Inside Joe Biden's 'war' room: Heads of state and heads of hair

By A O Scott

WAR

Author: Bob Woodward

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 435

Price: $32

It’s not listed among the enumerated powers of the American presidency, but one of the modern expectations of the office is that Bob Woodward will write at least one book about your administration. Over the past 30 years Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have earned two apiece, while the presidencies of George W Bush and Donald J Trump each fills out a trilogy.

As senator and vice president, Joe Biden was a supporting player in many of those books and the full-fledged co-star of Peril, the last Trump volume, which Woodward wrote with Robert Costa and which covered the 2020 election and the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Now, with War, Biden has a chronicle of his own. It’s a strange, self-divided book — more admiring of its subject than most of its predecessors and less confident in its own narrative, busy with incident and yet weirdly detached from the chaos of the world as we know it.

 

The presidency, a famously lonely office, is in Woodward’s presentation anything but solitary. Surrounding the commander in chief in each book are cabinet officers, aides and advisors. Some of them are Woodward’s sources, though he doesn’t say which. His method, explained in a note at the end of War, is to conduct his interviews “under the journalist ground rule of ‘deep background,’” meaning “that all the information could be used but I would not say who provided it.”

“At the centre of good governance,” Woodward writes, is “teamwork,” and the reader spends a fair amount of time with members of Biden’s national security team, including Lloyd Austin and Antony Blinken, the secretaries of defence and state; Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser and Vice President Kamala Harris.

They and their colleagues and underlings give the narrative a bustling, procedural efficiency. Woodward limns them in barbershop prose: “Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, 59, with dark brown hair and a friendly, high-charging demeanor”; Blinken, “5-foot-10 with a neat wave of once brown, now gray, hair.” If this were a movie, these people would be played by solid second-tier character actors.

Mostly, though, Biden shares the stage with other heads of state. Their hairstyles are a matter of public record. The tonsorially distinguished Boris Johnson, for example, is described simply as “a member of the British Conservative Party and a product of prestigious Eton and Oxford.” “Prestigious” in that sentence is a nugget of pure Woodwardian gold.

War opens with Trump in 1989, a 42-year-old wheeler-dealer sitting down to chat with Woodward and his Watergate reporting partner, Carl Bernstein. A transcript of that interview, unearthed in 2023, reveals, according to Woodward, “the origin of Trumpism in the words of Trump himself.” Then as now, “Trump’s character was focused on winning, fighting and surviving.”

The action stretches from early 2021 to this past summer — from the hectic weeks before Biden’s inauguration to the swirling aftermath of his withdrawal from the 2024 campaign. Not that War is primarily about electoral politics. (Tim Walz is mentioned once, J D Vance not at all.) Nor is it about the issues that polls suggest matter most to voters. There’s a brief chapter on immigration, a couple of references to inflation and nothing much about abortion, crime or climate change. The judicial branch of government goes all but unmentioned; the legislative branch consists mainly of Senator Lindsey Graham, seen largely in the role of Trump’s golf partner.

Woodward isn’t interested in partisanship or ideology. His subject is high statecraft, the exercise of power at its loftiest reaches, which mostly involves heads of government and their lieutenants talking — and frequently swearing — on the telephone. Leadership is a matter of personality, and a leader’s temperament is tested above all in the arena of foreign policy. In War, Biden’s presidency is defined — at times threatened and, in Woodward’s frankly stated opinion, ultimately vindicated — by how he handles Ukraine and West Asia.

In the case of Ukraine, after “an astonishing intell­igence coup from the crown jewels of US intelligence” revealed Putin’s war plan, the administration had to convince its allies — and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky — of the gravity of the threat. Once the Russian troops were moving toward Kyiv, the tasks were to bolster Ukraine militarily and diplomatically while avoiding the direct involvement of Nato or US forces and heading off the threat of a potential nuclear escalation.

This is harrowing, riveting stuff, even if you know how it will play out. The problem, though, is that we don’t really know. Since the book’s completion, Russia has been on the offensive again in Ukraine. The West Asia conflict has widened to include Hezbollah and Iran, an outcome that Biden and his team spend many pages working to prevent. Meanwhile, the election campaigns of Trump and Harris hurtle forward. Three weeks after War is published on October 15, voters will provide raw material for the sequel.

Though he specialises in real-time suspense, Woodward doesn’t write cliffhangers. His impulse — his talent — is to impose an arc and a moral on the mess and sprawl of very recent history. This time around, his stated conclu­sions are unambiguous: “Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the presidency,” he writes, “he is unfit to lead the country.” In contrast, “Biden and his team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.” Those judgme­nts sound authoritative. They also sound wishful.

---

The reviewer is a critic at large for The New York Times Book Review