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September/October 1993 | Contents

Impeaching Woodstein

DEEP TRUTH: THE LIVES OF BOB WOODWARD AND CARL BERNSTEIN, by Adrian Havill. Birch Lane Press. 264 pp. $ 21.95

Review by Steve Weinberg

Weinberg, a CJR contributing editor, is a long-time investigative reporter and biographer.

Bob Woodward, the most influential investigative journalist alive, is under attack -- again -- concerning the accuracy of his reporting. It would be simple to attribute the attacks to the jealousy of lesser journalists. After all, if the critics are so smart, why aren't they rich and famous?

I don't know if Adrian Havill is rich. I know he's not famous -- his only previous book, a biography of Jack Kent Cooke, received little notice. But, as the latest in a line of Woodward attackers, Havill is plenty smart.

He has embedded his attacks on Woodward's credibility in a well-researched, capably written biography of the Watergate twins, both turning fifty. In alternating chapters, the dual biography devotes lots of pages to the boyhoods and young adulthoods of Woodward and Bernstein. When biographers research the early years of their subjects, the result is sometimes mundane. But Havill makes these early years significant: talented investigative journalists don't arrive at The Washington Post without predispositions.

By spending time in Woodward's hometown of Wheaton, Illinois, and by studying high school year books, Havill is able to provide fascinating detail about the scandalous divorce of the future journalist's parents, to speculate with some authority about the impact of Bob being reared by his perfectionist lawyer father, and to serve up telling quotations from Bob's high school friends ("He was always well-intended, but remote," says Craig Simpson, who ran Bob's losing campaign for student council president. "In many ways, he was like Nixon"). Havill's research into Bernstein's youth in Washington, D.C., is equally revealing. "If Bob's youth was a dark episode of the sitcom Happy Days," Havill concludes, "Carl's was the ultimate Philip Roth novel."

By Havill's account, he discovered youthful behavior suggesting tendencies by both Woodward and Bernstein to fictionalize the real world. One especially convincing example involves Bernstein, who, Havill says, concocted a false account of a trip as a teenager to Greensboro, North Carolina, to participate in a civil right demonstration.

As Havill starts trying his pieces of evidence together, he sometimes sounds like a prosecutor during a courtroom opening statement. Here is one of many examples, based on Havill's belief -- supported by suggestive evidence but not proved conclusively -- that Woodward, while in the Navy, served as a White House briefer to Alexander Haig:

[Woodward] has vociferously fought all attempts to link him with White House briefings while working at the Pentagon. Bob portrays his background in such a way that his initial success as a . . . reporter . . . seems to have come from simple hard work, from knocking on doors in the dark of night, and from talking with low-level government secretaries. Nothing could be further from the truth. . . . Bob denied knowing Alexander Haig because General Haig would be one of his more important government sources when Bob became a newspaper reporter, and because Alexander Haig is one of two or three men who fit the description of Deep Throat.

The indictment goes on. By checking weather data with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for specific days described in All the President's Men, Havill shows that it almost certainly did not rain when the book says it was raining and that it almost certainly was warmer than described in "chilly" scenes, or colder than described in "sweaty" scenes. Havill's research also shows, seemingly beyond refutation, that the movie Deep Throat was not playing in Washington, D.C., on the day Bernstein supposedly watched the hard-core sex film while evading a subpoena.

To bolster his case that Woodward and Bernstein are published liars, Havill quotes form a 1976 book, The New Muckrakers, written by Leonard Downie, Jr. At the time he wrote the book, Downie was an investigative journalist colleague of Woodward and Bernstein, at The Washington Post. (Today, as the Post's top editor, Downie is Woodward's boss.) Relating a 1965 newspaper story Bernstein wrote about the New York City power outage, Downie asked, "How many people were in the Americana's lobby? How many of the hitchhiking executives were wearing Brooks Brothers suits? . . . With Bernstein, you could never be sure about the little details."

While Downie is harder on Bernstein than on Woodward in The New Muckrakers, Havill focuses on Woodward's alleged sins. His research is prodigious. Trying to show that during Woodward's years in the Navy he was more deeply involved in military intelligence than he admits, Havill studied the 1965-66 deck logs of the ship on which he served. Trying to establish Woodward's penchant for fiction, he notes that the journalist's first ambition was to be a novelist. And the idea for the book All the President's Men, he reports, originated with Robert Redford, who was looking ahead to a feature film.

Especially damaging is Havill's evidence that the alleged source Deep Throat could not have had the view of Woodward's apartment described in All the President's Men. After recounting Woodward's published version of how he supposedly communicated clandestinely with Deep Throat, Havill writes: "This author has been on every floor of 1718 P Street, N.W. -- Bob's former apartment building -- and has been inside Bob's sixth-floor apartment and has stood in the courtyard several times. He found the following discrepancies between Bob's account in All The President's Men and what was physically possible." Those discrepancies, which would take too much space to set out here, raise compelling questions about Woodward and Bernstein's veracity.

Havill effectively uses similar on-the-scene reporting in attacking Woodward's account of his hospital encounter with dying CIA director William Casey. Previous journalists have questioned the truthfulness of the hospital scene in Veil; Woodward used his stature to brush them off.

Perhaps Woodward will succeed in brushing Havill, too, but he has more explaining to do than ever after Havill's demonstration -- more detailed than any other known to me -- of how difficult it would have been for Woodward to gain access to Casey in his hospital room.

Because of Havill's persistence and the previous reporting of other Woodstein debunkers -- especially Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup and Jim Hougan in Secret Agenda (see CJR, November/December, 1991) -- I'm prepared to judge Woodward and Bernstein guilty on some counts until proven innocent. They have played the anonymous sourcing game too long, with consequences for history too serious to tolerate.

Speaking of his own, usually unsourced, revelations, Woodward has said that readers take his word because they can distinguish "between chicken salad and chicken shit." So now that Havill has served up chicken salad, and pretty well-sourced at that, what is Woodward's response?