THE WAR WITHIN….Yesterday I linked to Derek Chollet’s suggestion that Bob Woodward’s The War Within was, counterintuitively, actually fairly sympathetic toward George Bush. Today, Tim Rutten reviews the book in the LA Times and says exactly the opposite:
Bush, in Woodward’s view, is the worst kind of wartime president: controlling and disengaged, all at once. Worse, he frequently is not only detached from unpleasant or inconvenient facts but is also positively hostile to those who recite them. As Woodward reconstructs the last two years — in a stunning series of on-the-record interviews with participants — this willful blindness has spilled out of the White House and into the departments of Defense and State in a perfect maelstrom of dysfunction.
That certainly sounds more like the George Bush we’ve all come to know and love, but I suppose I really better read the book myself and see what Woodward has to say. I’m extremely unfond of Woodward’s technique of reconstructing events and conversations based on reams and reams of anonymous and obviously self-serving interviews, but if The War Within is based mostly on on-the-record interviews it might go down a little easier. I’ll start in on it tomorrow.
