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Subsequently, the investigations of the Senate Watergate Committee, the House Judiciary Committee and the Watergate Special prosecutor showed that the Woodward-Bernstein reporting had been accurate and perhaps understated the scope and depth of the criminality and abuse of power.

Over 40 people went to jail because of the Watergate investigations, including Nixon’s top White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and Nixon’s main attorneys, former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, White House Counsel John W. Dean and Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal attorney. The Senate report follows and supports much of the reporting by Bernstein and Woodward on the Watergate break-in, cover-up, Nixon White House and re-election campaign espionage, sabotage and fundraising.

Woodward’s first book with Bernstein, All the President’s Men, became a #1 national bestseller in the spring and summer before Nixon resigned in The movie version of All the President’s Men became a classic, with Robert Redford starring as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein.

David Halberstam, in his book The Powers That Be, reported how Seymour Hersh of The New York Times did important reporting on Watergate, especially on the payments of hush-money to the Watergate burglars.

But, Halberstam wrote of Hersh, “Woodward and Bernstein were always ahead; he was amazed at how good they were and how hard they worked, he who had always outworked everyone else, he was in awe of their energy and drive. His recurrent nightmare was of arriving at some lawyer’s office and seeing Woodward leaving it. Often that nightmare turned out to be true .

. . . It was an unusual feeling for Seymour Hersh, the feeling that someone was always just a little ahead of him.”

More than 25 years later, Hersh, who was then working for The New Yorker, endorsed Woodward’s care. “The one thing about Bob that’s amazing, he gets it right,” Hersh was quoted saying in The New York Times.

One of the leading academic historians of Watergate, Professor Michael Shudson of the University of California, San Diego wrote that Woodward’s and Bernstein’s reporting gave the tradition of muckraking “flesh and blood (Woodward and Bernstein) as well as an unforgettable knock-out-punch triumph (Nixon’s resignation).”

“The most obvious impact of Watergate on the media was to establish The Washington Post as a significant rival to The New York Times in national political reporting.

This has lastingly, altered the map of political journalism,” Shudson said.

Watergate, he also claimed, led to “the renewal, reinvigorization and remythologization of muckraking . . . between Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Ray Stannard Baker in , and Woodward and Bernstein in and , it had no culturally resonant, heroic exemplars.

But Woodward and Bernstein did not simply renew, they extended the power of the muckraking image.”

For Steffens, the corruption was in the local and state governments while the White House was a resource for pressuring for reform, Shudson said. If low and middle level campaign aides had been implicated, no one would remember Watergate, he said.

If Nixon’s top White House and campaign aides had been charged, Watergate would “be remembered as a great journalistic coup, bringing investigation into the White House itself. But it would not be the heart of American journalism mythology. Watergate found a president guilty of crimes, waist-deep in deception and forced him from office.

That makes Watergate, with all it complexities for the press, the unavoidable central myth of American journalism.”

The Frost/Nixon Interviews

Nixon himself had harsh words for Woodward and Bernstein during the famous David Frost televised interviews in The former president would not use their names, only referring to “the famous series by some unnamed correspondents” from The Washington Post.

When The Final Days had been published the year before, Pat Nixon had had a stroke, and in the Frost interviews Nixon chastised the two reporters for writing about his wife’s “alleged weaknesses.”

“They haven’t helped,” Nixon told Frost, adding that for, “those who write history as fiction on third-hand knowledge, I have nothing but utter contempt.

And I will never forgive them. Never!” Frost wrote in his book, “The words were spoken with utter hatred.” Then Nixon continued, “All I say is Mrs. Nixon read it, and her stroke came three days later. I didn’t want her to read it, because I knew the kind of trash it was, and the kind of trash they are . .

.” Nixon added his disclaimer, “But nevertheless, this doesn’t indicate that that caused the stroke, because the doctors don’t know what caused the stroke. But it sure didn’t help.”

Earlier in the taping session, Nixon had told Frost that “the greatest concentration of power in the United States today” is not in the White House, the Congress or the Supreme Court.

“It’s in the media. And it’s too much. . . . It’s too much power and it’s power that the Founding Fathers would have been very concerned about . .

. There is no check on the networks. There is no check on the newspapers.” In his book Frost said the session was “was perhaps the clearest window on the Nixon personality we might be able to obtain during the entire course of the tapings.”

Anthony Lewis in the New York Review of Books strongly disputed the account of a vote by his long-time friend Justice William Brennan in a criminal case (Moore v.

