Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991). 398 pp., $24.95.
Since his book-writing debut with All The President's Men seventeen years ago, Bob Woodward's technique has become increasingly novelistic. This newest peep behind Washington scenes, at the way the Pentagon led the nation to war in Panama and the Persian Gulf, is especially smooth and seamless.
It reads a little like a Tom Clancy novel, the reader pulled irresistibly from one page to another in accelerating haste to find what happens next. The visit to Saudi Arabia by Defense Secretary Cheney, General Colin Powell, and General Norman Schwarzkopf, during which they obtain the consent by King Fahd to send troops, is presented with such skill that, even though the reader knows the outcome, a strong element of suspense is retained.
Going through The Commanders the first time is highly pleasurable, easy reading, which explains why it reached the top of the bestseller list and stayed there. To re-read it for purposes of a review, however, underlines how much Woodward has sacrificed to achieve his novelistic effect.
There are no source notes, little direct attribution, and indeed no way to measure reliability. Woodward's technique admits of no knowledge gaps, which a historian looking at this subject a generation from now would surely confess and a journalist toiling during the war under deadline pressure takes as a matter of course. Rather, Woodward affects the posture of the old-fashioned omniscient novelist, able to read the minds of all his characters, as in the first paragraph of the prologue when Admiral William L. Crowe is depicted hurrying down the Pentagon's E-Ring. "It was a building dedicated to appearing busy, he thought"--a formulation that becomes all too familiar over nearly 400 pages.
