Bob Woodward is publishing a new book, titled "Secrets," that reveals many of the reporter's sources. The Washington Post has published an in-depth profile.
Of special interest are the sources Woodward relied on with Scott Armstrong for The Brethren (1979).
In the memoir, Woodward clears up another decades-long mystery: Which Supreme Court justices talked to him for the 1979 bestseller "The Brethren"? The exposé of the inner workings of the nation's highest court under Chief Justice Warren Burger electrified Washington.
When the book was published, Woodward and his co-author, Scott Armstrong, disclosed that they had interviewed five of the nine justices on the court, as well as 170 former law clerks, but on the condition that they not be named. Given the court's reputation for maintaining a Sphinxlike silence, "The Brethren" ignited a guessing game in Washington and in legal circles around the country, as well as criticism over the book's heavy reliance on anonymous sources.
"Our use of unnamed sources was a huge point of controversy for the book, but in my 55 years of reporting experience, people rarely shared secrets on the record, particularly at the time something is going on," Woodward writes in his memoir.Nearly a half-century later, Woodward finally names the five justices who granted interviews: Potter Stewart, Lewis Powell, Byron White, Harry Blackmun and William Rehnquist (all are now deceased). Woodward's memoir explains how he and Armstrong painstakingly cultivated the justices and their former clerks as sources. The authors kept long memos about the interviews, which Woodward draws on to quote the justices at length in his new book.
