Woodward’s High-Wire Act : Watergate Journalist Drawing Fire Again for Latest Book on the CIA

He may be the most revered and the most criticized journalist in the history of American publishing.

Once again, Bob Woodward--who, along with Carl Bernstein, stakes sole claim to having toppled a President--has written a book that is full of shocking revelations, this time about the CIA.

Once again, Bob Woodward is facing a 360-degree firing squad of critics who say the book is dangerous at best, and inaccurate at worst. Fellow journalists, some at his own paper, the Washington Post, are voicing disapproval that he withheld news stories from the Post to save them for his book, for which he reportedly received at least $1 million.

In the eye of this hurricane, Woodward went out and played nine holes of golf at a tattered public course in the heart of Washington a few days ago.

“Going back to Watergate, it’s kind of been my life--contested ground,” Woodward said later, calmly sipping orange juice in a quiet, sunny sitting room in his striking Georgetown home.

“Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987” says that the late CIA Director William Casey enlisted the help of Saudi Arabian intelligence for three covert operations, including an unsuccessful assassination attempt that instead killed 80 people in a car bombing; that President Reagan signed a secret national security directive in 1985 allowing the creation of hit squads in Beirut for pre-emptive strikes on terrorists; and that, at times, Casey found Reagan to be lazy.

But the most controversial item in the book involves a four-minute, 19-word interview with Casey in his Georgetown Hospital room after a malignant tumor was removed from the left side of his brain. In that conversation, Woodward wrote, Casey nodded affirmatively when asked whether he knew about the diversion of Iranian arms sales funds to the Nicaraguan rebels.

Reagan has angrily denounced the book as containing “an awful lot of fiction about a man who was unable to communicate at all and is now being quoted as if he were doing nothing but talking his head off.” Casey’s widow, Sophia, was also so livid that when Woodward sent her a copy of the book by Federal Express, she returned it. There have been other refutations in print, some from medical experts, and Woodward concedes that the conversation was “not 100% conclusive.” But he is adamant about being there. That, he says, is a fact.

Among the facts that Woodward’s various books have revealed are: the year that Richard and Pat Nixon stopped having sex; the bust, waist and hip measurements of a Playboy Magazine model John Belushi socialized with; and an account of Chief Justice Warren Burger riding a 67th birthday gift bicycle in figure eights on his driveway before taking a nasty spill, breaking five ribs and suffering a cut that required six--count ‘em, six--stitches.

Facts are clearly not just facts to Bob Woodward. They are his obsession. They are the net underneath the high wire he seems to walk alone, telling the personal, secret details other journalists often leave in notebooks or don’t pursue. And when the storm begins to blow around him, Woodward always falls comfortably back on his facts.

Asked about the nature of his relationship with Casey, he left the room and returned with a yellow legal pad, listing in red ink the dates of his discussions with Casey, “more than 48 interviews or substantive discussions.” Casey clearly told Woodward a great many things at “a number of meetings . . . dinner at his house, plane rides, phone calls” and his dealings with Woodward ranged from “screaming and not cooperating, to being very cooperative,” Woodward said.

But, Woodward was asked, Did you like the man?

“On and off. It’s hard to describe, it was truly, if you burrow into it, it was one of the most complicated relationships I’ve ever had,” he said.

‘An Intriguing, Interesting Figure’

“This is making too much of it but it’s like Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby, about Gatsby, an honest feeling that, you know, he was an intriguing, interesting figure and in the sense you have to disapprove of many of the things he did, but to a certain extent he was worth the whole damn bunch or better than the whole damn bunch. And by that I mean he was a devoted CIA director, worked all the time, had a set of beliefs which I think I describe.

“But I guess I get pretty ice-in-the-belly on the subject of how do I feel about him.”

Ice-in-the-belly is perhaps the perfect phrase to describe how a lot of people feel about Woodward, especially people who have been unhappy, embarrassed or humiliated about what he wrote about them or others.

Judy Jacklin Belushi, widow of John Belushi, called Woodward “a very joyless man” after his book, “Wired: The Short Life & Fast Times of John Belushi,” documented in jolting detail the drug habits and the death of the comedian.

Pat Nixon suffered a stroke after publication of “The Final Days,” an account of the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency which said the First Lady had rejected Nixon’s advances since 1962. Nixon said publicly that the stroke occurred after his wife read the book.

Asked how he felt about that, Woodward laughed.

“Look at the record, again,” he said, noting that Nixon did not exactly say the book caused the stroke. “I didn’t feel--I thought it was classic Nixon.

“As best as I can tell there’s never been in a book something I’ve written that’s untrue,” he said. But, he added, “I might reconsider some things that I put in the books, the personal relationship between the Nixons. I don’t know where I’d come out on that one finally. I sure see the argument for not using it.”

So he has had second thoughts about the Nixon sex-life passage?

“I have indeed. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t have second thoughts,” Woodward said.

Of the book on Belushi and the subsequent charges of inaccuracy by his widow and a number of celebrities, Woodward recalled, “Mrs. Belushi was complaining about that I didn’t show that drugs could be fun. She never disputed a single fact in the book.”

“I leveled with her,” he added. “I said it’s going to show both sides. I maintain it shows both sides. The sad thing is, it’s part of her grief, that she wished it (Belushi’s life story) had been different.”

Woodward was accused by friends of Mrs. Belushi of taking advantage of her grief and her trust in him, encouraging her to call him whenever she wanted. Like so many others, Mrs. Belushi found herself telling him everything.

