The Choice.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew

Through the early months of this year's presidential primaries, the word spread through the small fraternity of political reporters: Did you hear? Woodward's doing a book on the Republicans. Occasionally we would catch glimpses of him in action. Late one night this past winter, I sat in bed watching a Bob Dole campaign event being broadcast on C-SPAN. The aging Kansan was working a New Hampshire breakfast spot and there, with him, was Bob Woodward. When Dole got up from the table and went outside, Woodward followed him while the rest of the press corps was hustled off to waiting vans by pasty-faced advance men. Damn, I thought--he's getting in the car with Dole. I was envious of that valuable time in cars when you have a candidate's attention.

As the campaign went on, though, the fears of Woodward's book and what revelations it might hold began to dissipate among us "pencils." We had heard that Woodward had spent huge amounts of time with Phil Gramm and Pete Wilson, doomed candidates whose stories would not a bestseller make. We had heard that Woodward's long hours in Sacramento and College Station meant that he had spent too little time with Steve Forbes and Pat Buchanan, although any reader of The Final Days would have to suspect that Buchanan had been a longtime source for the Washington Post reporter. Suddenly, we political reporters were a little less fearful that Woodward's book would be an embarrassment for his competitors.

To be sure, The Choice has its scoops. The big one was supposed to be Hillary Rodham Clinton's conversations with the dead. I confess I wish I had gotten that bit of inside knowledge. But I don't think I would have, a la Bob, hyped it so hard. The conversations were not seances, but a reasonable, albeit somewhat silly, exercise in imagining what it would be like to talk with Eleanor Roosevelt or Mahatma Gandhi. In the end, it should not have been a big deal.

This is typical Woodward--great reporting, but too little context or coherence. Woodward prides himself on his just-the-facts-ma'am approach, and, indeed, when many reporters rely on attitude or verbal pyrotechnics rather than old-fashioned shoe leather, there's something to be said for keeping the analysis to a minimum. Still, Woodward takes it too far, and the reader suffers for it.

Anyone who has seen Woodward on TV has a pretty good sense of what his writing is like. He speaks slowly, in a flat Illinois accent with barely any affect. This is what his books...