It’s been three years since Bob Woodward’s last book chronicling the power games of the Washington elite—hardly a long interval, especially for an 81-year-old author. But that last book, Peril, published in 2021, was his third in just about as many years (following Rage and Fear).
Why the slowdown? Maybe he’s been waiting for the plot lines to play out. His last three tomes formed a trilogy about Donald Trump’s stormy, improbable presidency. Now we have War, about Joe Biden’s term so far (Woodward cuts off the story in July, with his decision not to run for reelection). It sports all the familiar Woodwardian trademarks—the anonymously sourced accounts of Top Secret meetings, the profanity-laced dialogue (in quotation marks, as if heard by a fly on the wall), the portrait of high politics as a clash of colorful characters: a fun, often compelling first (at times, second) draft of history.
Yet, compared with the previous volumes, this latest is in some ways more interesting (if a bit less sensational), and it offers a more (though far from completely) coherent narrative.
Woodward’s style of storytelling is more episodic than structural. Chapters tend to run for just a few pages. His mantra tends to be “And then … and then … and then … ” as opposed to “And so … and so … and so … ” Still, the stories here hang together, more than they usually do, because of their underlying thread—as the title suggests, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and how Biden and his team dealt with them.
For the most part, Woodward is impressed, concluding that they engaged in “genuine good faith efforts” to “wield the levers of executive power responsibly and in the national interest,” adding, “I believe President Biden and this team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.”
This is an uncharacteristically bold assertion for any author, much less Woodward, who, throughout his 50-year career, has been the less judgmental half of the Woodward and Bernstein team that broke the Watergate scandal and brought down Richard Nixon. In a Playboy interview back in 1989, he admitted that analysis wasn’t his strong point; it still isn’t. But heading into his ninth decade, with nearly two dozen books under his belt, it seems he feels entitled—properly so—to render some verdicts from journalism’s high bench.
He dangled his new assertiveness in 2020, on the eve of that year’s election, when he wrote, as the last line in Rage, “Donald Trump is the wrong man for the job.” The next year, after Trump’s defeat, he ended Peril by musing, “What is your country? What has it become under Trump?”
And even in War, where Trump plays a cameo role as he mulls making another run for the White House, Woodward declares, just before touting Biden’s legacy, “Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the presidency, he is unfit to lead the country.”
Earlier in the book, Woodward interrupts the narrative to recall a reception he attended in March 2023, where Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the heroes (and, clearly, a main deep-background source) in Peril, approaches him in a state of panic about the prospect of a Trump revival. “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country,” the general exclaimed. “I glimpsed it when I talked to you … for Peril, but I now know it, I now know it. … We have got to stop him! You have got to stop him! … He’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country! … A fascist to the core!”
Woodward concludes the digression: “I will never forget the intensity of his worry.” And so War, published on the eve of another election, is meant not only as a look back on the Biden years but a warning about the dangers ahead if Trump is allowed another four years in the White House.
Every Woodward book produces a few big headlines, and the biggest to emerge from War is, in fact, about Trump. As president, it seems, he secretly supplied Russian President Vladimir Putin with COVID test kits, at a time when they were in short supply on the home front. More eyebrow-raising, even after he lost the election, Trump continued to talk with Putin, as many as seven times.
This truly is worthy of headlines. Woodward doesn’t know what the two talked about because Trump told the aide who set up the call—presumably the source of this tale—to leave the room once Putin came on the line. The full scope of Trump’s bromance with the Russian dictator remains mysterious; the fact that they continue to talk heightens suspicions. More than that, these conversations are illegal. Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance dismissed the story, saying at a campaign rally, “Even if it’s true, is there something wrong with speaking to world leaders? No. Is there anything wrong with engaging in diplomacy?” He seems to be ignorant of the Logan Act, which forbids U.S. citizens, much less political rivals, from unauthorized contact with foreign leaders.
This titillating bit aside, the book’s most interesting sections deal with what it purports to be about—the wars. Woodward uncovers intriguing new facts about the conflicts or, at times, adds color and dimension to stories that others have reported in mere bits and pieces.
For instance, he writes that, in October 2021, four months before Putin invaded Ukraine, the United States gathered “exquisite” intelligence, from a “human source inside the Kremlin,” that the Russians were preparing a multifront assault and that Putin intended to follow through. The intelligence was a major coup for Biden’s intel officials—more detailed and high-level than they had ever seen before.
However, there was a dark side to this treasure trove—intel of “conversations inside the Kremlin,” that Putin thought he could get away with the invasion in part because of Biden’s “chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.” This, of course, is an oft-repeated charge leveled at Biden by Republican critics. It turns out, according to Woodward’s sources (who seem to be high-level Biden officials) that this critique has basis.
Putin was all the more overconfident because of the lack of any serious resistance he received after annexing Crimea and sending special forces into the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine back in 2014. “The West’s response was slow, weak, and divided,” Woodward writes. “The intelligence indicated Putin was expecting much the same this time.” In one of the book’s scenes, which takes place soon after the invasion, Biden complains to a “close friend” about the Obama administration’s failure to act more forcefully. “They fucked up in 2014,” Biden yells. “That’s why we are here. … Barack never took Putin seriously. We did nothing. We gave Putin a license to continue.” (Woodward doesn’t say so, but as Obama’s vice president, Biden—along with much of the NSC staff—argued strenuously but unsuccessfully for sending Ukraine anti-tank missiles, thinking that, in order to be deterred from invading more deeply, Putin needed to see some body bags coming back to Russian bases.)
