Obama gets the Suskind treatment, and Woodward gets the Woodward treatment

Two separate stories throw in sharp relief the art form known as "first-draft-of-history" journalism. Two of the most commercially successful practitioners of this art form are in the news in ways that point to the limits of the art form.

In the bigger story, the Obama administration is fighting back against a damaging account of policy dysfunction, as recounted in Ron Suskind’s latest book, Confidence Men. Suskind previously was a darling of Democrats for his earlier work attacking the Bush White House. For nearly a decade, Suskind was quoted as an authoritative source, especially for juicy anecdotes that seemed to legitimize caricatures of a megalomaniac Bush administration. Now it is Obama’s turn, and the sauce for the goose seems to taste more bitter than it did for the gander.

Supporters of Obama are hard-pressed to distinguish between the Bush and Obama era books, especially when Suskind makes clear in the titles that he sees them as paired chapters in a longer narrative about American politics: notice how the tagline of the subtitle of the Obama book, "…the Education of a President" echoes the Bush book "…the Education of Paul O’Neill." And the administration’s attempts to discredit Suskind have an added obstacle to overcome: Obama gave Suskind extensive authorized access to White House players, including a long on-the-record interview with President Obama himself. Despite all of this, the White House push-back has been especially vigorous, with several of the people who supplied the most damning quotes denying on-the-record that they said what Suskind claims they said.

For my part, I have some sympathy for the White House line in this dispute. While I have quoted Suskind’s earlier Bush reporting myself from time to time, I have always done so with more than a grain of salt. One of my hobbies during my days in the Bush White House was trying to track down the facticity of the more prominent critiques of the Bush administration, the sort of critiques that were accepted uncritically as gospel truth by my academic colleagues. Some of the critiques had merit — Vice President Cheney’s influence really was hard to determine because he kept his counsel in large group meetings and no one had read-outs from his private meetings with the president — but for many more I could find no strong factual basis. In particular, I could not verify some of the more sensationalized claims by Suskind. I came away from that exercise with a healthy dose of skepticism that I wished other consumers of his work shared.

Perhaps now they will. Consider one of the juicier Suskind quotes, Anita Dunn’s claim that "This place would be in court for a hostile workplace … Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women." Here is what Anita Dunn told Politico about that quote: "This is not what I told the author, this is not what I believe and anyone who knows me and my history of supporting this president as a candidate and in office knows this isn’t true." In other words, what Politico calls a "flat denial" coupled with a claim that Suskind fabricated a quote.

If Dunn’s current denial is correct, that calls into question the facticity of the rest of the book. And if Suskind can do this sort of thing to a President whose politics overlap so closely with his own — the gist of the Suskind critique of Obama, apparently, is that Obama has not pursued leftist policies with sufficient vigor — what does that tell us about how he might treat a White House which does not share his political preferences? Of course, it is also possible that Suskind is reporting accurately on the Obama administration and the current pushback is just damage control by staffers who know they have hurt the president with their candor. One way to determine whether the White House push-back is legitimate or not is to see the extent to which Obama officials are willing to let their view of Suskind’s current book affect their view of his earlier books. If they treat Confidence Men as the proverbial 13th chime of the clock — the error that calls into question the rest of the Suskind oeuvre, including anti-Bush screeds they otherwise were inclined to trust — then they probably sincerely doubt his reliability. 

Speaking of doubting a reporter’s reliability, there is no question that four of my former colleagues strongly doubt the reliability of Bob Woodward, the leading practitioner of this journalistic art form. Last week, Woodward wrote an op-ed criticizing Vice President Cheney for not learning the lesson of Iraq when he unsuccessfully advocated for a military strike on a Syrian nuclear reactor late in the Bush administration. That’s not quite right, claims four former civilian advisors who were intimately involved in late Bush administration Syria policy and so collectively more authoritative sources than Woodward: Elliott Abrams, Eliot Cohen, Eric Edelman, and (fellow Shadow Gov contributor) John Hannah. Woodward’s account, they claim, leaves out crucial facts and reaches a distorted conclusion. And Woodward’s editorial thesis — that Cheney failed to learn the lessons of the Iraqi WMD intelligence failure — is dead wrong, they claim.

The Woodward dispute is different from the Suskind dispute because the advisors are not disputing any of Woodward’s fact claims, quotes, or reporting. In my experience (meaning, when he reports on something for which I have first or second-hand knowledge), Woodward is remarkably accurate in part because he often has extensive access to contemporaneous notes. Rather they are claiming that Woodward has selectively pulled some facts/quotes from his reporter’s notebook and left others out, all in the service of a distorted thesis. In my experience, this is precisely where Woodward does get in trouble sometimes: when he makes an analytical judgment that requires him to interpret and weigh (as opposed to merely collect and report) evidence. Thus in this dispute, I am inclined to believe that Woodward reported the event accurately but incompletely, and that the picture painted by the Bush advisors, which supports a more benign interpretation of Cheney’s Syria judgment, is the more complete and trustworthy one.

At the commercial level, none of these critiques will do much damage to the authors’ bottom lines. Indeed, Suskind’s publishers are probably clapping their hands in glee over the White House reaction, which has boosted publicity and given the book substantial buzz. Those of us who are looking for insights into how policy is made at the pinnacle of government, however, are probably more inclined to wring our hands in despair. Without direct insider access to the White House of one’s own, there may not be any other way to get near-real-time peeks at the policymaking process than through these journalistic accounts. But we would be wise to use them with caution.