Woodward calls Rumsfeld's memoir "a travesty"

By Stephen Lowman

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward (Brad Barket/Getty Images)

Bob Woodward is “flat-out disgusted” with Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir.

“Rumsfeld's memoir is one big clean-up job, a brazen effort to shift blame to others -- including President Bush -- distort history, ignore the record or simply avoid discussing matters that cannot be airbrushed away,” Woodward writes on Tom Ricks’s Best Defense blog. “It is a travesty, and I think the rewrite job won't wash.”

The Washington Post reporter outlines contradictions in Rumsfeld’s version of events, including when the administration began focusing on Iraq, when the decision to go to war with the country was made, and on whom the responsibility of post-war planning ultimately fell.

“When all the records are available, the other memoirs written and the history complete, this failure to accept responsibility will likely be his legacy.” Woodward writes.

Woodward’s post comes after Rumsfeld said on MSNBC that Woodward's and his colleague Tom Ricks’s books on the Iraq war were written by “all on the outside listening to people two or three levels down.”

“No, I’ve not read their books,” Rumsfeld added.

Memos written in 2002 and made public on the former Secretary of Defense’s Web site show he was upset at the Bush administration agreeing to talk to Woodward and called his reporting filled "with a great many inaccuracies."

