Bob Woodruff Biography
Bob Woodruff is a television journalist from the United States. He has worked as an ABC News reporter since 1996. In 2006, Woodruff and ABC News journalist Elizabeth Vargas co-anchored ABC World News Tonight. During a reporting trip to Iraq in January of that year, he was severely injured by an IED explosion and had to recover slowly before returning to the skies.
Bob Woodruff Age
Woodruff is 60 years old as of 2021. He was born Robert Warren Woodruff on 18 August 1961 in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, United States.
Bob Woodruff Height
Woodruff stands at a height of 6 feet (1.8 m).
Bob Woodruff Family
Woodruff is the son of real estate agents Frances Ann (Dawson) and Robert Norman Woodruff Jr.
Bob Woodruff Education
In 1979, Woodruff graduated from the Bloomfield Hills, Michigan-based private Cranbrook Kingswood school. He graduated with a B.A. from Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, in 1983, where he played lacrosse and finished second all-time at Colgate with 184 points. Woodruff is a member of Theta Chi Fraternity and has a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.
Bob Woodruff Wife
In 1988, Woodruff married Lee McConaughy, and the couple has four children: Macklin Robert (Mack), Cathryn, Claire, and Nora, twins.
Bob Woodruff Accident
Woodruff was embedded with the US 4th Infantry Division near Taji, Iraq, on January 29, 2006, to report on US and Iraqi security forces. He and an ABC cameraman stood with their heads above the vehicle’s hatch to capture footage for a special report they were working on, wearing helmets and body armor while traveling in an armored vehicle.
Bob had been named to succeed Peter Jennings as co-anchor of ABC World News Tonight just 27 days before, capping a successful 17-year career as a journalist that included coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II and NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, among other events. When Bob’s car collided with a roadside bomb, everything changed. Bob was critically injured in the explosion of rocks and metal, suffering shrapnel wounds to the head.
He was rushed to an Air Force hospital in Iraq for surgery within hours, where he underwent a craniectomy to relieve pressure in his brain. According to Gregory O’Shanick, MD, president and medical director of the Center for Neurorehabilitation Services in Richmond, VA, and national medical director emeritus of the Brain Injury Association of America, the procedure entails removing a portion of the skull to allow a swelling brain to expand without being squeezed. Bob was then airlifted to Germany’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. He awoke five weeks later in a Bethesda Naval Hospital room in Bethesda, Maryland.
Bob Woodruff Traumatic Head Injury
Bob became one of the 1.7 million Americans who suffer from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) each year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lee’s life was also changed at that moment. Bob’s TBI was so severe that he almost died—and luck played a key role in his survival.
Bob Woodruff Net Worth
Woodruff has a net worth of $1.6 Million.
Bob Woodruff Home/House
During the Iraq War in 2006, he was inspired to build his dream home after surviving a roadside bomb attack. He purchased a half-acre waterfront plot in Rye, NY, a quiet NYC suburb, and built a four-bedroom, three-bath house for the couple and their four children. With wooden decks that extend from the family’s bedrooms and an outdoor pool that they enjoy, the house feels like an extension of nature. From the wide-open spaces to the reclaimed barn wood flooring, the home’s design and materials brought a little bit of the outdoors inside. When it came to furnishing the 3,800-square-foot space.
Bob Woodruff Career
In New York City, Woodruff worked as a bankruptcy associate at Shearman & Sterling, LLC. During the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, CBS News hired Woodruff as an on-screen interpreter while he was teaching law in Beijing, China. He left his law practice soon after and went to work as a full-time correspondent for several local stations.
In advance of a documentary that aired on ABC later that evening, Woodruff appeared on Good Morning America, ABC World News with Charles Gibson, and The Oprah Winfrey Show on February 27, 2007. Despite having made significant progress in his recovery, she had some difficulty remembering words and details during the GMA interview with Diane Sawyer, such as the name of the Vietnam War and the word “injury.”
“To Iraq and Back: Bob Woodruff Reports,” an hour-long documentary, looked at the effects of traumatic brain injury and the challenges that brain-injured veterans face in finding treatment, a topic that had first appeared in Discover magazine a few weeks before and was expanded on by Washington Post reporters in the exposé “Painting Over the Problems at Walter Reed’s Building 18.”
The following day, February 28, Woodruff returned to ABC World News with Charles Gibson with the first of a series of follow-up reports focusing on the problems that wounded American soldiers are encountering in their treatment and recovery, particularly at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was supposed to start reporting for Nightline “at regular intervals” on March 7.
On July 12, 2008, Woodruff began hosting Focus Earth with Bob Woodruff, a new weekly ABC News newscast on the Planet Green television channel. Woodruff covered the week’s environmental news on Focus Earth, examining topics such as climate change, environmental policy, political debate, and world events, as well as how climate change affects religious and cultural views and issues.
Woodruff worked as a reporter and host for ESPN and ABC Sports during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, usually alongside ESPN Brazil senior writer Rubens Pozzi. In 2020, he and his son Mack launched Rogue Trip, a National Geographic show. The series debuted on Disney+.
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