He continued the story of presidential leadership and foreign policy in Obamas Wars (2010). If you need to flag this entry as abusive. Journalists honor free press at Correspondents' Dinner wit 11-year-old reads aloud from 'pornographic' book he checked out from library at school board meeting, Canadian teacher with size-Z prosthetic breasts placed on paid leave, Mike McCarthy shreds ex-Cowboys coordinator after firing, 2023 Billboard Women in Music Awards: Lana Del Ray, Kim Petras, & more, RHOA star Drew Sidora accuses ex Ralph Pittman of cheating, mental abuse, Original Gone With The Wind script reveals secret war over slavery, cut scenes, Sunny Hostin Points Finger at China for COVID Crisis: Did Not Cooperate With the International Community, Kanye West and 'wife' Bianca Censori look surprisingly happy on dinner date. I mean, he was no rank amateur himself. 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. And no one goes back or slows down or digs enough, particularly me. 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. Are there particular books that you remember? Then and certainly today, there is still much debate about whether confidential informants are ethically viable due to their hidden identities. He wanted to understand Woodward and Bernstein deeply so he could capture their true characters and motivations for the movie. Each of these presidents had their own way of responding. The arrest of the Watergate burglars may have happened in the dead of night, but what came in the months ahead was truly an awakening. So you would not go from the CIA to the White House instantly, but within several days, through the work of another reporter, we learned there was this cryptic entry in the address books of two of the five burglars that very simply said H. Raised in a traditional Republican household, Woodward was very well-educated and has been described as gentle. TIME magazine has calledAll the Presidents Men perhaps the most influential piece of journalism in history. A second book by Woodward and Bernstein on the collapse of the Nixon administration, The Final Days, was also a huge success. Most of them didnt realize that the world had changed. We had Watergate. This button displays the currently selected search type. Its not clear, its obscure. [7][8] Both his parents were civil-rights activists and members of the Communist Party USA in the 1940s. We were told that before we could write it, but yes, we knew it. 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. The Watergate scandal may officially date to June 17, 1972, but August 8, 1974 was truly the night they drove ol' Dixie down, as it were; I watched with a sense of awe and disbelief on a 13-inch black-and-white set as our President Nixon resigned, refusing to go to bed, watching his "political obituary" until they finally signed off and played the Star Spangled Banner at 2 a.m. By the time the movie of "All the President's Men" -- the tale of how Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke some of the big stories of Watergate -- hit the theaters, I was 17 and seeing it with my first girlfriend. (They later discovered that Sloan meant to communicate to them that Haldeman was guilty, but that Sloan had not said so to the grand jury because he had not been asked.) These were the values, after all, that purged America of the evil Richard Nixon -- not the dirty (bleep)ing hippies. In their dogged reporting of the Watergate scandal, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the crimes that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in August 1974. 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. Bernstein's career since Watergate has continued to focus on the theme of the use and abuse of power via books and magazine articles. At that period, what did you like to read? Didnt you have a chat with the Posts publisher, Katharine Graham, in the midst of all of this? Bernstein was among three CNN reporters who last . Bob Woodward: Well, of course, what Faulkner is trying to do is get to the interior, and in the end, as a journalist, you are trying to get to the interior. He always saw me as a lawyer. Think of that! 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. When the Post persevered with the investigation, President Nixon induced the FCC to challenge the licenses of the Posts television stations. 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. 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 Yes. There were other burglaries. We missed the first edition, but we published it the second edition, which came out at 11 oclock at night, 11:30. Mitchell? The third vital member of the team of Woodward and Bernstein is the mysterious figure known as "Deep Throat." Together, they became Hollywood icons. How do I pay someone back, either good or bad, for what they have done to me?. And she decided to do it. Bob Woodward: As defendants, as tax cases, divorce cases, the full catastrophe of litigation. 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. 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. I mean, I believed it, because it was I knew it was coming. But together they did something that neither one of them could do individually. And there we watched thousands of "indignados" flood the streets of Madrid, the precursor to Occupy Wall Street back home. No surprises. . His father was a judge and Woodward eventually entered the Navy after graduating from Yale. It was one of those families that was glued together.. 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. Encyclopedias almanacs transcripts and maps. With astonishing regularity, Woodward has continued to produce bestselling books on previously hidden aspects of American life. You have kids who werent born at that time doing term papers on it at colleges and high schools. Deep Throat is the pseudonym given to the secret informant who provided information in 1972 to Bob Woodward, who shared it with Carl Bernstein.Woodward and Bernstein were reporters for The Washington Post, and Deep Throat provided key details about the involvement of U.S. president Richard Nixon's administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal. It was a White House operation. But even they seemed to take the wrong lessons from what they'd done. What made you decide that this had to be done? 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. These guys lied because they didnt know the truth, and they couldnt believe that they were being lied to. The rest of them all got away with it. 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 ). Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president on August 9. In general, Shepard said, "They had a hard time. (Spiro Agnew, who had been elected as Nixon's vice president in 1968 and 1972, had resigned in October 1973 after pleading no contest to a charge of tax evasion.). Nixon was a full-blown hater, and if you listen to the tapes, its chilling and frightening. Mr. Woodward, in your bookShadowyou talk about how Nixons presidency affected the presidents whove come since. Fresh out of the Navy, Bob Woodward washed out in his first attempt to work for The Washington Post, and went to work for a tiny suburban weekly. And he was the one who said that. A judge told the Times they couldnt publish it, so a judge would tell us the same thing. I got there just as Hoffman broke from the building. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/woodward-and-bernstein, "Woodward and Bernstein To many, the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, where the burglars were bugging phones that belonged to the Democratic National Committee, and the ensuing cover-up still don't make sense. From the age of 13 to 15, I embraced the scandal with all the geek force that puberty could muster. Had he been Deep Throat, he once told a Connecticut newspaper, I would have done better. By his own admission he failed at that". Margaret later became a government minister in her own right. Nixon didnt last too long in that second term. But in his interview with Woodward, Pakula discovered that the reporter could surprise: Other peoples secrets fascinated and obsessed him. Where were you born? 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. 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. His works to date include The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court; The Man Who Would Be President: Dan Quayle; Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi; Veil: The Secret Ways of the CIA; The Commanders, a look inside the decision-making process behind the 1991 Persian Gulf War; The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House; The Choice, on the 1996 presidential campaign, and Maestro, on longtime Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. 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.. What other American journalist could do that? Bob Woodward: And problems. Somebody who through force of personality made history interesting and important. The truth that few wanted to confront was Nixon wasn't really unique at all -- just a peculiarly rotten and inept defender of a system, the national security state, that actually didn't work at all, that was corrupt to its very core. That goes back to the idea of family secrets. } Ben Bradlee: Nixon himself? 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. 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