Pakula didnt want facts alone. A year later, he was back at the Post, and at age 29 found himself in the middle of one of the biggest stories of the century. 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. She had the lawyers on the same phones. LHW is a shallow division, this cancellation was just adding insult to injury. "Carl was the big thinker, and Woodward was the one that make sure it got done.". Theres so much richness in his language, its almost the opposite of journalistic writing. When you began to work as a journalist, what was the reaction of your family? Bernstein could be right intuitively -- but dangerous left to himself, Pakula wrote in his notes. Mr. President, the media is not fake news. Neither of those marriages could withstand all that pressure and that fame and money. " And I called my father, who was a judge at that point, or about to become a judge, and said, Im not going to law school, but have this job at a newspaper he had never heard of. 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. Bob Woodward: Certainly. I now do my books alone, but I have a full-time assistant who is kind of my collaborator. Were much better friends than we were at the time. [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. How did you do that? So why not take Woodward at his word? (February 22, 2023). Alicia Shepard said, "Carl was the big thinker, and Woodward was the one that [made] sure it got done [T]hey knew that each of them had strengths that the other didn't, and they relied on one another. Bob Woodward: Well, we looked at it differently. Carl Bernstein, born on February 14, 1944, in Washington, D.C., began part-time work at the Washington Star at the age of 16 and later dropped out of the University of Maryland to work full-time as a reporter. 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 no one goes back or slows down or digs enough, particularly me. } Yes. Youve said journalism should be called a practice, like law. Maybe it was appropriate that most of America slept through the occasion. It was going to be scrutinized and examined. [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. Woodward had married reporter Francie Barnard, and Bernstein was dating Nora Ephron, whom he married on April 14, 1976 -- 10 days after the movie debuted in Washington. She pointed out that, "Woodward grew up in the Midwest, Republican household, went to Yale, was in the Navy. It appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list for three weeks. It glosses over the scandals intricacies and discounts the far more crucial investigative work of special prosecutors, federal judges, the FBI, panels of both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. Mr. 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. 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). But she was quite curious, quite well-informed, plugged in. And my father said probably the severest thing he has ever said to me. Who were your favorite authors? What books impressed you as a kid? (Spiro Agnew, who had been elected as Nixon's vice president in 1968 and 1972, had resigned in October 1973 after pleading no contest to a charge of tax evasion.). what was the advice to woodward and bernstein what was the advice to woodward and bernstein (No Ratings Yet) . Give him a story, any story, and he runs with it. Dont tell me never. Dont let things elude us. As the stakes increased, and as the White House looked more and more threatened, and Nixon himself looked more threatened, and his office became threatened, we just were determined that we werent going to make any silly mistake. From the age of 13 to 15, I embraced the scandal with all the geek force that puberty could muster. Mr. Bradlee, there is a scene early in the book and the movie, All the Presidents Men, in which you criticize Woodward and Bernstein for their approach to a story about E. Howard Hunt, and his interest in Chappaquiddick and Ted Kennedy. The movie, which was released in April 1976 and starred Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, was relentlessly media-centric, ignoring the work of prosecutors and the FBI. No humor. 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. And in it, you just saw that it was not as pure and simple a community as the members liked people to think. 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. 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. www.8days.sg The assertion shocked some because even J. Edgar Hoover had tried and been unable to prove that Bernstein's parents had been party members. Whats not known? [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". So, yeah, I think they were friends. What made you decide that this had to be done? Not bad, as they say, and what legs! 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. What I try to do is piece together how people make decisions. Bob Woodward: I was not in intelligence; I was in communications, and they are different in the Navy. All of us do! Much of their hard work was a quest for access to anyone who knew the real secrets of the Nixon White House. He started working for the Washington Post in 1971, nine months before the Watergate break-in. JAWORSKI, LEON Back at home, you could cross out the word "party" and replace it with "Nixon." However, Bernstein was the first of the pair to think that the Watergate case could be related to President Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon's RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978) gives the former president's version of the events surrounding Watergate. 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. As of 1997 Woodward is an assistant managing editor of the CIA in Veil (1987), the Pentagon and the Gulf War in The Commanders (1991), and the Clinton White House in The Agenda (1994). What the hell were they in there for? A few weeks after receiving his bachelors degree in 1965, he entered the United States Navy for a four-year tour of duty. 