China And The First Pay Cut

Bob Woodruff arrived at Shearman & Sterling’s New York office in 1987, a newly-minted University of Michigan Law School graduate. That he was not going to retire from the firm at age 65 showed signs right away. After just six months he took a leave of absence to teach American law to Chinese lawyers in Beijing. His healthy six-figure annual salary became the equivalent of $150 per week.

Woodruff and his new bride arrived at the Chinese University of Politics and Law and moved into their new digs – a 15 by 20 feet cinder block dorm room. The bathrooms were communal and the toilet was a stall with a hole in the floor. The sinks were multi-purpose -- bathing, doing dishes and washing vegetables. The rooms reeked of sewage and rotting food.

Woodruff taught American Economic Law to Chinese lawyers who had been tapped by the government to deal with foreign lawyers. In In an Instant, Woodruff and his wife Lee’s co-authored memoir, there is a photo of the nascent lawyer-turned-law-professor standing in front of a group of Chinese students with the words “offer” and “acceptance” written on the backboard behind him. It is hard to imagine a BigLaw lawyer looking more out of place.

I asked Woodruff the obvious question. He explained to me that taking the position in China was fueled largely by being a “travel addict.” “I loved to go see places in the world that I hadn’t been to before. And maybe even hopefully very few had been.” Woodruff was also bored at Shearman & Sterling. The stock market crash in October 1987 had led to a sharp decline in M&A work. He found himself reading the newspaper in his office. But the teaching positon was only intended as a brief hiatus. “I was in love with Asia very early on,” Woodruff explained, “and my assumption was that I was going to go on and practice related somehow to China and Asia.”

The Moment It All Changed

Six months after arriving in Beijing, student protests against the government took place in the city’s Tiananmen Square. CBS News was there covering the story and the network was looking for an American teacher to interview about the situation. Woodruff got the nod. Fascinated by the news process and equipment he saw, Woodruff stayed to meet the crew and watch his CBS Evening News piece be edited. Feeling the adrenaline of the news business he asked for a job as a “fixer” – someone who helps a news crew with translation and getting things done in a foreign country.

The Tiananmen Square protests turned deadly after the Chinese government moved in troops to bring it to an end. Woodruff, hired to be a simple fixer, now found himself with a news crew, in the middle of the Square, as automatic weapons fire went off around him. “I witnessed and experienced something I never would have imagined in my life,” he told me.

Northern California And The Second Pay Cut

Woodruff and his wife were forced to return stateside after Tiananmen Square. He went back to Shearman & Sterling, this time its San Francisco office. But after just two years the pull of journalism become too strong and Woodruff exited in 1991. He had been waking up at 4:30 AM to volunteer at a television station in Oakland before heading to the office.

“I wanted to relive exactly what I had observed [in Tiananmen Square] when I was practicing law,” Woodruff told me. In his memoir he writes of the effect of that experience: “Reviewing documents at a law firm would never feel the same after the excitement and energy of watching one of the world’s epic events of the decade unfold.” Like the title of the book that he would later co-write, Woodruff’s career as a lawyer was over in an instant.

The move from lawyer to journalist was not seen by Woodruff as altogether unusual. “In some ways when you go to law school,” he said, “it’s the same way of thinking in terms of debate.” He was accepted at Berkeley’s journalism school. However, on the first day of school, Woodruff was offered a job at a small NBC affiliate in Redding, California, four hours north of San Francisco. He had earlier sent demo tapes to small news markets around the country. Woodruff opted for experience over the classroom and headed for the 130th broadcast market in the country (out of 200). His new salary -- $12,000 a year.

Woodruff was starting at the bottom, but knew he had no choice. “Make your mistakes when there is hardly anyone watching would be a good way to start,” he told me. “If you really think you have to live in New York and hang out with your friends to break into journalism you probably ought to think again. You gotta go someplace when you can actually practice journalism daily.”

Of course some of Woodruff’s lawyer colleagues though he was crazy to leave his firm for a 90% pay cut. He joked that years later some of them asked him to “hand [them] the rope to get over the wall” when discussing their decision to stay with the firm.

Woodruff had chosen law school for the same reason as many -- he got out of college, wasn’t sure what he wanted to do and liked the thinking process. Or because his father told him, “I hope to God you’re not going to be a lawyer,” he said, laughing. He worked as a paralegal for a year at Skadden Arps before heading to Michigan. “That was an intense place,” he says, chuckling. Having left the legal profession so quickly, I’m curious if the seed for this early exit had been planted by discontent in Ann Arbor. Not at all he says. “I loved law school.”

I told Woodruff that his decision to leave the money and security of Shearman took courage. But he responded that he does not like to use the word courage: “That sounds like those that don’t do it do not have courage.”

