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. It was to see if they could find the origins of our involvement in Vietnam, and what went wrong. We talk all the time. Hed started at age two, I think. 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. The New York Times played the lead role but we played a role too. Still, facts and events from the book were questioned by Nixon's friends and family, and some obvious sources denied ever speaking with Bernstein and Woodward. Why did they think of you? Bob Woodward: Yes, we are. We led the paper that day with Tricia Nixons wedding. It took some of us from the Watergate generation a long time to see it. This was our time, our story. ", To read excerpts, click here. They had a much-publicized extramarital relationship in 1979. (The Academy of Achievement interviewed both Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee, the Executive Editor of The Washington Post, on May 1 during the 2003 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. Their interviews are combined here.). Probably one of my favorite books is All the Kings Men, Robert Penn Warrens book about political corruption in Louisiana and about a reporter who watches this and gets to participate and see, but doesnt have all of the full consequences of the action fall on him. There were 7,000 papers finally, and The New York Times got a copy of it. Mr. Woodward, tell us what it felt like to you personally when Nixon stepped down. Dont tell me never. Dont let things elude us. What does it mean? Its that square, straight, intense, decent quality of Woodwards that works. What made you back the kids, Woodward and Bernstein? The Watergate scandal began in May 1972, when members of PresidentRichard M. Nixon's campaign team (known as Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President or CREEP) broke into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate Hotel (per History). "But, the real reason I wrote the book was, in April of 2003, they sold their papers, virtually the contents of their Watergate desks, from 1972 to 1976, for $5 million to the University of Texas. Retrieved February 22, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/woodward-and-bernstein. Not, "What did the president know and when did he know it? You could feel that they took not an adversarial position toward government, but a position of skepticism, a position of there is accountability reporting. Why did this happen? George W. Bush's Iraq War, in particular, was enabled by a docile press corps and by a feckless generation of lawmakers and judges -- largely the generation that came of age when I did, during those languid Watergate summers. Together, they became Hollywood icons. Bernstein and Woodward stayed on the story, though the government agencies they had helped to prod into activity now began to resent their continuing revelations. He was also integral in finding vital evidence and information at the scene of the crime (per Mental Floss). ", Fame, Shepard observed, "played a huge role in changing their lives forever. This button displays the currently selected search type. Ben Bradlee: Nixon himself? Their editors at the Post allowed them to keep most of their sources confidential, but demanded that alleged facts be confirmed by more than one witness. Woodward and Bernstein were successful at concealing the identity of their informant until 2005 when he outed himself due to the public. 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. But in fact at that time, we were. There were other burglaries. WASHINGTON Watching Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on stage at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner on Saturday night was like a Simon and Garfunkel reunion. How would you summarize that? Some people think I was in intelligence. Woodward and Bernstein did disclose financial links between Nixon's reelection campaign and the burglars arrested June 17, 1972, at headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in what. So why not take Woodward at his word? Do you think being the oldest had an influence on your life? And a college dropout. 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 And it in many ways is, I think, the principle under which she and her son, Don Graham, tried to run The Washington Post. Woodward and Bernstein (and many others) were absolutely convinced there was a deal where Nixon would resign if his successor Gerald Ford issued a presidential pardon. So that gave hope to the Republicans, and of course, all of the Republican spokesmen had a field day beating us upside the face over that, but it didnt last very long. Well, I was down there. They said, Keep going. 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. But together they did something that neither one of them could do individually. The Iran-Contra Affair involved a secret foreign policy operation directed by White House officials in the national security counc, Truman, Harry S. It was never conclusively established that this had been done by the Nixon campaign, but one of the people in the White House acknowledged to one of our reporters that he had written it. Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of Communication. A judge told the Times they couldnt publish it, so a judge would tell us the same thing. Despite their stark differences, they needed each another. It was a Saturday morning, I think the summer. 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. "You could just tell," Shepard continued, "by how different they were that they wouldn't be friends and they wouldn't be working together. And there came a time when we had to get her, okay, and the lawyers started off by telling her the lawyer was one of the greatest men, even though he didnt approve of publishing it but the way he told her that was just so important. As Hoffman ran, Bernstein, already a celebrity, understood how much had happened in the three years since five burglars broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate hotel. How did we get into committing 500,000 troops 10,000 miles away in a way that we could never win? Each had strengths that complemented the others. Bob Woodward: Yes, and each week it got more and more interesting. We had such good sources. 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). WASHINGTON Watching Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on stage at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner on Saturday night was like a Simon and Garfunkel reunion. All of the guys who later went to jail. Ephron delivered Max prematurely after finding out. Bob Woodward: Sure. Watergate reporters come together to discuss the 40-year-old scandal which resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Since 2003, he has written four books on President George W. Bushs conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: Bush at War, Plan of Attack, State of Denial and The War Within. In 1982, for ABC's Nightline, Bernstein was the first to report[citation needed] during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that Ariel Sharon had "deceived the cabinet about the real intention of the operationto drive the Palestinians out of Lebanon, not (as he had claimed) to merely establish a 25-kilometer security zone north from the border". It was the first film I ever made like this, Hoffman told me. ", Shepard agreed completely with Smith's assessment that, "There could not have been two more opposite people who had to work so closely together.". Didnt you have a chat with the Posts publisher, Katharine Graham, in the midst of all of this? So I had just a sense that we had done some of the first work on this that any suggestion that we had caused it, or brought down a president, was a stretch, to say the least, and not factual. Although Woodward and Bernstein were able to link the burglary of Democratic National Headquarters to operatives inside the Nixon White House, and to President Nixons re-election campaign, they were unable at first to prove any direct involvement by the president or his senior staff to either the burglary or its subsequent cover-up. But glaring gaps remain. It taught me the benefits of collaboration, and that collaboration is a wonderful thing. 