November 24, 2002

THE SECOND MOST BORING MAN IN WASHINGTON

DEEP THOUGHT REVIEWS BOB WOODWARD’S NEW BOOK: BUSH AT WAR

DON’T MISS IT!

What Bob Woodward lacks in imagination he makes up for in banality. His new book Bush at War has no table of contents. Can you guess why? Right, it has no content worth calling attention to. If he listed the contents, anyone picking up the book and flipping the pages would have yawned, put it down and asked for the new Elmore Leonard. No one who has paid attention to the events of the last year can possibly be surprised by what’s in Woodward’s new book, except for two wonderful facts: the United States won the war in Afghanistan with only 316 members of the Special Forces Units and 110 CIA officers and massive airpower; and we won the hearts and minds of our Afghan allies with $70,000,000 in crisp new hundred dollar bills, thus saving perhaps thousands of American lives—a great, great bargain.

Bob Woodward wants you to think of himself as your simple, honest, clean-living, friendly, reliable, unbiased—did I say honest?—broker of current history. Ergo the “Bob.” Like “Honest Abe.” Not like the journalists of the Beltway Elite who get their clothes in Saville Row. The “Bob” is part of his Boy Scout costume, like James Stewart’s in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. That’s the way he comes across in his interviews on TV and in his writing. But “Honest Bob” makes a sly end-run around sharing credit with valued co-writers. The back of the book is flooded with more acknowledgements than a Steven Spielberg movie. On the first page of the book there is a special acknowledgement in the form of “AUTHOR’S NOTE” which acknowledges that “Mark Malseed, a 1997 Phi Beta Kappa architecture graduate of Lehigh University, assisted me full-time in the reporting, writing, editing, research—and thinking—for this book.” He goes on for another 150 words singing Mark Malseed’s praises, concluding finally with “This book is a collaboration—his as much as mine.” It seems that there is nothing too good for Mr. Malseed except his name on the cover of the book.

The book purports to be a history of the first hundred days after 9/11—“my effort to get the best obtainable version of the truth.” It is based on notes taken by those who played a part in the discussions in those turbulent days. As distinct from the way real historians work, Woodward never attributes those from whom he got the notes he used. This makes it easy for him to “create” his history since there is no way of checking his version of the events.

As it turns out, Woodward’s faux modesty is not faux, he’s not being modest. His book is a slow-talking, plodding chronology of events known to us all, with skin-deep commentary added revealing only what the astute public was able to surmise at the time. Yes, there were and are sharp differences of opinion between Colin Powell on the one hand and Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney on the other. Needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this. The repetitious verbiage from someone’s notes—“Iraq, no!” “Iraq, yes!” “Iraq later”---rather than illuminating the issues, deadens the narrative. It is only Woodward trading on his impressive rolodex. You’re supposed to think that your getting the inside poop because it comes from someone’s notes of National Security Committee meetings when in fact you get expectable, unsurprising, muddled discourse.

Ever since he stumbled onto Watergate, Woodward has made a career of re-enacting his relationship with Deep Throat in a dozen different venues. Many of his books suffer from dependence on cooperative main sources, sometimes anonymous, who feed him the inside dope and usually create his point of view. His stock-in-trade is digging deep. This penchant, according to the Barnes and Noble on-line biography, “started when he was a teen-ager, working one summer as a janitor in his father’s law office in Wheaton, Illinois. He made his way through the papers in his father’s desk, his father’s partner’s desk and the files in the attic.

“ ‘I looked up all my classmates and their families, and there were IRS audits or divorces or grand juries that did not lead to indictment….It was a cold shower to see that the disposed files contained the secret lives of many of the people in this perfect town and showed they weren’t perfect.’”

It seems that not much has changed since his teen-age years. He still gets secret pleasure out of exposing the mighty, out of showing how imperfect they are. His targets in this book are Rumsfeld and Bush and his hero is Colin Powell—the company dove. Most of the point of view in the book comes from Powell. You understand Powell from the inside because Woodward gives him the opportunity that he gives to no one else. You hear Powell’s grievances, you hear how unfairly he is treated by the naughty boys in the Defense Department, you hear how noble and courageous he is—clearly, according to Woodward, the class act of the administration.

Woodward wants you to hate Rumsfeld. He depicts him as a megalomaniac, self-righteous, hawkish, and acerbic to all. From Woodward’s perspective he’s the man you love to hate,. Here’s a sample: In an epilogue Woodward explains that he met Rumsfeld by accident on a visit to the Pentagon.

“How was the war going? I asked.

“ ‘There is the war you see and the war you don’t see,’ he said. This was accompanied by appropriate hand motions—the war up here, above and seen, and the war down there, covert, unseen.

“ ‘They’ll hit us again,’ Rumsfeld said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘We have them off balance.’ He then jabbed three of his fingers into the center of my chest, tipping me back and slightly off balance.

“Nice wrestling move, I thought, but then I shifted forward , taking the bait. I said that it was not enough because I had regained my balance rather quickly.

