Pulitzer Prize-winner Bob Woodward to headline Elon's Fall Convocation

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and journalist Bob Woodward will be the featured speaker at Fall Convocation on Sept. 29 in Alumni Memorial Gymnasium. Woodward is associate editor of The Washington Post, a best-selling author and one of the nation’s most famous investigative reporters. He was a major contributor to the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Watergate and of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001.

Woodward will be spending the day at Elon, with his visit to include spending time with students before delivering his lecture titled “The Race for the White House in 2016: Bob Woodward’s Critical History from Nixon to Obama” at 3:30 p.m.

Woodward has been a journalist at the Washington Post since 1971, winning his first Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for joint coverage of the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, and his second in 2002 as the lead reporter covering the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

He has authored or co-authored 18 non-fiction books, all of which have been national best sellers. Twelve of his books have been No. 1 national best sellers, spanning from 1974 to 2010. “Woodward has established himself as the best reporter of our time,” said Bob Schieffer of CBS News. “He may be the best reporter of all time.”

In 2014, Robert Gates, former director of the CIA and secretary of defense, said he wished he had recruited Woodward into the CIA. “He has an extraordinary ability to get otherwise responsible adults to spill [their] guts to him … his ability to get people to talk about stuff they shouldn’t be talking about is just extraordinary and may be unique,” Gates said.

Gene Roberts, former managing editor of The New York Times, has called the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate coverage “maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time.” In listing the all-time 100 best non-fiction books, TIME magazine has called All the President’s Men by Woodward and Bernstein “perhaps the most influential piece of journalism in history.”

Woodward’s latest book, The Last of the President’s Men (October 2015), provides the missing pieces of the Nixon puzzle. The book is based on 46 hours of interviews with Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield, who revealed the secret White House taping system that changed history and led to Nixon’s resignation. The interviews with Butterfield are supported by thousands of documents, many of them original and not in the presidential archives and libraries, documenting new dimensions of Nixon’s secrets, obsessions and deceptions.

Tickets for Fall Convocation are now available.