Shadow
: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate
by Bob Woodward
There are two ways to look at this bestseller by Watergate scoopmeister
Woodward. First, it's an original take on Clinton's sex scandal, framing
it as the latest consequence of Nixon's assault on the U.S. political system.
Woodward sketches each president's tussles with scandal managing after
Watergate permanently turned up the press heat on the White House. Ford
lies about a meeting concerning a potential deal to pardon Nixon, but remains
convinced he did nothing wrong. Carter's pious advocacy of truth telling
backfires when he's confronted with conundrums involving his pal Bert Lance,
the fallout from CIA-provided hookers, and cash for King Hussein. Reagan's
men try to make him understand the lies and shocking wrongness of the Iran-Contra
debacle, but he simply, stubbornly doesn't get it. And by the time prosecutors
interview Reagan in 1992, he's so ill he can't remember his own oldest
friends and advisers.
All provocative stuff, some of it new. But most readers will flip to
the book's second half, a fly-on-the-wall account of the backroom mud-wrestling
in both the Clinton and Starr camps in the Monicagate morass. It's a trove
of racy facts (mostly from anonymous sources). We read that Clinton called
Nixon a "war criminal," yet tried to minimize Watergate in his Nixon eulogy,
that he disgusted Ford and Jack Nicklaus by cheating while golfing with
them, and that he kept falsely assuring aides, "I'm retired! [as an adulterer]."
We hear Hillary's alleged words of agony and see the pain on Bill's face
after Chelsea reads The Starr Report on the Internet. Starr comes off like
RoboCop without the human side. Woodward calls him "pathetic and unwise"
in rejecting his staff's urgent demand not to send the lurid details of
presidential sex to Congress. "I love the narrative!" Starr weirdly exulted,
according to Woodward's new Deep Throat (or Throats). Since Monica was
interrogated at Starr's mother-in-law's apartment, which he called "Grandma's
place," ethics expert Sam Dash suggested they call it "Operation Red Riding
Hood." What sharp teeth everyone in this book has!
To tell the truth, Woodward doesn't really knit together 25 years' worth
of scandals into a single strong narrative. But the Clinton part is the
closest thing yet to what we all crave: a tale of Monicagate with some
of the flavor of a John Grisham thriller. --Tim Appelo - Amazon.com
Paperback from Simon & Schuster
Book Published: 06 June, 2000 |
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