I'm a little late in coming to this, but it warmed my heart to see Bob Woodward giving Alan Greenspan the benefit of the doubt on his craven Bush-era fiscal-policy pronouncements. According to Woodward's write-up of Greenspan's just-released memoir, the former Fed chairman offers four explanations for his role in helping the Bushies blow a hole in the federal budget: 1.) Greenspan expected the president to veto a lot of spending bills; the president didn't live up to his end of the bargain. 2.) Greenspan didn't realize Congressional Republicans were so attached to pork. 3.) Greenspan didn't anticipate the effect of his largely pro-tax cut testimony in 2001, which many in Congress viewed as a green light for the $1.35 trillion (actually much more expensive) tax cut they subsequently passed. 4.) Greenspan underestimated the intellectual seriousness of the Bush administration's economic policymakers. Of the four explanations, only the last one seems legitimate. Greenspan had been friends with then-Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and Vice President Dick Cheney dating back to their Ford administration days. It's plausible that he believed O'Neill, whom Greenspan knew to have sound fiscal-policy instincts, would have more control over administration policy than he ended up having. It's also plausible that Greenspan believed he was dealing with the reasonable, Ford-era Dick Cheney, not the whacked out, megalomaniacal Bush-era Cheney who came into focus several months later. As for explanations 1.) and 2.), someone who's been around Washington as long as Greenspan knows pretty well how hard it is to cut (or veto) spending in practice. Republicans have constituents just like Democrats do. And those constituents demand federal dollars. Still, 3.) is probably the least believable. The idea that Greenspan didn't understand the consequences of his words when he testified about the Bush tax cut in early 2001 is just ludicrous. This is a man, after all, who spent his career finely calibrating every public statement he made. When he wanted to hedge, he made his comments impenetrable to the lay person. And when he wanted to endorse a course of action, he made it clear by way of emphasis. (He was also notoriously keen on ingratiating himself to those in power, and the Bush administration was riding high in the early days of 2001.) Anyway, don't take my word for it. Paul Krugman makes a far more compelling case than I could in today's column. And Senator Paul Sarbanes did a pretty good job rebutting Greenspan on this point at a congressional hearing back in 2005. Though I haven't read Greenspan's book yet, the early accounts make it sound like an exercise in self-rationalization and after-the-fact criticism from someone who, when it mattered, helped enable a pretty disastrous set of policies. Come to think of it, that wouldn't make it that different from Woodward's last Bush-era tome, which is probably why you get no hint of this in Woodward's piece. Actually, there's one more reason why Woodward might go easy on the "maestro"--they seem to be pretty chummy. There is, for example, this slightly bizarre line in his piece:

"The Age of Turbulence" is likely to be mined word by word on Wall Street, where the Masters of the Universe will seek clues to how to make billions.

As though Greenspan had written a how-to guide for aspiring day-traders. And what to make of this?

He knows how to enjoy a good Vivaldi cello concerto in Venice.

Well, then, Greenspan can't be all bad, can he? --Noam Scheiber