Bob Woodward's "I'm doing it for the kids" rationale for his interpretation of Gene Sperling's email as an attempt to chill his reporting is an about face from his previous posture when a White House engaged in real retaliation against any person who bucked the White House line. Specifically, in 2005 Woodward defended the Bush White House in extraordinary terms when they outed a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame. See
Why Is Bob Woodward Intent On Destroying His Reputation? and
Woodward's Descent.
One of the interesting reactions to Woodward's defense of retaliation by the White House against Joe Wilson came from his Watergate reporting partner Carl Bernstein, as reported by Arianna Huffington:
I called Carl Bernstein to ask what he thought of his old partner's behavior. He was loyal as ever but he did say something very revealing -- and unintentionally damning. "This investigation," he told me, "has cast a constant searchlight that the White House can't turn off the way it has succeeded in turning off the press. So their methodology and their dishonesty and their disingenuousness -- particularly about how we went to war -- as well as their willingness to attack and rough up people who don't agree with them are now there for all to see. They can't turn off this searchlight, which is shining on a White House that runs a media apparatus so sophisticated in discrediting its critics it makes the Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Ziegler press shop look like a small-time operation." And these are the very thugs that Woodward was protecting while attacking the guy operating the searchlight. [Emphasis supplied.]
It could be that Bob Woodward only cares now because he was the one getting pushback from the Obama White House (after all, why would the Bush Administration push back against Woodward? He was fawning in his coverage of the Bush Administration on Iraq prior to 2005—see, e.g., Bush at War ("[Woodward] is not analytical or critical, a skeptic of any sort or a questioner of any depth, and context is a concept as foreign to him as foreign policy. He only conveys an image the 'principals' on the inside, as Woodward loves to call them, want to reveal.")
Or it could be that he defended the Bush Administration on PlameGate because he was part of the scandal:
Bob Woodward apologized to The Washington Post yesterday for failing to reveal for more than two years that a senior Bush administration official had told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame, even as an investigation of who disclosed her identity mushroomed into a national scandal.
Woodward not only did not reveal it to his editors, he failed to reveal it when he was calling Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald a "junkyard dog" for pursuing the investigation:
WOODWARD: . . .Now there are a couple of things that I think are true. First of all this began not as somebody launching a smear campaign that it actually -- when the story comes out I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter and that somebody learned that Joe Wilson's wife had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job going to Niger to see if there was an Iraq/Niger uranium deal.
Woodward's apologia for a White House engaging, not in threats of retaliation, but in fact engaging in actual retaliation against Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame, was despicable in any context. In the context of his own undisclosed conflict of interest at the time, it became even more despicable.
The fact that Gene Sperling did not threaten, or even hint at retaliation, against Bob Woodward, makes Woodward's current dog and pony show, especially his appearance on the odious Sean Hannity's show, even more despicable.
The fact that Bob Woodward attempted to "chill" the reporting of his former researcher, Jeff Himmelman, demonstrates his skills at hypocrisy:
“I’ve known this young man for some years now,” Ben [Bradlee] said, meaning me, “and I trust his skills and his intent.” Then he looked down at the transcript and said, “Nothing in here really bothers me, but I know there’s something in here that bothers you. What’s in here that bothers you?”
Bob [Woodward] went into his pitch, which he proceeded to repeat over the course of the meeting. [...] Bob tried everything he could to get Ben to disavow what he had said, or at least tell me I couldn’t use it. Ben wouldn’t do either of those things. “Bob, you’ve made your point,” Ben said after Bob had made his pitch four or five times. “Quit while you’re ahead.”
Bob turned to me. I had worked for him; he had given an impromptu toast at my wedding. You know me and the world we live in, he said. People who didn’t like him and didn’t like the Post—the “fuckers out there,” as Ben had called them—were going to seize on these comments. “Don’t give fodder to the fuckers,” Bob said, and once he lit on this phrase he repeated it a couple of times. The quotes from the interview with Barbara were nothing more than outtakes from Ben’s book, he said. Ben hadn’t used them, and so I shouldn’t use them, either.
That argument didn’t make sense, and I said so. Bob told me it was his “strong recommendation” that I not use the quotes, then that it was his “emphatic recommendation.” Then, when that got no truck: “Don’t use the quotes, Jeff.”
The last person who can now come and lecture about chilling "the kids" is Bob Woodward. He has no credibility to do so.
What's left to say about him? He did one great thing as a reporter (with Carl Bernstein)—Watergate. Since then, his work has been below hack level. But hacks in the Beltway press corps are a dime a dozen. That's not remarkable.
What is remarkable is the lengths Bob Woodward will go to try and maintain relevance.
And he has succeeded. We now see what happens to a reporter with no scruples and no respect for the truth—he ends up on Sean Hannity's show defending his indefensible behavior as being "for the kids."