Boston: Book meant to burnish Biden’s legacy might tarnish Woodward’s [ Dallas Morning News ]

When Bob Woodward and his reporting partner Carl Bernstein pursued the Watergate story for The Washington Post starting in 1972 that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation, the men won a Pulitzer Prize for their newspaper and became heroes to many.

Since then, Woodward has written many books on presidents from Nixon through Joe Biden, which became bestsellers. His modus operandi has been to obtain scores of interviews with unidentified government insiders, and then assemble them into a narrative. Because of his stature, Woodward’s books have surely impacted the legacies of his subjects.

Knowing Woodward’s place in the annals of journalism and history, having read some of his prior books and interviewed him onstage twice at public events in Dallas, I dived into his newest book, War, released Oct. 15 (conveniently three weeks before Election Day), which covers Biden’s presidency and its relation to that of his predecessor and aspiring successor Donald Trump, a man Woodward has relentlessly cast as the personification of evil.

Not surprisingly, given his known political preferences, Woodward’s perspective in his new book is decidedly pro-Biden and anti-Trump, in spite of Biden’s disastrous handling of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan (which inspired Russian leader Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, per the intel Woodward received from his sources inside the Kremlin), his unconscionable border policy for most his term, and his excessive government spending that triggered a runaway surge in inflation and a major escalation of the federal deficit. Woodward ends the book with the conclusion that despite these major failures, he has had a “steady and purposeful presidency.”

Such a conclusion is beyond surprising given the many revelations and statements made in War that are, in a word, shocking. Woodward reports that as early as June 2023, Biden attended private fundraisers where attendees described him as looking “frighteningly awful.” At these events, he took time for only a few pre-arranged questions. To be able to answer them, Biden “carried a handful of notecards that had the answers printed out.” Armed with a cheat sheet, he still “seemed to wander off point,” “never completed a sentence,” “told the same story three times in exactly the same way,” and “was like an elderly grandparent or parent who talks and talks but makes no sense.”

Thus, a full year before the June 27, 2024, debate in which his performance reflected a clear lack of mental acuity and led to his withdrawal from the presidential race, Biden was clearly not in a cognitive condition to serve as president. Woodward nonetheless reports glowingly on the president’s handling of America’s foreign policy in 2023 and 2024.

According to War, President Biden operated as two totally different people over at least the last two years. On one hand, based entirely on anonymous interviews with White House insiders (since Biden refused to be interviewed for the book), the president was a “steady and purposeful” commander-in-chief. On the other hand, he was a rambling, doddering, notecard-dependent, “awful looking” person who couldn’t complete a sentence. Woodward presents these two irreconcilable portrayals and somehow states (presumably with a straight face) that both depictions are accurate.

The logical way the two extremes can be reconciled is to conclude that the insiders who made themselves available for Woodward to interview were not forthright in describing their boss, and to the extent the actions of the government’s executive branch during the last two years have been “steady and purposeful,” it necessarily had to be because the shots were being called by “steady and purposeful” anonymous insiders and not by the bumbling octogenarian at the fundraisers. Woodward fails to draw or even recognize the possibility of this obvious conclusion, and his failure to do so constitutes a clear deception.

Woodward’s description of Biden’s dropping out of the presidential race is totally (and incredibly) silent on the well-reported narrative that the president was pushed out of the race against his will by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and other Democratic Party leaders. It’s hard to understand how an investigative reporter of Woodward’s stature could have somehow failed to investigate and then report the facts regarding what amounted to an intraparty coup, masterminded by a former speaker of the House and former president.

In his effort to minimize Biden’s mishandling of America’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, Woodward claims “the real culprit was the untamed, impulsive desire to insert U.S. troops into a foreign country believing they were a fix and ignoring the lessons of Vietnam.” One wonders whether Woodward realizes how much his argument agrees with Trump’s isolationist philosophy, or how much the old journalist has forgotten about the Taliban’s holy war against America which reached its apex on Sept. 11, 2001, and required a strong American response.

Woodward’s Biden states repeatedly, “Great powers don’t bluff.” But history shows that an integral part of President Dwight Eisenhower’s and President Ronald Reagan’s successful foreign policy during the Cold War was their successful bluffing about the use of nuclear weapons and the Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative.

Woodward claims, “Real leaders have to risk looking weak, especially in efforts to stop war.” Such an absurd statement is certainly not true of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, either Roosevelt, Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, or Reagan. All of these great American presidents guided American foreign policy successfully by implementing foreign policies based on the premise that peace can be achieved in diplomacy only through the demonstration of strength.

Woodward similarly ignores or misstates pertinent facts related to Hunter Biden’s misdeeds and the nation’s post-COVID rebound in order to paint the rosiest possible picture of the outgoing president.

He even writes that by withdrawing from the 2024 race, Biden “freed himself up to potentially accomplish more in (his last) six months by handing off the presidential campaign to his vice president, and focus on governing.” Woodward has apparently failed to notice that Biden has essentially been missing in action since bowing out.

On his book’s Trump side of the analysis, Woodward makes it clear that he cannot say one positive thing and has no limit on the amount of negative things he says about his least favorite president. In particular, War goes deep on Trump’s strange dealings with Putin since 2016. At the Helsinki summit in 2018: “Putin had again won the moment. Trump’s carelessness was on full display.”

He quotes Gen. Mark Milley, Trump’s onetime Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in March 2023: “No one has ever been as dangerous to the country as Donald Trump. … He’s a fascist to the core.”

He also quotes CIA Director Bill Buras: “Putin’s got a plan just as he did when Trump was in office, at playing Trump.”

In the book’s conclusion, Woodward states, “Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character traits as a presidential candidate in 2024.”

Nowhere in War does Woodward acknowledge that during Trump’s term, Americans had more effective border security and a lower rate of inflation than in Biden’s term. And from 2017 to 2021, Putin did not have a perception of American weakness that emboldened him to invade Ukraine.

I remember Bob Woodward beaming with pride in our interviews when he mentioned the official slogan of The Washington Post: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Contrary to his esteemed work on the Watergate case, Woodward’s book War is crammed full of “darkness” and should surely damage his legacy as a historian and journalist.

Sadly, the man who broke the story of Nixon’s 1972-74 Watergate cover-up has now become a key player in the 2023-24 Joe Biden mental decline cover-up.