Illinois). According to The Brethren, Brennan refused to change his vote because he did not want to offend Justice Harry Blackmun, who would be important on upcoming obscenity and abortion cases. “He won’t leave Harry on this,” Brennan’s clerk reported. Woodward and Armstrong had the notes of Brennan’s clerk on the case, Paul Hoeber, who spoke on-the-record.

Lewis said that Hoeber later changed his story, which was supported by all but one of the other clerks on the court that term.

Woodward and Armstrong stuck by their account. Hoeber and his three co-clerks for Brennan that year initially wrote a letter to the Post disputing the account in the case but when told of the notes from interviews with Hoeber, they withdrew their letter.

In its review, The Los Angeles Times said 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. Business Week called it “The most comprehensive inside story ever written on the most important court in the world.”

Professor David J. Garrow, in a law journal article of June 22, cited files from Justice Lewis Powell, Jr.

showing how The Brethren stirred immense controversy within the court and perhaps had a direct impact on the decision in the Snepp v. United States decision. In that case, former CIA officer Frank Snepp had published a bestselling book, Decent Interval, exposing the CIA failures during the fall of Saigon in The Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision requiring Snepp to pay all his royalties to the government because he had not submitted his book for agency approval as required in his CIA contract.

Garrow cites Justice Powell’s internal correspondence that suggests the court anticipated a hemorrhage of leaks of court documents and secrets in the forthcoming book, The Brethren, and wanted to send a warning to future leakers.

Garrow wrote, “Over time, The Brethren has won a far more respectful reception from scholars than it did from its immediate reviewers.” He cites Georgetown Professor Mark Tushnet’s law journal article.

Tushnet, a former clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, wrote of The Brethren that “on most particulars and in its general depiction of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Burger, its accuracy has not been impugned.”

In her book, Becoming Justice Blackmun, Linda Greenhouse, the veteran New York Times reporter who had access to Blackmun’s extensive files from his years on the court, wrote that the Brethren’s “reliance on anonymous sources has made that best-selling book controversial, but, in many instances, Blackmun’s case files attest to its accuracy.” Greenhouse said that Blackmun gave two interviews for The Brethren and authorized his clerks to talk to Woodward and Armstrong but “Blackmun never revealed his cooperation to the other justices.” In an interview, Woodward disclosed how Justice Potter Stewart was the first justice to confidentially describe the court hostility to Chief Justice Warren Burger.

A number of officials, including President Reagan, publicly said that it was impossible that Woodward had interviewed Casey in his hospital room in January because they alleged Casey could not speak.

This was disputed by others who talked with Casey at the time.

For example, 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.

The CIA’s own 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.

Kessler also quotes Gates 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.”

The Agenda

Woodward’s next #1 bestseller was The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (), which was a graphic account of the disputes, temper tantrums and heated debates as the new president forged an economic recovery plan.

“An authoritative behind-the-scenes look at how things get done in the Clinton White House,” said Robert A. Rankin in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

More than a decade after The Agenda was published, in his book on the Clinton presidency, The Survivor, John F. Harris wrote, “Only someone who has worked to understand the Clinton presidency in retrospect can truly appreciate the magnitude of Woodward’s achievements in capturing so many essential facts and truths about the political and policy dramas of those years at the very moment they were unfolding.”

In his memoir, All Too Human, George Stephanopoulos, the Clinton communications director, wrote that the Agenda was “a comprehensive and basically accurate account.” He quotes President Clinton saying, “That Woodward book tore my guts out.” Stephanopoulos also described in detail how Woodward won his own cooperation, and he quotes Hillary Clinton saying in July , “The whole problem with this administration is the Woodward book.

It’s hurting us overseas, and it’s the reason all our numbers are down.”

The Choice

Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate

In his book Shadow, Woodward examined the impact of the scandal on Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton.

“Shadow is a meticulously documented chronicle of self-delusion and self-pity,” wrote Mary McGrory.

Several aides in the Clinton White House disputed emotional accounts of Hillary Clinton’s life in the White House and her reaction when her husband acknowledged he had had a sexual relationship with former intern Monica Lewinsky.

Woodward reported that Hillary had felt “angry .

Bob woodward washington post biography jew or muslim: Covert Aid to Afghans on the Rise; Rep. Examined a series of standoffs between Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner and how this broken relationship affected economic policy. He gave the Robert C. Drawing from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, contemporaneous meeting notes, files, documents and personal diaries, Fear brings to light the explosive debates that drive decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence.

