Playboy Interview: Bob Woodward

When Bob Woodward telephoned a source some time ago, the secretary who took the call thought it was Robert Redford on the line. Even the source--who knew better--hesitated when Woodward came onto the line, confusing the reporter with the actor who had once played him.

Woodward occupies a unique niche in American popular culture--he's perhaps the only print reporter who is more famous than most of the people he interviews. Much of his celebrity derives from Redford's portrayal of him in "All the President's Men," the 1976 film version of the Watergate saga based on the book by Woodward and his Washington Post side-kick, Carl Bernstein.

It's about to get even more confusing. For, in a relatively short time, Woodward will be portrayed by as many as four more actors. He is slated to be a character in movies or TV series based on three of his other best-selling books--"The Final Days" (1976), the story of Richard Nixon's decline and fall; "Wired" (1984), about the death of actor John Belushi; and "Veil" (1987), about William Casey's tenure as Director of Central Intelligence--and, perhaps, in an autobiographical script now being completed by Elsa Walsh, Woodward's companion of the past six years and herself a Post reporter.

Indeed, at the age of 45, Woodward is a full-blown journalistic legend. Ben Bradlee, his boss at the Post, calls him "the best reporter I've ever seen. Period." David Halberstam, who made his name with aggressive pursuit of the truth in Vietnam, hails his "single-minded ferocity." Seymour Hersh, perhaps the only other reporter of this era with a comparable investigative record--and a man not given to gushing about others' achievements--says of Woodward, "He's awfully good; his work has really held up over the years."

But, not surprisingly, Woodward's celebrity has brought him disparagement as well. Critics question his confidential relationship with his sources, suggest that he may even have fabricated some critical scenes in his books and argue that he has not found the proper balance of his roles as the Post's assistant managing editor in charge of its investigative unit, as the newspaper's star reporter and as a writer of best-selling books.

So pervasive is Woodward's influence and so familiar is his by-line on the front pages and the best-seller lists that it is hard to believe that he emerged onto the national scene only in 1973. His upbringing gave little hint of the role he was to play.

Born on March 25, 1943, in Geneva, Illinois, he grew up in nearby Wheaton, a suburb of Chicago. When he was 12, his parents divorced, with his father retaining custody of Bob, a brother and a sister. Later, his father remarried a woman who had three children of her own, and together they had another. The eldest of the seven, Woodward tried hard to live up to the expectations of his father, then Wheaton's leading lawyer (and later a judge). In sports, he did not impress, but academically, he did well enough to snag a naval R.O.T.C. scholarship to Yale, where he majored in history.

Graduating in 1965, he fulfilled his Navy obligation with four years as a communications officer at sea, then was "extended" to a fifth year in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations. Woodward hated the Navy and the Vietnam war, so when he got out, he gravitated toward the institution most critical of U.S. involvement in Vietnam: the press.

After a year with the Montgomery County Sentinel, where he made a local splash covering Maryland's political hanky-panky, he joined the Post in September 1971 and was assigned to the night police beat. Another story soon intervened.

On June 17, 1972, Woodward was awakened at home by a call from city editor Barry Sussman, who told him that five men carrying photographic and electronic gear had been arrested earlier that morning during a burglary at the Democratic Party headquarters. The city desk needed some extra hands on the story. Could he come in?

Woodward jumped out of bed and walked the six blocks to the Post, where he found another reporter, a rumpled, shaggy-haired fellow named Carl Bernstein, at work on the same story.

In the days following the break-in, as they worked side by side, the two young men--Woodward was 29; Bernstein, 28--eyed each other suspiciously. But soon they discovered that they worked well together--Woodward supplying the establishment credentials, a well-honed intelligence and dogged diligence; Bernstein providing the writing skill, cunning and an almost feral intensity. Woodward had been divorced from his first wife and high school sweetheart, Kathleen Middlekauff, and Bernstein was separated, so neither had a family life to prevent him from working 12 to 18 hours a day. Work they did, breaking story after story as the Watergate saga unfolded. For their efforts, the Post won a Pulitzer Prize.

Soon Watergate was a cottage industry, with Woodward and Bernstein its chief entrepreneurs. Their book on how they got the story, "All the President's Men," was published in 1974. It sold more than 300,000 copies and rose to number one on the best-seller lists. (It appeared first as excerpts in Playboy in May and June 1974.) Two years later, it was released as a film, starring Redford as Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein and Jason Robards as Bradlee. That same year, Woodward and Bernstein published their second book about watergate--"The Final Days"--which, like its predecessor, soared to the top of the best-seller lists and sold nearly 600,000 copies.

But behind the scenes of this long-running show, the two stars squabbled. Woodward took increasing umbrage at Bernstein's work habits; Bernstein met and married New York journalist Nora Ephron, left the Post and set out to become a true "writer." So, when the opportunity to report from inside the Supreme Court presented itself, Woodward turned to his boyhood friend Scott Armstrong, then a reporter at the Post. The result, in 1979, was "The Brethren," again a number-one best seller, with some 600,000 copies sold.

Meanwhile, Woodward was beginning to see himself as the logical successor to executive editor Bradlee. He became metropolitan editor, but it was soon apparent that that was not his strength. In 1981, one of his staffers, a young woman named Janet Cooke, won a Pulitzer Prize for her story about an eight--year-old heroin addict, only to have the prize revoked when it was discovered that she had fabricated the story. Although Woodward and his colleagues pried the truth out of Cooke and promptly published everything they knew, the episode was a setback for the young editor, dashing his hopes to succeed Bradlee. The next year, he was shunted aside, appointed an assistant managing editor and given free rein to pursue his own book projects while developing investigative stories for the paper.

His next book--and the first without a formal collaborator--was "Wired," which told the story of John Belushi's losing battle with drugs. (It, too, was excerpted in Playboy, in July 1984.) Once more, Woodward hit the top of the best-seller lists, with more than 300,000 copies sold, but the book stirred a furor among Belushi's family, friends and admirers, who charged that he had distorted the late actor's life.

Then, in September 1987, Woodward produced "Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981--1987." Its publication provoked fresh controversy, particularly over its final scene, in which he claimed to have interviewed CIA Director Casey in the hospital shortly before he died. Casey's widow vehemently denied that Woodward had been in her husband's hospital room. Others charged Woodward with withholding important material from his newspaper in order to hype his book.

As usual, the book hit the top of the New York Times best-seller list, selling an impressive 500,000 hardcover copies. But Wood--ward's publishers had expected even higher sales, and his critics were harsher than ever.

At this interesting juncture, Playboy askedJ. Anthony Lukas,twice a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism and nonfiction, to talk with Woodward. Lukas' report:

"When I told mutual friends that I was preparing for these conversations, they expressed astonishment that Woodward had agreed to talk. Reporters who have dealt with him claim that he is temperamentally secretive, loath to volunteer information about himself. 'Bob's one of this city's most private people,' said a colleague. 'Not quite the J. D. Salinger of the press corps, but getting there.'

