Living With <BR>Bob Woodward
It doesn't get much better
than this, unfortunately.
By Jonathan
Alter
(1285 words; posted
Tuesday, July 2; to be composted Tuesday, July 9)
This is the ninth book by
Bob Woodward, and whenever I read a new one, I always have the same two
reactions. The first reaction is that it is not really a book. It doesn't have
a theme or an argument or even a coherent story line. Books are supposed to
have spines. They're supposed to have context. Woodward doesn't know from
context, though in recent books he has made feeble efforts to stipulate some.
His narrative is more like a series of scenes from a pulpy novel, only they
aren't fiction--at least most of the time.
Which leads to a second
reaction: The reporting, if one defines reporting in its smallest-bore sense,
is sometimes breathtaking. Every time I begin to feel a bit guilty about my
part in the Woodward hype machine ( Newsweek almost always excerpts his
books, often on the cover) I reflect on my paltry powers to find out what
happened at an unimportant Oval Office meeting, much less a solarium seance.
The theory that Judge Sirica, not Woodward and Bernstein, brought down Richard
Nixon isn't right. Woodward is sui generis when it comes to getting people to
tell him stuff that is only supposed to come out under truth serum.
This time I have a third
reaction. For years, I've believed in the Perfectibility of Bob. Given his
Calvinist work habits, I held out hope that his devotion to self-improvement
would eventually take him to a new level (make that a first level) of real
political analysis. In the same way that he knows to unearth the outtakes of
the Clinton film bio, The Man From Hope, to mine it for details about
the Clintons' relationship, I thought surely he would start to read American
history seriously, so as to be able to mine it for historical perspective. If
he had, he would have learned, for instance, that Jean Houston, Hillary's
friend who gave Woodward his holy-shit headlines, was in a rich tradition of
spiritualists dating back through at least six first ladies to Mary Todd
Lincoln. Certainly her efforts to get Abe to talk with Benjamin Franklin and
George Washington would have been considered "anecdote-rich." But now I've
given up on searching for sweep and subtext and I've decided to accept Woodward
on his own mechanical terms. By that standard, he does fine. About half the
time, Woodward is a mindless Sir Edmund Hillary: He climbs for the detail
because it is there, gettable by him, even if it tells us nothing. But the
other 50 percent of the scooplets are fresh, or at least flavorful. If they
don't always reveal the character of the subject of the anecdotes, they are
invariably telling about the character of the source, and about the eternal
question of why people say things they shouldn't. Click here for one possible
answer.
Woodward's book may not be
online, but it's on the frontier of publishing. No need to worry about
acid-free pages for this one. The book, published a mere month after it was
completed (a remarkably short lead time for a hardcover), was not written to
last much beyond the length of the ballyhoo book tour. By next year, no one
will want to read a book about the 1996 campaign that ends in May. It's the
blockbuster syndrome taken to its natural conclusion.
Who talked for The
Choice ? The Clintons didn't. One imagines their dilemma. They knew that not
talking meant that they would take more of a beating. But their cooperation
would have given the green light to every Craig Livingstone in the
administration to drop a dime on them. Having already been Woodwardized once
for The Agenda , they passed. The only good news for the Clintons is that
Woodward chose not to write about Whitewater, at least not yet.
Al Gore talked some. Among
the juiciest parts of the book are the accounts, partly from him, of the
acrimonious budget meetings in the White House. "You have a chickenshit
operation here, Mr. President," Woodward quotes Newt Gingrich as saying.
"You've been calling me an extremist," he roared at Gore.
"At least we didn't accuse
you of drowning those little children in South Carolina," Gore shot back, in
reference to Gingrich's comments blaming liberals for the Susan Smith case.
Later, Clinton and House Majority Leader Richard Armey point
fingers--literally--at each other, and the Republicans go nuts over what they
consider to be an unflattering picture the White House released to Time .
All in all, everyone in the budget talks looks petty and political, except for
Dole.
Dole gave 12 hours of
formal interviews and lots more time informally, in part because, as his press
secretary Nelson Warfield told me last week, he likes Woodward personally. Dole
loved Nixon. Nixon hated Woodward. Dole trusts Woodward. Go figure. Anyway, it
paid off for him. He comes across up close as the same solid guy Richard Ben
Cramer found in his classic, What It Takes , the best campaign book of
the decade. The Dole camp loves The Choice , though to my mind, the book
makes him look as indecisive as Clinton and too uncommunicative to be a good
president
For instance, it turns out
that Elizabeth Dole had to make an office appointment with her husband to
discuss whether he should run or not, and that she wasn't informed that Dole
was resigning from the Senate until after he had told author Mark Helprin, a
supporter he barely knew. "In her 18 years with him, she had never once heard
Dole say, 'Here's what we're doing.' He never would come right out and say it,"
Woodward writes. "Dole had an inability to reach out fully or lay out
completely what was on his mind. He held things so close. He didn't
systematically vet things with her or even regularly delegate to her."
The other candidates
cooperated, but Woodward and his editor at Simon & Schuster, Alice Mayhew,
who had originally planned a book about the primaries, mostly left the Phil
Gramm and Lamar Alexander stories on the cutting-room floor. Woodward does
recount the decision-making process of those Republicans who decided not to
run. In every case, family members, who in an earlier age would have been
enthusiastic, urged them to stay out.
Woodward's is the best
look we're likely to get at Colin Powell's psyche. The retired general talks to
almost no journalist other than Woodward, who helped make him a hero in The
Commanders . Besides his wife, it turns out the key figure in Powell's
decision not to run was his laconic aide-de-camp, Bill Smullen: He laid out all
the reasons Powell gave later for why running would have been the wrong move
personally.
Powell obviously is Dole's
first choice for vice president, but Woodward uses reporting to make a good
case that if it's not Powell, it may well be James Baker or Richard Cheney or
former Illinois congressman Donald Rumsfeld, instead of one of the
oft-mentioned Midwestern governors. Such details might not mean anything in the
long run, but they're delicious in a campaign season. The conventional wisdom
among the wise guys of the press has been that there are now so many reporters
around--and so many leakers--that campaign scoops are a thing of the past. The
new grail is the "conceptual scoop"--the fresh frame that some smart analyst
can put on events, not the events themselves. But now comes along Bob Woodward
to prove that a little shoe leather still works. He fails to make us understand
what the 1996 campaign means for the country. But he does pull back the curtain
more, just when we thought it had disintegrated. Who can resist a peek?
