All the President’s Surrogates: War by Bob Woodward – A Review

“I think it [the US withdrawal from Afghanistan] reinforced Putin’s conceptions about how easy it would be,” Woodward quotes Eric Green, Biden’s Special Advisor on Russia. Green added, “Here’s a military force that’s been supported by the US for decades at that state. They just collapsed and the Americans didn’t back them up.”

– excerpt from War by Bob Woodward

Book Review: War by Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward made a prodigious name for himself as an investigative journalist, breaking, along with longtime colleague, Carl Bernstein, one of the biggest stories in American history, the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration. He has two Pulitzer Prizes among his many achievements.

No longer running down leads on scraps of paper, in recent years, Woodward has taken to writing books about various presidential administrations, choosing a theme and exploring it throughout the book. He is popular on interview shows and blitzes the airwaves when promoting one of his books.

He is seen as a presidential pundit, these days, having covered so many administrations. Certainly, having been immortalized on screen by Robert Redford in the acclaimed film All the Presidents Men, you have an advantage over other journalists: everybody wants to talk to you.

So, Woodward’s books get the inside scoop from those whom other journalists can only use on deep background at best. Most aren’t invited into the circle that Woodward breaks through. Moreover, when he writes one of these books, by the time he reflects the subject matter, it is no longer breaking news, so people are more willing to talk to him, the consequences of their testimonies unlikely to impact them or their superiors. More importantly for the subject, it gives them the opportunity to tell their side of the story, to spin things in hindsight that afflicts the story with the disease of a noble self-portrayal that carries with it the danger of not representing the facts. The price of entry into the club of eminence is to check ones skepticism at the door. Who wouldn’t an interview under such circumstances?

In his latest single-noun titled book, War, Woodward explores the statecraft behind the relationship between nations and the conflicts that occurred during the Biden Administration. There is also some reflection domestic politics with colour commentary from Donald Trump included as contrast and occasion reference to domestic issues like immigration, for the election is another ‘war’ upon which Woodward touches.

One cannot help but notice the timing of publication: less than one month before the election, presenting the accomplishments of the Biden administration in a favourable light against flippant and rather immature commentary of Trump is perhaps designed to serve a purpose, Woodward, himself mentions in the book. The war is also the war of the press on Donald Trump, to deny him what the establishment believes to be a dictatorial presidency.

Russian President, Vladamir Putin, also bears the brunt of criticism in the book. Biden is quoted as referring to him in private as, “that fucking asshole.” Boris Johnson calls him a “small, puckish, lowlife.” Ironically, many in the British electorate could have easily flung those epithets at Johnson whose tenure was troubled and scandalous tenure ultimately brought him down.

Woodward has a way of using the backgrounds of his protagonists to burnish their capabilities in the minds of readers – and I use that term because it’s clear which side Woodward is on – he calls Johnson the product of “the prestigious Eton and Oxford,” as though he wasn’t Britain’s version of Donald Trump, crashing through delicate moments with inappropriate comment and outright lies.

First, the adjective “prestigious” is utterly unnecessary as 20 UK Prime Ministers had attended Eton as well as royalty and twenty-seven attended Oxford by the time Mr. Johnson graced their hallowed grounds. If one examines Johnson’s formative years, it becomes apparent that he was ambitious to the point of being sociopathic, his only goal becoming president of the Oxford Union, which he succeeded in doing on the basis of lies. His pathological inclination towards dissembling led him to lose his first job in journalism at the Times of London for which he made up a quote to ‘sex up’ a story. His connections got him a job at The Telegraph where he covered Europe and continued to lie about the EU. The Brexit campaign, indeed, was full of lies the belief in which the British public have been paying for ever since.

Oxford is full of shenanigans of the privileged. Johnson was known as a misogynistic privileged toff who was a member of Bullingdon Club for which, according to a woman who acted as a scout for potential members of the in the 1980s, “female prostitutes performed sex acts at its lavish dinners, where women were routinely belittled, and that intimidation and vandalism were its hallmarks.”

Johnson’s predecessor, David Cameron, also an Etonian and Oxford Alumnus infamously once stuck his genitals into the mouth of a dead pig at Oxford as part of an initiation ceremony for the Piers Gaveston Society.

These are Etonian and Oxford roots from which these two great British statesmen are drawn.

