Interview: Bob Woodward
Investigative Reporter

(The Academy of Achievement interviewed both Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee, the longtime Executive Editor of the Washington Post, on May 1, 2003. The interviews are combined here.)

Mr. Woodward, can you tell us about the night you first got that phone call about a break-in at the Watergate?

Bob Woodward: June 17th, 1972. I had worked for The Post for nine months. They had this -- it looked like a local burglary at the Democratic Headquarters, a police story. I covered the night police beat. It was a Saturday morning, I think the summer. Editors looked around and thought, "Who could we call in? Who would be dumb enough to work on this story on a Saturday morning?" And they thought of me immediately. So I went to work with about seven or eight other people, including Carl (Bernstein), and I went to the arraignment of the five burglars, and the judge wanted to know where one of them worked, and he was mumbling. He wouldn't say. Kind of going, "CIA." And the judge said, "Where?" And he went, "CIA." And the judge said, "Speak up. Where do you work? Where did you work?" And he went, "CIA, Central Intelligence Agency." And I know my reaction was one of. "Oh! This is not your average burglary."

Why did they think of you? You mentioned that you had been at The Post for nine months. How long had you been at the previous paper?

Bob Woodward: One year exactly. So I did not have two years' experience. I was the lowest-paid reporter at The Washington Post, because they would only give you credit with the Newspaper Guild if you had worked for a daily, and I had worked for a weekly.

What an incredible jump in your fortunes as a journalist, from one year on a little suburban paper to The Washington Post. How did you do that?

Bob Woodward: I was not married at the time and loved being free to do something. I worked quite hard, did a number of stories that the Post and The New York Times picked up. The Post is a very competitive institution, and I think that was the main reason.

How old were you at the time of that break-in?

Bob Woodward: Twenty-nine.

Mr. Bradlee, when did it become clear to you that the Watergate break-in was something more than a simple burglary?

Ben Bradlee: Probably the first or second day, really. It was strange. You had a lot of Cuban or Spanish-speaking guys in masks and rubber gloves, with walkie-talkies, arrested in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at 2:00 in the morning. What the hell were they in there for? What were they doing?

The follow-up story was based primarily on their arraignment in court, and it was based on information given our police reporter, Al Lewis, by the cops, showing them an address book that one of the burglars had in his pocket, and in the address book was the name "Hunt," H-u-n-t, and the phone number was the White House phone number, which Al Lewis and every reporter worth his salt knew. And when, the next day, Woodward -- this is probably Sunday or maybe Monday, because the burglary was Saturday morning early -- called the number and asked to speak to Mr. Hunt, and the operator said, "Well, he's not here now; he's over at," such-and-such a place, gave him another number, and Woodward called him up, and Hunt answered the phone, and Woodward said, "We want to know why your name was in the address book of the Watergate burglars." And there is this long, deathly hush, and Hunt said, "Oh my God!" and hung up. So you had the White House. You have Hunt saying "Oh my God!" At a later arraignment, one of the guys whispered to a judge. The judge said, "What do you do?" and Woodward overheard the words "CIA." So if your interest isn't whetted by this time, you're not a journalist.

What a story.

Ben Bradlee: It's a good story. Not bad, as they say, and what legs! You have kids who weren't born at that time doing term papers on it at colleges and high schools.

Mr. Woodward, once you heard one of the burglars say he worked for the CIA, where did you take it from there?

Bob Woodward: Is the CIA connected to this? Well, it turns out a lot of CIA people were, and they tried to use the CIA to cover up the FBI investigation, but they never pinned it on the CIA. It was a White House operation. So you would not go from the CIA to the White House instantly, but within several days, through the work of another reporter, we learned there was this cryptic entry in the address books of two of the five burglars that very simply said "H. Hunt - W. House." So I called the White House and asked for Mr. Hunt, and he came on, and I said, "Why is your name in the address books of these two burglars who were caught in the Democratic Headquarters?" And he screamed out, "Good God!" and hung up the phone. And there was a sort of, as I have said, "I am packing my bags" quality to his voice that didn't tell you everything you needed to know but certainly got you focused on, you know, this is interesting now. And it turned out he had worked for the CIA for years, had been working in the White House as a consultant to Chuck Colson, who was then Nixon's hatchet man.

So this was over a period of days, I take it, that it got interesting.

