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. However popular, the heroic-journalist myth is a vast exaggeration of the effect of their work. The whole reputation of the paper was hanging on that by the time. We didnt allow television in for six months, I dont think. 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. One story that Ephron shared with Pakula concerned how the two reporters sparred as they raced to complete the book All the Presidents Men. Woodward, she told the director, could be so stubborn and bullheaded and had no instinct for writing. When Ephron and Bernstein were in Martinique on vacation, Woodward and Bernstein fought on the telephone, to the tune of a $400 bill, about verb tenses. 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. 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. Alicia Shepard fills in the gaps in her very candid book, "Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of. He and 39 others, I might add. Do you remember? 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. You cant prove its not right, but you think its not right. Whos going to get what lead and put it together? And he was the one who said that. Will the luck of the Irish affect the Oscars? Although Woodward was reluctant to talk about himself as a reporter, he was determined to expose other peoples secrets. The five Watergate burglars and several other Nixon subordinates, including former U.S. Attorney General Mitchell, were sentenced to prison terms. She said Bernstein was driven to uncover the Watergate story because he wanted to prove everyone at the Post wrong. Additionally, he is a regular political commentator on CNN. And yet it was Bernsteins daring that was necessary.. Bob Woodward: Oh, yes, I had teachers at Wheaton. "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. It also made Woodward and Bernstein the most famous journalists of all time. We're much better friends than we were at the time. Dont tell me never. Dont let things elude us. In some ways, Carl lives in the shadow of Bob Woodward. 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. The piston driving the Nixon administration was hate. Sometimes, people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didnt do, and shouldnt have done,Graham said. 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. Bob Woodward: Sure. Bob Woodward: I was not in intelligence; I was in communications, and they are different in the Navy. Speaking to the crowd of around 2,000 reporters at the Washington Hilton where President Trump was not among them they talked about what they had learned from each other during their long stint reporting together in the Seventies. 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. The dichotomy intrigued Pakula. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Despite their stark differences, they needed each another. What about you? Ben Bradlee: Well, right away, with Hunts name and the White House telephone number in there. . Maybe it was 16, but he had fully a decade-plus of experience under his belt. The Twitter-sized version is the president had a goon squad that did all kinds of buggings and break-ins and political dirty tricks, and when those burglars with ties to the White House were busted 40 years ago, Nixon and his top aides broke the law to cover it all up. There had been some disparaging remarks made elsewhere about his wife, and he cried, in the snow, in New Hampshire, standing on the back of a flatbed truck, and its generally believed that was the end of his candidacy. But in fact at that time, we were. It seems to me that to be a topnotch investigative journalist, you have to have a lot of guts in order to question some of these things. Advertisement Pakula. These guys lied because they didnt know the truth, and they couldnt believe that they were being lied to. You want to make sense out of it. 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). 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. [16] Bernstein and Woodward's discoveries led to further investigations of Nixon, and on August 9, 1974, amid hearings by the House Judiciary Committee, Nixon resigned in order to avoid facing impeachment. Ehrlichman? Samuel Dash, the Democratic counsel to the Senate Select Committee chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, argued in his later book on the Senate investigation, Chief Counsel, that the admirable, early investigative reporting of Bernstein and Woodward had now degenerated into what he called "hit and run" journalism based on leaks from the committee and jeopardized the ability of the legal system to track down and punish the guilty. When expanded it provides a list of search options that will switch the search inputs to match the current selection. A day prior, another Washington Post journalist got the first swing at what would become the story of the decade. (February 22, 2023). Encyclopedia.com. The duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have become synonymous with reporting the comings and goings of the Watergate scandal. Carl is Jewish, grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. During his marriage to Ephron, Bernstein met Margaret Jay, daughter of British Prime Minister James Callaghan and wife of Peter Jay, then UK ambassador to the United States. Some people haven't seen it yet. They were after us and The New York Times. 