Woodward also lauds the Yale University education of other players in the drama that is his book. One doesn’t have to look too deeply into Yale’s rituals to find a young George W. Bush, future two-term President and ‘decider’ whose two wars may have killed in upward of a million people, being credited with digging up the bones of the famous indigenous American known as Geronimo. Whether this is true, the laudatory nature of the myth serves to exemplify morays of privileged members of that institution.

In Woodward’s world, these qualifications matter to demonstrate that steady hands are at the helm of critical global developments. So, Woodward’s sets up a thesis that the Biden administration and his allies, filled with brilliant statesman of the right pedigree, had to deal with madman Putin and other crazies to fix a broken world. That Biden, himself, did not belong to that world, this being at the core of his own insecurity among Washington mandarins is not explored. It is neither mentioned that Volodomir Zelinsky does not come from such a pedigree, and his rise to power laughably came from life imitating ‘art’, for Zelinsky is probably the only world leader to have played a president on television and then become one, his party, Servant of the People, bearing the same name as the television show. The comedy masks his own corruption, typical of Ukrainian politics, which the Pandora Papers exposed but none of this figures into Woodward’s book. Zelensky is portrayed as a brave and inspirational leader doggedly resisting Putin’s Hitler-like expansionism, which isn’t entirely false. It’s just that the full picture of the man isn’t given.

Moreover, under Ukraine’s current martial law, Zelinsky’s term, which would have ended a year ago, now has no end in sight. He is, in essence, now, president for the foreseeable future. When Biden took an interest in Ukraine as Vice-President (allegations of influence profiteering by his son, Hunter, aside) it was to reinforce the development of an emerging but challenged democracy. That purpose has fallen by the wayside in the wake of the war, and none of the actors in the book speak to it; Woodward never asks the question.

What is clear from Woodward’s account of the discussion that preceded Putin’s invasion is that the humiliating withdrawal by the Americans from Afghanistan and total failure to contain the Taliban advance instilled in Putin the notion that the American response would be weak, similar to Obama’s after Russia seized Crimea in 2014.

“I think it [the US withdrawal from Afghanistan] reinforced Putin’s conceptions about how easy it would be,” Woodward quotes Eric Green, Biden’s Special Advisor on Russia. Green added, “Here’s a military force that’s been supported by the US for decades at that state. They just collapsed and the Americans didn’t back them up.”

The recollections of Woodward’s sources are stated as facts – embellished even by Woodward’s narrative style.  For example, in the discussions that CIA director William Burns and Secretary of State had with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Woodward describes Lavrov as belligerent based on the accounts of Woodward’s sources, though Woodward himself wasn’t there in the room: “Lavrov responded with bluster, flagrant denials and condescension. But he sounded convincing. That was the problem with Lavrov in these meetings. He was a showman and he had and attentive audience,” Woodward writes without attribution to any source. Not only was Woodward not present for this meeting, but he has also never personally interviewed Lavrov. So, how could he comment on the Russian official’s overall comportment, characteristics like showmanship and condescension.

Having recently watched an interview with Lavrov on YouTube, I saw none of the “showmanship,” to which Woodward alluded as a central characteristic of the man. Woodward’s style of translating what he has heard in third person into entertaining prose becomes misleading at times. For those who regard his books as having historical value, this is dangerous. The small fictions created in Woodward’s mind of how events unfolded, embedded in this non-fiction book add up, in the end – and the result isn’t journalism.

The accounts of the Biden administration uncovering intelligence that Putin was poised to attack Ukraine and the steps taken to forestall that eventuality are fascinating. So too, is the question of whether the Russians had considered using tactical nuclear weapons in the war. Details of phone conversations and meetings demonstrate comprehensively what is involved behind the scenes when an international crisis looms, and Woodward captures this with a feel of suspense, even though the outcome is known.

Several times, Woodward refers to “false flag” tactics employed by the Russians to justify or escalate the war without actually delving into these operations in any specific detail. The book dwells on behind-the-scenes discussions without describing the actual events of the war. This leaves a hole in the narrative.

At one point, when the Ukraine was in danger of running out of munitions for their howitzers and the United States could not supply them or find them in European countries, Woodward justifies the Biden administration’s decision to supply the Ukrainians with cluster bombs as Woodward notes that these viciously damaging weapons are “banned by 123 countries as inhumane and indiscriminate.” He then goes on to argue that American cluster bombs were much ‘safer’ than those already being used by Russians on the battlefield. He brings up child abductions and other atrocities to condone Biden’s decision advocate transfer of the much-reviled weapons to the Ukrainians for use in the war and fails to mention that the United Nations Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) “prohibits under any circumstances the use, development, production, acquisition, stockpiling and transfer of cluster munitions, as well as the assistance or encouragement of anyone to engage in prohibited activities.”

