One of the men who exposed the Watergate scandal will soon come clean about the sources who delivered it to him.
Bob Woodward has announced he will publish a memoir in September that will not only recount his decades of reporting in Washington, but also his so-called “forever sources,” many of whom are now dead.
“Some of the best sources are deceased, and I can tell those stories now,” he told Axios, who was first to report on the forthcoming book, Secrets: A Reporter’s Memoir. “Elsa Walsh, my wife, calls them ‘the forever sources.’ But no longer, because they are gone.”
Woodward said he never planned to write a memoir but, with him turning 83 on Thursday, the time had come.
“It was time to put some of my best reporting stories and details of my longest reporting relationships on paper,” he told Axios.
The Washington Post legend has kept “notes, transcripts, and files of all his interviews with the most important players in Washington” dating back to the eras of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, says his publisher, Simon & Schuster.
“Woodward describes in vivid detail his reporting methods in the newsroom and book-writing,” Simon & Schuster writes. “How does he get people to talk? Why do people talk? Why do some sources continue to talk for decades?”
The publisher adds, “Woodward’s one-of-a-kind reporter’s memoir lifts the lid on his historic reporting relationships and secret sources, some spanning decades.”
Woodward, who delivered the Post a pair of Pulitzer Prizes, is far from just a newspaperman, though he still bears the honorary title of associate editor at the Post. He has also authored 24 bestsellers, including All the President’s Men, co-written with his colleague Carl Bernstein, which was adapted into a 1976 film that won four Academy Awards.
More recently, Woodward riled up President Donald Trump during his first term with the books Fear (2018) and Rage (2020), in which he documented the chaotic, crisis-driven first Trump White House.
Trump has responded by calling Woodward an “idiot.” Fear revealed that Trump’s own aides undermined him to avoid economic or national security catastrophies, leading the president to complain that the book was “a con on the public” containing “many lies and phony sources.”
In one of his many tweets at the time, Trump wrote in 2018, “The Woodward book is a Joke - just another assault against me, in a barrage of assaults, using now disproven unnamed and anonymous sources. Many have already come forward to say the quotes by them, like the book, are fiction. Dems can’t stand losing. I’ll write the real book!”
Trump, of course, has not written a book since then.
Trump then sued Woodward and Simon & Schuster in 2023 over the publication of the audiobook The Trump Tapes, which the president claimed violated his copyright and was released as an audiobook without his permission.
The suit was dismissed last year.
