BOB WOODWARD’S SINS OF OMISSION:

More recently, we have learned that among those harboring deep skepticism about Woodward’s account of Deep Throat—so critical to the Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate, and to the Woodward legacy—was the man to whose memory The Last of the President’s Men is dedicated: Ben Bradlee, the executive editor who oversaw that coverage.
Rummaging through Bradlee’s papers for an authorized biography, Jeff Himmelman—himself a trusted former researcher to Woodward—came across an unpublished 1990 interview in which Bradlee had confided his misgivings about Woodward’s reliability. “Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen?” Bradlee mused about the notion that Woodward moved a flowerpot on his balcony to signal for meetings with Deep Throat. Likewise, about the purported rendezvous in the garage, Bradlee wondered: “One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings [there were] in the garage.” He added: “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”
Himmelman exposed half a dozen lies, evasions, deceptions, misrepresentations, and other journalistic sleights of hand on a single page of All of the President’s Men.

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The final product was Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee (2012). Were it up to Woodward, the book’s explosive contents would have been suppressed. Writing in New York magazine, Himmelman recorded how Woodward sought to intimidate his former protégé:

I had worked for [Woodward]; he had given an impromptu toast at my wedding. You know me and the world we live in, he said. People who didn’t like him and didn’t like the Post—the “fuckers out there,” as Ben had called them—were going to seize on these comments. “Don’t give fodder to the fuckers,” Bob said, and once he lit on this phrase he repeated it a couple of times. The quotes from [Bradlee’s 1990] interview…were nothing more than outtakes from Ben’s book, he said. Ben hadn’t used them, and so I shouldn’t use them, either.

That argument didn’t make sense, and I said so. Bob told me it was his “strong recommendation” that I not use the quotes, then that it was his “emphatic recommendation.” Then, when that got no truck: “Don’t use the quotes, Jeff.”

Read the whole thing.