Kylog

Just finished reading Ron Suskind’s extraordinary book on Paul O’Neill, The Price of Loyalty. For the moment, I’ll leave aside the remarkable insights the book offers into the Bush administration (but do please read the book for just that — totally eye-opening even to a jaded skeptic such as myself). Instead I want to grab onto Suskind’s insistent thread about how committed Paul O’Neill is to the pursuit of facts and evidence, to the exclusion of ideology.

“Evidence of what is real — that’s what changes everything.” This is the wrenching line from O’Neill as he concludes his career at the Treasury. Throughout the book, O’Neill is portrayed as conservative but completely non-ideological, as being completely committed to the pursuit of understanding.

Of course it’s not as simple as that; one can never leave one’s ideology behind, any more than one can leave one’s language behind. Our ideologies like our language are the framework through which we construct our world, the lens through which we see it. But this is an overly academic point: we can recognize what is ideological and what is not and continuously question the unquestioned.

Suskind convincingly portrays O’Neill as doing just this, and this is really a remarkable achievement. It takes vigilance not to rest on one’s laurels and to start each day asking questions about what is and what isn’t, but this is a mark of O’Neill’s greatness.