Woodward has written best-selling books on the last ten presidentsNixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. In addition, they tracked down and interviewed a large number of people who gradually revealed various pieces of the puzzle. The important discovery for Carl and myself was that Watergate wasnt isolated. Yet I knew that he was right.. Bob Woodward: We would frequently do competing drafts of stories and put it together. They were 30 and 31.". Events are in no way simple or cinematic. Youre not used to seeing your actions. And it did. That really is what were all about. Encyclopedia.com. Bull---- artist. It appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list for three weeks. And whats sad about the Nixon presidency is not just the criminality and abuse of power, but the simple truth, to the best of my knowledge at this point, on those tapes no one ever says what would be good, what would be right for the country, what would be best for the country, which of course is what a president is supposed to do. 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. A career FBI agent, Felt held the second ranking post in the FBI at the time of the Watergate break-in and made his disclosures to Woodward when Nixons appointed FBI director failed to act on information incriminating members of the administration. This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in and, of. There were other burglaries. Get to the bottom of it.. And when Redford wanted to film the movie in the Post, we told him he couldnt. And my father said probably the severest thing he has ever said to me. The dichotomy intrigued Pakula. 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. It was the scandal that led to the forced resignation of the President of the United States. Ben Bradlee: I was at The Washington Post, and I couldnt believe it. It was also the fact that they were so different, and that they were lowly metro reporters. What an incredible jump in your fortunes as a journalist, from one year on a little suburban paper to The Washington Post. It was a Saturday morning, I think the summer. www.8days.sg Richard Matthew Pious We missed the first edition, but we published it the second edition, which came out at 11 oclock at night, 11:30. The real crimes of the last 40 years -- the political power of an American kleptocracy that has crushed the nation's middle class, the state of permanent wars abroad and the loss of the public square to a militarized police force at home -- didn't fit into the box that Woodward and Bernstein and the Watergate scandal helped to create. At 2 a.m. yesterday, the Watergate scandal turned 40. One midnight in June 1975, Bernstein watched as Pakula directed a scene. Carl had a harder time. He always saw me as a lawyer. During Watergate, no matter how well Bernstein reported the story, he was pegged by Post editors as the bad boy of the duo -- always late, unreliable and quick to hype his leads. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward, left, and Carl Bernstein on March 1, 1974, Washington, D.C. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Our lawyers were telling us that and this New York judge had ruled that the statute says whoever has reason to believe that publication of certain information will threaten the national security of the United States shall be this was a civil suit, but the criminal equivalent, which they would certainly have done had they convicted us, would have put us in jail, put us all in jail, including Katharine Graham, or the possibility of it. 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. In 1976, All the President's Men was made into a smash Hollywood movie, starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, that won four Academy Awards. He and 39 others, I might add. No soul.. The Iran-Contra Affair involved a secret foreign policy operation directed by White House officials in the national security counc, Truman, Harry S. 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. Instead, they wrote 'All the President's Men' and they sold the movie rights to Robert Redford. The guts are supplied by the owners of the newspaper and the editors. But together they did something that neither one of them could do individually. Woodward lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Elsa Walsh, a writer for The New Yorker and the author of Divided Lives. 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. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman portrayed them in the 1976 movie. They were tireless young reporters, fearless and not intimidated by the very powerful people they were investigating. JAWORSKI, LEON So I went to work with about seven or eight other people, including Carl (Bernstein), and I went to the arraignment of the five burglars, and the judge wanted to know where one of them worked, and he was mumbling. Who would be dumb enough to work on this story on a Saturday morning? And they thought of me immediately. The processes that caused [Nixons] resignation were constitutional., Grahams words, however accurate and incisive, scarcely altered the dominant popular interpretation of Watergate. This was our time, our story. And it turned out he had worked for the CIA for years, had been working in the White House as a consultant to Chuck Colson, who was then Nixons hatchet man. Woodward and Bernstein were successful at concealing the identity of their informant until 2005 when he outed himself due to the public. ", To read excerpts, click here. Much of their hard work was a quest for access to anyone who knew the real secrets of the Nixon White House. Therefore, its best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publications requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. [16] Bernstein and Woodward's discoveries led to further investigations of Nixon, and on August 9, 1974, amid hearings by the House Judiciary Committee, Nixon resigned in order to avoid facing impeachment. You dont think of journalists automatically as patriots, one. Bernstein was among three CNN reporters who last . 