So, Bob Woodward’s Source Used to Threaten Journalists at the Daily Pennsylvanian Too

Bob Woodward foe Gene Sperling–the most feared economic adviser in the White House–has threatened journalists before. (You’ll recall he told Woodward “I think you will regret staking out that claim” about some stuff Woodward wrote about the sequester, which caused a national scandal.) Back when he was a graduate student at Wharton, Sperling wrote columns for the Daily Pennsylvanian, which was edited by current Atlantic national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg. Once, when Goldberg threatened to cut a column, things got out of control.

The average column on our op-ed page ran about 800 words. Gene would turn in columns at 1,500 or 1,800 words…We usually managed to squeeze the columns in, because he was the best columnist we had, but on occasion he would present us with an insurmountable physics problem, and we had to cut. One day, when we couldn’t get the column on the page at his preferred length, he put up a big fight, and he said, “You’ll rue the day you cut this column.”

WOW. Wow, just wow. Run with it people. [The Atlantic]