The Commanders
Woodward, Bob
THE COMMANDERS Bob Woodward/Simon and Schuster/398 pp. $24.95 Victor Gold W hen we last heard from Bob Woodward he was interviewing Bill Casey on his deathbed, and if you won't take Woodward's...
...Who sourced that one...
...him...
...But we're talking inordinate here, like hours adding up to days...
...That was as it should be...
...From The Commanders, pp...
...Instead, Scowcroft had become the First Companion and all-purpose playmate to the President on golf, fishing and weekend outings...
...The war was in the hands of these kids...
...Exhibit A: Everybody says he is and he has yet to deny it...
...So much for the question of whether the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is on cozy terms with the author of The Commanders...
...The deponent deposeth not...
...It's entirely possible, looking back at August 1990, that Powell, for all his public bravado, was concerned that the larger war might not turn out well...
...He thought only one thing: "How many will not come back...
...especially if that officer was serving a Republican President who was Richard Nixon's national party chairman during Watergate and headed the CIA under Gerald Ford...
...Bill Casey . . . But why beat that dead horse...
...Once a source makes it clear that he has a personal agenda to grind, Bob homes in like a smart bomb, morning, noon, and night...
...The ARMED AND DANGEROUS posters have been out for more than a decade and a half...
...It would come down to one American kid dealing with one Iraqi kid...
...But how could Colin Powell have been that short-sighted...
...Supreme Court...
...They would be flying in the darkness or dropping down behind the lines to spot targets...
...The money, if you're Bob Woodward and walk in the holy glow of media celebrity, lies in listening...
...Mother Teresa, screen your calls...
...Why is it that every book Bob Woodward writes manages to stir up more interest in who-said-it, or whether-itwas-said-at-all, than in what-was-said...
...All right, one: Nixon asked Kissinger to join him in prayer on the Oval Office rug, just above the official seal...
...For the record—and for those slow of wit in such arcane Washington matters as How to Make People Who Cross You Look Like Jerks—neither Scowcroft nor Sununu gave much quality time to Woodward while he was preparing The Commanders...
...There was no cheering, no thrill, no eagerness, no battle fever...
...though not so Deep as to escape detection...
...Then one thing led to another and there he was, involved in a larger war...
...Suffice it to say that, with The Commanders, Woodward has taken his gift to a new level...
...Yet Woodward managed to find, in the TOP SECRET/CONFIDENTIAL/EYES ONLY ambience of the Pentagon, a Deep Brass...
...Sununu only added to the problem, exerting little or no control over the process as White House chief of staff...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991...
...We are dealing, after all, with a muckraking serial killer who has THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 35 made his name and fortune skewering and barbecuing some of the most prominent figures in Western society...
...Richard Nixon hasn't talked to Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national -correspondent...
...And when it's all over and he doesn't protect them...
...And why should he...
...Instead, Woodward gives us that slyer-than-thou smile, Mona Lisa on the fast track, and invokes the First...
...But more: A large measure of Bob Woodward's special gift—aside from his nonpareil ability to invent dialogue and slip inside people's brain cells—is that he knows how to give his interviewees the warm, reassuring impression that they can speak freely, he'll protect them...
...Woodward, as anyone who has watched him work can testify, is a totalimmersion inquisitor...
...Proving...
...On this most important day of his life, he had one overriding thought...
...Think back...
...He was regularly failing in his larger duty to ensure that policy was carefully debated and formulated...
...Who then...
...Not all people, of course...
...None of the emotions of war raged...
...375-76: He thought of the troops and pilots as kids, even teenagers...
...It is Woodward's special gift—and he displays it to advantage once more in The Commanders—to be able to persuade people who should know better to open their doors and mouths when he comes calling...
...Does anyone remember anything about the text, other than Judy Belushi's calling it a Charmin tissue of lies and quotes-out-of-context...
...It never hurts when the interviewee's agenda meshes with the interviewer's...
...See what I mean...
...It should be the national security adviser...
...And if they screwed up, it would mean that Powell and the generals—the adults—hadn't done their jobs well enough...
...Not necessarily...
...24.95 Victor Gold W hen we last heard from Bob Woodward he was interviewing Bill Casey on his deathbed, and if you won't take Woodward's word for it, ask Casey...
