Bob Woodward and Richard G. Darman first met in 1973, during the Watergate affair, which Woodward was covering for the Washington Post. At that time, Darman was a top aide to the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson. Over the next decades, “Darman was what I call a ‘hide in plain sight’ source, because it was widely known that we were close friends,” Woodward writes. “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.” During the Bush Administration, Darman served as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and was instrumental in Bush’s economic policy. He persuaded Bush to break his “no new taxes” pledge to voters. When Woodward took an assignment to cover the economy—and Bush’s blunders—over a four part series for the Post, Darman was betrayed. “I said that the two of us had grown too close,” Woodward recalls. “No,” Darman replied, “the two of us did not get too close. Despite the portrait and the charges that I am Machiavellian and manipulative, in fact, I’m a fairly simple, ordinary person, and friendships are important.” Bob Woodward remembers the friendship he shared with Darman—and its ultimate demise. “I should have realized the danger,” he writes. “I didn’t want to lose him or his information channel.” newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…