Woodward at it again

Isay it with all modesty, confident in its bitter truth. It’s that circumstances are such that I know more about Bob Woodward’s books on presidencies than you do.

In 1993-94, I worked on a book about Bill Clinton’s first year as president. It was due for publication in November 1994. In June 1994, Woodward of Watergate investigative-reporting fame came out with a breezy, defining and pre-emptive best-seller called The Agenda.

That book delved into Clinton’s dramatic six-month push for a budget and economic plan, eventually passed by the drama of Vice President Al Gore’s tiebreaking vote.

My book was about Clinton and that White House. Woodward’s was from inside Clinton’s brain. When not in Clinton’s brain, it was on a nearby wall of practically every important meeting he conducted.

The account was a live-action narrative. Sometimes it was merely showing off, such as when Woodward reported that Hillary spent an evening helping Chelsea on a math homework problem. And then he wrote what the problem was.

Woodward’s method, perfected over decades in the company town of Washington where he is an institution, begins with interviews of most of the inside players. He gets detailed descriptions from them of major decision-making processes.

Most of those inside players are willing to provide those descriptions for fear that he might already have spoken to others who were in the room and whose versions might not be flattering or fair to them.

He protects the identities of sources even as he quotes their accounts of conversations. So, there’s no downside in telling the story from your perspective, or in blaming old so-and-so.

You don’t want to be the lone noble soul who took part in an important meeting where a dubious decision emerged and who declined to give his version to Woodward for Woodward’s forthcoming book.

Woodward puts all that together and, from the overlapping compilations, weaves an unattributed and presumably authoritative narrative.

Over the years the method has been criticized and a few people have cried foul. Mostly, though, Woodward has emerged credibly, unscathed, free to move on to the next big book advance and to listen in on the most private decision-making processes of the next poor sap who dares to move into his town and presume to be president.

So, I’d been wondering over these last few months: Was Woodward, now 75, still at it? Was he land-sharking his way around Washington, pulling together a gripping narrative on this most fictional-seeming character ever to infest the White House?

We now have our answer. Fear:

Trump in the White House will be out by Woodward from Simon & Schuster on Sept. 11.

Do you want to read the actual profane words of this president’s enraged megalomaniacal ranting when something flashing on the cable news screen displeases him? Do you want to know what he mutters about Steve Bannon or Hope Hicks as they leave his office, or vice versa? And would you like to know what Melania really thinks of her husband? And why, really, did she wear that jacket declaring that she didn’t care? And would you like to know what Sarah Huckabee Sanders is thinking as she walks from the Oval Office to the briefing room to tell reporters the lie Trump just told her to tell? And would you care to know how Trump gets his hair to do that, maybe with a chart?

Contact your favored bookseller on or before Sept. 11.

I’m wagering Woodward will reveal tweets that Trump chose not to post, if you can imagine.

Didn’t Michael Wolff do this book already? No. That was raw gossip. This will be refined gossip. Woodward’s own Washington

Post, where he remains an associate editor, reports that he has been uncommonly invigorated—made a young Watergate upstart again—by the work on this book.

The title, Fear, is based on what Trump told Woodward power was based on.

We can expect, then, that the book will provide supporting anecdotes of Trump seeking to use fear for power in the White House.

If the book merely presents in richer detail and with a few fresh scoops a narrative that we already know—that of a president who is an emotional and behavioral mess—then it will fade after several weeks atop the best-seller list.

But do you know what would make the book truly epic, indeed game-changing? I’m merely speculating wildly here. What if Woodward were to discover and report that, within the inner sanctum, Trump is more competent and stable and commanding and reassuring than we thought?

Surely not. If that were the case, then Fear would be the wrong title. It’s hard to say what title would be appropriate beyond Are You Blanking Me?

The publisher says only that Woodward’s tale puts us face to face with Trump and is “harrowing.” That much we already knew.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.