What Woodward Saw in the Clinton White House – and What He Missed

“It’s very depressing.  You want to read a depressing book, this is it,” said one critic of a book by Bob Woodward.  “It’s a sad, horrible story with all the sordid details that I guess people will just, you know, slaver over, but the fact of the matter is, it’s humorless and there’s no warmth.”

In his criticism of Woodward’s book Wired about his friend John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd captured the essence of the Woodward writing style: lots of little trees competing for air in a gloomy forest, often at the expense of the larger picture.  One can expect the same from Woodward’s’ new opus about the Trump White House, Fear. Trump in the White House.

In his two books about the Clinton White House, Woodward again did a thorough job documenting the trees, but in the second of these two books, The Choice: How Clinton Won, Woodward missed a Watergate-sized forest.  To his humble credit, he later almost admitted as much. Fear: Trump in the Whi... Woodward, Bob Check Amazon for Pricing.

Woodward was no Clinton fanboy.  In the first of the two books, The Agenda, Woodward detailed the chaotic run-up to the budget battle in Bill Clinton’s first term.  In fact, he used the word “chaos” repeatedly, even excessively.

The process “bordered on chaos.”  Clinton’s schedule “was again chaos.”  Clinton pushed debate “to the point of chaos.”  The administration’s first week “had been chaos.”  The meeting dissolved “into virtual chaos.”

In the second of these two books, this one about the 1996 election, Woodward saw a White House teetering – you guessed it – “on the edge of management chaos.”  He was not the only one to spot the disarray.  In his memoirs, aide George Stephanopoulos called the atmosphere of the White House “dysfunctional.”  And in his memoir, labor secretary Robert Reich lamented a “chronically undisciplined president.”

What distinguishes The Choice is what Woodward missed.  The Watergate reference earlier was not an exaggeration.  The two years preceding the 1996 election were the most venal and treacherous in American political history, and Woodward overlooked it all.

The Agenda: Inside the... Bob Woodward Best Price: $1.95 Buy New $14.99 (as of 11:00 UTC - Details) The story begins on Election Day, 1994.  “People are dazed,” wrote Reich.  “No one had expected quite this.”  In a time of peace and economic growth, Democrats had lost an incredible fifty-two seats in the House and eight in the Senate.  “The election itself is being described as a total repudiation of Bill Clinton and the Democrats,” Reich observed at the time.  “His presidency,” wrote Evan Thomas in his sympathetic account, Back from the Dead, “was in tatters.”

Just a week after the election, the Clintons headed to the one place in the world willing and able to bring the Clintons back from the dead: Asia.  Joining them all at the Asian Pacific Economic Conference in Jakarta were the notorious Hawaiian fundraisers Gene and Nora Lum as well as any number of shadowy figures like Little Rock restaurateur Charlie Trie and Thai citizen Pauline Kanchanalak, both later charged by the Justice Department’s campaign finance task force with funneling hundreds of thousands in cash to the Clintons.

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