(FORTUNE Magazine) – Shadow: Five Presidents And The Legacy of Watergate By Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster, 592 pages

It is not, we all know, a good time to be President. The constitutional Whack-a-Mole that we call the executive branch has taken powerful head blows in the past quarter-century; the presidency has gone from imperial to imperiled amid a heightened public and political appetite for scandal. That's the explicit subject of Bob Woodward's Shadow, but the implicit question is: Twenty-five years after Watergate, is it a good time to be Bob Woodward?

The years have been kind to the man himself: Nixon's investigative scourge is now assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, producing, every couple of years, a behind-the-scenes Washington bestseller that predictably spends a week dominating the headlines. But is it a good time to become a Bob Woodward--an investigator prized not just by editors but by the reading public for his or her ability to unveil the back story of a controversy? Shadow states correctly, if hardly revealingly, that Watergate yielded a permanent scandal culture, but more practically it also created the independent-counsel statute and reinvigorated congressional inquiries; the "Woodwards" who nearly brought down the President last time around were government lawyers. In the post-Starr Report era, there's less of a premium on veil lifting when the government itself--not to mention the tabloids, cable TV, and instant memoirists--has started lifting not just veils but skirts, zippers, and bed sheets besides.

With Shadow, Woodward tries to adapt to this situation by morphing into a political analyst, examining how Presidents Ford through Clinton have failed to learn from Watergate (or, to be snide, from Bob Woodward). And here's the problem. Bob Woodward is a facts guy, not an analysis guy: His forte is getting the inside story, giving high-placed, otherwise uncooperative sources a shoulder to leak on. He may, in fact, be the least deeply analytically inclined major political writer working today; asked on the talk-show circuit to draw a subjective conclusion from an episode in his books, the poor guy can stiffen like a vegan asked to gut a chicken.

Amid today's prediction-mad, shoot-from-the-lip media climate, that's kind of quaintly sweet. But the result in Shadow is a deeply unanalytical "analysis"--really, a standard Woodward you-were-there narrative, offering dramatic private conversations and Beltway intrigues, seasoned with a few drops of Sunday-pundit wisdom so familiar by now they probably appear in third-grade textbooks. "The great lesson of Watergate," we learn, "[is] that cover-ups never work." When accused, be honest. Disclose fast and in full. They may be worthwhile lessons (if debatable ones: Even Woodward says that by staging a one-man cover-up, Clinton avoided creating "witnesses who might testify against him," possibly avoiding ouster as a result), but they're hardly lightning bolts. A four-page (with white space) epilogue suggests unconvincingly that all five chief executives somehow bungled scandal management because of "the myth of the big-time president," and some chapter conclusions--a stilted, tacked-on paragraph or two of subjectivity--come off like forced reading-comprehension exercises: Did Jimmy Carter comprehend the forces unleashed by Watergate in the Bert Lance affair? Cite examples to support your argument.

Shadow first flits through the Ford and Carter scandals, Iran-Contra, John Tower, John Sununu. The rest, over half the book, addresses the Clinton era, in particular the Lewinsky investigation, on which the Starr team literally wrote the book nearly a year ago. (Starr particularly steams Woodward: The author, who uses disparaging adjectives about as liberally as an ulcer patient's dietitian dispenses cayenne pepper, calls the lawyer "schoolmarmish" and "prissy.") We know by now that the Administration stonewalled investigators for years; we know about the paranoia and recrimination and wasted energy. All that's left to learn is what people said and wore while they did it, which Woodward details exhaustively, raising minicontroversies over who ratted out whom, which probably won't much interest any American who doesn't have Cokie Roberts on speed-dial. It's not that Woodward hasn't dug hard or found juicy tidbits--he implies at one point that the Clintons went into counseling--but this subject is now so played out you actually look forward to the sections on Whitewater for relief. Oddly enough, the most interesting section is probably the earliest, where Woodward returns to Watergate's aftermath and Ford's public fumble of what could have been a smooth, well-prepared-for pardon of Richard Nixon.

There is so much of what Woodward does well here that it's a shame he chose to emphasize what he does not. Woodward has abilities like no other reporter--the time, wiles, resources, and stature to get first crack at the confidences of the powerful. If only he had turned them to a subject that needed it. Taking on stories so many people have been willing, or compelled, to lay open, even the best reporter is going to find little more than cap-gun-grade bombshells: Henry Hyde tried to arrange a censure! Jerry Ford drank martinis at lunch! Is it a good time to be Bob Woodward? When there's a buyer's market for scandal, and ever less shame in selling, it may be the best of times only for Deep Throat.

--James Poniewozik