Bob Woodward Interview (page: 7 / 9) Investigative Reporter	Print Interview

When you began to work as a journalist, what was the reaction of your family? Did they support you, or did they think it was a little strange?

Bob Woodward: I was going to go to law school after five years in the Navy, so I was age 27, and I got a job at a weekly paper in Montgomery County, Maryland for $110 a week. And I called my father, who was a judge at that point, or about to become a judge, and said, "I'm not going to law school," but have this job at a newspaper he had never heard of. And my father, a man of great restraint, nonjudgmental in fact, said probably the severest thing he has ever said to me. He said, "You're crazy." And at the same time, it was my decision. So he didn't think it was a good idea. He always saw me as a lawyer. To a certain extent, I always saw myself as a lawyer. And I was going on an unknown path, and that concerned him, but when I got into it and then went to work for the Post, he was quite supportive.
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What attracted you to the newspapers business?

Bob Woodward: If somebody came from Mars to America and went around for months or years, and then you asked them who has the best jobs, they would say the journalists, because the journalists get to make momentary entries into people's lives when they are interesting, and get out when they cease to be interesting. And most jobs, if you are a lawyer or a doctor, you have to deal with clients, patients who have boring problems or diseases that are routine, and of course, the definition of "news" is "non-routine." What's going on in the town -- in culture, in the nation, in the world -- is news, and you get to work on that.
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You get to have access to people you wouldn't normally have access to.

Bob Woodward: And problems. What I try to do is piece together how people make decisions.

How did you get interested in those things? Where were you born?

Bob Woodward: I was born in a hospital in Geneva, Illinois but lived in Wheaton, which is the home of Billy Graham, the evangelist, so it was very fundamentalist Christian. There were no bars in town. People who went to Wheaton College had to sign a pledge: no drinking, smoking, dancing, movies, playing of cards. So it was the classic kind of Winesburg, Ohio small town. My father was a lawyer there, and I worked as a janitor in his law office when I was in high school, and started reading the files and discovered that the projection that people in the town made about their own lives was in fact not who they were, that lots of them had secrets, and many of them were in my father's law office files.
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As defendants?

Bob Woodward: As defendants, as tax cases, divorce cases, the full catastrophe of litigation. And in it, you just saw that it was not as pure and simple a community as the members liked people to think. People had troubles, and people had secrets.

Were you the only child? Were there siblings?

Bob Woodward: In the family I was raised in: a brother, a sister, two stepsisters, a half-sister.

And you grew up with all of them?

Bob Woodward: Yes, and then later, my parents were divorced, and my father remarried a woman who had three kids also. It was one of those families that was "glued together."

How old were you during the divorce?

Bob Woodward: About 11, 12, 13.

Was it tough?

Bob Woodward: Of course. Divorce is painful because it is unknown to a child. You don't have a context for it, so it destroys the very notion of context, because the only context you know as a child is family.

Yes. Were there other writers in your father or mother's family?

Bob Woodward: No, not that I can think of. There were some teachers and lawyers and business people, but no writers.

What did your mom do?

Bob Woodward: She was a housewife.

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