Bob Woodward

Why organisations work with Bob Woodward

• First-hand reporting across ten U.S. presidents, from Nixon to the present, grounded in on-the-record transcripts with sitting presidents, cabinet officials, intelligence chiefs and military commanders.
• Author of more than twenty bestselling books on American power, including Fear, Rage, Peril and War, each built on contemporaneous interviews and primary documents rather than secondary commentary.
• A non-partisan frame for reading U.S. political risk: what the decision was, who made it, what information they had, and what it means for everyone downstream.
• The journalist who, with Carl Bernstein, broke the Watergate story for The Washington Post, earning the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and a second Pulitzer in 2002 for national reporting on September 11.
• A reading of the U.S. presidency as an institution under stress, valuable to any organisation whose strategy depends on the stability and direction of American policy.

Biography highlights

• Associate Editor of The Washington Post since 1971.
• Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner: 1973 Public Service (Watergate, with Carl Bernstein) and 2002 National Reporting (September 11 coverage).
• Author of All the President’s Men, The Final Days, Veil, Bush at War, Plan of Attack, Obama’s Wars, Fear, Rage, Peril and War.
• Fear: Trump in the White House holds Simon and Schuster’s first-week sales record at approximately 1.1 million copies.
• Recipient of the Heywood Broun Award, George Polk Award, Worth Bingham Prize, William Allen White Medal and the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Reporting on the Presidency.
• Yale University graduate and former U.S. Navy communications officer before joining journalism.

Biography

The Watergate break-in was dismissed as a third-rate burglary before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein traced it, through months of reporting in The Washington Post, to the re-election committee of a sitting American president. That reporting won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and forced a presidential resignation. Five decades on, Woodward is still doing the same work on the same beat.

Since 1971 he has been a reporter and then Associate Editor at The Washington Post. His books, published by Simon and Schuster, have covered the Reagan-era CIA in Veil, the Clinton White House in The Agenda, the post-September 11 Bush administration in Bush at War and Plan of Attack, the Obama war cabinet in Obama’s Wars, and the Trump presidencies in Fear, Rage and Peril. War, published in 2024 with Robert Costa’s earlier collaboration extended, reports the decisions behind U.S. policy on Ukraine and the Middle East.

The method is consistent and unusual in American journalism. Long on-the-record and background interviews with named principals, documented by notes, memos and contemporaneous records, assembled into a narrative of what was said in which room on which date. Fear sold approximately 1.1 million copies in its opening week, the largest first-week total in Simon and Schuster’s history at the time of publication.

For boards and executive committees, the value of that method is specific. It replaces cable-news framing with a documentary account of how the American presidency has been making foreign policy, economic policy and national security decisions across a generation. A second Pulitzer, for national reporting on September 11, confirmed that the Watergate work was a method, not a moment.

Key speaking topics

• American presidential decision-making
• U.S. foreign policy and national security
• The Washington policy process
• Political risk and the U.S. institutional landscape
• Investigative journalism and source-based reporting
• Watergate and the evolution of the presidency
• The state of American democracy

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees exposed to U.S. political and regulatory direction
• CEOs, CFOs and CSOs with strategic dependencies on American policy
• Public affairs, government relations and corporate communications leaders
• Financial services, defence, energy and technology firms reading Washington risk

Audience outcomes

• A first-hand account of how recent U.S. presidents have actually made consequential decisions
• A non-partisan framework for reading Washington as a system rather than a news cycle
• Concrete examples of how intelligence, military and White House staff shape presidential choices
• Historical perspective on the U.S. presidency as an institution across five decades
• Questions to ask about the reliability and sourcing of political information