So we did, and there was no threat to the national security, and information, truth, is not a threat to security, and we believed that. Woodward was soon joined on the story by Bernstein, and together the two young reporters undertook a series of investigative reports that gradually revealed the connections between the burglary and a converging pattern of crimes that finally implicated President Richard M. Nixon himself, forcing his resignation in the face of otherwise certain impeachment. We just didnt sleep a hell of a lot. He soon became the papers leading reporter, and by September 1971, the Post was ready to give him another try. Hes a good lawyer, a fair man.. Together, they followed the story and co-wrote the best-seller, "All the President's Men.". 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. Lets be sure for the record to say that it wasnt just the Post. White bread. Most of them didnt realize that the world had changed. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. 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. It was a Saturday morning, I think the summer. He was ten months further along in his career than Woodward when the scandal broke out. Kind of parse it out. But she wasnt the editor. 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. 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.". While Bernstein was surprised by how mythical Deep Throat became in American pop culture, he remains as much of a part of the Watergate story as Woodward and Bernstein. Woodward! 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. 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. The greater significance of Watergate was something that was hard to grasp in 1974, but seems crystal clear now, at least to me. He said, I think on balance I am against it. I mean, he didnt tear his hair out and say, God damn it, Katharine, you cant do this. Neither of those marriages could withstand all that pressure and that fame and money. " I had fallen in love with some books at a younger age like Swiss Family Robinson, adventure stories, but I tried to read Crime and Punishment, and read some other books, and then in high school I took a course reading books, and that really kind of focused me on the value of a book. It was very complicated, then and now. You dont think of journalists automatically as patriots, one. Ben Bradlee: Nixon himself? Well, it turns out a lot of CIA people were, and they tried to use the CIA to cover up the FBI investigation, but they never pinned it on the CIA. 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. It was to see if they could find the origins of our involvement in Vietnam, and what went wrong. He joined the Washington Post's metropolitan staff in 1966, specializing in police, court, and city hall assignments, with occasional self-assigned feature stories. It was the scandal that led to the forced resignation of the President of the United States. 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. First, the spokesmen at the White House, Ziegler and some of those guys, and next the Attorney General, and Chuck Colson, all of those people, the White House aides, were lying. [12][13], In 1965, Bernstein left the Star to become a full-time reporter for the Elizabeth Daily Journal in New Jersey. That version of Watergate has long dominated popular understanding of the scandal, which unfolded over 26 months beginning in June 1972. However popular, the heroic-journalist myth is a vast exaggeration of the effect of their work. 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. There was a letter forged, saying that Muskie had made some disparaging remark about Canadians, and Muskie got very upset. They were 30 and 31.". 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. Raised in a traditional Republican household, Woodward was very well-educated and has been described as gentle. That they would sabotage campaigns. So you would not go from the CIA to the White House instantly, but within several days, through the work of another reporter, we learned there was this cryptic entry in the address books of two of the five burglars that very simply said H. Within a year, his byline was appearing on the front page. He has also done reporting for television and opinion commentary. }, First published on December 26, 2006 / 7:23 AM. No humor. ." Bob Woodward: As defendants, as tax cases, divorce cases, the full catastrophe of litigation. 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. Of course, after the fame of "All the President's Men." Didnt you have a chat with the Posts publisher, Katharine Graham, in the midst of all of this? 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? Hunt W. House. So I called the White House and asked for Mr. Hunt, and he came on, and I said, Why is your name in the address books of these two burglars who were caught in the Democratic Headquarters? And he screamed out, Good God! and hung up the phone. There were 7,000 papers finally, and The New York Times got a copy of it. Very forceful, very insistent that we write essays to answer questions, and not short answers. One morning in June of 71 I think, they led the newspaper with it, with eight-column banners. But as Pakula began to understand Woodward, he wondered if the charming, handsome Redford, then 39, could play someone so different from himself. Bob Woodward: We accused some people of things they didnt do that were based on some reports, written reports. Robert Dole, and Doles successor as the chairman of the Republican Party, George Bush the first. Mr. Woodward, tell us what it felt like to you personally when Nixon stepped down. They show how Pakula came to view his protagonists. So this was over a period of days, I take it, that it got interesting. Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post during Watergate, told me that Pakula spent so much time with each of us. You are trying to find out what really happened. 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. 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. display: block; Between June 1972 to November 1973, Felt spoke with Bob Woodward 17 times, originally confirming leads the pair found, but eventually, began to offer new information to the team. And it did. The book inescapably promoted the impression Woodward and Bernstein were vital to Watergates outcome. Soon after the Nixon resignation, Bernstein and Woodward began work with a team of researchers on The Final Days, an account of the last months of Nixon's presidency, based on interviews with 394 people. Were there particular teachers or relatives? There are hundreds of millions of American dreams. From the time of the break-in, and through the fall and winter of 1972-1973, Bernstein and Woodward, under increasing public attack from White House spokesmen, worked virtually alone on the story. He wanted to understand Woodward and Bernstein deeply so he could capture their true characters and motivations for the movie. Get to the bottom of it.. They publicly tied prominent Washington figures, such as Nixons former attorney general, John Mitchell, to the scandal. Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. 