Excerpt:
Longtime Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's campaign to sell his forthcoming memoir, "Secrets," has included a long excerpt in the New Yorker and a sneak preview in the Post. These articles reveal the names of some of Mr. Woodward's top sources, most notably Richard "Dick" Darman, an aide in the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Conservatives have long suspected Darman of leaking. In a 1993 memoir, George H.W. Bush aide Charles Kolb tagged Darman as "one of Woodward's main sources and, apparently, the only official in the entire Bush administration to get everything right" on a series Mr. Woodward wrote about Bush's economic record. The series hurt Bush going into a tough re-election battle against Bill Clinton, a fight Bush ultimately lost.
Nixon and Reagan aide Ken Khachigian, another Darman skeptic, wrote in his memoir that "it was easy to spot Darman's DNA on leaks." Both Kolb and Mr. Khachigian were right. The Woodward articles reveal that Darman was a continuous source for Mr. Woodward for more than two decades, through all four administrations in which he served. Mr. Woodward describes him as a "gold mine" of material in no fewer than 58 meetings or conversations over the decades.
Seeing a number of Mr. Woodward's sources revealed at once shows that they tended to be on the "squish," or liberal, side in the liberal-versus-conservative divide in the GOP administrations of that era. Other exposed leakers include Bush Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and two-time national security adviser Brent Scowcroft.
For decades, conservatives in and out of administrations have bristled at the superior coverage that the squishes got in places like the Post. While they suspected that leaking played a role, the scale that Mr. Woodward has now described is shocking. Scowcroft, for example, was a "secret source for 35 years."
It was a symbiotic relationship.