The New York Times
December 4, 2005
All the President's Flacks
By FRANK RICH
WHEN "all of the facts come out in this case," Bob Woodward told Terry
Gross on NPR in July, "it's going to be laughable because the
consequences are not that great."
Who's laughing now?
Why Mr. Woodward took more than two years to tell his editor that he
had his own personal Deep Throat in the Wilson affair is a mystery
best tackled by combatants in the Washington Post newsroom. (Been
there, done that here at The Times.) Mr. Woodward says he wanted to
avoid a subpoena, but he first learned that Joseph Wilson's wife was
in the C.I.A. in mid-June 2003, more than six months before Patrick
Fitzgerald or subpoenas entered the picture. Never mind. Far more
disturbing is Mr. Woodward's utter failure to recognize the import of
the story that fell into his lap so long ago.
The reporter who with Carl Bernstein turned a "third-rate burglary"
into a key for unlocking the true character of the Nixon White House
still can't quite believe that a Washington leak story unworthy of his
attention has somehow become the drip-drip-drip exposing the debacle
of Iraq. "I don't know how this is about the buildup to the war, the
Valerie Plame Wilson issue," he said on "Larry King Live" on the eve
of the Scooter Libby indictment. Everyone else does. Largely because
of the revelations prompted by the marathon Fitzgerald investigation,
a majority of Americans now believe that the Bush administration
deliberately misled the country into war. The case's consequences for
journalism have been nearly as traumatic, and not just because of the
subpoenas. The Wilson story has ruthlessly exposed the credulousness
with which most (though not all) of the press bought and disseminated
the White House line that any delay in invading Iraq would bring
nuclear Armageddon.
"W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong," Judy Miller said, with no
exaggeration, before leaving The Times. The Woodward affair, for all
its superficial similarities to the Miller drama, offers an even wider
window onto the White House flimflams and the press's role in enabling
them. Mr. Woodward knows more about the internal workings of this
presidency than any other reporter. He has been granted access to all
its top officials, including lengthy interviews with the president
himself, to produce two Bush best sellers since 9/11. But he was gamed
anyway by the White House, which exploited his special stature to the
fullest for its own propagandistic ends.
Mr. Woodward, to his credit, is not guilty of hyping Saddam's
W.M.D.'s. And his books did contain valuable news: of the Wolfowitz
axis' early push to take on Iraq, of the president's messianic view of
himself as God's chosen warrior, of the Powell-Rumsfeld conflicts that
led to the war's catastrophic execution. Yet to reread these Woodward
books today, especially the second, the 2004 "Plan of Attack," is to
understand just how slickly his lofty sources deflected him from the
big picture, of which the Wilson case is just one small, if
illuminating, piece.
In her famous takedown of Mr. Woodward for The New York Review of
Books in 1996, Joan Didion wrote that what he "chooses to leave
unrecorded, or what he apparently does not think to elicit, is in many
ways more instructive than what he commits to paper." She was
referring to his account of Hillary Clinton's health care fiasco in
his book "The Agenda," but her words also fit his account of the path
to war in Iraq. This time, however, there is much more at stake than
there was in Hillarycare.
What remains unrecorded in "Plan of Attack" is any inkling of the
disinformation campaign built to gin up this war. While Mr. Woodward
tells us about the controversial posturing of Douglas Feith, the
former under secretary of defense for policy, there's only an
incidental, even dismissive allusion to Mr. Feith's Policy
Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. That was the secret intelligence
unit established at the Pentagon to "prove" Iraq-Qaeda connections,
which Vice President Dick Cheney then would trumpet in arenas like
"Meet the Press." Mr. Woodward mentions in passing the White House
Iraq Group, convened to market the war, but ignores the direct
correlation between WHIG's inception and the accelerating hysteria in
the Bush-Cheney-Rice warnings about Saddam's impending mushroom clouds
in the late summer and fall of 2002. This story was broken by Barton
Gellman and Walter Pincus in Mr. Woodward's own paper eight months
before "Plan of Attack" was published.
