Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward strolled pensively towards the impeccably set table by the window – the one with a clear view of the White House across Lafayette Square. Wearing a sober red tie and a spotless dark suit, the legendary Watergate-exposing journalist bore the faint traces of a frown. He had dined at the historic Hay-Adams Hotel so many times since he first came here in 1971, he reflected. Until now it was always him doing the interviewing ...
OK, I invented some of that. But the chance to write in Woodward’s trademark omniscient style was too hard to resist. For all his mild manners and gentle voice, the 66-year-old Washington Post journalist and bestselling author is a man who provokes extreme – and contradictory – reactions. The renowned CBS news anchor Bob Schieffer has called Woodward “the best reporter of our time – maybe the best of all time”. Whereas Arianna Huffington, of Huffington Post fame, describes Woodward as “the dumb blond of American journalism”.
Ben Bradlee, editor of the Post in the early 1970s when Woodward and Carl Bernstein dramatically exposed Richard Nixon’s involvement in, and subsequent cover-up of, a burglary of the opposition Democratic party offices in the Watergate complex, says Woodward is “the best reporter I have ever seen”. But for Christopher Hitchens, the English-born scourge of the great and the good, Woodward symbolises the “essential shallowness and ephemerality of Washington journalism”.
With its plush upholstered decor and neatly starched waiters, the Hay-Adams seems an appropriate venue to meet the man who has gone from the scourge of the establishment to one of its most celebrated members. We both order tomato and basil soup, and refuse anything stronger than iced water. “What is it you want to do with me?” asks Woodward, looking sceptical but friendly. “I’m in the same business so you can be direct.”
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With a new US administration in place – about which Woodward is already planning to write his next book – and against the backdrop of the crisis in newspapers, not least at Woodward’s Washington Post, I feel it is a good time to take the veteran reporter’s temperature about the state of the world. I ask Woodward whether he feels he is in a dying profession. His answer, given in that deliberate mid-western style that instantly transports you to the prairies and makes you want to trust the speaker, is a spirited defence of newspaper journalism.
“We’ll always be a band of brothers – or a band of brothers and sisters – who try to find out and publish what they believe the truth to be,” he replies between spoonfuls of soup. “American culture demands it. I think there’s a secret chamber in the heart of every single American that says we need the first amendment, we need disclosure, even if it hurts.”
How the other half lived
Carl Bernstein’s trajectory after Watergate reached far beyond the parochial world of American politics, writes Trevor Butterworth. While his partner, Bob Woodward, became the court chronicler of America’s Capitol, Bernstein found international notoriety.
When his second wife, the screenwriter Nora Ephron, whom he married in 1976, discovered that he was cheating on her as she was pregnant with their second child – and, scandalously, with Margaret Jay, then the wife of Peter Jay, the British ambassador to Washington – she left him, and later delivered a furious roman à clef about their tumultuous relationship, Reviewing Heartburn in 1983, Time magazine called it “a useful anthology of insults”, one of the most memorable being “the man is capable of having sex with a Venetian blind”.
Bernstein continued to appear in gossip columns, dating Bianca Jagger and Liz Taylor, and was also arrested for driving under the influence. Woodward bailed him out and, though their personal friendship endured, Bernstein appeared to fall out of favour with Washington insiders: he was not invited to the Washington Post board chairman Katharine Graham’s gala 70th birthday party in 1987.
In his writing, Bernstein recounted in Loyalties – A Son’s Memoir (1989) his frustrations at his parents’ politics during the McCarthy era – they were, though the government didn’t manage to prove it, former Communist party members. The book, wrote Walt Harrington in the Washington Post, explained “a lot about Bernstein’s chaotic life”. Bernstein himself found the writing, which took a decade, cathartic: “I used a book about myself to get out of myself. And as a result, I’m a lot more sure of myself.” he said.
He took a further eight years to write a biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman in Charge, which was published to considerable acclaim in 2007. The following year, Mark Felt, a former number 2 at the FBI, was revealed as “Deep Throat”, Watergate’s anonymous source, and this led Bernstein and Woodward to reunite for a meeting with Felt, just before his death in 2008. Woodward had been so dutiful in protecting Felt’s anonymity that it was the first time Bernstein had met him.
