Woodward was born in Geneva, Illinois to Alfred and Jane Woodward. He was brought up in nearby Wheaton and attended Wheaton Community High School. Woodward enrolled in Yale University with an NROTC scholarship, and studied history and English literature as a member of the fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta. He received his B.A. degree in 1965, and began a four-year tour of duty in the Navy to fulfill his NROTC commitment. Woodward was discharged from the Navy as a Lieutenant in August 1970 after serving as an aide to the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer. Toward the end of his naval service he had his first chance meetings with Mark Felt ("Deep Throat"), later his inside source for information leading to his reporting on the Watergate scandal.
He applied to several law schools, but also applied for a job as a reporter for The Washington Post. Harry Rosenfeld, the paper's metropolitan editor, hired him on a two-week trial basis, a tryout that failed because of his complete lack of experience as a journalist. Still interested in becoming a reporter, he got a job with the Montgomery Sentinel. A year after his on-the-job training at the Sentinel, he left that paper and joined The Washington Post in August 1971.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were assigned to report on the June 17, 1972 burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in a Washington, D.C. office building called Watergate. Their work, under editor Ben Bradlee, become known for being the first to report on a number of political "dirty tricks" used by the Nixon re-election committee during his campaign for reelection. Their book about the scandal, All the President's Men, became a #1 best-seller and was later turned into a movie. The 1976 film, starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, transformed the reporters into celebrities and inspired a wave of interest in investigative journalism.
The book and movie also led to one of Washington, D.C.'s most famous mysteries: the identity of Woodward's secret Watergate informant known as Deep Throat, a reference to the title of a popular pornographic movie at the time. Woodward said he would protect Deep Throat's identity until the man died or allowed his name to be revealed. For over 30 years, only Woodward, Bernstein, and a handful of others knew the informant's identity until it was claimed by his family to Vanity Fair magazine to be former FBI Assistant Director Mark Felt in May 2005. Woodward has confirmed this claim and published a book, titled The Secret Man, which detailed his relationship with Felt.
Woodward has spent the most time of any journalist with President George W. Bush, interviewing him four times for more than seven hours total. Woodward's three most recent books, Bush at War (2002), Plan of Attack (2004), and State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (2006), are detailed accounts of the Bush presidency, including the response to the September 11 terrorist attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a series of articles published in January 2002, he and Dan Balz described the events at Camp David in the aftermath of September 11. In these articles, they mention the Worldwide Attack Matrix.
Woodward has been accused by a few critics of being too close to the Bush administration, and some say his relationship with the current administration is in stark contrast to his investigative role in Watergate. Others disagree, however. In 2004, both the Bush campaign and the Kerry campaign recommended his book Plan of Attack, and The New York Times said the book contained "convincing accounts of White House failures... presented alongside genial encounters with the president." Rick Hertzberg in The New Yorker wrote that "Plan of Attack is Woodward's best book in years" and that "Woodward is welcomed as a fair witness."
State of Denial, released on October 2, 2006, describes alleged tensions and dysfunctions within the Bush Administration in the lead-up to, and following, the invasion of Iraq. Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal wrote, "It may be a great (book). It is serious, densely, even exhaustively, reported, and a real contribution to history in that it gives history what it most requires, first-person testimony. It is well documented, with copious notes."
On February 1, 2008, as a part of the Authors @ Google series, Woodward, who was interviewed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, said that he has a fourth book in his Bush at War series in the making. He then added jokingly that his wife told him that she'll kill him if he decides to write a fifth in the series.
On November 14, 2005, Woodward gave a two-hour deposition to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. He testified that a senior administration official told him in June 2003 that Iraq war critic Joe Wilson’s wife (later identified as Valerie Plame), worked for the CIA. Woodward therefore appears to have been the first reporter to learn about her employment (albeit not her name) from a government source. The deposition was reported in The Washington Post on November 16, 2005, and was the first time Woodward revealed publicly that he had any special knowledge about the case. Woodward testified the information was given to him in a “casual” and “offhand” manner, and said that he does not believe it was part of any coordinated effort to “out” Plame as a CIA employee. Later, Woodward's source identified himself. It was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy and an internal critic of the Iraq War and the White House inner circle.
Woodward said the revelation came at the end of a long, confidential background interview for his 2004 book Plan of Attack. He did not reveal the official’s disclosure at the time because it did not strike him as important. Later, he kept it to himself because it came as part of a confidential conversation with a source.
In his deposition, Woodward also said that he had conversations with Scooter Libby after the June 2003 conversation with his confidential Administration source, and testified that it is possible that he might have asked Libby further questions about Joe Wilson’s wife before her employment at the CIA and her identity were publicly known.
