BOB WOODWARD'S DRIVING AMBITION

Obsessed by what others keep secret

By Alicia C. Shepard
Published October 8, 2006

This story contains corrected material, published Oct. 11, 2006.

What drives Bob Woodward? Is it politics? Is it fame? Is it family history?

The legendary Watergate reporter just came out with his 14th book, "State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III," and once again, as with every book, Woodward has shaped the news and provoked strong reaction.

This time, everyone has decided that Woodward must really be a Democratic ideologue because the latest book skewers the president. But wait: People thought the 63-year-old veteran Washington Post reporter was a toady for Republicans after his last two books on the Bush White House.

Fact is, Woodward is apolitical. True, his father was a prominent Republican judge, and Woodward quoted Sen. Barry Goldwater in a high school speech. He even voted for Richard Nixon in 1968, just a few years before he helped bring him down.

But that was a long time ago.

Today, Woodward is a registered Democrat. But he has indicated that's because he lives in the District of Columbia, where Democrats dominate and election outcomes are decided in the primary. Most recently he let his 10-year-old daughter decide how he would vote.

Woodward is truly agnostic. He isn't anti-Bush. He's anti-secrets.

Woodward has been that way since he was 12 and discovered that his parents were divorcing after snooping through the mail at the family's Wheaton home.

He learned another powerful secret a few years later when, while rifling through his father's pockets, he found a letter saying his father was going to remarry.

"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 told movie director Alan Pakula in 1975. (Pakula directed "All the President's Men," based on Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's best-selling book.) "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 secrets."

His desire to uncover secrets was heightened when he began working as an $11.75-a-week janitor at his father's Wheaton law firm (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). As he swept the floor at night, he couldn't help but notice the files and the locked drawers.

"You'd go around cleaning up ashtrays and trash cans," he said in an interview. "What's that on the desk? Oh, that's interesting. You start looking at what's on the desk, then in the drawers, then in the files, then eventually ... in the old cases in the attic.

"Look, I'm a teenager. It just seemed obvious. There was no doubt or hesitation. ... No one knows you are doing this. Maybe it's a waste of time. Maybe it's not. But you are going to learn something."

Woodward pored over divorce cases, IRS files, trial transcripts and fraud cases. It all intrigued him. What he learned was that things in Wheaton were not what they seemed. Of course, they never are. He knew that was the case in his own home: Friends and acquaintances all thought the Woodwards were one big, happy family.

In one file he discovered that someone high up in the school system had made a sexual advance on a student. The district attorney had wired the girl, and Woodward read all the details in a transcript. "It was the first time you see the evidentiary purity of a tape recording," Woodward said.

Right then, the seeds of America's most famous and influential journalist were planted. Other people's secrets fascinated him then, and they continue to motivate him today.

Woodward says he has no agenda when he sets out to report for The Washington Post (which he barely does nowadays, though he's still technically an editor) or write a book.

He just wants to find out what really happened behind the scenes and let the American public know. The hallmark of his reporting is a desire and commitment to pull back the curtain and take away the mystery--whether it's the inside of a newsroom, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon or the White House.

During the early months of Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein tried to find as much information as they could about the men close to President Nixon, especially H.R. Haldeman. "We went to our library and elsewhere and found virtually no clips on him," Woodward said in a speech with Bernstein at the National Press Club in 1972. "We couldn't even find a recent picture, and the wire services were of little help.

"Haldeman was, in effect, a mystery man. There is no reason to have mystery men running this republic. Right from the start of the new [Nixon] administration, here is something that the press and TV can do better: Take away the mystery."

It's what Woodward has been trying to do ever since. Say what you will, but he just wants to get the facts.

"He really believes it is his job to bring to light secrets that would otherwise not be told, not give his opinion," said David Greenberg, a former Woodward assistant.

Woodward takes advantage of the access he has built up in 30 years of reporting. And he lets the reader decide what it all adds up to. He doesn't attempt to make sense of the story, to put it in context or even be analytical. It's just not who he is. Yet no matter what he finds, he has become so famous, so powerful and so controversial that he is a Rorschach test for America's frustrations in a way no other journalist is.

Hate President Bush, and Woodward is a sycophant. Love Bush, and Woodward is out to get the president.

"He's become a phenomenon," said retired New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis. "He's found a metier, a way of doing things that people like to read. He writes a book, and you know it's going to be No. 1 on the best-seller list. He does something no one else does."

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Alicia C. Shepard teaches journalism at American University in Washington, D.C. Her book, "Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate," is due out in November.