[Mb-civic] The Man With the Inside Scoop - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

The Man With the Inside Scoop
For Bob Woodward, Proximity to Power Cuts Both Ways

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 28, 2005; C01

It was a cinematic image that lured thousands of young people into 
journalism, Robert Redford coaxing information out of Hal Holbrook in a 
dimly lit parking garage.

And since, in real life, Bob Woodward fiercely protected Deep Throat's 
identity, what lingered was the mystique of a dogged journalist, plying 
his trade in the shadows.

Three decades older and millions of dollars richer, Woodward still has 
plenty of secret sources, but they work in the highest reaches of the 
Bush administration. They are molding history rather than revealing 
Watergate-style corruption. Some have even used the press to strike back 
against a critic of their war by revealing the identity of a CIA 
operative. And the public is no longer as enamored of reporters and 
their unnamed informants.

In the days since the Washington Post assistant managing editor 
apologized to his paper for failing to reveal his role in the CIA leak 
controversy, Woodward, 62, has found himself under fire not just over 
this incident but for his very approach to journalism. His unusual 
relationship with The Post, and whether he hoards newsworthy material 
for his books, have also come under fresh scrutiny.

Although he has spoken to CNN's Larry King and the Village Voice in the 
past week, Woodward declined several requests for an on-the-record 
interview with The Post, saying only that "I think the work speaks for 
itself."

In today's polarized political atmosphere, Woodward's journalistic 
methods have been assailed by those who view him as dependent on the 
Bush inner circle for the narratives that drive his bestsellers.

Still, his track record of consistently breaking news -- the New York 
Times ran two front-page pieces on his book "Plan of Attack," examining 
the prelude to the Iraq war -- is probably unmatched by any other 
journalist. In his 14 books since helping to unravel the Watergate 
scandal as a 29-year-old local reporter, Woodward has penetrated such 
varied institutions as the Supreme Court, the CIA and the Federal Reserve.

Most reporters -- whether they cover city hall, Hollywood studios or the 
local baseball team -- depend on access to the decision makers or 
celebrities who populate their beat. But they also publish or broadcast 
most of their stories as events unfold. Under Woodward's unusual 
relationship with The Post, he stays on the payroll while mainly writing 
books from his Georgetown home, with the paper carrying excerpts -- and 
providing a publicity boost -- upon publication. This has sparked some 
resentment among the staff.

Executive Editor Leonard Downie, maintaining that The Post benefits 
greatly from the arrangement, says Woodward "has gone from being someone 
who was on the outside to someone who has such access, who's famous, 
who's recognized on the street, who's treated by celebrities and very 
high officials as an equal." And, says Downie, "his access has produced 
a lot of information about the inner workings of this White House, the 
Clinton White House, the first Bush administration, and documents, 
actual documents, that nobody else has gotten."

Downie concedes that months sometimes go by without any contact with 
Woodward, adding that they have now agreed to communicate more often. He 
says Woodward occasionally volunteers to break off from his book 
research to produce news stories for The Post, especially with material 
too timely to be held, and sometimes does so at Downie's request. In 
fact, it was when Downie asked Woodward to work on the CIA leak case 
last month that the reporter acknowledged that a senior administration 
official had told him in 2003 that Valerie Plame, the wife of White 
House critic Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA.

A Special Niche

Woodward, of course, is hardly the first Washington journalist to move 
easily in the corridors of power. In earlier eras, Walter Lippmann, 
Joseph Alsop and James Reston had the ear of presidents and prime 
ministers. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked Reston if he would 
say on his own authority, in his New York Times column, that the 
administration would respond militarily if the Soviets tried to block 
U.S. access to Berlin. Only toward the end of his career, as the media 
culture turned more adversarial, did some critics question whether 
Reston should have allowed his column to be used as an instrument of 
diplomacy.

Woodward's role is different in that he weaves the intelligence he 
collects from the powerful into book-length form, freed from regular 
deadlines, with hundreds of pages to flesh out his instant histories. He 
is different in that he takes no unpaid leave to produce his books -- 
unlike most working reporters -- crafting his volumes for Simon & 
Schuster while retaining The Post's cachet. He is different in that he 
is a brand name, returning to the same cast of characters again and 
again, a luxury afforded one of the few nonfiction authors whose books 
consistently hit No. 1. He is different in that he is more famous than 
most of the people he interviews.

These days, a sizable number of newspaper and television reporters 
(including this one) also write books or appear regularly on TV public 
affairs shows, but unlike Woodward, they also must produce regularly for 
their primary employers. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Woodward has 
written one news story, one Outlook piece and one book review for The 
Post, not including his book excerpts. These excerpts are carefully 
edited by the paper, Downie says, they sometimes require additional 
reporting, and Woodward tells at least one top editor who the unnamed 
sources are.

