After 30 years, two Pulitzer Prizes, and 12 bestsellers, Bob Woodward remains an icon and arguably the most famous journalist in history.

Imagine for a moment that you are a young man with no journalism experience, but one of the world’s most prestigious newspapers is willing to seriously consider hiring you.
 
Imagine that you are a nobody, and yet while running a routine delivery to the White House as a young Navy officer, you bump into an enigmatic man who becomes a life-long contact and ultimately your window to the world of the powerful.
 
Imagine that you are cop reporter with barely a year’s experience, and you wind up being assigned one of the most important journalism stories in history.
 
Bob Woodward was fortunate, to put it mildly, to arrive on the scene when he did, the way he did. He has been remarkably lucky in timing and circumstances. His latest book, The Secret Man: the Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat, underscores all of this as Woodward documents his relationship with the most famous informant in journalism history, who was given his colorful moniker by Washington Post editor Howard Simons.
 
Woodward’s source, we all now know, was long-time FBI man W. Mark Felt, who spent 30 years at the Bureau, much of it side by side with J. Edgar Hoover. When Hoover died, Felt assumed he would get the nod from President Nixon. Instead, Nixon named as Hoover’s replacement J. Patrick Gray, a political crony. Thus were the seeds for betrayal — or courageous whistle blowing (depending on how you look at it) — sown.
 
Nixon and his band of operatives did their share to make the land ripe for scandal and misdeeds. During the tense days of the Vietnam War and domestic violence, Nixon — whose insecurities were already legend — was particularly prone to overreact to criticism. This helped create the environment in which dirty tricks, misuse of government resources and ultimately obstruction of justice activities became commonplace.
 
Interestingly, it is the president most unlike Nixon in style and temperament — John F. Kennedy — who in many ways mirrored Nixon's dark side. Indeed, it could be argued that when it came to corruption, dirty tricks and conspiratorial politics and policy, Nixon met his match and then some in JFK. Nixon suffered from guilt, but Kennedy breezed along cavalierly without much concern for consequences, no doubt confident that he could charm his way out of any situation.  Were both men corrupt? It would be hard to argue against the charge given the body of evidence on a host of issues, including personal behavior. (Nixon is implicated in shady business deals, Kennedy associated with the mob and more women than historians can count.) But Kennedy was the attractive bad boy who got away with everything, while Nixon played the awkward nerd whose slightest indiscretion became a matter of embarrassment and public scrutiny. Like Johnson before him, Nixon could neither forgive nor forget the obvious double standard.
 
This frustration might have contributed to Nixon's irrational behavior, but it does not wholly explain it. Nixon suffered from a maudlin self pity he never outgrew. William F. Buckley, Jr. noted during the unfolding of Watergate that Nixon’s self-righteous sanctimony annoyed to the point of being grating. Rather than simply saying — "Look, I apologize. We overreacted and made some terrible misjudgments," Nixon sank deeper and deeper into his own conspiracies until he trapped himself in utter darkness. One can imagine him waking up in the middle of the night screaming — let there be some light!
 
His use of profanity is a small point that helps illustrate the larger problems Nixon confronted. It is one thing to swear with flair and panache, the way Patton or Ike or even Kennedy might have. But Nixon’s language was less a matter of earthy emphasis than a litany of crude slurs aimed at perceived or real enemies. There was little art or humor in it. H.R. Haldeman noted in his memoir, The Ends of Power, that Nixon’s mean-spirited conversations, as revealed on the now famous tapes, offended most Americans more than his often petty crimes.
 
That mean-spirited approach led to what even one-time defenders of Nixon have had to concede was serious stuff. It is one thing to play political tricks here or there or even to misuse political contributions. It is another to attempt to leverage the power of the state to crush political opponents. That, as Buckley put it, was a form of proto-fascism and one of the more disturbing revelations to emerge from Watergate and memos circulated by Nixon’s men.
 
Woodward and Carl Bernstein, of course, played an instrumental role in bringing much of this to the American public. In the process, they changed the rules of journalism. The search for scandal became an obsession with journalists, who sought to emulate the fame and fortune bestowed on Woodward and Bernstein after their journalism coup. Journalism became even more glamorous and young journalists hungry for the big story were in over-supply. The odds of duplicating Woodward’s quick rise to stardom are infinitely longer these days. In fact, trying to get a job at the Post (or other major papers) is mostly futile unless you know the publisher personally, have won a Pulitzer or two, or belong to a group that qualifies on the diversity front. The path is so crowded as to be nearly impassable.
 
