WHAT DRIVES BOB WOODWARD?

Legendary journalist coming to Elm City Tuesday

Legendary journalist Bob Woodward has a couple of Pulitzer Prizes, and his Watergate coverage with Carl Bernstein helped bring down a lying and conniving president. His latest book, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” is a brisk read about another president who has issues with the truth.

Cut to New Haven, where Woodward will appear on stage Tuesday at the College Street Music Hall to talk about the

chief executive who dominates most news cycles in America.

But it was not at Yale in New Haven, where Woodward graduated in 1965, that Bob Woodward first was inspired to expose the secrets of the rich and powerful.

“When I was in high school, I was a janitor in my father’s law office,” Woodward said via phone from a vacation recently. “And I started looking at the papers on his desk and his partner’s desk and realized there were lots of things that were not known publicly about people in

this town, Wheaton, Illinois.”

Eventually, as kids will do, he went up to the attic and read through disposed files — “looking up the family names of classmates, and discovered there were tax cases and assault cases and so forth. And this was (a town) where Billy Graham went to college, Wheaton College. There was that veneer that ‘everyone’s good and there are no secrets’ and, of course, when you looked at the disposed files you dis-

Courtesy of Lisa Berg Bob Woodward will appear at College Street Music Hall.