The irony of liberal elites who talk of a rules-based order is that it is one that does not accord with International Law or strictures of organizations that form global civil society.

Biden is depicted as effective but measured in his approach to arming the Ukrainians. Of course, the book was written before November 17^th when, with but two months left in office, Biden authorized the first use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes deep inside Russia. This decision contrasts the approach of the administration depicted in War, which was to provide the means for effective resistance in Ukraine without escalating the conflict to a nuclear one.

Still, when the book was written, the way in which the Biden administration dealt with the crisis is accurately shown as thoughtful and restrained, though full-throated in its support of Zelensky and Ukraine. At one point, Lindsay Graham, a long-time Biden colleague and senator close to Trump was enlisted to keep Trump’s hands off a Ukraine aid bill, which Congress passed. This is but one example of Biden’s long experience in government demonstrating him to exhibit the traits of “steady purposeful leadership” by which Woodward concludes history will judge his administration. Based on Woodward’s account, this is a reasonable conclusion at which to arrive.

However, glaringly missing from book in detailing the seminal events of the Russia-Ukraine War are the missed opportunities to negotiate a peace deal that would have spared the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people. Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022 that the United States was arming Ukraine to “fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.” In sharp contrast to this, with the Biden Administration acquiescence, when peace negotiations seemed promising in Turkey in the spring of 2022. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, “prestigious Etonian and Oxford Alum” scuttled the deal to which Zelensky had already put his name in surprise visit. Just three days after this Western intervention in the negotiations, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that talks were at “a dead end,” and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, has since said that the US and UK “blocked” negotiations. How this crucial opportunity was passed over in Woodward’s book including reasoning behind it (which many readers would have wanted to know) is somewhat inexplicable. So, we are left with a tattered narrative of the war.

Woodward also fails to mention that Ukraine’s military successes in the provinces of Kharkiv and Kherson the following autumn spurred sober discussions within NATO over whether the time was opportune for Ukraine to return to the negotiating table. As reported by Italy’s La Repubblica, NATO leaders saw the capture of Kherson as providing the pivotal event in the war that the alliance been aspiring to achieve to again consider a peace agreement from a position of Ukrainian strength.

Fairobserver.com notes that:

“On November 9, 2022, the very day that Russia ordered its withdrawal from Kherson, General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke at the Economic Club of New York, where the interviewer asked him whether the time was now ripe for negotiations. The general expressed hope that leaders might be able to seize the opportunity provided by the winter slowdown in fighting to negotiate. General Milley compared the situation to the First World War, explaining that leaders on all sides understood by Christmas 1914 that that war was not winnable, yet they fought on for another four years, multiplying the million lives lost in 1914 into 20 million by 1918, destroying five empires and setting the stage for the rise of fascism and the Second World War.

Milley underscored the point of his cautionary tale by noting that, as in 1914, “… there has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably in the true sense of the word, is maybe not achievable through military means. And therefore, you need to turn to other means … So things can get worse. So when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it, seize the moment.”

But Milley and other voices of experience were ignored.”

Woodward writes much about Milley in War but his position on negotiation is, again, a conspicuous omission from the book. An informed reader would reasonably ask why this is so? How can one not then conclude that the book was written with a bias to reflect only the information that Woodward chose to keep in from his sources rather everything these same sources might have offered – even when one of his own sources were among the dissenters to the prevailing view in the administration. I won’t call this hack journalism out of respect for the esteemed Mr. Woodward. That said, the oversights leave the book as a less thorough account of what went on than what Woodward would have us believe.

Woodward’s recounting of the unfolding of the war between Israel and Hamas after the horrendous attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas rockets a 3,000 strong incursion into Israel is far more illuminating. The positions of the United States, Israel and various Middle East players are clearly elucidated.

It would have been fine to leave the story at that. But, awkwardly, Wookward has to peak into Biden’s brain, “Biden knew an Israeli-Hezbollah war would likely explode into an Israeli-Iran war.”  Given that Biden never actually talked to Woodward about any of this, this could have easily been rephrased to read “Biden must have known….” The certitude with which Woodward writes of what Biden’s knowledge and actions is typical of Woodward’s writing in these books – he presents his opinions as fact.

