Just in time for the 2024 presidential election, Watergate profiteer Bob Woodward and Simon & Schuster released Woodward’s latest book, War, which is a defense of the Biden administration’s national security policies and effectively a campaign contribution to Kamala Harris. The anti-Trump press is already promoting the book as a warning against a second Trump administration. Bob Woodward has apparently stepped forward to save the nation from Trump, just as, according to Washington, D.C., legend, he did in the early 1970s to save the nation from Richard Nixon.
Woodward, the supposedly great investigative reporter, in War merely describes the Biden administration’s foreign policy mostly through the voices of Biden’s top advisers — Secretary of State Blinkin, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, and others. They all think they have done a good job, even though on their watch the world is in turmoil after four years of relative peace under the Trump administration. Woodward seems to accept their version of events at face value, including initially portraying Joe Biden as an engaged, energetic, fully informed, decisive leader.
It appears that Woodward began writing the book when Biden was still a viable presidential candidate for 2024, but events — Biden’s poor debate performance against Trump and his obvious cognitive decline — likely forced Woodward to include more favorable stories about Harris. Indeed, Harris is portrayed by Woodward as a crucial administration envoy to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She is portrayed as thoughtful, calm, serious (instead of the giggling, word-salad artist we’ve grown use to), lecturing Netanyahu on the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza and the need for Israel to stop expanding settlements on the West Bank, and warning Zelensky that Russia was primed to invade Ukraine and that America would support Ukraine whatever happened. In promoting his book to a receptive NPR, Woodward says that Harris was at all of the crucial meetings with Biden and his national security advisers on Ukraine and the Middle East crises. Harris has been to “presidents school,” he says, which implies she is ready to take over as commander-in-chief. CNN, in reviewing Woodward’s book, notes that while Harris does not play a prominent role in Woodward’s War, when she does appear in the book, she gives “sound advice” to President Biden.
But the real purpose of the book, as Woodward made clear at the outset of an interview with MSNBC Lawrence O’Donnell, is to tell readers in the few weeks before the 2024 election that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. Throughout the book, Woodward portrays Trump as dangerous, erratic, and unpresidential. In the book’s conclusion, Woodward the “reporter” becomes Woodward the opinion columnist when he writes: “Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the presidency, he is unfit to lead the country. Trump was far worse than Richard Nixon, the provable criminal president…. Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024.”
More than 50 years ago, Bob Woodward went to “war” against Richard Nixon and his administration, telling a tale in news articles and later in All the President’s Men that combined with a Democratic Congress and a partisan special counsel’s office led to Nixon’s resignation. Woodward’s version of Watergate was initially called into question by Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda, then later by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup. More recently, Geoff Shepard has presented compelling evidence in a series of books of a conspiracy to destroy the Nixon presidence. Sorry, Bob. The jury is still out on the “proven criminality” of Richard Nixon.
But the jury is no longer out on the proven partiality of Bob Woodward in the 2024 election. His book War should be labeled as an in-kind campaign contribution to the Harris–Walz candidacy. He is anti-Trump to the core, which he has every right to be, but please stop calling yourself “just a reporter.” Woodward is famous for saying that his books on presidents present a first draft of history. But first drafts of history are often wrong.
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