Do you think being the oldest had an influence on your life? How did we get into committing 500,000 troops 10,000 miles away in a way that we could never win? 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. 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. Special Prosecutor Cox and Jaworski investigated this, put lots of people in jail. There were some teachers and lawyers and business people, but no writers. 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. They said, Keep going. 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). "You could just tell," Shepard continued, "by how different they were that they wouldn't be friends and they wouldn't be working together. He was also integral in finding vital evidence and information at the scene of the crime (per Mental Floss). 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. I covered the night police beat. He wanted to understand Woodward and Bernstein deeply so he could capture their true characters and motivations for the movie. "They couldn't be more different. It was a White House operation. You dont think of journalists automatically as patriots, one. 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. It seemed to always be about Nixon. No surprises. Perfect. Bob Woodward: One year exactly. And no one goes back or slows down or digs enough, particularly me. 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. Writers or journalists who inspired you? And that in a little way, and often in a significant way, thats realized. Bob Woodward has two daughters, Tali and Diana. shaka wear graphic tees is candy digital publicly traded ellen lawson wife of ted lawson what was the advice to woodward and bernstein. Few in the room. On a Saturday in June 1972, Bernstein was assigned, along with Bob Woodward, to cover a break-in at the Watergate office complex that had occurred earlier the same morning. The Woodward and Bernstein comparison is apt because it's a reminder that they were Metro Section reporters, not Political desk reporters. [16], In 1992, also for Time, Bernstein wrote a cover story publicizing the alliance between Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan. After the clapping died down, Woodward observed, "There was lots of applause, but it wasn't universal.". Carl knew he needed [that quality] but despised it in Bob. Why did this happen? They had it for three months, and they started to publish it. 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. He was ten months further along in his career than Woodward when the scandal broke out. 1996 - 2023 American AcademyofAchievement. . In 1975, it was turned into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein and Robert Redford as Woodward which later went on to be nominated in multiple Oscar (including Best Picture nomination), Golden Globe and BAFTA categories. Some questioned the credibility of the work due to the lack of footnotes and named sources, even though many acknowledged that it would have been impossible to write without the promises . Woodward had married reporter Francie Barnard, and . Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. W. Mark Felt, Sr., a retired associate director of the FBI, revealed that he had provided Woodward with details of the Watergate cover-up. And when Redford wanted to film the movie in the Post, we told him he couldnt. 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. .component--type-recirculation .item:nth-child(5) { Richard Matthew Pious What were they doing? 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! Thats a quote from the movie and the book. Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex. Woodward and Bernstein never disclosed any information or provided hints about Deep Throat and spoke about him in vague terms in their book, "All the President's Men.". 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. This was our time, our story. Together, they followed the story and co-wrote the best-seller, "All the President's Men.". Bernstein was born to a secular Jewish family in Washington, D.C.,[4][5][6] the son of Sylvia (ne Walker) and Alfred Bernstein. In a sense, there were the two worlds: of the Navy, where all the opposite principles seemed to prevail; and then there was The Washington Post there at my doorstep every morning, kind of saying, Wait a minute. Do you see President Clintons impeachment related to Watergate? By day, he circulated in the citys government offices, and pressed civil servants for every piece of information that might prove useful. Are there particular novels of his that you remember liking? And it in many ways is, I think, the principle under which she and her son, Don Graham, tried to run The Washington Post. It came out in the Ervin Committee hearings in the Senate. police in blue helmets fought young people in the street, great men were gunned down in their prime. The role of Congress and the courts -- where even Republicans refused to turn a blind eye to a Republican president's wrongdoing -- was critical to this belief, but it was the journalist at the very top of this moral pyramid. Mr. Bradlee, do you think there could be another Watergate today? 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. Such speculation sometimes pointed to W. Mark Felt, a former senior FBI official. We didnt allow any television people in. They were after us and The New York Times. Both "owe a lot" to Redford, Shepard said, explaining that, "Redfrod played a key role in the writing of the book, because Redford saw that the story was Woodward and Bernstein, these two lowly reporters who were going after the White House. Woodward stayed at The Washington Post. Bernstein was among three CNN reporters who last . 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. But we were the backwash of the Baby Boom. He is now Assistant Managing Editor of the Post, and has written nearly a dozen bestselling books. White bread. Hes a good lawyer, a fair man.. 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. How long had you been at the previous paper? What were some of the mistakes? Ben Bradlee: Four hundred stories about Watergate in The Washington Post Four hundred in two years and two months. The processes that caused [Nixons] resignation were constitutional., Grahams words, however accurate and incisive, scarcely altered the dominant popular interpretation of Watergate. Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of Communication. He and 39 others, I might add. During Watergate, no matter how well Bernstein reported the story, he was pegged by Post editors as the bad boy of the duo -- always late, unreliable and quick to hype his leads. 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 attracted you to the newspaper business? 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. They wanted to have a whole presidency where they could do what they wanted and no one would examine them or scrutinize them, and they got in trouble, a lot of them, because of this. To a certain extent, I always saw myself as a lawyer. Editors at the WaPo said that Lewis' early reporting and evidence findings are what convinced them that the story was greater than a simple break-in. You mentioned Faulkner. Nixon Exceptionalism and the triumph of objectivity kept a focus on "what did the president know and when did he know it," the provable fact-based lie, liberated from anything that might be corrupted by debatable policy or ideas. STARR, KENNETH WINSTON Pakulas notes, dated May 2, 1975, indicate that hed concluded this about the two reporters: * Bob thought Carl was hype, no follow-through. Ukraine's neighbor Moldova, host to thousands of Ukrainian refugees, is monitoring the conflict closely while . I now do my books alone, but I have a full-time assistant who is kind of my collaborator. Encyclopedia.com. 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. Ehrlichman? He was a very well-regarded lawyer in town. On the eve of the 2016 election, Woodward returned to the Watergate story one more time. But together they did something that neither one of them could do individually. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. 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. He started working for the Washington Post in 1971, nine months before the Watergate break-in. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. We worked her over very hard, but so did the lawyers. He went to jail for that. Ben Bradlee: We were being very careful. 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. Bob Woodward: I was born in a hospital in Geneva, Illinois but lived in Wheaton, which is the home of Billy Graham, the evangelist, so it was very fundamentalist Christian. It's the system. It took a long time, and if you examine the sequence, you could identify hundreds of points where the road to full disclosure would have been the thread would have been cut. What an incredible jump in your fortunes as a journalist, from one year on a little suburban paper to The Washington Post. So it was the classic kind of Winesburg, Ohio small town. They were 30 and 31.". Not bad, as they say, and what legs! Maybe it was 16, but he had fully a decade-plus of experience under his belt. For the team that took down President Nixon, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein followed this format to a tee. [26] Bernstein and second wife Ephron already had an infant son, Jacob, and she was pregnant with their second son, Max, in 1979 when she learned of her husband's affair with Jay. You are trying to find out what really happened. So much has happened since then. We missed the first edition, but we published it the second edition, which came out at 11 oclock at night, 11:30. 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. Somebody who through force of personality made history interesting and important. Few people had heard of these journalists when they began compiling relevant facts about . Certainly during Watergate, it didnt get transmitted to Carl Bernstein or myself through them. The rest of them all got away with it. [12][13], In 1965, Bernstein left the Star to become a full-time reporter for the Elizabeth Daily Journal in New Jersey. Shepard discussed it with co-anchor Harry Smith on The Early Show Tuesday. 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. Margaret later became a government minister in her own right. 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? This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in and, of. [14] While there, he won first prize in New Jersey's press association for investigative reporting, feature writing, and news on a deadline. He had the mannerisms. Bob Woodward: June 17, 1972. What is this secret government we have? And my father, a man of great restraint, nonjudgmental in fact, said probably the severest thing he has ever said to me. I can tell you exactly where it was the night when it all went down, when those burglars were arrested inside the Watergate Hotel. There were 7,000 papers finally, and The New York Times got a copy of it. It was strange. But as Pakula began to understand Woodward, he wondered if the charming, handsome Redford, then 39, could play someone so different from himself. But the real input comes from people who believe in a free press, believe in the First Amendment, believe in open discourse as much as possible, hate secrets, hate secret government, hate secret concentrations of power. He joined broadcast news in a high growth period. Bob Woodward is an associate editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1971. 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. One doesnt think of humility as a common quality of journalists for some reason. . However, the wiretapped failed to work properly and on June 17, five of the men broke back into the DNC's office in the Watergate Hotel. Where were you born? That they would sabotage campaigns. Are there particular books that you remember? The End of a Presidency (1974) by the staff of the New York Times provides a useful combination of analysis and chronology with a sampling of the major documents. When expanded it provides a list of search options that will switch the search inputs to match the current selection. Robert Dole, and Doles successor as the chairman of the Republican Party, George Bush the first. 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. He has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, first for the coverage of the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, and second as the lead reporter for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So you had a certain amount of independence? Bob Woodward: We had done some of the early stories, that it led to the Senate Watergate Committee, led to the House Judiciary Committee and impeachment investigation. 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