Such sources, of course, are at the heart of Woodward's work. "To get 
what's in the bottom of the barrel," he told CNN's King, "you have to 
establish relationships of confidentiality with people at all levels of 
government. You have to establish relationships of trust."

But the bonds of trust with some readers seem to have been frayed, if 
feedback to the paper is any measure. When Downie hosted an online chat 
recently, the questioners' tone was strikingly hostile.

"Do you think Woodward was covering up for the vice president?" one 
reader asked. "I used to regard Mr. Woodward as a hero," said another. 
"Mr. Woodward appeared to be more interested in protecting his book than 
reporting the news," said a third.

While most reporters are lauded for cultivating high-level sources, Jay 
Rosen, a New York University journalism professor, sees a 
"disillusionment" with Woodward over these confidential relationships. 
"Woodward for so long was a symbol of adversarial journalism because of 
the Watergate legend," Rosen says. "But he really has become an access 
journalist, someone who's an insider."

The harshest critiques have come from liberals who admired Woodward's 
role in toppling Richard Nixon but detest his relationship with 
President Bush. "A reporter who once brought down one corrupt 
administration now finds himself protecting another," says a headline in 
Mother Jones magazine.

Woodward made a "serious mistake" in not informing him about the Plame 
conversation, Downie says, even as Woodward was repeatedly criticizing 
special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as a "junkyard dog" whose conduct 
in issuing subpoenas to reporters was "disgraceful." But, says Downie, 
"the fact that people would see that as a firing offense is unfathomable 
to me."

Woodward, who once headed the Metro staff, is widely admired at The 
Post, but a series of incidents has made some staffers question his 
loyalty to the paper. The Post was scooped on his book "Plan of Attack" 
in April 2004 when the Associated Press obtained an advance copy. Vanity 
Fair, not The Post, was the first to reveal this past spring that Deep 
Throat was Mark Felt, although in that case Woodward believed the 
91-year-old former FBI official lacked the mental capacity to release 
him from his long-ago pledge. Metro reporters who wanted to know where 
they held their parking-garage meetings were miffed when Woodward 
revealed the Arlington location first to NBC's Tom Brokaw.

And much of the staff was puzzled this month when, on the day he 
acknowledged having testified in the Plame case, Woodward released a 
statement but would not answer questions from Post reporters.

In refusing to disclose his source -- except to Downie, The Post's 
attorneys and then Fitzgerald during his recent testimony -- Woodward 
has said he was standing up for the principle of confidentiality. Former 
New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who recently left her job after 
being hammered over her erroneous reporting on whether Iraq harbored 
weapons of mass destruction, said she was protecting the same principle 
by serving 85 days in jail. Detractors say both operated with few 
constraints at their newspapers.

But "unlike Judy Miller, his editor is on his side," New Yorker media 
writer Ken Auletta says of Woodward. "His editor said he made a mistake. 
He hasn't made very many, and he's a man of great integrity." As for 
Woodward's unique access to all the president's men, Auletta says: 
"People confuse access with softness."

David Gergen, a Harvard professor and an editor at U.S. News & World 
Report, was a Nixon White House aide when he first dealt with Woodward. 
He says Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, and others told him "that 
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were dead wrong, that this was all a 
vendetta." But, he says of Woodward's role, "it turned out he was the 
truth teller and the other people were lying. . . .

"I do think that Bob's politics have changed some over the years. He's 
much more sympathetic to the establishment, especially the Republican 
establishment," Gergen says. But after "30 years as a trailblazer," he 
adds, Woodward "doesn't deserve" the level of criticism directed at him.

Each Woodward book has generated its share of controversy -- 
particularly a hospital bed scene with a dying CIA chief William Casey 
in "The Veil" -- but nothing like the impassioned debate surrounding the 
Bush volumes. His books about Bill Clinton's administration, while 
nowhere near as polarizing as the work on Bush, were also dependent on 
top-level sources.

"He needs as his window into history the people who talk to him," says 
former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry, noting that not everyone in 
that White House cooperated with Woodward. "That gives you a very flawed 
and distorted view.

"I certainly was a source on some of his books. I felt like I ended up 
having a prominent role that really didn't reflect reality. My role was 
inflated because I talked to him. You become part of the breathless 
narrative."

Gergen, who worked for Clinton before McCurry joined the White House, 
says his bosses told him he was expected to talk to Woodward once a week.

During the Bush years, Woodward has enjoyed what seems like unfettered 
access to the likes of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Andrew Card and I. 
Lewis "Scooter" Libby. His highest-level source is Bush himself, who has 
granted him several long, on-the-record interviews and ordered Defense 
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who initially turned down Woodward, to 
cooperate with the reporter.

Mary Matalin, a former aide to Cheney, says Woodward does "an 
extraordinary job" and "works like a dog." But outsiders often wonder: 
Why does an administration not known for being fond of the press put so 
much effort into cooperating with Woodward?