At which untimely point, as if in sympathy with this struggle between an old craft and the new media, my tape-recorder gives out. Woodward, however, is equipped, and pulls out an elegant contraption from his jacket. I should have known. Given the fact that it was the revelation of the existence of the Nixon tapes that ultimately vindicated Woodward’s Watergate reporting, these contraptions must have an extra talismanic quality for him.
“I always carry a digital tape recorder,” Woodward says. “I’ll get my assistant to e-mail you the audio file.”
Woodward is not uncritical about the way journalism is evolving: he is harsh about what he calls the “give it to me now, give it to me live” culture of journalism today. He feels there is too much unsubstantiated opinion out there in the blogosphere, when what is needed is more reporting. “Information is powerful, people gather information, sift it, verify it and put it out and you can’t strangle that.”
“Harsh” is perhaps too strong a word. Woodward’s language is almost quaint in its mid-western gentility: when someone is talking nonsense, he describes it as “BS” rather than “bullshit”. In his world, people do not lie; they present a “misleading account”.
Woodward again reaches into his elegant suit jacket, this time to pull out a clipping from one of that day’s newspapers. A rightwing columnist has accused him and a list of others of “liberal amnesia” over September 11. But, according to Woodward, his words have been distorted. “This is a classic case of what people in government see – somebody taking something out of context, using it for their own purposes,” he says. “What they see is this corruption; it’s not an ideological corruption so much as a failure to listen.”
Woodward’s critics, on the other hand, accuse him of listening too much. Hitchens, for instance, depicts him as a glorified stenographer whose chief goal is to retain access to people in power.
The Man Who Would be President (1992), for example, is devoted to the ambitions of George Bush Sr’s vice-president J Danforth Quayle. The “listening” for this book included 20 or so interviews with Quayle, a politician now best remembered for misspelling potato[e] and describing people from Greece as Grecians.
Our main courses arrive: Woodward is having sautéed veal scallopini with baby spinach, potatoes and mushrooms; I am having Maryland jumbo crab cake with mashed potatoes. As we both begin stabbing at our plates, I raise the question of Maestro (2000), Woodward’s book about Alan Greenspan, which fed into the cult of genius surrounding the then Fed chairman. With hindsight, would he change the title? “That is a fair and important question,” allows Woodward. “Maestro came out in the year 2000, during the boom ... ”
But, I interrupt, after the dotcom bubble.
“After the dotcom bubble ... but before the housing bubble. It’s like you’re covering a baseball team that wins 60 per cent of their games the first half of the season and you write about what has happened,” Woodward continues reasonably. “You can’t write about what happens next: they could end up losing 80 per cent of their games. I get caught up in this [criticism] with the Bush books. You are taking snapshots.”
Woodward wrote four books about George W Bush while he was in office – a record for anyone writing about a sitting president. The first three, which deal with Bush’s response to 9/11 and his plans for the invasion of Iraq, were attacked for being too directed by the president’s own version of events, or at least the version provided by those who agreed to talk to Woodward (Bush himself provided 11 hours of interviews).
Towards the end of The War Within (2008), his most recent book on Bush, which has done less well commercially than the previous three, Woodward finally takes his gloves off and accuses him of a failure of leadership. But critics have held this up as proof that Woodward is only willing to attack when maintaining access is no longer an issue. “Well, they [the books] reflect what happened,” says Woodward calmly as he polishes off his veal. “In the 2004 election between Bush and John Kerry, even Kerry said that Bush did a good job after 9/11.”
Does he worry about jeopardising access? Isn’t access what everyone in Washington – non-journalists included – is obsessed with? I have prefaced my question with an apology for asking it. “Never apologise for asking a question,” Woodward says sternly. When you’re dining with the interviewee – and there is all this silver cutlery around – it is all a bit awkward, I reply. “That’s why I do longer books,” Woodward continues. “In part I do them because there is an access issue. You know it [fear of losing access] makes it [writing] difficult and that’s why I try to do the in-depth story. I try to get contemporary memos, calendars, logs.”
. . .
