Bob Woodward’s ‘War’ is – dare I say it – good

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At this late stage in Bob Woodward’s career it would be possible to publish an entertaining anthology of the negative reviews of his books. Although there is an ongoing debate about the journalistic merits of Woodward’s reporting, he has undoubtedly succeeded in bringing out the vicious best of the likes of Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens and Jack Shafer.

A few years ago I wrote to Woodward, hoping to get his help on an article I was reporting on. I decided to approach him with a thick layer of flattery, in what I thought was the spirit of Bob Woodward. To my embarrassment, he replied that he was having trouble reconciling my fawning message with the negative review of his book State of denial in which I had published The New York Times in 2006, “which strongly concludes the opposite.” His answer suggests that he might be the ideal editor of the anthology.

Over the years, my criticism of Woodward has softened considerably. It is not that the complaints about his works are unfair: he recites his sources’ version of events with excessive reverence; he trumpets every bit of reporting, no matter how trivial; he tells scenes without pausing to put them in context. But when he is in his most serious mode – and Warhis new book about President Joe Biden’s navigation of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East is perhaps the most serious of his career — exuding an almost atavistic obsession with the gritty details of foreign policy. Woodward is the most gifted thrill-seeker of his generation, but it is his enduring desire to be known as a serious person that yields his most meaningful reporting.

War reaches that fertile spot, but it starts in an unpromising way. In the prologue, Woodward recalls Carl Bernstein encountering Donald Trump at a dinner party in New York, in 1989. Trump exclaimed, “Wouldn’t it be great if Woodward and Bernstein interviewed Donald Trump?” The journalistic duo who helped bring down Richard Nixon agreed to meet with him the next day.

Last year, Woodward went to a storage facility and began going through his files in search of the lost interview. In a box full of old newspaper clippings, he found a battered envelope containing the transcript. That’s unfortunately the most interesting part of the story. Woodward subjects his reader to pages of banal musings from Trump: “I am a great loyalist. I believe in loyalty to people.” Since Woodward and Bernstein were the ones asking the questions, the conversation is apparently worthy of history. This is a crazy, superficial start to a book devoted to the foreign policy of the Biden presidency.

The cover, which features a row of faces of world leaders, has Kamala Harris’ face at the center. It’s another deception, because the vice president is a minor player in the story. That said, Harris comes off well in her cameos. She asks diligent questions in the Situation Room. In telephone conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she takes center stage and asks him about the civilian casualties in Gaza. However, there are no instances in which she substantively disagrees with Biden.

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The most revealing Harris moment comes toward the end of the book. One of Biden’s friends asks her, “Can you please talk to the president more than him?” Your president really loves you.” Her boss’s biggest disappointment was that she didn’t write or call. In response to the friend’s plea, Harris joked about her strongest bond with the president: “He knows I’m the only person around who knows how to pronounce the word correctly.” bastard.” It’s a genuinely funny exchange, and telling in its way.

But these are just MacGuffins: sops for the Beltway superfans. At its core, Woodward’s book is about diplomacy. Just beyond the miscellaneous tidbits about Trump — the most heinous being the former president’s ongoing friendship with Vladimir Putin, a charge Trump’s campaign denies — lies a serious history of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. I’ve reported on these stories myself and I can’t say I found any errors in his story. If anything, I’m unapologetically jealous of the way he managed to tell some big stories that escaped me. One of the most stunning parts of the book shows Putin reflecting on the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine – and the quiet diplomacy that pushed him back from the brink. Newspapers at the time hinted at this threat, but Woodward reveals the backstory in robust and chilling detail. (Jon Finer, the deputy head of the National Security Council, says Putin’s decision on whether to use the nuclear bomb was like a “flip of a coin.”) When Biden worries about the possibilities of nuclear escalation, he’s not just thinking to his childhood in the US. earliest days of the Cold War. He is currently facing a very real risk.

Unlike his predecessors, Biden was suspicious of Woodward. Old enough to remember how one of his books derailed Bill Clinton’s first term, Biden appears to have chosen not to participate in this history or Woodward’s previous book. Danger. Because he has been denied access, the president appears lifeless. It’s not like he’s having lunch; according to Woodward’s reporting, he is in charge of his assets. There are just no real insights into his psychology. His decision to withdraw from the 2024 race came too close to the book’s publication date for Woodward to report on the process that led to the president withdrawing. He has very little to say about the most fascinating decision in recent political history.

But in a way, Biden and Woodward were made for each other. These two octogenarians are both avatars of a bygone era in Washington, when foreign policy was the shared obsession of the establishment. Even though Woodward does not find Biden personally interesting, he delves into the president’s conversations with Netanyahu and Putin with genuine fascination. These aren’t the bits of reporting that move copies, but they are clearly what he cherishes. In his epilogue, he hints at how much he enjoyed reporting on “sincere good-faith efforts by the President and his core national security team to wield the levers of executive branch responsibly and in the national interest.” ‘

Despite his fixation on the substance, Woodward fails to answer — or even ask — some of the bigger questions about Biden’s foreign policy: Could he have done more to strengthen Ukraine? Could he have pushed Israel to accept a ceasefire? But Woodward does offer a judgment on the presidency that seems measured and fair to me: “Based on the evidence now available, I believe that President Biden and this team will largely be studied in history as an example of steadfast and purposeful leadership.” Despite this administration’s many mistakes, I suspect that Woodward’s judgment will stand the test of time, and that no review of War is intended for the anthology.