Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America by James B. Stewart

(Penguin, $30)

It’s a shame that James Stewart’s new book is saddled with such a “drab, finger-wagging” title, said Bloomberg Businessweek. The author of Den of Thieves hasn’t burdened his fans with a “fretful rumination on this country’s moral failings.” Instead, he’s dived deep into four familiar news stories about proven liars and produced an “extraordinary forensic analysis” of what lying looks like up close in high-stakes settings. Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, Barry Bonds, and Bernie Madoff, you can no longer claim that we misunderstand you. “This is tweezer journalism at its finest,” storytelling that takes us inside the very moment each of these grandees “made the fateful choice to lie.”

It’s actually “a workout” just to follow the stories at the level of detail provided, said Bob Hoover in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Stewart has focused on the investigations and trials of his subjects, resulting in “labyrinthine” tales that sometimes get unwieldy. But there are significant revelations here. “The bombshell” in the story about Libby is that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald at one point wrote to President George W. Bush urging him to fire political counselor Karl Rove and the State Department’s Richard Armitage. Fitzgerald believed that both men had lied to investigators about their roles in blowing the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the act that had triggered the investigation of Libby. Bush’s failure to hold those men accountable inspires Stewart, a usually sober reporter, to accuse the former president of “rank hypocrisy.”

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We could have used more such anger, said Scott Martelle in the Los Angeles Times. Stewart argues that lying is more endemic to our culture than it once was, and offers a few interesting ideas about why that might be so. Standards about honesty were seriously eroded, he says, when President Clinton went unpunished for lying under oath about his White House affair and when Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence for perjury. But that’s just the start of an argument. “In the end, you wish for less arcane detail” from Stewart and more in the way of analysis.