...Savage provides a comprehensive, authoritative history of the legal side of national security policy making during the Obama years. That might sound dry and forbidding, especially in a book so dense and long (almost 700 pages of text). But anyone truly interested in foreign policy or national security should find it essential and enthralling, thanks to the author’s intelligence, objectivity, legwork and literary skill.
The great strength of Power Wars, and sometimes its weakness, is its methodical, exquisitely detailed chronicling of the back-and-forth between principals and deputies as they crafted policy. That said, one can’t help wishing at times that Savage had chosen to tell this story by focusing on a handful of characters and their roles in the events rather than writing an exhaustive catalogue.
National security law experts will find little of interest here. The legal analysis is superficial throughout—the book is strung together from short vignettes that read like, well, New York Times articles—and Savage seems unable to judge whether the arguments made by the lawyers are legally sound.
The result of the author’s effort is mixed. Mr. Savage, a reporter for The New York Times, has succeeded in producing a book that will almost certainly stand as the most comprehensive account of the Obama administration’s policies, views, theories and bureaucratic battles over national security laws and the legacy of the 2001 attacks. His account is thoughtful and consistently fair-minded. These virtues amount to no small achievement. Yet Mr. Savage’s extensive reporting also leads to a failing: This is not an especially readable or user-friendly book.
It is hard to imagine many journalists capable of writing a book on this topic on the scale, and with the ambition, of this one. The book draws on Savage’s own reporting, some of it appearing here for the first time. It is clear that he has a wide range of sources, and while there will always be disagreements about specifics—when something exactly happened, who said what to whom, and the like—there is little reason to doubt the broad outlines of the story.
Savage is too much of a journalist — and a superb one — to be judgmental about his subject-in-chief. As a result, his book is sometimes inconclusive about Obama’s resolutions of tumultuous disputes, although it gives readers abundant evidence to draw their own conclusions. The author’s own conclusion might let the president off the hook a bit, but it was hard for this reader, at least, to dispute.
