Bob Woodward, the journalist played by Robert Redford in the 1976 corruption exposé All the President’s Men, has paid tribute to the actor who died on Tuesday, saying he was “a noble and principled force for good”.
In a statement posted on social media, Woodward said that Redford and he had been friends for 50 years and that he “admired him – for his friendship, his fiery independence, and the way he used any platform he had to help make the world better, fairer, brighter for others”.
Woodward said Redford played a key role in exposing the events of the Watergate scandal, saying that the actor had “urged Carl Bernstein and myself to tell the Watergate story through the eyes and experiences of our reporting”, resulting in the publication of their book All the President’s Men in June 1974 (which preceded Nixon’s resignation in August 1974), and the subsequent film, for which Redford had acquired the book’s screen rights and in which he co-starred with Dustin Hoffman.
In his statement Woodward also quoted recent conversations he had had with Redford. The actor said he had rewatched All the President’s Men in 2021 and was “taken aback at how appropriate it was, how timely it was, and how little has really changed. We don’t have Nixon any more, we have Trump.”
Redford added: “We live in a country where we can’t call ourselves the United States of America. We just can’t. We’re the Divided States of America because of the political parties and they’re so robust in their anxieties.”
Redford also commented directly on Trump, after Woodward suggested Trump was trying to destroy democracy. “[Trump] doesn’t understand [democracy]. So it’s easy for him to destroy it. It’s easy to destroy something you don’t understand. You can claim it doesn’t exist.”
