Pentagon Leaks and Collective Responsibility
Plot Beats
The narrative micro-steps within this event
Leo warns about impending Pentagon leaks regarding potential casualties in Khundu, escalating the stakes.
Bartlet accepts the potential fallout, asserting collective responsibility for their decisions.
Leo confirms the timeline for military action, solidifying their commitment to the plan.
Who Was There
Characters present in this moment
Morally resolved and quietly amused; uses wit to mask gravity while acknowledging potential political costs.
President Bartlet recites scripture to moralize intervention, pours and offers a drink, answers Leo with wry levity, accepts the political risk, and formally agrees to a Sunday-noon timetable, anchoring moral purpose to a concrete decision.
- • Frame Khundu intervention as a moral imperative rather than political maneuver.
- • Secure staff buy-in and a concrete timeline to move from private conviction to operational action.
- • Moral arguments (scripture) can legitimize risky foreign policy choices.
- • Shared sacrifice is necessary to sustain the policy politically and ethically.
Concerned and focused; anxious about leaks but composed enough to translate risk into actionable demands (a timetable).
Leo interrupts levity with blunt political reality: warning that Pentagon sources will leak casualty estimates and that search-and-rescue will 'find' a Gulfstream fragment; he presses the President for a timeline and secures a Sunday-noon commitment.
- • Expose and blunt anticipated Pentagon-driven narratives before they can define the debate.
- • Lock down a specific timetable to coordinate political and operational responses.
- • The Pentagon (or its sources) will proactively shape public perception to favor its institutional interests.
- • Concrete deadlines and preparation reduce the damage of inevitable leaks and political attacks.
Not an emotional actor here—serves as a steadying, righteous voice that Bartlet leans on to counter political calculation.
Isaiah is invoked by Bartlet as the moral authority framing the intervention; though not present, the prophet's words provide the ethical language that anchors Bartlet's justification.
- • Provide moral sanction for intervention decisions.
- • Shift the conversation from politics to duty and compassion.
- • Scripture can legitimize state action in the face of atrocity.
- • Evocative religious language persuades both conscience and public opinion.
Objects Involved
Significant items in this scene
A 'piece of a Gulfstream' is invoked by Leo as the physical evidence a search team will allegedly recover; narratively it functions as the promised, tangible hook the Pentagon will use to create a casualty story and undercut the administration's control of the narrative.
The 'lost helicopter' is referenced as the search-and-rescue target whose operations provide cover for discovery of the Gulfstream fragment; it functions as the operational context that will be narrated to suggest American casualties and complicate public support.
Location Details
Places and their significance in this event
Khundu is the distant theater whose human catastrophe motivates Bartlet's moral rhetoric and whose chaotic realities create the political leverage the Pentagon can exploit; it is the absent battleground that shapes the Oval Office exchange.
Organizations Involved
Institutional presence and influence
The Pentagon functions as the off-stage actor threatening to shape the public narrative: Leo warns that Pentagon sources will leak inflated casualty estimates and that operational actors will surface a wreckage fragment, thereby forcing the White House to respond politically and operationally.
Narrative Connections
How this event relates to others in the story
"Leo's warning about political threats and NSC directives directly leads to his later discussion with Bartlet about Pentagon leaks and potential casualties, showing the escalating stakes of their decisions."
"Leo's warning about political threats and NSC directives directly leads to his later discussion with Bartlet about Pentagon leaks and potential casualties, showing the escalating stakes of their decisions."
Key Dialogue
"BARTLET: Set free the oppressed, break every yoke, clothe the naked and your light shall break forth like the dawn, and the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard."
"LEO: You can expect to see pieces quoting Pentagon sources on how many lives we'd lose in Khundu. And a search and rescue group, diving for a lost helicopter prop, is going to find a piece of a Gulfstream."
"BARTLET: I think you're wrong. But if you're right, then okay. We should all have a little skin in this."