Woodward Reports the Cuss Words, Skips the Facts.
Another Misleading Tome from the Court Historian
To anyone who has slogged through Bob Woodward’s serial tomes, his latest, War, will come as no surprise. Its obsequious treatment of select senior officials grappling with the Ukrainian and middle east wars runs true to form. Just in case readers miss the point, he concludes with the assertion that “President Biden and his team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.”
As we shall see, it is unlikely that future historians will come to any such conclusion, assuming they have access to sources beyond Woodward.
Was it “steady and purposeful leadership” that brought on the mass-murder with American weapons of 42,000 people, at the very least, in Gaza and Lebanon? In which case the word “purposeful” takes on a sinister connotation that Woodward probably does not intend. Did any of his heroes, principally Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, pause for a second to ponder where, prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, plummeting relations with Russia might lead, or how Palestinians might react to their increasing marginalization and repression? Points raised by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in prewar discussions with Blinken are routinely dismissed without elucidation as “bluster.” Furthermore, historian Scott Horton has detected and reported what are clearly deliberate misquotations of Lavrov in the book.
Trudging through War induces a sort of trance, as the conversations related to Woodward by cooperative interested parties, notably Blinken and Sullivan, roll on remorselessly, like waves breaking on a beach. Just to show us that this is how our rulers really talk, the words “fuck” and “fucking” appear in quoted conversations no less than thirty nine times. Overall, inducing stupor is an important component of the Woodward technique, since it may preclude readers from sitting up and saying “wait a moment, what about..?”
Thus the chapters covering the early months of the Ukraine war trundle along, from its outbreak, past the failure of the Russian advance on Kyiv, Biden’s rage at Putin (lots of “fucking” there) and detailed reports of diplomatic encounters with various European leaders, through to the fall and a story of how steady U.S. leadership deterred Putin from using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. (Good Story If True, as my old editor at the Daily Mail used to write on copy.)
Amidst this there is zero mention of a crucial episode in the early months of the fighting, about which Woodward’s sources could supply details of enormous interest and importance.
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