Bob Woodward

Robert Upshur Woodward (born March 26, 1943) is an American investigative journalist. He started working for ''The Washington Post'' as a reporter in 1971 and now holds the honorific title of associate editor though the Post no longer employs him.

While a reporter for ''The Washington Post'' in 1972, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein, and the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal. These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Roberts.

Woodward continued to work for ''The Washington Post'' after his reporting on Watergate. He has written 21 books on American politics and current affairs, 15 of which have topped best-seller lists.

Early life, education and naval service

Woodward was born in Geneva, Illinois, the son of Jane (née Upshur) and Alfred E. Woodward, a lawyer who later became chief judge of the 18th Judicial Circuit Court. He was raised in nearby Wheaton, Illinois, and educated at Wheaton Community High School (WCHS), a public high school in the same town. His parents divorced when he was twelve, and he and his brother and sister were raised by their father, who subsequently remarried.

Following graduation from WCHS in 1961, Woodward enrolled in Yale University with a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) scholarship and studied history and English literature. While at Yale, Woodward joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and was a member of Book and Snake. He received his B.A. degree in 1965.

After Yale, Woodward began a five-year tour of duty in the United States Navy. During his service in the Navy, Woodward served aboard the USS ''Wright'', and was one of two officers assigned to move or handle nuclear launch codes the ''Wright'' carried in its capacity as a National Emergency Command Post Afloat (NECPA). At one time, he was close to Admiral Robert O. Welander, being communications officer on the USS ''Fox'' under Welander's command.

Career

After being discharged as a lieutenant in August 1970, Woodward was admitted to Harvard Law School but elected not to attend. Instead, he applied for a job as a reporter for ''The Washington Post'' while taking graduate courses in Shakespeare and international relations at George Washington University. Harry M. Rosenfeld, the ''Post'' metropolitan editor, gave him a two-week trial but did not hire him because of his lack of journalistic experience. After a year at the '' Montgomery Sentinel'', a weekly newspaper in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, Woodward was hired as a ''Post'' reporter in 1971.

Watergate

Woodward and Carl Bernstein were both assigned to report on the June 17, 1972, burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in a Washington, D.C., office building called Watergate. Their work, under editor Ben Bradlee, became known for being the first to report on a number of political "dirty tricks" used by the Nixon re-election committee during his campaign for re-election. Their book about the scandal, '' All the President's Men'', became a No. 1 bestseller and was later turned into a movie. The 1976 film, starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, transformed the reporters into celebrities and inspired a wave of interest in investigative journalism.

The book and movie also led to the enduring mystery of the identity of Woodward's secret Watergate informant known as Deep Throat, a reference to the title of a popular pornographic movie at the time. Woodward said he would protect Deep Throat's identity until the man died or allowed his name to be revealed. For more than 30 years, only Woodward, Bernstein, and a handful of others knew the informant's identity until it was claimed by his family to '' Vanity Fair'' magazine to be former Federal Bureau of Investigation Associate Director W. Mark Felt in May 2005. Woodward immediately confirmed the veracity of this claim and subsequently published a book, titled ''The Secret Man'', that detailed his relationship with Felt.

Woodward and Bernstein followed up ''All the President's Men'' with a second book on Watergate, entitled '' The Final Days'' (Simon and Schuster 1976), covering in extensive depth the period from November 1973 until President Nixon resigned in August 1974.

The Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Brethren and the Supreme Court

Woodward co-authored '' The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court'' with Scott Armstrong in 1979. The book provided the first detailed, insider account of how the United States Supreme Court arrived at decisions from 1969 to 1976.

Citing draft opinions, internal memos, and justice-to-justice exchanges, The Brethren, sets out Justice Harry Blackmun's emotional, medical and legal reasoning that eventually led to the controversial 7-2 landmark decision in the case Roe v. Wade (1973).

In its review, The Los Angeles Times wrote that The Brethren was: "Explosive... the most controversial book on the Supreme Court yet written." Five of the nine justices helped and dozens of internal court memos were quoted.