Woodward succeeded thanks to good fortune, a disarming personality and a relentless work ethic — but he is not all that interesting in style or substance. His books are to political journalism what John Grisham is to literature. He lacks the sharp critical edge or the philosophical underpinning that has distinguished the best political journalists (read Mencken, Lippman, Buckley, Hitchens, Didion or Tom Wolfe for that kind of inspired writing and commentary.)
 
And, yet, one suspects that it is precisely the lack of such brilliance that eased open the doors on which he knocked. He clearly has a gift for putting the powerful at ease. One might consider him a real-world Nick Carraway in whom powerful men invest their visions and ambitions. All the while, Woodward is dutifully scribbling and taping, the wheels spinning, the headlines about the next big book undoubtedly already written in his mind. No other journalist has been granted the access or given the freedom that he has enjoyed as a Beltway insider.
 
But there is a price for practicing his brand of journalism. He has been accused of being a scribe of the powerful, a Norman Rockwell of American politics who airbrushes out all the nasty stuff in order to maintain his access. Hitchens has called him a “stenographer” for the powerful. Didion wrote of Woodward’s efforts: “These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.” Others have accused him of exploiting his sources in a cynical way. One could certainly make this case about Woodward’s relationship with Felt. Once Woodward knew he had a big fish on the line, he never stopped trying to reel him in for information, whatever the cost to Felt. Even in recent years, with an elderly Felt battling bad health and a fading memory, Woodward visited and pumped him for more information and stories, desperate to understand motives and perhaps the larger issues of Watergate that escaped him as a young reporter.
 
And yet, this relentless prodding and questioning — Woodward’s real genius — led Felt and his long in-the-dark family to announce finally that Felt was, in fact, Deep Throat. Woodward got another book, and scores of others once considered potential candidates must have sighed in relief (those still alive at least): Alexander Haig, John Dean associate Fred Fielding, John Sears, Henry Kissinger, Pat Buchanan, and many others about whom there has been speculation. (One journalist — James Mann — pinned the tag on Felt, but Felt denied it so convincingly that the matter was left in doubt.)
 
Woodward clearly enjoyed the "guess who is Deep Throat game," but it began to wear on him. Jackie Kennedy once asked him at a Kennedy family dinner to reveal who his source was. Woodward was accosted by curious journalists, lawyers, and citizens. Attorney Leonard Garment and John Dean both explored the issue at length in books. Haldeman himself spent time in his memoir trying to figure it out. All the while, Woodward kept secret the identity of the man who made him famous. Felt would retire in the 1970s only to be convicted of violating a no-bugging law along with several other FBI employees. President Reagan eventually pardoned him, but it clearly irked Felt that Woodward enjoyed fame and fortune while he was threatened with jail for serving his country. And one of his biggest defenders, irony of ironies, was the very man Felt helped destroy — Richard Nixon. Interestingly, Nixon, had already learned at the height of Watergate that someone in the FBI — probably Felt — was leaking information to the Post.
 
Woodward has gone through his own trials, too. His credibility has been challenged, most notably for his reports of a deathbed conversation with the late CIA Chief William Casey about the Iran-Contra scandal. Many, including friends and family of Casey, have called Woodward's account, reported in Veil, a fabrication. More recently, Woodward has taken heat from liberals and the left because he failed to disclose that he had been told early on about Valerie Plame, the CIA operative at the center of the ongoing investigation of the Bush White House. Woodward remained mute as editors and colleagues covered the story. He has apologized, but has refused to name the Bush administration source who shared her name, which, I might add, everyone inside the Beltway seemed to know. (There seems to be disagreement as to whether or not she was a covert agent. There is little doubt, however, that her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, has manipulated the situation for PR purposes and has misrepresented the events surrounding his investigation into Iraq’s nuclear capability.)
 
In any case, Woodward’s latest book is an interesting read for those of us who lived through Watergate and have studied it over the years. Whether Nixon ultimately deserved his fate is a matter of continuing debate, though the consensus of history is clearly in the affirmative. As for Woodward, he has looked back only on occasion and usually with a book in mind. After 30 years, two Pulitzer Prizes, and 12 bestsellers, he remains — for all the criticism — an icon and arguably the most famous journalist in history.