|
|
|
March 9, 2003
Review: The fly on the wall
IF journalism programmes across the world saw a sudden increase in applications in the mid-to-late seventies, much credit goes to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward whose crack investigative reporting ultimately led the late Richard Nixon to vacate the White House. Like lawyers and dot.com entrepreneurs for later generations, many young men and women found in the Bernstein-Woodward duo the courageous heroism that beckoned others to choose the path of pen and paper.
Almost thirty years and several bestsellers later, Bob Woodward has done his trademark solo ‘behind the scenes’ look at another presidency. Unlike his previous commentary on the Clinton presidency (The Agenda), this one covers a short timeframe and narrow area of White House decision-making. In writing Bush at War, Woodward presents a President and his team going from the shock of September 11, 2001 to the decisive retribution in Afghanistan a few weeks later.
Less than a documentary and more than a direct narrative, it is a series of mini-stories of small and big meetings as seen, heard, and recorded by an ubiquitous fly on the wall. Except that, of course, this fly is the premier investigative reporter in America whose connections in Washington’s murky corridors of power are envied by many a king and foreign minister. Few other journalists, for that matter few other individuals, would have been able to have one-on-one interviews with the President, the Vice President, most of the cabinet, junior ministers and national security staffers in the formatting of one single book. Whether those interviews were completely candid or whether they were partially self-serving are questions left up to those who look back decades later with an eye unaffected by the proximity of time and place.
Through the pages of this book one sees the key decision-makers in matters of war and peace in America. A suave, perspicacious Greek-American CIA chief George Tenet who, within minutes of the September 11 tragedy, surmised an Al Qaeda hand; the dyed-in-the wool Cold Warriors Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld who could not wait to send in the infantry to Kandahar; the feisty and elegant Dr Condoleezza Rice whose sharp edge contrasts mightily with her fellow African-American, that most finessed diplomat Colin Powell.
Also found in some meetings at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the professional soldier General Tommy Franks and the tight-lipped Attorney General John Ashcroft whose distrust of America’s traditional civil liberties goes back to his days as a provincial chief prosecutor. The star of the meetings, the maestro if you will, is George Bush himself. Quite unlike the spoofs on popular media, the President emerges as a leader who takes charge, be it in small huddles with intelligence chiefs or full blown National Security Council meetings. He asks the closed-ended questions, wonders about the popular sentiment in the Tajik belt, and, by his own admission, goes with his instinct when deciding on a policy course.
In full-court meetings his Texan background is more in sync with the aggressive mood of the Rumsfeld-Cheney clique but his very patrician upbringing (and instinct, perhaps) tempers him to be almost deferential to the intellectual giant in his team, soldier-statesman Powell. In the end, perhaps the policy cleavages did not matter on the ground as much as the chief protagonists of the Bush cabinet would have liked to think so. Technological savvy, intelligence connections going back to the Soviet occupation, and old fashioned bribery by George Tenet’s men with bags full of cash rendered conventional warfare — and conventional diplomacy — a moot point.
Jolted by a few daisy-cutters, the Taliban commanders were all too willing to take the million dollars and go home. An almost anti-climactic end result of the whole set of small and large meetings that developed, debated, and delivered the first phase of the American response to the assault on the Twin Towers. The epilogue quickly summarizes the timeline and posits questions for the next phase, including a passing reference to George Bush’s supposed belief in the manifest destiny of America to do good in the world by opposing the bad guys.
As a vivid picture of important American personalities of our times, Bob Woodward’s book is peerless. Only someone with his access and descriptive abilities could re-create for the rest of us the meetings and interviews that went on in the White House between the 9/11 tragedy and the collapse of the Taliban. In that sense the volume is far less a historical perspective and more definitely a streaming portrait of the men and women who individually and collectively counsel the world’s most powerful man. As such, it is also a sneak glimpse into the mettle and mind of the 43rd President of the United States.
What the book is not, alas, is necessary. At least in the sense of its being a required reading for any course of study. It makes no startling revelations, asks no previously unasked questions, and covers no new ground that was not covered before by whispers and expert analysis. For example, the portrait Woodward paints of the philosophical schism between a sophisticated Powell and a rambunctious Rumsfeld is old lore in Washington. And elsewhere. Most of the developments at the meetings he mentions were already ‘leaked’ out by anonymous ‘senior’ officials. It makes leaders look like leaders, statesmen like statesmen, and loudmouths like loudmouths.
It also makes Bob Woodward look like a pale shadow of his towering self.
Bush at War
By Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 0743204735
400pp. £13.29
|
|
|
|
