Middle man

FORGET FOR A MINUTE, if you can, the last fortnight of publicity for Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack." Think back to November 2002 and the release of "Bush at War," his account of White House decision-making just after the Sept. 11 attacks. Like Woodward's previous 10 books, that volume was a bestseller, logging 20 weeks on the New York Times list, devoured by a public craving news of how Bush and his circle waged the war in Afghanistan.

Like many of Woodward's books, however, "Bush at War" fared less well among the chattering classes. Once the darling of the left for helping to expose the Watergate scandal, Woodward has, with each of his bestsellers, drawn increasing criticism from pundits and reviewers, especially those of the liberal intellectual stripe. Over the years they have honed a bill of indictment against Woodward and his methods, to which "Bush at War" was dutifully subjected in 2002.

In a pig-pile of negative reviews (amid some countervailing raves), big guns from Eric Alterman to Christopher Hitchens to Anthony Lewis rehashed the tiresome litany: By reporting but not analyzing his scoops, they charged, Woodward left the reader unsure of what to make of it all. By reconstructing quotations based on people's memories of what they said, they alleged, he violated standard journalistic practices. Worst of all, they griped, he got spun by his sources; by interviewing mainly Bush's own aides, in that instance, he had rendering a one-sided and unduly flattering portrait of the president.

Then, this spring, a funny thing happened. Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke published his own book, "Against All Enemies," which slammed Bush as delinquent before 9/11 in confronting the danger posed by Al Qaeda. The White House then launched a ruthless campaign to discredit Clarke. Suddenly, those liberal pundits and reviewers who had disparaged "Bush at War" as hagiography -- and Woodward as a mere stenographer to the powerful -- began leafing through their copies for evidence to bolster Clarke's claims that the president had raced to invade Iraq and neglected the more urgent fight against Al Qaeda.

The turnabout on "Bush at War" was as widespread as it was sudden. New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, for example, who in November 2002 faulted the book as "incomplete, provisional and sometimes highly selective," nevertheless found it useful last month in commending Clarke's memoir. "Against All Enemies," Kakutani noted, gained credibility from Bush's confession to Woodward that he "was not on point" and "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about terrorism before Sept. 11. Others noted additionally that "Bush at War" had shown key administration officials to have been bent on invading Iraq just hours after the Twin Towers fell.

Now, with "Plan of Attack," Woodward has advanced further into the good graces of his former critics. The rediscovery of Woodward's virtues that began with the fresh look at "Bush at War" has climaxed with the chorus of huzzahs for this second volume. Robert Sam Anson, writing in The New York Observer, cheered that like "Clark Kent finally finding a phone booth, the Bob Woodward of yore -- the one Robert Redford played in `All the President's Men' -- has returned." "An astonishing book," raved Robert Scheer in The Los Angeles Times. "Well, Bob Woodward has redeemed himself," declared Eric Alterman in The Nation. While "Bush at War" read like "a superhero comic book mistranslated from its original Serbo-Croatian," he continued, Woodward's latest "expands our understanding" of how the Bush administration goes about "making their catastrophic decisions and then denying them."

(On the other hand, some conservatives, after touting the Afghanistan book as objective proof of Bush's firm leadership, have returned to their old habit of dismissing Woodward, Nixon's old nemesis, as a liberal. Rush Limbaugh wrote in The Wall Street Journal on April 21 that Bush officials should have known that Woodward's "reporting methods, and his popularity with the `beautiful people' inside the Beltway for whacking Republican after Republican, would result in the inevitable anti-Bush, antiwar screed.")

The intellectuals' re-embrace of Woodward these last two weeks gave me no small measure of satisfaction. Woodward is not just a friend of mine but my old boss. Ten years ago I worked for him on "The Agenda" (1994), his account of the making of the first Clinton budget, as well as on a dozen in-depth newspaper articles. For three years I observed his hard-working reportorial style up close and grew to admire it increasingly. If four people were at a high-level meeting, he tries to get accounts from all four -- along with notes from the official note-taker if there is one. And he doesn't go easy on his most cooperative sources; far from getting spun, he examines all the different versions and tries to square any discrepancies.

I offer this endorsement of Woodward's books not just as a friend and fan but as one who in other respects actually resembles his critics (politically opinionated, partial to intellectual analyses over reportorial expos) more than Woodward himself. Working for him, however, convinced me that his brand of reporting has a unique and indispensable value. The world of political discourse now suffers from a headache-inducing glut of columns, ideologically oriented magazines, TV round-table shows, TV sparring shows, blogs, and talk radio. What we sorely need isn't more analysis but good, hard reporting on what's actually happening in government -- precisely what Woodward provides better than anyone else. (Ron Suskind's recent book about Paul O'Neill's experience working for Bush, though more opinionated than Woodward's tomes, similarly divulged useful new information about an administration in progress.)