Wired & John Belushi

In 1984, Woodward shifted to Hollywood, show business, music and drug culture with his book '' Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi'' (Simon and Schuster, 1984).

Based on records supplied by the comedian's widow and extensive on-the-record interviews with the agents, producers, directors and friends of John Belushi, such as actor Dan Aykroyd, Woodward charted the enabling culture that led to Belushi's drug overdose death in 1982.

Veil, The Secret Wars of the CIA

Woodward's next book, ''Veil, The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987'' (Simon & Schuster) was about William J. Casey, President Ronald Reagan's CIA Director, and the secret covert actions of the Reagan administration in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Libya, Cambodia, Iran, Angola and elsewhere.

David Martin, the veteran CBS national security reporter, in The New York Times review called the book: "A penetrating, profane, and sometimes brilliant portrait... This is no archaeological dig through the skeletons of the past. This is real-time intelligence."

Controversy arose over an interview Woodward conducted with Casey in his hospital room in January 1987, described in ''Veil'', where Casey supposedly admitted to his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair. Casey's widow and several individuals from the agency stated that Casey was incapable of speaking at the time of the alleged interview. However, Robert M. Gates, Casey's deputy at the time, in his book ''From the Shadows'', recounts speaking with Casey during this exact period. Gates directly quotes Casey saying 22 words, even more than the 19 words Woodward said Casey used with him.

George W. Bush administration

Woodward spent more time than any other journalist with former president George W. Bush, interviewing him six times for close to 11 hours total."The War Within" p. 443 Woodward's four books, '' Bush at War'' (2002), '' Plan of Attack'' (2004), '' State of Denial'' (2006), and '' The War Within: A Secret White House History (2006–2008)'' (2008) are detailed accounts of the Bush presidency, including the response to the September 11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In a series of articles published in January 2002, he and Dan Balz described the events at Camp David in the aftermath of September 11 and discussed the Worldwide Attack Matrix.

Woodward believed the Bush administration's claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction prior to the war. During an appearance on ''Larry King Live'', he was asked by a telephone caller, "Suppose we go to war and go into Iraq and there are no weapons of mass destruction", Woodward responded "I think the chance of that happening is about zero. There's just too much there." Woodward later admitted his error saying, "I think I dropped the ball here. I should have pushed much, much harder on the skepticism about the reality of WMD; in other words, should havesaid, 'Hey, look, the evidence is not as strong as they were claiming.

In 2008, as a part of the Talks at Google series, Woodward, who was interviewed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, said that he had a fourth book in his ''Bush at War'' series in the making. He then added jokingly that his wife had told him that she would kill him if he decides to write a fifth in the series.

The CIA's internal report found that Casey "had forty-three meetings or phone calls with Woodward, including a number of meetings at Casey's home with no one else present" during the period Woodward was researching his book. Gates was also quoted saying, "When I saw him in the hospital, his speech was even more slurred than usual, but if you knew him well, you could make out a few words, enough to get sense of what he was saying." Following Casey's death, President Ronald Reagan wrote: " oodwards a liar and he lied about what Casey is supposed to have thought of me."

The Commanders & The Gulf War

In 1991, Woodward publishe
''The Commanders''
which included a detailed, inside account of the decision making leading up to the first Gulf War. Newsweek ran excerpts with a drawing of General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the cover. The cover story was headlined, “The Reluctant Warrior,” and revealed some of Powell’s reservations about the war.

In his own 1995 memoir
''My American Journey''
Powell said that in one of his early phone conversations “Woodward had the disarming voice and manner of a Boy Scout offering to help an old lady cross the street.” Though his wife Alma warned him to be careful, Powell wrote, “I continued dealing with Woodward.”

In October 2021, following Powell’s death, Woodward published audio excerpts of his last phone interview with Powell earlier that year as a tribute to the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

The Bill Clinton Years

Woodard’s first book on President Bill Clinton,
The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House
' (Simon and Schuster, 1994) was a bestselling graphic account of the disputes, temper tantrums and heated debates as the new president forged an economic recovery plan.

