This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in and, of. 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. Bush . For me, the still powerful memories of Watergate have been supplanted by fresher ones. And she decided to do it. But Bernstein and Woodward were already branching out into another form of journalism, having secured a contract to write a book on their Watergate investigations. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Woodwards critics insisted that this informant was a fabrication, or at best, a composite based on a number of sources. 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. Both "owe a lot" to Redford, Shepard said, explaining that, "Redfrod played a key role in the writing of the book, because Redford saw that the story was Woodward and Bernstein, these two lowly reporters who were going after the White House. [16], In 1992, also for Time, Bernstein wrote a cover story publicizing the alliance between Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan. Divorce is painful because it is unknown to a child. Perfect. It took a long time, and if you examine the sequence, you could identify hundreds of points where the road to full disclosure would have been the thread would have been cut. These were the values, after all, that purged America of the evil Richard Nixon -- not the dirty (bleep)ing hippies. And we were so scared that we were going to by this time, we knew that the front page was going to be a historical document. 25 Feb/23. Ben Bradlee: John Mitchell, Attorney General Mitchell. They deposited, at the end of 1974, over $600,000. Beyond that, the deeper problem of Nixon Exceptionalism is that it established new standards for what constituted presidential misconduct -- standards that weren't based on the discredited ideas of the 1960s, but the "objective" standards of the Watergate era. Bob Woodward was born to a conservative family in the Midwest (via CBS News). She said Bernstein was driven to uncover the Watergate story because he wanted to prove everyone at the Post wrong. Nora Ephron's novel Heartburn (1983) caused a minor journalistic sensation with its fictionalized description of her divorce from Bernstein. [17] A second book, The Final Days, was published by Bernstein and Woodward in 1976 as a follow-up chronicling Nixon's last days in office. Bob Woodward: And problems. When will all the truth come out? Quite optimistically. The Post editors concluded that he was not ready for a major metropolitan daily newspaper, and arranged for him to take job as one of four reporters at a small suburban weekly, The Montgomery County Sentinel. I mean, I lived in that place for those periods. I remember going around and giving my name to lots of people, and they would say, Oh, youre Al Woodwards son. Bob Woodward: Oh, yes. Very forceful, very insistent that we write essays to answer questions, and not short answers. Available for both RF and RM licensing. Sometimes, people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didnt do, and shouldnt have done,Graham said. The five Watergate burglars and several other Nixon subordinates, including former U.S. Attorney General Mitchell, were sentenced to prison terms. The who-was-Deep-Throat conjecture kept Woodward, Bernstein and the heroic-journalist myth at the center of Watergate conversations. As the Watergate scandal unfolded in the pages of the Washington Post in the early 1970s, the two reporters who first broke the story became just as famous as the people they were writing about. [22] A CBS News end-of-year survey of publishing "hits and misses" included A Woman in Charge in the "miss" category and implied that its total sales were somewhere in the range of perhaps 55,00065,000 copies. [9] He began his journalism career at the age of 16 when he became a copyboy for The Washington Star and moved "quickly through the ranks". Dont tell me never. Dont let things elude us. You are trying to understand somebodys reasoning and their emotions and the demons they may or may not have. On the evening of June 16, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., discovered a piece of tape on the lock of the door that, Jaworski, Leon 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. When Woodward left the Navy, American involvement in Vietnam and domestic opposition to the war were at their height. Sometimes I was thought to be the more cautious one, but Carl (Bernstein) could be cautious, and I could be aggressive or overly aggressive. Later Career. Knopf had a first printing of 275,000 copies. Listen to the music that blared in static-y mono glory from 77, WABC, on the beach those Watergate summers, from Lynyrd Skynyrd ("Now Watergate does not bother me") to David Bowie ("Do you remember your President Nixon?"). During his marriage to Ephron, Bernstein met Margaret Jay, daughter of British Prime Minister James Callaghan and wife of Peter Jay, then UK ambassador to the United States. And in that same space of time, Woodward's written five books. Bob Woodward: Not really. He continued the story of presidential leadership and foreign policy in Obamas Wars (2010). Woodward and Bernstein were no closer to revealing who approved the break-in than they had been in June, and even further away from exposing the obstruction of justice that followed the. He'd started at age two, I think. In the series of stories that followed, Bernstein and Woodward eventually connected the burglars to a massive slush fund and a corrupt attorney general. In 1975, it was turned into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein and Robert Redford as Woodward which later went on to be nominated in multiple Oscar (including Best Picture nomination), Golden Globe and BAFTA categories. We worked her over very hard, but so did the lawyers. Im sure it would have been more interesting. But the real input comes from people who believe in a free press, believe in the First Amendment, believe in open discourse as much as possible, hate secrets, hate secret government, hate secret concentrations of power. Woodward relied on one source whom he refused to identify even to his editors except by the code-name "Deep Throat.". Mr. Woodward, can you tell us about the night you first got that phone call about a break-in at the Watergate? Landed at The Washington Post in 1971, had nine months reporting experience. The dichotomy intrigued Pakula. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon's: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency. I was worried about the Posts image of all of this, and that there would be a segment of society who said, you know, They were out to get him, those bastards, and they got him. And it was going to be we were just very careful. 