Bob Woodward, the legendary journalist whose reporting on the Watergate scandal won him a Pulitzer Prize and ended a presidency, will speak at Duke next week.
Just one year into his career with The Washington Post, Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein were assigned what appeared to be a straightforward story about a break-in at the Democratic Party’s national offices. The pair pursued the story relentlessly with the aid of an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat,” eventually revealing that the Nixon White House was guilty of burglary, money laundering and wiretapping, among other offenses. Robert Redford, who visited Duke in Spring 2009, immortalized Woodward as a rumpled young reporter in the Oscar-winning film “All the President’s Men.”
“No one has had a longer career of impact on Washington journalism than Bob. His career has tracked the rise of the modern investigative reporter, and he’s remained at the front of the development over a nearly 40-year span,” said Philip Bennett, the Eugene C. Patterson professor of the practice of journalism, who has worked alongside Woodward as managing editor of The Washington Post. “I actually think that since 2001 he’s done something really remarkable, in some ways as remarkable as the Watergate reporting. He’s produced what’s standing up so far as the definitive account of the key debates about the nation’s wars and counterterrorism efforts.”
Although Woodward remains best known for the series of stories referred to simply as Watergate, the longtime reporter and editor has written more than a dozen bestselling books that provide an inside look at Washington, including four on former President George W. Bush. Speaking at the Sanford School of Public Policy Oct. 27, Woodward will discuss his latest work, “Obama’s Wars,” which sheds light on the administration’s closed-door conflicts over the war in Afghanistan. The event is open to the public.
Peter Feaver, Alexander F. Hehmeyer professor of political science, hailed Woodward’s accomplishments.
“He is the best-sourced writer in this area today,” said Feaver, who is also co-director of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy, which is co-sponsoring the event. “He’s writing what is often called the first draft of history for presidential-level decision-making.”
Bennett went one step further.
“He’s even producing the second draft,” he said. “These books are holding up and they’re going to hold up. That’s because Woodward’s method is exhaustive, it is comprehensive, and he has a relentless style of reporting that produces these seamless accounts.”
In the 1970s, the revelations Woodward made in the pages of The Washington Post devastated the American public, sinking trust in government to a new low.
“Our belief in our leaders is kind of like our belief in our parents.... It was devastating. It was as if you had discovered that your parent was a burglar,” said Priscilla Wald, associate professor of English.
At a time when America most needed a hero, Woodward was there to fill the void, she added.
“While our faith in politics was waning, we believed there were heroic journalists that were on the job,” Wald said. “It restored our faith in democracy.”
A generation of young people, energized by Woodward’s example, was inspired to go into journalism and replicate the feat.
“That was what I was going to do—I was going to break stories like Watergate,” Wald said. “Graduate school tempted me away.”
Today, the state of journalism could not be more different, Wald noted, with some readers vesting more trust in upstart blogs than traditional news outlets.
Yet Bennett said Woodward’s work attests to the power old-fashioned reporting can still have in a changing landscape.
“I drew a lot of inspiration from Bob even when I was managing editor [at The Washington Post] 30 years after Watergate because he established a really high standard of holding government officials accountable,” he said. “What he’s doing has such a high degree of difficulty, and his ability to pull it off time after time is a really important, substantial public service.... In the end, he shows what a reporter applying some time-honored tools of journalism can accomplish.”
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.