Bob Woodward Reveals He Spoke With Justices Stewart, Powell, White, Blackmun, and Rehnquist for "The Brethren"
Steven Goldberg, one of Brennan's clerks, provided Woodward with the 75-page case history of U.S.v. Nixon.
Bob Woodward is publishing a new book, titled "Secrets," that reveals many of the reporter's sources. The Washington Post has published an in-depth profile.
Of special interest are the sources Woodward relied on with Scott Armstrong for The Brethren (1979).
In the memoir, Woodward clears up another decades-long mystery: Which Supreme Court justices talked to him for the 1979 bestseller "The Brethren"? The exposé of the inner workings of the nation's highest court under Chief Justice Warren Burger electrified Washington.
When the book was published, Woodward and his co-author, Scott Armstrong, disclosed that they had interviewed five of the nine justices on the court, as well as 170 former law clerks, but on the condition that they not be named. Given the court's reputation for maintaining a Sphinxlike silence, "The Brethren" ignited a guessing game in Washington and in legal circles around the country, as well as criticism over the book's heavy reliance on anonymous sources.
"Our use of unnamed sources was a huge point of controversy for the book, but in my 55 years of reporting experience, people rarely shared secrets on the record, particularly at the time something is going on," Woodward writes in his memoir.Nearly a half-century later, Woodward finally names the five justices who granted interviews: Potter Stewart, Lewis Powell, Byron White, Harry Blackmun and William Rehnquist (all are now deceased). Woodward's memoir explains how he and Armstrong painstakingly cultivated the justices and their former clerks as sources. The authors kept long memos about the interviews, which Woodward draws on to quote the justices at length in his new book.
It is curious that Woodward's sources were all the conservatives on the Court. (During the late 1970s, even after Roe v. Wade, Blackmun was still considered a conservative.) Woodward apparently did not talk with Justices Brennan, Marshall, or Stevens. Indeed, throughout the entire WaPo piece, nearly every one of Woodward's sources were conservatives. (I'll go through more of them below). I wonder what Chief Justice Burger would think if he knew that the other three Nixon appointees were the sources of the leaks.
Yet, even if Brennan did not talk directly to Woodward, one of Brennan's clerks leaked the critical document about the Watergate Tape Case. Steven Goldberg clerked for Brennan during the 1974-75 Term. Goldberg's co-clerk was Judge Marsha Berzon.
Woodward also tells the story of how got his hands on an internal Supreme Court document that was a cornerstone of "The Brethren": a confidential 75-page case history chronicling the justices' tense deliberations in U.S. v. Nixon. In an 8-0 decision, the court ruled in the 1974 landmark case that Nixon had to turn over his secret tape recordings in response to a federal subpoena and that, most importantly, the president is not above the law.
In "Secrets," Woodward writes that he learned about the existence of the case history from Steven P. Goldberg, a former Supreme Court law clerk who died in 2010. But Goldberg was adamant: He couldn't possibly give Woodward a copy.
Woodward wheedled and coaxed and pleaded. Despite Goldberg's repeated protestations, Woodward talked the clerk into letting him pay a visit to his home late that night.
Goldberg still refused to cough up the document, however, so Woodward suggested a compromise: How about you read it aloud while I take notes?
"My plan was to wear him out until I either had enough of it down or he eventually gave it to me," Woodward recalls.
With a sigh, Goldberg started reading from a comfortable living room chair. Woodward smiled and took notes — but he did so very, very slowly and kept asking Goldberg to pause.
After a while, Goldberg fell deeply asleep. Woodward contemplated grabbing the case history from his lap and bolting out the front door, but "that seemed a little too far, even for me," he recalls.
Instead, he walked over to Goldberg, gave him a slight nudge and informed him that he would take the document and bring it back first thing in the morning.
Goldberg stirred with a look of "absolute exhaustion" on his face, according to the memoir. But the former clerk mumbled okay — and that was good enough for Woodward.
"Not wanting to disturb him more, I gently took it. I did not want to run out the door but I moved swiftly," he writes. "If I was on a security camera, I wanted to be behaving properly, with whatever might be left of my dignity."
Woodward scampered home to read the whole thing. The case history proved invaluable, a "raw and unforgiving" and "Holy Grail" account of the court's inner workings.
Before returning it to Goldberg the next day, he stopped at The Post's newsroom to make a photocopy.
One wonders if Justice Brennan tacitly or expressly authorized this leak, so long as the document was not provided. While the Chief Justice would often warn that leakers would have their careers ruined, Goldberg did not suffer at all. He would become a law professor at Georgetown, advocating for a strict separation of church and state. Goldberg died in 2010.
I doubt Josh Gerstein had to take notes while someone read him the Dobbs opinion aloud.
There's more. Boyden Gray, a prominent conservative lawyer, was a regular source for Woodward:
One such leaker was C. Boyden Gray, who served as White House counsel to George H.W. Bush during Bush's presidency and vice presidency. Woodward describes Gray, who died in 2023, as "one of my lifelong secret sources." He also lived just a block and a half away from Woodward in Georgetown, which made passing sensitive documents much easier.
One Friday in February 1987, as the Iran-contra scandal was unfolding, Gray walked over to Woodward's house bearing a gift: a three-page memo labeled "top secret" regarding an Israeli official involved in the sale of U.S. arms to Iran. According to Woodward, the document contradicted the Reagan administration's public assertions about the scope of its contacts with Iran, and even he wondered at first why Gray had given it to him. He said Gray later explained that "he knew the memo would get out" eventually and "he wanted to get ahead of it."
Woodward also reveals that President Nixon's lawyers leaked information about their client.
As Nixon's defense counsel, Buzhardt listened to hundreds of hours of conversations that the president had secretly taped in the White House but resisted turning over to prosecutors until he was finally ordered to do so by the Supreme Court. In public, Buzhardt vigorously defended Nixon and was seen as "the operational man in charge of the Watergate cover-up," according to Woodward. In private, however, his assessment of Nixon was caustic.
"He flat out lies," Buzhardt told Woodward during one of 17 interviews that took place in 1974 and 1975. "He still to this day thinks that he was not involved in the cover-up."During the height of Watergate, Garment regularly met Woodward for interviews at a Chinese restaurant in downtown Washington and once brought along a briefcase filled with what the lawyer called "the really incriminating tapes." In the memoir Woodward doesn't say whether he was able to listen to them, but he writes that Garment called the recordings "infantile" and "sick." Through them, he added, Nixon was "letting America into the toilet of his mind."
Of all the leaks, these bother me especially. Lawyers have a duty of confidentiality. If they no longer could ethically represent a client, their recourse was to withdraw. It is unconscionable for lawyers to defend their client in court while undermining their client in the press. You wonder why Trump relies on lawyers he can trust. Because those he cannot trust are likely to attack him in the media. Not much has changed.
I've pre-ordered the book, which will be released in November. I am curious about details concerning his SCOTUS chats.