Author Bob Woodward to Give Book Talk

Bob Woodward, recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes, will be in conversation with Professor Akhil Reed Amar ’84 on October 19, 2015, at 4:30 pm in Room 127. Woodward will discuss his latest book, The Last of the President’s Men, which focuses on Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed the secret White House taping system that led to Nixon’s resignation. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Bob Woodward is an associate editor at The Washington Post, where he has worked for 44 years. He has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, first for The Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, and later for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He has authored or coauthored twelve No. 1 national nonfiction bestsellers.

Bob Woodward exposes one of the final pieces of the Nixon puzzle in The Last of the President’s Men. In 46 hours of interviews with Alexander Butterfield, supported by thousands of documents, many of them original and not in the presidential archives and libraries, Woodward has uncovered a new dimension of Nixon. The book is a story of the mysterious and under-appreciated relationship between Nixon and Butterfield that wound up changing history. Butterfield provides the intimate details of what it was like working and living just feet from the most powerful man in the world as he sought to navigate the obligations to his president and the truth of Nixon’s obsessions and deceptions.

Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law at both Yale College and Yale Law School. His work has won awards from both the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2008 he received the DeVane Medal—Yale’s highest award for teaching excellence. He has written widely for popular publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and Slate. Professor Amar is also the author of several books, including The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction, America’s Constitution: A Biography, and America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By. His most recent book, The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of our Constitutional Republic, has just been published, and his next book, The Constitution on Deadline: Real-Time Essays on the Issues of Our Era, will be published in 2016.