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Almost 50 years after Watergate, Bob Woodward continues to make front-page news and shock America’s presidents.
His reporting on the Watergate scandal as a journalist for The Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon.
Now the best-selling author, the latest 77-year-old book, “Rage,” is rocking President Donald Trump’s White House less than two months before the November 3 election.
In one of 17 official interviews Woodward conducted with Trump for the book, the president of the United States admits to having downplayed the threat of coronavirus at the start of a pandemic that has claimed nearly 200,000 lives in the United States. State.
“I always wanted to downplay it,” Trump said in a conversation with Woodward. “I still like to downplay it, because I don’t want to create panic.”
Trump also told Woodward that he understood early on that the virus was “a deadly thing” and much more dangerous than the common flu.
At the same time, he was assuring the American public that the virus would simply “go away.”
Trump’s Democratic challenger Joe Biden attacked the US president’s decision to downplay the severity of the health crisis as a “life and death betrayal of the American people.”
“He knowingly and willingly lied about the threat he posed to the country for months,” Biden said.
Woodward, in an interview with CBS “60 Minutes,” described the failure of the president to inform the public from the outset about how deadly the virus was as a “tragedy.”
“The president of the United States has a duty to warn,” he said. “The public will understand that, but if they have the feeling that they are not understanding the truth, then they are going down the path of deception and cover-up.”
Watergate brings Woodward to the fore
It was the crumbling of a cover-up, Watergate, that made the reputations of Mr. Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein.
Woodward studied at Yale University and toured the United States Navy for five years, before turning to journalism.
After a stint at a local newspaper in the suburbs of Washington, he got his break at the Post in 1971.
He had barely a year of reporting experience when he and Bernstein stumbled upon the story of his life: the 1972 robbery by Republican operatives of the Democratic Party offices in Washington’s Watergate complex.
His classic gumshoe investigation sparked Congressional hearings and led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
Woodward and Bernstein wrote a best-selling book, “All the President’s Men,” about the scandal that became a hit 1976 film starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein.
“Rage” already tops the Amazon bestseller list even before it goes on sale on September 15.
Since leaving daily journalism, Woodward has published 20 books, including authoritative tomes on Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.
His brand as a reporter on Washington’s power brokers is unmatched, and his ability to back up any insider story he hears has earned him grudging respect in the American capital.
Mystery surrounding Trump’s decision to conduct interviews
Why Trump agreed to conduct 17 official interviews with Woodward, 16 of which were recorded, is a mystery, particularly after his previous book portrayed the president in a far less flattering way.
Woodward’s “Fear: Trump in the White House,” published in 2018, painted a portrait of a paranoid and angry leader and a White House that Trump’s own chief of staff described as a “crazy city.”
Trump did not speak to Woodward out of “fear.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, told The Daily Beast that he had recommended that the president speak to Woodward about “Rage.”
“In the last book Woodward wrote, Trump said he didn’t know he wanted to be interviewed,” Graham said.
“So I said, well, the guy is a well-known presidential author. And, you know, you get a chance to tell your side of the story. The president agreed and that’s it.”
Woodward, who retains an honorary associate editor title at the Post but no longer writes for the newspaper, has received some criticism for hiding the details of his interviews with Trump, which took place between December 2019 and July 2020, for your book.
Bob Woodward had my dates for many months. If you thought they were so bad or dangerous, why didn’t you immediately report them in an effort to save lives? Didn’t he have an obligation to do so? No, because he knew they were good and appropriate answers. Easy, no panic!
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2020
“Bob Woodward dated my dates for many months,” Trump tweeted. “If you thought they were so bad or dangerous, why didn’t you immediately report them in an effort to save lives?”
Woodward, in an interview with the Post, defended his decision to withhold the material for his book.
He said he wanted to offer “the best you can get version of the truth” in book form and with proper context and fact-checking.
Also, he said, in dealing with the president’s revelations, “the biggest problem I had, which is always a problem with Trump, is that I didn’t know if it was true.”
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