I am not persuaded and try asking the same question another way but Woodward will not rise to the bait. I switch tack. How, I ask, does he know what people are thinking? Woodward’s writing style veers on all-seeing, with its knowledge of just how its protagonists are thinking or feeling. The first page of Plan of Attack (2004), for instance, contains the line: “Bush sauntered in [to the meeting] like Cool Hand Luke, flapping his arms slightly, cocky but seeming ill at ease.”
Who described this to Woodward? And are people’s memories accurate? “Oh, but lots of people’s are, and I do that all the time,” says Woodward. “There is this depth of: ‘What did you think at this moment ...’ I asked the president, ‘After you ordered the war [on Iraq], what did you do?’ He said, ‘I prayed. I walked around ... with a look of ‘I have the weight of the world on my face’. These books are not just about dry policy. They are about emotions.”
A waiter asks if we would like dessert. Neither of us succumbs to the chocolate truffle cakes and crèmes brûlées on offer. And Woodward has an early afternoon meeting with an Obama official (whose name he will not disclose). So we go straight to the espressos. Lunch has stretched well beyond an hour but I have many remaining questions so I ask if I can machine-gun him a few more: “Fire away,” says Woodward good-naturedly.
Given that he has spent his career steeped in politics, does he have any himself, I ask? Woodward says that not only does he lack politics – “You know, over 40 years, you see so many hopes dashed” – he doesn’t even vote. The last time he cast a vote, he says, was for Richard Nixon in 1968.
“I have seen so many people, and then [there is] this idea of understanding their point of view, taking them seriously – I try to take everyone seriously,” he says. “You know, you can see the true believers on both sides, the inadequacy of true believing and how disfiguring it is.” So what is it that has motivated him to write all these books?
Woodward was sponsored at Yale (where he studied English literature and history) by the US Navy, and completed five years in uniform before turning to journalism, a pursuit he clearly also sees as a patriotic calling. One of his two daughters has followed in his footsteps. He refers to Watergate and the notorious tapes with some quite un-Woodwardesque vocabulary: “I get up in the morning and I think, ‘What are the bastards hiding?’. To be honest with you, it is not to be adversarial. It is to be sceptical.
“In my last conversation with Bush last year, I said to him, ‘I spent all my life trying to preserve my outsider status’ . . . You [have] to stay on the outside . . . I had to remind him that I preserve, and fought to preserve’ my status as an outsider; some people call me an insider and that’s laughable.”
. . .
So is he motivated by a distrust of people in power? “Democracy dies in darkness,” Woodward replies. “The real thing to worry about is secret government – the constant accumulation of power. It’s actually a conservative notion that accumulations of power aren’t good ... There’s a whole apparatus set up in government institutions to keep people from finding out what’s really going on.”
We have nearly finished our coffees. Who, I ask, is the great presidential chronicler’s favourite president? His answer, Gerald Ford, takes me by surprise. It was Ford who pardoned Nixon.
“Ford convinced me that to have his own presidency he had to give the presidential pardon to get it off the front page and, if there were further investigation, indictment, trial, jail – it could be two or three years.” A bit like Obama and the torturers, I prompt, given the new president’s often-stated reluctance to prosecute those within the Bush-Cheney administration who paved the legal ground for torture. “Obama should relax about that,” he replies.
I cannot resist asking what it is like to be played by Robert Redford in All the President’s Men: “You have no idea how many women are disappointed by me,” he says. Does he get along with Bernstein? Woodward denies that it was a fraught Lennon/McCartney-style relationship. And what kind of advances did publishers pay for his books?
“Lots – you should always be humbled by that; nothing lasts,” Woodward said. “You know, like Bush said, he has a duty to free people, I think I have a duty to keep plugging at them and find out what happened.”
Edward Luce is the FT’s Washington bureau chief
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Hay-Adams Hotel16th & H Streets, Washington DC
Roasted natural grown tomato and basil soup x 2Panseared Maryland jumbo lump crab, green onion mashed potatoes, and red pesto and lemon sauceNatural sautéed veal scallopini, baby spinach, Pennsylvania mushrooms, and roasted chateaux potatoesDouble espressos x 2
Total (including service) $133.08