Woodward's 20K buyout?

The legendary Washington Post reporter will be taking the paper's early retirement package, which would have given him a cool $360,000 if he had kept his $180,000 salary as a Post AME. But a couple of years back, Woodward took a voluntary pay cut that dropped him down to a mere 10 grand a year. On that basis, the 65-year-old Woodward (Bob Woodward is 65?!) would be getting a good-bye check of $20,000. The Washington City Paper reports that "the biz people at the paper are now trying to figure out whether to give Woodward the small payout or the large payout."

This guy, of course, will put food on the table either way. Best-selling books finance a comfortable life for Woodward, a longtime Georgetown resident who is currently at work on his fourth tome about George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Other volumes in this series—Bush at War, Plan of Attack, and State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III—have sold millions of copies. As long ago as the ‘90s, Woodward asked his bosses at the paper to reduce his salary to $1 a year. They declined to make any such drastic adjustment–until after Craigslist and a prolonged advertising slump had shredded the paper’s profitability.