State of Denial
Now What?
ANDY CARD began his political ascent as George H. W. Bush’s driver and carried forward a valet’s mind-set into the job of White House chief of staff. Less a power broker than a punching bag, Card made it his mission to venture before the cameras to swallow blame for administration follies, like its catatonic response to Hurricane Katrina. And behind closed doors, his role was even more humiliating. The former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill recalled George W. Bush interrupting a top-level meeting to issue Card an extremely urgent request: “You’re the chief of staff. You think you’re up to getting us some cheeseburgers?”
STATE OF DENIAL
By Bob Woodward.
Illustrated. 560 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.
Readers’ Opinions
It is startling, therefore, to read Bob Woodward’s portrayal of Card as the conscience of the Bush administration. In his telling, Card orchestrated a brave but doomed campaign to oust Donald Rumsfeld and change course in Iraq. Where other advisers evaded responsibility, Card constantly told the president, “You should not be afraid to change me.” Card occupies considerable space in “State of Denial” and has dominated coverage of it. Such an unconventional portrait inevitably provokes a cynical explanation: that Woodward, amanuensis to the Washington stars, has once again uncritically transcribed someone’s self-serving version of events.
Cynicism, however, trivializes the significance of Card’s confessions. To have so many of the president’s fiercest loyalists, like Card, testify to his incompetence — and with the ultimate Establishment journalist’s tape recorder running — is itself a turning point. With two years to go, Woodward has written the Bush administration’s version of “The Final Days.”
He has retroactively bundled his books on the Bush White House into a trilogy. “State of Denial,” the jacket tells us, is Part 3 of his “Bush at War” cycle. This is obvious sleight of hand. Woodward’s first book provided so favorable a treatment of the administration that the Republican National Committee recommended it on its Web site. But “State of Denial” isn’t a continuation of his previous work as much as a repudiation — the installment in which he takes a mulligan and attempts to correct for past obsequiousness.
Your standard volume of Woodward reportage could be titled “Everything That Happened Since My Last Book.” But “State of Denial” deviates from this model. It doesn’t even begin where his last Bush book, “Plan of Attack,” left off — in the euphoric early days of the Iraq war. Instead, Woodward retraces his reportorial steps back to the moment George W. Bush first considered running for president, when his father called the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, down to Austin to provide his boy a foreign policy tutorial. And Bandar initiates the book’s flood of unflattering details. According to him, Bush exclaimed, “I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy.” (Domestic foreign policy was another matter.)
Where Bush appeared resolute in the first two installments of Woodward’s trilogy, he now comes across as a “Saturday Night Live” version of himself. He cracks fart jokes with Karl Rove and conspires to play a prank on the current Federal Reserve chairman. Woodward argues that this Andover grad still views himself as a cheerleader, bucking up the polity even if his rosy exhortations come at the cost of the truth. (When a C.I.A. briefer informs the president of the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, Bush dismisses the messenger from Langley as “Baghdad Bob,” a reference to Saddam Hussein’s old spokesman.) And if the president can’t face the facts, it may have something to do with his insecurities. According to Woodward, the president’s legs anxiously jiggle under the table in meetings. He also suggests, as others have, that our adventure in Iraq had less to do with the promotion of democracy and more to do with the president’s relationship with his father. Bush wanted to outdo his dad by taking down the tyrant his old man had left standing.
But the president is too passive a player to be Woodward’s central villain. Besides, Donald Rumsfeld fills that role far too perfectly. He comes across as utterly contemptuous of other human beings. When Condoleezza Rice makes important presentations to the president, Rumsfeld ostentatiously fails to pay attention — and then fails to return her calls afterward. What’s worse, he is an obsessive micromanager, but one who disavows projects once they look doomed. As soon as the hunt for weapons of mass destruction seemed fruitless, he handed over the mission to the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld takes so much pummeling that he eventually becomes a strangely sympathetic character. While almost every other member of the Bush administration stiffed Woodward’s request for on-the-record interviews, Rumsfeld manfully subjected himself to two sessions — this despite his obvious disdain for the author. In the course of these interviews, Woodward breaks his own time-honored rules of access journalism. Instead of rewarding Rumsfeld’s openness, he uses the interviews to disprove his own reputation for softness. After Rumsfeld employs the metaphor of a “fruit bowl” to describe the administration’s varying methodologies for measuring insurgent attacks, Woodward writes: “I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a ‘fruit bowl,’ a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion.”
While Woodward reserves particular antipathy for Rumsfeld, his descriptions of nearly everyone else in the administration are equally damning. Every chapter in the book presents a heretofore uncovered anecdote of incompetence. Why did we botch postwar reconstruction? Weeks before the invasion, one of the men recruited to help rebuild Iraq is sitting in a library scraping for any bit of available information about “what we should do with the Iraqi Army.” Unfortunately, the United States government didn’t have any good intelligence on the subject. When Jay Garner, who was in charge of the reconstruction, asked Rice on the eve of the invasion how he should put together a postwar government, he didn’t receive an answer. Garner didn’t even know he should relocate his operations to the Middle East until Paul Wolfowitz told him, “You should already be there.”
Amid all of Woodward’s maddening reports of administration ham-handedness and arrogance, unintentional comedy abounds. He captures official Washington offering the lamest excuses as it trips over itself to deny responsibility for the Iraq war and the Bush era. George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, is shown decrying the Iraq invasion as a “mistake” on the eve of the war — despite Woodward’s previous reports of his “slam dunk” assessment of the Iraqi arsenal. After Richard Armitage’s initial pre-presidential encounters with George W. Bush, he “was not sure Bush filled the suit required of a president” — yet nevertheless went on to serve as his loyal servant for four years. But Woodward doesn’t render this rat-jump with the appropriate comic flair. He portrays these revisionist accounts with far more sympathy than they deserve.
This book, after all, is an object lesson in precisely this brand of retreat. You can easily understand Woodward’s urge to retreat. For the past decade, he has received unending abuse, suffering a devastating Joan Didion hatchet job and then the scorn of the anti-Bush left. His critics have turned him into a symbol of journalism’s rot, a leading force in the sad demise of adversarial reporting that led to Judith Miller and media passiveness in the face of Bush spin. After writing “All the President’s Men,” Woodward became one of them.
With “State of Denial,” you sense this (somewhat overwrought) critique has rattled Woodward. It has forced him to change his style. There’s less of his signature omniscience here — a style that not only reflected his proximity to power, but captured the self-confidence of the Washington Establishment. In its place, he has grown self-referential, nervously mentioning his past books, as well as inserting himself as a character into his own tale. That Bob Woodward has strayed from the Bob Woodward method tells you a lot about the state of American journalism.
