Bob Woodward's statement on Robert Redford
Snippet from Woodward's statement:
“I interviewed him several times over the last 10 years about the state of this country and recorded them with his permission. Here are some quotes that show the Redford I knew and loved.
“On New Year’s Eve 2021, Redford said he had rewatched All the President’s Men a few days prior. ‘I was just taken aback by how appropriate it was, how timely it was and how little has really changed. We don’t have Nixon anymore, we have Trump.’
‘You know time waits for no one,’ Redford said. ‘Time moves on and you have to move on with it or get lost behind. And I thought, well, at my age — at the age I’m at, 85, at one time there was a long road ahead of me and now that road is a lot shorter and I don’t have a lot of time to mess around. So you do the best you can with what you’ve got left… We have to do something that changes the scenario, changes the dialogue. Just like we did many years ago with Watergate.’
“‘We live in a country where we can’t call ourselves the United States of America,’ Redford said. ‘We just can’t. We’re the Divided States of America because of the political parties and they’re so robust in their anxieties…’
“In September 2022, I told Redford my reporting showed that Trump was trying to destroy democracy. ‘He doesn’t understand it,’ Redford said. ‘So it’s easy for him to destroy it. It is easy to destroy something you don’t understand. You can claim it doesn’t exist.’