Whose state of denial?

Bob Woodward's critical new book left the Bush White House feeling betrayed. But his earlier "Bush at War" hagiography betrayed all Americans

By Sidney Blumenthal

Read more: Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Politics, Sidney Blumenthal, Bob Woodward, Opinion, Iraq War, Tony Snow

Oct. 11, 2006 | As soon as President Bush finished the first-year commemoration of Hurricane Katrina he turned to the fifth-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in order to restore his faltering popularity and set the themes for the Republican Party in the midterm elections campaign. Through a series of speeches he proclaimed that he would "stay the course" in Iraq, which he conflated with his war on terror. Polls, after all, showed that his standing on Iraq was sliding while his standing on terror was steady. His effort to merge one into the other, as he had done since before the invasion, was an act of political alchemy. Speaking at a Republican fundraiser on Sept. 28, he proclaimed, "The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run."

But on Oct. 5, an unimpressed Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, declared that Iraq was "drifting sideways," and that if Bush's policy was to continue it was time to "change the course." On Oct. 8, James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, a close associate of the elder Bush and now the chairman of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that will report its recommendations early next year to the president, declared his support for Sen. Warner's call to "change the course" "Yes, absolutely. And we're taking a look at other alternatives."

On Tuesday, a New York Times/CBS News poll reported, according to the Times, that "83 percent of respondents thought that Mr. Bush was either hiding something or mostly lying when he discussed how the war in Iraq was going." That staggering number is the exact mirror image of the 83 percent of respondents in a Washington Post/ABC News poll taken in September 2002 who believed Bush had a clear policy and therefore supported the invasion of Iraq.

Why did this change take so long? Why didn't the public figure out the facts earlier? Was the press an obstacle to information and understanding?

The distance between the two polls has also been marked by the publication of two books written by Bob Woodward, "Bush at War," in the fall of 2002 as the case for invasion was building, and "State of Denial," published this fall during the greatest violence in Iraq since the invasion ended. In between, just before the 2004 election, Woodward issued "Plan of Attack," a transitional volume. Woodward's latest volume has provided further documentary evidence to buttress criticisms of Bush's incompetence in Iraq and has contributed to the collapse of Bush's fall political offensive.

In Woodward's "Bush at War," Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld appeared as decisive, commanding and resolute. In "State of Denial," the same characters appear as ignorant, arrogant and out of control. In one book they are principled and stalwart; in the other they are devious and self-serving. Woodward sees no contrast between these obviously contradictory depictions and says merely that "circumstances" have changed. He judges himself to be the same Bob Woodward today that he was before, the same reporter getting the story, the same collector of facts.

Woodward's self-conviction is that he pursues the story as he always has and as a result gets it straight. He insists he has not altered his method of proof, the sort of evidence he seeks and finds persuasive. Was he looking in the wrong places before? Did he change his mind? He rejects any attempt to reconcile his conflicting portraits. He is Sgt. Friday of "Dragnet": Just the facts, ma'am. But his exposés almost always require further explication. His confidence about his power to produce the most revealing story is the basis of his limitations. And the apparent earnestness with which he follows his linear method makes him susceptible to the dangerous liaison.

Woodward doesn't see himself in any political context, but as someone who can be trusted to report what he sees and because of this virtue entrusted by insiders with their true accounts. By secret sharing with insiders he is certified to tell the story, and that certification gives him the aura of truth. As the insiders' insider he becomes the Washington journalists' journalist. He remains assured of the power of his method -- matter over mind. In his books Woodward is the constant narrator and hidden protagonist. Now Woodward becomes Pirandello: "Six Characters in Search of an Author."

Though Woodward presents himself as antiseptic, wearing a white lab coat and rubber gloves, immune to the political infections he handles, he has made obvious choices to devote himself to certain stories that might have clear consequences rather than others, and these stories have led his readers down a winding road. It is not only the circumstances that have changed; his perception of them has shifted as well, though he does not acknowledge it. Woodward's demurrals obscure his political journey over the past decade.

On one level, the Woodward story is a transparent, easily reported tale of a Washington player who in his own idiosyncratic way represents the drift of chattering class conventional wisdom, from envious contempt for Bill Clinton (and Al Gore) to blind infatuation with Bush the hero to sudden disdain for Bush the failure.

In the 1990s, Woodward hopped aboard the pseudo-scandal bandwagon, hoping to bring down a future president, Gore, by relying once again on a Deep Throat in the FBI. Instead of former Deputy Director Mark Felt, Woodward's Watergate source, he was promoted, befitting his stature, gaining then Director Louis Freeh as his source. Freeh had his own motives. As director of a bureau beset by scandal and mismanagement, threatened with evisceration by the cannibals in the Republican Congress, he threw in his lot with them. Congressional investigations into the FBI screeched to a halt. Freeh assigned more than 1,000 agents to a criminal probe of campaign finance corruption in the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, the largest FBI investigation in its history until after Sept. 11.

Woodward's drumbeat of stories portended the unmaking of the vice president. His byline appeared on pieces flatly reporting that the Chinese government had siphoned funds into the Clinton-Gore campaign. Here is Woodward on Feb. 13, 1997: "A Justice Department investigation into improper political fund-raising activities has uncovered evidence that representatives of the People's Republic of China sought to direct contributions from foreign sources to the Democratic National Committee before the 1996 presidential campaign, officials familiar with the inquiry said."

On March 2, 1997, as Republicans demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Gore, Woodward weighed in with a 2,700-word story on Gore as "solicitor-in-chief." But Woodward's stories came to naught. In the end, no special prosecutor was named, a Republican Senate committee issued a report admitting the charges were baseless, and not a single Clinton administration official was indicted for wrongdoing. Thinking he was a big-game hunter, Woodward had played paintball. But Woodward's splattering of Gore helped set the stage for the Republican smear campaign of 2000. To the degree that Woodward damaged Gore's reputation, he contributed to the narrow vote margin that wound up with the Supreme Court giving the presidency to George W. Bush.

Next page: Woodward fails to grasp his complicity in creating the stereotypes he's now debunking