39 or 40 people in this White House staff went to jail. Ben Bradlee: Because the kids were right. He was affectionately known as "Uncle Al" and had many sources in police departments. We just didnt sleep a hell of a lot. This. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Redford can get that compulsive drive. Ben Bradlee: How about the Boston Globe and the Catholic Church? 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. One of the managing editors at the Post, Howard Simons, during Watergate this was not on a Watergate story, but I was struggling with a story early in my time at the Post and he came by, and he said, You dont have to understand a man in an afternoon. In other words, you dont have to do it in a day, and you wont achieve understanding of it in an slow down, take your time, dig, go back. ", After Watergate, Shepard says, the two went in "completely different directions. This button displays the currently selected search type. To a certain extent, I always saw myself as a lawyer. ." } Leon Jaworski, like richard m. nixon, came from a poor, deeply religious background. display: none; Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of Communication. Bob Woodward: Well, of course, what Faulkner is trying to do is get to the interior, and in the end, as a journalist, you are trying to get to the interior. All talk. The follow-up story was based primarily on their arraignment in court, and it was based on information given our police reporter, Al Lewis, by the cops, showing them an address book that one of the burglars had in his pocket, and in the address book was the name Hunt, H-u-n-t, and the phone number was the White House phone number, which Al Lewis and every reporter worth his salt knew. A community high school history teacher named Elizabeth Duncan who taught American history and was a great teacher. Bob Woodward: Sure. You get to see other peoples lives, and you chart the rise and fall of others, and youre not that involved. The movie made Woodward and Bernstein forever famous and has become a classic. Yes. But their crimes unraveled in slow motion over those two years -- aided by one tough judge, a feistier Congress than we could comprehend today, and some skillful journalists, of whom Woodward and Bernstein became the most famous and best remembered. It also made Woodward and Bernstein the most famous journalists of all time. Sometimes I was thought to be the more cautious one, but Carl (Bernstein) could be cautious, and I could be aggressive or overly aggressive. In his obituary column written in 1994, writer Martin Weil had this to say about the late Lewis: "A familiar and trusted figure to top police officials, [Lewis] went into the building with investigators and remained there unchallenged through the day, gathering information available to no other news outlet.". Max Frankel, chief of the Washington bureau at the NY Times, famously blocked coverage after hearing from the White House that it wasn't a story, even though they had confirmation early on from FBI . He sat down with Woodward, then 32, Bernstein, then 31, their editors, their friends and the two women at the center of the reporters lives. Mr. Woodward, tell us what it felt like to you personally when Nixon stepped down. Bernstein wrote in the 1996 book that the Pope's role in supporting Solidarity in his native Poland, and his geopolitical dexterity combined with enormous spiritual influence, was a principal factor in the downfall of communism in Europe.[21]. Im not really like that anymore, Bernstein said in the interview. Ben Bradlee: Its a good story. display: block; Hes a good lawyer, a fair man.. Later, along with Vatican expert Marco Politi, he published a papal biography entitled His Holiness. Finally, the night before we published came the critical moment, and we were in my house. Its that square, straight, intense, decent quality of Woodwards that works. He sat down with Woodward, then 32, Bernstein, then 31, their editors, their friends and the two women at the center of the reporters' lives. Bob Woodward: Certainly. Was he the more experienced journalist at the time? Woodward gained valuable information through an unnamed informant, nicknamed Deep Throat, by Post managing editor Howard Simon. 