Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward

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Bob Woodward (1943–) is a famed journalist who has worked for The Washington Post since 1971. He is also a well known author, with over twenty books under his belt, fifteen of which became number one bestsellers.

Nixon

Woodward is most well known for his reporting on Richard Nixon, specifically regarding the Watergate scandal, which was done with the help of Carl Bernstein. Woodward has split this topic into four books, those being 1974's All The President's Men (written with Carl Bernstein) about the investigation into Watergate itself, 1976's The Final Days (written with Carl Bernstein) about the end days of the Nixon Administration in response to the scandal, 2005's The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat which tells the story of Woodward's mysterious source, and 2015's The Last of the Presidents Men about Nixon's aide Alexander Butterfield.

The specific importance of the reporting Woodward and Bernstein did was that they found the connection between those responsible for the Watergate break in and the Nixon White House. On 8/1/1972, for example, they reported "that a check for $25,000 earmarked for Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign was deposited into the bank account of one of the men arrested for the Watergate break-in." In the following months, information such as the Attorney General, John Mitchell, controlling a secret fund to gather information on Nixon's political opponents and Nixon's use of "dirty tricks" against the campaign of Edmund Muskie would also come to light.

Deep Throat

In All The President's Men, the authors discuss an anonymous source that gave large amounts of information to Woodward known as "Deep Throat," named after the pornographic film along with his "deep background" in the Nixon White House. This man did not want his identity revealed, to the point where "Woodward had promised to never identify him or his position, even as an anonymous source."

Who exactly Deep Throat is became a question that many people attempted to answer, with suspects including basically anybody in Nixon's inner circle. In 2005, it was officially revealed to be Mark Felt through an article in the magazine Vanity Fair, something that many people, including Nixon himself, had long suspected.

However, until the truth came out, various members of the Nixon Administration were suspected. One of the more popular theories stated that "Deep Throat wasn’t one person but a composite of several sources, while others had posited that he was merely a literary invention." Those who argued this usually based it off of the idea that Deep Throat was not mentioned in early drafts of the book, however, that was primarily because Woodward originally intended it to focus primarily on the secret actions of Nixon, and it was not until the later drafts that the investigation he engaged in to uncover the actions became such an important part of the story. Woodward specifically mentioned in the documentary Telling the Truth About Lies: The Making of All the President's Men that this was at the request of actor Robert Redford, who had also expressed a desire to make a movie out of their book.

Even after the reveal, some remain skeptical of this revelation. John Dean said this created more questions than answers, albeit other scholars thought the reveal made perfect sense.

Controversy

Given that Woodward has been in the business for so long, it's unsurprising that every now and again he comes across a controversy.

Jimmy's World

On 9/28/1980, The Washington Post published a story with the headline "Jimmy's World" about an eight-year old "third-generation heroin addict" named Jimmy. Although Woodward did not write the story, he did nominate it for a Pulitzer Prize, which it ended up winning. Then DC Mayor Marion Barry even attempted to search the city to find the kid, but the newspaper refused to reveal its sources.

It turns out, that's because this story was totally made up, and the Prize was later returned—the only time in history this ever occurred.

Obviously Woodward is not responsible for the hoax, and it is not as if he was the only person fooled by it (again, the Pulitzer Prize board believed it), however, this is one of the most well-known black marks on Woodward's career.

Woodward goes New York!

Sample of the index used to show how much Woodward talked about Belushi's drug problem over what he was more known for.

“”Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.

—Tanner Colby

Woodward's most controversial book is Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, telling the story of the life of the late comedian. A 2013 article in Slate by Tanner Colby, who co-wrote his own biography on Belushi along with Belushi's widow, notes about Woodward that "he takes what he is told and simply puts it down in chronological order with no sense of proportionality, nuance, or understanding." Specifically, he criticizes the book for focusing so heavily on Belushi's drug use, finding that three quarters of the pages make some reference to his drug habit, and downplaying his life as a comedian and friend to those around him. He notes that "there’s little doubt that the drug stories Woodward uses actually happened. But he just goes around piling up these stories with no regard for what is actually relevant" and notes that "Inconsequential details about rehearsing movie dialogue are rendered just as ham-handedly as critical facts about Belushi’s cocaine addiction."

Another rather infamous source of controversy for the book is how how it handled Belushi's interactions with others. What was seen as lighthearted fun by those involved becomes downright mean when Woodward explains, with Colby giving the following example regarding how Michael O’Donoghue described Belushi's antics:

I am very anal-retentive, and John used to come over and just move things around, just move things a couple of inches, drop a paper on the floor, miss an ashtray a little bit until finally he could see me just tensing up. That was his idea of a fine joke. Another joke he used to do was to sit on me.