Bob Woodward: Yes, and each week it got more and more interesting. As a colleague of ours at The Post, Bill Greider, wrote the day they disclosed the secret taping system in the White House. I think the lead of his story was, "Will the wonders of Watergate never cease?"

Mr. Bradlee, there is a scene early in the book and the movie, All the President's Men, in which you criticize Woodward and Bernstein for their approach to a story about E. Howard Hunt, and his interest in Chappaquiddick and Ted Kennedy. What was that about? Hunt had been studying Ted Kennedy and checked books out of the library

Ben Bradlee: A book had been taken out of the library. When we found out who had taken it out, it was Hunt, and everybody said, "What the hell is Hunt doing taking a book on Teddy Kennedy. Why is he interested in that?" But every Republican in the country was interested in Chappaquiddick, and not a few Democrats, so I said, "Find out what the hell he took it out for. Maybe we have a story and maybe we don't."

So all the while that this was coming out, you were being very careful that there was enough confirmation of these things?

Ben Bradlee: We were being very careful. As the stakes increased, and as the White House looked more and more threatened, and Nixon himself looked more threatened, and his office became threatened, we just were determined that we weren't going to make any silly mistake.

Were there any mistakes?

Ben Bradlee: One.

We made one mistake in a story in which we said that -- Woodward and Bernstein said -- that there was a slush fund of $300,000 set up in the Committee to Re-elect the President, and it was controlled by Haldeman, and that one of the witnesses had testified to that slush fund to the grand jury investigating Watergate. I have forgotten which one it was. But the following morning, Dan Schorr of CBS -- we saw on CBS Morning News-- shoved a microphone in front of this guy and said, "The Post says you did this. Did you?" and he said, "No." And the whole town shook, as far as I'm concerned, because that was the first time we had been accused of getting anything wrong. What it turned out was that the question hinged on whether or not he had told that to the grand jury, and since he hadn't, he was able to say "No." He wasn't asked was there a slush fund, which, of course, there was. It turned out that he hadn't been asked, and that interested us a great deal, because if the prosecution wasn't asking him those interesting question, that suggested that there was a reason they weren't, and the reason might be that they were trying to cover it up. Anyway, it took two days, and we got confirmation that there was, and in fact there was a slush fund of $750,000. So that gave hope to the Republicans, and of course, all of the Republican spokesmen had a field day beating us upside the face over that, but it didn't last very long. Thank God.

This was a long process.

Ben Bradlee: Four hundred stories about Watergate in The Washington Post Four hundred in two years and two months.

Mr. Woodward, there were mistakes made during Watergate, you have said in the book. What were some of the mistakes?

Bob Woodward: We accused some people of things they didn't do that were based on some reports, written reports. We said Haldeman had controlled the secret fund, according to the Grand Jury testimony of the Nixon Committee treasurer, and he had not testified to that. The story was true, but he had never testified to it because they never asked him.

Mr. Bradlee, at what point did you get the inkling that the Oval Office was involved? Do you remember?

Ben Bradlee: Well, right away, with Hunt's name and the White House telephone number in there.

And Nixon himself?

Ben Bradlee: Nixon himself? I can't remember, but there were so many. Haldeman? Yes. Ehrlichman? Yes. All of the guys who later went to jail. Mitchell? Yes. It was inconceivable that Nixon wasn't. But of course, that all became academic when the tapes came out. It came out in the Ervin Committee hearings in the Senate. We were told that before we could write it, but yes, we knew it. It was so important. The whole reputation of the paper was hanging on that by the time. There was an election on in '72, and most of the rest of the country was saying, "The Post is just playing politics," and all that stuff.

Mr. Woodward, at what point did you realize that President Nixon was implicated in this?

Bob Woodward: Quite late. We were reporting on the President's men, and the White House people, the Attorney General, John Mitchell, people in the Nixon campaign, the Committee to Re-Elect the President, and the focus was not Nixon. It was only later, when Dean testified, and the tapes came out, that it was quite clear that not only was Nixon involved, he was in charge of the cover-up.

And that this wasn't just a cover-up of a burglary.

Bob Woodward: That's right.

That was the key. The important discovery for Carl and myself was that Watergate wasn't isolated. There were other burglaries. There was the whole intelligence-gathering apparatus. There were spies in all the Democratic candidates' campaigns that had been planted and paid by the Nixon campaign. That they would sabotage campaigns. Things that seemed to be simple and innocuous but were quite devastating, false press releases, and accusing people of various activity and so forth, and a kind of sowing the seeds of discord.