"Indeed, when I first called, he didn't seem eager for the interview that had been suggested, though he graciously proposed a private dinner. I persisted, Woodward eventually acceded and one morning, I presented myself at his gray Victorian house in Georgetown.

"Vogue magazine once said that Woodward had a face 'as open as a Finnish sandwich,' and he was the soul of genial hospitality as he welcomed me into the spacious house decorated with movie posters, deep leather chairs, expensive stereo equipment and potted greenery. At our heelsnipped Pym, a tiny Lhaso Apso that belongs to Elsa Walsh. In the kitchen, the cook was assembling a picnic lunch, for Woodward had decided that our first encounter should take place at his new weekend retreat on the Maryland shore, just south of Annapolis.

"It took the best part of an hour in Wood--ward's Honda Accord to reach the house on a wooded point off Chesapeake Bay. The sunny Cape Cod--style home had breath-taking views of the water and the pine-clad islands. We sat on the bright sun porch in a brisk breeze off the bay.

"By noon, it had grown chilly, so we moved inside to eat lunch in two armchairs pulled up to the great stone fireplace. Perhaps it was the bone-chilling cold, perhaps the length of the marathon interview, but the afternoon session didn't go so well.

"As I dug into his relationship with confidential sources, he grew a bit testy. For a time, we danced around the delicate issues: the persistent doubts in some people's minds that Woodward's super sources, notably Deep Throat, exist as he describes them. Woodward suspected that I was pursuing some agenda of my own. It was getting late, we weren't making much progress, so we drove back to the city.

"A month later, I returned to Washington and checked into a hotel. Woodward couldn't make it until eight that evening, because he'd spent the entire day with the producers of 'Wired,' going over a draft of the script. When he arrived, he looked exhausted.

"But over dinner in my room, it soon became clear that the air between us had cleared. We were two reporters trading journalistic yarns. Talking about how he builds source relationships, Woodward warmed to the task.

"The next day, we finished up, with several hours at his house in a cozy study with forest-green walls, comfortable chairs and a well-stocked bar. I do a lot of interviews myself in this room,' he said. 'It puts people at their ease. They seem to talk here.'

"I bet they do."

[Q] Playboy: You have a problem most journalists don't suffer from--being mistaken for Robert Redford. Is it true that ever since he played you in All the President's Men, people have tended to confuse the two of you?

[A] Woodward: Well, I've gone out with lots of women who were immediately able to tell the difference.

[Q] Playboy: You're about to be portrayed in several more movies. Have you seen them?

[A] Woodward: I've seen an early print of the film based on Wired, my book about the death of John Belushi. It's terrific, well beyond my expectations; in fact, much better than the book. The movie doesn't pull any punches about drugs, but it really captures Belushi's spirit.

[Q] Playboy: However good it may be, it will be hard to top the impact of All the President's Men. There was a story around that the movie--and the original book--set off a flood of applications to journalism schools.

[A] Woodward: Yes, I know that that idea is around, but I think the Columbia Journalism Review showed that it wasn't so much Watergate as Vietnam that really struck a chord in young Americans. That feels right to me. Vietnam was a searing experience, a bloodletting. Nobody died in Watergate. The morality of Nixon and his group distressed a lot of people. But it's not the kind of distress that changes a career. Nobody has ever told me, "I went into journalism because of you."

[Q] Playboy: Nonetheless, you and your Watergate partner, Carl Bernstein, changed the image of reporters forever. Yet now, when reporting on personal lives has become a part of political life, polls are showing a marked hostility toward the press. Are you concerned about this kind of backlash?

[A] Woodward: No, I don't think those polls reflect what people really feel. People are uncomfortable with reporters' going around, as The Miami Herald did in 1987, staking out Gary Hart's house. No one likes that. Even the reporters who did it are uncomfortable. But, like the reporters, I think the public is comfortable with the result. They said, "Yeah, we needed to know that, and now that we know it, we don't think he's fit to be President."

[Q] Playboy: Why do you believe that evidence of an affair is an indication of unfitness for the Presidency?

[A] Woodward: It has to do with your word. The marriage vow is your word, even though a lot of people break it. And Hart wasn't just breaking it, he was obsessed with breaking it.

[Q] Playboy: The old rule of thumb was that you could report a public figure's private life only when it affected the performance of his public duties. Is that outmoded now?

[A] Woodward: Being President is a twenty four-hour-a-day job. If you've got somebody living a lie in one phase of his life, that inevitably affects how he's going to perform his duty. It's a fundamental character issue.

As to the old rule of thumb, remember, I started reporting in the middle of the Vietnam war, when everything was up for grabs. There we were, as reporters and as citizens, examining the basic issues of whether we were involved in an illegal and immoral war; indeed, what kind of nation we were. I never felt constraint when I entered the reporting business.

[Q] Playboy: But shouldn't there be constraints? If a Presidential candidate is always fair game, what about the woman who calls you at the paper and says, "I'm sleeping with a Congressional committee chairman and I'll go on the record." Do you report it?

[A] Woodward: Well, it depends. If you called him up on it and he said, "Yup, it's true; I'm going through a lousy time and my marriage is on the rocks," I'd tend on both a human and a reportorial level to say, "Well, here's a guy who knows himself pretty well and is willing to lay it out," and I probably wouldn't do the story.

Let me give you an example from real life. Just after Jimmy Carter was elected, his new Appointments Secretary was supposed to be a fellow named Greg Schneiders. Somebody came to me and said that Schneiders had owned some bars and defaulted on some loans and was in a financial mess. So I called him and he said, "It's absolutely true. My finances are in a mess. I'm straightening them out, but I think it's going to take some time." I didn't do a story on it. I gave it to another reporter, who mentioned it in passing in a profile of Schneiders. Eventually, he didn't get the job. It may subvert my attack-dog image, but, quite frankly, my threshold just wasn't crossed.

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to our hypothetical Congressman, if he said to you, "That's a damn lie," you'd go after him?

[A] Woodward: Well, if you see him on the cover of the local magazine with the perfect family, and so forth, then there's a contrast. And you know from human nature that if he's living that kind of lie in his private life, what kind of lie is he living as committee chairman? Then I'd say, "Let's take a look at this guy and his committee and see if there's a pattern."

I feel pretty strongly that you've got to look at these things. And the nice thing about where I work is, you can spend months looking at them and still end up saying, "Gee, we don't have a story."

[Q] Playboy: You seem to be saying that the behavior is less important than how the person cycles that behavior through his own psyche. Is that the standard?

[A] Woodward: It's about self-knowledge. Look, everyone has to confront failures or mistakes, and part of character is how you deal with failures and mistakes. I have a twelve-year-old daughter, and many of our confrontations are about owning up to behavior and accepting the consequences.

[Q] Playboy: But aren't there acts that are wrong in and of themselves, whatever the attitude of the person who commits them? Take the case of the SEC officer who was accused of beating his wife--

[A] Woodward: But that's a criminal act. We're talking about the margins, aren't we? Screwed-up finances, extramarital sex, smoking marijuana....

