In Monday’s Monitor story on Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, Danna Harman quotes Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

"If you don't talk to him [Woodward], you get slammed," he says. "If you talk, you get your perspective in." Mr. Luttwak recalls consulting to the CIA during the tenure of director William Casey, a key source for Woodward's book ["Veil"] on the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan years.

Luttwak continues,

"Woodward did a whitewash in that book - everyone was guilty except Casey," Luttwak says. "In fact, Casey was guilty.... But because he talked to Woodward, he got his point of view in." 

Joseph Persico writes in his biography of Casey that after a September 28, 1983, meeting between Woodward and Casey to discuss Debategate, "Casey continued to give Woodward time over the next several months, at formal interviews, in phone calls, and during casual encounters at social events." 

Obviously this kind of access doesn’t come easily.

"How does Woodward do it?" asks Harman.  "By long hours working his way up the information chain, just like any other journalist, insists Woodward."

But a look at Mr. Woodward’s background reveals more than just pluck.

Persico isn't the only author to address Woodward's facility within the beltway.  Adrian Havill and Jim Hougan are two other authors who’ve written about Woodward, whose resumé is unique among most journalists.

Robert Upshur Woodward, grew up the son of a Republican judge in Illinois, and later attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.  While there he joined Phi Gamma Delta and one of the "top" second tier secret societies, Book and Snake. 

Three days after leaving Yale, he entered the Navy and was assigned to the recently recommissioned  U.S.S. Wright, a National Emergency Command Post Afloat (NECPA).  In his book, "Secret Agenda," Hougan quotes Rear Admiral Francis J. Fitzpatrick who said the Wright was designed to "stand in readiness to embark the President and take him to sanctuary at sea in the event of national emergency."  But according to a "highly placed U.S. government official" who spoke to Havill, the ship was an "at sea Pentagon."

In "Deep Truth," Havill writes that Woodward’s clearance was "top secret 'crypto'" giving him "access to nearly any classified document as well as codes. He also ran the ship’s newspaper, which gave him an excuse to speak to anyone aboard."  After leaving the Wright, he boarded the U.S.S. Fox, which was based along the California coast and also outfitted for communications intelligence.  The Fox got as close as twenty miles from the Vietnamese coast.  After his four-year obligation in the Navy, he stayed on one more year. 

He was assigned to the Chief of Naval Operations where, Hougan writes, his duties at the Pentagon included presiding over "top-secret communiqués from the White House, the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the NSC ... That is, during his year at the Pentagon, he was one of a handful of officers chosen by the Navy to brief the government’s most important intelligence officials on events and operations around the world."

These briefers, Hougan tells us, "were the best that the Navy could find,"  and they've included, Richard Lugar, currently the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Admiral Bobby Ray Inman (ret.), who served as the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence and the NSA, as well as the Deputy Director of the CIA.  Inman recently retired from Science Applications International Corporation, which is one of the prime contractors currently in Iraq.

Havill writes, "While Bob certainly worked hard, he also had a network of contacts that began at Yale and continued at the Pentagon, a powerful combination that would serve him well over the next two decades ... When Robert Woodward left the Pentagon, he was completely plugged in, or, to use one of his book titles, Bob was 'wired'."

Robert Gates, who was on President Carter's NSC staff before moving to the Reagan administration, served under Casey before succeeding him as Director of Central Intelligence. He may have summed up the lure of Woodward best.  Persico talked to him about interviewing with Woodward.

"I gave Woodward over an hour and a half... He had no hard-edged agenda.  We just roamed.  He would have made a great case officer." (By Alan Messmer)

Also of interest:

“The most defective part of the Federal Constitution, beyond all question, is that which relates to the executive department.” (Abel P. Upshur, President John Tyler’s Secretary of State, quoted in “Secrecy and Foreign Policy,” ed. Thomas M. Franck & Edward Weisband, 1974)

This Thursday, Condoleezza Rice will testify before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. On March 30th, the White House finally agreed to let Rice testify publicly and under oath . President Bush’s public statement came after White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, sent a letter to the commission outlining the conditions upon which Rice, President Bush and Vice President Cheney would testify before the panel.

More recently, the White House has agreed to hand over about a quarter of the 11,000 relevant pages of material the Clinton administration had supplied at the time of transition.

Rice had said that her appearance before the commission would be both unprecedented and would compromise Bush's and future presidents’ ability to exercise their right to “executive privilege.” This argument was challenged by a provocative fax sent by commission executive director (and reported co-author of the 2002 National Security Strategy) Philip Zelikow to Gonzales Monday, March 30th, which may have led to the decision to let Rice appear before the panel. Apparently, Admiral William D. Leahy (ret.), President Franklin Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff, did testify during the investigations of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Executive privilege is a term first used during the Eisenhower administration, but the conflict goes back to the presidency of George Washington, who refused to reveal to the House of Representatives (and succeeded) the details of the Jay Treaty with Great Britain. But as professor Michael Dorf writes in his fine 2002 article on the battle between the GAO and Vice President Cheney, “The Constitution nowhere expressly mentions executive privilege.”

Rather, it is a kind of rubbery side effect of the system of checks and balances among the three branches of government set up in the Constitution, sometimes referred to as the "Separation of Powers." And besides Washington, it has embroiled presidents Jefferson, Nixon, and Clinton.

For additional information, see:

EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE REVIVED: SECRECY AND CONFLICT DURING THE BUSH PRESIDENCY

Picture shows FDR aide before Pearl Harbor panel (By Alan Messmer)