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. And there we watched thousands of "indignados" flood the streets of Madrid, the precursor to Occupy Wall Street back home. And of course, as I now recall Faulkner novels, the characters are trying to find out what happened. 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. They were after us and The New York Times. Stop!, Bernstein recalled in a 1975 interview, now in Pakulas archive, that big crowds were outside. What attracted you to the newspaper business? This was later confirmed by both Woodward and Bernstein. White bread. This was the lesson of Watergate: Nixon Exceptionalism, that the 37th president was so "uniquely and pervasively" corrupt that the fair and decent American "system worked" and removed him on the basis of the objective, indisputable fact of his evil. Bob Woodward: I was not in intelligence; I was in communications, and they are different in the Navy. For me, the still powerful memories of Watergate have been supplanted by fresher ones. Bob Woodward: Well, we looked at it differently. The dichotomy intrigued Pakula. 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. In fact, it probably doesnt work that often. The American escalation in Vietnam had just begun. Although the movie is the result of Redfords determination to get it made as the Watergate story unfolded, its authenticity and endurance have everything to do with its director, Alan J. Pakula, who morphed into a Sigmund Freud with notepad before any camera rolled. This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in and, of. Fresh out of the Navy, Bob Woodward washed out in his first attempt to work for The Washington Post, and went to work for a tiny suburban weekly. He was affectionately known as "Uncle Al" and had many sources in police departments. He spent a year in his research, which was published as a 25,000-word article in Rolling Stone magazine. Bob Woodward: Is the CIA connected to this? It is, however, a simplistic trope that not even Watergate-era principals at the Post embraced. Woodward moved logically. In the end, the Watergate scandal brought down a president and made Bob Woodward the most famous investigative reporter in America. Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. I think most people feel that the old Post would have just sat by. Kind of going, CIA. And the judge said, Where? And he went, CIA. And the judge said, Speak up. December 26, 2006 / 7:23 AM They were 30 and 31.". Woodward and Bernsteins account of the investigation, All The Presidents Men, became a national bestseller and was made into a popular motion picture. It turned out that he hadnt been asked, and that interested us a great deal, because if the prosecution wasnt asking him those interesting questions, that suggested that there was a reason they werent, and the reason might be that they were trying to cover it up. Woodward and Bernstein never disclosed any information or provided hints about Deep Throat and spoke about him in vague terms in their book, "All the President's Men.". I think journalism is a practice, like law, that you keep learning. The distinct memories I have of books are from college. Where were you born? Bob Woodward: Thats not humility, thats realism. Bobs sucking up to people. HARRY S. TRUMAN of Independence, Missouri, once remarked that three experiences prepared a man for, Woodward, Bob 1943- (Robert Upshur Woodward), Woodward, Daniel 1931-2007 (D.H. Woodward, Daniel H. Woodward, Daniel Holt Woodward), https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/woodward-and-bernstein. Bob Woodward: In the family I was raised in: a brother, a sister, two stepsisters, a half-sister. He was a much better writer. The piston driving the Nixon administration was hate. Im not really like that anymore, Bernstein said in the interview. The fallout or denouement caused President Nixon to resign from office and sent several "conspirators" to prison. It seemed to always be about Nixon. He worked at ABC, CNN, and CBS as a political commentator, and was a spokesman in various television commercials. Bernstein and Woodward pursued documentary evidence by cross-checking telephone books, airline records, building directories, hotel records, andin what some claimed were violations of journalistic ethics confidential credit card and telephone company records. Bernstein was among three CNN reporters who last . Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. After the Times had been estopped by a judge, we decided to publish them. I like what I do. Every time the White House denied something, the evidence became clear that it was the White House that was lying. Following the 1972 arrests, journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post investigated the scandal relentlessly. Back at home, you could cross out the word "party" and replace it with "Nixon." We didnt allow any television people in. Finally, the night before we published came the critical moment, and we were in my house. The who-was-Deep-Throat conjecture kept Woodward, Bernstein and the heroic-journalist myth at the center of Watergate conversations. Ben Bradlee: I was at The Washington Post, and I couldnt believe it. The heroic-journalist myth, which began taking hold even before Nixon resigned, has been sustained by three related influences. Carl Milton Bernstein (/ b r n s t i n / BURN-steen; born February 14, 1944) is an American investigative journalist and author.While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Bernstein was teamed up with Bob Woodward, and the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal.These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual . 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 . And my father, a man of great restraint, nonjudgmental in fact, said probably the severest thing he has ever said to me. Pakula didnt want facts alone. Bob Woodward: We read pretty much the range of classics, and nothing really jumped out or are books that I had distinct memories of. Deep Throat is the pseudonym given to the secret informant who provided information in 1972 to Bob Woodward, who shared it with Carl Bernstein.Woodward and Bernstein were reporters for The Washington Post, and Deep Throat provided key details about the involvement of U.S. president Richard Nixon's administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal. Give him a story, any story, and he runs with it. Goldwater Republican. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. 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. [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. 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