In 1996, Woodward published, ''The Choice'', about the race between Clinton and Bob Dole. Though a national bestseller, it was the first of Woodward’s books not to make it to #1 on the non-fiction list.

In his 1999 boo
''Shadow'': Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate
Woodward examined the impact of the Watergate scandal on Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton.

In 2000, Woodward published his ninth book, the bestseller
Maestro
': Greenspan’s Fed and the American Boom.

In his 2008 book The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan wrote, "Chapters 5 through 11, which cover my career at the Fed, draw on many sessions over the years with Bob Woodward, transcripts of which he generously made available for this project. The transcripts were the basis for Maestro, his book about me and the Fed."

George W. Bush Years
Woodward spent more time than any other journalist with former president George W. Bush, interviewing him six times for close to 11 hours total. Woodward's four books, '' Bush at War'' (2002), '' Plan of Attack'' (2004), '' State of Denial'' (2006), and '' The War Within: A Secret White House History (2006–2008)'' (2008) are detailed accounts of the Bush presidency, including the response to the September 11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In a series of articles published in January 2002, he and Dan Balz described the events at Camp David in the aftermath of September 11 and discussed the Worldwide Attack Matrix.

Woodward believed the Bush administration's claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction prior to the war. During an appearance on ''Larry King Live'', he was asked by a telephone caller, "Suppose we go to war and go into Iraq and there are no weapons of mass destruction", Woodward responded "I think the chance of that happening is about zero. There's just too much there." Woodward later admitted his error saying, "I think I dropped the ball here. I should have pushed much, much harder on the skepticism about the reality of WMD; in other words, should havesaid, 'Hey, look, the evidence is not as strong as they were claiming.'"

Deep Throat Revealed

The 2005 revelation in the ''Vanity Fair'' magazine that Mark Felt, the No. 2 official at the FBI in 1972-73, was Woodward’s Watergate source “ Deep Throat” all but ended decades of speculation.

Woodward’s book, ''The Secret Man'', and A G-Man’s Life by Felt and his attorney John O’Connor, described Felt’s motives and how he concluded that the Nixon administration’s corruption and obstruction of justice was so ingrained that he had to go to a reporter. Because of his failing health and dementia, Felt was not able to answer some of the questions about his role in Watergate and assistance to the Woodward-Bernstein team.

Felt died in December 2008 at the age of 95. At a memorial service for Felt in Santa Rosa, CA on Jan. 16, 2009, Woodward recalled that Felt faced a well-organized, well-funded cover-up of Watergate by the most powerful officials in the Nixon administration, including the president himself.
Felt, Woodward said, was “a truth teller. He knew his oath of office in the end was to the people of the country and to the Constitution. He served both creatively and ably and courageously. It was the highest loyalty.”

The Obama Years

Obama's Wars, Woodward's first book on the Obama administration, covered the time between the 2008 election and July 2010. focused on President Obama’s critical decisions on the Afghanistan war, the secret campaign in Pakistan, and the worldwide fight against terrorism. It revealed divisions between the civilian leadership in the White House and the United States military as President Obama was thwarted in his efforts to craft an exit plan for the Afghanistan War.

Woodward's second book on the Obama administration, ''The Price of Politics'', covers events from before the president’s inauguration up to July 2012, including the conflict between the White House and Congress over the stimulus bill.

Sequester dispute with Obama administration

In a February 28 Fox News Channel interview, Woodward said he had never used the word "threat" but said Sperling's conduct was "not the way to operate in a White House". He also said: "I've been flooded with emails from people in the press saying this is exactly the way the White House works, they are trying to control and they don't want to be challenged or crossed". '' National Journal'' editor Ron Fournier, conservative ''Washington Post'' columnist Jennifer Rubin, and Fox News contributor and former Clinton adviser Lanny Davis expressed support for Woodward; Fournier and Davis described similar experiences with Obama administration officials.

The Last of the President's Men

Woodward returned to the story of Richard Nixon in ''The Last of the President’s Men''.

