War
This is harrowing, riveting stuff, even if you know how it will play out. The problem, though, is that we don’t really know. Since the book’s completion, Russia has been on the offensive again in Ukraine. The Middle East conflict has widened to include Hezbollah and Iran, an outcome that Biden and his team spend many pages working to prevent. Meanwhile, the election campaigns of Trump and Harris hurtle forward. Three weeks after War is published on Oct. 15, voters will provide raw material for the sequel. Though he specializes in real-time suspense, Woodward doesn’t write cliffhangers. His impulse — his talent — is to impose an arc and a moral on the mess and sprawl of very recent history. This time around, his stated conclusions are unambiguous: 'Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the presidency,' he writes, 'he is unfit to lead the country.' In contrast, 'Biden and his team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.' Those judgments sound authoritative. They also sound wishful.
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...reducing the book to scoops trivializes Woodward’s ambitions for this sprawling, occasionally blinkered but timely book. If the nuggets were the meal, then the headlines would make the book itself redundant ... a reader who understands these perspectives can adjust for any slants the sources may seek to provide. And even if most of the sources Woodward spoke to for the book are residents or friends of Bidenworld, he is too good a writer and too experienced an observer to let the book’s lessons be dictated by his sources ... One might criticize the relative absence of attention in “War” to Gazans and Palestinians more generally. Atrocities committed against Israelis receive extensive attention (and the details are genuinely horrific and gut-wrenching), while the terror and toll of the conflict in Gaza are abstracted, intellectualized. The Biden team and the Israeli government are shown to be in constant communication: Netanyahu appears on more pages of the book than Vice President Kamala Harris and Defense Secretary Austin combined. Palestinian voices are absent ... If War is somewhat didactic, even pedantic, about the value of good policymaking, it is because it thrums with the urgency Woodward must feel of persuading the electorate not to make the same mistake — or a worse one — again.
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Over the years, my critique of Woodward has softened considerably. It’s not that the complaints about his works aren’t fair: He does recite his sources’ version of events with excessive deference; he trumpets every nugget of reporting, no matter how trivial; he narrates scenes without pausing to situate them in context. But when he’s in his most earnest mode—and War, his new book about President Joe Biden’s navigation of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, might be the most earnest of his career—he exudes an almost atavistic obsession with the gritty details of foreign policy. Woodward is the most gifted sensationalist of his generation, but it’s his abiding desire to be known as a serious person that yields his most meaningful reporting ... Despite his fixation on substance, Woodward fails to answer—or even ask—some of the bigger questions about Biden’s foreign policy: Could he have done more to bolster Ukraine? Could he have pushed Israel to accept a cease-fire? But Woodward does arrive at a judgment of the presidency that strikes me as measured and fair.
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