How did it happen? Ben Bradlee: John Mitchell, Attorney General Mitchell. What in my business Ive found is that we basically do have a free press, that we can operate independently. Did you? and he said, No. And the whole town shook, as far as Im concerned, because that was the first time we had been accused of getting anything wrong. On the evening of June 16, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., discovered a piece of tape on the lock of the door that, Jaworski, Leon But we were the backwash of the Baby Boom. Maybe it was 16, but he had fully a decade-plus of experience under his belt. Compared to Woodward, Bernstein was a strong writer, and therefore wrote articles based on Woodward's information from Deep Throat. He said, Youre crazy. So he didnt think it was a good idea.. 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 had married reporter Francie Barnard, and . What the hell were they in there for? ." So it was the classic kind of Winesburg, Ohio small town. Carl tried his hand in television, at ABC News (and was a consultant at CBS News for awhile). 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 . What about you? It also made Woodward and Bernstein the most famous journalists of all time. Who played quite a role in the Watergate affair. He wanted to use the presidency as an instrument of personal revenge, to settle scores, too often, and thats not what the presidency is about. It was embarrassing that they had this great story and we didnt. He yelled, Stop! And when Redford wanted to film the movie in the Post, we told him he couldnt. Between June 1972 to November 1973, Felt spoke with Bob Woodward 17 times, originally confirming leads the pair found, but eventually, began to offer new information to the team. 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 looked like I was going to become a lawyer, and my father to a certain extent was my model. These actions would lead to his resignation in August 1974. But together they did something that neither one of them could do individually. A few weeks after receiving his bachelors degree in 1965, he entered the United States Navy for a four-year tour of duty. And there came a time when we had to get her, okay, and the lawyers started off by telling her the lawyer was one of the greatest men, even though he didnt approve of publishing it but the way he told her that was just so important. I covered the night police beat. Whereas the Bernstein and Woodward stories in the Washington Post had consisted of straight investigative reports, All the President's Men told not only the story of Watergate but the story of Woodward and Bernstein. Stop!, Bernstein recalled in a 1975 interview, now in Pakulas archive, that big crowds were outside. A judge told the Times they couldnt publish it, so a judge would tell us the same thing. We had such good sources. Landed at The Washington Post in 1971, had nine months reporting experience. In her interview with Pakula, Ephron tried to rehabilitate her boyfriends reputation. They show how Pakula came to view his protagonists. Bob Woodward: Sure. And in that same space of time, Woodward's written five books. In the series of stories that followed, Bernstein and Woodward eventually connected the burglars to a massive slush fund and a corrupt attorney general. Ben Bradlee: A book had been taken out of the library. We didnt allow any television people in. LHW is a shallow division, this cancellation was just adding insult to injury. Yes. So, yeah, I think they were friends. The American Academy of Achievements interview with Bob Woodward is combined with an interview with his longtime editor and mentor, Ben Bradlee (1921-2014). 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. Were you in intelligence? Ben Bradlee: Because the kids were right. Lets be sure for the record to say that it wasnt just the Post. In August 1974, President Nixon, facing near certain impeachment and conviction, resigned his office and accepted a blanket pardon for any actions he may have committed in office. How old were you at the time of that break-in? I say we publish it. And three of the journalists all hung up immediately, because we didnt want any we had what we came for, and we didnt want to let her change her mind. Not, "What did the president know and when did he know it? Following the 1972 arrests, journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post investigated the scandal relentlessly. Where the hell? Why did this happen? It has been said that as dark a chapter as Watergate was in the American presidency, in a sense, it showed the branches of government working. How did you do that? Ben Bradlee: Well, we were tired. Woodward and Bernstein reflect on Watergate and its place in American history. Ehrlichman? Mr. Woodward, there were mistakes made during Watergate, you have said in the book. However popular, the heroic-journalist myth is a vast exaggeration of the effect of their work. His writing was serious and matter-of-fact. It's the system. Im out there doing it, and if theres pressure or debate or controversy, theyre absorbing that pressure. And it was the origins of the tradition of every scandal after having the suffix, "gate" added onto it at the end of its title to stress how important it is. 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. Robert Redford played Woodward; Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein. Im thinking of the bookAs I Lay Dying, which is from all different characters points of view, like interviewing people for a story. We're lucky to have Woodward and Bernstein -- so young in 1972 -- still with us. display: none; Since 2003, he has written four books on President George W. Bushs conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: Bush at War, Plan of Attack, State of Denial and The War Within. 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. 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. 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. The book drew upon the notes and research accumulated while writing articles about the scandal for the Post and "remained on best-seller lists for six months". I called my father and said Im not going to law school, but have this job at a newspaper he had never heard of. You mentioned Faulkner. Watergate reporters come together to discuss the 40-year-old scandal which resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Bernstein's biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton, A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, was published by Alfred A. Knopf on June 5, 2007. 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. Who would be dumb enough to work on this story on a Saturday morning? And they thought of me immediately. And once you are convicted of a felony, you cant own television stations, so it would have cost us all the television stations. 