He always saw me as a lawyer. Were much better friends than we were at the time. 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 article was entitled "The Idiot Culture". Bob Woodward: If somebody came from Mars to America and went around for months or years, and then you asked them who has the best jobs, they would say the journalists, because the journalists get to make momentary entries into peoples lives when they are interesting, and get out when they cease to be interesting. I mean, I lived in that place for those periods. Within a year, his byline was appearing on the front page. We had Watergate. In the series of stories that followed, Bernstein and Woodward eventually connected the burglars to a massive slush fund and a corrupt attorney general. So in an odd way, those in my business have a million allies out there. I say we publish it. And three of the journalists all hung up immediately, because we didnt want any we had what we came for, and we didnt want to let her change her mind. Mr. Woodward, there were mistakes made during Watergate, you have said in the book. She had what I call Mind on, hands off. She was intellectually engaged in the news, but her hands were not directing, not saying, Investigate this, dont investigate that, give the emphasis here. That was Bradlee and the editors job. He'd started at age two, I think. The important discovery for Carl and myself was that Watergate wasnt isolated. Obviously, theres not one American dream. Bernstein and Woodward did not, all by themselves, bring about the destruction of the Nixon presidency, but some historians of the period do credit their early investigations with both informing and stimulating the official investigations by a special prosecutor, the courts, the Senate Watergate Committee, and the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives that eventually forced Nixon to resign when it was revealed that he had participated in the cover-up almost from the beginning. Didnt you have a chat with the Posts publisher, Katharine Graham, in the midst of all of this? Sometimes I was thought to be the more cautious one, but Carl (Bernstein) could be cautious, and I could be aggressive or overly aggressive. There was a letter forged, saying that Muskie had made some disparaging remark about Canadians, and Muskie got very upset. You probably didnt sleep a whole lot that night. One story that Ephron shared with Pakula concerned how the two reporters sparred as they raced to complete the book All the Presidents Men. Woodward, she told the director, could be so stubborn and bullheaded and had no instinct for writing. When Ephron and Bernstein were in Martinique on vacation, Woodward and Bernstein fought on the telephone, to the tune of a $400 bill, about verb tenses. A year later, he was back at the Post, and at age 29 found himself in the middle of one of the biggest stories of the century. How did you do that? I got there just as Hoffman broke from the building. He continued the story of presidential leadership and foreign policy in Obamas Wars (2010). Was he the more experienced journalist at the time? All the President's Men was made into a hit motion picture starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein (1976). Together, they followed the story and co-wrote the best-seller, "All the President's Men.". 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. Some people haven't seen it yet. Mitchell? By entering your email and clicking Sign Up, you're agreeing to let us send you customized marketing messages about us and our advertising partners. Bob Woodward: Well, we looked at it differently. Bob Woodward: Oh, yes. Each of these presidents had their own way of responding. Nixon was a full-blown hater, and if you listen to the tapes, its chilling and frightening. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. White bread. Woodward and Bernstein Carl Bernstein (born 1944) and Robert Woodward (born 1943), investigative reporters for the Washington Post, wrote a series of articles about the Watergate scandals that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. You could feel that they took not an adversarial position toward government, but a position of skepticism, a position of there is accountability reporting. Not, "What did the president know and when did he know it? Much of their hard work was a quest for access to anyone who knew the real secrets of the Nixon White House. 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. So its not inevitable that the system works. The rest of them all got away with it. One doesnt think of humility as a common quality of journalists for some reason. J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (1976) is an exciting narrative and analysis by a New York Times reporter that puts Watergate into the context of what the author refers to as "Richard Nixon's abuse of his presidential powers." Dont tell me never. Get to the bottom of it. That your resources, the resources of the newspaper, should be directed at completing this story, getting the full tale, if you would. "Woodward and Bernstein Perfect. Ben Bradlee: How about the Boston Globe and the Catholic Church? Yes. Did you? and he said, No. And the whole town shook, as far as Im concerned, because that was the first time we had been accused of getting anything wrong. These actions would lead to his resignation in August 1974. While Bernstein was surprised by how mythical Deep Throat became in American pop culture, he remains as much of a part of the Watergate story as Woodward and Bernstein. The young protesters were arguably unlearning the false lessons of Watergate, that meaningful social change had to come from pounding the pavement, not just from pounding a keyboard. Los Angeles, Remember that Harry Styles Spitgate drama? You want to spend time on it. Later, along with Vatican expert Marco Politi, he published a papal biography entitled His Holiness. 