Iraq: In An Instant

Woodruff, and now with family, moved around the country as he took jobs at various local stations. His promotion to the network came in 1996 when ABC called. He spent some time in Washington as its Justice Department reporter. This was followed by several years of reporting from far-flung places around the world, often in war zones. The experience of Tiananmen Square was still having an impact, planting in Woodruff a desire to cover conflicts.

Woodruff was one of the first reporters to enter Afghanistan after the September 11th attacks and among the first to report from Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003. He has reported from North Korea countless times. His recent story for 20/20, about North Korea’s ruling Kim family, is gripping. It’s on the show’s website.

In December 2005, Woodruff was handed the brass ring of television news – the anchor desk for ABC’s World News Tonight, along with Elizabeth Vargas. The co-anchors would be replacing the legendary Peter Jennings, who had died of lung cancer three months earlier.

But the job would be short-lived. On January 29, 2006 Woodruff was nearly killed when he was hit by a large improvised explosive device while covering the war in Iraq. He had been embedded with the U.S. Army and was reporting while standing up, out of a tank hatch, when the IED went off. The report was to be part of a story for World News Tonight on the handover of U.S. military activities to Iraqi forces, an important subject to be discussed during President Bush’s State of the Union address the next day. [Woodruff’s cameraman was also injured but much less seriously.]

Woodruff’s injuries were devastating. Rocks shattered the left part of his face and jaw. One rock, the size of a marble, went all the way through his neck, past veins, arteries, his trachea and esophagus. His back and scapula were shattered. Woodruff’s life was saved by the heroic work of soldiers and skilled military medical professionals. He underwent a craniectomy that removed the left part of his skull and was in a medically induced coma for 36 days. Woodruff suffered a traumatic brain injury. Following intense physical and cognitive therapy he was, remarkably, back on the air just thirteen months later.

Scars remain on Woodruff’s face. But thanks to his square jaw and rugged good looks they are nowhere as noticeable as they’d be on, say, a nerdy guy wearing a bow tie. As for Woodruff’s current condition, his lower back, which he arched a few times as we spoke, causes him problems. He also suffers from aphasia, which he described as a loss of memory that can make it difficult to find a word that he’s looking for. Woodruff pointed it out to me when it happened once during our conversation. “Names are hard to remember,” he said. “But I don’t have any understanding problem or the ability to keep the facts.”

Woodruff also acknowledged the effects of his ordeal in Iraq, both positive and negative, that go beyond the physical and cognitive: “We’re able to do some things now that I probably never would have been able to do if this didn’t happen,” he told me. He points to his foundation, which he called “probably the most personally satisfying thing I’ve ever done.”

The Bob Woodruff Foundation

In 2006 Bob and Lee Woodruff started the Bob Woodruff Foundation. Woodruff’s experience in Iraq introduced the couple to families of service members dealing with traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress. The foundation’s mission is to give these individuals support and resources. But rather than provide these services at the ground level, the foundation’s approach is to raise money to fund some of the 46,000 non-profits around the country that are serving veterans. The foundation finds and vets innovative programs with a diversity in focus and geographic location. It has invested more than $45 million to assist 2.5 million impacted veterans, service members and their families. Woodruff told me that he is also focused on bringing attention to the topic: “It is getting more and more difficult to get people to remember that there are people that are serving and that there are impacts from the conflicts that are going on in the world.”

An important funding source for the foundation is its annual Stand Up For Heroes event in New York. It brings together musicians and comedians for a night of entertainment. Last year’s event, the 11th annual, included Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Conan O’Brien, Trevor Noah and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was the first event since its debut that did not include Bruce Springsteen on the bill, on account of a conflict that the New Jersey icon had with his current Broadway run. Springsteen has been a strong supporter of the foundation, auctioning off guitars over the years and even a lasagna dinner at his house. The foundation is currently auctioning two tickets to Springsteen’s Broadway show, along with a private meet and greet and autographed guitar.

The Ultimate Journalism Compliment

I jokingly asked Woodruff how often people come up to him and comment about that Watergate story he broke. He laughs. Even his wife-to-be mistakenly called him Bob Woodward when she ran into him a few years after their graduation from Colgate. Woodruff is amazed at how often he is mistaken for the famed Washington Post reporter, especially considering their nearly twenty-year age difference. “I think there’s been moments of disappointment when people go to an event and they thought Bob Woodward was coming,” he joked. Woodruff told me about a time that Bob Woodward appeared on CNN and the network mistakenly put Bob Woodruff under his name. “It was the greatest honor I’ve ever seen.”

Woodruff told me he’s made many bad mistakes, but one that he did not “was to pursue what I thought I would be more in love with.” Bob Woodruff didn’t think he’d have much to say about a three decades old legal career. But I’d told him not so fast.