A friend of mine who must remain unidentified but who's in the thick of the Washington press scene wrote the following in response to my earlier musing and said it was okay if I shared it with you. And yes, I think there's irony somewhere in the fact that he's anonymous here as he writes about anonymous sources…
You're overthinking the question of whether Woodward changed his views or not. Woodward prides himself in not having any views of the subjects he covers. The only exception is that he cares about whether or not they're talking to Bob Woodward and telling Bob Woodward the truth. The thing that separates him from all other reporters is access. His sources are extraordinary. Everyone talks to him. People who swear on a stack of Bibles they don't talk to Bob Woodward talk to Bob Woodward. He takes it all down, sorts out the lies and self-serving b.s. according to the Bob Woodward b.s. meter, prints the rest and sells a million copies.
The key thing you're missing is that people talk to him. Is it true? Is it not true? Who knows? But it always came from a source that should know what he or she is talking about. If the portrait of Bush is that he's a cowardly jerk, it's because some insider whose opinion Woodward can't dismiss or ignore or disprove thinks Bush is a cowardly jerk. It's someone close to the man, someone who if he were quoted by name we'd all say "That means something if that guy says it." Only Woodward can't say who it is. The whole Deep Throat thing made his reputation as the guy who will always protect a source and honor background.
That sounds right to me. The image of Bush in Woodward's books has changed because he's now getting different stories and accounts from the people around Bush. It makes you wonder how many of them are the same people.
On a slight change of subject: One thing I've always wondered about in books and reporting of the Woodward variety is the "blind source" whose identity seems obvious. There are a lot of them in his work…in The Final Days, especially. For example, it seems obvious that Alexander Haig was a major source for the book. There are many scenes that could never had been reported if Haig had declined to speak with Bernstein and Woodward. Now, if you were to ask Woodstein about it, they'd say, "Sorry…can't divulge sources." But in this case, if Haig didn't talk to them for the book and provide the accounts that were the basis of those pages, the authors are guilty of deliberately conveying a false impression that he had.
I'm sure they would argue, "Well, we didn't say he did." But they sure led people to believe he did.
Then there's the scene in which Nixon and Henry Kissinger get down on their knees and pray together. Much dialogue is quoted, a lot of details are included. You figure it could only have come from someone who was there…but only Nixon and Kissinger were present, and they say in the introduction that Nixon refused to be interviewed for the book. Ergo, while Woodward and Bernstein are pointedly refusing to say that Kissinger was the source, they're also quite consciously leading everyone to believe that he was.
I have to go run an errand but I'll write more about this tomorrow if I have time. I'm not sure how I'd reconcile your view of Woodward, even though I suspect it is on-target, with what he did in his book about John Belushi. There, I think he interviewed all the right people and probably quoted them accurately…but ended up with a shallow, incomplete portrait of the world in which Belushi operated, if not of the man himself. It's almost like he assembled the right pieces into the wrong puzzle or something. And that was with sources who weren't anonymous.