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 ). And no one goes back or slows down or digs enough, particularly me. Like most media myths, the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate rests on a foundation of simplicity. Bob Woodward: Oh, yes. We want to thank you for talking with us today. Soon other newspapers began to investigate the Watergate story more energetically, and legislative and judicial agencies began to uncover a larger and larger pattern of lawbreaking. You could feel that they took not an adversarial position toward government, but a position of skepticism, a position of there is accountability reporting. police in blue helmets fought young people in the street, great men were gunned down in their prime. Within a year, his byline was appearing on the front page. Woodwards critics insisted that this informant was a fabrication, or at best, a composite based on a number of sources. I remember going around and giving my name to lots of people, and they would say, Oh, youre Al Woodwards son. How did we get into committing 500,000 troops 10,000 miles away in a way that we could never win? This was the lesson of Watergate: Nixon Exceptionalism, that the 37th president was so "uniquely and pervasively" corrupt that the fair and decent American "system worked" and removed him on the basis of the objective, indisputable fact of his evil. Nixon was a full-blown hater, and if you listen to the tapes, its chilling and frightening. The dichotomy intrigued Pakula. I can't tell you how many times back then that Americans -- looking for a silver lining in the cloud of Watergate -- uttered this phrase: "The system worked." Without them, he likely would have served out his presidential term. Dont tell me never. And I remember thinking and feeling quite motivated that she was saying the standard here is the bar is quite high. Raised in a traditional Republican household, Woodward was very well-educated and has been described as gentle. ", To read excerpts, click here. 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. You want to spend time on it. At that period, what did you like to read? How would you summarize that? For example, the newspapers publisher during Watergate, Katharine Graham, pointedly rejected that interpretation during a program 25 years ago at the now-defunct Newseum in suburban Virginia. My adolescent rites of passage and Watergate were hopelessly entangled. Most of us had quite fancy security clearances in that capacity. While Bernstein was surprised by how mythical Deep Throat became in American pop culture, he remains as much of a part of the Watergate story as Woodward and Bernstein. Sometimes I was thought to be the more cautious one, but Carl (Bernstein) could be cautious, and I could be aggressive or overly aggressive. It was a White House operation. The movie All the Presidents Men placed Woodward and Bernstein at the decisive center of Watergates unraveling. But glaring gaps remain. display: block; 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. People had troubles, and people had secrets. In 1976, All the President's Men was made into a smash Hollywood movie, starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, that won four Academy Awards. Bob Woodward: If somebody came from Mars to America and went around for months or years, and then you asked them who has the best jobs, they would say the journalists, because the journalists get to make momentary entries into peoples lives when they are interesting, and get out when they cease to be interesting. You have kids who werent born at that time doing term papers on it at colleges and high schools. Mr. Woodward, once you heard one of the burglars say he worked for the CIA, where did you take it from there? A day prior, another Washington Post journalist got the first swing at what would become the story of the decade. Bernstein was born to a secular Jewish family in Washington, D.C.,[4][5][6] the son of Sylvia (ne Walker) and Alfred Bernstein. Hoffman was running down an empty street, chasing after Redfords gray Volvo as it pulled out of the Post parking lot. 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]. And she decided to do it. 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. He attended Yale University on a Naval ROTC scholarship, and majored in history and English literature. And I called my father, who was a judge at that point, or about to become a judge, and said, Im not going to law school, but have this job at a newspaper he had never heard of. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. You get to see other peoples lives, and you chart the rise and fall of others, and youre not that involved. He said, Youre crazy. And at the same time, it was my decision. He joined the Washington Post's metropolitan staff in 1971. Together, they became Hollywood icons. Mr. President, the media is not fake news. George W. Bush's Iraq War, in particular, was enabled by a docile press corps and by a feckless generation of lawmakers and judges -- largely the generation that came of age when I did, during those languid Watergate summers. Perfect. 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.". 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. What were some of the mistakes? But she finally said, Well, okay. White bread. 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? Vertalingen van het uitdrukking IK BEN BOB WOODWARD van nederlands naar engels en voorbeelden van het gebruik van "IK BEN BOB WOODWARD" in een zin met hun vertalingen: En ik ben Bob Woodward .. What made you back the kids, Woodward and Bernstein? He had gone to Vietnam as a soldier, so he had fought in Vietnam, but he got convinced that it was a quagmire and that it was a great mistake and that by releasing this study, he could shine light into the darkest corners and change the course of the world. Where do you work? Mitchell? 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. While single, in the 1980s, Bernstein became known for dating Bianca Jagger, Martha Stewart, and Elizabeth Taylor,[16] among others. Can he get the hurt and vulnerability?, Throughout filming in 1975, if there was a question on how Woodward or Bernstein might react, Redford or Hoffman or Pakula called either man. See also Myron J. Smith, Watergate: An Annotated Bibliography (1983).Updated information gathered from simonsays.com, an online service. Sometimes, people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didnt do, and shouldnt have done,Graham said. He just had a psychosis about being controlled by authority figures. His unfounded fear of being fired and his need to belong fueled his workaholic lifestyle. 