Trump should fear Woodward’s ‘Fear’
Forget the denials, he does not make stuff up
President Donald Trump has called “Fear,” Bob Woodward’s new book, “a work of fiction” and “a scam” that uses “made up” quotes. But he and any other doubters of Woodward’s reporting should know that the veteran journalist will go to great lengths to uncover the truth and demand fairness.
I discovered these traits in researching and writing “Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate,” my 2007 book. Plumbing the archives of author David Halberstam and director Alan Pakula, I found that they go all the way back to Woodward’s troubled childhood in Wheaton, Illinois.
His quest for the truth derives from an insatiable curiosity. At 12, as he told Halberstam, he learned of his parents’ impending divorce by snooping through the mail. He discovered his father’s intent to remarry while rifling through his father’s pockets.
Pakula, who directed the movie “All the President’s Men” that was based on the book by Woodward and Carl Bernstein, did in-depth interviews with them before filming in 1974. He wanted to get at who each of them really was and the early forces that shaped them.
After Woodward’s father remarried, the new blended family included three Woodward kids and three from his stepmother. One Christmas, Woodward counted how many presents his stepmother bought for her children versus his father’s. “He made a list of both sets of presents — priced them in the stores,” wrote Pakula. “She had spent much more money on her own kids. He told his father it was unfair. … That kind of list making, investigations, thoroughness, obsession with unfairness has a lot to do with how he functions as an investigative reporter.”
Pakula’s notes revealed Woodward’s voracious desire to get beyond the surface to expose the truth. “I was raised in a small town in the Midwest, and one of the things I learned very early was that everybody in the town had a secret,” Woodward said. “My mother had a secret. Or a series of secrets. I had secrets. My friends had secrets. And most of the time nobody ever found out about those secret things.”
When Woodward’s father hired him at $11.75 a week to clean his law office in Wheaton, he found a treasure trove of documents about his hometown. Alone at night, he scoured divorce cases, IRS files, trial transcripts and fraud cases.
In one tantalizing case, Woodward discovered that a high school official was hitting on a student. She wore a wire for the district attorney, and Woodward read the transcript. “It was the first time you see the evidentiary purity of a tape recording,” he said.
For “Fear,” as Woodward told Trump in an 11-minute phone call in August, he has hundreds of hours of tape-recorded, transcribed interviews. If they are ever made public, they will confirm that Woodward doesn’t make stuff up. (His critics still don’t believe his most disputed story — a deathbed interview with CIA Director William Casey, during which Casey admitted knowing about the diversion of Iran arms sales money to the Nicaraguan Contras.)
Paul Begala, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, rued talking to Woodward when his book, “The Agenda,” came out. He did just what top Trump officials are doing now; he denied it. Today, Begala, a CNN analyst, tells a different story in a tweet: “24 years ago, Woodward quoted me in his Clinton book saying all kinds of profane and rude things. Why? Maybe because he’s a Republican. Or maybe because: I. Said. Them.”
One reason for Woodward’s success: He doesn’t give up. When I interviewed him in 2016, he noted that even today, he still shows up on people’s doorsteps unannounced just as he and Bernstein did 40 years ago as cub reporters. He said he had done it fairly recently with a general who dodged all interview attempts through phone, intermediaries and emails. So, Woodward told me, he went to the man’s house on a Tuesday night, about 7 p.m., when he figured most people are at home.
The general opened the door. Once he got over the shock of seeing the now-gray-haired Woodward standing on his doorstep, he paused and said, “Are you still doing this s--t?” And invited Woodward in.