BOB WOODWARD has done it again and with a vengeance. As a young reporter for the Washington Post, with the help of Carl Bernstein and Deep Throat, he toppled Richard Nixon from the White House.
Now with his latest book, The Choice, he has shown the Clintons as so insecure that they need gurus to psych them up when things go badly wrong. Meanwhile, Bob Dole is revealed as frighteningly indecisive for a man aiming to lead the most powerful nation in the world.
For the Clintons and the White House staff, this is Woodward's second strike. For his book The Agenda, on the new Administration's economic policy disputes, the White House co operated with Woodward and some got badly burned.
How he got one of his famous quotes still puzzles Washington. The book opened with Bill and Hillary Clinton in bed in Arkansas while the White House was still a dream and she says: "I think if you run, you win. And so you better be really careful about wanting to do this and making these changes in your life." Woodward won't reveal his source.
For his new book, President Clinton refused to be interviewed; but, like the last time, his friends and aides were ready to tell nearly all to Woodward. A rival writer, Richard Reeves, recalls enviously how for his earlier book, White House staffers "were treating him [Woodward] as if he were a national institution and it was their patriotic duty to tell him everything".
Hillary Clinton cannot be too happy that her so called "psychic guru, sorceress", "spiritual adviser - take your pick - talked to Woodward about the "brain storming", "seances", etc, they had in the White House solarium over fresh fruit, popcorn and pretzels when Eleanor Roosevelt and Gandhi were summoned for advice. Jean Houston, the guru - she prefers to be called a "philosopher" - is not happy either.
She says she does not recognise herself in Woodward's book. "I'm not a psychic. I don't believe in spirits or spooks." They certainly were not seances. "We discussed Hegel. We discussed cholera in Bangladesh."
Houston says that she only agreed to be interviewed by Woodward because "he had a very weird version of what went on, just hearsay". But she had also enjoyed his earlier books.
This time she says that he has "greatly exaggerated" her role in Hillary Clinton's life. In the book "he has used words that are novelistic, that are fun but end up in wholesale maligning".
But this is Woodward's technique. Clinton's political consultant, Mandy Grunwald, had been dodging Woodward but succumbed when he told her that she had "speaking parts" in his book.
"He has a fascinating technique," she told friends. "He starts off by describing a meeting where he knows 80 per cent of what went on ... so you end up telling him the 20 per cent he doesn't know. His next question is about a meeting where he has 60 per cent of the information and the next, 40 per cent. And you're always helping him fill in the blanks. By the time you are finished, you are telling him about things he didn't even know existed."
Sounds like perfect journalistic technique but in a profile of Woodward in the current number of John F. Kennedy junior's magazine, George, a fellow journalist, James Fallows, is critical of what he calls Woodward's "pretence of absolute omniscience, a God's eye view of what at best can only be one side of the story".
Woodward's defence is that his readers can distinguish between "chicken shit and chicken salad". But he is also accused of sometimes breaching the "off the record" rule.
When Dan Quayle's wife, Marilyn, was confronted by Woodward with a report that she had once kicked a photograph of her husband, she broke down weeping and told him: "You really are a slime. You really are a sneak. Somebody tells you something off the record, and you ask somebody else about it so you can use it."
Hands up journalists who have never done that.
Woodward is philosophical about the friendships that ended abruptly when his various books appeared. "When you do a job, you pay a price," he says.
Incidentally, Woodward was invited to meet President Robinson when she was in Washington the week before his book came out.
Did she tell him who is her guru? Watch out for his next book.