Obama's Woodward gamble

Mike Allen and John F. Harris

Early in Barack Obama’s term, he and his aides faced a rite of passage familiar to every White House for the past 40 years: What to do about Woodward?

In Obama’s case, the answer came quickly: The White House doors swung wide for the world’s most successful non-fiction writer. Once inside, the author was treated to a buffet of access to bold-faced names—Biden, Clinton, Gates, Panetta—topped off with a sit-down with Obama himself. “Obama’s Wars,” Bob Woodward’s 16th book—the previous 15 have all been best-sellers and often dominated the news upon release—comes out Monday. Administration officials believe, but so far don’t know for sure, that their bet on lavishing the Watergate legend with cooperation paid off with a largely sympathetic portrait they expect looks something like this:

A young commander-in-chief, with no military experience, inherits festering, deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan. After some scraps with military brass who were testing their limits, Obama draws on his innate confidence and deftly brings together competing factions of his own war cabinet behind a hybrid plan that includes a troop “surge” not unlike the one in Iraq, which he had denounced as a candidate.

But there already are reasons to believe that the portrait will not be entirely what the White House team bargained for, and that Obama—far from mastering his competing groups of advisers—will be seen as tugged and pulled by them and by his own deep misgivings about the Afghan war and its chances of success.

The New York Times, reporting Tuesday night that it had obtained a copy of the Woodward book before publisher Simon & Schuster’s official release, said it shows how aides “spent much of the last 20 months quarreling with one another over policy, personalities and turf.”

The Times article recounts several examples, culled from the Woodward book, of mistrust and malice among the Obama team. For example, Vice President Biden reportedly called Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, “the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met.”

Gen. David Petraeus, the Afghanistan commander, is said to believe that White House senior adviser David Axelrod is a “complete spin doctor.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates allegedly warned that Tom Donilon would be a “complete disaster” if promoted to be national security adviser from his current position as deputy.

If their bet on giving Woodward access turns out wrong, White House aides will have little grounds for complaining that Woodward is out of the loop. At times during the reporting, according to administration officials and other sources familiar with the book, Woodward surprised top defense and intelligence officials by coming in for interviews armed with classified maps, in some cases labeled with code names for clandestine operations.

Inside the White House, according to administration officials and other sources familiar with the book, senior adviser Axelrod largely took the lead in monitoring Woodward’s movements on the book, and is himself a source. Others who spoke with Woodward - in addition to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gates, CIA Director Leon Panetta - include Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Holbrooke; and a long roster of other top officials.

Obama’s interview was on the record and lasted just over an hour.

The Obama team would not be the first administration to calculate that Woodward is better managed by inviting him inside than trying to shut him out.

But that calculation is not always right. During Bill Clinton’s second year in office, he and Hillary Rodham Clinton were scalded by Woodward’s depiction of an unsure and erratic president, making decisions in what the author said in a book promotion interview with “60 Minutes” was an environment of “chaos, absolute chaos.”

Clinton, according to aides, stewed for months about what he considered distortion by Woodward and betrayal by his top aides, and over time even changed his style in larger meetings to limit public disclosure of his private musings.