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 there, 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 journalist and former editor of The New York Times Gene Roberts.Roy J. Harris, Jr., Pulitzer's Gold, 2007, p. 233, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, .
Woodward continued to work for The Washington Post after his reporting on Watergate. Since 1974, he has written 21 books on American politics and current affairs, 14 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.
Naval service After Yale, Woodward began a five-year tour of duty in the United States Navy, working as a communications officer. Woodward has sometimes been cited as working in intelligence, but Woodward denies this. 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
Early 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.Woodward, Bob, The Secret Man, pp. 17–20, 27–35, Simon and Schuster, 2005
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 (published in 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.
"Jimmy's World" scandal
In September 1980, a Sunday feature story appeared on the front page of the Post titled "Jimmy's World" in which reporter Janet Cooke wrote a profile of the life of an eight-year-old heroin addict. Although some within the Post doubted the story's veracity, it was defended by the paper's editors including Woodward, who was assistant managing editor. It was Woodward who submitted the story for Pulitzer Prize consideration, and Cooke was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing on April 13, 1981. The story was then found to be a complete fabrication, and the Pulitzer was returned. In retrospect, Woodward made the following statement:
1996 campaign finance controversy China's alleged role in the 1996 United States campaign finance controversy first gained public attention when Woodward and Brian Duffy published a story stating that a United States Department of Justice investigation into the fund-raising activities had uncovered evidence that Chinese agents sought to direct contributions from foreign sources to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) before the 1996 presidential campaign. The journalists wrote that intelligence information had shown the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. was used for coordinating contributions to the DNC.Woodward, Bob and Duffy, Brian, "Chinese Embassy Role In Contributions Probed", Washington Post, February 13, 1997
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, [I should have] said, '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.
Involvement in the Plame scandal
On November 14, 2005, Woodward gave a two-hour deposition to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. He testified that a senior administration official had told him in June 2003 that Iraq war critic Joe Wilson's wife (later identified as Valerie Plame) worked for the CIA as a WMD analyst, not as an undercover operative. Woodward appears to have been the first reporter to learn about her employment (albeit not her name) from a government source. The deposition was reported in The Washington Post on November 16, 2005, and was the first time Woodward revealed publicly that he had any special knowledge about the case. Woodward testified the information was given to him in a "casual" and "offhand" manner, and said that he does not believe it was part of any coordinated effort to "out" Plame as a CIA employee. Later, Woodward's source identified himself. It was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy and an internal critic of the Iraq War and the White House inner circle.
Woodward said the revelation came at the end of a long, confidential background interview for his 2004 book Plan of Attack. He did not reveal the official's disclosure at the time because it did not strike him as important. Later, he kept it to himself because it came as part of a confidential conversation with a source.
In his deposition, Woodward also said that he had conversations with Scooter Libby after the June 2003 conversation with his confidential administration source, and testified that it is possible that he might have asked Libby further questions about Joe Wilson's wife before her employment at the CIA and her identity were publicly known.
Woodward apologized to Leonard Downie Jr., editor of The Washington Post, for not informing him earlier of the June 2003 conversation. Downie accepted the apology and said even had the paper known it would not have changed its reporting.
New York University professor Jay Rosen severely criticized Woodward for allegedly being co-opted by the Bush White House and also for not telling the truth about his role in the Plame affair, writing: "Not only is Woodward not in the hunt, but he is slowly turning into the hunted. Part of what remains to be uncovered is how Woodward was played by the Bush team, and what they thought they were doing by leaking to him, as well as what he did with the dubious information he got."Jay Rosen, "Murray Waas Is Our Woodward Now" , PressThink (blog), April 9, 2006, accessed June 21, 2007
Sequester dispute with Obama administration On February 22, 2013, shortly before the United States federal budget sequester took effect, The Washington Post published a column by Woodward in which he criticized the Obama administration for their statements in 2012 and 2013 that the sequester had been proposed by Republicans in Congress; Woodward said his research showed that the sequester proposal had originated with the White House. Press Secretary Jay Carney confirmed, "The sequester was something that was discussed, and as has been reported, it was an idea that the White House put forward."
On February 27, Woodward told Politico that before the column was published, Woodward had called a senior White House official, later identified by reporters as economic adviser Gene Sperling, to discuss the piece, and that the official had "yelled at [Woodward] for about a half-hour" before sending him a page-long email that included the sentence, "I think you will regret staking out that claim." In Politico reporting, Woodward's focus on that line was described as "making clear he saw [that sentence] as a veiled threat", although Woodward did not use the word "threat" or "threatened". Several other sources also indicated that Woodward had described the line as an intended threat.