Crucial historic query about Woodward is: How does he do it? Over almost a half-century, no different particular person—together with individuals
Crucial historic query about Woodward is: How does he do it?
Over almost a half-century, no different particular person—together with individuals wielding official energy as legislators or prosecutors—has executed as a lot to light up the fashionable presidency and assist form understanding of the 9 individuals to carry the workplace throughout his profession as Woodward, wielding solely a journalist’s unofficial powers of curiosity, notepad, and recorder.
But at the same time as Woodward has made it his life’s work to demystify presidents, his personal type and strategies stay shrouded in fastidiously cultivated mystique. This paradox—he retains his secrets and techniques, whereas exposing these of his influential topics—is central to his work.
I’m not asserting full understanding of the how-Bob-does-it dynamic. However I’ve had a good window on the query from two views. One is as a pleasant colleague of Woodward’s—he’s a technology older than me—once we overlapped in my twenty years at The Washington Publish, and on quite a few events I benefited from his generosity. The opposite is as somebody who additionally has written and reported on the presidency (Invoice Clinton’s most of all) and has spoken typically with White Home officers about their decisions of whether or not and how you can have interaction with Woodward. Nearly invariably the reply as to whether is “sure” and to how is “on phrases favorable to Woodward.”
This makes him an amazing car for understanding the tradition and psychology of Washington, the interaction between authorities and media, and the methods these have modified in current a long time. Publicly, throughout the information enterprise, there’s virtually common respect for Woodward and his astonishing profession. Privately, when reporters shoot the breeze amongst themselves or with sources, it’s not unusual to listen to grumbling about how his books don’t comply with typical journalistic guidelines of the type that will apply to day by day newspapers.
The good theme of Woodward’s profession has been that each presidency is constructed to a point on phantasm, and that there’s all the time an amazing story in exploring the gulf between phantasm and actuality.
The phantasm is that presidents and the individuals round them are engaged in a solemn and dignified endeavor, that they’re righteous individuals pursuing the general public curiosity, and, above all, they’re in management. The fact doesn’t all the time contradict this phantasm, however there’s all the time a stress. That’s as a result of the truth is by definition about life-size individuals—stuffed with blind spots, insecurities, and private agendas—who can’t reside as much as heroic illusions. Actual decision-making is harried and improvisational, not solemn and dignified. All White Homes are beset with rivalries and antagonisms; no White Home is definitely as in management—even of its personal individuals and course of, by no means thoughts occasions themselves—because it hopes to venture to the general public.
By no means was the hole between phantasm and actuality starker than with the president originally of Woodward’s profession, Richard Nixon, who beneath his typical and pious exterior was a person of agitated obsessions and criminality. Nixon’s whole political venture was about masking up the artifice on the heart of his profession.
Trump places the basic Woodward strategy of exploring the hole between phantasm and actuality in an odd place. This president, a veteran of the on line casino enterprise, has by no means pretended to be a person of conference or piety. The hole between the bottom motives and public chaos seen for anybody to see and the bottom motives and personal chaos revealed by Woodward’s reporting is definitely fairly slender. Not like Nixon’s determined bid to hide his artifice, the largest revelation in “Rage” comes from Trump positively boasting about his artifice, together with his unselfconscious assertion that he deliberately performed down the seriousness of the coronavirus originally of the pandemic to keep away from public panic.
Irrespective of. Trump was bested by the Woodward methods a minimum of Nixon was. These methods relaxation on Woodward’s understanding of 5 sorts of energy.
The Energy of Tick-Tock
Woodward is usually known as an investigative reporter, however most of his profession doesn’t mirror investigative reporting as journalists normally consider it. There’s a quite common sort—an obsessive, typically socially awkward, particular person, who thinks of himself as a born outsider. This particular person makes use of paperwork and sources (typically equally obsessive sorts) buried deep throughout the forms to pry free info that folks on the prime don’t need informed.
Woodward, since he made the pivot a long time in the past to emphasise ebook writing over day by day newspaper work, is a grasp of a unique style: The narrative reconstruction of how a choice will get made. Reporters name these “tick-tocks” as a result of they depend on the notion that readers are getting a moment-by-moment account of what actually occurred. Woodward used to inform younger reporters on the Publish that as a author he typically considered himself like a film director, “constructing scenes” that will seize character and unfolding occasions in vivid methods.
In Woodward’s tick-tocks, he might have some sources decrease down however crucial ones are larger up: Principals, together with presidents, who share their tales. With these sources, they might feign reticence however not like in basic investigative reporting they aren’t throwing up stone partitions. Woodward, and different practitioners of this style, faucet into an important dimension of human nature: Individuals discover their very own tales fairly attention-grabbing, and wish to inform them. At a minimal, they are not looking for different, doubtlessly biased or adversarial sources, telling the story.