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.". You get to have access to people you wouldnt normally have access to. Do you think being the oldest had an influence on your life? Carl Bernstein has some strong words for what his former colleague's revelations mean for the Trump presidency and democracy itself.On Wednesday The Washington Post published a preview of Bob Woodward's forthcoming book, Rage, in which Trump told Woodward in March that he knew COVID-19 was serious but "wanted to always play it down." Six months later, 190,000 people have died in the U.S. from . We made one mistake in a story in which we said that Woodward and Bernstein said that there was a slush fund of $300,000 set up in the Committee to Re-elect the President, and it was controlled by Haldeman, and that one of the witnesses had testified to that slush fund to the grand jury investigating Watergate. The book drew upon the notes and research accumulated while writing articles about the scandal for the Post and "remained on best-seller lists for six months". Was he the more experienced journalist at the time? The book and movie introduced Woodwards super-secret source, Deep Throat. For 31 years after Nixons resignation, Washington periodically engaged publicly in guessing games about the sources identity. Was he the more experienced journalist at the time? Now an associate editor at The Washington Post, for several years Bob Woodward oversaw the papers special investigative projects. The Supreme Court ordered the president to turn over his tapes, which really sunk him the smoking gun tapes at the end. I like what I do. But their crimes unraveled in slow motion over those two years -- aided by one tough judge, a feistier Congress than we could comprehend today, and some skillful journalists, of whom Woodward and Bernstein became the most famous and best remembered. We talk all the time. 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. Lewis was with the Post from 1935 until his retirement in 1985. That goes back to the idea of family secrets. The fallout or denouement caused President Nixon to resign from office and sent several "conspirators" to prison. Underneath all the arguments and fights -- way down, they hated each other, Pakula wrote. Ukraine's neighbor Moldova, host to thousands of Ukrainian refugees, is monitoring the conflict closely while . We had to be sure. Bob Woodward has two daughters, Tali and Diana. Then and certainly today, there is still much debate about whether confidential informants are ethically viable due to their hidden identities. Were you in intelligence? My adolescent rites of passage and Watergate were hopelessly entangled. 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! On the eve of the 2016 election, Woodward returned to the Watergate story one more time. And when, the next day, Woodward this is probably Sunday or maybe Monday, because the burglary was Saturday morning early called the number and asked to speak to Mr. Hunt, and the operator said, Well, hes not here now; hes over at such-and-such a place, gave him another number, and Woodward called him up, and Hunt answered the phone, and Woodward said, We want to know why your name was in the address book of the Watergate burglars. And there is this long, deathly hush, and Hunt said, Oh, my God! and hung up. We didnt allow television in for six months, I dont think. 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. How would you summarize that? Bob Woodward: Who knows whether its that? Three Post editors were portrayed by award-winning character actors: Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, Martin Balsam as Howard. And it did. [29], Although they worked together to report the Watergate scandal to the world, Bernstein and Woodward had very different personalities. Goldwater Republican. 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. Robert Dole, and Doles successor as the chairman of the Republican Party, George Bush the first. "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. Woodward! Nonetheless, the heroic-journalist myth became so entrenched that it could withstand disclaimers by Watergate-era principals at the Post such as Graham. What made you back the kids, Woodward and Bernstein? 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. It took some of us from the Watergate generation a long time to see it. They deposited, at the end of 1974, over $600,000. In general, Shepard said, "They had a hard time. 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. For example, talk about how it affected Muskie. I was the lowest-paid reporter at The Washington Post, because they would only give you credit with the Newspaper Guild if you had worked for a daily, and I had worked for a weekly. Ben Bradlee: Four hundred stories about Watergate in The Washington Post Four hundred in two years and two months. Woodward was assigned to cover the breaking story, along with a younger but more experienced reporter, Carl Bernstein. But glaring gaps remain. "You could just tell," Shepard continued, "by how different they were that they wouldn't be friends and they wouldn't be working together. Pakula wrote that Redford would have to scrap his charm. Bob Woodward: June 17, 1972. Bob Woodward: Its the nature of the business. Those were second marriages. Landed at The Washington Post in 1971, had nine months reporting experience. Why did they think of you? He worked at ABC, CNN, and CBS as a political commentator, and was a spokesman in various television commercials. They both got married during the heady days of Watergate, Carl most famously to Nora Ephron. Mr. Woodward, at what point did you realize that President Nixon was implicated in this? I mean, I lived in that place for those periods. We missed the first edition, but we published it the second edition, which came out at 11 oclock at night, 11:30. One was Woodward and Bernsteins All the Presidents Men, the well-timed memoir about their reporting. And of course, Muskie was going to be the strong candidate against Nixon. There was a letter forged, saying that Muskie had made some disparaging remark about Canadians, and Muskie got very upset. 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