Talk about how it affected Muskie, for example.

Bob Woodward: There was a letter forged, saying that Muskie had made some disparaging remark about Canadians, and Muskie got very upset. It was never conclusively established that this had been done by the Nixon campaign, but one of the people in the White House acknowledged to one of our reporters that he had written it. Muskie, in the emotion of the campaign, was trying to explain what had gone on. There had been some disparaging remarks made elsewhere about his wife, and he cried, in the snow, in New Hampshire, standing on the back of a flatbed truck, and it's generally believed that was the end of his candidacy. And of course, Muskie was going to be the strong candidate against Nixon.

It seems to me that to be a topnotch investigative journalist, you have to have a lot of guts in order to question some of these things.

Bob Woodward: No. The guts are supplied by the owners of the newspaper and the editors. They have always backed what I do. I'm out there doing it, and if there's pressure or debate or controversy, they're absorbing that pressure. Certainly during Watergate, it didn't get transmitted to Carl Bernstein or myself through them. They said, "Keep going. Get to the bottom of it."

Didn't you have a chat with the Post's publisher, Katharine Graham, in the midst of all of this?

Bob Woodward: About six months after Watergate, after Carl and I had written many of -- almost all of -- our main stories, she called me up for lunch. And she had a style of "I want to know what's going on. I want to offer some ideas. Kind of parse it out." But she wasn't the editor. She was the publisher. She had what I call, "Mind on, hands off." She was intellectually engaged in the news, but her hands were not directing, not saying, "Investigate this, don't investigate that, give the emphasis here." That was Bradlee and the editors' job. But she was quite curious, quite well-informed, plugged in. And she said, "When will we know the full story of Watergate? When will all the truth come out?" Quite optimistically. She posed this, almost suggesting that it was inevitable. And my reaction was, I told her, "Well, Carl and I think that it will never come out, that Nixon and his White House are so good at obscuring things, of sealing off information, preventing disclosure, that we'll never know." She looked at me quite stricken and said, "Never? Don't tell me never." And I remember thinking and feeling quite motivated that she was saying the standard here is the bar is quite high. "Don't tell me 'never.' Get to the bottom of it." That your resources, the resources of the newspaper, should be directed at completing this story, getting the full tale, if you would. And it in many ways is, I think, the principle under which she and her son, Don Graham, tried to run The Washington Post. "Don't tell me 'never.' Don't let things elude us. It's our job to figure them out."

Mr. Bradlee, it's important to remember that Nixon was reelected during this period.

Ben Bradlee: By an overwhelming margin, as we were reminded so often.

But you decided to "back the kids."

Ben Bradlee: I backed the kids.

That's a quote from the movie and the book. What made you "back the kids," Woodward and Bernstein?

Ben Bradlee: Because the kids were right. They were not hard to support, these young reporters, because they were right. Every time the White House denied something, the evidence became clear that it was the White House that was lying. First, the spokesmen at the White House, Ziegler and some of those guys, and next the Attorney General, and Chuck Colson, all of those people, the White House aides, were lying. Robert Dole, and Dole's successor as the chairman of the Republican Party, George Bush the first. These guys lied because they didn't know the truth, and they couldn't believe that they were being lied to.

Nixon didn't last too long in that second term. Where were you when he resigned, and what were your feelings?

Ben Bradlee: I was at The Washington Post, and I couldn't believe it. I mean, I believed it, because it was -- I knew it was coming. I really -- we knew it, we knew it, we knew it, but we couldn't -- we were being told by the people who were telling us that if we publish it, he'll change his mind and won't resign! So we started phrasing it "close to resignation," and "debating resignation," and then, finally, we learned that -- I think he was going to do it at nine o'clock at night, or eight o'clock at night. He resigned. Well, I was down there. Where the hell? I mean, I lived in that place for those periods. And we were so scared that we were going to -- By this time, we knew that the front page was going to be a historical document. It was going to be reproduced in the history books, and we wanted to be sure that we got it right, and be sure that some -- there wasn't a typo. In those days, you worried terribly about typos. We wanted to be sure that it wasn't sabotaged in some way by, you know, printers slipping in the "F" word or something like that that was going to screw it up. And we had to be sure the headline was right. We had to be sure. Just -- it was terribly, critically important that we do it right and that we not brag, not seem to be bragging, and that we didn't allow any television in there for days.

