I'd been meaning to post a little followup on Woodward to you since Message 22864236 , so here we go. Personally, I find it appropriate that Woodward's book came out on or around Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, since Woodward has some personal history to atone for on the topic. There is sort of a stream of books coming out from WaPo types; Ricks' "Fiasco" seemed to have gotten the most press recently, while Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City ", excerpted in Message 22829469 , seems to have gone mostly unnotice except for dutiful ire in the warblogosphere. Too bad about that, since handing over "nation building" in Iraq to twenty-something ideologues in training probably has as much to do with the mess there as anything.
There is one thing that Kakutani picked up on that I wanted to emphasize:
Startlingly little of this overall picture is new, of course. Mr. Woodward’s portrait of Mr. Bush as a prisoner of his own certitude owes a serious debt to a 2004 article in The New York Times Magazine by the veteran reporter Ron Suskind, just as his portrait of the Pentagon’s incompetent management of the war and occupation owes a serious debt to “Fiasco,” the Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks’s devastating account of the war, published this summer. Other disclosures recapitulate information contained in books and articles by other journalists and former administration insiders.
Oops, I guess you picked up on that pretty well too, in your post of Kakutani's review. As I said at the beginning , Woodward has some atonement to do after his previous puff pieces. I'd much prefer he'd been doing his job before the war rather that stating the obvious afterwards, but that's life.
There's some further expansion on that up today in nytimes.com, Particularly this bit from near the end:
“State of Denial” is a bit like watching a replay of a marble rolling off the table. It could be argued that the last book he wrote about the administration should have been his first. Only the passage of time allows for the kind of consideration that takes the historical narrative beyond the status of a draft.
Mr. Woodward ended up breathing the same air and classified documents as his exalted sources, sharing, not exposing, the group think. (Meanwhile, Seymour M. Hersh, his journalistic contemporary and competitor, has spent time working disaffected generals and government lifers to what many consider more substantive investigative ends.)
“Some thought the books showed Bush as a strong leader because that was the evidence at the time; others drew contrary views,” Mr. Woodward said. “But it is silly to criticize a book for dealing with things that hadn’t happened yet. ‘Bush at War’ and ‘Plan of Attack’ essentially covered Sept. 11, 2001, to March 2003. The new book picks up from there.”
Woodward sounds a bit defensive there, wouldn't you say? Anyway, better late than never. That article in full:
October 2, 2006
The Media Equation
A Reporter Who Scoops His Own Paper
By DAVID CARR
Few Washington events, save Congressional page scandals and cherry blossoms, arrive more reliably than a Bob Woodward book flap. Every other year, Mr. Woodward, arguably the pre-eminent journalist of the last three decades, will emerge from his headquarters in Georgetown with a book full of federal intrigue, gold-plated sources and the dark arts of Washington.
Within hours, various aggrieved parties will emerge to say that they were misquoted on the record and mischaracterized by those who were off, and talk shows will be preoccupied by Mr. Woodward’s latest offering. This time, the marketing bonanza preceded the publication date today of the book “State of Denial,” with The New York Times and The New York Daily News both obtaining copies last week.
Its exclusive blown, The Washington Post, the professional home for Mr. Woodward — albeit one he doesn’t visit very often — was left scrambling, as was the Bush administration. This was Mr. Woodward’s third book about the second Bush presidency. After two friendly tours — “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack” — he decided to set off a grenade deep inside the administration.
People do business with Mr. Woodward because when he is good, he is very, very good. But as an army of one, with a name that has its own purchase on the American consciousness, he can do as he pleases, writing his books, going on television, dropping into the newspaper when a story heats up.
Critics have already said that he missed the Bush story while standing in the middle of it. But his work is not so much beyond consequence as above it, held aloft by his spectacular career and a superseding contract with the reader that he will take them inside the parlor.
Blogs and podcasts may be the future, but for the time being the headlines are still coming from one of journalism’s big names, working in the fusty confines of a hardcover book. The leak was hardly a crisis for Mr. Woodward, who ended up getting an early bite of the apple. At The Washington Post, the experience of having lost the first crack at the work of its most renowned reporter — an excerpt finally appeared yesterday — is probably more sweet than bitter.
After all, having Mr. Woodward as a hood ornament on the enterprise, even one who husbands his most lustrous scoops for his books, has its compensations. Yesterday, Mr. Woodward was running out the door, but took a moment to say the relationship is highly mutual.
“The Washington Post is a great newspaper,” he said. “We have the best owners and the best editors. Being there helps me a lot, and while I focus on books, I do my best to help them in return.”
It is a marriage of very modern convenience, an exchange of brands that has little to do with a traditional employer-employee relationship. At a time when newspapers are hurting for attention, a paper will take it where it can get it. “It is an accommodation that The Post has made, and they seem to be happy with the arrangement,” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University. “The important thing is everybody is going in with their eyes open, but the fact still remains that under the arrangement, supremely newsworthy information assembled by one of its senior editors is not going into the paper.”
