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| Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman celebrate when the Dodgers rallied in the fifth inning. @Dodgers. |
The Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series after they erased a five-run deficit in Game 5, to beat the Yankees, 7-6, on Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium.
WAR
By Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster; hardcover, 448 pages; $32.00
Bob Woodward is the renowned reporter who uncovered the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein at the Washington Post, which led to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974. Since then, Woodward has authored 22 bestselling books, 15 of which have been #1 New York Times bestsellers, on presidents from Nixon to Biden. His three books on President Trump - Fear (2018), Rage (2020), and Peril (2021) were all #1 Times bestsellers.
War is Woodward's first book on President Biden's time in the White House, an intimate and sweeping account of one of the most tumultuous periods in political and American history. As he does with the titles of his books, he zeroes in on a word to describe what dominated a leader's time in office.
That is because President Biden's term has been dominated by two wars that began since he took over. The war in Ukraine, which began when Russia launched an invasion in February 2022, is the most significant land war in Europe since World War II, and it is still raging, with support for Ukraine wavering among the political establishment along partisan lines in the U.S. The war in Gaza, which began with Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and has dominated the past year.
Woodward takes you inside the White House, with President Biden and his top advisers engaging in tense conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky.
Former President Donald Trump has also lurked over Biden's Presidency, as he sought to run a shadow government in his aim to regain political power. They were set for a rematch in this year’s election until this past July, when Biden dropped out of the race, and was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris. Wooodward examines how Harris has tried to embrace the Biden legacy and policies while also charting a path of her own in this presidential race, which concludes next Tuesday.
Naturally, this book opens in the transition period after Biden bested Trump in the 2020 election, and the bloody aftermath that followed, in which Trump never conceded and incited the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Woodward reports on the role that Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader of the House at that time, played on the day of the attack, urging Trump to tell his supporters to get out of the Capitol. He told Trump shortly afterwards that, "You need to call Joe Biden and you need to do it today," and after he relented and was obviously trying to get off the call, McCarty asked him, "What do you think your grandchildren are going to think of you if you don't do this?"
Not surprisingly, the phone call between the outgoing and incoming Presidents never happened, but, Woodward writes, "on his last night in the Oval Office, January 19, 2021, Trump hand-wrote a two-page letter to Joe Biden. He finished it at 10:00 p.m., signed it Donald J. Trump and placed it inside the desk. Biden would later tell his White House press secretary Jen Psaki it was 'shockingly gracious.'"
Six months into Biden's presidency, Trump was still convinced that if audits of the election were completed in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and other key states, he would return to the White House. This, Woodward writes, was Trump tapping into the real power of instilling doubt, which brought him back to how he was told by the then-candidate in 2016, "Real power is, I don't even want to use the word, fear."
Woodward reports that Senator Lindsey Graham was one of the most forceful voices telling Trump to drop it, that he lost Arizona because he feuded with their longtime, beloved Senator, John McCain. Graham was also mindful that the focus had to be on the 2022 Midterm election, and fielding the best House and Senate candidates.
Instead, Trump pushed Republicans, in June 2021, to support his reinstatement as President. He called up one Republican representative, in Alabama, Mo Brooks, and asked that he call for a special election. Brooks, who was running in the Alabama Senate race, had Trump's endorsement - until he refused the outlandish request, and he went on to lose the Republican primary.
This, of course, was a massive distraction for Biden, just as he and his team were grasping what Russian President Vladimir Putin was up to, especially with the cozy relationship he had with Trump. That went up to the point, as news reports on this book have cited, that Trump made sure Putin got Covid tests in the early stages of the pandemic in 2020.
The new President, along with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, was set to take a different approach, as Woodward writes, "President Biden and Sullivan had debated what the administration's Russia policy should look like. Biden was clear.
"'I'm not looking for a reset,' Biden said during his first weeks as president. 'I'm not looking for some kind of good relationship, but I want to find a stable and predictable way forward with Putin.'
"But so far the relationship with Russia was neither good, stable, nor predictable. From their first days in office, Biden and Sullivan had been responding to various acts of Russian aggression. The near fatal poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Russian interference in the 2020 U.S. elections, suggestions that Russians may have paid the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan, and the massive SolarWinds cyberattack on more than 16,000 computer systems worldwide, including U.S. government departments, and key private industries. It was one of the worst data breaches in U.S. history."