Besides, Woodward's critics have proven themselves more than adept at providing the kinds of explication of which he may deprive his readers. A surfeit of columnists happily seize on each Woodward disclosure to tell us what conclusions to draw. Indeed, given how much important new information Woodward has unearthed over the years -- from the unprecedented peek behind the Supreme Court curtains in "The Brethren" (1979) to his glimpse into Bill Clinton's confidential relationship with his lawyers in "Shadow" (1999) -- it seems beside the point to ritually grumble that he didn't also give us a dazzling, fresh analysis of his subject as well.

As for complaints about Woodward's practice of reconstructing quotations based on people's recollections, I have some news for the critics: This is in fact standard journalistic and historical practice. Open any work of narrative history and check for yourself. Writers employed quotations long before tape recorders existed. Even the oral history interviews that scholars conduct place recollected words between quote marks. Woodward's quotations vex people only because they occur in the Oval Office -- usually within the last six or 12 months.

Given all this, it's time, I believe, to acknowledge that Woodward's immense value as a reporter outweighs whatever shortcomings critics may find in his writing. It's time to let Woodward be Woodward.

I put it this way because Woodward's critics never cease trying to impress him into duty as a pundit or analyst. When a newspaper beat man comes up with a scoop, we don't fault him for not tossing in his personal take. Neither should Woodward's preference for reporting facts over opining about them be held against him, simply because he presents them in books rather than articles. Was Clinton's economic plan a good idea? Is Bush a good president? Woodward reports, you decide.

He manages to transcend the partisan warfare surrounding his subjects not just because he conceives of himself as a reporter rather than a pundit, but also because he's the rare Washington political creature who's genuinely innocent of ideology. Woodward continually eludes pigeonholing as a liberal or conservative. Could any reader begin to guess whom he voted for in the last election?

Yet political junkies are so used to tagging political books or writers as left or right, as pro- or anti-administration, that they invariably read into Woodward's books sympathies that aren't there. If reviewers thought "Bush at War" depicted the president favorably, it's because they construed Bush's laser-beam focus on retaliating for 9/11 as a virtue rather than an example of dangerous tunnel vision. The author himself remained neutral.

Similarly, in a recent column arguing that Woodward really does analyze his material (if ineptly), Tim Noah of Slate (for which I often write) revisited the treatment of Bill Clinton's 1993 economic plan in "The Agenda." According to Noah, the book depicted Clinton as having "sold out" by heeding the advice of the "deficit hawks" on his staff at the expense of the "populists" from his campaign who preferred more stimulative spending and tax cuts. Noah claimed that although Woodward's "thesis" was "dead wrong" (since the deficit-cutting measures fueled the `90s economic boom), it was "presented so unobtrusively that it detracted only slightly from what was otherwise a really good book."

In fact, the "thesis" was so "unobtrusive" that it slipped right by the author and his assistant. Indeed, when "The Agenda" was published, as many readers thought it sided with the deficit hawks as with the populists. In truth, Woodward tried to represent the views of both sets of advisers without taking sides.

Precisely because Woodward doesn't force an argument on his readers, they're left to sort out for themselves the facts he reveals. Many, therefore, fit these facts into a preexisting viewpoint -- admiration for Clinton's decision to tackle the deficit, or outrage over Bush's obsession with Iraq. They attribute the resulting judgment to the author.

Hence, "Bush at War," published at a moment of widespread praise for the Afghanistan campaign, was deemed pro-Bush. "Plan of Attack," appearing as the Iraq occupation went awry, is judged anti-Bush. But neither book propounds the partisan judgments ascribed to it. In fact, even as Bush-haters rifle through "Plan of Attack" for evidence of Bush's incompetence, the president's aides comb it for Bush-friendly material and urge people to buy it.

This irony underscores Woodward's value. A recent study by Valdis Krebs, a network theorist, found that of all the political books hitting the bestseller charts of late, few gain an audience across the ideological spectrum. Molly Ivins buffs might read Michael Moore, but not Sean Hannity or David Frum. Of the 66 books Krebs studied, only three escaped the ideological ghettoes: Robert Baer's "Sleeping with the Devil" (about the US-Saudi relationship), Stephen Kinzer's "All the Shah's Men" (about the 1953 CIA coup in Iran), and "Bush at War." "Plan of Attack" seems destined to enter that select circle as well.

As a result, it will inform millions of readers of differing sensibilities about what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War -- and let them judge it for themselves.

David Greenberg, a historian and journalist, is the author of "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image" (2003). He served as Bob Woodward's assistant in writing "The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House" (1994).