Bob Woodward

His father was a lawyer in Wheaton, Illinois, who became chief judge of the 18th Judicial Circuit and who raised three children alone after the divorce, then remarried. Woodward went to Yale on a Navy ROTC scholarship, read history and English literature, and graduated in 1965 owing the Navy five years. He spent them as a communications officer. Aboard the USS Wright, which the Pentagon kept fitted out as a floating emergency command post, he was one of two officers cleared to handle nuclear launch codes. Later he served on the USS Fox under Admiral Robert Welander. He has sometimes been described as an intelligence officer and denies it. Discharged a lieutenant in August 1970, he was admitted to Harvard Law School and did not go.

He asked the Post for a job instead. The metropolitan editor gave him a two-week tryout and declined to hire him, because he had never worked at a newspaper. He put in a year at the Montgomery Sentinel, a suburban weekly, and the Post hired him in 1971. The following June, police arrested five men inside the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate, and he and Carl Bernstein got the story. The paper won the 1973 Pulitzer for Public Service. All the President's Men in 1974 and The Final Days in 1976 turned the reporting into a genre and the reporters into celebrities. What followed was half a century of the same method aimed at the executive branch — Veil, The Agenda, Maestro, Bush at War, Plan of Attack, Obama's Wars, Fear, Rage, Peril, and War in 2024.

The access that makes the books possible is also the standing charge against them. Joan Didion wrote in 1996 that measurable cerebral activity was virtually absent from everything he had published since Watergate, and called his fairness a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story as it is presented. Christopher Hitchens called him a stenographer to the rich and powerful. When Veil appeared in 1987 carrying a deathbed interview in which William Casey admitted knowing about Iran-Contra, Casey's widow and CIA officials said Casey could not speak, though Robert Gates later wrote that he had held conversations with Casey in the same period. In 1980, as an assistant managing editor, Woodward championed Janet Cooke's invented profile of an eight-year-old heroin addict and submitted it for the Pulitzer it won and gave back.

He is 83 and the argument has not closed. He held Mark Felt's name for more than 30 years and confirmed it only after Felt's family went to Vanity Fair in May 2005, and John Dean and others have argued since that Deep Throat was a composite. He interviewed Donald Trump about the coronavirus in February 2020 and kept the tapes until Rage came out that September, which drew the hardest criticism of his career. Trump sued over the audiobook in January 2023 and Woodward called the suit meritless. He no longer works for the Post, though he keeps the title of associate editor, which one of the paper's own columnists called honorific. His Watergate papers sit in Austin.

Bob Woodward's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• All the President's Men book
  Written with Carl Bernstein and filmed in 1976 with Redford and Hoffman 1974
• The Final Days book
  November 1973 to the resignation, again with Bernstein 1976
• Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA book
  The book whose deathbed Casey interview is still disputed 1987
• Bush at War book
  The first of four books on the Bush wars 2002
• The Secret Man book
  On Mark Felt, published after Felt's family identified him 2005
• War book
  Published October 15, 2024 2024

• 1965 aged ~22 Graduates from Yale and reports to the Navy for five years
• August 1970 aged 27 Discharged a lieutenant, admitted to Harvard Law and declines to go A two-week tryout at the Washington Post produced no job.
• 1971 aged ~28 Hired by the Washington Post after a year at a suburban weekly
• June 17, 1972 aged 29 Five men are arrested inside the Watergate offices of the DNC
• 1973 aged ~30 The Post wins the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service
• April 13, 1981 aged 38 Janet Cooke wins a Pulitzer for a story Woodward submitted, and gives it back The profile of an eight-year-old heroin addict was a fabrication.
• May 2005 aged 62 Mark Felt is identified as Deep Throat by his own family
• September 2020 aged 77 Rage appears with February interviews on the danger of the virus He was criticized for holding the tapes seven months.
• October 15, 2024 aged 81 Publishes War

• Carl Bernstein b. 1944
  Investigative journalist who, with Bob Woodward, uncovered the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post. reporting partner
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. reported on
• Ben Bradlee 1921–2014
  Editor who built The Washington Post into a leading national newspaper and directed its Watergate coverage. editor
• Katharine Graham 1917–2001
  Publisher who strengthened The Washington Post and backed its reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. publisher who backed the story
• Donald Trump b. 1946
  Businessman, media personality, and 45th and 47th president whose populist movement transformed American politics. interviewed, then sued by
• Joan Didion 1934–2021
  Essayist and novelist whose precise prose captured the anxiety and disillusionment of American life. wrote the sharpest attack on his method