I was worried about the Post's image of all of this, and that there would be a segment of society who said, you know, "They were out to get him, those bastards, and they got him." And it was going to be -- we were just very careful. We had such good sources. One of the sources I can now reveal -- I mean, I have talked about -- was Senator Goldwater, who was a great friend of my wife's family, and I used to talk to him all the time. I'd have drinks with him early -- all of late July and early August. And he would be going over to the White House to give Nixon the news that he didn't have any -- his support in the Senate was eroding. And he was the one who said that. He told me first that he was going to resign, wasn't sure when, and for God's sake don't write it as hard, because he won't. So we were terribly worried, and we didn't -- it's a big newspaper and a lot of people in it, and you can't control all of them even if you wanted to. So we tried to just keep people out of the building. We didn't allow any television people in. We didn't allow television in for six months, I don't think. And when Redford wanted to film the movie in the Post, we told him he couldn't. He wanted to film it from 3:00 in the morning until 8:00 in the morning, and we just told him it was not possible.

Mr. Bradlee, what were your emotions when Nixon resigned?

Ben Bradlee: That we had really done a really good job. That the difficulties they put up to prevent the truth from coming out had been overcome. That really is what we're all about. Let's be sure for the record to say that it wasn't just the Post. The Post played a critical role in the beginning, and Woodward and Bernstein came in at critical moments. They were the first to reveal the tapes, and they were always ahead of the curve, but there was a lot of great reporting done by other people, Sy Hirsch, the Los Angeles Times, they all did really good work.

Mr. Woodward, tell us what it felt like to you personally when Nixon stepped down.

Bob Woodward: We had done some of the early stories, that it led to the Senate Watergate Committee, led to the House Judiciary Committee and impeachment investigation. Special Prosecutor Cox and Jaworski investigated this, put lots of people in jail. The Supreme Court ordered the President to turn over his tapes, which really sunk him -- the "smoking gun" tapes -- at the end. So I had just a sense that -- we had done some of the first work on this -- that any suggestion that we had caused it, or brought down a President, was a stretch, to say the least, and not factual. That we had done stories, but it is a process of the judiciary, the Congress, the Supreme Court, that led to Nixon's demise. But then, of course, if you think about it, Nixon is the one who did himself in. The piston driving the Nixon Administration was hate. Nixon was a full-blown hater, and if you listen to the tapes, it's chilling and frightening.

Paranoid too. Right?

Bob Woodward: Well, paranoid, and...

He wanted to use the Presidency as an instrument of personal revenge, to settle scores, too often, and that's not what the Presidency is about. And what's sad about the Nixon Presidency is not just the criminality and abuse of power, but the simple truth, to the best of my knowledge at this point, on those tapes no one ever says what would be good, what would be right for the country, what would be best for the country, which of course is what a President is supposed to do. It seemed to always be about Nixon. "How does this affect me, Nixon, the President? How do I pay someone back, either good or bad, for what they have done to me?"

Mr. Bradlee, by the time of the Watergate affair, the Post had already come into conflict with the Nixon administration over the Pentagon Papers. How did that come about?

Ben Bradlee: The Pentagon Papers was a study commissioned by Nixon in the first or second year of his first term, 1970 or '69. It was to see if they could find the origins of our involvement in Vietnam, and what went wrong. How did we get into committing 500,000 troops 10,000 miles away in a way that we could never win? There were 7,000 papers finally, and The New York Times got a copy of it. They had it for three months, and they started to publish it. We had heard that they had this big blockbuster coming up, and suddenly, they just dropped this on us. One morning in June of '71 I think, they led the newspaper with it, with eight-column banners. My God, it looked like the end of the world! We led the paper that day with Tricia Nixon's wedding. It was embarrassing that they had this great story and we didn't.

How did they get the story?

Ben Bradlee: From Daniel Ellsberg. He had worked in the Pentagon, and then he had worked for the Rand Corporation. He had gone to Vietnam as a soldier, so he had fought in Vietnam, but he got convinced that it was a quagmire and that it was a great mistake and that by releasing this study, he could shine light into the darkest corners and change the course of the world. He did. It was already changing, but he certainly speeded it along.

The New York Times played the lead role but we played a role too. After the Times had been estopped by a judge, we decided to publish them. I think most people feel that the old Post would have just sat by. A judge told the Times they couldn't publish it, so a judge would tell us the same thing. But three or four days later, we got a copy of them from Ellsberg, only we didn't have three months to study them. We had one day.

