Another leftist icon tarnished

Bob Woodward Has A Trail Of Accuracy Issues That Nobody Is Talking About
9:28 PM 09/10/2018
Peter Hasson | Reporter

Bob Woodward’s new book “Fear” presents a scathing depiction of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Woodward has a muddy history with a trail of allegations that he embellished the truth or otherwise misled his readers.

Media coverage of Woodward’s book has been largely positive and ignores Woodward’s controversial record.

Longtime journalist Bob Woodward’s best-selling new book, “Fear,” presents a scathing depiction of President Donald Trump and his ability to perform his duties as commander-in-chief.

While senior Trump officials including Secretary of Defense James Mattis have denied quotations attributed to them in the book, media coverage of “Fear” has been largely positive, emphasizing the 75-year-old Woodward’s experience and trustworthiness.

But that coverage has left out part of the story: repeated, credible charges — including from well-respected fellow journalists — that in previous books Woodward embellished the truth, made dubious bombshell claims or was otherwise misleading.

Woodward’s former editor at the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, though publicly complimentary of Woodward, privately doubted some of the more dramatic elements of Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate-era bestseller, “All The President’s Men.”

Bradlee and Woodward’s former assistant at the Post, Jeff Himmelman, revealed Bradlee’s nagging doubts in a 2012 biography of the longtime editor.

Bradlee gave Himmelman full access to his files, which revealed that details about Woodward’s relationship with infamous Watergate source “Deep Throat” gnawed at Bradlee years later. Details like Woodward communicating with Deep Throat by placing a flag in a potted plant on his balcony, or their dozens of shadowy garage meetings.

“You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat,” Bradlee said to an assistant in a 1990 interview that he originally intended to use for a memoir but which remained private until Himmelman published his book.

“Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? … and meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage … There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”

Himmelman wrote that Woodward, fearful of the truth coming out, tried to pressure him into removing the damaging information from the book.

Himmelman’s book also revealed that Woodward and Bernstein misled the public for decades about another Watergate source, known as source “Z.”

“For four decades, Carl and Bob have insisted that the grand jurors they contacted had given them no information. For four decades, that story endured, as it was replayed in interviews and reread in library copies of All The President’s Men, and as Woodward and Bernstein and ­Bradlee became a holy trinity of newspaper journalism,” Himmelman wrote in a New York Magazine excerpt.

“But, according to the memo, it didn’t appear to be true: Z was no mystic; she was a grand juror in disguise, and had apparently broken the law by talking. Woodward and Bernstein had always denied it—in 1974, and as recently as 2011,” Himmelman wrote.

Woodward and Bernstein’s book described Z as someone “in a position to have considerable knowledge of the secret activities of the White House and [the Committee to Re-elect the President]” and quotes her saying: “My boss called it a whitewash.”

That was misleading for two reasons, Himmelman showed.

First, the second half of that quote (which Woodward and Bernstein left out) was: “and he [the boss] doesn’t even have the facts.”

Second, what Z’s boss thought about the case was far less relevant if her day job wasn’t directly related to the Nixon administration.

Woodward and Bernstein’s account “leads the reader to think some wise man of the Nixon administration, Z’s sage boss, was troubled by all the criminality there,” then-Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen, a renowned Watergate historian, noted in a 2012 piece for The Atlantic. “It’s beyond misleading.”

Former FBI Director L.Patrick Gray III’s notes, published for the first time in a 2008 book by his son Ed Gray, similarly challenged Woodward and Bernstein’s account of Deep Throat.

Former FBI agent Mark Felt took credit for being Deep Throat in 2005 but Gray, cross-referencing his father’s FBI files and four of Woodward’s notes on Deep Throat at the University of Texas, argued that some information Woodward attributed to Deep Throat couldn’t plausibly have come from Felt.

“There is now convincing evidence that ‘Deep Throat’ was indeed a fabrication. Bob Woodward has provided it himself,” Gray wrote in the book, a copy of which was reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“‘Deep Throat’ could not be the single individual Woodward always claimed him to be” but instead was a “composite fiction,” Gray charged.

Gray’s book “demolishes forever the notion that Deep Throat was Mark Felt alone. Others have already made inroads on this subject, but the use of Woodward’s own typed notes makes the judgment final,” Rosen wrote in a June 2008 review in American Spectator.

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http://dailycaller.com/2018/09/10/bob-wo...atergate-trump/


Lots more, with links, in the article.