The management has been, across the record, characterized by a specific combination of candor and limits. He has spoken about his father directly and in some detail: the discovery via radio, the visits, the feelings about the conviction, the appeal effort, the shared birthday. He has not, by the available record, either dramatized the connection into a public narrative of suffering and redemption or pretended the connection did not exist. He has acknowledged it as part of his life — a significant part, but one among several — and has not made it the organizing principle of his public identity.
This is, in the circumstances, a psychologically sophisticated position. The alternative framings available to him are less satisfying: the narrative of the innocent child destroyed by the father’s crimes (which would be both an overstatement and a form of self-victimization that his publicly confident persona does not suggest he has adopted); the narrative of the loyal son who fought for the wrongly convicted father (which would require a certainty about the conviction’s correctness that neither the legal record nor Woody’s own public statements support fully); the narrative of the famous man who transcended his criminal family origins (which implies that the family was a weight to be escaped rather than a context to be understood). None of these is quite right, and Woody has consistently resisted the ones that are most available.
What he has said, across forty years of public conversation about it, is something simpler: this is part of my life, I have managed it as best I could, my father was a complicated person I had complex feelings about, and the work I have done is the work I have done. The work speaks for itself. The biography is part of the story but not the whole story.