He continued the story of presidential leadership and foreign policy in Obamas Wars (2010). By day, he circulated in the citys government offices, and pressed civil servants for every piece of information that might prove useful. Yes. ALICIA C. SHEPARD, who teaches journalism at American University, is the author of "Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate. 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. But the following morning, Dan Schorr of CBS we saw on CBS Morning News shoved a microphone in front of this guy and said, The Post says you did this. Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. Woodwards critics insisted that this informant was a fabrication, or at best, a composite based on a number of sources. 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. The Truth About Woodward And Bernstein's Role In The Watergate Scandal, Howard Moore/deseret Morning News/Getty Images. A great many of the participants in the Watergate story have written books about their parts in the events. Woodward moved logically. This time though, a security guard noticed that multiple latches on the doors were taped so they wouldn't lock and called the police, who caught the men in the act. Richard Nixon's RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978) gives the former president's version of the events surrounding Watergate. I suspect that most people from the generations that came after mine don't really know that much about Watergate other than that a president resigned in disgrace, the only time that's ever happened. Few in the room. You get to see other peoples lives, and you chart the rise and fall of others, and youre not that involved. Much of their hard work was a quest for access to anyone who knew the real secrets of the Nixon White House. 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 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. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. We led the paper that day with Tricia Nixons wedding. Overnight, Woodward and Bernstein became household names. ." Mr. President, the media is not fake news. That version of Watergate has long dominated popular understanding of the scandal, which unfolded over 26 months beginning in June 1972. His parents were members of the Communist Party. And of course, Muskie was going to be the strong candidate against Nixon. So in an odd way, those in my business have a million allies out there. If you didnt have the Independent Counsel, which was a direct outgrowth of Watergate, you never would have had Ken Starr, you never would have had a criminal investigation of Clinton. In 1992, Bernstein wrote a cover story for The New Republic magazine indicting modern journalism for its sensationalism and celebration of gossip over real news. 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. 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. I have forgotten which one it was. He quickly tired of the routine assignments his position offered, and began to hunt for news on his own. In addition, they tracked down and interviewed a large number of people who gradually revealed various pieces of the puzzle. Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Ben Bradlee all confirmed Felts revelation. Are you and Bernstein still friends? [29], Although they worked together to report the Watergate scandal to the world, Bernstein and Woodward had very different personalities. The notes from Pakulas interview with Ephron reveal a key to his understanding of Woodward and Bernstein. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Roberts.[2]. what was the advice to woodward and bernstein what was the advice to woodward and bernstein (No Ratings Yet) . Woodward -- the one who stayed in the Beltway journalism racket -- had all the access to the highest level officials that he had craved at the start of Watergate, and yet he remained clueless as to how such access could provide as much disinformation as truth. That the difficulties they put up to prevent the truth from coming out had been overcome. The Iran-Contra Affair involved a secret foreign policy operation directed by White House officials in the national security counc, Truman, Harry S. display: none; He did. Bob needed Carl because Carl was pushy. Whos going to get what lead and put it together? We actually published three papers with it before they stopped us, and then we were in the courts for 12 days. I really we knew it, we knew it, we knew it, but we couldnt we were being told by the people who were telling us that if we publish it, hell change his mind and wont resign! 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. Bob Woodward: Or The Sound and the Fury, which is his great book. And I think that they knew that each of them had strengths that the other didn't, and they relied on one another. My God, it looked like the end of the world! The rest of them all got away with it. Thats why we all joined this business. 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 fallout or denouement caused President Nixon to resign from office and sent several "conspirators" to prison. Between 1980 and 1984, Bernstein was the network's Washington Bureau Chief and then a senior correspondent. 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. He had the mannerisms. I think there were two or three then, but I think there are six now. 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 ON 9 August 1974, Richard Nixon arose in the White House and, after meeting briefly with the household staff a, Iran-Contra Affair Woodward gained valuable information through an unnamed informant, nicknamed Deep Throat, by Post managing editor Howard Simon. www.8days.sg How did that come about? Carl had a harder time. Woodward had married reporter Francie Barnard, and . I worked quite hard, did a number of stories that the Post and The New York Times picked up. You are trying to find out what really happened. 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. How did we get into committing 500,000 troops 10,000 miles away in a way that we could never win? Not one of the 17 stories he filed was printed. 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. 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. Bob Woodward: Yes. He was also integral in finding vital evidence and information at the scene of the crime (per Mental Floss). The duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have become synonymous with reporting the comings and goings of the Watergate scandal. } So we tried to just keep people out of the building. "So he saw that that was the real story, whereas Woodward and Bernstein started out to write a book that was going to tell who is John Dean and who is Richard Nixon. You had a lot of Cuban or Spanish-speaking guys in masks and rubber gloves, with walkie-talkies, arrested in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at 2:00 in the morning. 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. It was only later, when Dean testified, and the tapes came out, that it was quite clear that not only was Nixon involved, he was in charge of the cover-up. He wanted to film it from 3:00 in the morning until 8:00 in the morning, and we just told him it was not possible. Writers or journalists who inspired you? Despite their stark differences, they needed each another. More than 40 years after they became the world's most famous journalism duo, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are still making news. [23], Bernstein is a frequent guest and analyst on television news programs, and in 2011 wrote articles for Newsweek/The Daily Beast, comparing Rupert Murdoch's News of the World phone-hacking scandal to Watergate. Theres so much richness in his language, its almost the opposite of journalistic writing. Where were you in the pecking order of siblings? Robert U. Woodward was born in Geneva, Illinois, and raised in nearby Wheaton. However popular, the heroic-journalist myth is a vast exaggeration of the effect of their work. 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. Bush . Bob Woodward: Yes, and then later, my parents were divorced, and my father remarried a woman who had three kids also. What an incredible jump in your fortunes as a journalist, from one year on a little suburban paper to The Washington Post. 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. 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