Bob Woodward’s Fear: A Review

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I have read Bob Woodward’s book on the Trump presidency, titled Fear: Trump in the White House, so you don’t have to. If you have paid reasonably close attention to the fake news — the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and the like — for the past year and a half, you know pretty much everything that’s in the book, except for the cuss words.

If you’re remembering Woodward’s (and Bernstein’s) Nixon-killing book All the President’s Men, forget it. Here there are no mysterious characters such as Deep Throat, no life lessons such as “follow the money,” and above all, no satisfying conclusion. In fact, there is nothing at all satisfying about this book. On the contrary, it’s like reading an account of the Zombie Apocalypse in which the zombies have won and are governing the country, and you realize it’s not fiction. This is not your worst dream ever, from which you will shortly awaken, it is your new life.

But other than the horror of realizing that these morons are in charge of the country, the book offers little more than a series of dry anecdotes about meetings. This happened, and then that happened, and then something else happened. Nothing here about Manafort, or Cohen, or the Steele Dossier, or the Russian Oligarchs or the Ukraine Resolution. Just one story after another about meetings on trade policy, on tax policy, back to tariffs, then taxes again. The only mystery in this book is how the president of the United States could possibly be as stupid as he appears to be.  

I have a long and growing list of mystery authors who put out a book a year, or so, authors on whom I have relied for years for a good, solid, entertaining read, authors who are successful and rich and are now phoning their new books in from the Hamptons. Sometimes they die, and the marketers just keep on putting out books with their names on them. Zombie books. Bob Woodward isn’t dead, of course. But he’s close.

Bad enough that he’s put out a book on the Trump presidency without addressing the Russia connections, the mob connections, the financial crimes, the plight of survivor after a sexual assault, the criminal friends and associates. But there’s one thing that to my mind is an even worse literary infraction.

If you’re an architect, your work product is expected to be more than gray, rectangular cinder-block buildings. If you’re an author, your books are expected to have structure and ornamentation pleasing to contemplate — a story, and this is just one example, told from beginning through the middle to the end, ornamented with flashbacks, perhaps, that illuminate the events being related. A good book should have a good ending, one that leaves one reflecting on what the author’s hard work and long thought have revealed and suggested.

The Woodward book just stops, You’re slogging along from one short bit to another, and all of a sudden you run out of book. You’re in the middle of the story, in the middle of the presidency, there are things you want to understand about how this happened and why it’s still happening and all you hear is the slamming of a distant door as the author heads back to the Hamptons, several million dollars richer.

I gave him some money, and I read his book. Now you don’t have to.