Bob Woodward: ‘Democracies die in darkness’

When Bob Woodward uncovered the first details of the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein in 1972, he worked against a government that clouded itself in secrecy and became infamous for hiding important information from the American people. Woodward believes the current administration is much the same.\n“I think the Bush administration has made an effort to keep things secret and an awful lot has come out,” Woodward said at a press conference Monday afternoon. “I go to bed at night with a lump in my stomach thinking about what we don’t know.”\nWoodward spoke to a packed lower level at the IU Auditorium Monday night, discussing the newest book in his series on the Bush administration, “State of Denial.” He focused on his work developing anonymous sources, from W. Mark Felt, the mysterious FBI investigator who was known only as “Deep Throat” until 2005, to sources inside the Bush administration that have leaked secret memos and government reports.\nSince Watergate, Woodward has worked to pull away the curtain from influential institutions and people including the Supreme Court and Alan Greenspan. Most of his recent work, however, has concentrated on the Bush presidency and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.\n“I really thought it was interesting what he said at the end, that with secret government, democracies die in darkness” said graduate student Todd Hertling, who said he spent a total of two years serving in the military in Iraq. “That’s an important message to take – that we should have truth and honesty \nin government.”\nWoodward said that the Bush Administration had consistently ignored reports from inside their own government about trouble in Iraq and continued to tell the public that the war was proceeding better than it actually was.\n“Reports came in from the intelligence agencies saying ‘It’s bad now and it’s going to get worse in 2007,’” Woodward said, “And right at that moment the president went and gave a speech in Chicago and said ‘This will mark the moment that the terrorists begin their retreat’ – absolute total contradiction of the reality of the underlying violence.”\nThe speech ended with a short question-and-answer session, during which Woodward championed investigative journalism and the idea that government should be held accountable to the people.\n“He’s a great figure in the history of journalism – maybe one of the finest,” said IU president Michael McRobbie, who attended the event. “When you see Bob Woodward, you’re looking at a piece of history in a sense.”\nSchool of Journalism Director of Communications Beth Moellers said that it was fairly easy to bring Woodward to IU, and that he is just the first in a series of fall lecturers that the School of Journalism \nis sponsoring.\n“Very few people have the level of experience that he does,” Moellers said. “Very few people are Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists – it’s pretty much just Carl Bernstein that can match his experience.”