[Q] Playboy: Then the lesson to anyone in public life is, If you've committed a criminal act, you probably ought to cover up, because Woodward will go after you. But if the activity is at the margins--

[A] Woodward: Confess! [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: Does any of this apply to Watergate? Of course, that involved outright criminal activities. But if Nixon had been more frank about what the White House had done, wouldn't he have finished out his second term?

[A] Woodward: We could sit here and craft the one-paragraph statement that Nixon could have read in late June 1972 that would probably have disposed of the whole thing. But what kept everyone going was the fierce and overstated denial from the start, so people said, "What's being concealed here? Why is there such a rabid reaction to all of this?"

[Q] Playboy: We'll return to Watergate, but before leaving the topic of ex-candidates, let's clear up a side light about Gary Hart. It turned out that he was your friend and had even lived in your house on two occasions. How did that come about?

[A] Woodward: In 1979, Hart called me up and said he knew I had recently been divorced and had a big house in Georgetown. He was a distressed, confused person--confused about his marriage, about whether it was on or off. The human thing to do was to say yes, which I did.

[Q] Playboy: How well did you know Hart?

[A] Woodward: We'd had a couple of long conversations. That's all.

[Q] Playboy: How long did he stay that first time?

[A] Woodward: A couple of months. Then he came back in 1981 or 1982, well before he was a Presidential candidate.

[Q] Playboy: Did you see much of him when he was living with you?

[A] Woodward: No. That second time, he barely ever opened the refrigerator. I found out that he was staying at some woman's place and using my house as a kind of mail drop, and I was uncomfortable with that. Then some Colorado reporter wanted to interview me about the Senator and I told Hart I would have to answer fully and honestly. We had a lunch at Trader Vic's that got pretty testy. He said, "These are private matters. Why can't you just tell him, 'No comment'?" And I said, "Because he's a colleague and because dodging something like that never works." Hart was upset, but he moved out.

[Q] Playboy: A telling conversation in light of what happened later.

[A] Woodward:More than telling. I was very distressed. I told Bradlee, "This man thinks that he can erect a Chinese Wall between his personal life and his political career, and you can't do that." I urged him to assign a reporter to carefully examine Hart's career after the 1984 election. So all I did was encourage aggressive coverage.

[Q] Playboy: If you got a call this afternoon from a general at the Pentagon who was separated from his wife and he said, "Bob, I hear you have a spare room...."

[A] Woodward: If you called up and needed a room, I might let you in if you were willing to sign a notarized affidavit that you would never run for public office. That thing with Hart, it was a mistake. I didn't see its ramifications. It substantiates my mother's view that no good deed goes unpunished.

[Q] Playboy: Are you bothered at all by the appearance of hypocrisy in the reporting of such subjects? When you investigated Watergate, you were examining activity you'd presumably never engaged in. But when reporters investigate marital infidelity or the use of marijuana, that is something many of them have done themselves.

[A] Woodward: Well, you couldn't have a reporter who was committing adultery on Thursday following some candidate around on Friday night to see who he was sleeping with. That would be absurd and hypocritical. But a reporter who had committed adultery years before and learned his lesson, maybe....

[Q] Playboy: Gay Talese, in his book on The New York Times, says that all good reporters are outsiders. Are you an outsider?

[A] Woodward: Yeah, I think so.

[Q] Playboy: Really? Son of a leading lawyer in a Midwestern town. Protestant. Middle class. Educated at Yale. A naval officer. To many people, you look like the quintessential insider.

[A] Woodward: That's where you've got it wrong. There's no better place to start a career as an outsider than on the bench at Wheaton Community High School, which was Red Grange's school, too. I was terrible. I almost never got into a game. And up in the stands was my father, who'd been captain of the Oberlin football team.

[Q] Playboy: Was he disappointed in you?

[A] Woodward: He never upbraided me, but I knew how disappointed he was. So I spent a lot of time up in my room as a radio ham, talking in Morse code around the world. You remember the ham-radio club in high school--all those guys with slide rules on their belts? That's an outsider, believe me.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't it begin even earlier than that? There's a story one of your friends tells about you as a child at Christmas. Your parents had divorced, and you didn't think that the presents you and your siblings got were up to those your new stepbrothers and stepsisters got.

[A] Woodward: Oh, yes. I looked up the prices of all the presents in the gift catalog. It was a moment of great emotional distress for me and my father when I confronted him and showed him that the money he'd spent on them and on us was so dramatically out of balance.

[Q] Playboy: Bob Woodward's first piece of investigative reporting and, psychologically speaking, a significant moment?

[A] Woodward: Oh, absolutely. It was kind of sad, but the fact is that it's a very competitive world when two families are brought together that way. You end up feeling like an outsider in your own family.

[Q] Playboy: What about Yale? Did you feel like an outsider there?

[A] Woodward: I remember taking the train from New York to New Haven--and walking into the university and literally knowing no one. I was eighteen years old and utterly rootless in this Eastern-establishment world, starting all over again.

[Q] Playboy: It's a paradox, isn't it, to seem like such an insider and feel like an outsider?

[A] Woodward: A paradox, maybe, but I'm not so sure it's a handicap. In fact, it may be a wonderful benefit to feel like an outsider inside establishment institutions.

[Q] Playboy: You started writing at Yale, didn't you--some poetry and a novel?

[A] Woodward: A silly novel, about a young man growing up in a small Midwestern town very much like Wheaton. And all the turmoil in the family. One chapter would be in very overwritten Faulknerian prose, the next in sparse Hemingway style. Garbage. I sent it off to some New York publishers. But when they said no, I abandoned it.

[Q] Playboy: You abandoned more than the novel, didn't you? We're told that you abandoned all your literary ambitions, the whole idea of being a writer, even the notion of yourself as an intellectual.

[A] Woodward: Yes. It was purely practical. The novel wasn't accepted and it was clear that I wasn't any good at it.

[Q] Playboy: But you'd had only one book turned down something every published novelist has experienced. It doesn't seem' to be enough of a reason to give up all literary aspirations. Did something else drive you away?

[A] Woodward:[Pause] Yes. I suppose what later attracted me to journalism was that I could deal with the external world and not have to look inside so much. Because inside me, inside that first novel was all the painful material of Wheaton and childhood and divorce and families in which all the innocent are wounded, because children are innocent, and it inflicts great pain....

[Q] Playboy: The novelist has to dredge up all those buried emotions, while the journalist can keep them at a distance?

[A] Woodward: At a great distance. Frankly, I find other people more interesting than I find myself. One has to make choices in life. That was a choice I made. Maybe it has erected a barrier in my life, but by and large, it has worked for me.

[Q] Playboy: But it wasn't only a rejection of the inner life-wasn't there also a strong attraction to the life of a newspaperman?

[A] Woodward: Oh, yes! I knew right away that was what I wanted to do, because I got excited just going into the newsroom. It was immediate, not filtered or abstruse.

[Q] Playboy: Your first real exposure to journalism was when you got out of the Navy, in 1970, right?

