Harvard Book Store to Host Journalist Rock Star Bob Woodward

One of the reporters who broke the Watergate scandal is stopping by for a conversation with David Gergen.

It’s just a tad ironic that one of the reporters who helped bring down President Richard Nixon is promoting his new book so close to a university Nixon so thoroughly loathed.

The Harvard Book Store will host legendary journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Bob Woodward at the First Parish Church in Cambridge on October 20. Woodward will promote his new book, The Last of the President’s Men, the product of 46 hours of interviews with Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed the existence of the president’s secret White House taping system.

This discovery, along with the investigative reporting by Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein at the Washington Post (immortalized in the Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman-led adaptation of All the President’s Men) led to Nixon’s resignation in 1973. The Last of the President’s Men, meanwhile, is backed by “thousands of documents, many of them original and not in the presidential archives and libraries,” revealing “new dimensions of Nixon’s secrets, obsessions and deceptions.”

Woodward will discuss the book with CNN senior political analyst David Gergen, also of the Harvard Kennedy School. Tickets for the event, sponsored by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, are $5 went on sale Tuesday morning. You don’t even have to put a red flag in your flower pot or circle page 20 of the New York Times—they’re available online.