Woodward interviewed Alexander Butterfield, former aide to President Nixon who disclosed the secret White House taping system on July 13, 1973, for over 11 months in 2014 and 2015, recording over 46 hours of tape, and examined 20 boxes of documents and files - a previously unknown Nixon archive.

Woodward concludes, "The result is a deeper, more disturbing and baffling portrait of Nixon. ... So the story, like most of history, does not end."

The Trump Years

On March 31, 2016, Woodward and ''Washington Post'' reporter Robert Costa interviewed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.Bob Woodward & Robert Costa, "Transcript: Donald Trump interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa," The Washington Post, April 2, 2016: Transcript: Donald Trump interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa

Quotes from that interview:

“I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I think it was, I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do."

"Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, fear."

Fear: Trump in the White House

''Fear'' was both a ''New York Times'' and International #1 bestseller in 2018.

Woodward revealed the harrowing life inside Donald Trump’s White House and how the president makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies.

''Fear'' presents vividly the negotiations between Trump’s attorneys and Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia investigation, laying out the discussions and strategies.

It discloses how senior Trump White House officials joined together to steal draft orders from the president’s Oval Office desk so he would not issue directives that would jeopardize critical intelligence operations.

“It was no less than an administrative coup d’etat,” Woodward writes, “a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.”

RAGE

Woodward interviewed President Donald Trump 19 times for more than 8 hours for his second book on the Trump White House, ''Rage''. It covered Trump’s major national security decisions and actions as he faced a global pandemic, economic disaster, and racial unrest.

Woodward obtained 25 personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that have not been public before. Kim describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a “fantasy film,” as the two leaders engage in an extraordinary diplomatic minuet.

Peril

In September 2021, Woodward and co-author Robert Costa released Peril, a New York Times # 1 bestseller about the final days of the Trump presidency, including the January 6, 2021 United States Capitol attack.

Woodward and Costa interviewed more than 200 people at the center of the transition from President Trump to President Biden, resulting in more than 6,000 pages of transcripts. the book was quoted in the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack subpoenas of Steve Bannon, John Eastman and others.

The Trump Tapes

Woodward published his first audiobook, �
The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward's Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump
” (Simon & Schuster Audio) in 2022.

“I’m doing something here that I’ve never done before… Hearing Trump speak is a completely different experience to reading the transcripts or listening to snatches of interviews on television or the internet,” Woodward said.

It features more than eight hours of his interviews with President Donald Trump. Woodward presses Trump on the topics that defined the final year of his presidency in 2020: the COVID-19 pandemic, racial justice protests, Trump’s first impeachment trial, his relations with foreign leaders like North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and Trump’s re-election campaign.

In a special edition of Ari Melber’s “ The Beat,” Woodward and Melber looked back at the Covid pandemic and Trump’s handling of the crisis as President. Woodward said he had “never seen such a failure to protect the people” until his reporting on President Trump’s handling of Covid.

Career recognition and awards

Although not a recipient in his own right, Woodward made contributions to two Pulitzer Prizes won by ''The Washington Post''. First, he and Bernstein were the lead reporters on Watergate and the ''Post'' won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973. He was also the main reporter for the ''Post''s coverage of the September 11 attacks in 2001. The ''Post'' won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for 10 of its stories on the subject.

Woodward himself has been a recipient of nearly every major American journalism award, including the Heywood Broun award (1972), Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting (1972 and 1986), Sigma Delta Chi Award (1973), George Polk Award (1972), William Allen White Medal (2000), and the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Reporting on the Presidency (2002). In 2012, Colby College presented Woodward with the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism as well as an honorary doctorate.

Woodward has authored or co-authored 23 nonfiction books in the past 40 years. All of them have been national bestsellers, and 16 of them have been No. 1 national nonfiction bestsellers—more No. 1 national nonfiction bestsellers than any contemporary author.