[A] Woodward: I went to see the Post's metropolitan editor, Harry Rosenfeld, who somewhat reluctantly gave me a two-week tryout. I wrote fifteen stories, none of which was published. He said, "See, you're terrible. It's a profession you've got to learn like any other. Get your training somewhere else. Then come back and we'll see."

[Q] Playboy: Those words didn't discourage you as the rejection of your novel had?

[A] Woodward: No, and when I went to see the editor of the Montgomery County Sentinel, I told him, "I want this job so bad I can taste it." Later he told me, "That's why I hired you."

Some of the stories I did there got picked up by The Washington Post, and in the summer of 1971, Harry Rosenfeld took me back. They put me on night police, from six-thirty P.M. to two-thirty A.M. I'd work the night shift and then go in the next day and write the story. I did nothing but work. I was all over the paper.

It was a period I remember with great fondness. Life was simple and direct. This may overstate it a little bit, but it's the closest thing to the Platonic academy that exists in this country, where you're interested in ideas, inquiring, skeptical. There were no sacred cows. Nothing was off limits.

[Q] Playboy: Nine months later, along came Watergate. Where were you when you first heard about the burglary?

[A] Woodward: I was asleep in bed when the phone rang. It was nine o'clock on a Saturday morning, and Barry Sussman, my city editor, told me that five men had been arrested earlier that morning in Democratic headquarters. It didn't seem like much, but I liked to work weekends, so I went over to cover the arraignment hearing.

[Q] Playboy: What first aroused your suspicion that there was something bigger lurking in that little burglary?

[A] Woodward: The presence of this lawyer, Douglas Caddy, representing the burglars. Burglars normally don't have attorneys ready to appear at the arraignment. I kept asking Caddy how he'd become involved. He was very vague, finally claiming he'd gotten a call in the night asking him to represent Bernard Barker, a man he'd met at a cocktail party. It made you go, "Hey, wait a minute."

But the big "Hey, wait a minute" was when they asked one of the burglars, James McCord, where he worked. He said he'd recently retired from Government. The judge asked, "Where in Government?" and McCord finally said, "CIA." That's when I really did a "Holy shit." A burglar who worked for the CIA!

[Q] Playboy: You did have one disappointment over Watergate, didn't you? The Pulitzer advisory board later decided to award a prize for what you had done, but Brad lee determined that it should go to the Post as an institution rather than to you and Bernstein individually.

[A] Woodward: Yes, you get only a couple of shots at a Pulitzer in your career. That was our chance and it was snatched away. I worked myself up into some concern about it and went to see Bradlee. He said that Carl and I would always be identified with the story but that the Post needed the prize at that moment. He had the longer perspective and I had the shorter one.

[Q] Playboy: Of the major unanswered questions about Watergate, which interest you the most?

[A] Woodward: I think the main unanswered question is, Did Nixon know about the burglary in advance? I'm working on part of that answer now. I think there are some people who are still alive who may be able to answer that.

[Q] Playboy: What about the motive for the Watergate burglary itself? As you know, there has long been a theory that the Nixon forces were principally interested in finding out how much Larry O'Brien, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, knew about Nixon's ties to Howard Hughes, specifically the one hundred thousand dollars that Hughes had passed to Nixon through the President's friend Bebe Rebozo. At a recent conference on the Nixon Presidency, Jeb Magruder said that that was, indeed, the motive. What do you think?

[A] Woodward: I think the Hughes-Rebozo thing was part of it, but motivations are complex. There's a tendency to feel that because Watergate turned out to be such a calamity, the burglars had to have been looking for the Holy Grail. In fact, if you look at their testimony, they say they were on a general fishing expedition to find some dirt on the Democrats. And, as with any expedition, everyone had a different motive.

[Q] Playboy: Do you resent the implication by some critics that your sources on Watergate--among them the fabled Deep Throat--may have been people in the intelligence community?

[A] Woodward: I resent it because it's untrue. As you know, I'm not going to discuss the identity of Deep Throat or any other of my confidential sources who are still alive. But let me just say thatthis suggestion that we were being used by the intelligence community was of concern to us at the time and afterward. When somebody first wrote the article saying about me, "Wait a minute; this is somebody in an intelligence agency who doesn't like Nixon and is trying to get him out," I took that seriously.

The CIA is an agency with professional covert manipulators who try to alter events by deceiving people and directing them, running them like an intelligence agent. I have revisited this question of disinformation--I'd rather not go into how it was done--but I've satisfied myself and others that that was not the case.

[Q] Playboy: With the story's breaking all around you, how did you find time to write All the President's Men?

[A] Woodward: We didn't. That August, Carl said, "We've got to get out of town." My mother had a house in Naples, Florida. Bradlee gave us six weeks off and we flew down. Carl wrote on a glass-topped table by the pool and I wrote inside, controlling the car keys and the telephone to keep Carl around. We wrote most of the book that way and finished it locked in a couple of New York hotel suites that December.

[Q] Playboy: The book came out in spring 1974 and was quickly a best seller. When did you realize to what extent it had captured the nation's imagination?

[A] Woodward: The excerpts first ran in Playboy, and one evening, Carl and I were riding down Connecticut Avenue and this all-news station was reading from an excerpt with no break for about six minutes. Carl and I looked at each other and shrugged. What was this?

[Q] Playboy: Later on, especially after the movie, a lot was made of the contrast between you and Bernstein. When he looked at you, he saw, as he would later put it, "lawns, greensward, staterooms and grass tennis courts." You were supposed to have seen him as "one of those counterculture journalists" you despised. Was that a problem between you?

[A] Woodward: No. I especially don't remember ever talking politics with him. We had a job to do and that absorbed our energy.

[Q] Playboy: But wasn't there some friction developing between the two of you?

[A] Woodward: We had some disagreements about work habits. I tend to be more of a workaholic and Carl tends to be on the lesser side of workaholism. But the differences weren't political.

[Q] Playboy: If Bernstein was the countercultural kid, you had been an officer in the U.S. Navy. Did the Vietnam war affect your politics?

[A] Woodward: I was on board a Navy ship off the coast of Vietnam, a radar picket ship that ran communications for carrier-based bombers. And bouncing around out there, I asked myself, What am I doing here? What are we trying to achieve? Who is the enemy? Why is my life being wasted?

I was a great fan of Catch-22 and saw the senselessness that pervaded everything we were doing out there. I really hated the war. I hated the idea of dying. I hated the idea of killing. When I think back to 1970 and ask why I became a reporter, it was probably because of Vietnam more than anything else. It was a bad war, a wrong war, and the people who were uncovering that were journalists. So, yes, I was affected.

[Q] Playboy: But for a lot of young Americans in that period, the passion against the war carried over to a passion about everything else that was wrong with America. That didn't happen with you, did it?

[A] Woodward: Did I become a radical? No. Think of it. I left the Navy in 1970. Less than two years later, I was working on Watergate. In another two years, the President had resigned. You couldn't come off that experience and say the system was corrupt. It was a sense that you didn't need radical solutions. The establishment solutions work. And after what we did on Watergate, which would have seemed so outlandish a few years before, Carl and I both became the nice little boys. Carl got a haircut, and so forth. So you could probably say that we were co-opted and taken into the establishment.

