It marked the low point in a country's trust and respect for the highest office of the land and left the nation to question its very foundation. Somebody who through force of personality made history interesting and important. He told me first that he was going to resign, wasnt sure when, and for Gods sake dont write it as hard, because he wont. But glaring gaps remain. Famously portrayed by Dustin Hoffman (Bernstein) and Robert Redford (Woodward) in the 1976 movie classic All the Presidents Men, the pair are far from best buddies and though they did not sit together on the dais, it appears some ice has thawed. There were 7,000 papers finally, and The New York Times got a copy of it. Ben Bradlee: Four hundred stories about Watergate in The Washington Post Four hundred in two years and two months. I would have been more effective.. But the following morning, Dan Schorr of CBS we saw on CBS Morning News shoved a microphone in front of this guy and said, The Post says you did this. Back at home, you could cross out the word "party" and replace it with "Nixon." That happened a long time ago. Mr. Woodward, there were mistakes made during Watergate, you have said in the book. Of course, after the fame of "All the President's Men." I mean, I believed it, because it was I knew it was coming. A community high school history teacher named Elizabeth Duncan who taught American history and was a great teacher. When will all the truth come out? Quite optimistically. To a certain extent, I always saw myself as a lawyer. Sunburned from swimming laps in the forced labor of summer recreation camp, I raced home so I could catch John Dean's afternoon testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, and the next summer I read the paperback version of the committee's report by flashlight at a campground along the Delaware River, while raccoons scurried under my tent. Not one of the 17 stories he filed was printed. My father was a lawyer there, and I worked as a janitor in his law office when I was in high school, and started reading the files and discovered that the projection that people in the town made about their own lives was in fact not who they were, that lots of them had secrets, and many of them were in my fathers law office files. What books impressed you as a kid? Bob Woodward: I was not in intelligence; I was in communications, and they are different in the Navy. It risks the whole thing. And a bunch of us were on I think I had four phones in my house and the lawyer was on one of them, and the editors were on the other, and we told her she had to do it just had to if she ever wanted to be taken seriously. I think the lead of his story was, Will the wonders of Watergate never cease?. Ephron delivered Max prematurely after finding out. I was the lowest-paid reporter at The Washington Post, because they would only give you credit with the Newspaper Guild if you had worked for a daily, and I had worked for a weekly. You mentioned Faulkner. It was to see if they could find the origins of our involvement in Vietnam, and what went wrong. But three or four days later, we got a copy of them from Ellsberg, only we didnt have three months to study them. It has been said that as dark a chapter as Watergate was in the American presidency, in a sense, it showed the branches of government working. Carl knew he needed [that quality] but despised it in Bob. That really is what were all about. Trending News Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). The important discovery for Carl and myself was that Watergate wasnt isolated. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/woodward-and-bernstein, "Woodward and Bernstein The piston driving the Nixon administration was hate. Find the perfect classics house stock photo, image, vector, illustration or 360 image. Were you the only child? [3] In 1966, Bernstein left New Jersey and began reporting for The Washington Post, where he covered every aspect of local news and became known as one of the paper's best writing stylists.[15]. Didnt you have a chat with the Posts publisher, Katharine Graham, in the midst of all of this? It was embarrassing that they had this great story and we didnt. Kind of going, CIA. And the judge said, Where? And he went, CIA. And the judge said, Speak up. In her interview with Pakula, Ephron tried to rehabilitate her boyfriends reputation. It was strange. It took some of us from the Watergate generation a long time to see it. William Faulkners books, certainly. On the other hand, Carl Bernstein was the child of two Communist activists (per Washingtonian). Other than Woodward and Bernstein, no personalities prominent in Watergate were the subjects of a bestselling memoir, the inspiration for a star-studded motion picture, and the protectors of a mythical source who eluded conclusive identification for decades. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman portrayed them in the 1976 movie. But even they seemed to take the wrong lessons from what they'd done. Thats why we all joined this business. TIME magazine has calledAll the Presidents Men perhaps the most influential piece of journalism in history. A second book by Woodward and Bernstein on the collapse of the Nixon administration, The Final Days, was also a huge success. Maybe it was 16, but he had fully a decade-plus of experience under his belt. More so than the book, the cinematic adaptation of All the Presidents Men placed Woodward and Bernstein at the decisive center of Watergates unraveling. Carl tried his hand in television, at ABC News (and was a consultant at CBS News for awhile). ", Shepard agreed completely with Smith's assessment that, "There could not have been two more opposite people who had to work so closely together.". Bob Woodward: About six months after Watergate, after Carl and I had written many of almost all of our main stories, she called me up for lunch. Woodward also got a dig in about Bernsteins famed love of the ladies, recalling Bernstein got a list of people who worked on the Richard Nixon re-election campaign from an ex-girlfriend. Whos going to get what lead and put it together? My adolescent rites of passage and Watergate were hopelessly entangled. More than 40 years after they became the world's most famous journalism duo, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are still making news. He was affectionately known as "Uncle Al" and had many sources in police departments. We actually published three papers with it before they stopped us, and then we were in the courts for 12 days. What was that about? The Post played a critical role in the beginning, and Woodward and Bernstein came in at critical moments. The real crimes of the last 40 years didn't fit into the box that Woodward and Bernstein and the Watergate scandal helped to create. The heroic-journalist myth, which began taking hold even before Nixon resigned, has been sustained by three related influences. And it did. We're lucky to have Woodward and Bernstein -- so young in 1972 -- still with us. "Woodward and Bernstein When you were a child, who most inspired you? Few in the room could recall a joint public appearance by the famous Washington Post reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal that brought down a president. And most jobs, if you are a lawyer or a doctor, you have to deal with clients, patients who have boring problems or diseases that are routine, and of course, the definition of news is non-routine. Whats going on in the town in culture, in the nation, in the world is news, and you get to work on that. