The Final Days
Book Review
By JILL ABRAMSON
NYT Book Review
THE WAR WITHIN: A Secret White House History 2006–2008
By Bob Woodward
Illustrated. 487 pp. Simon & Schuster. $32
The Bob Woodward rollout is always strictly scripted. His books are “held back,” meaning that no advance copies are available for reviewers and that pain-of-death secrecy vows are extracted from book review editors. His “bombshells,” those fly-on-the-wall details from inside the power dome and classified memos impossible to obtain (for all except Woodward), are disclosed in multipart, front-page articles in The Washington Post, where for decades the author was an assistant managing editor. (He is now an associate editor.) Then there is the bump from exclusive interviews on “60 Minutes” followed by more televised amplification, an éclat that almost always results in a No. 1 best seller.
This time, with the arrival of “The War Within,” the final volume in his four-part Bush oeuvre, the script is the same, but the headlines mask what is really newsworthy about the book. The reported bombshells — that the Bush administration has secretly monitored nearly every move and word of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and that American military and intelligence officials have used top-secret spying methods to zap foreign terrorists in Iraq — are hardly shocking. And this final narrative, which glacially explores the nearly three-year process by which President Bush and his counselors came to the epiphany that they needed a new strategy for the spiraling violence in Iraq, is far less gripping than any of the previous Woodward books on Bush.
What is most consequential about “The War Within” is the evolutionary shift it marks for the author. Woodward is famous for his flat, just-the-facts-ma’am style, if one can call it that. It is the old-fashioned newspaperman’s credo of show, don’t tell. He rarely pauses in his narratives to synthesize or analyze, let alone to judge his powerful subjects, especially those who have been his sources. He has only one angle, the close-up. The striking lack of contextual analysis in all his books about presidents going back to Richard Nixon has angered some readers and critics, most famously Joan Didion, who in an appraisal of six Woodward volumes (from the 1980s and ’90s) wrote, “These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”
(Continued here.)
By JILL ABRAMSON
NYT Book Review
THE WAR WITHIN: A Secret White House History 2006–2008
By Bob Woodward
Illustrated. 487 pp. Simon & Schuster. $32
The Bob Woodward rollout is always strictly scripted. His books are “held back,” meaning that no advance copies are available for reviewers and that pain-of-death secrecy vows are extracted from book review editors. His “bombshells,” those fly-on-the-wall details from inside the power dome and classified memos impossible to obtain (for all except Woodward), are disclosed in multipart, front-page articles in The Washington Post, where for decades the author was an assistant managing editor. (He is now an associate editor.) Then there is the bump from exclusive interviews on “60 Minutes” followed by more televised amplification, an éclat that almost always results in a No. 1 best seller.
This time, with the arrival of “The War Within,” the final volume in his four-part Bush oeuvre, the script is the same, but the headlines mask what is really newsworthy about the book. The reported bombshells — that the Bush administration has secretly monitored nearly every move and word of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and that American military and intelligence officials have used top-secret spying methods to zap foreign terrorists in Iraq — are hardly shocking. And this final narrative, which glacially explores the nearly three-year process by which President Bush and his counselors came to the epiphany that they needed a new strategy for the spiraling violence in Iraq, is far less gripping than any of the previous Woodward books on Bush.
What is most consequential about “The War Within” is the evolutionary shift it marks for the author. Woodward is famous for his flat, just-the-facts-ma’am style, if one can call it that. It is the old-fashioned newspaperman’s credo of show, don’t tell. He rarely pauses in his narratives to synthesize or analyze, let alone to judge his powerful subjects, especially those who have been his sources. He has only one angle, the close-up. The striking lack of contextual analysis in all his books about presidents going back to Richard Nixon has angered some readers and critics, most famously Joan Didion, who in an appraisal of six Woodward volumes (from the 1980s and ’90s) wrote, “These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”
(Continued here.)
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