Bob Woodward, Valerie Wilson, and Nostalgia for Watergate

I don’t wish to draw attention away from the previous posts, because I think it is important that we recognize the rampant abuse of detentions by the US and that we make a stand against the idiocy of Bill O’Reilly. However, I do wish to point out some very sad news, at least for me. Bob Woodward has become entangled in the Valerie Wilson investigation. And it is shaping up to be more than an innocent problem of recollection, as Judy Miller so glibly argued.
The Washington Post has reported here that its own assistant managing editor, Bob Woodward, was given information about the identity of Amb. Joseph Wilson’s wife a month before Miller was given her name by Scooter Libby. There is already speculation that the official who leaked this information to Woodward may be the same person who gave that information to Robert Novak, but neither reporter will go on record with the name of their fabled “Mr. X”. From the investigation’s perspective this is particularly interesting in that Woodward has said that this person is neither Karl Rove nor Scooter Libby, meaning that there is at least one more administration official who was giving out this information to reporters. John Aravosis of Americablog wrote that this has become a “clear pattern of leaks” by the administration to at least five reporters: Woodward, Miller, Matt Cooper, Tim Russert, and Bob Novak.
But what the bloggers have picked up on even more forcefully is the disingenuousness of Woodward throughout the whole affair. Woodward has been a critic of the leak investigation from the beginning. On Oct. 27 he said on Larry King Live:

“First of all this began not as somebody launching a smear campaign that it actually — when the story comes out I’m quite confident we’re going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter and that somebody learned that Joe Wilson’s wife had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job going to Niger to see if there was an Iraq/Niger uranium deal.

“And, there’s a lot of innocent actions in all of this but what has happened this prosecutor, I mean I used to call Mike Isikoff when he worked at the ‘Washington Post’ the junkyard dog. Well this is a junkyard dog prosecutor and he goes everywhere and asks every question and turns over rocks and rocks under rocks and so forth.”

In response to this criticism, blogger John Marshall writes:

“[I]t now seems that Woodward — who has long been publicly critical of the Fitzgerald investigation — has been part of it from the beginning. Literally, the beginning. . . .

“Woodward seems to have some explaining to do, at least for the fact that he became an aggressive commentator on the leak story without ever disclosing his own role in it, not even to his editors.”

Woodward is currently in the process of writing his third book about the administration, and both of the previous books have portrayed the Bush administration in a rather positive light. He has been rewarded for his soft reporting with interviews from top officials that seem impossible for others to get. In response to this Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake writes:

“Woodward isn’t just reluctant to criticize the Administration — he’s become the water carrier of choice. . . .

“Woodward stopped being a ‘journalist’ in the true sense of the word long ago — when he decided celebrity status and book sales meant more than the truth. He has gone from being — well, whatever he was, to something much worse: an official peddler of lies told by powerful people to whitewash their criminal activities.”

It certainly makes one question Woodward when he openly criticizes the investigation when he should have been involved with it from the beginning, and when he has such close ties to the administration that his journalistic integrity comes into question. And so it is with a heavy heart that I ask: Where is the Bob Woodward that I grew up idolizing for Watergate, for his unrelenting pursuit of the truth that set the names Woodward and Bernstein as the height of journalistic grit? And I close with some thoughts by Village Voice’s Sydney Schanberg the day before this news was released:

“Bob Woodward rightly became a beacon in the journalism world for the groundbreaking shoe-leather reporting he and Carl Bernstein did on the Watergate scandal in 1972 for The Washington Post. Since then he has become known for his books gleaned from rarely given interviews with presidents and other powerful people in Washington’s high places. He appears often on television talk shows, giving inside looks at major stories as well as orotund comments on the practice of good journalism. . . .

“I wish I were wrong, but to me Woodward sounds as if he has come a long way from those shoe-leather days — and maybe on a path that does not become him. He sounds, I think, like those detractors in 1972, as they pooh-poohed the scandal that unraveled the Nixon presidency — the scandal that Woodward and Bernstein doggedly uncovered. . . .

“His remarks about the Fitzgerald investigation convey the attitude of a sometime insider reluctant to offend — and that is hardly a definition of what a serious, independent reporter is supposed to be. It’s a far piece from Watergate.”

ADDENDUM: More information is coming out about this new development, and I am sure that we can expect even more to come of it. The New York Times is reporting that many top government officials have officially denied being Woodward’s source, but not Dick Cheney. This is particularly damning because Patrick Fitzgerald has said that Scooter Libby testified that he got his information about Valerie Wilson from Cheney on June 12th, although Libby now seems to claim that he got it from Tim Russert on some other date. Overall the NY Times article is excellent coverage of the newest development, even looking into which officials were suspected to have known about the identity of Joseph Wilson’s wife, and which of them have testified to the special prosecutor. It also points out that Washington Post writer Walter Pincus has also been interviewed by the prosecutor and may have known about Mrs. Wilson before many of the administration officials. There is speculation that his questions about her at the White House and CIA may have caused many of the officials to become interested in her identity in the first place. Interesting stuff.

Last 5 posts by Dan

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• Domestic Spying Affects Me Personally - December 17th, 2005