Sullivan discovered in April 2021 - just three months since President Biden took office - that Putin had amassed 110,000 Russian troops on the border with Ukraine. Sullivan likened it to "Chekhov's gun," the theory that the 19th-century playwright Anton Chekhov wrote that, if a pistol appears in the first act of a play, it is there for a reason and will be used at some point.
Russia and Ukraine had been fighting in the eastern Ukrainian region, the Donbas, of which it controlled nearly a third, since 2014, when Russia also seized Crimea. Sullivan thought it was possible that Putin was going to use the troops to seize more territory of that region, which has sizable coal reserves.
Soon after this revelation, Woodward reveals, Biden gathered together a group of Russian experts. This included a well-respected figure who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama as an intelligence analyst specializing in Russian affairs, Dr. Fiona Hill.
When President Trump took office, Dr. Hill served on the National Security Council and was his chief Russia expert. She was surprised with the informality when President Biden called about gathering a group to assess his thoughts on Putin and get a feel for what he was thinking.
Woodward writes that this gathering stood out, as "Hill had experienced the 'I'll take that under advisement,' when in reality a president has already made up their mind. But here, Biden had gathered together a group of experts with very different views on Russia. He wanted a debate.
"The last time she had been in the Roosevelt Room, President Trump had spent the entire briefing glowering at a picture of Teddy Roosevelt's Nobel Peace Prize on display, unable to concentrate. 'Trump hated it,' Hill thought. Did he think it was unfair? Did he think he deserved his own?"
Biden had a phone call with Putin on April 13, 2021, and then a meeting at Villa La Grange, an 18th-century French-style Manor on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland a couple months later. Biden departed from Trump's meetings with Putin by having advisers in the room for the summit, which included his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. It also was a highly-scripted affair, unlike the free-wheeling discussions his predecessor had with Putin. The leaders also held separate press conferences afterwards, with Putin going first so Biden's national security advisers and Russia experts could hear what he said before Biden responded.
On July 12, 2021, just around a month after the Geneva summit, Putin released a starkly personal and aggressive 5,000-word diatribe in which he argued that Ukraine had never existed as an independent country.
As Woodward reports, "Sullivan read the Russian president's manifesto as a declaration of the inner Putin, who he was and what he wanted to do.
"'Russians and Ukrainians are one people - a single whole,' Putin began. 'Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians are all descendants of ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe.' And since the 9th century, he continued, Kyiv was considered 'the mother of all Russian cities.'
"'The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state,' Putin said, 'is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.'
"His tone self-righteous and academic, Putin erased the existence of Ukraine as a separate country, a people with their own history, beliefs, culture and language.'”
U.S. intelligence reporting also showed that Putin was changed by the isolation of the pandemic, and he had surrounded himself with a group of people he trusted who shared the same outlook marked by nationalistic views. Those who wanted to see Putin had to quarantine for weeks, and he was physically and metaphorically separated from Russian society for almost three years.
This is just the tip of the iceberg on what you will learn in War, one of the most valuable books you will read before Election Day, as he captures the role one country, Ukraine, played on two Presidents, and which future you want for the country and the world.
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| Austin Wells watching his home run. @Yankees. |
The Yankees, backed by big nights from Anthony Volpe and Austin Wells, rolled to an 11-4 win over the Dodgers in Game 4 on Tuesday night to stay alive in the World Series.
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| Santi Rodriguez looks for position. @NYCFC. |
New York City Football Club lost a heartbreaker in the opening game of the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs Round One, 1-0, at FC Cincinnati.
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| Will Smith tagging out Giancarlo Stanton in the fourth inning. @Dodgers. |
The Los Angeles Dodgers, led by five shutout innings from Walker Buehler and another home run from Freddie Freeman, beat the Yankees, 4-2, in Game 3 of the World Series on Monday night at Yankee Stadium.
LUCKY LOSER: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success
By Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig
Penguin Press; hardcover, 528 pages; $35.00
Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig are investigative reporters at the New York Times, and since 2016, their reporting has focused on the personal finances of former President Donald Trump. These articles revealed the fortune that Trump inherited from his father, Fred, and the record of business failures found in twenty years of tax returns they examined. Their articles received a Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk Awards. Buettner, who has been with the The Times since 2006, was also a finalist for a Pulitzer in 2012 for articles with Danny Hakim highlighting abuse and neglect in New York's care of developmentally disabled people. Craig joined The Times in 2010, and before this reporting, she covered Wall Street and was the Albany bureau chief.
In the FWAA-NFF Super 16 Poll for Week 9 of the 2024 college football season, Oregon claimed the top spot for the second straight week, after they rolled past Indiana, 38-9.