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (1979) places the Bernstein and Woodward story into a history of recent American journalism. And that this wasnt just a cover-up of a burglary. To a certain extent, I was able to go my own way. Raised in a traditional Republican household, Woodward was very well-educated and has been described as gentle. Not, "What did the president know and when did he know it? Woodward had married reporter Francie Barnard, and . While single, in the 1980s, Bernstein became known for dating Bianca Jagger, Martha Stewart, and Elizabeth Taylor,[16] among others. With astonishing regularity, Woodward has continued to produce bestselling books on previously hidden aspects of American life. Sometimes I was thought to be the more cautious one, but Carl (Bernstein) could be cautious, and I could be aggressive or overly aggressive. What made you back the kids, Woodward and Bernstein? Woodwards critics insisted that this informant was a fabrication, or at best, a composite based on a number of sources. Bernstein has been married three times, first to a fellow reporter at The Washington Post, Carol Honsa; then to writer and director Nora Ephron from 1976 to 1980; and since 2003 to the former model Christine Kuehbeck. He just had a psychosis about being controlled by authority figures. Knopf had a first printing of 275,000 copies. And of course, Muskie was going to be the strong candidate against Nixon. Would I run like that again?. He said, Youre crazy. And at the same time, it was my decision. Ben Bradlee: That we had really done a really good job. Hes finally embarrassed, said Woodward with a smile. That the difficulties they put up to prevent the truth from coming out had been overcome. I may have been an extreme case, but not a unique one. Where were you in the pecking order of siblings? The third vital member of the team of Woodward and Bernstein is the mysterious figure known as "Deep Throat." Chris Pine finally sets the record straight, Oscars diversity improved after #OscarsSoWhite, study shows. In their dogged reporting of the Watergate scandal, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the crimes that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in August 1974. I now do my books alone, but I have a full-time assistant who is kind of my collaborator. It was very complicated, then and now. Then in March 1973 one of the Watergate burglars, James McCord, a former CIA official, wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica, who was trying his case, that essentially confirmed the Bernstein and Woodward stories. It appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list for three weeks. I recall in that incident, I did one, he did one, and I looked at his, and I realized his was better, as was almost always the case. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Roberts.[2]. And he was the one who said that. White bread. They publicly tied prominent Washington figures, such as Nixons former attorney general, John Mitchell, to the scandal. This time though, a security guard noticed that multiple latches on the doors were taped so they wouldn't lock and called the police, who caught the men in the act. Its small wonder that the heroic-journalist myth still defines popular understanding of Watergate. So I did not have two years experience. Mr. Bradlee, what were your emotions when Nixon resigned? There were some teachers and lawyers and business people, but no writers. Hunt had been studying Ted Kennedy and checked books out of the library. I think it is an emotion that if you bask in it, its like hate; it will destroy you. Where the hell? Woodward relied on one source whom he refused to identify even to his editors except by the code-name "Deep Throat.". } Bob Woodward: No, not that I can think of. Pakula didnt want facts alone. It was a takedown that transcended politics, transcended ideology. Just it was terribly, critically important that we do it right and that we not brag, not seem to be bragging, and that we didnt allow any television in there for days. The next year, when I entered college determined to be a reporter just like the guys that Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman had portrayed on the screen, there was a surge in enrollment in journalism schools. Thanks to their investigation and reporting, the American people had a deep look into Nixon's role in the break-ins and cover-ups. Woodward was assigned to cover the breaking story, along with a younger but more experienced reporter, Carl Bernstein. LHW is a shallow division, this cancellation was just adding insult to injury. So you are dealing a glancing blow to whats out there. THIS year marks the 30th anniversary of the movie All the Presidents Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, respectively. Who were your favorite authors? Neither of those marriages could withstand all that pressure and that fame and money. " Bob Woodward: Yes. So we were terribly worried, and we didnt its a big newspaper and a lot of people in it, and you cant control all of them even if you wanted to. He wanted to understand Woodward and Bernstein deeply so he could capture their true characters and motivations for the movie. Ben Bradlee: He sure did. He wouldnt say. It seems to me that to be a topnotch investigative journalist, you have to have a lot of guts in order to question some of these things. Author Alicia Shepherd said about the pair, "They couldn't be more different. On the other hand, Bernstein was born to a Communist Jewish family. We had such good sources. It was, after all, the courts unanimous ruling in July 1974, ordering Nixon to surrender tapes subpoenaed by the Watergate special prosecutor, that sealed the presidents fate. Ben Bradlee: Well, we were tired. He knew all about my mother, brother -- everything. (Jason Robards, who played Bradlee, is on screen only 10 minutes.). Was he the more experienced journalist at the time? Bob Woodward: Yes, we are. I think in the atmosphere we are in now, somebody who would get up and propose some of the things that were done in Vietnam, like conducting the war when we didnt believe in it, or burglarizing, or wiretapping, or doing the abusive things of Watergate, I think its so ingrained that there are enough people who would stand up and say, We cant do that. Bernstein was portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film version of All the President's Men[28] and by Bruce McCulloch in the 1999 comedy film Dick. W. Joseph Campbell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Bob Woodward: Well, we looked at it differently. 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