The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Well, you see, Bob Woodward Ñ now the most-famous journalist in the world Ñ and this scribbler used to share a woman. This was in Washington, in Georgetown it being the most chic place in town Ñ Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post (and Newsweek) just around the corner, Kitty Kelley, destroyer of all reputations, just down the street. The scribbler was at 3027 Dent Place. By happenstance, Woodward was at the same address two blocks down the slope. By happenstance, we were both bachelors (happily no longer) at the time and had no idea how to throw a proper dinner party. Enter the woman. A bright young lady who, for a reasonable fee, would bring in the groceries, go into the kitchen, prepare a lovely feast, serve it to our guests, and then would go off lonely into the night. Alas, she fell in love with a rotten reporter from the Boston Globe, who wooed her and won her and married her and took her off to Boston. Woodward and I hated the guy ever since. Which brings us back to the most-famous scribe in the globe, the guy who with young buddy Carl Bernstein unveiled Watergate and drove Richard Nixon from the White House. All of Washington (not to mention TV) is abuzz about his new book, Plan of Attack, which has leapt to the No. 1 best-seller list in which everyone in the know in Washington (the gossip capital of the universe) knows that he got the inside dirt on George Bush and Iraq from Secretary-of-State Colin Powell. Revealing, among other embarrassing secrets, that the most powerful man on the globe told Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's Ambassador to the U.S., that he was going to "war" against Iraq before bothering to inform Powell. (My dining out line, before and since, is that the U.S. going to "war" against Iraq is like Woody Allen getting into the ring against Arnold Schwarzenegger.) See 'Advice' P.# Con't from P.# Some years ago, the late Stuart Keate, the very wise publisher of the Vancouver Sun, gave some very wise advice to a young new columnist. He said that the only friend a newspaper man can have is another newspaper man. Columnists, of course, depend on contacts. They don't have to reveal them. Unlike poor reporters, who have to tell their readers who said what. For columnists, lunches are the life-link to the truth. It's a high-wire act. One day, Keate warned, a columnist is going to run into a problem with a trusted contact Ñ cabinet minister, businessman Ñ over something, conflict-of-interest, mistress, whatever, and has to decide to throw him off the bridge. It's true. Conrad Black, once a luncheon companion, is the latest example. Colin Powell is Bob Woodward's latest victim. Woodward is a wonder to all his journalistic companions. He is a senior editor at the Washington Post. And such is his clout, he gets Ñ in this case three and a half-hours cuddling with Dubya Ñ and never reveals anything to his own paper before his zillion-dollar book comes out. Who knows? What we do know is what the wise Stu Keate warned the young columnist. At some stage, you may have to throw your best contact over the bridge. That's what everyone in Washington, and every capital on the globe, knows that's what Woodward has done to Powell, who will never be in the Bush administration after the November election. A boy's gotta do what he's gotta do.
