are woodward and bernstein still friends

But together they did something that neither one of them could do individually. That happened a long time ago. Leon Jaworski, like richard m. nixon, came from a poor, deeply religious background. ." 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 . "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. These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The unmasking of Woodward and Bernstein sheds no credit on Bradlee, nor on his employer, my late friend, and a very gracious and generally admirable woman, Kay Graham. And no one goes back or slows down or digs enough, particularly me. How does this affect me, Nixon, the president? He'd started at age two, I think. In the end, the real exceptionalism of Richard Nixon was merely that he was dumb enough to get caught. Muskie, in the emotion of the campaign, was trying to explain what had gone on. Divorce is painful because it is unknown to a child. Instead, they wrote 'All the President's Men' and they sold the movie rights to Robert Redford. 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.". I would have been more effective.. Woodward gained valuable information through an unnamed informant, nicknamed Deep Throat, by Post managing editor Howard Simon. Woodward, with Scott Armstrong, wrote a study of the Supreme Court, The Brethren (1979); and Woodward wrote a study of the death by drug overdose of comedian John Belushi, Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi (1984). So we were terribly worried, and we didnt its a big newspaper and a lot of people in it, and you cant control all of them even if you wanted to. So that gave hope to the Republicans, and of course, all of the Republican spokesmen had a field day beating us upside the face over that, but it didnt last very long. If you didnt have the Independent Counsel, which was a direct outgrowth of Watergate, you never would have had Ken Starr, you never would have had a criminal investigation of Clinton. But glaring gaps remain. Together, they followed the story and co-wrote the best-seller, "All the President's Men.". So I had just a sense that we had done some of the first work on this that any suggestion that we had caused it, or brought down a president, was a stretch, to say the least, and not factual. When the Post persevered with the investigation, President Nixon induced the FCC to challenge the licenses of the Posts television stations. These guys lied because they didnt know the truth, and they couldnt believe that they were being lied to. . All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon's: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency. What are you most proud of, looking back on your career so far? Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post during Watergate, told me that Pakula spent so much time with each of us. "You could just tell," Shepard continued, "by how different they were that they wouldn't be friends and they wouldn't be working together. Who were your favorite authors? Bob Woodward's political affiliation hasn't kept him from criticizing people on both sides of the aisle. When you were a child, who most inspired you? So I went to work with about seven or eight other people, including Carl (Bernstein), and I went to the arraignment of the five burglars, and the judge wanted to know where one of them worked, and he was mumbling. We're lucky to have Woodward and Bernstein -- so young in 1972 -- still with us. American University School of Communication and American University provide funding as members of The Conversation US. 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. From the time of the break-in, and through the fall and winter of 1972-1973, Bernstein and Woodward, under increasing public attack from White House spokesmen, worked virtually alone on the story. But as Pakula began to understand Woodward, he wondered if the charming, handsome Redford, then 39, could play someone so different from himself. Bob Woodward: Yes, and then later, my parents were divorced, and my father remarried a woman who had three kids also. 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. Sometimes I was thought to be the more cautious one, but Carl (Bernstein) could be cautious, and I could be aggressive or overly aggressive. / CBS. Carl is Jewish, grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. He and 39 others, I might add. 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. It was very complicated, then and now. We actually published three papers with it before they stopped us, and then we were in the courts for 12 days. 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. 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.. When will all the truth come out? Quite optimistically. When expanded it provides a list of search options that will switch the search inputs to match the current selection. All of us do! [12][13], In 1965, Bernstein left the Star to become a full-time reporter for the Elizabeth Daily Journal in New Jersey. Bob Woodward: In the family I was raised in: a brother, a sister, two stepsisters, a half-sister. I think it is an emotion that if you bask in it, its like hate; it will destroy you. Thats a quote from the movie and the book. Woodward -- the one who stayed in the Beltway journalism racket -- had all the access to the highest level officials that he had craved at the start of Watergate, and yet he remained clueless as to how such access could provide as much disinformation as truth. 