In June 1972, two young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, investigated the break-in at the Watergate Office Building. Their dedicated effort, which ultimately resulted in the downfall and resignation of President Richard Nixon, was called by Gene Roberts, former managing editor of The New York Times, “may be the single greatest reporting effort of all time.” All the President’s Men, the book they wrote about their journey, became a best-seller and was nominated as one of Time magazine’s All-Time 100 Best Nonfiction Books.
Bob Woodward, arguably the most famous investigative journalist in the world, went on to write over twenty books, including those he did on Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. War, his latest work, is on President Joe Biden and the wars in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza. Woodward says, “This book, War, presents the efforts and decisions to prevent war, and where war came to avoid escalation.”
The author took two and a half years to write. It takes you from inside of the well-known Oval Office, to the man cave, to palaces, to tents in the desert, to deep underground bunker offices to state-of-the-art command centres where you meet some of the most powerful men of history in the making, their interactions and their decisions, which would affect the boundaries of their countries and the lives of the people they represent, command or rule. It not only reflects how their minds work but how their hearts beat, too.
You may learn how ugly and undesirable the face of war is and how lethal and deadly its arsenal is. In its over 400 pages, apart from the wealth of information, there are quite a few surprises about the people who surface on the pages of War.
If, after reading this far, I have not been able to recommend this book enough for you to buy or borrow and read, then I have failed miserably. My writing may not be up to it, but War is worth reading.
I would like to share two excerpts from the book War without paraphrasing anything.
“As the Taliban closed in on Kabul, Secretary of State Blinken spoke to President Ghani on the phone on August 14. Ghani declared defiantly that he would defend Afghanistan until the end. The next day, Ghani was in the United Arab Emirates. He had fled.”
“We know you are contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine,” Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said during a phone call with Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, one of Putin’s closest advisers, on October 21, 2022.
Shoigu said he did not take kindly to being threatened.
“Mr. Minister,” Austin said bluntly with not a hint of anger.
“I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don’t make threats.”
Bob Woodward writes: “This book, War, presents the efforts and decisions to try to prevent war, and where war came to avoid escalation.” It is not my place to offer a comment on that. It would be unfair to compare this book’s eloquence, style, and quality of writing to a volume of literary fiction. Read the book; yes, I strongly recommend it, and in its over 400 pages, you may find the goings-on, in and out of the most powerful presidency of the world. The interactions, the exchanges, the cajoling, the standoffs, and the show of power, those in power display, are interesting, to say the least. The book will undoubtedly have good, bad, or even no effect. It may depend on whose side you are on and whose side the United States is on. The book has no conventional ending: the War is still going on.
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