Last week, Bill Murray was on the Joe Rogan Experience. Their conversation eventually wended to Murray’s departed friend and Saturday Night Live co-star John Belushi. Murray discussed Bob Woodward’s book about Belushi — Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi — and said it was a tsunami of fabrications. Murray even posited that since Bob Woodward’s journalism played an integral role in the demise of the Richard Nixon administration, it’s entirely possible that unseen forces were at work to depose Nixon.
I wrote a book about Watergate — The Truth About Watergate: A Tale of Extraordinary Lies and Liars — in which I demonstrate that the Tom Brady of journalism, Bob Woodward, is an unabashed liar and ethical eunuch. If he were Pinocchio, his nose would have a length that rivaled the elevation of the Chrysler Building.
Woodward was born in 1943, and he came of age in Wheaton, Illinois, a conservative, prosperous, and pious enclave on the outskirts of Chicago. Wheaton was a W.A.S.P. Xanadu: 94 percent of its denizens were white and Protestant churches were generously sprinkled throughout the hamlet. Republicans also outnumbered Democrats by a margin of four to one. Woodward’s father was a talented trial lawyer, who would be awarded a county circuit judgeship.
Outwardly, Woodward grew up in an idyllic environment. “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril,” Oscar Wilde said of art, and Wilde’s statement was equally applicable to the Woodward household: His mother had an affair with a Sears’ executive, which ruptured the family. Twelve-year-old Woodward was the eldest of three siblings when his father was awarded custody of the three children. His father remarried a divorcee who had three children, and the couple eventually had a daughter. So the Woodward household mutated from Father Knows Best into The Brady Bunch.
Woodward has depicted himself as an outsider of sorts throughout his high school years. But he was elected class president during his sophomore year, and he was one of four commencement speakers for his graduating class. He followed in the conservative wake of his father, and his commencement speech was gleaned from The Conscience of a Conservative, a book written by ultra conservative Barry Goldwater.
After Woodward graduated from Wheaton Community High School, he skipped into Yale University on a Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship. He doubled down on his dedication to the status quo when he entered Book and Snake, one of Yale’s secret societies. At Yale, Woodward majored in English and history. A Yale history professor described his conservative bent as “crypto-fascist.”
Though Woodward eschewed the peace, love, and brown rice of the 1960s, he revealed in an interview after his celebrity that he had become disenchanted with the Vietnam War and thought of seeking sanctuary in Canada. But Woodward’s recollections about his collegiate misgivings on Vietnam diverge from the memories of his high school sweetheart and first wife: When the authors of Silent Coup inquired if Woodward had ever talked about evading his R.O.T.C. commitment to the Navy in Canada, she responded with a resounding, “Heavens no!” She also depicted him as “ruthless” and “extremely ambitious.”
Following Woodward’s graduation from Yale, his R.O.T.C. scholarship mandated a six-year hitch in the Navy — four years of active duty and two years in the naval reserve. He was a communications officer who had a “top-secret crypto” security clearance when he served on the USS Wright and then the USS Fox.
After his four-year tenure in the Navy, he was assigned to the Pentagon, where he served a fifth year of active duty, working for the Chief of Naval Operations. His responsibilities included briefing Alexander Haig. The official Watergate narrative, sanctified by the government, ablates Woodward briefing Haig at the White House in 1969 and 1970. And Woodward’s Big Lie throughout Watergate was that he didn’t meet Alexander Haig until 1973. But his Big Lie is trumped by three sources who maintain that he had, indeed, briefed Haig: The Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Thomas Moorer, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, and also an aide to the Secretary of Defense. Woodward’s Big Lie has seismic implications, which are discussed in The Truth About Watergate.
Hellbound and Down 