Bob Woodward  On Himself


BOB'S BEAT HISTORY

I did not go to journalism school. I spent five years in the Navy. My first job in journalism was at a weekly paper in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, and I was one of four reporters, and my job was kind of not to cover schools or courts or the county council, but to be kind of the investigator and look behind things a little bit. I liked that experience a great deal, because it was small, yet if there was a typographical error in the proof of your story before the newspaper was published, you actually had to go down with a razor blade and cut it out and get the word set correctly and then fit it in yourself. The advertising people were down the hall, the publisher was a dentist. Got a real sense of what a newspaper was. And is.

BOB LEARNS A REPORTING LESSON

In the fall of 1971, I came to work at the Post. My first job was the night police beat. And that was working from 6:30 at night to 2:30 in the morning. It was a great beat. Great example of seeing the real city, having to work fast, having to deal in facts, having to know, which I think is as important in reporting as anything, when you don't have a fact, when you don't know. Knowing that you want the quality of information to be very good. I think the first front-page story I did for the Post was about a fire. And four children were killed in the fire. And the night city editor was wise enough to tell me to go down to the scene. It's the first time I saw a dead body. And I counted. And he said, "Did you see four bodies?" And I did. And it was a wonderful lesson about, "Well, the police say there's four dead, the hospital says there's four dead, you've got time, go check, go look." By going to the house, I met somebody who said, "This is a rental unit," and I had a second front-page story the following day, because the person I met at the scene said there were a lot of code violations at the house, and the house had not been properly inspected. You don't get that kind of story often unless you go to the scene. You often can't, you often can. It's a matter of making sure you give yourself as many alternatives as possible. Develop as many sources as possible. And even the simplest story.

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING

I was young and had a lot of time, and I don't really think there's investigative reporting and then reporting. I think they're all the same. And investigative reporting just means spending more time, talking to more people, going back again and again. Again, working on this premise, the truth is not right on the surface. In fact, the truth is often deeply buried beneath the surface. And what I did was cover the police beat at night, and then go home and sleep awhile, and come in in the morning and work on stories I would develop or stories that were assigned to me, and found out you could talk to almost anyone. That a great deal of records were available whenever there was a story that people were talking about, there was generally something on paper to confirm or contradict or supplement what's there. And become a great believer in documents. They don't always tell the truth, but they will give you some idea of where the truth might lie.