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. This was later confirmed by both Woodward and Bernstein. Bob Woodward: And problems. Woodwards critics insisted that this informant was a fabrication, or at best, a composite based on a number of sources. She said Bernstein was driven to uncover the Watergate story because he wanted to prove everyone at the Post wrong. Bernstein's career since Watergate has continued to focus on the theme of the use and abuse of power via books and magazine articles. The tapes incontrovertibly showed that he had participated in an attempt to obstruct justice from as early as six days after the Watergate burglary. We talk all the time. 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. ", After Watergate, Shepard says, the two went in "completely different directions. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman portrayed them in the 1976 movie. Bob Woodward: Oh, yes. I like what I do. The Post played a critical role in the beginning, and Woodward and Bernstein came in at critical moments. 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. Woodward would only reveal his informant was an individual working in the Executive Branch. That, at least, was the interpretation of the late Stanley Kutler, one of Watergates leading historians, who noted: You had to have that kind of corroborative evidence to nail the president of the United States.. It was already changing, but he certainly speeded it along. Bob Woodward has two daughters, Tali and Diana. He spent a year in his research, which was published as a 25,000-word article in Rolling Stone magazine. Goldwater Republican. For example, talk about how it affected Muskie. Nixon resigned from the presidency on August 9, 1974, after tape recordings that he had ordered made, and then tried to conceal from and deny to investigators, were made public. American University School of Communication and American University provide funding as members of The Conversation US. 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. Mr. Bradlee, its important to remember that Nixon was re-elected during this period. Thank God. Bob Woodward: An immense amount of independence. Bob Woodward: Of course. By June 17, 1972, what Hunter S. Thompson had famously called "the crest of a high and beautiful wave." of the 1960s had crashed and dissapiated. Bob Woodward: Its the nature of the business. In addition to the espionage and sabotage, another series of felonies stemmed from the attempt to cover up the earlier crimes by perjury and other obstructions of justice. Perfect. Ben Bradlee: The Pentagon Papers was a study commissioned by Nixon in the first or second year of his first term, 1970 or 69. Available for both RF and RM licensing. He quickly tired of the routine assignments his position offered, and began to hunt for news on his own. You are trying to get it right and you never do, and that there must be a sense whenever you get to something and then realize two weeks earlier, two days or two minutes earlier, you didnt know that, and its critical that no matter what you do, you are never going to have the full story. And we had to be sure the headline was right. Robert U. Woodward was born in Geneva, Illinois, and raised in nearby Wheaton. So why not take Woodward at his word? To a certain extent, I always saw myself as a lawyer. 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. The movie made Woodward and Bernstein forever famous and has become a classic. You get to have access to people you wouldnt normally have access to. Were there other writers in your father or mothers family? You mentioned that you had been at the Post for nine months. You want it to be fair. Ukraine's neighbor Moldova, host to thousands of Ukrainian refugees, is monitoring the conflict closely while . Sometimes I was thought to be the more cautious one, but Carl (Bernstein) could be cautious, and I could be aggressive or overly aggressive. Ben Bradlee: How about the Boston Globe and the Catholic Church? They both got married during the heady days of Watergate, Carl most famously to Nora Ephron. 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. [30], They were also different in work styles. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Thanks for contacting us. 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. Bob Woodward: I was going to go to law school after five years in the Navy, so I was age 27, and I got a job at a weekly paper in Montgomery County, Maryland for $110 a week. The American Academy of Achievements interview with Bob Woodward is combined with an interview with his longtime editor and mentor, Ben Bradlee (1921-2014). "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. Woodward lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Elsa Walsh, a writer for The New Yorker and the author of Divided Lives. Mr. Bradlee, what were your emotions when Nixon resigned? Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Ben Bradlee all confirmed Felts revelation. Compared to Woodward, Bernstein was a strong writer, and therefore wrote articles based on Woodward's information from Deep Throat. We worked her over very hard, but so did the lawyers. The next year, when I entered college determined to be a reporter just like the guys that Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman had portrayed on the screen, there was a surge in enrollment in journalism schools. Robert Redford played Woodward; Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein. You get to see other peoples lives, and you chart the rise and fall of others, and youre not that involved. Was he the more experienced journalist at the time? It risks the whole thing. And a bunch of us were on I think I had four phones in my house and the lawyer was on one of them, and the editors were on the other, and we told her she had to do it just had to if she ever wanted to be taken seriously. Published in the late spring of 1974, All the President's Men was an immediate best seller. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. How old were you at the time of that break-in? Kind of going, CIA. And the judge said, Where? And he went, CIA. And the judge said, Speak up. Whats secret? With the full support of their editor, Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward and his Post colleague Carl Bernstein continued to pursue the Watergate story, after other news outlets had dropped the story. But the new Woodward and Bernstein piece was remarkably good, in a sense, of placing the crimes of the Nixon White House in a broader campaign of a war against lawful dissent to the Vietnam War that expanded to the media and the opposition Democrats. Maybe we have a story and maybe we dont.. 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. So we were terribly worried, and we didnt its a big newspaper and a lot of people in it, and you cant control all of them even if you wanted to. From the age of 13 to 15, I embraced the scandal with all the geek force that puberty could muster. 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. Bob Woodward: One year exactly. Nixon didnt last too long in that second term. Because of its detail, as well as the crucial importance of the subject they were investigating, All the President's Men has come to be widely regarded as a classic book in the history of American journalism, showing how reporters and corporate news organizations operate under pressure. Lets be sure for the movie made Woodward and Bernstein deeply so he could capture their true and... 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are woodward and bernstein still friends