Bill's Reviews > Peril

Bob Woodward books to me are like big bags of potato chips. I can't resist them, I can finish them off in a few sittings, they're satisfying in the moment, and once opened, they have a short shelf life so are better enjoyed while fresh - you can't pull them off your shelf in a year or two and expect them to be anywhere near as good.

As a result, I avoid buying potato chips altogether, otherwise I will binge on them. I lack such self control when it comes to Bob Woodward books.

Fear and Rage took us inside the Trump presidency as it was happening. "Peril" invites us to look back at the administration's waning days and the beginning of the Biden administration. It seems a little early to want to relive this in book form - didn’t all of this just happen? The past year-plus has already been news overload, with the pandemic, the election and the insurrection, so if you’ve been paying any attention, much of what’s recounted here will be familiar.

But there are plenty of unique nuggets, most of which have already been revealed in pre-publication news articles about the book - such as Gen. Mark Milley’s efforts to prevent Trump from instigating a “Wag the Dog” style armed conflict, the John Eastman “coup memo,” Mike Pence’s call to Dan Quayle for advice, and so on. Reading these spoilers in advance blunts their impact when read in the context of the book, but it shouldn’t detract from the impressiveness of the reporting that uncovered them.

The rest of the book is vintage Woodward, in that it takes you inside the rooms where conversations were happening, allowing you to relive now-familiar events with a different, fly-on-the-wall perspective. Even though you know what happened next and how it all turned out in the end, it’s still an engrossing read.

Woodward's co-writing partnership with Robert Costa seemingly helped get this book out just a year after the previous one, cutting in half the two-year interval between the first two books. But the dual authorship never shows any seams, so it still reads like a Woodward book. The narrative goes back and forth between Trump and Biden - the chapters on Trump are both surprising and entirely unsurprising at this point, while the chapters on Biden mostly read like a straightforward recounting of well-reported events. About ¾ of the way through, the book loses some steam as the story progresses to Biden’s first few months in office, and wonkish discussions of the efforts to get his coronavirus relief package through Congress.

As is Woodward’s style, all interviews for the book were conducted on background, so it’s left to the reader to deduce who spoke with the authors. But it’s not at all difficult to figure out. The problem is that you end up with a lot of stories designed to make the teller look good. Bill Barr, for example, comes across looking like a principled, irreproachable, calming influence in the chaotic final days of the Trump administration - according, apparently, to Bill Barr. And Lindsey Graham never comes across quite so good as when Lindsey Graham is telling the story.

It will be decades before the events of this past year or so can be properly analyzed as history. If you just can’t wait, this book - which neatly concludes the trilogy in its final few sentences - will serve its purpose as the first draft of that history. And it will undoubtedly prove useful for future authors and historians to build upon. It’s not something I’m likely to pull off the shelf in a year or two or three to reread, but like that bag of chips I just can’t resist - it may not provide lasting nutritional value, but it sure tasted good.