This Time, Bob Woodward Gets It Right

At this late stage in Bob Woodward’s career, it would be possible to publish an entertaining anthology of the negative reviews of his books. Although there’s an ongoing debate about the journalistic merits of Woodward’s reportorial mode, he has no doubt succeeded in bringing out the vitriolic best from the likes of Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens, and Jack Shafer.

A few years back, I wrote to Woodward, hoping to get his help with an article I was reporting. I decided to solicit him with a thick layer of flattery, in what I believed to be the spirit of Bob Woodward. To my embarrassment, he replied that he struggled to reconcile my fawning missive with the negative review of his book State of Denial that I had published in The New York Times in 2006, “which strongly concludes the opposite.” His response suggests that he might be the ideal editor of the anthology.

Over the years, my critique of Woodward has softened considerably. It’s not that the complaints about his works aren’t fair: He does recite his sources’ version of events with excessive deference; he trumpets every nugget of reporting, no matter how trivial; he narrates scenes without pausing to situate them in context. But when he’s in his most earnest mode—and War, his new book about President Joe Biden’s navigation of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, might be the most earnest of his career—he exudes an almost atavistic obsession with the gritty details of foreign policy. Woodward is the most gifted sensationalist of his generation, but it’s his abiding desire to be known as a serious person that yields his most meaningful reporting.

War gets to that fruitful place, but it begins in unpromising fashion. In the prologue, Woodward remembers that Carl Bernstein ran into Donald Trump at a New York dinner party, back in 1989. Trump exclaimed, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if Woodward & Bernstein interviewed Donald Trump?” The journalistic duo that helped bring down Richard Nixon agreed to see him the next day.

Last year, Woodward went to a storage facility and began rummaging through his files in search of the lost interview. In a box filled with old newspaper clippings, he found a battered envelope containing the transcript. That’s the most interesting part of the story, alas. Woodward subjects his reader to pages of Trump’s banal musings: “I’m a great loyalist. I believe in loyalty to people.” Because Woodward and Bernstein were the ones asking the questions, the conversation is apparently worthy of history. This is a goofy, tangential start to a book devoted to the foreign policy of the Biden presidency.

The cover, which features a row of faces of global leaders, places Kamala Harris’s visage in the center. It’s another piece of misdirection, because the vice president is a bit player in the story. That said, Harris comes off well in her cameos. She asks diligent questions in the Situation Room. In phone calls with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she plays the heavy, asking him about civilian casualties in Gaza. There are no instances, however, of her disagreeing substantively with Biden.

[Franklin Foer: The war that would not end]

The most revealing Harris moment comes toward the end of the book. One of Biden’s friends asks her, “Could you please talk to the president more than you talk to him? Your president really loves you.” Her boss’s biggest disappointment was that she didn’t write, she didn’t call. In response to the friend’s plea, Harris joked about her strongest bond with the president: “He knows that I’m the only person around who knows how to properly pronounce the word motherfucker.” It’s a genuinely funny exchange, and telling in its way.

But these are just MacGuffins: sops to the Beltway superfans. At its core, Woodward’s book is about diplomacy. Just past the sundry tidbits about Trump—most horrifying, the former president’s ongoing chumminess with Vladimir Putin, a charge that Trump’s campaign denies—there lies a serious history of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. I have reported on these stories myself, and I can’t say that I found any faults in his account. If anything, I’m unashamedly jealous of how he managed to get a few big stories that eluded me. One of the most stunning sections of the book captures Putin mulling the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine—and all the quiet diplomacy that pushed him back from the brink. Newspapers hinted at this threat at the time, but Woodward reveals the backstory in robust and chilling detail. (Jon Finer, the deputy head of the National Security Council, says that Putin’s decision on whether to deploy the nuke seemed like a “coin flip.”) When Biden frets about the possibilities of nuclear escalation, he’s not just recalling his youth in the earliest days of the Cold War. He’s confronting a very real risk in the present.

Unlike his predecessors, Biden was distrustful of Woodward. Old enough to remember how one his books helped to derail Bill Clinton’s first term, Biden appears to have chosen not to participate in either this history or Woodward’s previous book, Peril. Having withheld access, the president comes across as lifeless. It’s not that he’s out to lunch—he is in command of his faculties, according to Woodward’s reporting. There are just no real insights into his psychology. His decision to withdraw from the 2024 race came too close to the book’s publication date for Woodward to report on the process that led the president to back away. He has very little to say about the most fascinating decision in recent political history.  

But in some sense, Biden and Woodward were made for each other. These two octogenarians are both avatars of a bygone era in Washington, when foreign policy was the shared obsession of the establishment. Even if Woodward doesn’t find Biden personally interesting, he pores over the president’s conversations with Netanyahu and Putin with genuine fascination. These aren’t the scraps of reporting that move copies, but they are clearly what he treasures. In his epilogue, he hints at how much he enjoyed covering “genuine good faith efforts by the president and his core national security team to wield the levers of executive power responsibly and in the national interest.”

Despite his fixation on substance, Woodward fails to answer—or even ask—some of the bigger questions about Biden’s foreign policy: Could he have done more to bolster Ukraine? Could he have pushed Israel to accept a cease-fire? But Woodward does arrive at a judgment of the presidency that strikes me as measured and fair: “Based on the evidence available now, I believe President Biden and this team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.” Despite the many mistakes of this administration, I’m guessing that Woodward’s verdict will pass the test of time, and that none of the reviews of War is destined for the anthology.