He made his reputation as the Washington Post reporter who, along with colleague Carl Bernstein, broke the Watergate story in 1972. Now an associate editor of the Post, Bob Woodward has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes and is the author or co-author of 15 books, all of which have been national bestsellers. What's less well known is that he began his career as a naval officer, from 1965 to 1970.
One popular image of journalists is that we didn't serve in uniform, don't know much about the armed forces, and are, vaguely if not blatantly, anti-military. Like many simplifications, this is often just wrong.
I spent five years as a naval officer before I became a newspaper reporter and book author. I saw a lot on active duty, and the lessons that could be learned would fill a long book. Here are some of my observations, looking back now nearly four decades later.
In 1961 I enrolled at Yale University on an NROTC scholarship. The draft was almost inevitable in those days, and serving in the armed forces was an accepted part of life. My father had been a naval officer in World War II, and John F. Kennedy—then President—was well-known for his exploits on PT-109. The Navy seemed a logical option for me.
When I graduated in 1965, the Vietnam War had escalated, and my first assignment was as circuit-control officer on the USS Wright (CC-2), a command-and-communications ship. The ship had been designated as the National Emergency Command Post Afloat, one of the places to which the President could be moved in the event of thermonuclear war.
Serving on board a ship at sea was the most grueling job I ever had. My strongest impression and remembrance of the Navy is how intense and exhausting shipboard life was. We worked all day, often seven days a week, and stood communications watches or deck officer watches day and night. There was the plan of the day, the numbing routines and cleaning, the work assignments, and the watch bill. Sleep deprivation wasn't torture—it was routine.
Whatever the pressures of journalism and the stress of deadlines that would come later—and no matter how much it took to uncover facts I needed for a story or a book—I've always thought that after the Navy, everything was easy.
One of many surprises was that despite all the Cold War-era precautions in the 1960s, the unthinkable still was eerily possible. On the Wright, I was responsible for 20 radiomen who maintained top-secret, encrypted teletype communications with the heads of the then-eight-or-so major U.S. military commands around the world.
The Wright carried a set of top-secret codes called the Sealed Authentication System, which would enable the President to verify his launch order for the Strategic Integrated Operations Plan, the nuclear war plan, to the military commanders. You'd think it would be the most scrutinized, rigorous, rule-laden system imaginable, but it wasn't.
Under the safeguard system, two officers had to have control of the authentication codes at all times. Another officer and I had this responsibility on the Wright. The theory was that one junior officer might go nuts and try to start a war, but two wouldn't. The codes were kept in a large walk-in vault in the ship's communications center. Inside the vault was a small safe that contained the codes. That safe was secured by a pair of flimsy bicycle-style locks. I was the only one with the combination to one of those small locks, and the other officer was the only person with the combination to the other one.
I realized early on that, theoretically, I could easily enter the vault when the other officer wasn't around, close the door, open my own lock and then jimmy the other one with a dinner knife. With the authentication codes and the precut teletype tapes, it would have been possible for a single officer to at least issue a launch order. A number of senior military officers later assured me that commanders of the worldwide forces would have attempted to verify a launch order by voice communications or other means. But in a tense crisis, it's conceivable that someone might have launched a strike himself. However slim the possibility, the system was dangerously vulnerable. I was astonished.
Two-and-a-half years later I was communications officer on board the USS Fox (DLG-33), operating in the Pacific and off the coast of Vietnam. We relied on standard high-frequency, short-wave communications, and we often lost contact with the Fleet headquarters and couldn't receive the regular teletype Fleet broadcast. The captain and I agreed it was dangerous for any ship—particularly one like the Fox, which carried tactical nuclear weapons—to be routinely out of communications.
The captain dealt with the problem succinctly. "Fix it," he told me.
So the chief radioman, a soft-spoken man named Haber who had seemingly limitless contacts around the Fleet, "borrowed" some state-of-the-art receivers and antennas and built a new system that would allow us to receive the Fleet broadcast on at least two different frequencies. His solution may have wasted huge volumes of teletype paper, but for some 40 consecutive days off the coast of Vietnam we maintained continuous communications with the Fleet commanders.
It was a new idea, and we spent a lot of time improving the system. The captain was delighted, awards were handed out, and we sent a long report up the chain of command. The incident carried another lesson, also a surprise: the military permits—and even encourages—innovation. Thank God I had Haber and his radiomen who were itching to fix a broken system.
In 1969 my active-duty time was involuntarily extended for a year because of the Vietnam War, and I was assigned as a communications watch officer for the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer. Occasionally I served as a courier for the (Nixon) White House. It was on one of these trips that I met W. Mark Felt, then an assistant director of the FBI and the man who would later become known as Deep Throat, a key source for the Washington Post's Watergate stories.
One final observation about government and its secrets: When I worked in the Pentagon, I saw reams of message traffic and documents that were classified up to top secret. Some of it contradicted the public declarations about progress in the Vietnam War made by military and civilian leaders and gave them protections from the grave inconsistencies between the classified record and their public posturing. Obviously the U.S. government has some real secrets that should be protected. But the classification system almost runs on automatic pilot and is often misused to hide the illegal, embarrassing, or difficult-to-explain truth.