Spirited, thorough, and thunderously foreboding.
A former criminal defense attorney and legal analyst sifts through much of the “damning” evidence of Russian ties to Donald Trump, specifically in terms of criminality.
Abramson (Digital Journalism, Legal Advocacy, and Cultural Theory/Univ. of New Hampshire; Golden Age, 2017, etc.) uses a two-tiered approach: a summary of evidence and a compilation of news stories that he has linked to his Twitter feed since January 2017. As such, there is much that is overlapping and repetitive as he moves chronologically through the years of Trump and his associates’ dealings with Russia, from the 1987 attempts to create a Trump hotel in Moscow and “rigging” of the 2002 Miss Universe pageant to the actions of dozens of the “Trump Team” in creating a “back channel” to funnel National Rifle Association money and Russian support into Trump’s incipient presidential campaign. The author minutely examines the many troubling threads to this labyrinthine story. Among them: the alleged kompromat recording of Trump’s scandalous meeting with prostitutes in the Ritz-Carlton Moscow suite in 2013; the covert activities of Russian operative Maria Butina to establish a hidden link between the Kremlin and Republican leadership; the establishment of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee in early 2016 (many of whose members had “puzzling contacts with the Russians”), which coerced the GOP to change its platform at the Republican National Convention to ease the anti-Russian stance on Ukraine; and Trump’s overt “aiding and abetting” activities in publicly encouraging Russian cyberaggression months after he was officially informed as a presidential candidate that Russians were involved in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. There are so many bizarre turns to this ongoing saga that Abramson fears the truth will take many years to come to light. Still, he expresses confidence that Robert Mueller’s final report will present “an entire landscape of graft Americans can’t now contemplate.”
Spirited, thorough, and thunderously foreboding.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982116-08-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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