Casey whispered, “I believed.” Did it happen like that? Even today, it’s a matter of dispute.

“He stared, and finally nodded yes.” “Why?” Woodward asked. “His head jerked up hard,” Woodward wrote. As John Cassidy detailed in a New Yorker story two weeks ago,Ĭasey, according to Woodward’s telling, admitted that he knew about the illegal diversion of monies from Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras. Then there was Veil: The Secret Wars of the C.I.A., 1981-1987, in which Woodward claimed to have gotten a sensational deathbed confession out of Ronald Reagan‘s CIA director William Casey. Woodward’s second book, The Bretheren, co-authored by Scott Armstrong, contained so many outlandish assertions about the behavior of Supreme Court Justices behind the scenes that, in a front page review for the New York Times Book Review, Renata Adler famously declared that every sentence in the book should end “with the caveat ‘ if true. She also told Dean she did not believe there was a single source for Deep Throat.” Even Woodward’s iconic boss at the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, told his biographer Jeff Himmelman, “You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat… There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.” Nixon White House counsel Leonard Garment noted one of the better known counterpoints in his book, In Search of Deep Throat - that Simon and Schuster editor Alice Mayhew, who edited All the President’s Men, “told Dean that she was the one who had invented the detective story structure for the reporters’ book. Even after former FBI associate director Mark Felt claimed to have been Deep Throat, doubts continued that the former agent - his mind clearly fogged by age - was quite the drama-prone informer depicted in the book. Lots of people questioned whether there ever really was a Deep Throat, for example, when All the President’s Men came out. How reliable is Bob Woodward? From the very first there have been those who thought, well, he was making shit up. Bob Woodward: Is the jig finally up? » MobyLives

Veil by bob woodward