Our lawyers were telling us that -- and this New York judge had ruled -- that the statute says whoever has reason to believe that publication of certain information will threaten the national security of the United States shall be -- this was a civil suit, but the criminal equivalent, which they would certainly have done had they convicted us, would have put us in jail, put us all in jail, including Katharine Graham, or the possibility of it. And once you are convicted of a felony, you can't own television stations, so it would have cost us all the television stations. I think there were two or three then, but I think there are six now. But it would have been -- I mean, there was a lot of money on the table. And she decided to do it.

We worked her over very hard, but so did the lawyers. She had the lawyers on the same phones.

Finally, the night before we published came the critical moment, and we were in my house. The reporters were all there, and the editors were there, working on the copy, and there was some guy writing for the next morning. And there came a time when we had to get her, 'okay,' and the lawyers started off by telling her --the lawyer was one of the greatest men, even though he didn't approving of publishing it -- but the way he told her that was just so important. He said, "I think on balance I am against it." I mean, he didn't tear his hair out and say, "God damn it, Katharine, you can't do this. It risks the whole thing." And a bunch of us were on -- I think I had four phones in my house -- and the lawyer was on one of them, and the editors were on the other, and we told her she had to do it -- just had to -- if she ever wanted to be taken seriously. I mean, I shudder to think the way we put it. But she finally said, "Well, okay. I say we publish it." And three of the journalists all hung up immediately, because we didn't want any -- we had what we came for, and we didn't want to let her change her mind. And we published the next day. We missed the first edition, but we published it the second edition, which came out at 11 o'clock at night, 11:30.

You probably didn't sleep a whole lot that night.

Ben Bradlee: Well, we were tired. We actually published three papers with it before they stopped us, and then we were in the courts for 12 days. We just didn't sleep a hell of a lot.

What made you decide that this had to be done?

Ben Bradlee: It is an interesting thing.

You don't think of journalists automatically as patriots, one. You don't think of them as real authorities in the question of what is classified and what isn't, and what is a threat to the United States and what isn't. But in fact at that time, we were. We were more expert than a lot of the government witnesses who testified against us. Like an assistant secretary of defense who had been a year or two before head of a big Republican contributor and head of an automobile company and, you know, sold cars in Omaha or somewhere. And most of us had served in World War II. Most of us had quite fancy security clearances in that capacity. So we did, and there was no threat to the national security, and information, truth, is not a threat to security, and we believed that.

Eighteen years after the Supreme Court ruled that they couldn't shut us down, the prosecuting attorney, who was the Solicitor General of the United States, wrote The Post a letter saying that in the whole Pentagon Papers, there was no threat to national security.

Who was that? What was his name?

Ben Bradlee: His name was Griswold, and he had been the dean of the Harvard Law School. I mean, he was no rank amateur himself. They were after us and The New York Times. You have to remember that the Attorney General, who prosecuted us was the first and only Attorney General in the history of the United States to go to jail.

And that was?

Ben Bradlee: John Mitchell, Attorney General Mitchell.

Who played quite a role in the Watergate affair.

Ben Bradlee: He sure did. Much to his chagrin. He went to jail for that. He and 39 others, I might add. Think of that! 39 or 40 people in this White House staff went to jail.

Mr. Woodward, in your book, Shadow, you talk about how Nixon's presidency affected the presidents who've come since. How would you summarize that?

Bob Woodward: This is a book I did in 1999 that took the five presidents after Nixon -- Ford, Carter, Reagan, the first Bush, and Clinton -- and analyzed the Special Prosecutor law, and showed how that, and the new climate of Congressional activism and media activism, meant the Presidency was going to be forever altered. It was going to be scrutinized and examined. Each of these Presidents had their own way of responding. Most of them didn't realize that the world had changed. They wanted to have a whole Presidency where they could do what they wanted and no one would examine them or scrutinize them, and they got in trouble, a lot of them, because of this.

Do you see President Clinton's impeachment related to Watergate?

Bob Woodward: Certainly. If you didn't have the Independent Counsel, which was a direct outgrowth of Watergate, you never would have had Ken Starr, you never would have had a criminal investigation of Clinton.

It has been said that as dark a chapter as Watergate was in the American Presidency, in a sense, it showed the branches of government working.

