Department of "Huh?"

Ummmm... Bryan Burrough is insane: he thinks the right way to review Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine is to give a big wet kiss to Bob Woodward:

"The One Percent Doctrine," by Ron Suskind - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times: 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...

But Woodward has tackled this material: in Plan of Attack and Bush at War. And what Woodward produced is--it is now clear--tripe. Huge chunks of the story Woodward tells are wrong. And huge chunks of the story are not told by Woodward.

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... but what we get are narrative bits and pieces... 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....

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....

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...

Suskind has written a very good book. Burrough, by contrast, has simply written a very strange and incomplete review.