Insight

The sign on the wall of the Clinton campaign “war room” in Little Rock had three short messages on it, generally attributed to flamboyant political strategist James Carville:

Change vs. more of the same.

The economy, stupid.

Don’t forget health care.

Time for the midterm exam, Mr. President.

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Commentary

IS THERE a more celebrated journalist, or for that matter a more reviled one, than Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer prize-winning assistant managing editor for investigations at the Washington Post? No one can deny that, for better or worse, his daily reporting with Carl Bernstein on Watergate contributed mightily to the downfall of the Nixon administration twenty years ago. The two books that came out of that episode, All the President’s Men and The Final Days, are as classic as they are controversial still.

Since then, Woodward has given us a look inside the Supreme Court (The Brethren, written with Scott Armstrong); an explosive and heavily litigated biography of a Hollywood superstar (Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi); Veil, a chronicle of “the secret wars of the CIA” during the Reagan administration, including, incredibly, a purported death-bed interview with the CIA’s William Casey; and The Commanders, a portrait reaching to the very top of the United States military establishment, published as the nation prepared to go to war in the Persian Gulf.

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