Mr. Woodward’s excerpt was not the only book by a Washington Post editor that made news yesterday. “Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell” by Karen DeYoung, an associate editor at The Post, was excerpted in the paper’s Sunday magazine. It revealed that in his final meeting with the president, the secretary of state warned of the dangers confronting the administration in Iraq.
And in August, “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” a book by the Post’s Pentagon correspondent, Thomas E. Ricks, took the story beyond the newspaper as well. Much of the big news these days seems to be coming out in hardcover, a troubling development that signals that some part of the story is not making it into the daily paper. “It takes a long time to smoke these things out,” Mr. Woodward said. “You can’t do that on a daily basis.”
But the book as news vehicle also creates an issue of custody and management — both Mr. Ricks and Mr. Woodward have been rebuked by their executive editor for things they said on television while promoting their books.
Nor is The Washington Post the only one vexed by the issue. The New York Times ended up negotiating with its own reporter, James Risen, over reporting about domestic surveillance of phone calls that he used in his book, “State of War.”
No one understands the contemporary primacy of the individual brand more acutely than Mr. Woodward, who manages the arrival of his books with deftness and competitive ferocity. A fresh success might change the subject after his decision to hide the fact that he was one of the people who learned of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. agent early on, even as he criticized the prosecutor.
But to the public, he remains the B.M.O.C. of Washington, a reporter who took down one president and seems poised to maim another.
“What Americans see in Bob Woodward is a guy who hits for a higher batting average than anybody else in the business,” said Marc Fisher, a columnist at The Post.
The actual journalistic accomplishment in “State of Denial” is less than grand. It took him three books to arrive at a conclusion thousands of basement-bound bloggers suggested years ago: that the Bush administration is composed of people who like war, don’t seem to be very good at it and have been known to turn the guns on each other. Such an epiphany doesn’t seem to reflect a reporter who had rarefied access.
Given widespread appetites for public information on private matters, even the most afflicted policy wonks can’t resist reading how Colin became the odd man out or when exactly Donald started backstabbing Condi. It is not that far a walk from the throwdowns between Paris and Nicole, albeit with fewer fashion meltdowns and more policy papers. After many years of demystifying institutions like the Supreme Court and the Pentagon, Mr. Woodward has become a celebrity journalist who makes celebrities out of Beltway players.
“Woodward seems to know that the question of ‘What are they really like?’ resonates whether you are talking about Tom Cruise or Donald Rumsfeld,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia.
Paul Begala, a former Clinton aide and a Democratic strategist who has appeared in previous Woodward books and uses them in a class he teaches at Georgetown, said the books continued to preoccupy Washington because they had the virtue of being deeply reported, although the gossip couldn’t hurt.
“The fact is, a guy who has written about this administration in the most glowing terms imaginable is now of a very different view, but in that sense, that is a journey that most Americans have been on as well,” he said.
“State of Denial” is a bit like watching a replay of a marble rolling off the table. It could be argued that the last book he wrote about the administration should have been his first. Only the passage of time allows for the kind of consideration that takes the historical narrative beyond the status of a draft.
Mr. Woodward ended up breathing the same air and classified documents as his exalted sources, sharing, not exposing, the group think. (Meanwhile, Seymour M. Hersh, his journalistic contemporary and competitor, has spent time working disaffected generals and government lifers to what many consider more substantive investigative ends.)
“Some thought the books showed Bush as a strong leader because that was the evidence at the time; others drew contrary views,” Mr. Woodward said. “But it is silly to criticize a book for dealing with things that hadn’t happened yet. ‘Bush at War’ and ‘Plan of Attack’ essentially covered Sept. 11, 2001, to March 2003. The new book picks up from there.”
One of Mr. Woodward’s chief discoveries was that Donald H. Rumsfeld was not the asset that he first described him as. In “Bush at War” in 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld was described as “handsome, intense, well educated with an intellectual bend, witty with an infectious smile.” In “Plan of Attack” in 2004, he was a leader whose “way was clear, and he was precise about it.” In “State of Denial,” he is a turf-obsessed control freak whose “micromanaging was almost comic.”
Given Mr. Woodward’s tendency to fill his books with kitchen-sink detail, he maintained that the seeds of dysfunction were there to see in his previous two books. But Mr. Woodward’s time spent living in the treetops seems to have blinded him to the fact that the forest below was on fire.
“A book has a much longer arc than one day,” said David Rosenthal, executive vice president of Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher. “But it has been on sale for one day, it is already causing a ruckus, dominating the Sunday morning shows, and will determine the agenda for the weeks. It is interesting to me that in an age of blogs, Webs and texting that a book, something which is essentially a tortoise, very quaint in its own way, can carry the most immediacy.” |