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. Ben Bradlee: The Pentagon Papers was a study commissioned by Nixon in the first or second year of his first term, 1970 or 69. The piston driving the Nixon administration was hate. . Most of them didnt realize that the world had changed. Woodward and Bernstein reflect on Watergate and its place in American history. The assertion shocked some because even J. Edgar Hoover had tried and been unable to prove that Bernstein's parents had been party members. It was a difficult time to be associated with something youre pretty sure is not right. As a teen, he was a "pool shark," a leader of the Jewish service organization B'nai Brith, and a copyboy at The Washington Star. (Spiro Agnew, who had been elected as Nixon's vice president in 1968 and 1972, had resigned in October 1973 after pleading no contest to a charge of tax evasion.). See also Myron J. Smith, Watergate: An Annotated Bibliography (1983).Updated information gathered from simonsays.com, an online service. They were the first to reveal the tapes, and they were always ahead of the curve, but there was a lot of great reporting done by other people, Sy Hersh, the Los Angeles Times, they all did really good work. Three Post editors were portrayed by award-winning character actors: Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, Martin Balsam as Howard. They wrote that history has shown that Watergate was even worse than we thought it was at the time: In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars -- against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. Compared to Woodward, Bernstein was a strong writer, and therefore wrote articles based on Woodward's information from Deep Throat. The rest of them all got away with it. 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. You should let it, He put $40,000 on credit cards to make his first film. There was competition. [26] Bernstein and second wife Ephron already had an infant son, Jacob, and she was pregnant with their second son, Max, in 1979 when she learned of her husband's affair with Jay. Even Woodward has disavowed the heroic-journalist interpretation, once telling an interviewer that the mythologizing of our role in Watergate has gone to the point of absurdity, where journalists write that I, single-handedly, brought down Richard Nixon. Were you in intelligence? Woodward! The End of a Presidency (1974) by the staff of the New York Times provides a useful combination of analysis and chronology with a sampling of the major documents. Were much better friends than we were at the time. How does this affect me, Nixon, the president? But we were the backwash of the Baby Boom. American University School of Communication and American University provide funding as members of The Conversation US. Mr. Bradlee, at what point did you get the inkling that the Oval Office was involved? Bob Woodward was at the very head of that pack, flaunting his access to the Bush White House while failing to ask the only question that really mattered. Few in the room. Bob can formulate and Carl can draw conclusions.. More so than the book, the cinematic adaptation of All the Presidents Men placed Woodward and Bernstein at the decisive center of Watergates unraveling. That version of Watergate has long dominated popular understanding of the scandal, which unfolded over 26 months beginning in June 1972. I didnt like the Navy, I didnt like Vietnam, I didnt like the war, and was disappointed in myself that I didnt figure out how to adjust to being a part of this that I didnt like, and so I didnt quite have the guts to run away or stand on principle. I covered the night police beat. That the difficulties they put up to prevent the truth from coming out had been overcome. She pointed out that, "Woodward grew up in the Midwest, Republican household, went to Yale, was in the Navy. Not, "What did the president know and when did he know it? In 1974, two years after the Watergate burglary and two months before Nixon resigned, Bernstein and Woodward released the book All the President's Men. The story was true, but he had never testified to it because they never asked him. He dropped out of the University of Maryland and became a reporter in New Jersey where his investigative reporting caught the eye of the Washington Post, which hired him in 1966 (via Huffington Post). However popular, the heroic-journalist myth is a vast exaggeration of the effect of their work. And she decided to do it. They said, Keep going. People who went to Wheaton College had to sign a pledge: no drinking, smoking, dancing, movies, playing of cards. He had the mannerisms. "They couldn't be more different. Bob Woodward: Or The Sound and the Fury, which is his great book. And once you are convicted of a felony, you cant own television stations, so it would have cost us all the television stations. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. While Woodward has written books leveling criticisms against both Nixon and Trump, his critiques have not been limited to Republican presidents, and his praise is not limited to Democratic ones. Bob Woodward: June 17, 1972. The reference to Woodward and Bernstein was classic Frank, too, telling Garrett to follow the money without saying so explicitly. All of us do! He started working for the Washington Post in 1971, nine months before the Watergate break-in. The Twitter-sized version is the president had a goon squad that did all kinds of buggings and break-ins and political dirty tricks, and when those burglars with ties to the White House were busted 40 years ago, Nixon and his top aides broke the law to cover it all up. We had heard that they had this big blockbuster coming up, and suddenly, they just dropped this on us. When you began to work as a journalist, what was the reaction of your family? You dont have a context for it, so it destroys the very notion of context, because the only context you know as a child is family. There were 7,000 papers finally, and The New York Times got a copy of it. 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. [20], He then began working for ABC News. 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