Bob Woodward

Listening to his mealymouthed excuses for helping cover up Treasongate, I wonder how Bob Woodward went from journalist to stenographer.

Was Woodward ever the crusading journalist that Robert Redford portrayed in All the President’s Men, cracking the Watergate coverup? Did he just ride on Bernstein’s coattails? Why, when he got a taste of fame, did he sell his soul for invitations to hobnob with the elite? Why has Bob Woodward gone from exposing dirty tricks campaigns to participating in them? Merely for the dubious prestige of scribing lies straight from a president’s lips?

His refusal to reveal Deep Throat was a shining example of the virtue of journalists shielding anonymous whistleblowers informing on criminals in high places. Now he and Tim Russert and Judy Miller and Bob Novak distort that principle to allow criminals in high places to anonymously attack whistleblowers. They invoke journalistic privilege not to expose corruption, but to cloak the corrupt.

Where’s Spider Jerusalem when we need him? In Britain today, the editors of The Spectator and Private Eye are asking people to leak them documents, just classified under their Official Secrets Act, that prove Bush planned to assassinate foreign journalists. They say if someone leaks them the documents, they’ll defy the law and proudly go to jail for publishing them. Those are leakers who warrant protection, those are truths that must be revealed. That’s what real journalists stand for.

Bob Woodward stood for that, too, once. Alas, our heroes sometimes have fingers of clay.