Woodward Touts New Book

Bob Woodward, half of the reporting team that broke the Watergate scandal which toppled the Nixon administration, stopped in Cambridge last night to answer questions about his book, “State of Denial,” the third in his investigative series on the Bush administration.

The Harvard Book Store sponsored the sold-out event, held at First Parish Church, and the Cantabrigian crowd applauded Woodward’s critiques of the White House’s management of the Iraq war.

Using previously undisclosed memoranda and an unprecedented access to Bush and high-ranking members of his administration, Woodward’s book describes how White House officials turned a deaf ear toward their own advisers, who predicted post-war chaos in Iraq as early as May of 2003.

“These were their guys,” he said again and again yesterday, referring to the advisers hired by the Bush administration.

One of these consultants, Steve Herbits, was hired by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld as a “consultant with a license to analyze current problems.” In May 2003, three weeks after Bush gave a press conference under a banner reading ‘Mission Accomplished,’ Herbits told Rumsfeld that the administration’s six months of planning for the Iraq invasion had been a failure, according to Woodward.

“This is not Nancy Pelosi, this is not some think tank, this is not some journalist,” Woodward said. “This is [Rumsfeld’s] guy.”

After speaking for 20 minutes, Woodward then spent almost 40 minutes answering audience questions, which ranged from succinct queries of Woodward’s opinion to confrontational polemics.

Woodward acknowledged the media’s culpability in the overestimation of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which have not been found, but emphasized that the current situation in Iraq is “the government’s fault.”

Reviews of Woodward’s latest book have remarked on its apparent departure from the previous two in the series, which critics say were more sympathetic toward Bush and his staff. Last night, however, Woodward denied having gone soft on the Bush administration.

“You can see the seeds of denial in the previous two [books],” Woodward said, and likened the process of reporting on the war to delivering a “play-by-play” or “peeling the onion.” The lesson, he said, is that “straight reporting works.”

Asked whether Bush should be impeached for his conduct of the Iraq war, Woodward said, “I’ll stick to the facts and let others make judgments.”

Woodward has received two Pulitzer prizes for his work on investigative reporting teams.

The first was in 1973 for Public Service, given to the staff of The Washington Post, with a special citation for Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, for its coverage of the Watergate scandal. His second Pulitzer came in 2002 for his series with Dan Balz on the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.