Woodward Apologizes for his Secret

Famous for keeping a secret - 30 years with Deep Throat, Bob Woodward apologized today to the WaPo's executive editor for "failing to tell him for more than two years that a senior Bush administration official had told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame, even as an investigation of those leaks mushroomed into a national scandal."

Woodward, an assistant managing editor and best-selling author, said he told Leonard Downie Jr. that he held back the information because he was worried about being subpoenaed by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case.

"I apologized because I should have told him about this much sooner," Woodward said in an interview. "I explained in detail that I was trying to protect my sources. That's Job No. 1 in a case like this. . . .

"I hunkered down. I'm in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn't want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed."

All of this is SO very ugly... given the nature of what we know now. The many recent disclosures in the Plame Leak case certainly have changed public opinion, as recently reported here -- and may have changed the results of last year's election, had the public known then. Many critics say that Woodward has "grown too close to White House officials."

"The net to readers," Woodward said, "is a voluminous amount of quality, balanced information that explains the hardest target in Washington," the Bush administration.

Evidently, that some would call the Bush administration "Worse than Watergate," had not prompted Bob Woodward (who valiantly worked to expose Watergate), before now to to come forward. One can only surmise at this point that Woodward was sleeping with enemy. I always admired Bob Woodward for exposing Watergate, I'm deeply troubled by the latest revelations about his Secret.