...It was one thing to get self-aggrandizing White House staffers to blab on their boss, or to get cantankerous judges and their upwardly skittering clerks to tattle, or to slip alongside a bereaved widow and say, oh so sincerely, "I'd really like to be the one to tell John's side of the story...
...Spiro Agnew hasn't talked to him...
...He was hoping it would not be a lot...
...Haig, we were led to believe in The Final Days, saved the country from the clutches of a manic paranoid in the Oval Office...
...Take me to jag burn me at the stake, but I'm not talking...
...Deep Throat then...
...Powell, under the careful tutelage of his JCS predecessor, Admiral William Crowe—so we're told by Woodward—struggled to keep an "emotional" President in check, despite the negative input of Bush's top White House aides...
...Too bad, General, that was yesterday's book...
...But who was Deep Throat—assuming, of course, that he actually exists...
...11-y these on for size: From The Commanders, page 302: The operation needed a field marshal—someone of the highest rank who was the day-to-day manager, Powell felt...
...Does anyone remember a single new—really new—revelation about Watergate in All the President's Men or The Final Days...
...One would think that any enlightened senior officer in the Pentagon, on being approached by Bob Woodward, would reach for either his aluminum athletic truss or his gun...
...Not since Alexander Haig was working up a cauliflowered phone ear talking to Woodward during the Watergate days have we seen such buoyant prose about a military man written by the Washington Post's star performer...
...To be sure, from the perspective of those who took part in the decision-making that went into the Persian Gulf war, anything over ten seconds might be considered too much...
...Colin Powell's personal agenda...
...We are not, keep in mind, operating in a civilian court of law where an accused's silence can't be used against him...
...But to get military commanders at the highest level, in the heat of war, to set aside large chunks of their time to chatter on about who-said-what in the Situation Room, who-wore-andate-what that fateful weekend at Camp David . . . How does he do it...
...Both would want to live...
...One would think...
...lake Wired, Wood-ward's book about the death of John Belushi...
...The President, given his other domestic and political responsibilities, couldn't be chief coordinator...
...It remained quiet in the Chairman's office...
...Do you doubt that a publisher's announcement that Bob Woodward's next monumental project will be the life story of Mother Teresa would bring the entire JudeoChristian world to ask, as one, "What's she been up to...
...Can't reveal my sourres you know...
...Justice Marshall—neither the living Thurgood nor the dead John—won't say, and the clerks of the court aren't available for comment...
...When a national newsmagazine, hyping excerpts from the book, features Powell's face on its cover, tagging him "The Reluctant Warrior," it's a reasonable assumption that if he hadn't been just that, he'd be cutting off the story's head and killing it...
...But then again, did he really, and if so, who was Woodward's source...
...Same story with The Brethren, Woodward and Scott Armstrong's expose of the U.S...
...Exhibit B is the fact that, as everyone in the Pentagon corridors knows, Powell spent an inordinate amount of time gassing with Bob Woodward in the past year...
...Penetrating the inner sanctums and getting others to talk...
...T hat Colin Powell is the primary 1 chatterbox whose behind-thescenes-gossip fills the pages of Wood-ward's latest docu-fiction is, by now, beyond question...
...that by the time the book was published, American troops would be bogged down in bloody landfighting, and he wanted it on record that it wasn't his fault we had a manic warmonger in the Oval Office...
...It's not as if Woodward sneaks up on his interview targets disguised as some ingenuous free-lancer working on a field manual for the Boy Scouts of America...
...For one thing, The Commanders was originally scripted as a study of the Pentagon and Operation Just Cause, the Panamanian venture...
...Powell felt a foreboding and a chill...
...Kissinger...
...No one knew or had any real idea how many Americans would die in the war, he realized...
...And for those who do cooperate, there are always those sweet rewards a powerful Washington journalist can pass out to his friends, something no amount of PR money can buy...
...Powell's early contacts with Woodward might have been aimed at clearing the air on that subject...
...Certainly not Nixon...
...Possible, but not likely...
...Thus do astute Washington game-players assure their politically correct place in history, if only instant-history...
...Didn't he know that when Woodward's book came out, the fat would be in the fire...
Vol. 24 • July 1991 • No. 7