[Q] Playboy: But, of course, your politics had been pretty establishment, hadn't they? At your high school graduation, you gave a speech cribbed from Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative; and as a Yale freshman, your political-science instructor called you a cryptofascist.

[A] Woodward: Yeah, but by the time I got out of Yale, I was probably a cryptoliberal, largely about the race issue.

[Q] Playboy: As late as 1968, though, you were a registered Republican and voted for Nixon.

[A] Woodward: Yeah, but that was largely an antiwar vote. I was in the Navy then, voting by absentee ballot. I hated the war L.B.J. had been waging and, reading the press, it was obvious that if there were any chance of stopping the war, it would be the other party--Nixon's.

[Q] Playboy: Nixon was, of course, the subject of the next book you and Bernstein wrote, The Final Days. Many people believe that that was your finest book. But it also stirred up a storm. Those people who didn't like the way you had used Deep Throat--perhaps suspected there never was a Deep Throat--were even more critical of your reliance on confidential sources in The Final Days and of your adamant refusal to name them.

[A] Woodward: Oh, yes. When that book came out, there was an incredible barrage. People jumped up and down, saying, "How can you say that Nixon and Kissinger were praying on the floor together? How did you know he was talking to the pictures on the wall?"

[Q] Playboy: And demanding that you tell them who your sources were?

[A] Woodward: The late John Osborne, then the White House correspondent of The New Republic, invited me to lunch one day and said he had to know whether Al Haig was a source for the book. And I said, "I'm not going to tell you." He was outraged and he grilled me, implying that Haig had said he wasn't a source. I remember thinking, What a temptation to answer.

I'd like to tell you who all the sources are. I don't get any kick out of protecting sources or keeping names out of books and newspapers. But those are the terms of engagement, particularly when you're involved with the intelligence agencies or the Nixon White House or the Supreme Court. In those worlds, there's no way people are going to talk on the record.

So it's a kind of sacred trust that works from a practical point of view as well, because the people who come to me at the Post know that if they request confidentiality, it will be protected at all costs.

[Q] Playboy: If you found that a source had lied to you, would you feel released from the confidential relationship?

[A] Woodward: Yes. The terms of that relationship are trust and candor. If I quote the Secretary of State as saying something, he's accountable for what he said. But if I say that a source said this, the underlying fact has to be true. So if I could establish that somebody had lied to me, I'd write an article saying that so-and-so had broken the trust relationship, and this is how it happened.

[Q] Playboy: Has it ever happened?

[A] Woodward: Not that I'm aware of.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't it important that a reader know what "spin"--what tone or interpretation--is being put on a story? And whose spin that is?

[A] Woodward: Well, first, my hackles get up when I hear that term spin. People often have an ax to grind, but we put it through a pretty rigorous process to determine that somebody isn't distorting. You have to correct for that by having a second or a third source, trying to get documents, putting it through all the tests and filters.

Finally, the real question is how our reporting has stood the test of time. I am totally comfortable with the record. After all the attacks on The Final Days, Kissinger's memoirs come out and, lo and behold, he describes the prayer scene almost exactly as we did. He puts it in the Lincoln bedroom instead of the Lincoln sitting room--apparently our mistake. Then Nixon comes out with his memoir. One line: The President and the Secretary of State got down onto the floor and prayed. As more memoirs are written, piece after piece of the book proves to be right.

[Q] Playboy: OK, The Final Days comes out and it, too, is a huge best seller. But then you and Bernstein split up. Why?

[A] Woodward: Our differences in work habits took their toll. There were distractions in his life that kept him from the task at hand in a way that caused too much anxiety for me. And I just couldn't see undertaking another project with him.

We had talked about doing something on the military, but that was pre-empted when Carl fell under the spell of New York and of [writer] Nora Ephron. He ultimately decided, with encouragement from New York, to cease being a daily journalist, to leave the Post--and to upgrade himself, to re-create himself as a writer's writer. It has always fascinated me that there's this feeling that people have--generally not for themselves but for others--that now that you've succeeded, let's find something you can fail at or something that you will have difficulty adapting to.

Carl is a great reporter. So the fact that he hasn't practiced that much in the past dozen years is everyone's loss, including his own. And I have told him that. But you have to credit him; he has produced a magnificent book on his parents in the McCarthy era. And, happily, since we stopped working together, we've become much better friends.

[Q] Playboy: How did you happen to go on to write a book about the Supreme Court?

[A] Woodward: I'll tell you the source who started that whole project, because he's dead. I'm revealing his name now, for the first time, because it's worth showing that there really are sources, people really do talk. It's not some reporter's imagination or some letter that comes in the mail with no address, typed on a standard typewriter. You have relationships, you nurture them and they pay off.

[Q] Playboy: We're all ears.

[A] Woodward: It was Justice Potter Stewart. It was the spring of 1977. I was back at the Post, writing on a whole range of things. I went to a party at the home of Mrs. Katharine Graham, the publisher, and Justice Stewart was there. All through the reporting on The Final Days, I'd tried to talk with him and he said he couldn't. But when I renewed the request at Mrs. Graham's, he said, "Well, maybe; call my office."

So, the next morning, I called his office and he asked me to come by the next night. It was after dinner on April eleventh, 1977, that I drove out to Wesley Heights and, for security's sake, parked my car a block away from his big home on Palisades Lane. We sat out on his enclosed sun porch and he drank out of a silver mint-julep cup. I told him I'd become fascinated by the Court when writing about the Nixon-tapes case. He agreed to tell me about the Court--on background. "You don't identify me in any form or shape."

Then out came this anger about Warren Burger. It wasn't really a Burger Court, he said. The Court was actually controlled by a group of center Justices made up of himself and Powell, with bits of White, Stevens, Blackmun and sometimes even Rehnquist. What came through most of all was this real intellectual disdain of Potter Stewart, who'd gone to Yale, for Burger and for John Mitchell, these Nixon appointees who'd gone to night school.

I didn't take a note that night, didn't even take out my notebook, and then when I got home, typed out this two-and-a-half page single-spaced summary.

[Q] Playboy: How long were you there?

[A] Woodward: Oh, it must have been four or five hours. What Potter Stewart did that night was to outline The Brethren. He talked about all the fights with Burger, about who was going to get paid the most, whether the Chief Justice would get twenty-five hundred dollars a year more than the other Justices. And about dinners at the Court given by other Justices in which Burger would take over the whole evening and act as though it were his occasion because it was his Court. And Powell, this courtly gentleman from the South, labeled Burger's behavior "gross."

But the most impressive thing Stewart did that night was to describe in incredible detail the sanctum sanctorum of the Court, the Friday conference. He went around the table and described the approach each Justice would take. All Burger would want to do was uphold criminal convictions; Brennan would give the straight liberal line; White was a loner, hard to predict; Blackmun would say, "I agree with everything that has been said," which Stewart thought hilarious, because there had generally been total contradictions.

