According to Timothy Noah, anyway.
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Woodward: Stupid Like a Fox
He isn't nearly the idiot savant he pretends to be.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, April 21, 2004, at 3:40 PM PT
Bob Woodward is always the last person you want to ask about the lessons to be drawn from his books. Woodward is an astonishingly good reporter, and when he's got something hot, he knows it. But when it comes time to arrange all the facts and anecdotes into a coherent whole, he tends to flub it. Every book Woodward publishes should be stamped, "assembly required."
Sometimes Woodward flubs it because he's misread the data. That was the case with The Agenda, his book about the making of Bill Clinton's first budget. Although the book wasn't constructed as an argument, its thrust was that in putting the concerns of bond traders ahead of special-interest pleas for a "stimulus package," Clinton sold out. But the truth is that Clinton's first budget became the keystone to what may have been Clinton's greatest accomplishment—elimination of the monstrous budget deficits created by Ronald Reagan. (Clinton's accomplishment was evident at the time, and it's even more evident now.) Woodward's thesis was dead wrong, but it was presented so unobtrusively that it detracted only slightly from what was otherwise a really good book—still one of the best ever written about Clinton. When Woodward has a great story to tell, there's no reason to care that he doesn't grasp its meaning.
Increasingly, though, Chatterbox gets the feeling that Woodward often flubs the analysis in his books not because he doesn't get it, but because he's deliberately playing dumb. This is especially true of Woodward's two books about George W. Bush, which differ from his previous books about presidents in that they incorporate lengthy interviews—be careful what you wish for!—with the president himself. In both Bush at War and Plan of Attack, the narrative grinds to a halt whenever Woodward quotes Bush mouthing platitudes about the business of governing this great nation. One can't really blame Bush for this. All presidents describe their Oval Office experiences in a particular dialect characterized by tedious and self-serving generality. That explains why readers can never finish their memoirs. They do buy them, though. And Bush is the president. What's more, Bush has taken such a liking to Woodward that he now orders reluctant underlings to grant interviews, too. So, if Bush gives Woodward a lot of useless interview material that would be tossed out if it came from anyone else, no matter. It goes in, along with a lot of power-porn boilerplate about the awesome burdens shouldered by the commander in chief. Gotta keep that man happy.
As Woodward's burden of access grows heavier, the chasm widens between the book Woodward writes and the book Woodward pretends to write. By now, it's reached the point where assembly is required to understand not only the book, but even the marketing of the book. A case in point is Woodward's apparent reluctance to draw attention, in the publicity blitz for Plan of Attack, to his remarkable finding that it was Vice President Dick Cheney—not Bush—who made the final decision to wage war in Iraq.
more......
http://slate.msn.com/id/2099307/
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