On Campus
Bob Woodward tells war stories, defends old-fashioned fact-gathering
Conversation with faculty and students part of SCILS’ 25th anniversary celebration
Bob Woodward – author of 14 books about politics and popular culture, assistant managing editor of The Washington Post and, most famously, the buttoned- down half of the reporting team that broke the Watergate story – asked a Rutgers audience last week not to take his profession too seriously.
"I’d like to shoot down the notion that those of us in the news business know what we’re doing,” Woodward said. He spoke at the Cook Campus Center on the New Brunswick Campus November 2, a guest of the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS), as part of the school’s 25th anniversary celebration.
What reporters do when they’re doing their jobs correctly, Woodward said, is to tell the rest of us what the facts are – not what they mean. He offered as an example the aftermath of the Watergate story. When President Gerald Ford pardoned his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon, Woodward was still asleep in a hotel room in New York City. His reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, called him bright and early with the news. “Carl Bernstein, then and now, is a master at conveying the most information with the fewest possible words,” Woodward recalled. “His exact words were these: ‘The sonofabitch pardoned the sonofabitch.’”
Woodward remembered being as outraged as Bernstein. “He [Nixon] was at the center [of Watergate], and he got off and 40 people went to jail,” Woodward said.
But 25 years later, when Woodward was working on a book about the legacy of Watergate, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (Simon & Schuster, 1999), he interviewed Gerald Ford several times and came to believe that Ford had done the right thing for the country in pardoning Nixon. Ford told Woodward that he thought that more trials and investigations, particularly those including Nixon himself, would further divide the country. Reflecting on this, Woodward came to agree. “Even I, who had enjoyed the last two and a half years of Watergate, couldn’t have taken another two and a half years of Watergate,” Woodward said.
Not long after the book came out, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation bestowed its Profiles in Courage Award on Ford. And, in 2003, Woodward himself received the Gerald R. Ford Prize for distinguished reporting on the presidency.
Woodward’s appearance at Rutgers resulted from his relationship with his former assistant, David Greenberg, now assistant professor of journalism and media studies at SCILS. Greenberg said working for Woodward as an editorial assistant on The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (Simon & Schuster, 1994) was a key experience in his career choice. Greenberg, who writes about the relationship between the presidency and the media, said he was impressed right away by Woodward’s dedication to the facts of the story. He also was impressed, and remains so, with Woodward’s work ethic. “I think of him as the James Brown of journalism – the hardest-working man in the business,” Greenberg said.
During his conversation with students and faculty – for it was more a conversation than a talk – Woodward professed himself unworried about the future of print journalism, since the news – the facts – were what mattered, whether they appeared on paper or on a computer screen. He confessed to being a bit at sea when it comes to new media, particularly when it came to charting a career. When a student asked him for advice on how to build a journalistic career on that very subject, Woodward declined. “I’m 64 years old,” he said, “and there’s no possible way I can give advice.”
Greenberg suggested to Woodward that he was more current than he made out – since, after all, he had his own Facebook page. “I do?” Woodward asked, genuinely surprised.
He did, but as it turned out, not because he arranged it. Emily McInerny, a junior political science major who was in the audience, confessed to having constructed the page with a classmate after Woodward’s great anonymous Watergate source, Deep Throat, revealed himself as former FBI man Mark Felt. Woodward joked back and forth with her, and she gave him the password to his Facebook site.
Finally, Woodward described a journalist’s job as the best job in the world. “As a journalist, by definition, you make an entrance into someone’s life when they’re interesting,” Woodward said. “And when they cease to be interesting, you leave.”