Bob Woodward: Yes. That's the standard cliché about Watergate: the system worked. And it did. It took a long time, and if you examine the sequence, you could identify hundreds of points where the road to full disclosure would have been -- the thread would have been cut. So it's not inevitable that the system works. In fact, it probably doesn't work that often.

Mr. Bradlee, do you think there could be another Watergate today? It seems that there are very few long, extensive investigations into corruption where an editor lets reporters work on a story for a couple of years.

Ben Bradlee: How about the Boston Globe and the Catholic Church? There's an example of incredibly good reporting over a long, protracted time period, laced with denials by the highest people in Boston society -- the Cardinals and the priests. I know a lot about that story because my son was the editor at the Boston Globe who ran that investigation, and I think that's a perfect example of how newspapers can persist in the face of denials and correct wrongs. That's why we all joined this business.

Mr. Woodward, there is an interesting scene in the book and in the film All the President's Men where you tap out a story and Carl Bernstein immediately starts rewriting it, and you're miffed. Tell us a little bit about what actually happened.

Bob Woodward: We would frequently do competing drafts of stories and put it together. I recall in that incident, I did one, he did one, and I looked at his, and I realized his was better, as was almost always the case. He was a much better writer.

That's an astonishing thing for a journalist to say. One doesn't think of humility as a common quality of journalists for some reason.

Bob Woodward: That's not humility, that's realism.

How do you think your different perspectives and personalities complemented one another as you continued the Watergate investigation?

Bob Woodward: Well, we looked at it differently. There was competition. Who's going to get what lead and put it together? Sometimes I was thought to be the more cautious one, but Carl (Bernstein) could be cautious, and I could be aggressive or overly aggressive. It taught me the benefits of collaboration, and that collaboration is a wonderful thing. I now do my books alone, but I have a full-time assistant who is kind of my collaborator. A man named Mark Molsey on the last book and the next book; I've done 11 books.

Are you and Bernstein still friends?

Bob Woodward: Yes, we are. We talk all the time. We're much better friends than we were at the time.

Was he the more experienced journalist at the time?

Bob Woodward: Oh, yes. He'd started at age two, I think. Maybe it was 16, but he had fully a decade-plus of experience under his belt.

What about you? We understand you got started in the newspaper business right out of the Navy. What did you do in the Navy? Were you in intelligence?

Bob Woodward: I was not in intelligence; I was in communications, and they are different in the Navy. Some people think I was in intelligence. I'm sure it would have been more interesting.

I didn't like the Navy, I didn't like Vietnam, I didn't like the war, and was disappointed in myself that I didn't figure out how to adjust to being a part of this that I didn't like, and so I didn't quite have the guts to run away or stand on principle. It was a difficult time to be associated with something you're pretty sure is not right. You can't prove it's not right, but you think it's not right. And my last year, I served in the Navy here in Washington and lived over on P Street and decided I would get a subscription to a paper called The Washington Post that had a young, very feisty editor named Ben Bradlee, and started reading the Post, and during that year, 1969-1970, you could just feel the energy in the newspaper. You could feel that they took not an adversarial position toward government, but a position of skepticism, a position of there is accountability reporting. Why did this happen? How did it happen? What's secret? What's not known? What does it mean? In a sense, there were the two worlds: of the Navy, where all the opposite principles seemed to prevail; and then there was The Washington Post there at my doorstep every morning, kind of saying, "Wait a minute. What's the government up to? What is this secret government we have?

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.

What attracted you to the newspaper 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.

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.

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.

When you were a child, who most inspired you? Were there particular teachers or relatives?

Bob Woodward: Oh, yes, I had teachers at Wheaton. A community high school history teacher named Elizabeth Duncan who taught American history and was a great teacher. Very forceful, very insistent that we write essays to answer questions, and not short answers. Somebody who through force of personality made history interesting and important.

Were there other people that inspired you? Writers or journalists who inspired you?

Bob Woodward: Not really. It looked like I was going to become a lawyer, and my father to a certain extent was my model. He was a very well-regarded lawyer in town. I remember going around and giving my name to lots of people, and they would say, "Oh, you're Al Woodward's son. He's a good lawyer, a fair man."

Where were you in the pecking order of siblings?

Bob Woodward: The oldest.

Do you think being the oldest had an influence on your life?

Bob Woodward: Who knows whether it's that? To a certain extent, I was able to go my own way. I would have summer jobs, while my parents and other siblings would go on vacation, for instance.

So you had a certain amount of independence?

Bob Woodward: An immense amount of independence.

