Woodward, a name in Washington, D.C., interviewed nine U.S. presidents, brought down one of them (Nixon), wrote two dozen books, and amassed more than $25 million in personal wealth. Although he is a journalist, when he appears in any public place, he is no different from the big names he interviews. Because of himself, he has become a legend.
Woodward has published new books largely a year over the years, the latest of which is his new book, "Peril," which he co-authored with Robert Costa, which reveals the final days of Trump's presidency. Books that have sold well in recent years are also related to Trump, including the 2018 bestseller "Fear: Trump in the White House" and the 2020 "Rage" book.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="7" > are well versed in bestseller routines</h1>
If you think that every book in Woodward sells well, simply because he's a well-known journalist, that's naïve. In a conservative city like Washington, where every blockbuster book is distributed and promoted according to "tradition," Woodward knows it.
It's the same as today's domestic variety shows: generally a week or two before the release of the new book, the biggest melon in the book is first cut into small pieces, and then the mainstream media such as CNN, The Washington Post, and the New York Times are given priority to taste the early adopters, and then start to shake the material little by little. After the news is almost released and has aroused enough heat, Woodward will go to the mainstream media one by one and accept "exclusive interviews" respectively. At this time, new books that are still in the pre-sale period have begun to be wildly booked. So when the book is released on its first day, it will naturally become a New York Times bestseller and Amazon's no. 1 book.
Woodward, who has published more than 20 books, is paired with Bob Barnett, Washington's most powerful publishing agent, and Simon & Schuster, the most powerful publisher, the most powerful media platform, The Washington Post. Such a combination of two fists, Woodward wants to not sell much is difficult!
In nearly half a century of journalism, Woodward is no longer part of the same world as his journalists, not only a journalist but also a public figure, running his own independent media outlet, overseeing the establishment of the agency and making a lot of money.
Today, when Woodward's name is familiar, many people may have forgotten Woodward's partner in watergate coverage, Carl Bernstein, who is considered to be a better writer than Woodward. But after Watergate, the two chose a very different path of development.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="93" rose to fame > Watergate</h1>
Let's take a brief review of woodward and Bernstein's most glorious deeds. (Friends familiar with Watergate can skip it.) ）
On a Saturday morning, June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a security guard at the Watergate Building of the Democratic National Committee of the United States, noticed that the door was locked abnormally, and it was taped so that the door could not be locked. Wells didn't care at first, but tore off the tape and left. After breakfast, Wells returned to the building to find that the door had been tagged with rubber strips again! The more he thought about it, the stranger it became, so he reported it to his superiors and called the police.
The two police officers who responded to the call were dressed in civilian clothes that day, and the people who gave the "intruders" outside the Watergate Building did not notice the arrival of the police. So the police and Wells went up to the Federal Reserve Board office on the 8th floor and began to search. Later they found five intruders who were trying to unload the door because they couldn't open the door to the Office of the Democratic National Committee!
After seeing the police, the intruder did not struggle at all and obediently surrendered. The people looking downstairs saw that the lights in the building suddenly turned on, and they immediately fled in a hurry. And the five people disguised as "thieves" carried surveillance equipment, telephone wiretaps, and hundred-dollar bills, which made people wonder about their true motives.
After the incident was revealed, Nixon's team tried to cover up the truth. But a growing body of evidence has been directed at them, such as the "thief's" hundred-dollar bill being shown to be linked to Nixon campaign committee funding. At this time, it was Woodward and Bernstein who were in charge of the Watergate investigation in the Washington Post.
At that time, clues from the Huayou duo had shown that the Watergate "burglary" incident was not simple and was directly related to the top levels of the US government, including the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department and the White House. As the investigation progressed, they found that documents had been destroyed and election funds had been misappropriated. A nixon-news media war officially kicked off.
After the conviction and trial of the five "thieves", the media has opened their minds: Who is associated with these five people? Why destroy evidence? What are they hiding? Nixon, on the other hand, fell deeper and deeper into the lie. The Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate directly formed a Watergate Commission of Inquiry, which eventually released the tapes from Nixon's Oval Office. This sparked the famous Saturday Night Massacre in U.S. history (Nixon fired the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, and Special Prosecutor in a fit of rage), culminating in Nixon's impeachment and resignation.
During these months, the Duo always had access to exclusive information that no other media outlet had, including one of the most important government informants recorded in history known as "Deep Throat," whose true identity was not made public until 2005. (FBI no. 2 person at the time, Felt)
Stills from the Watergate movie
Felt and Woodward are alumni of George Washington University, and the two have been in touch. While investigating Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein discover that one of the "thieves" was a member of nixon's presidential campaign committee, and then they followed the vine and discovered that another committee member had called two "thieves."
In order to obtain more valuable information within the government, Woodward directly called Felt to try his luck, who knew that Felt, who had been unhappy with Nixon for a long time, also felt that he could use the Chinese postal duo to take down Nixon. The two sides hit it off, and Felt became Woodward's most important informant. Felt also directly sent Woodward and Bernstein to the podium of the Pulitzer Prize, the press's highest honor.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="94" > abandoned Wu Congwen but was turned away by Huayou</h1>
Woodward was born in 1943 in illinois, the son of a lawyer, who later became chief judge of the 18th Circuit. After graduating from high school in 1961, Woodward enrolled in history and English literature at Yale University on a Naval Reserve Officers' Corps scholarship. While at school, Woodward joined the Brotherhood and joined Book and Snake, Yale's fourth oldest mysterious organization. Members of this organization included bill Nelson, the future NASA administrator, and former U.S. secretary of defense and treasury. This also laid the foundation for Woodward to later build an extensive network of relationships.