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). Yes. My father was a lawyer there, and I worked as a janitor in his law office when I was in high school, and started reading the files and discovered that the projection that people in the town made about their own lives was in fact not who they were, that lots of them had secrets, and many of them were in my fathers law office files. #inline-recirc-item--id-abdd83c2-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d ~ .item:nth-child(5) { I had worked for the Post for nine months. It was so important. You want to make sense out of it. [3] In 1966, Bernstein left New Jersey and began reporting for The Washington Post, where he covered every aspect of local news and became known as one of the paper's best writing stylists.[15]. Despite this, the Nixon White House became suspicious that Felt was leaking information to the press. The tapes were crucial to determining that Nixon had obstructed justice. I have forgotten which one it was. [3] The Star, however, unofficially required a college degree to write for the paper. Mr. Bradlee, at what point did you get the inkling that the Oval Office was involved? Woodwards critics insisted that this informant was a fabrication, or at best, a composite based on a number of sources. These were the values, after all, that purged America of the evil Richard Nixon -- not the dirty (bleep)ing hippies. The American escalation in Vietnam had just begun. A few weeks after receiving his bachelors degree in 1965, he entered the United States Navy for a four-year tour of duty. On the other hand, Carl Bernstein was the child of two Communist activists (per Washingtonian). NEW YORK . Within a year, his byline was appearing on the front page. And a college dropout. We talk all the time. "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. We worked her over very hard, but so did the lawyers. What did you mean by that? In the series of stories that followed, Bernstein and Woodward eventually connected the burglars to a massive slush fund and a corrupt attorney general. Few in the room. [17] A second book, The Final Days, was published by Bernstein and Woodward in 1976 as a follow-up chronicling Nixon's last days in office. And most jobs, if you are a lawyer or a doctor, you have to deal with clients, patients who have boring problems or diseases that are routine, and of course, the definition of news is non-routine. Whats going on in the town in culture, in the nation, in the world is news, and you get to work on that. However, Bernstein was the first of the pair to think that the Watergate case could be related to President Richard Nixon. Bob Woodward: Yes. Would I run like that again?. That really is what were all about. Much to his chagrin. Bob Woodward: Well, we looked at it differently. Bernstein was the first to suspect that President Nixon was involved, and he found a laundered check that linked Nixon to the burglary. Carl tried his hand in television, at ABC News (and was a consultant at CBS News for awhile). Hunt had been studying Ted Kennedy and checked books out of the library. Events are filtered through minds and memories and prejudices, and you feel intimate with his characters. His detailed notes, first made public in December 2005, were donated by his wife to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after his death in 1998 in an automobile accident. Bob Woodward: Or The Sound and the Fury, which is his great book. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Roberts.[2]. 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. What was that about? What the hell were they in there for? All talk. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. They weren't big, White House reporters. Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. As a colleague of ours at the Post, Bill Greider, wrote the day they disclosed the secret taping system in the White House. For the team that took down President Nixon, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein followed this format to a tee. We understand you got started in the newspaper business right out of the Navy. They were the first to reveal the tapes, and they were always ahead of the curve, but there was a lot of great reporting done by other people, Sy Hersh, the Los Angeles Times, they all did really good work. Watergate was the biggest political scandal of the century. While Woodward has written books leveling criticisms against both Nixon and Trump, his critiques have not been limited to Republican presidents, and his praise is not limited to Democratic ones. You could feel that they took not an adversarial position toward government, but a position of skepticism, a position of there is accountability reporting. Bob Woodward may have achieved the greatest publishing success of his career with Fear, the inside story of turmoil inside the administration of President Donald Trump. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. Woodward has written best-selling books on the last ten presidentsNixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Although Woodward was reluctant to talk about himself as a reporter, he was determined to expose other peoples secrets. Encyclopedias almanacs transcripts and maps. Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. The rest of them all got away with it. What it turned out was that the question hinged on whether or not he had told that to the grand jury, and since he hadnt, he was able to say No. He wasnt asked was there a slush fund, which, of course, there was. Knopf had a first printing of 275,000 copies. And once you are convicted of a felony, you cant own television stations, so it would have cost us all the television stations. From the age of 13 to 15, I embraced the scandal with all the geek force that puberty could muster. You dont think of journalists automatically as patriots, one. 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. 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. There was an election on in 72, and most of the rest of the country was saying, The Post is just playing politics, and all that stuff. All stability. [30], They were also different in work styles. One morning in June of 71 I think, they led the newspaper with it, with eight-column banners. Yes. It turned out that he hadnt been asked, and that interested us a great deal, because if the prosecution wasnt asking him those interesting questions, that suggested that there was a reason they werent, and the reason might be that they were trying to cover it up. They wrote that history has shown that Watergate was even worse than we thought it was at the time: In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars -- against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. 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. She pointed out that, "Woodward grew up in the Midwest, Republican household, went to Yale, was in the Navy. 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. Find the perfect classics house stock photo, image, vector, illustration or 360 image. They had it for three months, and they started to publish it. 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. } Nora Ephron's novel Heartburn (1983) caused a minor journalistic sensation with its fictionalized description of her divorce from Bernstein. And he would be going over to the White House to give Nixon the news that he didnt have any his support in the Senate was eroding. Bernstein wrote in the 1996 book that the Pope's role in supporting Solidarity in his native Poland, and his geopolitical dexterity combined with enormous spiritual influence, was a principal factor in the downfall of communism in Europe.[21]. We were reporting on the Presidents men, and the White House people, the Attorney General, John Mitchell, people in the Nixon campaign, the Committee to Re-Elect the President, and the focus was not Nixon. He said, Youre crazy. And at the same time, it was my decision. Woodward is the fifth branch of government! There were no bars in town. So all the while that this was coming out, you were being very careful that there was enough confirmation of these things? So in an odd way, those in my business have a million allies out there. 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. 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Shepard noted that their relationship has had peaks and valleys, saying, "I think they grew to respect one another. Hes finally embarrassed, said Woodward with a smile. Bob Woodward: This is a book I did in 1999 that took the five presidents after Nixon Ford, Carter, Reagan, the first Bush, and Clinton and analyzed the Special Prosecutor law, and showed how that, and the new climate of Congressional activism and media activism, meant the presidency was going to be forever altered. Not, "What did the president know and when did he know it? How did that come about? David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (1979) places the Bernstein and Woodward story into a history of recent American journalism. Hed started at age two, I think. In the watergate scandal, Jaworski, Starr, Kenneth Winston He started working for the Washington Post in 1971, nine months before the Watergate break-in. }, First published on December 26, 2006 / 7:23 AM. That we had done stories, but it is a process of the judiciary, the Congress, the Supreme Court, that led to Nixons demise. Bob Woodward is an associate editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1971. Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Ben Bradlee all confirmed Felts revelation. Woodwards 2012 bookThe Price of Politicsexplores the efforts of President Obama and congressional leaders to restore the American economy following the financial crisis of 2008. You want to spend time on it. There was even a movie made about the scandal and their role in it, "All The President's Men.". Ben Bradlee: Well, we were tired. I called my father and said Im not going to law school, but have this job at a newspaper he had never heard of. 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. He dropped out of the University of Maryland and became a reporter in New Jersey where his investigative reporting caught the eye of the Washington Post, which hired him in 1966 (via Huffington Post). 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. [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. But she finally said, Well, okay. 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. 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. Mr. Bradlee, when did it become clear to you that the Watergate break-in was something more than a simple burglary? Were there particular teachers or relatives? Some people haven't seen it yet. It was one of those families that was glued together.. 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. Halberstam, the Nixon White House became suspicious that Felt was leaking information to the press a.! 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