Woodward, Darman,” he said. It was how every phone call from him began over two decades. Richard G. Darman was what I call a “hide in plain sight” source, because it was widely known that we were close friends. Not known, but perhaps suspected, was that he was a pipeline for me into the White House during the Presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
I first met Darman in 1973, during the Watergate affair, which I was covering for the Washington Post with my reporting partner Carl Bernstein. Darman and I were both thirty, and both obsessed with work and with the dramatic political history we were witnessing. At that time, Darman was a top aide to the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, who had refused to carry out Richard Nixon’s order to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. Richardson resigned and Nixon fired Cox. This was the firestorm called the Saturday Night Massacre, a crucial event that helped lead to Nixon’s resignation, on August 9, 1974. Darman regularly filled me in on the behind-the-scenes story, its color and meaning.
Darman was a Harvard graduate, an overachiever, clearly driven, cerebral, witty, and tenacious. He believed in the good that both he and the government could do for the country. He was an idealist and a cynic. He once told the New York Times that his only hobby was work.
We had countless long lunches together—Saturday or Sunday—at the Madison Hotel, across the street from the Post, discussing government, journalism, and ourselves. I felt like I was getting a master class in how government really operated. Plus, many scoops. In later years, Darman would drive out on weekends to our country house near Annapolis, Maryland, to spend large parts of the day with me and my wife, the journalist Elsa Walsh, who was particularly fond of him. Some people found him arrogant, but I loved his comfortable confidence as a friend and a source. It was part of what made him so extraordinary and valuable. He knew how to turn on the charm, and he did for both Elsa and me.
The most celebrated source of my career was Mark Felt, the No. 2 man at the F.B.I. during the Nixon years, who died in 2008. I referred to him as Deep Throat. But if Felt was on one end of the source spectrum—a secret source for thirty-three years, who operated entirely in the shadows, deeply paranoid and careful about what information he provided me and how he did it—Darman was his opposite. Flagrant and out in the open, he casually spoke to me about the most sensitive and high-level decision-making inside the Reagan and Bush White Houses.