What books impressed you as a kid? Are there particular books that you remember?

Bob Woodward: Sure. I didn't start reading seriously until probably junior high school. I had a friend who read books like Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. I had fallen in love with some books at a younger age like Swiss Family Robinson, adventure stories, but I tried to read Crime and Punishment, and read some other books, and then in high school I took a course reading books, and that really kind of focused me on the value of a book.

At that period, what did you like to read? What were your favorite authors?

Bob Woodward: We read pretty much the range of classics, and nothing really jumped out or are books that I had distinct memories of.

The distinct memories I have of books are from college. William Faulkner's books, certainly. Probably one of my favorite books is All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren's book about political corruption in Louisiana and about a reporter who watches this and gets to participate and see, but doesn't have all of the full consequences of the action fall on him.

Sounds familiar.

Bob Woodward: It's the nature of the business. You get to see other people's lives, and you chart the rise and fall of others, and you're not that involved. You are an observer and you have to work pretty hard to preserve your outsider status, but that is what you get to do as a reporter.

You mentioned Faulkner. Are there particular novels of his that you remember liking?

Bob Woodward: Sure. Light in August; Absalom, Absalom; "The Bear," that little novella. It was mysterious always, his writing, but of great emotional impact.

There's so much richness in his language, it's almost the opposite of journalistic writing.

Bob Woodward: Well, of course, what Faulkner is trying to do is get to the interior, and in the end, as a journalist, you are trying to get to the interior. You are trying to understand somebody's reasoning and their emotions and the demons they may or may not have. You are trying to find out what really happened. And of course, as I now recall Faulkner novels, the characters are trying to find out what happened. It's not clear, it's obscure. Events are in no way simple or cinematic. Events are filtered through minds and memories and prejudices, and you feel intimate with his characters.

I'm thinking of the book, As I Lay Dying, which is from all different characters' points of view, like interviewing people for a story.

Bob Woodward: Or The Sound and the Fury, which is his great book. That goes back to the idea of family secrets.

What are you most proud of, looking back on your career so far?

Bob Woodward: I don't know whether I feel pride. I think pride is hubris. I think it is an emotion that if you bask in it, it's like hate; it will destroy you. So I don't make those kinds of assessments. I like what I do. I am repeatedly struck by how I have missed part of the story, always. One of the managing editors at the Post, Howard Simons, during Watergate -- this was not on a Watergate story, but I was struggling with a story early in my time at the Post -- and he came by, and he said, "You don't have to understand a man in an afternoon." In other words, you don't have to do it in a day, and you won't achieve understanding of a in an -- slow down, take your time, dig, go back. And no one goes back or slows down or digs enough, particularly me.

You've said journalism should be called a practice, like law. What did you mean by that?

Bob Woodward: Yes.

I think journalism is a practice, like law, that you keep learning. You are trying to get it right and you never do, and that there must be a sense whenever you get to something and then realize two weeks earlier, two days or two minutes earlier, you didn't know that, and it's critical that no matter what you do, you are never going to have the full story. So you are dealing a glancing blow to what's out there. You want to deal a careful glancing blow. You want to spend time on it. You want to make sense out of it. You want it to be fair. But in the end, it's only a glancing blow.

Mr. Woodward, there's a last question we'd like to ask. What does the American Dream mean to you?

Bob Woodward: Interesting question. Obviously, there's not one American dream. There are hundreds of millions of American dreams.

What in my business I've found is that we basically do have a free press, that we can operate independently. But the real input comes from people who believe in a free press, believe in the First Amendment, believe in open discourse as much as possible, hate secrets, hate secret government, hate secret concentrations of power. So in an odd way, those in my business have a million allies out there. People who are basically truth-tellers, want to help somebody, know that the truth is cleansing, that the truth is a good thing, that the society needs to function on that. And that in a little way, and often in a significant way, that's realized. That we do explain enough about what's going on. I think in the atmosphere we are in now, somebody who would get up and propose some of the things that were done in Vietnam, like conducting the war when we didn't believe in it, or burglarizing, or wiretapping, or doing the abusive things of Watergate, I think it's so ingrained that there are enough people who would stand up and say, "We can't do that. We shouldn't do that." That doesn't mean there won't be more scandals and maybe even larger scandals, but in a sense, the vision or the dream of the people who wrote the Constitution has, at least in part, been realized.

We want to thank you for talking with us today.

Thank you.