SUMMARY: The full, fascinating--and controversial--lives of the two most famous journalists in the world.

Watergate was the most important event for journalism, politics, and the presidency in the last 100 years. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became household names throughout the world after they helped topple Nixon and left an indelible high-water mark that confronts every future American journalist. But how do you live the rest of your life knowing you've reached your peak before your thirtieth birthday?

Award-winning journalist Alicia C. Shepard separates myth from reality in this new and thoughtful look at the duo collectively known as "Woodstein." She sorts through their influential early lives and their widely divergent careers since Watergate. Shepard's riveting tale is the sum of key interviews with virtually everyone around them, numerous new archival materials, including the newly opened Watergate archives, and the revelation of Deep Throat's identity.

The pair became millionaires overnight. Bernstein married fellow celebrity Nora Ephron, quit the Post, failed miserably as a network news executive, and has never lived up to his potential. Woodward soldiered on to become the biggest brand in the newspaper business, despite having a Pulitzer-winning protégé at the Post get exposed as a fraud and losing all his goodwill in Hollywood with a notorious biography of John Belushi. He famously tells every interviewer he's just not that interesting, but writes a mega-bestseller every other year and bears the weight of nearly all the criticism and praise heaped on his profession.

As gripping as All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein takes readers on an insightful journey through the contentious intersection of journalism, politics, and celebrity.

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In the most devastating political detective story of the century, two Washington Post reporters, whose brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation smashed the Watergate scandal wide open, tell the behind-the-scenes drama the way it really happened.

Beginning with the story of a simple burglary at Democratic headquarters and then continuing with headline after headline, Bernstein and Woodward kept the tale of conspiracy and the trail of dirty tricks coming -- delivering the stunning revelations and pieces in the Watergate puzzle that brought about Nixon's scandalous downfall. Their explosive reports won a Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post and toppled the President. This is the book that changed America.

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SUMMARY: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year." This was the secret Pentagon assessment sent to the White House in May 2006. The forecast of a more violent 2007 in Iraq contradicted the repeated optimistic statements of President Bush, including one, two days earlier, when he said we were at a "turning point" that history would mark as the time "the forces of terror began their long retreat."

State of Denial examines how the Bush administration avoided telling the truth about Iraq to the public, to Congress, and often to themselves. Two days after the May report, the Pentagon told Congress, in a report required by law, that the "appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007."

In this detailed inside story of a war-torn White House, Bob Woodward reveals how White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, with the indirect support of other high officials, tried for 18 months to get Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld replaced. The president and Vice President Cheney refused. At the beginning of Bush's second term, Stephen Hadley, who replaced Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser, gave the administration a "D minus" on implementing its policies. A SECRET report to the new Secretary of State Rice from her counselor stated that, nearly two years after the invasion, Iraq was a "failed state."

State of Denial reveals that at the urging of Vice President Cheney and Rumsfeld, the most frequent outside visitor and Iraq adviser to President Bush is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who, haunted still by the loss in Vietnam, emerges as a hidden and potent voice. Woodward reveals that the secretary of defense himself believes that the system of coordination among departments and agencies is broken, and in a SECRET May 1, 2006, memo, Rumsfeld stated, "the current system of government makes competence next to impossible."

State of Denial answers the core questions: What happened after the invasion of Iraq? Why? How does Bush make decisions and manage a war that he chose to define his presidency? And is there an achievable plan for victory? Bob Woodward's third book on President Bush is a sweeping narrative -- from the first days George W. Bush thought seriously about running for president through the recruitment of his national security team, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the struggle for political survival in the second term. After more than three decades of reporting on national security decision making -- including his two #1 national bestsellers on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush at War (2002) and Plan of Attack (2004) -- Woodward provides the fullest account, and explanation, of the road Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and the White House staff have walked.

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SUMMARY: The most facile presidential comparison one could make for George W. Bush would be his father, who presided over a war in Iraq and a struggling economy. Some "neocons" reject the parallel and compare Bush to his father's predecessor, Ronald Reagan, citing a plainspoken quality and a belief in deep tax cuts. But John Dean goes further back, seeing in Bush all the secrecy and scandal of Dean's former boss, the notorious Richard Nixon. The difference, as the title of Dean's book indicates, is that Bush is a heck of a lot worse. While the book provides insightful snippets of the way Nixon used to do business, it offers them to shed light on the practices of Bush. In Dean's estimation, the secrecy with which Bush and Dick Cheney govern is not merely a preferred system of management but an obsessive strategy meant to conceal a deeply troubling agenda of corporate favoritism and a dramatic growth in unchecked power for the executive branch that put at risk the lives of American citizens, civil liberties, and the Constitution. Dean sets out to make his point by drawing attention to several areas about which Bush and Cheney have been tight-lipped: the revealing by a "senior White House official" of the identity of an undercover CIA operative whose husband questioned the administration, the health of Cheney, the identity of Cheney's energy task force, the information requested by the bi-partisan 9/11 commission, Bush's business dealings early in his career, the creation of a "shadow government", wartime prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, and scores more. He theorizes that the truth about these and many other situations, including the decision to go to war in Iraq, will eventually surface and that Bush and Cheney's secrecy is a thus far effective means of keep a lid on a rapidly multiplying set of lies and scandals that far outstrip the misdeeds that led directly to Dean's former employer resigning in disgrace. Dean's charges are impassioned and more severe than many of Bush's most persistent critics. But those charges are realized only after careful reasoning and steady logic by a man who knows his way around scandal and corruption. --John Moe

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Straight Up: Arts, Media and Culture News with 'Tude by Jan Herman

Read Herman's bio and blog at: http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/

Article entitled, "Tears of Bullshit" -- Commentary on Bush's private anguish of the war in Iraq

Click the link to read more:

http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/2006/09/tears_of_bullsh.html

Article entitled, "Memory Lane: Woodward Sort of Outside the Beltway"

Click the link to read more:

http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/2005/06/memory_lane_woo.html

Blog entry entitled, "Deep Flame," a poem by Leon Freilich

Click the link to read:

http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/2005/11/deep_flame.html

Another poem by Leon Freilich in response to Deep Throat's identity:

Click here to read more: http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/2005/05/deep_and_deeper.html

Response to Chuck Colson, White House staff as Counsel to President Richard Nixon

A Blog Response: "I find it strange..."

Click here to read more: http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/2005/06/i_find_it_stran.html