This is compared with Woodward's description, which reads:

A compulsively neat person, O’Donoghue was always picking up and straightening his office. Frequently, John came in and destroyed the order in a minute, shifting papers, furniture or pencils or dropping cigarette ashes.

Al Franken, summing up what Tom Davis had told him, said the following about the book due to its focus on the worst parts of Belushi's life over the reasons people actually liked him:

He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.

Basically anybody involved with the story has disowned the book. J.T. Walsh was fired from the Dan Aykroyd from Loose Cannon due to his participation in a film adaptation of the book. Meanwhile, Judith Jacklin Belushi, John's wife at the time of his death, wrote the book Samurai Widow specifically as "an extended windup for a punch at Bob Woodward."

Possible fake interview with William Casey

In his 1987 book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA Woodward claimed to have had a deathbed interview with then-CIA Director William Casey, where he admitted knowledge of the Iran-Contra scandal that would engulf the later years of the Reagan Administration. Ronald Reagan himself accused Woodward of lying about this occurring, as did Casey's daughter Bernadette Casey Smith.Reagan already had a bit of a bone to pick with Woodward after he reported that the Administration was lying to the media about what was going on in Libya the previous year, in hopes of destabilizing the Qaddafi regime.

This is one that Woodward himself has debunked: Noting that many of his critics' attempt to use Casey's inability to speak during this time as a smoking gun. The issue was that Casey was able to talk, and Robert Gates—Casey's second-in-command at the time—even said that, although his words were slurred, one could still understand "enough to get sense of what he was saying."

George W. Bush

During the Administration of George W. Bush, Woodward was getting criticized from multiple sides for failures in his journalism. Woodward, by his own admission, was not nearly as skeptical about the WMD claims the White House made as he should have been, even telling Larry King he thought "the chance of" Bush not finding them in Iraq was "just about zero."

In 2007, a controversy occurred over how Woodward described CIA Director George Tenet in his 2004 book Plan of Attack, with Tenet himself criticizing Woodward in his 2007 work At the Center of the Storm. Specifically, Tenet went after Woodward for writing that he called the case for the Iraq War a "slam dunk," claiming he said no such thing. Woodward responded by pointing out that he had four different sources on his side who could confirm the event occurred as described, and others have noted how Tenet pushed the White House line in public regardless anyway.

Threat

In 2013, Woodward claimed that an economic advisor to the White House, later identified as Gene Sperling, told him that he will "regret" taking a certain viewpoint on the actions of the Obama Administration. When the emails were revealed, it turned out that this was not the case because the White House was going to attack Woodward for criticizing the President, but instead because the position he was taking was about to be proven wrong. Even many on the right said that Woodward had misunderstood the email in question.

Criticism of style

While reviewing his 1996 book The Choice, Christopher Hitchens used the opportunity to discuss a number of issues he had with the style of Woodward's writing. Specifically, he called Woodward's writing hollow and believed that he was too willing to take politicians at their word in hopes of keeping access to his sources as opposed to actually holding their feet to the fire when such a thing is needed. Anthony Lewis, who reviewed Bush at War for the New York Review of Books made similar criticisms of Woodward. "Page after page" Lewis writes, "raises questions in the reader’s mind that Woodward does not mention, much less try to answer."

Lewis specifically took note of how Woodward frames the George W. Bush White House, showing it going from extremely cautious about invading Iraq to viewing it as something that had to be done without any real explanation:

The idea of attacking Iraq was brought up at a National Security Council meeting the day after September 11, Woodward says. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, raised it, asking: Why shouldn’t we go after Iraq, not just al-Qaeda? (Woodward does not put that question in quotation marks.) At Camp David the next day, Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, again raised the Iraq idea. Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke eloquently against it. Also opposed, Woodward writes, was Vice President Dick Cheney, who said, “If we go after Saddam Hussein, we lose our rightful place as good guy.” By August 2002, however, Cheney was publicly pressing for a war to remove Saddam Hussein, dismissing the idea of sending arms inspectors back into Iraq as pointless. By then he was “hell-bent” for war, Woodward says in an epilogue. What happened in between? Woodward does not remark on the change in Cheney’s view or try to explain it.

As for the President, Woodward quotes Bush as telling his aides on September 17, “I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not going to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point.” If he ever got the evidence, he did not tell the world about it. But in 2002 he began demanding “regime change” in Iraq. Why? Was he moved by the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz argument? Woodward does not illuminate the course of his thinking.