“Flies should choose their walls carefully’, was a quip that did the rounds at the time of Watergate. Some wag put it less succinctly, ‘All the President’s stink’.
No one can beat Woodward at getting the story of the White House annals from the inside, from the angles of the decision makers, as they saw themselves. People tell Woodward things they shouldn’t. He may be occupier of a form that inhabits the space between journalism and history. When he’s on a good story, there are none better.
In SHADOW, Woodward looks at how Watergate particularly the special prosecutors and independent counsellors, affected the five Presidents after Nixon, from Ford to Clinton. The Watergate metaphor is strained at times and Woodward underplayed the legacy of Gary Hart in the presidency of Bill Clinton, but there’s lots of juicy stories here, including the time Jimmy Carter lied to Woodward and Ben Bradlee, and the sad post-presidential deposition of Ronald Reagan, who couldn’t remember anything and said, “It’s like I wasn’t president at all”.
Twenty five years after Richard Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford promised a return to normalcy, but it didn’t eventuate. The Watergate scandal and its enduring impact on presidents and the country lingered like a tide. This book takes us deep into the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton to describe how each discovered that the presidency was forever altered. With special emphasis on the human toll, Woodward fleshes out the consequences of the new ethics, laws and an emboldened media and congress. Powerful investigations stripped away the protection and privacy one accorded or expected by the nation’s number one executive.
So for all the ducking, weaving and dodging, they still didn’t come clean. Critics still ask what Woodward gave up in exchange for these retellings. Many reporters argue that one unnamed source for these conversations is not enough to justify dropping his transcripts into the teletype of history. Hardcore anti Woodward stalwarts ludicrously maintain that Watergate’s fabled “Deep Throat” is an amalgam at best, or an invention at best.
Using presidential documents, diaries, prosecutorial records and hundreds of interviews with first-hand witnesses, Woodward connects-the-dots on how all five men failed first to understand and then to menage the inquisition that followed. Gerald Ford was relieved he had been offered a deal to pardon Nixon, then clumsily rejected it, leaving lingering suspicions that followed him in the White House. Jimmy Carter used Watergate to win an election and watched in bewilderment as the rules of strict accountability engulfed his budget director, Bert Lance, challenging his own credibility. Carter never found the decisive healing style of leadership that he promised from his public pronouncements in the Iranian hostage crisis.
We learn that President Reagan had a special team of more than 60 attorneys and archivists working the Iran-Contra affair. They turned the Reagan White House and the intelligence agencies upside down investigating the President with orders to disclose any incriminating information they found. Reagan realised his presidency was in peril and attempted to prove his innocence, ala Ollie North and Mr Poindexter.
In SHADOW, a bitter and disoriented President Bush routinely decried the permanent scandal culture in his personal diary, as dozens of investigations touched people close to him. At one point of anger, he pounds a plastic mallet on his desk in the Oval Office because Special Counsel, Lawrence Walsh, continued investigating him. “Take that, Walsh! he shouts, “I’d like to get rid of this guy.” Woodward also reveals why Bush avoided telling one of the remaining secrets of the Gulf War.
The second half of SHADOW focuses on President Clinton’s scandals. Woodward shows how and why Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation became a permanent war with the Clintons. He reveals who Clinton really feared with the Paula Jones case and the fierce behind-the-scenes manoeuvring to protect the Clintons. SHADOW also describes how impeachment affected Clinton’s war decisions and scarred his life, his marriage and his presidency. “How can I go on?” First Lady Hillary Clinton asked in 1996, two years before the Monika Lewinsky scandal broke. “How can I?”
SHADOW is an authoritative, unsettling narrative of the position of the American President in the modern age.
