Seeking George Bush
I decided to do a portion of the assignment you all are working on, which is to locate a speech by a member of the Bush Administration. As these events gradually fade into the past, the information gets more and more difficult to find, having been deleted and replaced by current news and events. So I began as I recommended you begin, by reviewing the History Commons timeline, which I found only a few days ago as I was working to update the information on the Resources page. I skimmed down the timeline, reading things as they struck my interest. Under September 12 2002 I found this: "At a meeting of the White House Iraq Group, speechwriter Michael Gerson suggests that Bush argue in his next speech that the US should not wait until there is conclusive evidence that Iraq has acquired a nuclear weapon because the first sign of a ’smoking gun’ may be a ‘mushroom cloud.’ Gerson’s suggestion is met with enthusiastic approval. The soundbite is so well liked that the phrase is leaked to the New York Times before the speech, appearing in an article on September 8." I immediately began to wonder how often this soundbite was used, and which of Bush’s speeches the speechwriters were working on. The History Commons timeline revealed that Bush’s next major speech was on September 12, to the United Nations General Assembly. The timeline gave no link to the text of this speech, and so my troubles began.
In Google I typed his name, "speech," "U.N." and the date of the speech. I got a lot of web sites that mention this speech, but no hits for the speech itself. I tried adding other words, such as "transcript," and "Iraq," and still didn’t get anything. Usually, when a search goes awry, I can look at the hits I did get for clues about how to rework my search, but this time I just couldn’t see why I wasn’t getting anything. I went to the "news" option in Google and tried it there, but not even when I used the menu on the left to select the year, 2002, did I feel like I was getting close. So I tried CNN.com, which is always a good source for transcripts, and typed in the same info in their search engine. All I got was the unpleasant discovery that nothing on the CNN site is more than a couple of years old. By now I had been trying various things for nearly an hour, and I was getting frustrated. Well, one reason I’m doing this project is to test the accuracy of my own instructions, so I went to the White House archives website that I’ve given you a link for on the Resources page. I typed my info in the search box at that site and…you guessed it, I got a whole lot of junk. My wife called me and asked if I was coming home soon–she wanted to walk the dog with me before dark. "I’ll leave in a couple of minutes," I said, and began to do some backtracking. I revisited the entry in the History Commons page to make sure I had the date and venue correct, then I went back to Google and tried a few more things, then I went back to the White House archive and in a fit of exasperation typed in the words "United Nations General Assembly," copied from the History Commons page. Finally, I found it.
The problem with computers is that they’re stupid. Bush’s speech, in the White House archive, was saved as "Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly." Remarks, not speech. Computers are stupid; when I asked the search engines to look for "speech" they didn’t find it, because it was "remarks."
OK, so I finally found what I was looking for. There’s just one little problem: Bush didn’t use the "smoking gun" sound-bite in his "remarks" on 9/12. Now I have to decide whether to go back to the drawing board and start hunting for another occasion that Bush used that sound-bite, or else to just use the "remarks" I did manage to find. And I didn’t get home in time to walk the dog with my wife.