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Criticisms of content
Woodward has been accused of exaggeration and fabrication regarding "Deep Throat," his Watergate informant. Even since W. Mark Felt was announced as the true identity behind Deep Throat, John Dean[45] and Ed Gray,[46] in separate publications, have used Woodward's book All The President's Men and his published notes on his meetings with Deep Throat to argue that Deep Throat could not have been only Mark Felt. They argued that Deep Throat was a fictional composite made up of several Woodward sources, only one of whom was Felt. Gray, in his book In Nixon's Web, even went so far as to publish an e-mail and telephone exchange he had with Donald Santarelli, a Washington lawyer who was a Justice Department official during Watergate, in which Santarelli confirmed to Gray that he was the source behind statements Woodward recorded in notes he has attributed to Deep Throat.[47] However, Stephen Mielke, an archivist at the University of Texas who oversees the Woodward-Bernstein papers, said it is likely the page was misfiled under Felt because no source was identified. The original page of notes is in the Mark Felt file but "the carbon is located with the handwritten and typed notes attributed to Santarelli." Ed Gray said that Santarelli confirmed to him that he was the source behind the statements in the notes.[48]
J. Bradford DeLong has noted considerable inconsistencies between the accounts of the making of Clinton economic policy described in Woodward's book Maestro and his book The Agenda.[49]
Some of Woodward's critics accuse him of abandoning critical inquiry to maintain his access to high-profile political actors. Anthony Lewis called the style "a trade in which the great grant access in return for glory."[50] Christopher Hitchens accused Woodward of acting as "stenographer to the rich and powerful."[51]
Writer Tanner Colby, who co-wrote a biography of John Belushi with the late actor's widow Judy, wrote in Slate that, while Woodward's frequently criticized 1984 book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi is largely accurate in its description of events, Woodward either gets the context wrong or doesn't find any context at all. For example, Belushi's grandmother's funeral, which led him to make a serious effort to sober up, gets merely a paragraph in Woodward's retelling, while a 24-hour drug binge in Los Angeles goes on for eight pages simply because the limo driver was willing to talk to Woodward. "It's like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn't very good at playing basketball," he concluded. Because it was unique among Woodward's books in that it made no use of confidential or anonymous sources, Colby was able to interview many of the same sources that Woodward had used, making comparisons of their recollection of events to Woodward's accounting of them relatively easy.[52]
Woodward believed the Bush administration's claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war, and the publication of the book At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA by former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet led Woodward to engage in a rather tortuous account of the extent of his pre-war conversations with Tenet in an article in The New Yorker in which he also chastised New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd for being critical of him.[53]
Woodward was also accused of fabricating a deathbed interview with CIA Director William Casey, as described in Veil. Critics say the interview simply could not have taken place as written in the book.[54][55][56][57] Robert M. Gates, Casey’s deputy at the time, in his book "From the Shadows", recounts speaking with Casey during this exact period. Gates directly quotes Casey saying 22 words, even more than the 19 words Woodward said Casey used with him.[58] The CIA’s internal report found that Casey "had forty-three meetings or phone calls with Woodward, including a number of meetings at Casey’s home with no one else present" during the period Woodward was researching his book.[59] Gates was also quoted saying, "When I saw him in the hospital, his speech was even more slurred than usual, but if you knew him well, you could make out a few words, enough to get sense of what he was saying."[60] Following Casey's death, President Ronald Reagan wrote: "[Woodward]'s a liar and he lied about what Casey is supposed to have thought of me."[61]
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