WAR, by Bob Woodward
It’s not listed among the enumerated powers of the American presidency, but one of the modern expectations of the office is that Bob Woodward will write at least one book about your administration. Over the past 30 years Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have earned two apiece, while the presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump each fill out a trilogy.
As senator and vice president, Joe Biden was a supporting player in many of those books and the full-fledged co-star of “Peril,” the last Trump volume, which Woodward wrote with Robert Costa and which covered the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Now, with “War,” Biden has a chronicle of his own. It’s a strange, self-divided book — more admiring of its subject than most of its predecessors and less confident in its own narrative, busy with incident and yet weirdly detached from the chaos of the world as we know it.
The presidency, a famously lonely office, is in Woodward’s presentation anything but solitary. Surrounding the commander in chief in each book are cabinet officers, aides and advisers. Some of them are Woodward’s sources, though he doesn’t say which. His method, explained in a note at the end of “War,” is to conduct his interviews “under the journalist ground rule of ‘deep background,’” meaning “that all the information could be used but I would not say who provided it.”
“At the center of good governance,” Woodward writes, is “teamwork,” and the reader spends a fair amount of time with members of Biden’s national security team, including Lloyd Austin and Antony Blinken, the secretaries of defense and state; Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser and Vice President Kamala Harris.
They and their colleagues and underlings give the narrative a bustling, procedural efficiency. Woodward limns them in barbershop prose: “Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, 59, with dark brown hair and a friendly, high-charging demeanor”; Blinken, “5-foot-10 with a neat wave of once brown, now gray, hair.” If this were a movie, these people would be played by solid second-tier character actors.
Mostly, though, Biden shares the stage with other heads of state. Their hairstyles are a matter of public record. The tonsorially distinguished Boris Johnson, for example, is described simply as “a member of the British Conservative Party and a product of prestigious Eton and Oxford.” “Prestigious” in that sentence is a nugget of pure Woodwardian gold.