WASHINGTON, 2 December 2005 — In the beginning, seasoned political reporters at the Washington Post disdained the Watergate story as insignificant, implausible and unserious. Three decades later, Bob Woodward had come to embody the ultimate Washington insider. Over the past month, however, he has personified the stonewalling and covering up he once shattered to launch his brilliant career. His unraveling is as surprising and symptomatic a story of Bush’s Washington as his making was of Nixon’s.
On Oct. 27, the night before Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, Woodward appeared on CNN. Asked about the case, he said: “I’m quite confident we’re going to find out that it started as a kind of gossip ... There’s a lot of innocent actions in all of this ... I don’t know how this is about the build-up to the war.” He expressed his sympathy for those who might be indicted: “ ... what distresses me is, you know, so and so might be indicted and so and so is facing ... And it is not yet proven.” He concluded with invective against Patrick Fitzgerald, “a junkyard dog prosecutor”.
On Nov. 16 Woodward admitted he had been called to testify on Nov. 3 before the prosecutor, having been given up by a source after Libby’s indictment. Woodward, it turned out, was the first journalist to learn Plame’s identity. “I hunkered down,” he told his own newspaper. “I’m in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn’t want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed.” Woodward claimed he heard about Plame in an interview he conducted in June 2003 for his book Plan of Attack, which failed to contain this startling information. While two Post reporters testified before the prosecutor, Woodward hid his role as material witness. With the disclosure, the storyteller lost the plot.
Woodward advocates no ideas and is indifferent to the fate of government. His fabled access has been in the service of his technique of accumulating mountains of facts whose scale fosters an image of omniscience. Woodward’s 2002 book Bush at War, based partly on selected National Security Council documents leaked to him at White House instruction, was invaluable to the administration for its portrait of Bush as strong and decisive. Its omissions are as striking as its fragmentary facts, such as the absence of analysis of the disastrous operation at Tora Bora that allowed Bin Laden to escape. Plan of Attack includes intriguing shards of information about the twisting of intelligence to justify the war, but he fails to develop the material and theme. By the publication of Plan of Attack, Woodward was “hunkered down,” hiding his “secrets” from his newspaper, its readers and the prosecutor. He cryptically told one of the subpoenaed Post reporters to “keep him out of the reporting”. He said there were “reasonable grounds to discredit” Joseph Wilson, the whistleblower. He asserted that a CIA assessment had determined that Plame’s outing had done no damage, but the CIA said no damage assessment report had been done.
But when a source outed Woodward to the prosecutor, his cover-up was revealed. Above all, the extent of his credulity is exposed. It is more than paradoxical that the reporter who investigated Nixon and worked closely with professionals in government alarmed by the abuses should exhibit so little skepticism about Bush.
— Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars.