Woodward’s revelation was controversial because he had not told his editor at the Post about the conversation for more than two years, and also because he had publicly criticized the investigation. He had referred to Fitzgerald as a “junkyard dog prosecutor” on Larry King’s television show, , and said he believed that when “all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great.". On another occasion, he said of the investigation that he thought there was “nothing to it,” and that Fitzgerald’s behavior had been “disgraceful.” In later interviews after his deposition, Woodward said he had meant by his “junkyard dog” comment to suggest colorfully that Fitzgerald was a tenacious prosecutor, and that the “disgraceful” comment concerned the tactic of putting journalists in prison to coerce them to reveal their confidential sources.
Woodward apologized to Leonard Downie, the editor of The Washington Post for not informing him earlier of the June 2003 conversation. Downie accepted the apology and said even had the paper known it would not have changed its reporting.
Woodward has continued to write books and report stories for The Washington Post, and serves as an assistant managing editor at the paper. He focuses on the presidency, intelligence, and Washington institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court, The Pentagon, and the Federal Reserve. He has also written the book, Wired, about the Hollywood drug culture and the death of comic John Belushi.
Woodward has twice contributed to collective journalistic efforts that were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 1973, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Though the Prize was awarded to the entire Post staff, the citation specifically named his and Bernstein's reporting on Watergate as exemplary work. In addition, Woodward was the lead reporter for the Post's articles on the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks that won the National Reporting Pulitzer in 2002. He also was awarded the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency in 2003.
Woodward is widely regarded as one of the top reporters of the last half-century, and has earned trust and accolades from government officials and journalists of all political persuasions. In 2003, Al Hunt of The Wall Street Journal called Woodward "the most celebrated journalist of our age." The Weekly Standard called him "the best pure reporter of his generation, perhaps ever." In 2004, Bob Schieffer of CBS News said "Woodward has established himself as the best reporter of our time. He may be the best reporter of all time."
In writing his books, Woodward collects detailed records, including interviews, documents, transcripts, and recordings. He then uses them to describe events as a story with an omniscient narrator, present tense and dialogue. His books are often very visually descriptive.
While this style may have earned Woodward commercial success, many literary critics consider his prose awkward and his approach inappropriate for his subject matter. Nicholas von Hoffman complained that "the arrestingly irrelevant detail is used" while Michael Massing thinks the books are "filled with long, at times tedious passages with no evident direction." Joan Didion said Woodward finds " too insignificant for inclusion," including such details as shirts worn and food eaten in unimportant situations. "The reader attuned to the conventions of narrative might be led by the presentation of these quotidian details into thinking that a dramatic moment is about to occur," she noted, only to be disappointed by bland comments like how the President "thought a lot of the criticism he received was unfair."
The narrative, reporting-driven style of Woodward's books also draws criticism for rarely making conclusions or passing judgment on the characters and actions that he recounts in such detail. Didion concluded that Woodward writes "books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent," and finds the books marked by "a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured."
Many commentators and historians have criticised Woodward for inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his books and other writings. A number of these criticisms can be found in the list below.
The Brethren, for example, painted a picture of the Supreme Court based partly on the comments of its clerks; some believe that, as a result, the book suggests that the Supreme Court Justices do little of the actual work. Woodward points out recently that the ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was one of his primary sources for "State of Denial," yet is perhaps the most harshly portrayed figure in the book. Other sources who have spoken to Woodward also confess to having failed to "spin" him, as they had hoped to do.
Despite these criticisms and challenges, Woodward has been praised as an authoritative and balanced journalist. The New York Times Book Review said in 2004 that "No reporter has more talent for getting Washington’s inside story and telling it cogently." The publication of a Woodward book, perhaps more than any other contemporary author's, is treated as a major political event that dominates national news for days.
Commentator David Frum has said, perhaps partly tongue-in-cheek, that Washington officials can learn something about the way Washington works from Woodward's books: "From his books, you can draw a composite profile of the powerful Washington player. That person is highly circumspect, highly risk averse, eschews new ideas, flatters his colleagues to their face (while trashing them to Woodward behind their backs), and is always careful to avoid career-threatening confrontation. We all admire heroes, but Woodward's books teach us that those who rise to leadership are precisely those who take care to abjure heroism for themselves."
Bob Woodward regularly gives speeches to industry lobbying groups, such as the American Bankruptcy Institute, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, and the Mortgage Bankers Association. Woodward commands speaking fees "rang from $15,000 to $60,000" and donates them to his personal foundation, the Woodward Walsh Foundation, giving him a tax write-off. The foundation donates most of the money to Sidwell Friends School, the elite private school Woodward's children attend. Washington Post policy prohibits "speaking engagements without permission from department heads" but Woodward insists that the policy is "fuzzy and ambiguous".
Woodward now lives in the Georgetown section of Washington. He is married to Elsa Walsh, a writer for The New Yorker and the author of Divided Lives: The Public and Private Struggles of Three American Women, which Entertainment Weekly cited as one of the 10 best books of 1995. He has two daughters.
Woodward still maintains a listed number in the Washington, D.C. phone directory. He says this is because he wants any potential news source to be able to reach him.
