Veteran journalist Bob Woodward remembered Robert Redford as “a noble and principled force for good” in a tribute to the late actor who portrayed him in the 1976 film about the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men.
“His impact and influence on my life cannot be overstated,” Woodward wrote of Redford, who died Tuesday at age 89. “I loved him, and 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.”
Not only did Redford play Woodward, the journalist credited the actor and filmmaker with encouraging him and his co-author Carl Bernstein to “tell the Watergate story through the eyes and experiences of our reporting and the relations between the two of us.” That recommendation resulted in All the President’s Men, the book that traced the downfall of Richard Nixon and inspired Alan Pakula’s 1976 Oscar-winning film.
“Over 50 years of friendship, he always said what he was going to do and then did it,” Woodward said of Redford, adding: “He will be remembered as one of the great storytellers in our country’s history. He elevated stories beyond the mainstream. He not only cared about the environment, but he took all conceivable actions to protect it.”
Woodward also revealed that, over the last 10 years of Redford’s life, he conducted numerous interviews with the actor “about the state of this country.” He shared several excerpts from those interviews, which he said “show the Redford I knew and loved.”
One of these conversations took place New Year’s Eve 2021, with Redford saying he’d just rewatched All the President’s Men. “I was just taken back by how appropriate it was, how timely it was, and how little has really changed,” he said. “We don’t have Nixon anymore, we have Trump.” In the same conversation, 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.”
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Another set of quotes came from September 2022, after Woodward told Redford about his reporting that “showed that Trump was trying to destroy democracy.” Redford replied, “He doesn’t understand it. So it’s easy for him to destroy it. It is easy to destroy something you don’t understand. You can claim it doesn’t exist.”
To close his tribute, Woodward shared a quote Redford gave about himself in 2019: “One last thing before we go on about why I am the way I am. Not wanting to be pinned down, not wanting to be corralled. I was totally free as a child. I was totally free… Those were the earlier years that kind of define why I think there’s some part of me still that way. Not wanting to be pulled into a group situation, wanting to maintain some independence.”