Word: woodwards
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...Within By Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster; 487 pages...
...President rarely was the voice of realism on the Iraq War," writes Bob Woodward near the end of The War Within, his fourth volume on George W. Bush. And after seven years of reporting on the President, Woodward may well have given us his culminating judgment. In his most measured behind-the-scenes look at the White House to date, Woodward stakes out a middle ground between 2002's hagiographic Bush at War and 2006's scalding State of Denial. While Denial seethes with a barely contained anger (mostly directed at Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld), The War Within closes...
...appeared as if there was no plan to succeed in Iraq. Though sectarian violence had spiked and political progress stalled, Bush forged ahead confidently with a policy that amounted to little more than "We must win." As Woodward writes, "No matter how he tried to dress it up with positive language and sugarcoat it to the American public, he was losing the war. But somehow he had no set deadlines, demanded no hurry." Eventually, Bush ceded the responsibility for a new strategy to National Security Adviser Steve Hadley, who pushed ahead with the idea of a troop surge despite...
...Nearly 50 years ago, in The Burden of Southern History, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued that the South was profoundly different from the rest of America because it was the only part of the country that had lost a war: "Southern history, unlike American ... includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social and political life." Woodward believed that this heritage led Southerners to be more obsessed with the past than other Americans were - at its worst, in popular works like Gone With the Wind, there was a gagging nostalgia...
...really know, a country with a much greater potential for justice and creativity - and perhaps even prosperity - than the sepia-tinted version of Main Street America. But that vision is not sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans. They live in a place, not unlike C. Vann Woodward's South, where myths are more potent than the hope of getting past the dour realities they face each...