WILL TRUMP FOLLOW NIXON, WHOSE DOWNFALL WAS FROM LYING

...Richard Nixon was his own worst enemy

Woodward’s book brings back memories of Watergate.

The award winning author and investigating journalist, Bob Woodward’s new book “FEAR” shows how a federal criminal investigation has come to obsess the current US  president while it has paralyzed the operations of the White House.

There are so many examples in Woodward’s book that bring back the memories that Woodward & Bernstein offered about Richard Nixon in his final days, which consisted of total paranoia.  At the end, Nixon was seen late at night by White House workers wandering the White House halls and talking to the portraits of former presidents hanging on those White House walls.

Even though there have now been multiple books about the strange and bizarre actions of this latest president such as Fire & Fury, by Michael Wolff, UNHINGED, by Omarosa Manigault Newman, UNBELIEVEABLE, by Katy Tur, TRUMPOCRACY, by David Frum, and IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN YOU THINK, by David Cay Johnston, the new book by Woodward is quite different.

“FEAR” is a very important book because of who the author is.  It was Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s dogged investigative reporting that led to Richard Nixon’s eventual resignation.  Woodward has since written or co-authored 18 books, 12 of them became No. 1 bestsellers.  He has also broken other major stories as an investigative reporter and by being an associate editor at the Washington Post.  Because of this, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His work has always been  totally factual.  

The point is, that due to Woodward’s dogged reporting in the 1970’s, that attention to detail is even more valuable today.  Woodward has a total devotion to digging out “just the facts”, and his thorough interviews are recorded for this book, which make him such a reliable story teller.  In this age of Trump’s “alternative facts” and his nasty tweets about “fake news”, Woodward has become the media truth’s “Gold Standard”.

While President Trump calls the mainstream press: “the enemy of the people,” Woodward has his old-fashioned ideas of objectivity. “My job is not to take sides,” he told a Vox interviewer. “I think our job is not to love or loathe people we’re trying to explain and understand.  It is to tell exactly what these people have done, what it might mean, what drives them, and who they are.”  While Woodward tries to always tell the real truth and all its details, President Trump obviously calls Woodward's book a 'work of fiction'.

It’s ironic that most of what comes out of Trump’s mouth is so many times that total, “work of fiction”.

In Woodward’s other books about eight US presidents, Woodward has always worked hard at not making personal judgments. He tries to only use the information drawn directly from his interviews. 

However, these days, it’s Woodward’s truthful reporting process that seems like an answer to the real “fake news” you hear on Fox or inside Trump’s tweets. The authority of this focused reporting, which has no personal opinion, that’s what gives the book its absolute credibility.

Many publications and well established writers were able to obtain an early copy of “Fear,” but it is not available to  the general public until today, September 11^th.  However, it is already on the New York Times, Best Seller list, due to all of the pre-sales of which I was one.

What has so many people excited about this book is from the excerpts that have been quoted from those early copies that were distributed by Woodward’s publisher.

Woodward has that stellar reputation for absolute credibility, and none of the other books have been as revealing or convincing as in  “Fear”. 

Woodward’s inputs are only based on eyewitness recollections with multiple interviews with key individuals, and they often include the dates and transcripts of actual conversations.

As examples of the other books, Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” was a major bestseller, however it was seriously reliant on one chief source, Steve Bannon, before he left the White House.  The latest bestseller, “UNHINGED,” came from a former White House aide and a onetime “Apprentice” star Omarosa Manigault Newman, who had been fired and obviously had an ax to grind.

I must note that the daily press, especially The Post and the New York Times, have also offered some interesting looks into the inner workings of the Trump White House and into the mind of Trump himself.  But “FEAR” provides a more complete picture, based on interviews with the president’s closest advisers.  Woodward’s book resists the less than 24 hour reporting demanded by the Internet.  He does this by visiting with his subjects away from their offices.  He also tests and re-tests the advisers memories again and again.

As usual for Woodward, he starts the book with an exciting story about two of the president’s closest advisers that stopped one of his requests.

In one instance, Trump had ordered for a letter to announce the US withdrawal from a trade agreement with South Korea. His then-chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, and then-staff secretary, Rob Porter, who were major sources for the book, they understood that letter as a major disaster.  So, Cohn just took it off of the president’s desk.  With Trump’s now well-known, short attention span...out of sight is totally out of mind. That removal bought time and short-circuited a bad presidential decision that had not been allowed to go through the proper vetting process.

To confirm that his story was true, it actually ends with a copy of the actual unsigned letter.  This is classic Woodward in proving his point.

That story set-up the next point of the book.

“The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader,” Woodward writes. “Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.”

You will notice that this particular action by key White House staff was written about by Woodward, well before the anonymous op-ed that was recently printed in the New York Times, which basically talked about the staff doing these same things.

Over and over again, there are clear scenes that show the ignorant decision-making by Trump and then the crazy actions by his aides to undo the damage.

Some of the more explosive statements, including his current chief of staff calling Trump an “idiot” and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis ignoring an order from the president to assassinate Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.  This was all leaked out before the book’s publication. In the book, Rob Porter, the staff secretary, is consistently trying to delay Trump’s efforts to withdraw from various treaties, not only the South Korean trade deal but also NAFTA and even NATO. These and other Woodward illustrations offer the frustration of White House aides who see themselves as protecting the public from an out-of-control president. This is a recurring theme in FEAR.

In his childish writing on his editing a speech, the president wrote, “Trade is bad.” As Woodward explains it, “The president clung to an outdated view of America, such as locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines.” When Cohn had asked Trump why he clings to such beliefs, the president responded: “I just do. I’ve had those views for 30 years.”

Readers hoping for inside accounts of where the Mueller investigation will lead, they will be disappointed.  What Woodward does provide are lawyer Dowd’s worries that the president will perjure himself and wind up in an orange jumpsuit if he does agree to testify.

Still, the lawyer Dowd doesn’t think Mueller has much of a case. 

However, the interviews with Dowd and the book were completed before the conviction of Paul Manafort or the plea deal with the Trump lawyer, Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime New York attorney.  The case has since gotten very solid.

“FEAR” ends with lawyer Dowd’s resignation.  But for the man and his presidency, Dowd had seen his obvious flaws.  In the political back-and-forth, Trump's evasions, his denials, his tweeting, his crying ‘Fake News,’ and his indignation, Trump has one overriding problem that Dowd knew but just could not bring himself it to say to the president: ‘You’re a fucking liar.’ ”  But Dowd did tell that to Woodward.

And everyone must remember.  Lying, was Nixon’s down fall.  Will it do-in Donald Trump?

Copyright G.Ater  2018