Bernstein was the first to suspect that President Nixon was involved, and he found a laundered check that linked Nixon to the burglary. Bob Woodward: Yes, we are. In those days, you worried terribly about typos. 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. [30], They were also different in work styles. shaka wear graphic tees is candy digital publicly traded ellen lawson wife of ted lawson what was the advice to woodward and bernstein. [20], He then began working for ABC News. The dichotomy intrigued Pakula. I know a lot about that story because my son was the editor at the Boston Globe who ran that investigation, and I think thats a perfect example of how newspapers can persist in the face of denials and correct wrongs. Watergate reporters come together to discuss the 40-year-old scandal which resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon. [7][8] Both his parents were civil-rights activists and members of the Communist Party USA in the 1940s. Despite their stark differences, they needed each another. Who were your favorite authors? 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. He just had a psychosis about being controlled by authority figures. 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. 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 had the lawyers on the same phones. 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.. Divorce is painful because it is unknown to a child. Encyclopedia.com. And we were so scared that we were going to by this time, we knew that the front page was going to be a historical document. 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. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. display: block; However, the date of retrieval is often important. 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. That happened a long time ago. You mentioned that you had been at the Post for nine months. Three Post editors were portrayed by award-winning character actors: Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, Martin Balsam as Howard. He was assigned to the police beat, from 7:00 in the evening to 3:00 in the morning, but he did not limit his work activities to his assigned hours. The assertion shocked some because even J. Edgar Hoover had tried and been unable to prove that Bernstein's parents had been party members. In January 1975, five months after President Nixon had resigned, Pakula flew to Washington to begin in-depth interviews with a dozen of the principals involved in unraveling the Watergate tale. And once you are convicted of a felony, you cant own television stations, so it would have cost us all the television stations. We didnt allow television in for six months, I dont think. 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. ", After Watergate, Shepard says, the two went in "completely different directions. Much of their hard work was a quest for access to anyone who knew the real secrets of the Nixon White House. They both got married during the heady days of Watergate, Carl most famously to Nora Ephron. He knew all about my mother, brother -- everything. (Jason Robards, who played Bradlee, is on screen only 10 minutes.). I think the lead of his story was, Will the wonders of Watergate never cease?. 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. It was a takedown that transcended politics, transcended ideology. When you began to work as a journalist, what was the reaction of your family? The piston driving the Nixon administration was hate. }, First published on December 26, 2006 / 7:23 AM. Its our job to figure them out.. ALICIA C. SHEPARD, who teaches journalism at American University, is the author of "Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate. Kenneth Starr has served as a judge on the court of appeals, as U.S. solicitor general, and came to nat, Richard M. Nixon He was a very well-regarded lawyer in town. STARR, KENNETH WINSTON 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. The shadowy man was the compass to point the journalist duo in the right direction. The book inescapably promoted the impression Woodward and Bernstein were vital to Watergates outcome. And most of us had served in World War II. Events are in no way simple or cinematic. Do you remember? But even they seemed to take the wrong lessons from what they'd done. 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). Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman portrayed them in the 1976 movie. They have always backed what I do. He soon became the papers leading reporter, and by September 1971, the Post was ready to give him another try. We've received your submission. Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president on August 9. We talk all the time. So much has happened since then. ", To read excerpts, click here. 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. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/woodward-and-bernstein, "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. Sometimes, people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didnt do, and shouldnt have done,Graham said. display: none; 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. Can he get the hurt and vulnerability?, Throughout filming in 1975, if there was a question on how Woodward or Bernstein might react, Redford or Hoffman or Pakula called either man. Bob Woodward: No. Its not clear, its obscure. Woodward lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Elsa Walsh, a writer for The New Yorker and the author of Divided Lives. ." And no one goes back or slows down or digs enough, particularly me. They said, Keep going. Bob Woodward is an associate editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1971. Like an assistant secretary of defense who had been a year or two before head of a big Republican contributor and head of an automobile company and, you know, sold cars in Omaha or somewhere. The recordings captured Nixon, six days after the burglary, agreeing to a plan to deter the FBI from pursuing its Watergate investigation. Im not really like that anymore, Bernstein said in the interview. Together, they became Hollywood icons. Its that square, straight, intense, decent quality of Woodwards that works. It took some of us from the Watergate generation a long time to see it. Woodwards critics insisted that this informant was a fabrication, or at best, a composite based on a number of sources. 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. Pakula gradually realized that neither Woodward nor Bernstein could have pulled off Watergate alone. Who would be dumb enough to work on this story on a Saturday morning? And they thought of me immediately. 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. All of the guys who later went to jail. Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss are "still good friends", a source has insisted, despite rumours the pair might have fallen out. On the other hand, Bernstein was born to a Communist Jewish family. But in his interview with Woodward, Pakula discovered that the reporter could surprise: Other peoples secrets fascinated and obsessed him. But they grew to like one another" and are very good friends now. We had heard that they had this big blockbuster coming up, and suddenly, they just dropped this on us. But they missed decisive elements of Watergate, notably the payment of hush money to the burglars and the existence of Nixons White House tapes. [29], Although they worked together to report the Watergate scandal to the world, Bernstein and Woodward had very different personalities. Bob Woodward: Oh, yes. The Post editors concluded that he was not ready for a major metropolitan daily newspaper, and arranged for him to take job as one of four reporters at a small suburban weekly, The Montgomery County Sentinel. 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. Dont tell me never. Dont let things elude us. Nora Ephron's novel Heartburn (1983) caused a minor journalistic sensation with its fictionalized description of her divorce from Bernstein. Carl was the big thinker, and Woodward was the one that make sure it got done" (via CBS News). 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