The Perils Of Court Reporting 
Exhibit A: Bob Woodward's Latest Book On The Presidency

Richard Blow is the author of American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr.

So here comes another Bob Woodward book and all the inevitable hoopla: excerpts in The Washington Post, chat show buzz over Woodward’s gossipy tidbits, instant bestseller-dom.

And, among journalists who care about nagging details like accuracy, there will also be the inevitable handwringing over Woodward’s dubious reporting methods, the fact that he writes from a fly-on-the-wall perspective yet never identifies his sources.

This sequence of events has happened so many times before.

Woodward is the author of "eight No. 1 national nonfiction bestsellers," according to his book jacket. It’s easy to think that nothing changes. And yet this book, Bush at War, is different. Its methodology is so suspect, its hidden agendas so ubiquitous, that to read the book seriously -- to read it critically -- is simply exhausting, and in the end, pointless.

Bush at War suggests that the time may have come to stop reading Bob Woodward.

Let us first take Bush at War at face value. Its story is how the president and his closest advisers reacted to the 9/11 attacks and led the nation in war against Afghanistan. The reader gets to sit in on countless (and surprisingly dull) meetings of Bush with Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and CIA head George Tenet as they discuss how to invent what the president repeatedly calls "a new kind of war."

There are some revelations: The CIA spent $70 million buying off Afghan warlords; the startling fact that, before 9/11, the Pentagon didn’t have a single military scenario for war in Afghanistan. (What are we paying these guys for, anyway? Was it so crazy to think that we might one day be fighting in the land of Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban?)

Along the way, we get some sense of the personalities involved. Rumsfeld and Cheney are the unilateralist hawks; Powell is the cautious coalition-builder; Tenet is, contrary to his reputation, competent and in command of his agency; and Condoleeza Rice comes across, depending on your point of view, as either a snitch and a sycophant, or Bush’s closest adviser on whom he relies on to facilitate harmony among the members of the war planning group.

But perhaps the biggest revelation is Woodward’s portrayal of George Bush. Gone is the linguistically challenged, intellectually shallow, foreign-policy novice that we thought we knew. In its place is a wise, determined executive, a master at manipulating and motivating the world-weary Washington insiders around him, a visionary leader who wants to use the war on terrorism to effect world peace and the end of human suffering.

This would be a remarkable transformation, except that Woodward doesn’t even portray it as that. Even the White House put out the spin that Bush had "grown" after 9/11. But in Bush at War, from day one the president is steadfast, thoughtful to the point of being philosophical, and ironclad in his determination.

He is also shockingly eloquent. Bush is extensively quoted in this book -- not paraphrased, but quoted -- and in all those dozens of quotes, I think I counted two instances where Bush did not speak in a complete sentence. I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe it.

It’s not that the liberal caricature of Bush strikes me as accurate; Bush is clearly more complicated and more capable than the Internet satires floating around. But we have seen almost no evidence in public that Bush is the iconic figure Woodward would have us believe, and Woodward’s logic is little more compelling than that of the Bush-haters.

Woodward would have us believe in Bush’s awesome talents merely because he says so. Take my word for it, he says. I can’t tell you who I spoke to for this book. But I’ll write in a way that makes it sound like I spoke to everyone. And besides, I’m Bob Woodward. Isn’t that enough?

If you think I’m being too tough on Woodward, consider two instances where he awkwardly inserts himself into the book. The first comes after he’s written that after 9/11 Bush would sometimes wake up in the night.

"Of course he was waking up," Woodward writes, explaining away any presidential weakness. "I was waking up, and I didn’t live at [the White House.]" Well, if even Bob Woodward was having trouble sleeping, then who could blame the president?

Woodward insertion number two comes when he and fellow Post reporter Dan Balz bump into Don Rumsfeld and ask him about something that happened in an early meeting.

"What the hell did they do?" Rumsfeld exploded. "Give you every goddamn classif—." "I urged him not to worry," Woodward says soothingly. (He won’t really shake up the status quo, never fear.) "I said that perhaps we could put an 18 1/2 second gap in our tape."

What is the point of this bizarre anecdote? I can think of only one: Rumsfeld’s angry reaction and the Watergate reference reinforce the premise that Woodward’s reporting both upsets those in power and stands the test of time.

Is Woodward right? The answer to the first part is clearly no. The man who helped bring down a president has now become an administration’s court historian, painting an embarrassingly uncritical portrait of a president marshalling his troops as if leading the nation into war were second nature for the man who had trouble leading the Texas Rangers.

And I can only surmise that there are two reasons for this, neither of which is that the portrayal is accurate. One, it’s a smarter commercial decision. While the country is at war -- and this book was rushed into print to be more timely -- a heroic Bush sells better than a mediocre one.

And two, it’s part of Woodward’s quid pro quo: You give me access, I’ll make you look good. Well, Bush gave him access, and after this book, probably will again. I’ll bet that Rumsfeld and Cheney, who don’t come across particularly well, gave Woodward little or none. In a way, I admire them for that.

But ultimately, I have no idea whether what any of Woodward writes is correct. No one could, except the players involved. I suspect that some of what Woodward writes is true, some is roughly accurate, and some is total hogwash. Yet because Woodward won’t reveal his sources, there’s just no way to assess the crediblity of the material presented.

Speaking anonymously allows people to say things that they don’t have to be held accountable for, and without accountability there is no impediment to spinning, manipulating and just plain using the reporter. Of course, if Woodward were to demand that his sources take responsibility for what they say, he wouldn’t get the access that he does.

But access is not an end in itself. To say that nobody has access like Bob Woodward is only a promotional tool for Woodward’s publisher. What matters is what a reporter does with that access. For Woodward, however, the situation is reversed. His aura of having an all-access pass is so commercially valuable that he can’t afford to lose it; Woodward’s access keeps him from writing the truth. And his ego -- even I was waking up at night -- compels him to insist that he is not bound by the rules that the vast majority of reporters swear by. In his own mind, Woodward stands alone.

You have to give George Bush credit for one thing. He was smart enough to figure out how to play Bob Woodward like a maestro, and now he has the hagiography to show for it.


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Published: Nov 27 2002