What does the American Dream mean to you? It was the first film I ever made like this, Hoffman told me. Ben Bradlee: It is an interesting thing. ", After Watergate, Shepard says, the two went in "completely different directions. "[32], Differences between Bernstein and Woodward, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, "Carl Bernstein on Trump and the Current State of Journalism", "Yes, kids, there is life after high school", "He Went From Watergate to 'Heartbun,' From Investigative Superstar to Celebrity Dinner Guest. Samuel Dash, the Democratic counsel to the Senate Select Committee chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, argued in his later book on the Senate investigation, Chief Counsel, that the admirable, early investigative reporting of Bernstein and Woodward had now degenerated into what he called "hit and run" journalism based on leaks from the committee and jeopardized the ability of the legal system to track down and punish the guilty. 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. 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. 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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Thanks for contacting us. Hunt had been studying Ted Kennedy and checked books out of the library. Ben Bradlee: That we had really done a really good job. You want it to be fair. Whereas the Bernstein and Woodward stories in the Washington Post had consisted of straight investigative reports, All the President's Men told not only the story of Watergate but the story of Woodward and Bernstein. Bernstein could be right intuitively -- but dangerous left to himself, Pakula wrote in his notes. They wrote the best-selling All the President's Men and became millionaires. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward, left, and Carl Bernstein on March 1, 1974, Washington, D.C. When the Post persevered with the investigation, President Nixon induced the FCC to challenge the licenses of the Posts television stations. 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. Maybe we have a story and maybe we dont.. He'd started at age two, I think. But it would have been I mean, there was a lot of money on the table. Lets be sure for the record to say that it wasnt just the Post. Where were you born? Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of Communication. Im thinking of the bookAs I Lay Dying, which is from all different characters points of view, like interviewing people for a story. Between 1980 and 1984, Bernstein was the network's Washington Bureau Chief and then a senior correspondent. How did you get interested in those things? I mean, I lived in that place for those periods. W. Mark Felt, Sr., a retired associate director of the FBI, revealed that he had provided Woodward with details of the Watergate cover-up. It appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list for three weeks. Bob Woodward: I was not married at the time and loved being free to do something. I now do my books alone, but I have a full-time assistant who is kind of my collaborator. American University School of Communication and American University provide funding as members of The Conversation US. "They were journalistic icons for the role they played in bringing down, or helping to bring down a president of the United States, (Richard) Nixon in 1974," Shepard understated. See also Myron J. Smith, Watergate: An Annotated Bibliography (1983).Updated information gathered from simonsays.com, an online service. 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 It was to see if they could find the origins of our involvement in Vietnam, and what went wrong. It's the system. Thats the standard clich about Watergate: the system worked. Knopf had a first printing of 275,000 copies. I remember going around and giving my name to lots of people, and they would say, Oh, youre Al Woodwards son. 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. 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. Ben Bradlee: I was at The Washington Post, and I couldnt believe it. Five long years of unruly marches and campus takeovers hadn't toppled the Establishment. Who would be dumb enough to work on this story on a Saturday morning? And they thought of me immediately. What it turned out was that the question hinged on whether or not he had told that to the grand jury, and since he hadnt, he was able to say No. He wasnt asked was there a slush fund, which, of course, there was. Mr. Woodward, can you tell us about the night you first got that phone call about a break-in at the Watergate? There were other burglaries. Bob Woodward was born to a conservative family in the Midwest (via CBS News). I had worked for the Post for nine months. Pakulas notes, dated May 2, 1975, indicate that hed concluded this about the two reporters: * Bob thought Carl was hype, no follow-through. Bob Woodward said that Lewis "laid the foundation for what the paper was able to do in reporting the story." It was one of those families that was glued together.. White bread. 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. And it in many ways is, I think, the principle under which she and her son, Don Graham, tried to run The Washington Post. 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. Leon Jaworski, like richard m. nixon, came from a poor, deeply religious background. We shouldnt do that. That doesnt mean there wont be more scandals and maybe even larger scandals, but in a sense, the vision or the dream of the people who wrote the Constitution has, at least in part, been realized. All the Presidents Men was published in June 1974 and quickly reached the top of The New York Times bestseller list, remaining there 15 weeks, through Nixons resignation and beyond. The movie made Woodward and Bernstein forever famous and has become a classic. Events are in no way simple or cinematic. 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. After a brief period of national self-examination and a few watered-down post-Watergate reforms, the sins that Woodward and Bernstein attribute uniquely to Nixon, including the squelching of dissent and the discrediting of journalism, resumed with an intensity just as great as the early 1970s. The whole reputation of the paper was hanging on that by the time. 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. Dont tell me never. Dont let things elude us. He is the author or co-author of seven books: All the President's Men, The Final Days, and The Secret Man, with Bob Woodward; His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time, with Marco Politi; Loyalties; A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton;[3] and Chasing History, a memoir of his early years in journalism. Goes Out newsletter, with the week's best events, to help you explore and experience our city. . You mentioned that you had been at the Post for nine months. Maybe it was 16, but he had fully a decade-plus of experience under his belt. All of the guys who later went to jail. He joined the Washington Post's metropolitan staff in 1966, specializing in police, court, and city hall assignments, with occasional self-assigned feature stories. All talk. 