Biden did respond to the invasion (as he told his friend, “I’m revoking [Putin’s] fucking license”) while striking a difficult balance: refusing to insert U.S. troops (which would set off World War III) but providing the Ukrainian army with intelligence and arms, while rallying the Western world to do the same, even encouraging Finland and Sweden—which had long observed neutrality in East-West affairs—to join NATO. (This is new, too: that enlarging NATO to include those two neighbors of Russia was Biden’s idea.)
Woodward also reveals that concerns over the possibility of an escalation to nuclear war were not merely hypothetical. In late September 2022, he writes, “new highly sensitive credible” intelligence—again, based on “conversations inside the Kremlin”—showed that Putin “was seriously considering using a tactical nuclear weapon” to avoid a major Russian defeat on the battlefield.
Biden stepped into gear. He spoke with Putin directly, warning him of “catastrophic consequences” if this happened. He also encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to put pressure on Putin, which he did. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin did the same with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu.
Another intriguing bit: Biden had said “privately” that, if Putin used tactical nukes on the Ukrainian battlefield, the U.S. “would not respond with nuclear weapons.” Instead, the “catastrophic consequences” would include isolating Russia throughout the world and, more promptly, using America’s vast conventional military power to wipe out Russia’s troops and weapons inside and near Ukraine.
Intelligence showed Putin soon backing away from the nuclear option, though Woodward notes that one reason may have been the fact that, over the next few months, the battlefield stabilized—Russia no longer faced the threat of a dreadful defeat. So who knows what might happen if the balance tipped Kyiv’s way again.
The Middle East takes up the bulk of the book, including its most dramatic scenes and the closest that Woodward comes to trenchant (dare I haul out the A–word?) analysis. The story he outlines—Hamas’ murderous attack of Oct. 7, Israel’s excessive counterblows, the talks (at first productive, then futile) over a cease-fire and a hostage-for-prisoner exchange, the widening of the war to include Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran—will be familiar to any follower of the news. But Woodward fleshes out the conflict (military and political) and adds details.
Biden’s longtime frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is well known. Here it’s dramatized. “What the fuck, Bibi?” Biden says in opening a phone conversation after Israel bombs a target in Beirut. “He’s a bad fucking guy. … He’s a fucking liar,” Biden tells a friend after Netanyahu once again ignores his pleas to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza. One Saturday afternoon, he calls a friend to unload his anger: “I have spent almost five hours going back and forth, back and forth on the phone, with two of the biggest fucking assholes in the world—Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas [the head of the Palestinian Authority]. The biggest fucking assholes in the world!”
Still, Woodward goes beyond these great anecdotes, which one can imagine him underlining three times after transcribing them in his notebook. He also does something he has often neglected to do in previous books: He supplies context. For all his weariness, Biden has refused to stop supplying Israel with weapons because he knows that, if he made that move, U.S. support of Israel’s basic defense—its right to exist—would seem wobbly and that Iran would take the cutoff as a signal to escalate.
At the same time, Woodward describes the dilemmas faced by the leaders of Israel’s Sunni Arab neighbors. Biden sends Vice President Kamala Harris on a tour to talk with those leaders, and she concludes in a report that all of them detest Hamas and would love to improve relations with Israel—which they see as a powerful ally in their main rivalry with Iran and its Shiite proxies—but they can’t say so without alienating their own people, who take pro-Palestinian rhetoric more seriously than the leaders do; nor can they deepen relations with Israel until there is peace in Gaza and at least a pretense of resuming talks toward a Palestinian state.
Similarly, Brett McGurk, Biden’s chief emissary to the Middle East, tells Woodward that, several times during the cease-fire talks, Hamas’ political leaders, who live in Qatar or Egypt, agreed to a deal—but they had to get approval from Hamas’ real leader, Yahya Sinwar, who has remained hiding in the Gazan tunnels and who rejected every overture.
Woodward probably hoped to finish the book with the celebratory fireworks of a peace deal, especially if some of his sources—particularly Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan—were telling him what they were telling the rest of us over the last several months: that they were very close to a deal.
But it was not to be, and Woodward reports that Biden knew it. Once, earlier this year, after Blinken returned from Israel, enthusiastic that Netanyahu seemed on the verge of accepting a compromise, Biden waved the idea away. “Oh, come on,” he tells his longtime aide, “there’s no way he can do what’s necessary now.” As Woodward puts it, “Biden’s bullshit detector was blinking red.”
And so, Woodward leaves things till the next volume, where either Donald Trump resumes his rampage against the country and the world, or Harris takes the reins. Woodward probably had to rewrite his final chapters after Harris took over as the Democratic candidate. He does note that Biden included Harris in “almost all” of his calls with Netanyahu, and sent her on far-from-trivial diplomatic missions not just to the Sunni Arab leaders but also to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron.
But one message of this book is that the world, especially the Middle East, is a messy place, and no countries—not even former superpowers—have a lot of leverage over its flailings. Biden and his people are talented and well-meaning, but they couldn’t close the deal. Who knows what happens next.