What also came across that night was Stewart's contempt for Richard Nixon. He felt that what had happened with Carl's and my Watergate reporting was very important for the country and for journalism and for subduing this rightist movement in America, tamping it down and saying "Whoa." The guys who had proclaimed they were going to fight crime turned out to be the criminals.

At the end of the evening, his wife reminded him to walk the dog, Amos. So he had a long leash, which was actually a clothesline, and he was still carrying his mint-julep cup. He was stumbling around--not drunk, just feeling good--and it was this nice spring night and he said, "Look, any time you want anything, or you want to talk, you call. I'll answer any question." He knew what he was doing and I think he almost hoped that he could bring Warren Burger down by launching this inquiry into how he ran the Court.

[Q] Playboy: What were you thinking that night as you drove away from those incredible four hours with an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court?

[A] Woodward: Well, as I drove home, I realized that either I could write a really interesting article with a little bit more work or here was the next book. So I wrote a memo and then I went to my boyhood friend Scott Armstrong--whom I had helped place as an investigator for the Ervin Committee and who was now at the Post and said, "This is really a two-man job," and so that's how The Brethren got under way.

[Q] Playboy: Did you go back to see Stewart?

[A] Woodward: He continued to cooperate on and off in a very complicated way. He realized he'd started something, but as Scott and I really dove into this thing and talked with four other Justices, talked with one hundred seventy law clerks and penetrated to the point where we got internal memos, drafts of opinions, conference notes, and so forth, Stewart realized he wasn't necessarily going to be happy with the result. I think he realized he had started an avalanche of sorts that was going to cause the Court a lot of problems internally and externally. He would talk with me for hours, but he was never quite as candid as he had been that first night.

Now, I want to emphasize that we had this confidential relationship that has been preserved until this moment. I don't know to what extent Stewart shared with his brethren the fact that he had talked, but I think they had some idea, particularly after the book came out, and I think I complicated his presence on the Court. Another Justice told me that part of the reason Stewart had left the bench was that there was a suspicion--I suspect in Burger's mind in particular--that this was a Stewart operation.

[Q] Playboy: All right. Here's an insider offering you information because it serves his agenda. How do you correct for that?

[A] Woodward: Well, Stewart's contempt for Burger is very clearly stated in the book. Some other people's contempt for Stewart is also clearly stated.

[Q] Playboy: Yes, but if Stewart had wanted a book that would cast doubt on the way Warren Burger ran the Supreme Court, he certainly got it, didn't he?

[A] Woodward: A lot of the things Stewart said checked out from left, center and right.

[Q] Playboy: But your critics would say that this is typical of source journalism. "Here's this Justice who has a grudge against the Chief. At a party, he responds to Woodward's suggestion that they get together. Then he opens the door to Woodward, giving him material with which to assail the Chief in a way the Justice himself could never do. Attracted by the opportunity to penetrate the Court's secrecy, Woodward serves as Stewart's hit man, while reporter and source take shelter behind the confidential-source relationship." That would be the attack, wouldn't it?

[A] Woodward: But that would be from somebody who hadn't read the book. Yes, Burger probably comes off worst, but that's a view shared by the other Justices we talked with, by the clerks, by most academic Court watchers and supported by the documents we got. They agreed on Burger's pomposity, his concern with appearance, his lack of real interest in cases and the level of his scholarship.

And I wouldn't say that Stewart comes off best. I think Powell probably comes off best, then maybe Blackmun and Rehnquist, Stevens, to a certain extent. I have to tell you of Stewart's private comment to someone else after the book came out. He said, "There's a lot of truth in that book, probably too much." Which meant, it hurt. He didn't call up and say, "Great job, great hit job."

[Q] Playboy: Did you talk with him at all after the book came out?

[A] Woodward: Yes, but it was chilly. You see, he. opened the door, but then we got into the room and I think we saw it from all corners. Look, would it have been nice to spell this all out in the introduction: "By the way, it was Stewart who opened the door and there's a lot of animus here"? The answer is, the terms of engagement prevented it. I would argue that a good journalist has to protect those relationships or he'll never get into the room in the first place.

[Q] Playboy: Your most acerbic critic on The Brethren was Renata Adler, who, in her review for The New York Times, condemned the protection of a source's identity, "except when actual, identifiable harm would result to the source or to some other worthy cause or person." The confidential-source relationship, she concludes, "makes stories almost impossible to verify. It suppresses a major element of almost every investigative story: who wanted it known."

[A] Woodward: Adler didn't understand how the Court worked. She understood how it was supposed to work, based on having gone to Yale Law School, but not how it actually worked. And she has a kind of infantile ignorance about the way reporters work, because she's not a practicing journalist.

Specifically, she doesn't understand what we were doing in that book. It is verifiable. We had documents, we had diaries. In the Nixon-tapes case, we had all the memos, all the drafts--everything. If you make the simplest effort to check that book, you will find that you can verify it, which, thankfully, scholars have done. As for sources, I've named our first one for you, and when others die, I'll be happy to name them, too.

[Q] Playboy: How security conscious did you have to be on The Brethren! Did you ever interview a Justice in his chambers?

[A] Woodward: Oh, yes, and I didn't even wear a red wig. I remember calling one Justice for the first time, and he said, "Can you be here in five minutes?" It was before the term started. We just sat there in his chambers for two or three hours. I went back the next day and the day after that.

The Justices are part of the intellectual, political and social life of Washington. One night, at a party, I met Sandra Day O'Connor. "Oh," she said, "I loved The Brethren. It told me more about the Court!" And I said something like, "I'd like to do an update on it," and she said, "Absolutely not." And, in fact, I gather that her clerks have to sign what amounts to a secrecy pledge.

[Q] Playboy: You met Justice Stewart at a party and Justice O'Connor at a party. You must disagree with I. E. Stone, who said a reporter had no business breaking bread with the people he writes about.

[A] Woodward: Of course, undue chumminess can be a problem, but if people invite me to cocktails or dinner, I accept. My job is to get to know people. I think I. E. Stone, who is obviously one of the greats, limits himself by not dealing with people.

[Q] Playboy: By the time you finished The Brethren in 1979, you began taking on a new role at the Post.

[A] Woodward: Yeah. Bradlee said, "You ought to try this." So, I gave up writing books for a while and became the paper's metropolitan editor. Colleagues would go out to lunch with me and say, "You're going to be Bradlee's successor; it's obvious." And I would say, "I don't know about that." It was fortunate that I didn't put all my eggs in that basket, because, although I really enjoyed editing, I guess it's pretty clear that I wasn't very good at it.

[Q] Playboy: Your critics argue that that was a result of your inordinate concentration on high-impact, "Holy shit!" stories at the expense of routine, bread-and-potatoes coverage of a city. Is that fair?

[A] Woodward: Yes, I think that's fair. I think that's what I was looking for. In a way, I got what I deserved.

[Q] Playboy: And that came to be symbolized by the Janet Cooke affair?

[A] Woodward: Yes. Miss Cooke, a reporter on the city staff, which reported to me through the city editor, wrote a remarkable story about an eight-year-old heroin addict who was essentially being held hostage by his mother and the mother's boyfriend.