‘A Natural Gift’

“He has a demeanor, a way of dealing with people that makes them want to talk,” said Post columnist Richard Cohen, a good friend who has known Woodward for 15 years. “But then, like a lot of people who have a natural gift, he’s honed it. And he’s extremely persistent and diligent.”

Interviewing Mrs. Belushi, encouraging her to call him, is “my job,” Woodward said. “You really look at the record on that, and it factually holds out. It’s a tricky relationship, I agree. She was particularly upset about the title. She was upset.

“I got distressed that people wouldn’t check the facts.”

Facts are just what Mrs. Casey is contesting about the latest book. “I say Bob Woodward is lying,” she said in a phone interview from her Long Island home. “He never got into the hospital and never got a confession. My husband couldn’t speak. His whole right side was paralyzed, his tongue was paralyzed on his right side, his vocal chords were paralyzed on his right side.”

“I understand,” Woodward said of Mrs. Casey’s comments, “the emotion of saying, ‘Well, he could not have been at the hospital.’ Well, I was. It happened. It’s true. It’s in fact an old Casey technique: Go to the scene.”

He has not called Mrs. Casey, he said. “I have thought of it,” Woodward replied. “But I think it might be misinterpreted that I’m distressed or trying to manipulate her. I’m not distressed and I’m not manipulating her. I think I’m going to send her a note and explain that she should read the book. I think if she reads it, she will say, ‘Hey, that was him.’

“She said that Bill was a perfect spy.”

Told of Woodward’s comment, Mrs. Casey replied, “That’s the one true thing he said in the whole book.”

Woodward is perturbed that so much attention is being paid to the hospital visit.

‘It’s a Serious Book’

“That’s not what the book is about. It’s a serious book about governing and the dark, hidden agency,” he said. “I’m kind of caught between the people saying there’s not enough truth in the book and those who say there’s too much truth in the book. Now that it’s a ‘dangerous’ book, there’s too much truth in it.”

Woodward continued: “I don’t believe it is (dangerous). It’s about Casey and the CIA, six years and one day, how essentially they went unmonitored, where he had in a certain sense a blank check within the executive branch to do what he wanted and that he was able to roll, or frustrate Congress. To a certain extent we all kind of have to face what happened. And it’s not a very encouraging story.”

To deflect yet another line of fire--the one from those who wondered whether Woodward was withholding stories from his newspaper while writing the book--the Washington Post itself published a story by media critic Eleanor Randolph noting that Woodward produced 75 stories for the Post while writing his book, starting in January of 1986, including scoops on the Reagan administration’s disinformation campaign to rattle Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi with reports that the United States was planning to attack the country again.

“It isn’t enough that the Washington Post, thanks to Bob Woodward, got all these stories first,” Post executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee was quoted as saying in the story. “It’s that we didn’t get them to fit some schedule that the critics think was more appropriate.

“He and I agreed we would be getting the fruits of his labor regularly. Woodward and I have been dealing together a long time. These were not hostile negotiations here, but on the question of whether he kept anything for the book, I’m sure he did.”

There is a common thread in the criticisms leveled against all the books Woodward has written or co-authored: “All the President’s Men” and “The Final Days” about Richard Nixon, “The Bretheren” about the Supreme Court, “Wired” and now “Veil.” And that thread, Woodward believes, is not inaccuracy.

“It’s contested ground,” said Woodward, “and it’s essentially people living their lives and conducting their business a certain way and projecting a way that is untruthful.”

More Like an Adviser

Woodward would reveal no specific plans for his future or for more books, but does plan to remain at the Post, where he is an assistant managing editor for the investigative staff. It is a job Woodward does not do in a daily, hands-on manner, because he works primarily at home on his books. He functions at the Post as more of an adviser and an inspiration. His three-year stint as the paper’s metropolitan editor ended in spectacular disaster in 1982, nine months after the Post had to return a Pulitzer prize awarded to metro reporter Janet Cooke, who fabricated a story about a child drug addict.

Woodward has frequently been cast as a workaholic who works all day and often after dinner as well. His two marriages reportedly broke up because he spent too much time with his work.

He has been seriously involved with Washington Post reporter Elsa Walsh, who he lives with in a spacious Georgetown home that is decorated cozily rather than lavishly. Friends say there is a warm, playful side to Woodward, who often sends Walsh huge bouquets of flowers at her office at the DC Superior Court, which she covers for the Post. On the end table next to the sofa in the sitting room is a picture of Woodward and Walsh kissing, with a dog at their feet.

There is nothing emotionally wrong with Woodward, “unless you categorize industriousness as some sort of psychological affliction,” said Cohen, who is one of several married men who have lived with Woodward during rocky periods of their marriages. Former Sen. Gary Hart is another. When Woodward’s famous Watergate colleague Carl Bernstein was having trouble with writer’s block in New York, Woodward welcomed him to stay at his home for a while.

‘He’s Extremely Generous’

“He’s not a hearty, insincerely affable guy,” said Cohen, “and a lot of people take that as coldness. It’s not. He’s just not phony. He’s extremely generous, and money is the least of it.”

In a 1984 Rolling Stone article, Woodward talked little about his childhood in Wheaton, Ill., about coping with his parents’ divorce when he was an adolescent by busying himself with activities. “You don’t have an emotional life,” interviewer Lynn Hirschberg quotes him as saying.

“I’ve always had an emotional life,” Woodward said this week, clearly uncomfortable with the personal nature of the questioning. “After my parents were divorced, I did indeed have an emotional life. I’m very much in love with Elsa and have been for six years, five or six.”

As to whether Woodward, now 44, will marry again, he said, “I don’t know.

“When I say I don’t know,” he added, “that means I don’t know.”