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. "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. [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. In the end, the real exceptionalism of Richard Nixon was merely that he was dumb enough to get caught. Sunburned from swimming laps in the forced labor of summer recreation camp, I raced home so I could catch John Dean's afternoon testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, and the next summer I read the paperback version of the committee's report by flashlight at a campground along the Delaware River, while raccoons scurried under my tent. And she said, When will we know the full story of Watergate? Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. www.8days.sg So you are dealing a glancing blow to whats out there. Bob Woodward: Or The Sound and the Fury, which is his great book. Where were you when he resigned, and what were your feelings? The team stole top-secret documents and wiretapped the phones to listen to conversations. Yes. You have to remember that the Attorney General, who prosecuted us was the first and only Attorney General in the history of the United States to go to jail. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. President Nixon attempted to use the office of the presidency to cover up the crimes and his involvement with any break-ins. 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. There were 7,000 papers finally, and The New York Times got a copy of it. Tell us a little bit about what actually happened. 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. [12][13], In 1965, Bernstein left the Star to become a full-time reporter for the Elizabeth Daily Journal in New Jersey. He was ten months further along in his career than Woodward when the scandal broke out. Woodward noted how Bernstein had taught him about the importance of being very aggressive, and recalled how Bernstein had clambered aboard a full cab with the Watergate burglars lawyers to get information and borrowed $20 from Woodward, which he did not return. The rest of them all got away with it. Woodward! Alicia Shepard fills in the gaps in her very candid book, "Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate.". Few in the room. In a very different summer -- 2011 -- I had the good fortune to visit Spain with my family shortly before sending my daughter off to college. Do you think being the oldest had an influence on your life? But the following morning, Dan Schorr of CBS we saw on CBS Morning News shoved a microphone in front of this guy and said, The Post says you did this. 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. So we did, and there was no threat to the national security, and information, truth, is not a threat to security, and we believed that. On September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for any crimes he might have committed while in office, thereby cutting off further criminal investigation of the former president. Yet I knew that he was right.. That we do explain enough about whats going on. Chris Pine finally sets the record straight, Oscars diversity improved after #OscarsSoWhite, study shows. He also felt compelled, as a reporter, to point out that Bernstein's remarks were . There was even a movie made about the scandal and their role in it, "All The President's Men.". Sometimes, Felt would speak on the phone, but on other occasions, he would meet Woodward in a parking garage in Virginia. This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in and, of. Are you and Bernstein still friends? Together, they followed the story and co-wrote the best-seller, "All the President's Men.". But as Pakula began to understand Woodward, he wondered if the charming, handsome Redford, then 39, could play someone so different from himself. And a college dropout. The Supreme Court ordered the president to turn over his tapes, which really sunk him the smoking gun tapes at the end. Get to the bottom of it.. Some people haven't seen it yet. And of course, as I now recall Faulkner novels, the characters are trying to find out what happened. As a teen, he was a "pool shark," a leader of the Jewish service organization B'nai Brith, and a copyboy at The Washington Star. Were there particular teachers or relatives? (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.). [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. 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. The shadowy man was the compass to point the journalist duo in the right direction. After graduating from Yale University, he joined The Washington Post; nine months later, he was assigned the Watergate break-in story. Bob Woodward: Sure. Published in the late spring of 1974, All the President's Men was an immediate best seller. John Dean's afternoon testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, the crest of a high and beautiful wave.", They wrote that history has shown that Watergate was even worse than we thought it was at the time, they seemed blind to the reality that Felt wasn't motivated by an altruistic loyalty to the nation or the truth but by blind career ambition and petty revenge, 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, Bob Woodward was at the very head of that pack. 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. The heroic-journalist myth, which began taking hold even before Nixon resigned, has been sustained by three related influences. 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. At 2 a.m. yesterday, the Watergate scandal turned 40. 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. Did they support you, or did they think it was a little strange? And of course, Muskie was going to be the strong candidate against Nixon. Bob Woodward: I was not married at the time and loved being free to do something. 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. Were much better friends than we were at the time. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Thanks for contacting us. Writers or journalists who inspired you? It was the first film I ever made like this, Hoffman told me. It came out in the Ervin Committee hearings in the Senate. Then and certainly today, there is still much debate about whether confidential informants are ethically viable due to their hidden identities. The burglary was revealed as part of an extensive program of political espionage and sabotage run by Nixon subordinates at the White House and its political campaign organization, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, or, as referred to in most later press coverage, CREEP). Ben Bradlee: From Daniel Ellsberg. Available for both RF and RM licensing. 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. So I did not have two years experience. Watergate was the biggest political scandal of the century. If you need to flag this entry as abusive. The whole reputation of the paper was hanging on that by the time. For example, talk about how it affected Muskie. They publicly tied prominent Washington figures, such as Nixons former attorney general, John Mitchell, to the scandal. I can tell you exactly where it was the night when it all went down, when those burglars were arrested inside the Watergate Hotel.