War by Bob Woodward, published by Simon and Schuster, October 2024, 410 pp., RRP $55
If facts alone could bring down a President of the United States … but why begin any review of a Bob Woodward book in a speculative mood when facts alone once did, and Woodward was instrumental in unearthing them?
Woodward of Watergate has repeatedly warned — over six years in three books, each of them ringing an alarm with a one-word title: Fear, Rage, Peril — that this latter-day President is a greater danger to the republic than Nixon ever was. Woodward now sounds the tocsin once again, more loudly and urgently than before. As time grows short, with Trump’s potential ‘retribution’ calculated in days, weeks and hours, the author has chosen a title even more abbreviated, abrupt and arresting: War.
News coverage since the release of Woodward’s new book has naturally cherry-picked it of the revelations you would expect of one of the world’s most penetrative reporters — most remarkably that, in the depths of 2020, when Americans were dying by the tens of thousands in the absence of timely medical equipment, President Trump sent a clearly petrified Vladimir Putin a COVID-19 test machine for his personal use, and has been in regular phone contact with him since leaving office, in seeming violation of the Logan Act.
But you’d be mistaken to think bombshells like this have emptied such a tome of all interest. Far from it. Nuggets of intrigue are scattered throughout, like pearls on the seabed. Early on, we read: ‘on his last night in the Oval Office, January 19, 2021, Trump hand-wrote a two-page letter to Joe Biden. He finished it at 10:00 pm, signed it Donald J. Trump and placed it inside the desk. Biden would later tell his White House press secretary Jen Psaki it was ‘shockingly gracious’. Wouldn’t you love to know (and will we ever?) what it said?
The technique Woodward adopts this time is to dive into three major geopolitical issues of our time — Ukraine, the Middle East and America’s Cold Civil War — and scrutinise each of them through the lens of violence both rhetorical and lethal.
'Anyone possessed of the facts can write history. Few can express so well as Bob Woodward the heartbeat of his times and the heartbreak that history frequently brings in its wake.'
Matters so little known to the outside world that they amounted to secrets