Bush at War
by Bob Woodward
View on GoodreadsBob Woodward's 2002 inside account of the George W. Bush administration's response to 9/11 and the early war on terror — the National Security Council meetings, the Afghanistan invasion planning, the Iraq-pivot decisions — built on access to Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld.
Core ideas
- The post-9/11 inner-circle reconstruction is the book's documentary value — what was said in which meeting, who pushed for what, and how the decision sequence actually unfolded inside the administration that produced Iraq and the rest.
- Woodward's access was unusual even by his standards — Bush sat for repeated long interviews, and the book preserves Bush's contemporaneous self-understanding before the historical record curdled.
- Read in 2025, the book functions as the prequel to Woodward's later Plan of Attack (Iraq decision-making) and the foundational text for the Bush-era national-security memoir genre; reading it on December 31, same day as All the President's Men, is a deliberate double-bill.
Published2002
Pages416
ISBN9780743461078
ReadDec 2025