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. LHW is a shallow division, this cancellation was just adding insult to injury. A judge told the Times they couldnt publish it, so a judge would tell us the same thing. I think they were really out to get to the bottom of the story. 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. In fact, it probably doesnt work that often. At 2 a.m. yesterday, the Watergate scandal turned 40. In the end, the real exceptionalism of Richard Nixon was merely that he was dumb enough to get caught. 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. . 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. Carl is Jewish, grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. He always saw me as a lawyer. 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. I think pride is hubris. Like most media myths, the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate rests on a foundation of simplicity. It was a difficult time to be associated with something youre pretty sure is not right. 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. 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. But she finally said, Well, okay. Mr. Bradlee, at what point did you get the inkling that the Oval Office was involved? 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. Author Alicia Shepherd said about the pair, "They couldn't be more different. Why has the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate persisted through the 50 years since burglars linked to Nixons campaign were arrested at the Watergate complex in Washington? He met his Deep Throat source secretly to get as much information as possible. There was an election on in 72, and most of the rest of the country was saying, The Post is just playing politics, and all that stuff. Bob Woodward: Yes, and each week it got more and more interesting. Do you think being the oldest had an influence on your life? Light in August; Absalom, Absalom; The Bear, that little novella. ", Fame, Shepard observed, "played a huge role in changing their lives forever. Nixon didnt last too long in that second term. They were tireless young reporters, fearless and not intimidated by the very powerful people they were investigating. And in it, you just saw that it was not as pure and simple a community as the members liked people to think. Bob Woodward is an associate editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1971. Woodward had married reporter Francie Barnard, and . So this was over a period of days, I take it, that it got interesting. Woodward and Bernstein were successful at concealing the identity of their informant until 2005 when he outed himself due to the public. This is not your average burglary.. "They couldn't be more different. Later Career. The first report featuring the now legendary journalists came on June 19, 1972, two days after the break-ins and arrest of the conspirators (via Constitution Center). This button displays the currently selected search type. There were no bars in town. But three or four days later, we got a copy of them from Ellsberg, only we didnt have three months to study them. Whats secret? You get to have access to people you wouldnt normally have access to. He said, Youre crazy. So he didnt think it was a good idea.. 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. 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. He was not lazy, she insisted. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. We talk all the time. Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Ben Bradlee all confirmed Felts revelation. 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. I want to offer some ideas. Id have drinks with him early all of late July and early August. Kind of going, CIA. And the judge said, Where? And he went, CIA. And the judge said, Speak up. In those days, you worried terribly about typos. 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. All of us do! For over 30 years, the informants identity was known only to the man himself, and to Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee. The judge said, What do you do? and Woodward overheard the words CIA. So if your interest isnt whetted by this time, youre not a journalist. 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? Before this, the three men went to great lengths to hide Felt's identity. I think journalism is a practice, like law, that you keep learning. Bob Woodward: Oh, yes, I had teachers at Wheaton. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. Alicia Shepard fills in the gaps in her very candid book, "Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate.". You want to make sense out of it. We just didnt sleep a hell of a lot. Robert Upshur Woodward, born on March 26, 1943, in Geneva, Illinois, attended Yale University on a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship, after which he served for five years as a naval officer. Without them, he likely would have served out his presidential term. An informant in the federal government, it was not until 2005 that the public finally put a name on Deep Throat. So it was the classic kind of Winesburg, Ohio small town. 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. Ben Bradlee: Probably the first or second day, really. So we started phrasing it close to resignation, and debating resignation, and then, finally, we learned that I think he was going to do it at nine oclock at night, or eight oclock at night. }, First published on December 26, 2006 / 7:23 AM. She posed this, almost suggesting that it was inevitable. For example, talk about how it affected Muskie. Stop!, Bernstein recalled in a 1975 interview, now in Pakulas archive, that big crowds were outside. 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. He has also done reporting for television and opinion commentary. Thats a quote from the movie and the book. 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. 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. The American escalation in Vietnam had just begun. You dont think of journalists automatically as patriots, one. Staggering snowfall in California mountains leaves residents trapped for days, SpaceX launches new crew to space station, Prosecution wraps case at Alex Murdaugh murder trial, White House cybersecurity strategy pivots to regulation, Explosive found in checked luggage at Pennsylvania airport, feds say, FDA authorizes first at-home test for both COVID and flu, Couple accuses fertility clinic of implanting embryo with cancer genes, Air Force relieves six officers after failing safety inspection, Several hospitalized after Lufthansa flight diverted to Dulles due to turbulence. So much has happened since then. Why did this happen? We had such good sources. 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. Where do you work? What made you back the kids, Woodward and Bernstein? Bob Woodward: No. 22 Feb. 2023