Near the book's end, Mr. Woodward writes of some "troubling" tips from
three sources "that the intelligence on W.M.D. was not as conclusive
as the C.I.A. and the administration had suggested" and of how he
helped push a Pincus story saying much the same into print just before
the invasion. (It appeared on Page 17.) But Mr. Woodward never
seriously investigates others' suspicions that the White House might
have deliberately suppressed or ignored evidence that would contradict
George Tenet's "slam-dunk" case for Saddam's W.M.D.'s. "Plan of
Attack" gives greatest weight instead to the White House spin that any
hyped intelligence was an innocent error or solely the result of the
ineptitude of Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A.
Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby are omnipresent in the narrative, and
Mr. Woodward says now that his notes show he had questions for them
back then about "yellowcake" uranium and "Joe Wilson's wife." But the
leak case - indeed Valerie Wilson herself - is never mentioned in the
400-plus pages, even though it had exploded more than six months
before he completed the book. That's the most damning omission of all
and suggests the real motive for his failure to share what he did know
about this case with either his editor or his readers. If you assume,
as Mr. Woodward apparently did against mounting evidence to the
contrary, that the White House acted in good faith when purveying its
claims of imminent doomsday and pre-9/11 Qaeda-Saddam collaborations,
then there's no White House wrongdoing that needs to be covered up. So
why would anyone in the administration try to do something nasty to
silence a whistle-blower like Joseph Wilson? The West Wing was merely
gossiping idly about the guy, Mr. Woodward now says, in perhaps an
unconscious echo of the Karl Rove defense strategy.
Joan Didion was among the first to point out that Mr. Woodward's
passive notion of journalistic neutrality is easily manipulated by his
sources. He flatters those who give him the most access by upholding
their version of events. Hence Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack
who helped shape WHIG's war propaganda, rushed to defend Mr. Woodward
last week. Asked by Howard Kurtz of The Post why "an administration
not known for being fond of the press put so much effort into
cooperating with Woodward," Ms. Matalin responded that he does "an
extraordinary job" and that "it's in the White House's interest to
have a neutral source writing the history of the way Bush makes
decisions." You bet it is. Sounds as if she's read Didion as well as
Machiavelli.
In an analysis of Mr. Woodward written for The Huffington Post, Nora
Ephron likens him to Theodore H. White, who invented the modern
"inside" Washington book with "The Making of the President 1960."
White eventually became such an insider himself that in "The Making of
the President 1972," he missed Watergate, the story broken under his
(and much of the press's) nose by Woodward and Bernstein. "They were
outsiders," Ms. Ephron writes of those then-lowly beat reporters, "and
their lack of top-level access was probably their greatest asset."
INDEED it's reporters who didn't have top-level access to the likes of
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who have gotten the Iraq story right. In the
new book "Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11," Kristina Borjesson
interviews some of them, including Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder,
who heard early on from a low-level source that "the vice president is
lying" and produced a story headlined "Lack of Hard Evidence of Iraqi
Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials" on Sept. 6, 2002. That was two
days before administration officials fanned out on the Sunday-morning
talk shows to point ominously at the now-discredited front-page Times
story about Saddam's aluminum tubes. Warren Strobel, a frequent
reportorial collaborator with Mr. Landay at Knight Ridder, tells Ms.
Borjesson, "The most surprising thing to us was we had the field to
ourselves for so long in terms of writing stuff that was critical or
questioning the administration's case for war."
Such critical stories - including those at The Post and The Times that
were too often relegated to Page 17 - did not get traction until the
failure to find W.M.D.'s and the Wilson affair made America take a
second look. Now that the country has awakened to that history, it
will take more to shock it than the latest revelation that the Defense
Department has been paying Iraqi newspapers to print its propaganda.
Thanks in large part to the case Mr. Woodward found so
inconsequential, everyone knows that much of the American press did
just the same before the war - and, unlike those Iraqi newspapers or,
say, Armstrong Williams, did so gratis.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company