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. Would I run like that again?. The New York Times played the lead role but we played a role too. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. But three or four days later, we got a copy of them from Ellsberg, only we didnt have three months to study them. The fastest-selling book in the history of its publisher, Simon & Schuster, it immediately topped The New York Times bestseller list, and within eight days of publication was already in its tenth printing. Make no mistake (as Nixon himself was fond of saying), what Woodward and Bernstein accomplished from 1972 to 1974 was incredible and deserving of all the accolades they received at the time. Following the 1972 arrests, journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post investigated the scandal relentlessly. Yes. There was competition. White bread. While Woodward interviewed their informant, known as "Deep Throat," Bernstein discovered cash payments from Nixon's reelection campaign in one of the burglar's bank accounts (via The Washington Post). The Post played a critical role in the beginning, and Woodward and Bernstein came in at critical moments. 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? Eighteen years after the Supreme Court ruled that they couldnt shut us down, the prosecuting attorney, who was the Solicitor General of the United States, wrote the Post a letter saying that in the whole Pentagon Papers, there was no threat to national security. Muskie, in the emotion of the campaign, was trying to explain what had gone on. head of the CRP. More than 40 years after they became the world's most famous journalism duo, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are still making news.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 Robert H. Ferrell Trending News Since the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan closed the lid on the post-Watergate era, we've seen a president who WASN'T impeached for evading Congress to cut secret arms deals in Iran and fund a secret war in Nicaragua, a president who WAS impeached for lying about his sex life, and a president who WASN'T impeached for lying the nation into a war that killed thousands of American soldiers and innocent civilians, while carrying out torture and other violations of human rights more "perverse" than anything during Nixon's presidency. Karlie Kloss and Taylor Swift still good friends - 8 Days - 8Days.sg. And she had a style of I want to know whats going on. Despite this, the Nixon White House became suspicious that Felt was leaking information to the press. Felt was 91 when, in 2005, he acknowledged through his familys lawyer that he had been Woodwards source after all. 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. Woodward was able to soldier on and write 14 books. It was also the fact that they were so different, and that they were lowly metro reporters. It was strange. The idealized journalist of the Watergate era and beyond was wedded to the highest ethical standards and driven only by truth, not by ideology. 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. You are also agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. His detailed notes, first made public in December 2005, were donated by his wife to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after his death in 1998 in an automobile accident. Did they support you, or did they think it was a little strange? They were tireless young reporters, fearless and not intimidated by the very powerful people they were investigating. (February 22, 2023). I think journalism is a practice, like law, that you keep learning. It was one of the most incredible feelings that Ive had in my life because, you know, it had been a long time since we had started to work on the story, and I didnt exactly know who I was or who he was -- existentially, it was sort of a total mind----. On a Saturday in June 1972, Bernstein was assigned, along with Bob Woodward, to cover a break-in at the Watergate office complex that had occurred earlier the same morning. How did that come about? Encyclopedia.com. The assertion shocked some because even J. Edgar Hoover had tried and been unable to prove that Bernstein's parents had been party members. Where did you work? And he went, CIA, Central Intelligence Agency. And I know my reaction was one of Oh! 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. Ben Bradlee: Because the kids were right. How does this affect me, Nixon, the president? He soon became the papers leading reporter, and by September 1971, the Post was ready to give him another try. It looked like I was going to become a lawyer, and my father to a certain extent was my model. Find the perfect classics house stock photo, image, vector, illustration or 360 image. That version of Watergate has long dominated popular understanding of the scandal, which unfolded over 26 months beginning in June 1972. He just had a psychosis about being controlled by authority figures. The greater significance of Watergate was something that was hard to grasp in 1974, but seems crystal clear now, at least to me. ", But, "Is what the president doing moral?". Ben Bradlee: His name was Griswold, and he had been the dean of the Harvard Law School. They weren't big, White House reporters. Back at home, you could cross out the word "party" and replace it with "Nixon." It was already changing, but he certainly speeded it along. I had a friend who read books like Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. He always saw me as a lawyer. We talk all the time. And once you are convicted of a felony, you cant own television stations, so it would have cost us all the television stations. Woodward's strength was in investigation, so he focused on investigating the Watergate scandal. And so the other day they wrote a lengthy piece -- their first joint byline in 36 years -- trying to correct all the myths about Watergate that have risen in the years since. 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. The burglary was revealed as part of an extensive program of political espionage and sabotage run by Nixon subordinates at the White House and its political campaign organization, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, or, as referred to in most later press coverage, CREEP). No soul.. Ben Bradlee: He sure did. 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. It wasn't just me -- a culture was defined. You have kids who werent born at that time doing term papers on it at colleges and high schools. 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