George Stephanopoulos, in his 1998 Clinton-era memoir “All Too Human,” gave one of the best account of what it’s like as a White Home official coping with Woodward. “I knew that Woodward all the time beguiled sources into saying greater than they need to,” Stephanopoulos wrote. “However like so many others who had supped at his desk and spoken into his cassettes underneath the duvet of ‘deep background,’ I used to be conceited sufficient to consider that I may beat him at his personal recreation, that my spin would win.”
The Energy of Deep Background
With few exceptions, virtually all of Woodward’s interviews are on this situation: He can use the fabric, however with no direct attribution.
As a rule, journalists are all the time alleged to want on-the-record quotes to background materials. Woodward normally frames his use of background as a needed safety granted to sources to get them to talk actually.
What he doesn’t emphasize is that this offers him an enormous benefit over topics: It permits Woodward to imagine the Voice of God. For the reason that reader—and even different sources with firsthand information—can’t know for positive who stated what, it permits Woodward to recount episodes as one thing near omniscient narrator.
If each single supply agreed to speak however did so on the document, together with his or her personal transcript made public, it might be laborious to write down a Woodward ebook within the basic type. It could reveal what most individuals intuitively find out about any necessary episode in any enviornment of public or personal life: There are key details that may be fairly ascertained, however there’s not often capital-T Reality. What there’s are fragmentary recollections, conflicting accounts, distortions attributable to ignorance and ego, or typically simply variations of emphasis between individuals of equally good intentions.
The Woodward narration methods are one of many essential issues that makes many different journalists bridle. He sometimes recounts prolonged passages of dialogue between principals. Except somebody is secretly taping a gathering, it’s unlikely certainly that the conversations from reminiscence are ever so exact. Attempt it your self about some assembly at your office—who precisely stated precisely what?—even 30 minutes after the actual fact.
Individually, I don’t need to consider that dialogue is exactly correct to assign it worth as a trustworthy expression of the overall spirit of what occurred.
The Energy of Standing
Woodward’s profession overlaps with two associated developments in Washington tradition. One is the now commonplace tendency of once-anonymous senior governmental officers to capitalize—with each cash and media consideration—on their public service tenures. The opposite is the blossoming of journalism, not less than within the Washington context among the many best-known journalists, right into a occupation with excessive social standing.
Each developments assist Woodward’s trigger. A White Home chief of workers or nationwide safety adviser might briefly, so long as she or he is within the job, have extra Washington swat than a well-known journalist like Woodward or, say, Wolf Blitzer. However the journalists have extra enduring swat, and the chief of workers or nationwide safety adviser fairly doubtless will wish to keep on their good sides as soon as out of energy operating their very own profitable consulting agency. Woodward met Deep Throat at a parking storage in Virginia simply over Key Bridge from Georgetown (and simply up the road from the POLITICO newsroom) however lately he’s extra more likely to keep in Georgetown to interview sources who’re flattered to just accept an invite to speak over dinner at Woodward’s personal home.
A president’s realization that subordinates typically are extra invested in reaping the rewards of everlasting Washington than they’re loyal to him is usually a searing expertise. After Woodward wrote “The Agenda,” about Clinton’s early funds battles, the president was shocked by how a lot inside info had been shared by subordinates. From then on, he modified his type in conferences, now not pondering out loud or believing that what was stated would keep within the room. “That Woodward ebook tore my guts out, and I didn’t deal with it utterly nicely,” Clinton later informed Stephanopoulos.
For his half, Woodward informed “60 Minutes” that Clinton’s working type was, “Chaos, absolute chaos”—a line that appears quaint by the requirements of the Trump period.
The Energy of Thriller
The identification of Deep Throat—unknown for 33 years till the revelation that it was senior FBI official Mark Felt in 2005—is clearly the signature thriller of Woodward’s profession.
Actually, for individuals actually within the know, it might not have been that a lot a thriller. As early as the autumn of 1972, nicely earlier than Deep Throat grew to become immortalized in Woodward’s and associate Carl Bernstein’s “All of the President’s Males,” Nixon and Bob Haldeman have been recorded on White Home tapes speculating precisely that Felt was feeding info to the Publish.
Woodward evidently believes that maintaining as a lot thriller about his work—What’s he engaged on? Who’s he speaking to? What’s it going to say?—for so long as doable is a crucial a part of his private model.
Leonard Downie Jr., the previous government editor of the Publish, says in a brand new memoir (“All Concerning the Story”) that Woodward was cagey and secretive even with him— the boss of the newsroom—concerning the information in his forthcoming books.
That is totally different than the type of most journalists, who are usually inveterate gossips about their very own work and everybody else’s. However it clearly works for Woodward—it was his fame and the mystique about his work that triggered Trump to provide him 17 self-damning interviews for “Rage.”