Eager to prevent the president from testifying, Dowd worked tirelessly to convince Mueller that the investigation should be wrapped up, according to Woodward. At one point, Kelly urged Dowd to tell Mueller that the probe was preventing Trump from constructively engaging with Putin on various national-security issues, for fear of appearing overly solicitous of the Russian leader. Kelly told Dowd that even Mattis, traditionally hawkish on Russia, favored such engagement by Trump. “Mattis has told the president that Putin and the Russians are just getting too dangerous, and that we’re going to have to deal with them,” Kelly told Dowd. “And I want you to convey that to [Mueller.]”

After several meetings with Mueller’s team, Dowd ultimately decided that he did not trust them, and strongly advised the president not to do the interview, according to Woodward. But he did not trust Trump, either—not to tell the truth, anyway. He warned the president that if he spoke to Mueller, he’d end up “in an orange jumpsuit.” Woodward ended the book with a blunt, and ominous, assessment: “In the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying ‘Fake News,’ the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: ‘You’re a fucking liar.’”

Dowd disputed this in a statement released on Tuesday: “I have not read Bob Woodward’s book, which appears to be the most recent in an endless cycle of accusations and misrepresentations based on anonymous statements from unknown malcontents ... I did not refer to the President as a ‘liar’ and did not say that he was likely to end up in an ‘orange jumpsuit.’ It was a great honor and distinct privilege to serve President Trump.”

Woodward zooms out at several points in the book, stepping back to marvel at the absurdity of the world he is reporting on—and what he saw as his own role in fueling the president’s paranoia. At one point, Woodward addresses comments he made on Fox News in January 2017 about the Trump-Russia dossier authored by the former British spy Christopher Steele. Woodward called the document “garbage” and chastised the FBI for bringing it to the president’s attention. His comments raised eyebrows at the time because his old reporting partner from the days of Watergate, Carl Bernstein, was part of the team that broke the dossier story for CNN. Trump quickly picked up on Woodward’s comments and thanked him for them in a tweet.

“I was not delighted to appear to have taken sides, but I felt strongly that such a document, even in an abbreviated form, really was 'garbage’ and should have been handled differently,” Woodward writes. He did not elaborate on his reasons for thinking the dossier was useless. But that belief seemed to contradict his own reporting on what former CIA Director John Brennan had told former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about the dossier: namely, that it would “add substantiation to what we are doing,” and that the information was in line with what the agency’s own sources had revealed.

In a stark moment of either self-awareness or arrogance, Woodward declares blithely in the book that his own denunciation of the dossier helped to launch the president down his destructive path. “The episode played a big role in launching Trump’s war with the intelligence world,” Woodward wrote, “especially the FBI and Comey.”

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.