May 13, 2004

THE MOST BORING MAN IN WASHINGTON: BOB WOODWARD

Horsefeathers’ rolodex had listed Senator Grassley of Iowa as the most boring man in Washington—that is, until Bob Woodward’s new best-seller “Plan of Attack” appeared in stores and he began to haunt the slow-talk shows.

What Bob Woodward lacks in imagination he makes up for in banality. His new book 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 the slightest attention to the events of the last year can possibly be surprised by what’s in Woodward’s new book.

Bob Woodward wants you to think of himself as your simple, honest, clean-living, friendly, reliable, unbiased—did I say simple?—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. But on the first page of the book there is a special acknowledgement in the form of an “AUTHOR’S NOTE” which acknowledges that “Mark Malseed, a 1997 architecture graduate of Lehigh University… assist[ed] me full-time in the reporting, writing, research and conception of the book.” He goes on for another 150 words singing Mark Malseed’s praises, concluding finally with, “Last time he was a collaborator. This time he was a partner.” It seems that there is nothing too good for Mr. Malseed except his name on the cover of the book.

The book purports to “provide the first detailed, behind-the-scenes account of how and why President George W. Bush, his war council and allies decided to launch a preemptive war in Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein.”
“Information in the book comes from more than 75 key people directly involved in the events….These interviews were conducted on background, meaning I could use the interviews but not identify the sources of it in the book.” This, of course, 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, 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. You’re supposed to think that you’re 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 teenage 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.

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. “Bush sauntered in like Cool Hand Luke, flapping his arms slightly, cocky but seeming ill at ease.”

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 words or behavior that more burnished politicians would never allow themselves to express.

Bush is often characterized by Woodward and others as being inarticulate and verbally impaired, and in the book Woodward presents his own quotations as crystal clear. The Department of Defense, however, published much of his interview with Rumsfeld on its website, and here is what Bob Woodward sounds like unedited: “Q: And having talked to people -- it seems to be the breakthrough in that, if there’s a breakthrough, and this is what I would ask you that you develop -- you with General Franks but General Franks making the presentation. This is kind of a summary version of it, the lines of operation versus slices of regime vulnerability that you set up the things that -- these are the lines of operations, kinetics, SOF, all the way down to humanitarian. And then these are the targets or the things that could be attacked. Does that sound--?”

Here is another typically irrelevant but mean-spirited third-hand observation of Bush that Woodward includes in the book: “The JCS staff had placed a peppermint at each place. Bush unwrapped his and popped it into his mouth. Later he eyed Cohen’s mint and flashed a pantomime query, Do you want that? Cohen signaled no, so Bush reached over and took it. Near the end of the hour-and-a-quarter briefing. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army General Henry ‘Hugh’ Shelton, noticed Bush eyeing his mint, so he passed it over.”

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 what he is accused of by those who are ignorant of the facts, he is not impulsive or thoughtless. Sixteen months elapsed between the early thinking about invading Iraq and the actual invasion. And those sixteen months included six months of intense international diplomatic negotiations. 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.

Woodward’s interests are not deep, nor is his analysis of events. He is like a little boy who has wandered into a laboratory and who sees little mice being treated “cruelly” and who doesn’t really understand what is going on. He does not seem to have a grasp of the complexity of governmental dynamics within the context of history. For example, 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.

Woodward’s implied agenda in the book is that Bush had fallen under the spell of Cheney and Wolfowitz early on and from 9/11 he had decided to invade Iraq even though it had no direct connection with the war against terrorism. And that their view of events is merely gratuitously hawkish. His historical naiveté compels him to see each of the 22 Arab nations as distinct and autonomous and as though radical jihadists within all the Arab nations were not interconnected and were not supported within the context of Pan-Arabism.

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—men like Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bush, men who are not eloquent, 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.