Investigative journalist Bob Woodward, best known for the story he broke about the 1973 Watergate break-in for The Washington Post, told AU students to "focus, rewrite, re-interview ... and always try to suck out the truth," at the Kay Spiritual Life Center Thursday.
According to Woodward, the best way to do that is to "simply ask why and shut up and let someone answer."
While Woodward expressed his belief that "the thing that will do this country in is secret government," he disagrees with former Nixon aide John Dean's recent statements that the current administration is more secretive than Nixon's.
"The difference between Bush and Nixon is that Bush talks, and Nixon didn't," he said.
For Woodward's 2004 book, "Plan of Attack," he conducted the longest interview a sitting president has ever given on a single topic, discussing the decision to go to war in Iraq with President Bush for three and a half hours. He said he came away feeling that it is "almost inconceivable to rewrite the ending and imagine a world where Bush didn't go to war."
"The question of who George Bush is persists today ... The decision [to go to war] is the clearest way to understand him," Woodward said. "Important things have happened, but nothing as important as the decision to go to war in Iraq."
Despite the access he was given while writing "Plan of Attack," Woodward insisted he is still the outsider he was when he worked to reveal Watergate to the public.
"I've felt that feeling of being in the parking garage again," he said, referring to his initial meeting with W. Mark Felt, who many in the '70s knew only as "Deep Throat," the anonymous source who revealed key details of the Watergate scandal.
Following the speech, Katherine Baldwin, a senior in the School of International Service, described it as "very balanced in a journalistic sense," and said that Woodward had "inspired us to find the truth in everything we do."
Daniel Ortiz, a first year student at the Washington College of Law, came away with a different feeling, saying Woodward "definitely went around questions that dealt with journalistic professionalism," and "he clearly came in with his own agenda of what he wanted to talk about."
At one point during his speech, Woodward described being asked by Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, with regards to Watergate, "When is all of the truth going to come out?" At the time, he told her never - an answer she rejected.
Faced with this same question regarding today's issues, Woodward said the answer might still be never.
"It is human nature to have secrets, and there never will be a final draft of history," he said.
