Bob Woodward Books In Order

Publication Order of Bush At War Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Bob Woodward real name Robert Upshur Woodward is an American author and journalist. He is best known for his work with Carl Bernstein in reporting on the “Watergate Scandal” for “The Washington Post” which won the paper the Pulitzer Prize.
The author was brought up in the Chicago suburb of Wheaton where his father was one of the most prominent jurists in the city. When he was young, he believed that he would follow his father into law when he went to Yale University.
However, Bob Woodward decided to study English Literature and history for his bachelor’s degree before he became a communications officer for more than five years.

When he was done with that, he went to Harvard Law School but instead of taking a law degree, he sent an application for a two-week unpaid internship to “The Washington Post.”
However, none of the stories he submitted was published even though the editors told him he had potential. Still, the editors referred him to the weekly Maryland paper the Montgomery County Sentinel.
Within a year of working with the county paper, he was good enough to get offered a place at the “Washington Post.”

Woodward spent nearly a year working on the coverage of the police beat when he was required to cover a break-in at the Watergate complex which was the headquarter of the Democratic National Committee.

Collaborating with fellow Washington Post reporter Bernstein, the two soon linked the burglary to the highest levels of Richard Nixon’s government. For their reporting, the Washington Post was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

The names Bernstein and Woodward would ultimately become synonymous with the scandal in particular, and investigative journalism in general. Their 1974 published work “All the President’s Men” was a bestselling title that would go on to be made into a very successful film starring Robert Redford.

Soon enough, Woodward was promoted to assistant managing editor. However, he would gain more notoriety for his novels than for his work in the newspapers.

He penned exposes on characters as varied as Dan Quayle the former American vice president and John Belushi the comedian all of which garnered both criticism and admiration.
Many of his reviewers praised how good he was at unearthing volumes of information even though some saw him as being sordid. He would later on focus more on the power and politics of Washington and hard news.

In 2002, Woodward was the leader of a team that covered the aftereffects of the September 11 attacks which earned the Washington Post another Pulitzer. It was in that very year that he published the first of the works that provided insights into George W Bush’s administration.
His works profiled the many people that shaped the War on Terror going back to before the attacks and providing unheeded advice and a withering dissection of the missteps that made the war ineffective.
He would later on pen works about the American president in The War Within his fourth volume in the series. Next, he penned some works providing insights into the Obama administration.
He also wrote about the divisions in the president’s government over policy in Afghanistan and the struggles between Congress and the administration over fiscal matters.

He would later on pen works on the presidency of Donald Trump right from his campaigns up to his efforts to retain his seat despite evidence showing he lost the election in 2020.

In “Fear” by Bob Woodward is the journalistic type of work that draws the picture of an unpredictable and erratic figure that would do anything to retain his power. Trump is painted as a man that lacks integrity and knowledge of his responsibility.
He is totally incapable of analyzing situations to come up with a definite and coherent decision he can defend. He makes irrational decisions with little appreciation of legal agreements, legislature, or political structures.

The president is presented as lacking an understanding of economic strategies and how they affect global and domestic markets. He also has very little loyalty and candor when charged with coming up with a team that will be capable of delivering on what he has planned.
His unpredictability and impulsiveness often lead to him making some bad decisions such as turning close friends into enemies with no qualms. However, his approach sometimes bears fruit such as when he got NATO member countries to agree to honor their financial contribution commitments.
His unpredictability is also a great tool when diplomacy gets mired in negotiation and debate. However, it can be detrimental when it is employed too often as it makes one too predictable and ineffective.

Bob Woodward’s work “Rage” is an intimate and unprecedented work on the Trump presidency. The work goes behind the scenes and provides new details on the early operations and national security decisions as Trump faced racial unrest, economic disaster, and a global pandemic.
In this work, the author takes a deeper look into the entirety of the Trump presidency up to the 2020 election. Woodward was provided a window into Trump’s thinking through a series of exclusive interviews with the president which provided much of the material in the novel.
At key decision points, the novel shows the president’s response to a range of crises. As is his custom, the former president usually responds with the instincts, style, and habits he developed in his first three years as head of the American government.
Drawing from hundreds of confidential documents, interviews with firsthand witnesses, calendars, notes, diaries, and emails Bob Woodward pens a seminal work on the Trump presidency.

In it, he includes accounts of the risks, contradictions, and turmoil of the Trump presidency, thus providing voters with an accurate view of the vivid and volatile Trump years.

“Peril” by Bob Woodward follows the end of the Trump presidency and then provides insights into the early months of the Joe Biden presidency.

This turned out to be one of the most chaotic and dangerous periods in the history of America. Working with Robert Costa the acclaimed reporter the author shows that this was not simply a domestic political crisis.
Costa and Woodward interviewed more than 200 people who were at the center of the chaos. They got more than 6000 words of transcripts that would then result in a definitive and spellbinding portrait of a nation on the brink.
It is a classic work that provides insights into Washington during the Trump and Biden years, the 2020 campaign, and Congress and the Pentagon.

Making use of vivid eyewitness accounts in addition to never before seen transcripts of meeting notes, confidential calls, emails, diaries, and government and personal records, it makes for an unparalleled historical work.
It also provides great insights into the challenges of the Biden presidency as it faced soul-crushing economic pain and a deadly pandemic in the midst of a disabling and bitter partisan divide