Masquerading as something else, this is really a book about Bill Clinton. Almost 300 of its 517 pages of text are about the embattled current President, only 87 about Ford and Carter. It is effectively a book-length treatment of the issue that has swamped the public prints for the last couple of years.
The detail, even after all the revelations we have become used to, is astonishing. Most of it, too, is political - not sexual - detail: conversations, asides, exclamations, phone logs, minute-by-minute chronologies of key events. It is almost as if it is now normal practice for most senior office holders in the United States to keep detailed diaries, record their phone conversations, and nail everything down for posterity.
Whether the motivation for this almost pathological desire to preserve every detail is self-exculpatory, commercial, or merely vain is to some extent beside the point. What is intriguing is that it exists side by side with an increasing ruthlessness, on the part of both journalists and lawyers, towards those who hold power. In these circumstances, notes and diaries, made for whatever reason, have time-bomb potential.
Woodward's thesis, more implied than explored, is that American presidents since Nixon have failed to learn the lesson of Watergate. They have continued to use their power to attempt to conceal their politically inconvenient or embarrassing decisions and actions and those of their subordinates, ignoring the fact that the new inquisitorial climate makes it less and less likely that they will get away with their misdemeanours.
At one level, I find his astonishment a bit hard to take. For people who wield political power, dealing with political accusations against them, whether true or untrue, is simply part of the job. As the French put it with their customary finesse: "Ce mauvais chien - quand on l'attaque, il se defend!" In the process, they will bend the rules where they can, and break them if they must. They wouldn't do it if they don't - at least occasionally - get away with it. As long as this remains at the merely political level, it is not of much consequence. The debate about how much of what the governors know should also be known by the governed is a political debate, and there are often good arguments to be made on both sides. Our rulers do not have a right to deceive us, but neither do we have the absolute right to know everything: open government, in this sense, will always be to some extent a contradiction in terms.
However, where secrecy involves corruption, perversion of justice (it is worth noting that Woodward exonerates Clinton on this charge), misuse of public funds, or gross deception of the electorate, it becomes rather more significant. In this context, his charges against Bush are more serious than those against Clinton: there are still stories that Bush ought to tell, but won't.
AT the core of this book, however, is another question, which isn't really addressed, much less answered. It relates to another of the lessons of Watergate, still evidently unlearned - that a political system which makes decisions in haste and in anger should occasionally review those decisions in case the cure is worse than the disease.
The office of the Special Prosecutor is a case in point. It was refined in the wake of Nixon's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to castrate it. Under Starr it became a monster out of control. It was the lynch-pin of a system which denied the object of its inquiries - the president of the United States - the protections that are afforded to many common criminals in the ordinary justice system. It gave uncorroborated, untested evidence - much of it of little or no relevance to the central charges - the status of fact. It worked as much through leaks and innuendo as through investigation. It made sleaze into an art form for the media to recycle, conflating prurience and the public interest. Clinton may have weathered the impeachment storm, but once he fell into the hands of the Special Prosecutor, these flaws in the system meant that the only question was not whether he would be damaged, but by how much.
This is a constitutional question for the United States to resolve. There is not much sign, so far, that it even recognises it has a problem on its hands in the need to provide mechanisms that can subject even presidents to necessary and impartial investigation without denying their essential civil rights. And investigative journalism might usefully spend less time uncovering the sexual misdemeanours of its rulers and more time exploring the ways in which their political campaigns are financed, and the links between the financing of political activity and the determination of political agendas. But that wouldn't be sexy, would it?
John Horgan is Professor of Journalism at Dublin City University and author of biographies of Sean Lemass and Mary Robinson