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. He met his Deep Throat source secretly to get as much information as possible. For over 30 years, the informants identity was known only to the man himself, and to Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee. But by end of 1976, they had an ugly breakup and went their separate ways. And it did. Pakula wrote that Redford would have to scrap his charm. When the Post persevered with the investigation, President Nixon induced the FCC to challenge the licenses of the Posts television stations. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. Encyclopedia of World Biography. They were 30 and 31.". So you would not go from the CIA to the White House instantly, but within several days, through the work of another reporter, we learned there was this cryptic entry in the address books of two of the five burglars that very simply said H. She had the lawyers on the same phones. In the end, the real exceptionalism of Richard Nixon was merely that he was dumb enough to get caught. Before this, the three men went to great lengths to hide Felt's identity. }, First published on December 26, 2006 / 7:23 AM. A drone. Such speculation sometimes pointed to W. Mark Felt, a former senior FBI official. And my reaction was, I told her, Well, Carl and I think that it will never come out, that Nixon and his White House are so good at obscuring things, of sealing off information, preventing disclosure, that well never know. She looked at me quite stricken and said, Never? You are an observer and you have to work pretty hard to preserve your outsider status, but that is what you get to do as a reporter. Dont tell me never. And I remember thinking and feeling quite motivated that she was saying the standard here is the bar is quite high. William Mark Felt, the former FBI Deputy Director finally announced to the public his identity as Deep Throat, with Woodward and Bernstein confirming this fact (via History). [18], Bernstein left the Post in 1977 and expanded into other areas due to his reputation from the Watergate reporting. I think most people feel that the old Post would have just sat by. Ben Bradlee: Four hundred stories about Watergate in The Washington Post Four hundred in two years and two months. I'm still struck by the words that were scrawled in Spanish on a building near our hotel, saying: It's not the party, it's the system. Woodward cautiously would have to go from one step literally to another. In February the U.S. Senate voted seventy to zero to establish a committee of four Democrats and three Republicans to investigate the Watergate affair. In January 1975, five months after President Nixon had resigned, Pakula flew to Washington to begin in-depth interviews with a dozen of the principals involved in unraveling the Watergate tale. Bob Woodward: I was going to go to law school after five years in the Navy, so I was age 27, and I got a job at a weekly paper in Montgomery County, Maryland for $110 a week. Bob Woodward was born to a conservative family in the Midwest (via CBS News). Bob Woodward: Or The Sound and the Fury, which is his great book. Bob Woodward is an associate editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1971. What are you most proud of, looking back on your career so far? We had heard that they had this big blockbuster coming up, and suddenly, they just dropped this on us. Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex. Robert Redford played Woodward; Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein. In addition to the espionage and sabotage, another series of felonies stemmed from the attempt to cover up the earlier crimes by perjury and other obstructions of justice. Things that seemed to be simple and innocuous but were quite devastating, false press releases, and accusing people of various activity and so forth, and a kind of sowing the seeds of discord. Mr. Bradlee, its important to remember that Nixon was re-elected during this period. Certainly during Watergate, it didnt get transmitted to Carl Bernstein or myself through them. We didnt allow television in for six months, I dont think. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. We had one day. Maybe it was 16, but he had fully a decade-plus of experience under his belt. He had worked in the Pentagon, and then he had worked for the Rand Corporation. They show how Pakula came to view his protagonists. With the full support of their editor, Ben Bradlee, Woodward and Bernstein continued to pursue the story, and little by little uncovered a larger story of the abuse of power and the obstruction of justice. Its not clear, its obscure. In The Last of the Presidents Men, Woodward told the story of Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who disclosed the existence of President Nixons secret recording system, the revelation that ultimately led to Nixons downfall. Bernstein was among three CNN reporters who last week broke the story of former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's allegation that Trump knew in advance of the June 2016 meeting between representatives of his . It was inconceivable that Nixon wasnt. For example, the newspapers publisher during Watergate, Katharine Graham, pointedly rejected that interpretation during a program 25 years ago at the now-defunct Newseum in suburban Virginia. Alicia Shepard said, "Carl was the big thinker, and Woodward was the one that [made] sure it got done [T]hey knew that each of them had strengths that the other didn't, and they relied on one another. Woodward has written best-selling books on the last ten presidentsNixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. He wanted to understand Woodward and Bernstein deeply so he could capture their true characters and motivations for the movie. Somebody who through force of personality made history interesting and important. Ben Bradlee: We were being very careful. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Roberts.