The Greatest Story Ever Sold ─ The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America

When America was attacked on 9/11, its citizens almost unanimously rallied behind its new, untested president as he went to war. What they didn't know at the time was that the Bush administration's highest priority would be to consolidate its own power at any cost. As only he can, New York Times columnist Frank Rich brilliantly and meticulously illuminates the White House's disturbing love affair with "truthiness." His step-by-step chronicle shows how the nation was misled into war in Iraq and how the bungled aftermath, a Washington leak, and a devastating hurricane at long last revealed the lies in a story that had been so effectively sold to the nation as God-given patriotic fact.

Frank Rich became a New York Times op-ed columnist in 1994 after serving for thirteen years as the newspaper's chief drama critic. He has written about culture and politics for many publications and was on the staff of Time, the New York Post, and New Times magazine after starting his career as a founding editor of The Richmond Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970s. He is the author of Ghost Light, a childhood memoir; Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993; and The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, coauthored with Lisa Aronson. A native of Washington, D.C., he lives in Manhattan with his wife, the author Alex Witchel, who is a reporter for The New York Times.