Oddly, Woodward keeps coming back to Biden’s argument when as vice-president, he was opposed to the surge of sending 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan. Biden believed then that it was a case of the military establishment trying to manipulate an inexperienced president – and he knew better. Clearly, Woodward agrees with this position but Biden’s disastrous pull-out in Afghanistan, which, even as noted in the book, only emboldened Putin, belies this view.

In his version of Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision-making process on whether to launch a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah, against Biden’s advice, Woodward essentially describes an Israeli false flag intelligence warning in which Ron Dermer, the American-born Israeli Minister of Strategic affairs proclaims, “They’ve (Hezbollah have) launched the attack. There are paragliders coming from the north,” according to Woodward. When the intel turns out to be disproven by the US Department of Defence “J2” intelligence coordination unit, Brett McGurk, National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East and Deputy Special Advisor to Joe Biden is exasperated.

Woodward quotes as ‘thinking’: “The Israelis always do this…They claim, ‘We’ve got the intel! You’ll see it. You’ll see it.’ But like 50 percent of the time, the so-called intel doesn’t actually show-up.” Despite Woodward’s communing with McGurk, he never characterizes the Israeli’s false intelligence to justify an attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon as a “false flag” despite referring to Russia’s use of such tactics without actually identifying the Russian false flag. When it comes to the Israeli’s it’s just an honest mistake despite what Woodward writes of McGurk’s thoughts. It’s not that I doubt Russian use of this tactic – they are no angels. A balanced account would have treated both in the same way. It would have made for a more interesting narrative; countering Russian murky tactics on the one hand and trying to restrain the same from Israel on the other. The story, is therefore, incongruent.

Interspersed in the description of the wars are snippets of Donald Trump either talking to Woodward or having conversations with Senator Lindsay Graham, opining on the war, the midterm elections or whether to run for president. These seem out of place without any contextual establishment. It appears that Woodward’s contention is that the Biden administration’s other war was with Trump and his followers – those who had stormed the Capital on January 6th. Indeed, in these sections, we learn that it was a General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who approached Attorney General Merrick Garland to prompt him to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the January 6^th Capitol Hill demonstrations only after Trump had announced that he was running for president for a third time. Inadvertently, Woodward gives credence to Trump supporers who call his prosecutions as “lawfare.”

Insider conversations revealed in War show that Trump’s decision to run again was of grave concern with Kamala Harris making a remark that we would hear throughout the 2024 election campaign about it being “the most consequential election in US History”.

The purpose of including Donald Trump becomes clearer somewhat later in the book as the political war facing the Biden administration comes into focus. It appears, upon reflection, that including the Trump excerpts all the way through is a means of striking a contrast between the Trump and Biden: Biden’s professional leadership compared to Trump’s cowboy attitude.

Woodward actually says it, towards the end of the book: “Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the presidency, [but] he is [also] sic. unfit to lead the country. Trump was far worse than Richard Nixon, the provably criminal president.” This statement disregards that under Trump, the United States was not involved in war while under Nixon, his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger’s ‘Operation Breakfast’ or the illegal bombing of supply lines to Vietnam in Cambodia killed at least 24,000 innocent people with estimates even reaching a million. Likewise, total human cost of the Indo-China war under Nixon is somewhere between 4 and 6 million people. The casual attitude to the mass killings is exemplified by an excerpt from the diary entry of Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.H. Halderman (convicted for the Watergate break-in conspiracy exposed by Woodward & Bernstein’s award-winning reporting) after the morning after Cambodia bombing campaign: “ … Historic day. K[issinger]‘s ‘Operation Breakfast’ finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident]…. He [Kissinger] came in beaming with the report.” How Woodward can rank Trump to be worse than Nixon and his accomplices in mass murder, belies reason!

Throughout the book, Biden is portrayed as a commander-in-chief who is capable and firmly at the helm of all decisions, despite the debates around them. These are based only on the recollections of Woodward’s sources because conspicuously missing from War is Biden’s actual voice talking about the events to Woodward. He refused to participate in the book.

The depictions by Woodward’s Biden Administration insider sources of a competent president at the top of his game contrast sharply with the accounts in War of those who attended fundraisers Biden’s 2024 run for president. They characterize the president as we all saw him on the debate stage with Trump. One person described him as being, “like your 87-year-old senile grandfather wandering around the room, saying to woman guests, ‘your eyes are so beautiful’.” Yes…that’s creepy.

