Susan Faludi

Commentary

New essays and articles by Susan Faludi.

The Rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch, the Soldier Remade into the ‘Helpless Young Girl,” 2003.

October 29, 2007


I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, billed as the book that finally “lets Jessica Lynch tell the story of her capture in the Iraq war in her own words,” debuted at number one on the New York Times nonfiction best­seller list in November 2003. One of the readers curious to learn its contents was the subject herself. In a Time cover story that accompanied the book’s release, Lynch told the reporter that she had taken a look at it but “skipped the parts” that might upset her. If this seemed like a peculiarly arm’s-length relationship to one’s own memoir, Lynch had her reasons. “The Jessica Lynch Story” wasn’t hers—and hadn’t been since the day eight months earlier when the nineteen­year-­old private and fellow soldiers in the army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company had been ambushed on the outskirts of a desert town. Eleven of her thirty­three comrades—chefs, mechanics, requisition and supply clerks—died, five were held hostage for three weeks in a succession of houses, and Lynch, severely injured in an ensuing car wreck that knocked her unconscious for three hours, woke to find herself in a Nasiriyah hospital room, where she remained for nine days.

It would be more accurate to say that I Am a Soldier, Too belonged to its Boswell, Rick Bragg, a former New York Times correspondent who had recently left the paper under a cloud, after acknowledging that he had outsourced his reporting on an article to an intern who was neither paid nor credited for it. In this case, Bragg had interviewed Lynch, but she seemed strangely absent in the resulting account. The “I” in the title was missing from the text, which was told in the third person. The ghostwriter had ghosted his subject. And imposed on her an interpretation of the hours right after the accident that she didn’t recall, having been out cold. Of these conjured memories, Lynch told Time, “It’s like reading a book that really wasn’t about me.”
Bragg’s narrative was only the most recent in a line of ­rewrites—authored by the military, the media, docudrama script doctors, and a self­proclaimed Iraqi savior whom Lynch said she never met. “It seemed like I was doomed for scrutiny,” Jessica Lynch told me when we talked four years later. “I was the one everyone wanted to dig into and pick apart.” The only person not offering a Jessica Lynch chronicle, it seemed, was Jessica Lynch. She had packed a camcorder in her duffel bag, but during her deployment she never once removed it from its case. For months after her return, she uttered not one public word.












The Presidential ‘Hug’ that Became the Most Effective and Expensive Ad of the 2004 Campaign

October 23, 2007

A few days before Mother’s Day in 2004, President Bush made a brief campaign stop in the Republican stronghold of Lebanon, Ohio. His handlers were hustling him down the crowded rope line outside the Golden Lamb Hotel when a voice cut through the din: “Mr. President! This girl lost her mom in the World Trade Center on 9/11!” Bush, according to the much­burnished retellings, wheeled around and plunged back down the line.

Linda Prince, the woman who belted out the summons, had arrived many hours earlier to stake out a position up front for her neighbor, Lynn Faulkner, and his fifteen­year­old daughter, Ashley, the girl who lost her mom. The president “locked” eyes with the grieving teenager.
“I know that’s hard,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m OK,” she said.

Then he gave her “The Hug.” The moment was captured by Ashley’s father, a marketing consultant and ardent Bush supporter, who had purchased a new digital camera for the occasion. After professedly averting his eyes from the viewfinder to grant his daughter her “private moment” with the president, Lynn Faulkner went home and e-mailed the photograph to more than a dozen “friends and family” across the country. They must have been well­positioned intimates; by the next day, the photo was on prominent display on the Drudge Report and scores of conservative blogs. The day after that, The Hug ran in the Cincinnati Enquirer and soon thereafter was enjoying national news coverage. As various reverential accounts of this “emotion­packed encounter” later characterized it, the president had “stopped in his tracks” when he heard the call and fought his way “against the flow” of the rope line, and “without fanfare” and “in one of those huge solitary moments that speak legions” had “instinctively reached for the teenager, clutched her head, placed it on his chest—and just held her.”

The photo drew a record 1.6 million page views on the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Web site. In the echo chamber of the conservative blogo­sphere, the photo was said to reveal Bush as a man of “strength” with “the courage to do what needs to be done to protect our country.” “The protective encirclement of her head by President Bush’s arm and hand is the essence of fatherly compassion,” said a particularly adoring post on FreeRepublic.com. To Bush’s backers, the photo became the money shot. “Nothing speaks better to the compassion, the character, and the leadership of the president,” Brian McCabe, the head of one of the biggest Republican funding groups, told CNNfn. Some weeks after Lynn Faulkner snapped that single frame, McCabe’s group, the Progress for America Voters Fund, dispatched a camera crew to the Faulkners’ home to film “Ashley’s Story,” a ­multimillion-­dollar po­liti­cal commercial.