In 1981, her story won a Pulitzer Prize. Within a few hours, the Associated Press checked with Vassar, where Miss Cooke claimed to have gone, and found that she'd been there for only one year. Then Vassar called Bradlee and he called me in and we just looked at each other, said, "Oh, my God," and we knew.

So then I went on the case and got her notes, questioned her into the night, really got tough with her and finally said, "In the interest of yourself and this newspaper, this can't go on. We need the truth." That Sunday, we published the full story of how she had fabricated that piece.

[Q] Playboy: Did the episode hit you hard?

[A] Woodward: Those were dark days. I was shaken. I talked with everybody, trying to figure out how I could have been so stupid. One night, I invited the entire metropolitan staff out to my living room. There were a lot of questions, there was a lot of anger, because people felt it splattered on them. It was like the passengers on an ocean liner that had gone aground who said to the guy up there on the bridge, "How did you let this happen?"

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever contemplate resigning from the paper?

[A] Woodward: Yes, the next Sunday, I went out to [publisher] Don Graham's house and told him that somebody had to be fingered and I felt that I should quit. I was not the one who edited the story; the city editor did that. But when you're at the top of the chain of command, you have to accept responsibility. Graham said that if I quit, then the city editor would have to quit, and so would the managing editor and Bradlee and Graham himself--which he wasn't about to do. What we ought to do was to look hard at the mistakes and extract the proper lessons.

[Q] Playboy: What were those lessons for you?

[A] Woodward: My failure was not only journalistic but moral. I said, "This is a great story" and never looked at the human impact on an eight-year-old. I think my greatest failure when Cooke came in with this story was not to have said, "We're going to run the story tomorrow and then I'm going down to a phone booth and drop a dime myself to the cops and tell them, 'Go to this address and rescue this child.'"

That might have set off alarm bells to solve the journalistic problem. After the story came out, the mayor, to his credit, wanted to know who the child was and where she was. And we took a "principled" stand, saying, "No, we have a source relationship with the mother." Well, that's absurd. It was murder, or slow torture, of a child. If that happened now, I'd think of journalism second and the child first.

[Q] Playboy: That is interesting, coming from the protector of confidential sources. Suppose you were writing on covert operations and your source were someone who had participated in the assassination of a foreign leader, which is a crime--would you drop a dime on that person?

[A] Woodward: No, I wouldn't. But it's a provocative question. I think there are times when you might find a way to do your story and also uphold the law. They shouldn't be at war with each other. But I have a special feeling for children. I have a twelve-year-old daughter and I think journalists have extra responsibilities toward children.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about your next book, Wired. It's the only book you've done on a non-Governmental subject. How did the project develop?

[A] Woodward: Well, as in The Brethren, it began with a key point of access to somebody. Judy Jacklin Belushi, John's widow, called me and said, "I want you to look at this."

[Q] Playboy: She went to you because she believed there was something fishy about her husband's death, that the woman who had injected her husband with the lethal dose of drugs might have been a police informant. So once again, the source went to you armed with her own agenda.

[A] Woodward: Yes, but there was a major difference here: Virtually all my interviews for Wired were on the record. Certainly, all the discussions with Judy Belushi. There was no disguised source, certainly no disguised agenda.

[Q] Playboy: Lynn Hirschberg, who wrote a piece in Rolling Stone about the Wired controversy, believes you were drawn to Belushi because, in some way, it was your own story. She thinks you were "fascinated by the failure of success." She quotes you as saying, "I know what it's like to have early fame. And I hate to say it, but it's almost like you're already dead."

[A] Woodward: Sure, the perils of early success--and that real problem, What are you going to do next? "What are you going to do for us now?" is the famous Bradlee line on the pressures of a daily newspaper. Howard Simons was wonderful on that issue, a real mensch. He sat me down even during Watergate and said, "This is going to be hard; it's going to be treacherous. Think about what you do. I'll help you."

[Q] Playboy: Specifically, you launched the Belushi project about a year after the Janet Cooke fiasco and the forced abandonment of your ambition to succeed Ben Bradlee. Were the two episodes related?

[A] Woodward: Oh, yes, I guess so. Here were these two men from Wheaton, both of whom had tasted failure. I'd been hit from behind and had to turn and look at the whole situation. Belushi got hit from the front and it was terminal. He had no time to take stock and extract a lesson. Maybe that's what I was trying to do on his behalf. And, since we all identify with everybody we write about, maybe I was trying to extract a lesson for myself as well.

But I was also drawn to the subject for other reasons. There's the Wheaton connection; there's the universal mystery of death; there's drugs; there's the Hollywood culture, which is Mysteryland to those of us in Washington.

[Q] Playboy: When the book was published, some prominent people charged that you hadn't done justice to Belushi's life. Dan Aykroyd called the book "trash." Jack Nicholson said of you, "The man is a ghoul and an exploiter of emotionally disturbed widows." The widow herself said, "He lied to me." How did you react to those ferocious attacks?

[A] Woodward: What I did in that book was hold a mirror up to those people and draw attention to their responsibility for Belushi's death. They didn't like it.

Film people are used to getting a free ride in the press, particularly out there. If we covered Washington like the Los Angeles Times covers Hollywood, we would be out of business. There is no curiosity at all about the abuses, the stuff in Indecent Exposure or the drug stuff in Wired. They just don't touch it. They don't ask the hard questions about these people.

[Q] Playboy: The film people seem initially to have accepted you as a celebrity. Did their rage come from a sense of betrayal, that a fellow celebrity had turned on them?

[A] Woodward: If so, then they're naïve. Because I was there with my tape recorder out, notebook out, making it clear what I was doing.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps you can dismiss the criticism from Nicholson and Aykroyd, but isn't it harder to deal with the widow's contention that you lied to her?

[A] Woodward: Well, everything I did with her is on the record. She knew exactly what I was doing. I think Judy Belushi wanted a different ending to the story. I guess she hoped I would find out that John had been tied up and forced to take drugs or that he was still alive in Des Moines living under a different name. She couldn't cope with the real ending. I understand that emotionally.

[Q] Playboy: Let's move on to your most recent book, Veil, once again based on extraordinary access to a major source, though no longer a confidential one. Perhaps the central question is, What was William Casey's agenda? Why did he talk with you?

[A] Woodward: Well, he was one of the cagiest, sliest, smartest, most manipulative, unscrupulous people.

[Q] Playboy: But what was he up to in this case?

[A] Woodward: I think he was up to a whole series of things. I think he kind of enjoyed the game. I think he wanted to play defense. I was an early-warning system for him. People have quoted him as saying that I was dangerous to the agency, and he may have thought it was better to know what was going on than to slam the door.

[Q] Playboy: Murray Kempton wrote a column putting it a bit more bluntly. He suggested that by drawing you into a quasi-confidential relationship and by spilling selectively to you, Casey was diverting your attention from the things he didn't want you to find out. Any truth to that?

[A] Woodward: As an umbrella description of what was going on, no, I think Kempton just doesn't know what he's talking about.

