. Suskind wrote the book with extensive help from O’Neill, who offered hours of interview time and over 19,000 documents he’d collected during his time in the Cabinet. What emerges is an insider’s view of the Bush White House during its first two years.

The press and several Democratic candidates have already latched on to some of the more incendiary sections of the book, mostly relating to cabinet-level meetings at which the invasion of Iraq was discussed a solid eight months prior to Sept. 11, 2001. O’Neill claims plans to topple Saddam Hussein were in place virtually from day one. He also says that, during his time as a member of the National Security Council, he saw no evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

It’s said that human beings can only handle so much truth, and in the case of governments, the manageable amount is even less. Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of Defense and a close friend of O’Neill’s, is wary of such tell-all books as the former Treasury secretary has participated in, because they only show a “narrow, little slice of what they saw, not a 360-degree view.” Yet that mythical 360-degree view is possible only from the vantage point of history, and maybe not even then; O’Neill has simply told what he saw, without embellishment or political rancor. That his view finds a wider audience at a time that is inconvenient for Donald Rumsfeld is a problem for the secretary of Defense, not O’Neill or Suskind.

Already, though, the Treasury Department has begun an investigation into those documents O’Neill took with him. The administration claims the documents are classified; O’Neill says they were released by the Treasury’s general counsel. Critics note the speed with which an investigation was begun – literally within hours of O’Neill’s Sunday appearance on “60 Minutes” – and wonder, rhetorically, at the speed of such an inquiry, next to the molasses-like pace of the probe into who outed CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Most of these firecrackers are background noise, yet somehow they’ve drowned out Paul O’Neill’s stated aim for writing the book, “I hope people will read it because I think it makes a contribution to illuminating, especially for young people, what I consider to be a bipartisan, broken political process.”

I hope it will be illuminating, Mr. O’Neill. If not for this generation, then maybe for the next. But most of all, I hope you’re having fun.

Jesse Hicks is always having fun. E-mail him at jhicks@pittnews.com.