Woodward scores again
I was in the Watergate Class of journalists, the young men and women who entered the profession in the mid-1970s, immediately after the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. During my years at Hope College, I avidly followed the reporting on the scandal by the national press, especially the stories of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. It was hard to see the actual Washington Post in Michigan in those pre-Internet days, but many of their more important stories went out on the wire and were reprinted in the Detroit Free Press and Grand Rapids Press, if my memory serves me. Their two books on Watergate, "All The President's Men" and "The Final Days," became holy writ for young reporters like me. We could quote chapter and verse.
Many of us wanted to be like Woodward and Bernstein, investigative reporters who pounded the street and worked their sources to get big stories with a momentous impact on America. A few of us actually succeeded--the 1980s and 1990s were the golden age of American investigative reporting. I did it on a much smaller scale with my reporting on the Centralia mine fire and my own book, Unseen Danger, published in 1986. Woodward and Bernstein weren't perfect journalists, but they came mighty close to the ideal.
Woodward, long a solo act, proved it again this week with stories from an interview he did with former President Gerald Ford before his death. First came the story that Ford was highly critical of George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq, and tonight comes an admission from beyond the grave that his personal friendship with Nixon influenced Ford's decision to pardon him a month after taking office in August 1974. He had always said he did it to spare the country the torment of seeing a former President put on trial, as Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski wanted to do.
I can tell you as a journalist that you don't get stories like this by walking in cold and asking Ford why he really pardoned Nixon. Woodward did extensive pre-research, including combing the Nixon Tapes for hitherto unknown conversations between Nixon and Ford that suggested their friendship was far closer than either man ever let on publicly. The journalist is part detective, part psychiatrist, part musical conductor. He must win the trust of his subject, but also induce him to believe that he is just confirming what the reporter already knows.