With the media world ga-ga over Bob Woodward and his new book--at least before the Foley scandal hit--The New Republic asked me to participate in an exchange with historian David Greenberg, a Woodwward champion. Given that I have my own book to promote--and that I've already offered critiques of Woodward--how could I resist? So today the battle begins. I go first, Greenberg replies tomorrow, and then we each get another turn on the following days. Here is my opening shot:
Bob Woodward's State of Denialby David Greenberg & David Corn
[Editor's Note: Today, TNR Online introduces day one of a four-part debate between journalist David Corn and historian David Greenberg about Bob Woodward's book State of Denial. The debate begins with Corn's critique of Woodward; it continues tomorrow with Greenberg's rejoinder. ]
Tuesday, October 17
Dear David G.,
I'm glad to be discussing Bob Woodward and his work with you. For me, his latest effort raises issues about his methodology and his position as the nation's number-one journalist. Let me get right into it:
On March 6, 2003, as President Bush was close to invading Iraq, Bob Woodward, the nation's most famous investigative reporter, appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live" and backed the administration's case for war. "They're saying weapons inspection is not working," Woodward said. "That there may be some visible successes and missiles destroyed here and so forth, a few things found. The intelligence shows ... there are massive amounts of weapons of mass destruction hidden, buried, unaccounted for."
Woodward, like many (but not all) in the press corps, missed perhaps the most important Washington story since Watergate: that the Bush administration was taking the nation to war on the basis of faulty, flimsy, and even fraudulent intelligence. The new book I co-wrote with Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, chronicles the battles that occurred within the CIA, White House, State Department, Pentagon, and Congress regarding the prewar intelligence and its use in Bush's sales campaign. This is what Woodward did not catch when it was happening, and his new 560-page book, State of Denial, does not directly address the original sin of the Bush-in-Iraq debacle.
Plan of Attack, the book Woodward published in April 2004 about the run-up to the Iraq war, also largely neglected the administration's pre-invasion public distortions. In that volume--in a section covering less than two pages--Woodward reported he had come across several sources before the invasion who had said the intelligence was not as conclusive as the administration was claiming. But Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, did not jump on this critical subject at the time for the newspaper. And, in Plan of Attack--written in the months after the invasion--he did not thoroughly dissect how Bush and his aides had deployed and exaggerated lousy intelligence to make the case for war (even though indications of this had already emerged).
With all his much-acclaimed insider access--which does allow him to break important stories--Woodward had tunneled past the real gold. Why? By focusing on what was transpiring at the highest levels of the palace, he had zeroed in on what was important to his high-placed sources. But that's not always the most significant story. The news often occurs outside the president's court. For example, because Bush and his aides ignored the hotly contested dispute between the CIA and Energy Department before the war over whether aluminum tubes obtained by Iraq were evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program (as the administration claimed), this key fight did not register on Woodward's radar. And, in Plan of Attack, he did not cover this important fight, which concerned the only hard piece of evidence in the Bush administration's WMD case for war. (The Post had briefly mentioned this dispute in September 2002). Nor does he do so in State of Denial, which replows some of the territory of his previous Bush-at-war books.
As I wrote months ago, Woodward failed to nab another major story for Plan of Attack because his sources had described to him a January 2003 meeting between Bush and Tony Blair but had left out a significant part of the tale: that the two leaders had discussed cooking up a provocation to trigger a war with Iraq. The fact that Bush had considered staging a stunt to start a war only emerged this past year with the disclosure of portions of a British government memo. Thus, Woodward's account of this particular meeting--in which Bush came across positively--was slanted, because Woodward had not been told the full truth by his high-level informants. And State of Denial does not include the subsequent revelations about this meeting.
State of Denial has little in it about the Niger uranium controversy and the Valerie Plame leak case--which ended up ensnaring Woodward. It may have been a justifiable editorial decision for him to sidestep these matters (even though the Niger affair did lead to open warfare between the CIA and the White House). But Woodward's entanglement with a source involved in this episode appears to have caused him to misguide the reader. In the book, he reports that, in the summer of 2004, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was asked if he would succeed George Tenet as CIA chief. Woodward notes that Armitage turned it down because he could not stomach working with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. In this telling, Armitage (an important Woodward source) comes across as a fellow rejecting a prestigious job out of principle. But there was more to it than that.
Armitage (as Hubris disclosed) had been under investigation for having leaked classified information on undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson to conservative columnist Robert Novak. Woodward knew that Armitage had leaked the same information to him, and he "had long suspected" (as he said in an interview for our book) that his source--meaning Armitage--had been Novak's. So Woodward must have realized when writing State of Denial that Armitage could not have accepted the CIA job and gone through the confirmation process. At any moment the news could have emerged that the man nominated to be the CIA chief had blown the cover of an undercover CIA employee. But Woodward--apparently to protect a source--tells his reader none of this. Consequently, he paints a not-entirely-true picture. On "60 Minutes," Woodward recently described the anecdotes in State of Denial as "not just kind of right, but literally right." Not so in this case.
With State of Denial, Woodward has come late to the party (as I've already commented). He now maintains--as he did on "Meet the Press" last week--that the Bush administration has "not been telling the truth" about Iraq. But that was true before the invasion (when Woodward was reporting for the Post) and after the invasion (when he produced Plan of Attack). Only now does the Bush administration's competence and credibility (or lack thereof) grab Woodward as a plot line. His previous work on Bush was imbued with no such skepticism. He now even propounds different conclusions based on the same research. In Plan of Attack, he included a long portion of a December 2003 interview he conducted with Bush during which the president insisted, "We have found weapons programs that could be reconstituted." That statement was not true, but Woodward did not make much of this misleading remark. Woodward concludes State of Denial with the same interview excerpts. Yet, in the new book he highlights Bush's comments as evidence of the president's "habit of denial." Why point out Bush's denial of reality in September 2006, but not in April 2004? Does this have something to do with Bush's--and the war's--dwindling popularity?
Better tardy than not at all, one might say. And there's something to that. Woodward still discloses secret documents showing that the administration has misled the public, and he serves up impressive reporting, even as critics suggest he hypes his material.
State of Denial presents two core truths: (1) Rumsfeld has abysmally managed the war, including the post-invasion planning; and (2) the president and his aides have not leveled with the American public about "what Iraq had become." But note Woodward's implied demarcation between Bush's pre-invasion misrepresentations (which he, in a way, endorsed) and Bush's post-invasion untruths (which Woodward now reveals to great effect). For all the book's disclosures, Woodward--who deserves to be judged by a high standard--has partly failed by taking so long to apply his considerable reporting skills, his insider's access, and brand-name cachet to documenting these now self-evident propositions.
Best,
David C.
Posted by David Corn at October 17, 2006 10:41 AM
