Chronicle of a Disaster Foretold

Photograph by Christian Hartmann / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In 1996, Joan Didion unholstered the X-Acto knife that was her pen and went to work on Bob Woodward. In a register of pitiless irony, she quoted Woodward’s earnest explanations of his journalistic methods—the difference between “background” and “deep background,” his “eight file drawers” of documents for a book on the Supreme Court. She was unimpressed. “These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent,” Didion wrote. In the end, she determined that Woodward was engaged in the writing of “political pornography.”

This was unfair, at best a category error. What Didion failed to note was that Woodward was a reporter, not a scholar or a belletrist, and that before he was thirty he, with his Washington Post partner, Carl Bernstein, had unearthed the predations of the Watergate scandal—hardly the work of stenographers in thrall to power. It brought down the Presidency of Richard Nixon. Journalism is a first rough draft of history, as they say, and scholarship, which feeds on journalism and so much more, plays by another clock. Robert A. Caro began the research for his multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson half a century ago.

Maggie Haberman, a reporter of impressive energy, began her career at the New York tabloids and joined the Times in 2015. She has been on the Trump beat since The Donald was a real-estate guy hustling for attention in the columns of Liz Smith and Cindy Adams. As “Confidence Man,” Haberman’s first book about Trump, from 2022, made clear, he is a man of immutable character. “He has had only a handful of moves throughout his entire adult life,” she wrote. The “quick lie,” the “shift of blame,” the “outburst of rage,” the abuse of loyalists, a “raft of old grievances,” a “refusal to be shamed.”