It was one of the most incredible feelings that Ive had in my life because, you know, it had been a long time since we had started to work on the story, and I didnt exactly know who I was or who he was -- existentially, it was sort of a total mind----. Mr. Bradlee, its important to remember that Nixon was re-elected during this period. #inline-recirc-item--id-abdd83c2-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d, #right-rail-recirc-item--id-abdd83c2-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d { What were some of the mistakes? 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). Ben Bradlee: That we had really done a really good job. Ben Bradlee: By an overwhelming margin, as we were reminded so often. Bob Woodward: Or The Sound and the Fury, which is his great book. Both men continued to work for the Post. I now do my books alone, but I have a full-time assistant who is kind of my collaborator. However popular, the heroic-journalist myth is a vast exaggeration of the effect of their work. What made you decide that this had to be done? I cant remember, but there were so many. The fallout or denouement caused President Nixon to resign from office and sent several "conspirators" to prison. She was the publisher. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. You dont have a context for it, so it destroys the very notion of context, because the only context you know as a child is family. 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. And most of us had served in World War II. You mentioned that you had been at the Post for nine months. Editors looked around and thought, Who could we call in? 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. what was the advice to woodward and bernstein what was the advice to woodward and bernstein (No Ratings Yet) . His writing was serious and matter-of-fact. 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. Give him a story, any story, and he runs with it. President Nixon attempted to use the office of the presidency to cover up the crimes and his involvement with any break-ins. Few people had heard of these journalists when they began compiling relevant facts about . Five long years of unruly marches and campus takeovers hadn't toppled the Establishment. He has also done reporting for television and opinion commentary. And a college dropout. And it in many ways is, I think, the principle under which she and her son, Don Graham, tried to run The Washington Post. Get to the bottom of it.. He yelled, Stop! 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. A year later, he was back at the Post, and at age 29 found himself in the middle of one of the biggest stories of the century. Woodward lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Elsa Walsh, a writer for The New Yorker and the author of Divided Lives. After filling their mantles with every journalism prize . Hed started at age two, I think. Woodward relied on one source whom he refused to identify even to his editors except by the code-name "Deep Throat.". The New York Times played the lead role but we played a role too. 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. Hunt had been studying Ted Kennedy and checked books out of the library. Im sure it would have been more interesting. (The Academy of Achievement interviewed both Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee, the Executive Editor of The Washington Post, on May 1 during the 2003 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. Their interviews are combined here.). Woodward moved logically. Bob Woodward: Quite late. But in the end, its only a glancing blow. And my father said probably the severest thing he has ever said to me. This was our time, our story. In The Last of the Presidents Men, Woodward told the story of Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who disclosed the existence of President Nixons secret recording system, the revelation that ultimately led to Nixons downfall. Ben Bradlee: How about the Boston Globe and the Catholic Church? It was also the fact that they were so different, and that they were lowly metro reporters. They were after us and The New York Times. 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. How old were you at the time of that break-in? It also made Woodward and Bernstein the most famous journalists of all time. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/woodward-and-bernstein, "Woodward and Bernstein Bob Woodward: We accused some people of things they didnt do that were based on some reports, written reports. Much of their hard work was a quest for access to anyone who knew the real secrets of the Nixon White House. And once you are convicted of a felony, you cant own television stations, so it would have cost us all the television stations. When you were a child, who most inspired you? I think they were really out to get to the bottom of the story. 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. Mr. Bradlee, what were your emotions when Nixon resigned? Woodward would only reveal his informant was an individual working in the Executive Branch. It was a takedown that transcended politics, transcended ideology. So you had a certain amount of independence? What in my business Ive found is that we basically do have a free press, that we can operate independently. Bob Woodward: Yes. ", After Watergate, Shepard says, the two went in "completely different directions. 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. So I dont make those kinds of assessments. }, First published on December 26, 2006 / 7:23 AM. "Woodward and Bernstein I called my father and said Im not going to law school, but have this job at a newspaper he had never heard of. Such speculation sometimes pointed to W. Mark Felt, a former senior FBI official. We had to be sure. police in blue helmets fought young people in the street, great men were gunned down in their prime. What is this secret government we have? The Iran-Contra Affair involved a secret foreign policy operation directed by White House officials in the national security counc, Truman, Harry S. The first report featuring the now legendary journalists came on June 19, 1972, two days after the break-ins and arrest of the conspirators (via Constitution Center). He is the author or co-author of seven books: All the President's Men, The Final Days, and The Secret Man, with Bob Woodward; His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time, with Marco Politi; Loyalties; A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton;[3] and Chasing History, a memoir of his early years in journalism. Instead, they wrote 'All the President's Men' and they sold the movie rights to Robert Redford. The team stole top-secret documents and wiretapped the phones to listen to conversations. We're lucky to have Woodward and Bernstein -- so young in 1972 -- still with us. Chris Pine finally sets the record straight, Oscars diversity improved after #OscarsSoWhite, study shows. In February the U.S. Senate voted seventy to zero to establish a committee of four Democrats and three Republicans to investigate the Watergate affair. Nixon didnt last too long in that second term. How would you summarize that? Would I run like that again?. 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. Carl Bernstein, born on February 14, 1944, in Washington, D.C., began part-time work at the Washington Star at the age of 16 and later dropped out of the University of Maryland to work full-time as a reporter. 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, Carl Bernstein and Ben Bradlee all confirmed Felts revelation. 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. 