Who is Bob Woodward? If his books had no jackets, if the prefaces and acknowledgments were ripped away; if you'd never watched American television or read the US papers; if all you had were the texts and you read them from cover to cover, would you know who Bob Woodward is? No, you wouldn't, but if you read the jackets, acknowledgments and prefaces and followed the TV news, you still wouldn't know that much about him. There's nothing personal about Woodward, his books, journalism and public presentation, little that's self-revealing. But then the people he writes about, usually men who dress, as Woodward does, in dark suits, plain ties and light blue shirts, the better to be observed on TV - they never reveal much of themselves.

LRB 30 November 2006 | PDF Download