After graduating, Woodward served in the Navy for five years, during which time he was stationed on the USS Wright aircraft carrier and became one of two officers capable of operating nuclear launch codes at the national maritime emergency command post on the Wright.
Woodward might be able to continue his career if he remained in the Navy, but he had a very clear goal: to become a reporter for the Washington Post. After retiring from the army in August 1970, Woodward applied to Harvard Law School and was easily accepted. But he turned Harvard down and went to George Washington University to study Shakespeare and International Relations, while applying for a position as a reporter for the Washington Post.
Interestingly, Harry Rosenfeld, then editor of the Washington Post's Metropolitan Edition, did not hire Woodward after trying out Woodward for two weeks, citing his lack of journalistic experience. But Woodward, who had a journalistic ideal, was not reassured, and after a year of working on a local weekly magazine in Washington, D.C., he was eventually hired as a regular employee by the Washington Post. Less than a year into his career, he partnered with Bernstein to investigate watergate.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="95" > interviewer that presidents can hardly resist</h1>
When it comes to Woodward, his readers, including many of his fellow journalists, praise him as America's greatest investigative journalist. But in private, not all journalists look to Woodward as an example. Some people will criticize his words for being dull and not expressing any personal opinions, and the most fatal thing is that there are factual errors.
Taking the latest edition of "Danger" as an example, the biggest revelation of the book is the two phone calls between Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Chinese side. But the scene, which Woodward described as a "secret call," was not conducted in secret at all, with about 15 people involved in both calls, and the content of each call was shared with other government departments.
Millie, on the other hand, had his personal motivations for interviewing Woodward. After the White House chose violence to expel peaceful protesters in LaFiyette Square last June, Millie has been very remorseful that he was standing with Trump in a military uniform. As a result, Millikin began to give interviews to the media in a frenzy, trying to whitewash his reputation. One well-known Washington journalist described Millie this way: "Since the la Fayette Square incident, Millie has become a very generous interviewer who is willing to wipe his ass, and it has become very easy to get his interview permission, and he has become a public bicycle in Washington." ”
In fact, almost no one in Washington can reject Woodward, including Trump, who hated Woodward to the bone when he first took office because of the book "Fear". When Woodward wrote Fury, Trump didn't give him an interview, so much so that he later began to regret it. So Trump was deeply involved in the creation of Woodward's second book, "Anger", and gave 18 interviews in a year, with 10 hours of interview recordings.
A question in many people's minds is: Why is it so difficult for Trump to refuse a journalist who rose to fame in Watergate for overthrowing the president? Of course, Trump will tell you because he's Trump.
But beyond the Trump era, Woodward has been a regular in the Oval Office for the past 50 years, including interviews with at least seven U.S. presidents including Ford, Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Most of the people interviewed by Woodward have the same mentality: if you can be interviewed by Woodward, you will be recorded as part of history. (Nixon and three other presidents explicitly declined to interview Woodward.)
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="96" > Woodward controversy</h1>
During the George W. Bush administration, Woodward had two books, both of which glorified the then U.S. Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, as a dashing, heroic figure. The two were also very good, but with the Iraq war came more and more questions. When Woodward wrote the third book, the style of painting suddenly changed!
Woodward writes that he confronted Rumsfeld head-to-face and asked Rumsfeld bluntly whether he was responsible for the thousands of people who lost their lives in Iraq. Rumsfeld was speechless and did not know what to say for a moment.
But sources involved in the interview revealed that the situation was not so intense at the time, and the two continued to talk for more than a decade after Woodward raised the issue. Moreover, Woodward can be said to be extremely "flattering" to Rumsfeld, even suggesting that if Rumsfeld was in charge of the CIA in 2002-2003, there would be no scandal in which the United States falsely accused Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
Cliff Sims, a former Trump employee, also wrote in his memoirs that Woodward had completely fabricated the interview scene. Not only that, but Tanner Colby has interviewed many of Woodward's interviewees, many of whom complained that Woodward had distorted their speeches. Some even joked that because the distortion was too severe, Nixon might have been innocent at that time.
Woodward was told in a March 2020 interview with Trump about the novel when he published Fury, but he withheld an exclusive message from the public until the new book was released. In the face of scoops and public health, Woodward chose the former.
Although whenever Woodward has a new book published, the accompanying doubts will continue to be heard, but this does not affect people's pursuit of Woodward.
In Washington's Game of Thrones, Woodward has undoubtedly been at the top. Woodward used the power of his personal branding over half a century to make the people he interviewed feel that talking to Woodward was already a sign of success because you were important enough that Woodward noticed you.
But in reality, this success reverses the balance between the interviewer and the interviewee. Unlike ordinary journalists, who chase after the president of the United States and senior government officials like paparazzi, Woodward invites these high-ranking officials to his home in Georgetown. Mr. Obama's senior adviser, Ben Rhods, has enjoyed this treatment. People familiar with Woodward say it's a very clever way to get respondents to open up to you, invite guests into the home, compliment them, make them feel comfortable, and then start talking. Rhodes later wrote in his memoirs that Mr. Obama's media adviser, Dan Pfeiffer, later blamed Rhodes for the danger of self-casting nets.
But even though the voice of doubt about Woodward never stopped, in Washington, if any politician suddenly got a call from Woodward: Hey, I'm Woodward and want to invite you to my house. How many people can refuse?