The One Source Bob Woodward Can’t Get to Talk
These might seem to contradict one another, but in fact few people can survive stenography.
Key points
- I would pry into cabinets and bedside tables, nosing through the top drawer of my father’s dresser.” At 11, Bob discovered among his father’s socks a letter from his mother referring to “our divorce”—a topic they had kept from their son.
- Woodward was the first child of a successful lawyer and his homemaker wife in mid-century Wheaton, Illinois, strictly Republican, devoutly Christian—the most staid beginning imaginable.
- Instead, Hersh replied that he valued Woodward’s books because they reliably told him what was going on in the inner sanctum from which he and the rest of us were shut out.
The genre of the Washington book—a sequence of scenes inside rooms where important things happen, based on a convention called “deep background,” with riches of information traced to no sources—is so familiar that it’s easy to forget that Woodward practically invented it.
Additional details
- Woodward opens Secrets with scenes of self-exposure likely to startle the many sources and powerful subjects who have often experienced him as cold-blooded, risky company.
- And yet, though they know better, they always talk, as if transfixed by a predatory stare—like the frog that agrees to carry the scorpion on its back across the lake.
- The atmosphere of tension and evasion gave their son a sense that his world might fall apart (since childhood, Woodward has had an acute fear of house fires).
- Long quoted scenes stripped of context and meaning are almost always the cause of the damaging controversies in Woodward’s books.
- B ob Woodward has published a book roughly every two years since the Watergate scandal, 24 in all.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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