MB Civic

Review by BRYAN BURROUGH

For 30 years Bob Woodward has ruled the world of narrative nonfiction books set in Washington, especially those dealing with the inner workings of the White House. We read Woodward because we know that almost everyone in the book — almost everyone in Washington — will talk to him, each for his or her own reasons: self-interest, self-protection, self-aggrandizement. Woodward so dominates the genre that most would-be competitors have run up the white flag. Those books that attract wide notice today tend to be niche efforts, in-depth examinations of single subjects, like Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,” or tell-alls retailed by those who kept their juiciest tales out of Woodward’s reach, like Richard A. Clarke’s “Against All Enemies.”

If Ron Suskind were an Olympic diver, I guess we’d say he has pulled off a quarter-Woodward with a twist. His new book, which focuses on the Bush-Cheney administration’s shadowy “war” against Al Qaeda, is a valuable, if narrowly sourced, addition to the growing literature that attempts to explain why the president is doing what he’s doing. In style and manner it is a sequel to the Clarke book, a breezy, anecdotal, altogether accessible effort aimed at readers who spend more time at the Waffle House than at the White House.

“The One Percent Doctrine” is very much in the mold of Suskind’s previous book, “The Price of Loyalty,” which told the story of the early months of the Bush administration through the eyes of the former Treasury chief Paul O’Neill. It was a fascinating exercise, essentially O’Neill’s memoir under Suskind’s byline, and suggested a new hybrid at work: the point-of-view narrative. Everybody won. Suskind was able to tell a fly-on-the-wall, insidery account of the Bush White House, never mind that he really possessed just one fly on the wall. O’Neill not only got to vent his spleen, he avoided the unpleasantries of the sour-grapes memoir — all those god-awful evenings with Larry King and Anderson Cooper — while his views gained credibility by passing through the typewriter of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

This time, though he never comes out and says so, Suskind partners with a former director of central intelligence, George Tenet, along with members of Tenet’s team and a few Rolodex Regulars, like the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. Tenet is a good horse to ride: the C.I.A. was at the center of the Qaeda fight, and there is plenty of new material here concerning the pursuit of the Khalid Shaikh Mohammeds and Ramzi bin al-Shibhs of the world. The problem is that Tenet, however central, was just one horse in a crowded field. President Bush is here, as are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. There’s no hint, though, that any of them said word one to Suskind. There’s no attribution, a concern magnified in the point-of-view format, but their every appearance clearly arrives through the eyes of Tenet or his men. It’s not so much that the text is ill informed. It’s just one set of hands on a very big elephant.

This is a book of moments and glimpses and impressions, of scattered scenes and Hollywood Minute characterizations, all stitched together in hopes they will form a whole. Had Woodward tackled this material, one suspects, the dark cavern of intelligence work would be bathed in cathode rays that penetrated its every crevice. In Suskind’s hands the murk is pierced by random shafts of light, interesting where they fall but disappointing where they don’t. Time and again his ambition outstrips his source base. Every hot button of the last five years is pressed — Tora Bora, torture, nuclear proliferation, Libya, Iraq, Valerie Plame, W.M.D. and many more — but what we get are narrative bits and pieces, inevitably scenes built around Tenet or an aide, rather than anything approaching a rigorous, detailed exploration of the issue, much less a rigorous, detailed retelling of what actually happened.

That it works as well as it does is testimony to the author’s narrative skills. Suskind was a top-notch newspaperman, one of the best natural writers The Wall Street Journal (where I also once worked) ever produced, and he commands an authorial voice many journalists can only dream of. Give him an hour with a cooperative source, and he’ll give you six pages of beautiful scene-setting, scissor-sharp dialogue and a nugget or two of insight; his discussion of Bush’s view of the Iraq war as a global “game changer” is eye-opening. His prose, aimed at a general audience, is warm, rhythmic and conversational, sometimes too much so, as in references to the United States as “we” or spies as “guys.”

As fine as the scene-setting can be, too often it doesn’t lead anywhere. For instance, there is a wonderful anecdote about the F.B.I.’s taking delivery of a skull believed to be that of Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. But Suskind pads it with page after page of background and color about the life of the veteran agent who sticks the skull in the trunk of his Oldsmobile and ferries it to an F.B.I. lab for analysis. The agent pops up a time or two more, but is hardly a main character. Worse, after all the buildup, the eventual discovery that the head is not, in fact, Zawahiri’s is kissed off in a single line. There is similar padding throughout. There are also frequent and lengthy sections of exposition in which Suskind muses on matters of import, ruminating, for example, on the intricacies of the Bush-Cheney relationship. These passages are silky, familiar, impressionistic and sometimes a tad strange, as when he imagines what it’s like to be a post-9/11 spy: “You realize you’re neck-deep in a global game of Marco Polo, in an ocean-size pool — but all of it deadly serious, winner take all. It’s terrible in that pool. Especially when it’s deathly quiet — the way it is in the months after 9/11 — and no one is answering when you yell ‘Marco,’ and you only feel the occasional whoosh as your opponent silently passes, and you snap around while images of burning buildings and exploding planes dance behind your closed eyelids.” It’s certainly vivid writing, but every time I read a section like that I can’t help thinking this is the war on terror as narrated by Dr. Phil.

The Bush and Cheney we glimpse here look and sound real enough. Suskind emphasizes how Bush makes just about everything personal, measuring the credibility of a briefing by his measure of the briefer. His Bush is thoroughly engaged, boundlessly confident and attentive to the detail of intelligence operations, if not always to intelligence policy and organization. Cheney comes off as Cheney — smart, steady and gruff, the grown-up who decides what the president sees and, in some cases, how he sees it. The “one percent doctrine” is his, a mandate that any threat that bears even a 1 percent chance of being real must be treated as real. This is a profound shift in thinking, Suskind tells us, and leads to American action, as in Iraq, in which force is deployed where there is only the slightest chance of a true threat.

To his credit, Suskind’s portrayals, as sketchy as they can be, seem evenhanded. Avoiding the trap that sometimes ensnares Woodward, he neither deifies his principal source, Tenet, nor caricatures the easy targets who didn’t cooperate, resisting the urge to portray Bush as vacuous or Cheney as Darth Vaderish. He has gotten a smattering of headlines for an anecdote or two where important intelligence intended for Bush’s desk never makes it past Cheney’s. At least it appears that way. We can’t really be sure, since Suskind’s sources are Tenet and company, not Bush and Cheney. And in the end, that’s probably fine. For an administration as tightly controlled as this one, the mere suggestion of a genuine insight is welcome. The same could be said for the entire book. Even if Suskind is flank steak to Woodward’s sirloin, “The One Percent Doctrine” is still an easy and worthwhile summer read.

Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair.