O'Neill says book on administration used no secret papers

By Esther Schrader
Los Angeles Times

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Reacting to an announcement by the Treasury Department that it was launching an inspector general's investigation into why a document stamped "secret" was used to illustrate an O'Neill interview Sunday night on the CBS program "60 Minutes," O'Neill said, "The truth is, I didn't take any documents at all."

O'Neill told NBC's "Today" show yesterday that he had asked the Treasury Department's chief legal counsel if he could "have the documents that are OK for me to have" for use in the book, "The Price of Loyalty," by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind. O'Neill was the principal source for the book.

O'Neill said he thought the investigation would show that Treasury employees who collected the materials he gave to Suskind had acted legally.

"I don't think there is anything that is classified in those 19,000 documents," O'Neill said.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld challenged the book's assertion that President Bush planned from the administration's earliest days to oust Saddam Hussein. He said that although the Bush White House had inherited the policy of "regime change" in Iraq from the Clinton administration, Bush decided to go to war "after trying everything else in the world."

"The idea that he came into office with a predisposition to invade Iraq, I think is a total misunderstanding of the situation," Rumsfeld said.

He said the portrayal in the book of Bush as detached from policy-making and making decisions solely out of political motives was a "night-and-day" contrast to his experience with the president.

O'Neill told the "Today" show that he "probably" will vote for Bush in November's presidential election and said he was chagrined at some of the "vivid" language he used during his hundreds of hours of interviews with Suskind for the book.

"If I could take it back, I would take it back," he said of a quote in which he said that Bush at Cabinet meetings was "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people."

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