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 . He yelled, Stop! So it was the classic kind of Winesburg, Ohio small town. Whats the government up to? "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. But even they seemed to take the wrong lessons from what they'd done. She had what I call Mind on, hands off. She was intellectually engaged in the news, but her hands were not directing, not saying, Investigate this, dont investigate that, give the emphasis here. That was Bradlee and the editors job. On the other hand, Bernstein was born to a Communist Jewish family. 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. What does it mean? Bob Woodward: About six months after Watergate, after Carl and I had written many of almost all of our main stories, she called me up for lunch. We actually published three papers with it before they stopped us, and then we were in the courts for 12 days. She posed this, almost suggesting that it was inevitable. Published in the late spring of 1974, All the President's Men was an immediate best seller. 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. This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. "Woodward and Bernstein Woodward and Bernstein were successful at concealing the identity of their informant until 2005 when he outed himself due to the public. 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Still, Felt resigned from the FBI in June 1973 after he was suspected of leaking information to The New York Times. You mentioned Faulkner. Underneath all the arguments and fights -- way down, they hated each other, Pakula wrote. These guys lied because they didnt know the truth, and they couldnt believe that they were being lied to. If you need to flag this entry as abusive. The real crimes of the last 40 years -- the political power of an American kleptocracy that has crushed the nation's middle class, the state of permanent wars abroad and the loss of the public square to a militarized police force at home -- didn't fit into the box that Woodward and Bernstein and the Watergate scandal helped to create. You are trying to find out what really happened. Who played quite a role in the Watergate affair. It was going to be scrutinized and examined. How would you summarize that? Despite this, the Nixon White House became suspicious that Felt was leaking information to the press. Woodward stayed at The Washington Post. 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. I now do my books alone, but I have a full-time assistant who is kind of my collaborator. 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. I think pride is hubris. The who-was-Deep-Throat conjecture kept Woodward, Bernstein and the heroic-journalist myth at the center of Watergate conversations. "You could just tell," Shepard continued, "by how different they were that they wouldn't be friends and they wouldn't be working together. The young protesters were arguably unlearning the false lessons of Watergate, that meaningful social change had to come from pounding the pavement, not just from pounding a keyboard. He soon became the papers leading reporter, and by September 1971, the Post was ready to give him another try. After graduating from Yale University, he joined The Washington Post; nine months later, he was assigned the Watergate break-in story. His father was a judge and Woodward eventually entered the Navy after graduating from Yale. Was he the more experienced journalist at the time? 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. 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. Bob Woodward: We accused some people of things they didnt do that were based on some reports, written reports. The real crimes of the last 40 years didn't fit into the box that Woodward and Bernstein and the Watergate scandal helped to create. Ben Bradlee: He sure did. [30], They were also different in work styles. Editors looked around and thought, Who could we call in? Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Bob Woodward was at the very head of that pack, flaunting his access to the Bush White House while failing to ask the only question that really mattered. 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 . You want to make sense out of it. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (1979) places the Bernstein and Woodward story into a history of recent American journalism. He worked at ABC, CNN, and CBS as a political commentator, and was a spokesman in various television commercials. Of course, after the fame of "All the President's Men." In addition, they tracked down and interviewed a large number of people who gradually revealed various pieces of the puzzle. That they would sabotage campaigns. Perfect. 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 Bob Woodward: Well, we looked at it differently. William Mark Felt, the former FBI Deputy Director finally announced to the public his identity as Deep Throat, with Woodward and Bernstein confirming this fact (via History). It was mysterious always, his writing, but of great emotional impact. Mr. Bradlee, when did it become clear to you that the Watergate break-in was something more than a simple burglary? Like most media myths, the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate rests on a foundation of simplicity. [3] The Star, however, unofficially required a college degree to write for the paper. But there's a lot that's not generally known about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Ben Bradlee: We were being very careful. I didnt like the Navy, I didnt like Vietnam, I didnt like the war, and was disappointed in myself that I didnt figure out how to adjust to being a part of this that I didnt like, and so I didnt quite have the guts to run away or stand on principle. Was he the more experienced journalist at the time? Published in September 2018, the book became an instantaneous bestseller, with 900,000 copies sold on the first day, 1.1 million in the first week. Ben Bradlee: A book had been taken out of the library. It was never conclusively established that this had been done by the Nixon campaign, but one of the people in the White House acknowledged to one of our reporters that he had written it. 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. What an incredible jump in your fortunes as a journalist, from one year on a little suburban paper to The Washington Post. His writing was serious and matter-of-fact. } Beyond that, the deeper problem of Nixon Exceptionalism is that it established new standards for what constituted presidential misconduct -- standards that weren't based on the discredited ideas of the 1960s, but the "objective" standards of the Watergate era. We didnt allow television in for six months, I dont think. It marked the low point in a country's trust and respect for the highest office of the land and left the nation to question its very foundation. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Thanks for contacting us. Bernstein and Woodward's All the President's Men (1974) and The Final Days (1976) capture the excitement of the chase, the enormity of the constitutional crisis, and the agony of the downfall. No surprises. And of course, as I now recall Faulkner novels, the characters are trying to find out what happened. 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.. Additionally, he is a regular political commentator on CNN. It also made Woodward and Bernstein the most famous journalists of all time. Later, along with Vatican expert Marco Politi, he published a papal biography entitled His Holiness. But there's a lot that's not generally known about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward also got a dig in about Bernsteins famed love of the ladies, recalling Bernstein got a list of people who worked on the Richard Nixon re-election campaign from an ex-girlfriend. Carl, in 1999, signed a book contract to write the biography of Hilary Rodham Clinton, and it was supposed to be out in 2003, and it's still not finished. So you are dealing a glancing blow to whats out there. In 1974, two years after the Watergate burglary and two months before Nixon resigned, Bernstein and Woodward released the book All the President's Men. Without them, he likely would have served out his presidential term. In those days, you worried terribly about typos. What are you most proud of, looking back on your career so far? Staggering snowfall in California mountains leaves residents trapped for days, SpaceX launches new crew to space station, Prosecution wraps case at Alex Murdaugh murder trial, White House cybersecurity strategy pivots to regulation, Explosive found in checked luggage at Pennsylvania airport, feds say, FDA authorizes first at-home test for both COVID and flu, Couple accuses fertility clinic of implanting embryo with cancer genes, Air Force relieves six officers after failing safety inspection, Several hospitalized after Lufthansa flight diverted to Dulles due to turbulence. 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