Recommended Reading

In "Recommended Reading," we'll take turns writing about books from other publishers. In this installment Jon Karp discusses the oeuvre of Bob Woodward, whose book The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008 came out from Simon & Schuster in September.



In Praise of Bob Woodward
By Jonathan Karp

George W. Bush sent me a letter once. I keep it taped to my office door as a reminder of how quickly things can change.

I had commissioned Bill Minutaglio, then a reporter at the Dallas Morning News, to write a portrait of Bush. He had not yet decided to seek the presidency, and in his letter, dated May 22, 1998, he politely expressed his "misgivings" about the project: "I am amazed that anyone would want to do a biography about me. I have only lived 51 years. My life is far from complete. I am not even sure what the final chapters of a George W. biography will say, because I do not know what I will do."

Well, now we know.

It still seems remarkable to me that someone so ostensibly uncertain of his future could have ascended to the nation's highest office only a short time later. Minutaglio's book, First Son, offered a detailed first impression of Bush. Striving for a neutral tone, the author did his best to let Bush's personal history speak for itself. While I don't mean to suggest that the last eight years could have been avoided only if a few thousand Floridians had focused on Minutaglio's book, I do believe that anyone who bothered to read about Bush should't have been surprised by the way he conducted his presidency.

The passages of First Son that have stayed with me most over the past ten years concern Bush's time at Yale. "He was not obsessed by anything, or a cause. He didn't have an agenda, a timetable, a program," according to his classmate, Muhammed Saleh. "We were in the Vietnam era, it was a big subject, and the big thing about George is that really he was not doctrinaire about anything. You would think, coming from a political family, that he would take strong views."

Minutaglio elaborates: "At Yale, he had aggressively avoided the weight, the intellectual gravity, the ambiguity unfolding before him -- “ all those questions being asked about hazing, about women being admitted, about fraternities, secret societies, jocks, Vietnam, the government, big business. Years later, he was certain about his aversion to all of it." Bush himself agreed with this characterization. "I don't remember any kind of heaviness ruining my time at Yale."
As I've watched the Bush presidency unfold, I've often wondered whether the lasting lesson of Minutaglio's account is that people really don't really change all that much; that the person Bush was at Yale is basically the same guy who occupied the White House. A few years later, I edited a book by Bush speechwriter David Frum, who, though largely admiring of the president, described his former boss as: "impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill-informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be."

Of all the Bush books I've read, Bob Woodward's have been the most illuminating. I concur with Jill Abramson's New York Times Book Review assessment: "These books may be the best record we will ever get of the events they cover..." Simply by explaining what various administration officials said they were thinking at key moments during the past eight years, Woodward has provided a valuable template for historians. Two of my favorite scenes from Woodward's most recent book, The War Within, illustrate just how difficult it will be for historians to reach any firm conclusions about Iraq:

First, Woodward shows a side of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice we rarely see. On November 26, 2006, she challenged Bush: "You're not getting a clear picture of what's going on on the ground. The briefings from the military are a bunch of maps that nobody can read -- statistics that don't relate to anything....I don't know how anybody's going to tell you whether or not more troops are going to help when you don't know what's going on on the ground." What's so revealing about Rice's quote is what it acknowledges: the essential incomprehensibility of Iraq, even among the leaders who are supposed to be the most informed.

Then, there's a revealing exchange between President Bush and Woodward, one which underscores just how difficult it will be for historians to gauge President Bush's level of engagement with the facts. Woodward asks Bush to reconstruct what he said to General Casey, the commander in Iraq, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, when Bush realized the war strategy wasn't working. Bush's response: "I can't give you the interface [with] these men because I can't remember it." As Woodward puts it: "Iraq was the most important issue in Bush's presidency. He was commander in chief, and he knew the war was essentially failing. By his own account, he was thinking about it all the time. So I asked, 'Did you give them a deadline at this point?'

" 'I don't think I did,' the president said. 'This is nothing that you hurry.'" (Note that Bush isn't certain of what he said or did.) Woodward's rhetorical summation: "But how could there be no deadline, no hurry, three and a half years into a failing war?"

Bush's inability to remember such crucial details suggests just how disengaged he was from events. Or, perhaps Bush simply didn't want to talk, or his memory is capable of being refreshed once he has access to documents. Regardless, given how contemporaneous Woodward's reporting has been, the fog of war (and the memories of those who conducted it) will only grow thicker in the coming years. That's why Woodward's books will be an essential source.

One final unappreciated gem from The War Within: In one of their last conversations, Woodward asks the president if the United States is seeking "hegemony" in the Iraq region. Bush doesn't seem to understand the connotation of the word because National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley feels compelled to interrupt the president to note the word's imperial "implications." Bush chides Woodward for being "very tricky" and then goes the journalist one better by asking him whether the U.S. was "hegemonistic" in Japan, Germany, and Korea in the postwar years.

Woodward passes no judgment on Hadley's interruption or Bush's response, nor does the author point out that "hegemonistic" is barely a word; that "hegemonic" might be more apt. Woodward has long been criticized for not providing enough of an analytical frame to his reporting, but such criticism overlooks the lasting importance of Woodward's work. Facts and details tell the story, and in Woodward's world, we learn the story of official Washington's mindset. In the Bush years, no one has told it better.

Jonathan Karp is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of TWELVE.