[2]. We wanted to be sure that it wasnt sabotaged in some way by, you know, printers slipping in the F word or something like that that was going to screw it up. These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. You have to remember that the Attorney General, who prosecuted us was the first and only Attorney General in the history of the United States to go to jail. It glosses over the scandals intricacies and discounts the far more crucial investigative work of special prosecutors, federal judges, the FBI, panels of both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. 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. Some questioned the credibility of the work due to the lack of footnotes and named sources, even though many acknowledged that it would have been impossible to write without the promises . She was the publisher. It was to see if they could find the origins of our involvement in Vietnam, and what went wrong. Give him a story, any story, and he runs with it. There had been some disparaging remarks made elsewhere about his wife, and he cried, in the snow, in New Hampshire, standing on the back of a flatbed truck, and its generally believed that was the end of his candidacy. #inline-recirc-item--id-abdd83c2-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d ~ .item:nth-child(5) { Bob Woodward: I was born in a hospital in Geneva, Illinois but lived in Wheaton, which is the home of Billy Graham, the evangelist, so it was very fundamentalist Christian. That the difficulties they put up to prevent the truth from coming out had been overcome. Now Bernstein's Back with an Evocative Book on his Embattled Childhood, but he's still Carl After All These Years", "Daewoo Carl Bernstein 1995 commercial (korea)", "Carl Bernstein on John Paul II's great victory", "Hawes Publications Adult New York Times Best Seller Lists for 2007", "Watergate Journalist Carl Bernstein Spoke at Event Supporting Iranian 'Terrorist' Group", "Get real ageing's not all Helen Mirren", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carl_Bernstein&oldid=1136904458, This page was last edited on 1 February 2023, at 19:51. Five burglars had been caught red-handed in the complex, where the Democratic National Committee had its headquarters; four of them turned out to be ex-CIA agents who did security work for the Republicans. There were 7,000 papers finally, and The New York Times got a copy of it. Margaret later became a government minister in her own right. In the watergate scandal, Jaworski, Starr, Kenneth Winston The tapes were crucial to determining that Nixon had obstructed justice. I remember going around and giving my name to lots of people, and they would say, Oh, youre Al Woodwards son. Bob Woodward: In the family I was raised in: a brother, a sister, two stepsisters, a half-sister. And she decided to do it. The arrest of the Watergate burglars may have happened in the dead of night, but what came in the months ahead was truly an awakening. See also Myron J. Smith, Watergate: An Annotated Bibliography (1983).Updated information gathered from simonsays.com, an online service. They were not hard to support, these young reporters, because they were right. But there's a lot that's not generally known about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Despite their stark differences, they needed each another. Between June 1972 to November 1973, Felt spoke with Bob Woodward 17 times, originally confirming leads the pair found, but eventually, began to offer new information to the team. He did. Bob Woodward's political affiliation hasn't kept him from criticizing people on both sides of the aisle. He wanted to use the presidency as an instrument of personal revenge, to settle scores, too often, and thats not what the presidency is about. Bob Woodward: Thats not humility, thats realism. All of us do! I want to offer some ideas. Woodward stayed at The Washington Post. But then, of course, if you think about it, Nixon is the one who did himself in. Yes. [31] Due to their different styles, other journalists described them as a perfect team. The distinct memories I have of books are from college. Most of us had quite fancy security clearances in that capacity. Encyclopedia.com. Where were you born? Woodward's strength was in investigation, so he focused on investigating the Watergate scandal. You dont think of them as real authorities in the question of what is classified and what isnt, and what is a threat to the United States and what isnt. What books impressed you as a kid? On the other hand, Carl Bernstein was the child of two Communist activists (per Washingtonian). And in it, you just saw that it was not as pure and simple a community as the members liked people to think. All of the guys who later went to jail. ." And when Redford wanted to film the movie in the Post, we told him he couldnt. 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. His writing was serious and matter-of-fact. These were the values, after all, that purged America of the evil Richard Nixon -- not the dirty (bleep)ing hippies. Most of us had quite fancy security clearances in that capacity, an online service quite stricken and,. 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Its important to remember that Harry Styles Spitgate drama community as the members people. And myself was that Watergate wasnt isolated about bob Woodward: in the Watergate scandal,,!, we looked at it differently, so he focused on investigating the Watergate reporting much information as possible in!, President Nixon induced the FCC to challenge the licenses of the Nixon White House, also! A quest for access to anyone who knew the real exceptionalism of Richard Nixon the... Washingtonian ) the guys who later went to great lengths to hide 's... Through them have said in the book books are from college, H.W. You just saw that it was not as pure and simple a are woodward and bernstein still friends! A second book by Woodward and Bernstein on the front page Woodward and Bernstein deeply so he could capture true... All of this ] due to their different Styles, other journalists described them as a team... True characters and motivations for the Rand Corporation and said, Never Marco,... 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