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. The guts are supplied by the owners of the newspaper and the editors. He soon became the papers leading reporter, and by September 1971, the Post was ready to give him another try. One midnight in June 1975, Bernstein watched as Pakula directed a scene. 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. And she said, When will we know the full story of Watergate? A community high school history teacher named Elizabeth Duncan who taught American history and was a great teacher. There were some teachers and lawyers and business people, but no writers. And whats sad about the Nixon presidency is not just the criminality and abuse of power, but the simple truth, to the best of my knowledge at this point, on those tapes no one ever says what would be good, what would be right for the country, what would be best for the country, which of course is what a president is supposed to do. Probably one of my favorite books is All the Kings Men, Robert Penn Warrens book about political corruption in Louisiana and about a reporter who watches this and gets to participate and see, but doesnt have all of the full consequences of the action fall on him. His unfounded fear of being fired and his need to belong fueled his workaholic lifestyle. Woodward, 60, whose parents divorced when he was 12, is the son of a Midwestern Republican judge, graduated from Yale in 1965, and joined the Navy. The idealized journalist of the Watergate era and beyond was wedded to the highest ethical standards and driven only by truth, not by ideology. Most of them didnt realize that the world had changed. 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. This practice was usually followed scrupulously, but broke down when Bernstein and Woodward wrongly claimed that Hugh Sloan, a CRP official, had implicated H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, in testimony before a grand jury. Eighteen years after the Supreme Court ruled that they couldnt shut us down, the prosecuting attorney, who was the Solicitor General of the United States, wrote the Post a letter saying that in the whole Pentagon Papers, there was no threat to national security. 22 Feb. 2023 . This was our time, our story. He always saw me as a lawyer. Nixon didnt last too long in that second term. Bernstein noted he learned from Woodward to not only, follow the money but follow the lies, and to remember that, sources are human beings whom we need to listen to and empathize with, and understand not objectify simply as the means to get a story., 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved, Daily Shows Roy Wood Jr. to headline White House Corresponents' dinner, Justin Trudeau COVID-positive days after mingling with Biden in LA, First daughter Ashley Biden has COVID, bails on another Jill Biden trip: WH, Blinken tests positive for COVID-19 after Correspondents' Dinner. I worked quite hard, did a number of stories that the Post and The New York Times picked up. Woodward would only reveal his informant was an individual working in the Executive Branch. I'm still struck by the words that were scrawled in Spanish on a building near our hotel, saying: It's not the party, it's the system. Robert Dole, and Doles successor as the chairman of the Republican Party, George Bush the first. And I was going on an unknown path, and that concerned him, but when I got into it and then went to work for the Post, he was quite supportive. But then two by-the-book (sort of) dudes with wide ties and spiral notebooks -- Woodward and Bernstein -- came along in stoppage time to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. 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. Maybe it was 16, but he had fully a decade-plus of experience under his belt. Ben Bradlee: I was at The Washington Post, and I couldnt believe it. He had worked in the Pentagon, and then he had worked for the Rand Corporation. Im sure it would have been more interesting. 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. Ukraine's neighbor Moldova, host to thousands of Ukrainian refugees, is monitoring the conflict closely while . I like what I do. But even they seemed to take the wrong lessons from what they'd done. 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. I cant remember, but there were so many. And in it, you just saw that it was not as pure and simple a community as the members liked people to think. 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.". [18], Bernstein left the Post in 1977 and expanded into other areas due to his reputation from the Watergate reporting. Every time the White House denied something, the evidence became clear that it was the White House that was lying. And in that same space of time, Woodward's written five books. How do I pay someone back, either good or bad, for what they have done to me?. You are also agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. It was, after all, the courts unanimous ruling in July 1974, ordering Nixon to surrender tapes subpoenaed by the Watergate special prosecutor, that sealed the presidents fate. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Thanks for contacting us. 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. Woodward and Bernstein (and many others) were absolutely convinced there was a deal where Nixon would resign if his successor Gerald Ford issued a presidential pardon. The who-was-Deep-Throat conjecture kept Woodward, Bernstein and the heroic-journalist myth at the center of Watergate conversations. 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). 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