"There is a really deep respect for his work, and a deep desire by the 
president to have a contemporaneous, historically accurate account," 
Matalin says. "The president rightly believed that Woodward, for good 
and ill, warts and all, would chronicle what happened. It's in the White 
House's interest to have a neutral source writing the history of the way 
Bush makes decisions. That's why the White House gives him access."

The Game of Access

Woodward views himself as conducting the same kind of reporting -- 
piling fact upon fact from a range of sources -- as he did during 
Watergate, with the added benefit of access to Bush. He has said Bush is 
just one voice in a complex narrative and that he includes material that 
does not necessarily cast the president in a favorable light.

Woodward's 2002 book, "Bush at War," was a largely positive portrayal of 
the successful military campaign in Afghanistan, and some critics 
derided it as too soft on the president. But last year's "Plan of 
Attack" was more of a critical success.

The book made headlines with reports that Rumsfeld had given the Saudi 
ambassador a heads-up on the coming war, that then-CIA Director George 
Tenet had called the weapons intelligence a "slam dunk," and that 
then-Secretary of State Powell had warned Bush on Iraq that "you break 
it, you own it." Campaign aides to both Bush and John Kerry embraced the 
book, seizing on different aspects.

Fresh memories of events can also be crucial, academics say. "If you 
didn't have Woodward at the time or shortly afterward pushing people 
very hard to get information for his books, much of that stuff would be 
lost forever," says historian Michael Beschloss.

What, then, explains the recent storm of criticism? "There's an enormous 
jealousy factor over this guy," says Jeff Leen, The Post's assistant 
managing editor for investigations, who has worked closely with 
Woodward. "People like to see the king fall. . . . There are a lot of 
armchair quarterbacks who couldn't carry Woodward's shoes but are 
weighing in on whether he should keep his job."

Some liberals, while crediting Woodward's past work, suggest he has been 
co-opted.

"The administration plays along with this by giving him some juicy 
details in service of the larger effort to make Bush look like he walks 
on water," says Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the American Prospect. "Bob 
is the willing enabler of that, and it's shameful. Bob has it both ways 
-- he's the court biographer and he keeps intact his reputation as an 
investigator."

Kuttner accuses Woodward of running "a protection racket -- you sit 
still for an interview and you get treated generously. You don't 
cooperate with Woodward and it's going to be hell."

Woodward dismissed criticism of any "quid pro quo," telling King: "I'm 
not compromising anything. And anyone who looks at the books or the 
coverage will see that it has some pretty tough stuff in it. At the same 
time, the president or others get to express their point of view."

Gergen calls Woodward "one of the most seductive individuals in the 
whole world," one who will stress that he's already spoken to others in 
a meeting and that "you're only going to hurt yourself and hurt the 
cause you care about if you don't talk."

Woodward has faulted himself for not being more aggressive before the 
war when three sources told him the weapons intelligence on Iraq was not 
as strong as the administration was claiming. "I blame myself mightily 
for not pushing harder," he said last year.

Woodward, who employs researchers at his own expense, disputes the 
notion that he saves all his material for his books. Indeed, he wrote 
numerous stories for The Post after 9/11 that, combined with the work of 
colleagues, won the paper a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

On Sept. 28, 2001, he disclosed a handwritten note left behind by 
hijacker Mohamed Atta. On Oct. 21, he revealed that Bush had signed an 
intelligence order directing the CIA to take lethal action against Osama 
bin Laden and al Qaeda. On May 18, 2002, Woodward co-wrote a piece 
disclosing that a top-secret memo presented to Bush a month before the 
attacks was headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

"The man was a dynamo," Leen says. "All hell was breaking loose, and he 
went out and brought the story back. He does triangulation reporting. He 
goes back to people and back to people and back to people." At the 
paper, however, "people are obviously intimidated by him," Leen says. 
"You don't approach Bob Woodward and give him an order like you would 
other reporters."

At the same time, Woodward has readily collaborated with Post 
colleagues, sometimes passing along information without credit.

As an author, Woodward regularly reconstructs scenes without identifying 
sources, a practice that stirred controversy again with the Bush books. 
"If you don't know where the information is coming from, it really does 
diminish the value of the book you're reading," says historian Robert 
Dallek.

Rick Shenkman, a history professor at George Mason University, says 
Woodward's books are "very, very important" in an age when presidents 
and their top aides no longer keep diaries or write letters for fear of 
possible subpoenas. "To the extent Bob Woodward has become a captive of 
their narrative, that's to the advantage of historians," Shenkman says. 
"He's channeling these people."

For all his fame and fortune, Woodward will forever be compared with the 
scrappy shoe-leather reporter who was investigating a president three 
decades ago, rather than sitting down with a president for long chats at 
his Texas ranch.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/27/AR2005112701140.html?nav=hcmodule
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