But I concede that there were elements of what Kempton is talking about. For example, one of the things I should have made explicit it the book is that Casey succeeded in keeping me from writing that William Buckley, one of the hostages, had been his CIA station chief in Beirut. For more than a year, I knew that he was a CIA man and Casey regularly talked me out of writing it: "If you want to get him killed, you go right ahead." So I talked with Brad-lee and others at the Post, and we agreed not to do it. I think we made the right decision. But I'm sure he was able to say to people, "I've kept that story out of the paper." And that was very important, more important than I said in Veil.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Woodward: Well, because Buckley had some secrets that were unrelated to the Middle East.

[Q] Playboy: What were they?

[A] Woodward: I'd love to tell you what they were, but I'm not going to. Anyway, Casey felt that he had to leave no stone unturned to get Buckley out or, if not, to protect him and that information.

[Q] Playboy: All right. What about Iran/Contra? You've admitted that you missed much of that while it was happening. Did Casey's strategy work there?

[A] Woodward: Well, I would have preferred to have found out about the Iran arms sales before that rag in Beirut, and I didn't. I failed and I should have got it, and I am really critical of myself. He knew about it and he didn't tell me. So was I being co-opted? I don't know. I didn't get anyone else to tell me about it.

[Q] Playboy: Casey was pretty shrewd at using the press, wasn't he?

[A] Woodward: Oh, yes. I think the real story there is the manipulative quasi openness of the Reagan Administration that didn't create the Haldeman-Ehrlichman wall. The Reagan people let people in and they talked. All kinds of officials--National Security Advisors, CIA Directors, White House Chiefs of Staff--dealt with stories in a very sophisticated way, a level of sophistication that neither the Nixon nor the Carter White House could match. I don't think it was necessarily dishonest, but I think it wound up concealing some things.

Casey was part of that. People were surprised that he would deal with me, that he would say, "C'mon, fly back with me, sit on the plane, get out the Scotch and the peanut mix," and let me roam the world with the Director of Central Intelligence [D.C.I.]. So I think the case file is still not closed on what and how much Casey managed to conceal.

[Q] Playboy: Let's take a great story you did have in the book: the fact that Casey personally authorized the attempted assassination of Sheik Fadlallah, the Shiite leader. You write that Casey had blood on his hands, because eighty innocent people--though not Fadlallah--were killed in the bombing. Isn't that something Americans ought to have known about as soon as a reporter uncovered it, without having to wait a year or to read it in a book?

[A] Woodward: I agree with you completely. But, in that case, the final information--about the crucial discussion between Casey and Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States--was not confirmed until July 1987. We were winding up the book and we knew it would be out in September. So I told the Post's editors about it. Casey was dead at that point, the Iran/Contra hearings were winding down, they couldn't get the Saudi ambassador to testify, because he had diplomatic immunity. So we waited two months. If I had had that confirmed much earlier, when Casey was D.C.I., I would have published it. But I didn't.

[Q] Playboy: That raises the question of whether your multiple roles--as the Post's assistant managing editor for investigations, as its best-known investigative reporter and as a writer of best-selling books--are in some conflict. It's the issue Flora Lewis of The New York Times raised in a very pugnacious column.

[A] Woodward: I think it raises some questions, but I think there are answers. Again, I think Flora Lewis just charged out of the box with that and didn't look at what was in the book or what had been in the newspaper, and I think, pretty much, we put the right things in the paper and saved the right things for the book.

Flora Lewis kind of assumed in that column that we hadn't thought about that question, whereas we were well aware that it was fraught with potential problems, which were sorted out in open consultation with the senior editors at the Post. It was a case-by-case decision on each story.

A lot of what I was getting from Casey and elsewhere at the CIA found its way into the paper, either under my by-line or in conjunction with what others at the paper were doing. I did a lot of good exclusive stories for the paper with the White House, the State Department and the Defense Department correspondents.

[Q] Playboy: So you would argue that your diverse roles actually reinforce one another.

[A] Woodward: Oh, yes. Getting secrets, particularly top-secret documents, out of people in the intelligence world takes incredible nurturing. I mean dozens of meetings, the slow building of trust and mutual confidence. So I and the top editors at the Post agree that you aren't going to get good daily stories about the CIA unless somebody's going for the deep game, interviewing people over months, years. You can't get the stories without the book and you can't get the book without having the role at the newspaper.

Casey knew I was going to write about the CIA in the Post, maybe the next day, which gave me access to him and to lots of other people. The fact that I was doing the book made it possible to build the source relationships that produced documents, tips and clues on major stories.

[Q] Playboy: A word about the famous scene in the hospital. Don't you think the reason that it attracted so much attention is that you put it at the end, implying that you lent Casey's few mumbled words a great deal of weight? Was placing it there a mistake?

[A] Woodward: Well, the book is the story of my relationship with Casey. That was the last encounter, so it appropriately goes at the end. Was it conclusive evidence that he knew about the diversion of funds to the Contrast No, there's an inherent ambiguity about much that he says. At the same time, I think everyone agrees now that of course Casey knew about the diversion, that of course Casey was the hidden hand behind Oliver North, behind the whole series of actions, many of which we know about, many of which we may never know about. So I think it's kind of a nice coda, and I feel basically comfortable about it.

[Q] Playboy: One reason many people seem to doubt that you were in that hospital room is that you were so mysterious about how you got in there--presumably because you had help and don't want to identify that help. Can you be any less mysterious today?

[A] Woodward: Sure I had help. Whether it was high-level, low-level or mid-level, I'm just not going to say. I gather the CIA conducted some sort of witch-hunt, trying to determine how it occurred. So I have to protect whoever helped me, and I will, just like any other source.

[Q] Playboy: Mrs. Casey insisted that you were never in her husband's hospital room and, indeed, that you hadn't had the relationship you claimed to have had with him.

[A] Woodward: She's a very sweet lady. Those were statements of emotional support for her husband, which she had every right to make.

[Q] Playboy: As we move toward the end here, it occurs to us that you're reputed to have a problem, as a writer, with the big, sweeping conclusion. You tried to write a big summary chapter at the end of Veil and couldn't; you tried a similar chapter at the end of The Brethren and couldn't do that. True?

[A] Woodward: Yes, that's true. I can't write those big cosmic analyses. I read things by various people that I wish I could replicate, weaving fact and judgment, the kind of sophisticated calls that really help the narrative. But I am just not capable--and this is a grave fault--of taking A, B, C and D and saying, "OK, now E." And I'll tell you why. You never know what you don't know. You fill in the puzzle, you get lots of things, but there are parts you don't see. And I've found it best to stick with what I've got.

So you play to your strengths, and I guess I'm destined to be a fact reporter. If I thought there was a whole array of fact reporters out there finding out everything that needed to be reported, I guess I would fold my tent. But I don't. I think there are still all kinds of important things we don't even know the basics about.

"I don't get any kick out of protecting sourses, but... it's a kind of sacred trust."

"Getting in the secrets out of people in the intelligence world takes incredible nurturing."