ALL over Washington this week, in the aisles of bustling bookshops and in spacious corner offices with grand views of the US Capitol, people were doing the Washington Read.

The Read is a quick and easy way for busy types to gauge whether a new book is worth bothering with. It involves taking the latest of the hundreds of volumes published each year on American politics and skipping straight to the index. If your own name is there, you can savour the moment. It matters not what the entry refers to — it could be an account of how you looted the contents of your child’s piggy bank. It is merely enough to know that you’re in there, documentary proof, on page 257, that you are an essential fixture in the Establishment of the most powerful city in the world.

Nothing better captures the vanity of this city than the Read. And no one is better at indulging it and massaging that vanity than Bob Woodward.

This week, his latest book, State of Denial, an account of policymaking in a dysfunctional Bush Administration in the past two years, has been required reading. Hundreds of politicians, pundits and, yes, journalists have had their day made for them this week by seeing their name in Woodward’s lengthy index. And, one assumes, thousands more have been cast into deepest misery by their absence.

Of course, most of Woodward’s sources do not need the Washington Read to establish themselves as important people. The reporter’s unique strength is that, more than 30 years after the Watergate scandal catapulted him to the status of the most influential newspaper reporter in the world, his modus operandi is to sit down for hours at a time with some of the most important members of the US Government while they pour out to him, in often painful detail, much of what they know.

The Woodward books, more than a dozen of them now over the past three decades, fill the gap for information-obsessed politics junkies between the hurly-burly of daily journalism, with its inevitable errors and omissions, and the serious, well-researched but rather long- delayed, real history books.

State of Denial has been seized upon by critics of the Bush Administration as a devastating indictment of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary. Mr Bush comes across as — surprise! — incurious, disengaged, hopelessly over-optimistic and not very bright. Mr Rumsfeld is described as “arrogant, a control freak whose micromanaging is almost comic”.

Woodward’s critics have been quick to point out that this is odd, because, only two years ago, in his previous book on the Bush Administration, the President was portrayed as focused, engaged, sharp as a tack and deeply realistic about the nature of the threats facing America after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Mr Rumsfeld was described in an earlier book as “handsome, intense, well-educated with an intellectual bent”.

The key to disentangling these contradictions is to understand that there are two basic pieces of information in them.

The first is the hard fact, incontrovertible bits of information that speak volumes in themselves about the protagonists. Examples abound in State of Denial. Most damning, perhaps, is when Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, calls David Kay, the US official having difficulty finding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction after the war, manically insisting that he search a location where Mr Cheney was certain there were WMD. It turns out that the co-ordinates he gave pointed to a spot somewhere in Lebanon.

The second sort of fact in Woodward’s style is the highly personal observation reported to him from the sources he spoke to. Since even Woodward does not speak to everybody, this inevitably produces a highly partial account of the historic events.

This weakness is evident in the strangely heroic role ascribed to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi Ambassador to the US, in State of Denial.

Did you know, for example, that the Saudi Ambassador was singlehandedly responsible for defusing the dispute with China early in the Bush Administration over the US spy plane forced down in Chinese airspace? Or that he alone persuaded Mr Bush to become the first President to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state? Co-operate with Woodward and you generally get a hero’s role in his instant history. Failure to co-operate means a grim relegation to the com- pany of goats and fools — and the most demoralising of Washington Reads.

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