The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation by Philip Shenon

Here's the full email Friday from Senator Gorton, who has both criticism and praise for The Commisison:

For the copy of "The Commission", many thanks. I have read it from cover to cover with genuine interest and have learned a great deal that I did not know about our proceedings. It quotes me accurately (something to which I was only occasionally privileged during my political career) and is altogether complimentary of my participation on the Commission. It does twice misspell my last name in two places in the text and my first name in the notes, but I have also become accustomed to that failing.
Nevertheless I am disappointed.
The statutory charge to the Commission was to write an objective history of the facts and circumstances leading up to 9/11, a fact that caused Hamilton and the Commission to do our work "without adjectives and adverbs", and to make recommendations to help prevent a recurrence. It did both, and it had more of its recommendations adopted by the Congress and the Administration than any other such commission of which I have any knowledge. The history, while supplemented around the edges since, remains the definitive description of the times. Thus the Commission discharged its responsibilities magnificently, but the book ignores the result in order to criticize the process.
You make it clear that we should have assessed blame, but that would not only have split the Commission but would have been outside of the charge to the Commission. Certainly the findings left the reader with plenty of ammunition with which to criticize a wide range of people and institutions and your book is a perfect illustration of using them to do so. Obviously you would have preferred a Kerry election (I might have preferred a Kerrey one), but it's hardly our fault that he misused the material we handed him.
You also are a running critic of Philip Zelikow, in a fashion I believe to be without merit. In my view, his prior career was an asset rather than a detriment to the process. On a number of occasions, some of which you recognize, he took on people and institutions with which he was formerly associated, buttressed with knowledge he gained from those associations. The vicious concept of "appearance of conflict", which can never be entirely avoided in an imperfect world, would deprive us of invaluable assistance in a wide range of public tasks, and in this case ignores completely the result of the exercise, a result clearly free of bias and representing the views of the members who signed the report. I believe that the report would not have been as good, and might well not have been unanimous, had it not been for Philip.
I do believe, however, that you make a real contribution to our history, but that it would have been improved by praising the contributions of our staff director.
Slade Gorton

(As promised, I have already notified the publisher to correct the misspellings in the book. Phil Shenon)