One of the knocks on Bob Woodward’s relationship with the Washington Post — and really, on Woodward in general — has been that he routinely keeps his best scoops out of the pages of the Post in order to save them for his books.
We saw this in November 2005, when it was discovered that one of Woodward’s vaunted administration sources passed along some information about the identity of former CIA operative Valerie Plame to him back in 2003 — information Woodward never shared with his paper until one of his sources told federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about it, forcing Woodward to fess up.
Woodward’s lofty perch is so many leagues above those ink-stained wretches shuffling around the newsroom at the Post that when the story of his Plame knowledge broke, he refused to speak to the paper for its story on him, opting instead to issue a statement, that the paper dutifully printed on page A8. At the time, the New York Observer summed up Woodward’s position succinctly: “He is in the business of hoarding tidbits, not publishing them. His loyalties are divided between his jobs as a news-gatherer for The Post and as a best-selling book author for Simon & Schuster.”
This past Sunday, we again saw Woodward in the pages of the Washington Post represented as an author first, a newspaperman second. This time, it’s in the form of an interview he conducted with Senator John Kerry in, it seems, March 2006.
According to the lead of the partial transcript, sometime before the presidential election of 2004 while working on “Plan of Attack,” the second book in his Bush trilogy, Woodward sent the Kerry campaign “a list of 22 questions based on Bush’s actions, asking how Kerry would have responded at each key decision point if he had been president. Kerry declined the interview at the time. More than a year later, on March 7, Kerry agreed to be interviewed by Woodward and answer the 22 questions. Below is an edited version of their two-hour conversation.”
The interview itself is about as far from newsworthy as it gets, since Kerry obviously isn’t president, and hearing how he would’ve-could’ve-should’ve done things differently doesn’t really amount to much. Wasn’t all this the point of the 2004 presidential election — two years ago? Are all the Kerry supporters reading this supposed to feel wistful?
The interview seems to say more about Woodward and his relationship with the Post than it does about Kerry. After taking it on the chin for failing to share information about his role in the Plame case with Len Downie, the Post‘s executive editor, or with fellow reporters working on the Plame story, (he did say he told the paper’s Walter Pincus, but Pincus disputed when this conversation took place), all parties promised to do a better job of communicating.
Perhaps they are, but by the looks of this stale interview, inexplicably pulled from the waste bin at Woodward’s home office, it looks like he still isn’t giving the Post much more than crumbs.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.