Bob Woodward Demonstrates Lack of Understanding About How Book Festivals Work

Surveying the crowds gathered at this weekend's National Book Festival I was struck: Having 1,000+ people jockeying for chairs to sit and listen to you talk about something that began while hunched over your writing desk at home has to be pretty effing astounding.

Also, advice to Bob Woodward. I didn't come to the festival to hear Scott Turow talk about "Presumed Innocent" (1987) or to hear Doris Kearns Goodwin talk about "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream" (1976). So I certainly didn't come to hear you talk about "All the President's Men." When you're speaking at a major book festival in the nation's capital the weekend your new book comes out about the very naughty behavior of the people running said capital, and it's already been written about in the New York Times, don't have some festival flunkie official come out and tell the folks who've waited all day to see you that you're not going to take any questions, nor are you going to talk about that book because you've cut a deal with "60 Minutes" for an exclusive. That's the kind of thing that gets you booed. To be specific that's the kind of thing that did get you booed. Loudly. Mainly by me. In your defense though, everyone else could have just been yelling, "Booourns, Booourns."