1. Bob Woodward is indeed very good good at selling books. But having read the two previous books he's written on Trump, I want to extend a few cautions about his new book and its supposedly earth-shattering revelations about General Milley.https://twitter.com/davidaxelrod/status/1438656654342557697 …
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2. Woodward is best seen as the ne plus ultra of access journalism elevating the form away from daily journalism into a kind of court history. Like all court historians, he relies on the gossip of courtiers. This has some value, but courtiers tend to be self-serving.
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3. It's usually fairly easy to figure out which courtiers Woodward is relying on: they tend to be the ones who are shown in a heroic light as the pivots of momentous events. In Fear, Rob Porter & Gary Cohn allegedly saved us from Trump's worst instincts.
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4. The self-serving account of courtiers adds some color to the historical record, but it misses the big events: it's business history informed by office gossip rather than economics. In the case of Trump, what Woodward tells nothing about how GOP enabled Trump.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
https://slate.com/culture/2013/03/bob-woodward-and-gene-sperling-what-woodwards-john-belushi-book-can-tell-us-about-the-sequester-scandal.html …. Don't know if you ever read the Slate review of Woodward's book on Belushi that covers this kind of territory?
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