Why Does Bill Murray Think that Bob Woodward Framed Richard Nixon?

And there’s your WTF headline of the day, folks—courtesy of Bill Murray, who appeared recently on the Joe Rogan podcast. As I have mentioned a few times, I listen to the odd Rogan episode because I feel like I should at least have a passing familiarity with the most popular podcast in the U.S. And honestly, a lot of people I once thought were reasonable show up and quickly disabuse me of that notion. A few weeks ago, for instance, a guy I hadn’t thought about in decades — Adam Curry, the original host of MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball — made an appearance. Turns out, he’s a total whackjob now.

Despite his extensive history of inappropriate conduct, I at least expected Bill Murray to exist in this reality. And for the most part, he does. Amusingly, in the first minutes of the podcast, after Rogan gushed about how much of a comedy hero Murray is to him, Murray responded with, basically, “I don’t know who you are. I heard you were a weightlifter or something,” and “When people heard I was going to be on your show, they asked me, ‘Are you OK?’” That wasn’t Murray being tongue-in-cheek; that was just Bill Murray being Bill Murray.

Early on, he also launched into a long, meandering story, stopping at one point to acknowledge, “I understand this podcast is long, so I can do this,” which is maybe why I ended up skipping through a lot of it. Overall, it wasn’t a particularly revealing conversation, though my ears did perk up when I heard Murray say, “Bob Woodward framed Nixon.”

Excuse me? Come again?

For context, the discussion began when Rogan brought up what he claimed was the “real” story of Nixon’s downfall, as told to him by, who else? Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s version is that while Nixon did everything he was accused of, the whole thing was orchestrated by intelligence agencies to take him down for investigating JFK’s assassination. This is why you shouldn’t listen to Joe Rogan, kids.

Murray also believes Nixon was “framed” by Bob Woodward — sort of — but for an entirely different reason. See, Woodward, who broke the Watergate story with Carl Bernstein for The Washington Post back when that was a real newspaper, also wrote Wired, a biography of John Belushi—an original SNL cast member and a close friend of Murray’s.

Here’s Murray’s reasoning:

All of a sudden, I went, oh my God, if this is what he writes about my friend that I’ve known for half of my adult life—which is completely inaccurate, talking to the people of the outer circle getting the story—what the hell could they have done to Nixon? I just felt like, if he did this to my friend like this—and I acknowledge I only read five pages—but the five pages I read made me want to set fire to the whole thing… If he did this to Belushi, what he did to Nixon is probably soiled for me, too. I can’t take it. And I know you say, well, you gotta have two sources and everything like that. But the two sources that he had, if he had them for the Wired book, were so far outside the inner circle that it was criminal, cruel.

The criticism of Wired isn’t new. Plenty of people close to Belushi—including his widow, Judith Belushi Pisano, have made similar complaints. They argued that the book was too clinical, too focused on his drug use, and failed to properly celebrate Belushi as a person. In fact, one recurring critique is that Woodward approached Belushi with the same detached, investigative rigor he applied to Watergate. And that’s precisely why he could be so effective in exposing Nixon while also producing a biography that those closest to Belushi found unfair and inaccurate.

Murray is probably just being protective of his friend’s legacy. But his explanation for why Woodward wrote the book the way he did? Pure nonsense:

And the reasoning for it is that the most famous person ever to come from Wheaton, Illinois, is John Belushi. The second most famous person to come from Wheaton, Illinois, is Harold “Red” Grange, the football player… And the third most famous person to come from Wheaton, Illinois, is Bob Woodward.

That’s it. That’s the grand conspiracy. Woodward wrote a takedown of Belushi because he resented being third on the Wheaton, Illinois, leaderboard.

Source: The Joe Rogan podcast