“Rumsfeld gave one of his big, healthy, happy, full-faced smiles that overpower his face. He had made his point. We talked for a few more minutes. He asked me for my address and a fax number so he could send me some material….and walked off preppy and peppy. A man at war? It didn’t seem that way. He was very comfortable, exuding self-confidence. I didn’t know if he was too confident.”

Since Woodward hides behind the opinions of others there are only few examples of his own ignorance and uneducated opinions. It is clear that he has never read the discussions and planning conferences that have taken place in wars past. He would have understood then that there are always clashes of opinion, and war plans are always doubtful, and in most cases are never carried out as planned. If he had ever familiarized himself with Churchill’s Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings during World War II he would have seen some of the same behavior on the part of a commander-in-chief that he finds so unacceptable in George W. Bush—his prodding for speedy action, his reliance on his gut instincts, his hawkish inclinations—all traits that characterize Bush as well as Churchill. At one point in a long interview with Bush at Bush’s ranch he posed the following question: “I said that someone had mentioned to me that there were only about 11,000 FBI agents but nearly 180,000 United States Marines. Could not some of those Marines, some of whom are excellent intelligence officers and security experts, be assigned to airports and other vulnerable, potential targets?”

Woodward may not be a dim bulb, but there does seem to be a problem up there. Can you imagine a marine who has been trained to make amphibious assaults and helicopter strikes in the field, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per man, going through my socks and underwear at Kennedy.

His treatment of Bush is characterized by a repellant slyly condescending attitude: Will the boy-president make good? His expose of Bush’s clay feet is more subtle than his workover of Rumsfeld. He does not do a hatchet-job on Bush. Instead it is death by ten thousand cuts. He quotes everything he can to make Bush look childish, uneducated, macho, impulsive. There is no doubt that Bush says the things he says—stumbling, repetitive, cliché-ridden, uncool. But Woodward’s less than deep understanding of Bush can not seem to see that Bush’s actions are very different from his words. Contrary to being childish, he has a near perfect pitch for being parental, fatherly, and responsible, as he demonstrated throughout the early days after the attack. His performance was acknowledged by all as serving the needs of victims of the attack as well as America as a whole.

He is not impulsive or macho. Throughout the planning phase of the war, he listened endlessly to the experts to-ing and fro-ing on countless aspects of the complex situation before he finally came to a decision about what he thought was the best plan. And where he was uneducated, he educated himself quickly and relevantly. A typical example of Woodward’s superficiality is the following: Woodward asks Bush whether he explained to his staff that he was going to be testing them on these important matters. Bush answers, “Of course not, I’m the commander—see, I don’t need to explain—I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” Even as Bush is making this tactless claim, the fact that he has spent two and a half hours with Woodward explaining himself is ignored by Woodward.

There’s an old Yiddish saying that goes “If you’re out to beat a dog, you’ll find a stick to beat it with.” Woodward has no difficulty in finding many sticks with which to beat Bush. He is fond of using Bush’s own words to make him look silly, obnoxious, adolescent or unpresidential. And since Bush’s trade-mark style is informality, directness, and what-you-see-is-what-you-get, it is not hard to find in his unguarded conversation expressions that more burnished politicians would never allow themselves to utter.

Woodward’s implied agenda in the book is that Colin Powell—urbane, polished, cosmopolitan and multilateral—is the presidential model and George W. Bush—raw-boned, instinctive, unilateral (read forcefully assertive), who embraces the firemen and ironworkers at ground zero, and whose thumbs-up was returned by the guys at Yankee Stadium—is the model to beware.

What Woodward leaves out—because it would ruin his brief for Powell—is that the turning point in the Afghan War came on October 31, when Bush stopped listening to to Powell’s worried, restricting advice not to bomb the Taliban forces directly for fear of offending one faction or another. Once the U.S. started carpet bombing Mazar the war was over in a couple of weeks.

The fact is that journalists have, in the last twenty-five or thirty years, become part of the cultural elite. No more Hildy Johnson and the boys in the press room playing poker and shooting the breeze. Now every kid who graduates from journalism school wants to (1) write a novel, or (2)expose some Republican wrongdoer, or (3) change the world. They have a secret romance with the culture of the verbally endowed elite—writers, intellectuals, and Hollywood celebrities. They are uncomfortable with men of action as political leaders like Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bush, men who are not eloquent, men who stumble over their words and who do not bear the kosher stamp of higher education. They laughed at Harry Truman at first, sniggered at Eisenhower throughout his administration, and smile condescendingly at Ronald Reagan still. And in Great Britain the elites laughed at Winston Churchill when he became Prime Minister. Churchill was another what-you-see-is-what-you-get leader, impulsive, unburdened by higher education, often childish, but unquestionably the greatest wartime leader Britain ever had.

Bush is clearly an imperfect leader with feet of clay. But all men of affairs have feet of clay. Unfortunately, Woodward never got over his adolescent need to prove this disappointing fact of life.

So if you are looking for a really slow read, something that will make your eyes glaze over, something as flat as yesterday’s beer, run out and buy Bob Woodward’s new book.

Yale Kramer