. . betrayed . . . lonely . . . exasperated . . .humiliated.”

But Hillary Clinton’s own memoir, Living History, published in , described her reaction when her husband told her of the affair in almost the same terms. On page of Living History, she wrote, “I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him .

. . Why did you lie to me? . . . . I was furious . . . I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged . . . He had betrayed the trust in our marriage, and we both knew it might be an irreparable breach . . . This was the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience of my life.” On page , she wrote, “I was left with nothing but profound sadness, disappointment and unresolved anger.

I could barely speak to Bill, and when I did, it was a tirade . . . I felt unbearably lonely.”

Maestro & the Federal Reserve

In an afterword in the paperback edition of the book published the next year, Woodward criticized Alan Greenspan for not speaking out more aggressively and frequently about the stock market bubble: “I think he could have made a greater, more visible and prolonged effort—a careful and repeated warning about exuberance and greed might have tamed the markets.

Even if he had failed, it might have been worth trying. In a sense, he held back his greatest asset: his immense knowledge and experience. It could have been his most important forecast.”

In his 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."

In his last two books on Bush, Woodward departed from his neutral style and rendered some harsh judgments on the president. The last line of State of Denial reads, “With all Bush’s upbeat talk and optimism, he had not told the American public the truth about what Iraq had become.” And in The War Within, Woodward concluded that President Bush maintained a detachment from managing the Iraq War: “He never got a handle on it, and over these years of war, too often he failed to lead.”

In an exhaustive, 3,word review, Jill Abramson, the managing editor of The New York Times praised the four books.

“It is impossible not to be impressed by Woodward’s reporting, which provides a vivid week-by-week chronology, from the post-9/11 attack on Afghanistan to the Iraq surge, of how the president’s war policy unspooled and of its consequences … There is immense value in the Woodward quartet. The fine detail is wonderfully illuminating and cumulatively these books may be the best record we will ever get of the events they cover … they stand as the fullest story yet of the Bush presidency and of the war that is likely to be its most important legacy.”

Bush At War, 9/11, and Afghanistan

Plan of Attack & Iraq

Woodward’s Bush second book, Plan of Attack, included nearly three and a half hours of interviews with Bush and quoted from dozens of classified documents and secret meetings at length.

Included are detailed accounts of disputes between Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell over the alleged connection between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network that attacked the United States on 9/ At one point, the book reports, Powell concluded that Cheney had a “fever” and “an unhealthy fixation” on converting ambiguous intelligence to fact.

The book also shows how the White House orchestrated aggressive briefings on Iraq intelligence for 71 senators and members of the House.

The New York Times ran front page stories on April 17 and April 19, about the disclosures in Plan of Attack, saying that it “has jolted the White House.”

The New York Times book review said Plan of Attack “offers by far the most intimate glimpse we have been granted of the Bush White House, and, better still, a glimpse of the Administration’s defining moment.”

The revelation in Vanity Fair magazine that W.

Mark Felt, the No. 2 official at the FBI in , was Woodward’s Watergate source “Deep Throat” all but ended decades of speculation.

Woodward’s own 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 at the age of

At a memorial service for Felt in Santa Rosa, CA on Jan. 16, , 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.”

Ed Gray writes in In Nixon’s Web that he still believes Deep Throat was a composite. Gray is the son of the late L. Patrick Gray III who was acting director of the FBI from and Felt’s boss. Ed Gray cites notes at the University of Texas, which bought Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate papers and files for $5 million, that he says attribute a meeting with Donald Santarelli, a former Justice Department official during Watergate, to Felt.

This is one page of typed notes for a March 24, meeting. Woodward has never said there was a meeting with Deep Throat then, and there is no such meeting described in All the President’s Men or The Secret Man, which provide the most detailed accounts of the Woodward-Felt meetings. These notes obviously are not notes of a conversation with Felt because the notes twice quote the source referring to “Felt” by name.

Stephen Mielke, an archivist at the University of Texas who oversees the Woodward-Bernstein papers, said that the original page of notes is in the Mark Felt file but, “The carbon is located with the handwritten and typed notes attributed to Santarelli.” Mielke says it is likely the page was misfiled under Felt because no source was identified.

Ed Gray said that Santarelli confirmed to him that he was the source behind the statements in the notes.