Free tickets are available starting October 21 for the second annual First Commonwealth Endowed Lecture at Indiana University of Pennsylvania featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning author and investigative reporter Bob Woodward.
Woodward will present “From Nixon to Bush: What Can President Obama Learn from Presidents Past?” on November 4, 2009, at 7:30 p.m. in IUP's Fisher Auditorium.
Tickets will be available at the Hadley Union Building ticket window or by calling 724-357-1313.
Dr. Tony Atwater, IUP president, announced this year's speaker during the annual State of the University Address on August 27.
“We continue to appreciate the generosity of our friends at First Commonwealth, who have provided a significant financial commitment to IUP to establish its first comprehensive, university endowed lecture series and offer it free to charge to our community,” he said.
Woodward is an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, where he has worked since 1971. He has won nearly every American journalism award, including the Pulitzer for his report on the Watergate scandal. He earned a second Pulitzer as lead reporter for the team that reported on the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Of Woodward's books, three have been featured on 60 Minutes, three have been made into movies, and Newsweek has excerpted five in headline-making cover stories.
In his most recent book, State of Denial: Bush at War Part III, Woodward provides his story of the White House and how the Bush administration “avoided telling the truth about Iraq to the public, to Congress, and often to themselves.”
Woodward has coauthored or authored more number-one national best-selling nonfiction books than any other contemporary American writer. They include All the President's Men and The Final Days, coauthored with Carl Bernstein; The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, coauthored with Scott Armstrong; Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi; Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987; The Commanders; The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House; Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate; Bush at War; and Plan of Attack.
Woodward was born March 26, 1943, in Illinois. He graduated from Yale University in 1965 and served five years as a communications officer in the U.S. Navy before beginning his journalism career at the Montgomery County (Maryland) Sentinel, where he was a reporter for one year before joining the Washington Post. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Elsa Walsh, an author and writer for the New Yorker. He has two daughters, Tali and Diana.
The inaugural presentation in IUP's First Commonwealth Endowed Lecture Series in October 2008 featured political commentators James Carville and Mary Matalin.
The lecture is presented in conjunction with IUP's Ideas and Issues program.