Foreign Policy: The big news yesterday is national security advisor Jim Jones announcing his departure from the White House. This is something that's been talked about almost from the very moment that he took the job in the beginning of the administration. There are people inside the White House suggesting that the account of his tenure as portrayed in your book perhaps hastened the departure. What's your sense of it? He obviously wasn't happy in the job.
Bob Woodward: The account of his tenure squares with everyone else's. And he warned President Obama at the beginning, saying you know, "I was not a very good staff guy." I think he wanted to be secretary of state but he said when he'd been the aide to Bill Cohen, secretary of defense, or to the Marine commandant, it wasn't kind of his thing and, you know, they picked him anyway. As everyone knew, he was outside the circle.
FP: Is this a story about presidents needing to be close to their national security advisors?
BW: Obama told people he thought it was important to pick somebody who's kind of not part of the political in-crowd. Obviously he's gone the other way now with [new national security advisor Tom] Donilon so it's interesting to see.
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FP: The one thing that neither of these two figures is -- either Tom Donilon or Jim Jones -- is a big strategist type. You don't have anybody who's coming in with a grand vision -- it seems -- for what the Obama administration's footprint in the world should be.
BW: I think that's right and it is now clear Obama's his own chief foreign policy strategist. He designed the Afpak option himself. Interestingly -- and no one has kind of put this together because it's a little complex -- but he took the Gates memo of October 30th in which Gates said "Oh, we could do 30,000 or 35,000 troops" and Gates clearly did not see it as an option he was offering but the president latched onto it and he latched onto what Gates said, "we can begin thinning out forces in 18-24 months." And like somebody grabbing onto whatever he could, the president took that and then set the withdrawal dates so in a real sense Obama's his own strategist on these things.
FP: A lot of the commentary about the book has seized upon that and has made the point that it's very unusual the way in which Obama has interacted with the Pentagon, that he's been much more aggressive than say President Bush was in not just choosing options presented by the Pentagon but trying to create his own in the White House.
BW: Which he did and of course if it works, he's going to be a strategic genius. If it doesn't work, a lot of Republicans, Democrats and the military people are going to say "See, none of us recommended this."
FP: That's the account that really comes through very clearly and wasn't really sharply defined before this portrayal.
BW: Yes, I don't think it was out there that he couldn't get options from the Pentagon, that he laid into them and said "I want more options" and actually said "It's unacceptable that I'm not getting them."
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