This was a full year before George Clooney wrote his now infamous open letter to the New York Times, calling for Biden to step down after witnessing much of the same at a fundraiser he had organized for Biden. Clooney now claims to have been manipulated by Barack Obama into writing the letter but clearly it reflects what the Democratic establishment had concluded by that time – that Biden was not fit to run again…maybe not fit to continue as president.

Of another fundraiser, Woodward writes, “many thought it was just a ‘bad night’ for Biden.” This was the excuse used by Democrats and Biden, himself, to explain his unintelligible debate performance against Trump. The book was notably written after the debate.

The two Bidens are irreconcilable, and Woodward apparently never went back to his original sources to ask them about whether any signs of decline were apparent during the crisis – and if so, who was actually in charge. This line of inquiry may have been too loaded for follow-up, and his sources might have clammed-up or disavowed their participation, concluding that the book project was turning into a hit-job on Biden, which it surely wasn’t.

None of this takes away from the fact that Woodward is a supremely talented raconteur: his anecdotal story-telling style, which places the reader inside the room as events unfold in a manner that can be easily assimilated, makes his books immensely popular with the public; it also serves his subjects as their inside accounts get the benefit of being put out into the public sphere. Having said that, he is not above mixing metaphors: “It was like a curve ball from out of the blue.” One wonders if these awkward elements would have present when Woodward was in his prime.

Woodward’s ease with the establishment (not quite the case during the zenith of his years as an investigative reporter) enable the establishment side of story to be told. Therein lies the implicit flaw in Woodard’s books: as acclaimed an investigative reporter as he has become known, he is no longer the objective outsider, and is not in a position to dig up the bodies that the establishment wants to hide – a far cry from the time period during which he and Bernstein were cub reporters for the Washington Post when nobody knew them and they challenged the powers that be to expose the truth.

One may certainly gain valuable insights from these chronicles that otherwise wouldn’t be told in the way that only Bob Woodward can weave the various lengths of them together. However, the professional skepticism is thin and there is little if any analysis to accompany the storytelling to challenge the recollection of Woodward’s sources.

As John Simpson of The Guardian writes, “Although the confidences which Woodward passes on to us are no doubt exactly as his interviewees gave them to him, how do we know these were the words originally spoken in the moment being recalled? Reading War, like so many of the other monosyllabically titled books Woodward has given us, you find yourself wondering if some of the key stuff isn’t l’esprit de l’escalier – the things people wish they’d said; or maybe wish they’d said more clearly and toughly and quotably, instead of mumbling or trailing away into aposiopesis.”

In the end, Woodward, givens the Biden Administration a clean chit on their handling of the foreign policy crises of his administration.  While touching on domestic problems such as the influx of illegal immigration, there isn’t much in it except the admission that Biden undid Trump’s policies without replacing them with a well-thought-out plan of his own. The tired blaming of Trump for killing a bill that would have brought more agents to the border is the only explanation offered. It is one that was repeated by Kamala Harris and her surrogates throughout the 2024 election campaign, and it is an accusation that clearly failed to land.

The repercussions of so much military aid being sent to the Ukraine and Israel on the domestic economy is not touched upon in the least. By contrast, that so many jobs were created under Biden’s tenure (purely coincidental as no policies are cited to have been responsible for the job-creation) is credited to the administration. That the price of basic goods had gone up astronomically leaving many ordinary Americans with having to choose between food and medicine doesn’t figure into the book. The “steady hand,” that Woodward attributes to the Biden administration in foreign policy could be characterized as a recking ball on the domestic front.

The fact remains that wars need to be funded – and they are incredibly expensive. The US government had to go far deeper in debt to fund Biden’s foreign policy – a liability accrued against the US economy. Energy prices surged, pushing up the price of goods, and inflation spiraled out of control. The Biden administration does not seem the least preoccupied with this.

Woodward mentions the problem of the isolation of being president in War. He even quotes an official asking Biden’s VP to interact more with him for fear that the president was retreating into an executive silo. Woodward might have done more to contemplate the repercussions of such isolationism the cost of living rose thereby pushing voters away from the “steady hand” of Joe Biden.

In the end, War, despite its biases and omissions, contributes to the overall canon on the Biden administration and should be seen as one of many informative accounts of the presidency. Bob Woodward is not likely to spend time writing a bad book, but he is quite capable of mediocrity. What it is not is a thorough report on the administration or the state of the country during Joe Biden’s tenure as president. This leaves Woodward mirroring Biden in a way:  a lion in winter, capable of showing his teeth but, in the end, yearning for a rest.