In his 1995 memoir, ''A Good Life,'' former ''Post'' Executive Editor Ben Bradlee singled out Woodward in the foreword. "It would be hard to overestimate the contributions to my newspaper and to my time as editor of that extraordinary reporter, Bob Woodward—surely the best of his generation at investigative reporting, the best I've ever seen.... And Woodward has maintained the same position on top of journalism's ladder ever since Watergate." In 1995, Woodward also received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

In 2014, Robert Gates former director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense, said that he wished he'd recruited Woodward into the CIA, saying, "He has an extraordinary ability to get otherwise responsible adults to spill heirguts to him...his ability to get people to talk about stuff they shouldn't be talking about is just extraordinary and may be unique."

In 2023, he won the Freedom of Speech Award.

Criticism

Nicholas von Hoffman has made the criticism that "arrestingly irrelevant detail is ftenused", while Michael Massing believes Woodward's books are "filled with long, at times tedious passages with no evident direction."

Commentator David Frum has said that Washington officials can learn something about the way Washington works from Woodward's books: "From his books, you can draw a composite profile of the powerful Washington player. That person is highly circumspect, highly risk averse, eschews new ideas, flatters his colleagues to their face (while trashing them to Woodward behind their backs), and is always careful to avoid career-threatening confrontation. We all admire heroes, but Woodward's books teach us that those who rise to leadership are precisely those who take care to abjure heroism for themselves."

Lecture circuit

Woodward has given speeches on the " lecture circuit" for decades. Woodward spoke at th
Sir Harry Evans Global Summit in Investigative Journalism 2023
He interviewed Maryland Governor Wes Moore a
St. John's College
Annapolis, Maryland for thei
Great Conversation's Series
on October 29, 2023. Woodward recently participated in The New York Times DealBook Summit 2023.

Woodward also lectures at colleges and universities. He gave the 2001 Robert C. Vance Distinguished Lecture at Central Connecticut State University, and has spoken at the University of Arkansas, University of Alabama, Eastern Connecticut State University, West Texas A&M University, and Oklahoma City Community College. Following the publication in 2018 of ''Fear: Trump in the White House'', he spoke to an overflow crowd of students, faculty, and guests at Virginia Commonwealth University. His May 4, 2019 speech at Kent State University contained the startling revelation of previously unreleased audiotape on which then-president Richard Nixon can be heard lauding the 1970 shooting of four students for its effect on those who disagreed with him.

Bibliography

Woodward has co-authored or authored 15 No. 1 national bestselling non-fiction books.
* ''All the President’s Men'' (1974, with Carl Bernstein),
* ''The Final Days'' (1976, with Carl Bernstein),
* ''The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court'' (1979, with Scott Armstrong),
* ''Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi'' (1984),
* ''Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987'' (1987),
* ''The Commanders'' (1991),
* ''The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House'' (1994),
* ''The Choice: How Bill Clinton Won'' (1996),
* ''Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate'' (1999),
* ''Maestro: Greenspan’s Fed and the American Boom'' (2000),
* ''Bush at War'' (2002),
* ''Plan of Attack'' (2004), which continues ''Bush at War''
* ''State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III'' (2006), continuing ''Plan of Attack''
* ''The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006–2008'' (2008),
* ''Obama’s Wars'' (2010),
* ''The Price of Politics'' (2012),
* ''The Last of the President’s Men'' (2015),
* ''Fear: Trump in the White House'' (2018),
* ''Rage'' (2020), continuing ''Fear''
* ''Peril'' (2021, with Robert Costa), continuing ''Rage''
* ''The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with Donald Trump'' (2022),
* ''War'' (2024),

References

External links

Official personal websiteBob Woodward
at ''The Washington Post''
Bob Woodward Biography and Interview
with American Academy of Achievement
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Woodward, Bob
1943 births
Living people
20th-century American journalists
20th-century American writers
21st-century American journalists
21st-century American writers
American investigative journalists
American male journalists
American newspaper reporters and correspondents
American political writers
Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award recipients
Journalists from Washington, D.C.
People from Geneva, Illinois
People from Georgetown (Washington, D.C.)
People of the Office of Naval Intelligence
The Washington Post people
Watergate scandal investigators
Journalists from Chicago
Writers from Wheaton, Illinois
Yale College alumni