SHADOW
By Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster, 1999, $27.50

What reader interested in modern presidential politics could resist a book by Bob Woodward subtitled "Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate 1974-1999"?

Woodward should be considered the ranking authority on the Watergate scandal and its repercussions. He was co-author, with Carl Bernstein, of dozens of news reports in the Washington Post that were instrumental in forcing the resignation in disgrace of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. He later collaborated with Bernstein to produce two of the three definitive books about the scandal: "All the President’s Men" and "The Final Days." (The third? Anthony J. Lukas’s "Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years.")

More recently Woodward has written in-depth investigative books about the U.S. Supreme Court ("The Brethren," with Scott Armstrong), the Central Intelligence Agency ("Veil"), the American military’s top chain of command ("The Commanders"), the 1992 presidential campaign ("The Choice"), and Bill Clinton’s first 100 days as president ("The Agenda").

In "Shadow," he has returned to the subject of Watergate with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight.

Woodward’s thesis is that Nixon’s disgrace removed much of the power from the office of the president, but that the five presidents since Nixon have behaved as if the presidency were as powerful as it was under Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy.

Theodore Roosevelt called the presidency "a bully pulpit," but in TR’s day much of the power of the office lay in its holder’s personality and his powers of persuasiveness. According to Woodward, Nixon’s downfall — and, to some extent, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam problems as well — returned the prestige of the presidency to something resembling what it was when Calvin Coolidge took summers off to go trout fishing in New England, out of reach by telephone or telegraph — and nobody thought it mattered.

Problem is, according to Woodward, no president since Nixon has gotten the message. They have gotten themselves into trouble by attempting to exercise what they perceived as almost unlimited executive powers and by failing to realize that, since Watergate and succeeding scandals unleashed the press to peer into presidential peccadilloes both public and private, presidents must behave like Caesar’s wife — being not only blameless, but also so circumspect as to avoid all appearance of indiscretion.

Gerald R. Ford’s first major exercise of executive power was to pardon Nixon for any crimes he may have committed in the Watergate mess. Ford’s idea was to prevent a long series of court cases that would further divide the nation; indeed, and the pardon was probably beneficial to the country’s mental and emotional health — but at the time, it was widely viewed as the result of a "deal" wherein Nixon agreed to resign the presidency only after Ford agreed to pardon him.

According to Woodward’s sources, the Nixon camp made some approaches to Ford along those lines, and Ford had to walk a very thin line in order to keep his options open while turning down the deal outright.

Jimmy Carter, believing that the presidency was still an all-powerful office, promised too much; his was the first presidency to collapse under the weight of raised expectations. Carter has admitted as much, saying, for example, that he would never have campaigned on the slogan "I will never lie to you" had he realized the implications of such a pledge for national security and the reputations of public men.

Though the "scandals" in his administration — Bert Lance’s finances and Hamilton Jordan’s alleged nighttime shenanigans — turned out to be mostly without substance, Carter could never shake the image of incompetence that dogged him after the press and public realized that could not fulfill his campaign promises.

Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush had the Iran-Contra scandal. But the record shows that they had learned enough from the experiences of their predecessors to insulate themselves from direct involvement in that corruption of foreign policy and constitutional law. Bush was able to claim that he had been "out of the loop" during the Iran-Contra planning, although Woodward suggests that this was never precisely the case. And Reagan, whatever the extent of his own involvement and knowledge, followed his usual practice of channeling decisions through committees of subordinates so that he could not be painted by critics as having originated any specific action.

Sadly, by the time Reagan was called to testify by deposition as to his and others’ involvement in Iran-Contra, his as-yet-undiagnosed Alzheimer’s Disease was already so far advanced that, as he admitted at times during the deposition, not only could he not remember details of meetings and decisions, he could not even recall the names of Cabinet members and White House staffers. In fact, he could hardly remember having been president.

Bill Clinton’s early warning could have come from a study of Nixon’s disgrace, but he might have learned even more from a failed presidential candidate, Gary Hart — who, as the first candidate since Grover Cleveland to be confronted directly with questions about extramarital affairs, dared the press to catch him in an affair and then paid the price when reporters did catch him. Clinton’s experience was eerily similar to Hart’s, albeit on a grander scale. And if the prestige of his office helped him delay the reckoning for his sexual misdeeds for an entire four-year term and part of another, the microscopic scrutiny of the presidential officeholder by press and public, a legacy of Richard Nixon and Donna Rice, finally brought him down.

Woodward was not able to interview Reagan for "Shadow," and former presidents Ford and Bush declined to be interviewed. Woodward’s quotations from Carter and Clinton appear not to be contemporaneous with the writing of the book, and so "Target" has an aura more of history than of investigative reporting. Its best sections are those on Reagan and Bush, the only sections that contain new information. The Ford and Carter sections are brief and perfunctory, and the Clinton section, which takes up almost the second half of the book, is little more than a reworking of what we already have learned from earlier books by other writers.

Also troubling is Woodward’s frequent use of unidentified sources — although, to his credit, he has found two sources for each uncredited allegation. In order to get vital information on behind-the-scenes politics, it will always be necessary to rely to some extent on reliable but anonymous sources — but the excessive reliance on such sources in "Target" weakens the book, in spite of the persuasiveness of Woodward’s thesis.

Clark Cox is the news editor of The Pilot.