“It’s very depressing. You want to read a depressing book, this is it,” said one critic of a book by Bob Woodward. “It’s a sad, horrible story with all the sordid details that I guess people will just, you know, slaver over, but the fact of the matter is, it’s humorless and there’s no warmth.”
In his criticism of Woodward’s book Wired about his friend John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd captured the essence of the Woodward writing style: lots of little trees competing for air in a gloomy forest, often at the expense of the larger picture. One can expect the same from Woodward’s’ new opus about the Trump White House, Fear. Trump in the White House.
In his two books about the Clinton White House, Woodward again did a thorough job documenting the trees, but in the second of these two books, The Choice: How Clinton Won, Woodward missed a Watergate-sized forest. To his humble credit, he later almost admitted as much.
Fear: Trump in the Whi…
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Woodward was no Clinton fanboy. In the first of the two books, The Agenda, Woodward detailed the chaotic run-up to the budget battle in Bill Clinton’s first term. In fact, he used the word “chaos” repeatedly, even excessively.
The process “bordered on chaos.” Clinton’s schedule “was again chaos.” Clinton pushed debate “to the point of chaos.” The administration’s first week “had been chaos.” The meeting dissolved “into virtual chaos.”
In the second of these two books, this one about the 1996 election, Woodward saw a White House teetering – you guessed it – “on the edge of management chaos.” He was not the only one to spot the disarray. In his memoirs,…