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. They show how Pakula came to view his protagonists. 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. By his own admission he failed at that". [23], Bernstein is a frequent guest and analyst on television news programs, and in 2011 wrote articles for Newsweek/The Daily Beast, comparing Rupert Murdoch's News of the World phone-hacking scandal to Watergate. Bob Woodward: And problems. 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. 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.". Mr. By June 17, 1972, what Hunter S. Thompson had famously called "the crest of a high and beautiful wave." of the 1960s had crashed and dissapiated. . 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. With the full support of their editor, Ben Bradlee, Woodward and Bernstein continued to pursue the story, and little by little uncovered a larger story of the abuse of power and the obstruction of justice. But their crimes unraveled in slow motion over those two years -- aided by one tough judge, a feistier Congress than we could comprehend today, and some skillful journalists, of whom Woodward and Bernstein became the most famous and best remembered. What books impressed you as a kid? It came out in the Ervin Committee hearings in the Senate. A community high school history teacher named Elizabeth Duncan who taught American history and was a great teacher. No surprises. That writing was actually on the wall the whole time. Bernstein and Woodward did not, all by themselves, bring about the destruction of the Nixon presidency, but some historians of the period do credit their early investigations with both informing and stimulating the official investigations by a special prosecutor, the courts, the Senate Watergate Committee, and the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives that eventually forced Nixon to resign when it was revealed that he had participated in the cover-up almost from the beginning. Tell us a little bit about what actually happened. Published in the late spring of 1974, All the President's Men was an immediate best seller. In the end, the real exceptionalism of Richard Nixon was merely that he was dumb enough to get caught. 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. Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post during Watergate, told me that Pakula spent so much time with each of us. Mr. Bradlee, when did it become clear to you that the Watergate break-in was something more than a simple burglary? They had this it looked like a local burglary at the Democratic Headquarters, a police story. Where were you born? Carl Milton Bernstein (/ b r n s t i n / BURN-steen; born February 14, 1944) is an American investigative journalist and author.While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Bernstein was teamed up with Bob Woodward, and the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal.These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual . There were other burglaries. [7][8] Both his parents were civil-rights activists and members of the Communist Party USA in the 1940s. 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. Knopf had a first printing of 275,000 copies. He worked at ABC, CNN, and CBS as a political commentator, and was a spokesman in various television commercials. When Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published their groundbreaking Watergate reporting that led to the resignation of former President Richard Nixon in 1974, the duo thought he would be the. Ben Bradlee: I was at The Washington Post, and I couldnt believe it. Whos going to get what lead and put it together? 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. All talk. He also felt compelled, as a reporter, to point out that Bernstein's remarks were . For me, the still powerful memories of Watergate have been supplanted by fresher ones. Thanks to their investigation and reporting, the American people had a deep look into Nixon's role in the break-ins and cover-ups. Most news outlets dropped the story, and Nixon was re-elected in a historic landslide. Ben Bradlee: Its a good story. Bernstein was the first to suspect that President Nixon was involved, and he found a laundered check that linked Nixon to the burglary. And redford was the one who shaped 'All the President's Men.' Refer to each styles convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. His parents were members of the Communist Party. 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. And he was the one who said that. He joined the Washington Post's metropolitan staff in 1971. One of the sources I can now reveal I mean, I have talked about was Senator Goldwater, who was a great friend of my wifes family, and I used to talk to him all the time. Whats secret? Underneath all the arguments and fights -- way down, they hated each other, Pakula wrote. You want it to be fair. Bob Woodward: Thats not humility, thats realism. Alicia Shepard fills in the gaps in her very candid book, "Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of. 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). Some people think I was in intelligence. He sat down with Woodward, then 32, Bernstein, then 31, their editors, their friends and the two women at the center of the reporters lives. Theres an example of incredibly good reporting over a long, protracted time period, laced with denials by the highest people in Boston society the Cardinals and the priests. What was that about? The assertion shocked some because even J. Edgar Hoover had tried and been unable to prove that Bernstein's parents had been party members. Famously portrayed by Dustin Hoffman (Bernstein) and Robert Redford (Woodward) in the 1976 movie classic All the Presidents Men, the pair are far from best buddies and though they did not sit together on the dais, it appears some ice has thawed. It was going to be reproduced in the history books, and we wanted to be sure that we got it right, and be sure that some there wasnt a typo. 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. The rest of them all got away with it. That really is what were all about. I covered the night police beat. Bob Woodward: Its the nature of the business. When we found out who had taken it out, it was Hunt, and everybody said, What the hell is Hunt doing taking a book on Teddy Kennedy. ON 9 August 1974, Richard Nixon arose in the White House and, after meeting briefly with the household staff a, Iran-Contra Affair Encyclopedia.com. He was a much better writer. Bob Woodward: Sure. 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). The best duos complement the other's strengths. 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. "Woodward and Bernstein He continued the story of presidential leadership and foreign policy in Obamas Wars (2010). She had the lawyers on the same phones. 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. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss are "still good friends", a source has insisted, despite rumours the pair might have fallen out. I have forgotten which one it was. He is now Assistant Managing Editor of the Post, and has written nearly a dozen bestselling books. Five burglars had been caught red-handed in the complex, where the Democratic National Committee had its headquarters; four of them turned out to be ex-CIA agents who did security work for the Republicans. 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. ", Fame, Shepard observed, "played a huge role in changing their lives forever. 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