4

The Washington Press Corps: Nixon as News Manager

The air was thick with lies, and the president was the lead liar.

—Ben Bradlee, A Good Life¹

Senator Sam Ervin, Democrat of North Carolina, banged his gavel, silencing the Senate Caucus Room. A fervent civil libertarian, given to quoting Shakespeare, the Bible, and America’s founders, the crusty, graying Ervin had called a round of committee hearings because Richard Nixon’s recent abuses of power had made him fear that “the Constitution’s guarantee of a free press” might be “on its deathbed.” Over the next weeks, a parade of famous figures came before Ervin’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, speaking of the administration’s failed lawsuit to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers and Vice President Spiro Agnew’s lacerating attacks on the news media. One witness after another echoed Ervin’s worry that American freedom was in jeopardy.²

The now forgotten hearings that Ervin held in the fall of 1971 on Nixon’s crusade against the media failed to bring him the fame he later achieved as the head of the Senate’s Watergate investigation. But he did attract a flurry of attention with his procession of journalists, news executives, and First Amendment experts, including NBC president Julian Goodman, CBS president Frank Stanton, and even the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite, whose appearance packed the caucus room.³ And although Ervin’s hearings proved inconsequential, the mere fact that in September 1971 an influential senator was investigating—or at least grandstanding about—this issue meant that presidential press relations had reached a point of crisis.

Ervin’s witnesses voiced a growing sense among Washington journalists that Nixon was waging an unprecedented war against them. In a slew of articles, books, and public and private comments, reporters bemoaned the president’s campaign of evasions, attacks, propaganda, and abuses of power designed to control the news.⁴ These reporters struggled with a range of administration offensives, from routine wrangles with the notoriously evasive White House press secretary Ron Ziegler to the secret tapping of their telephones. From these daily fights, they formed a picture of Nixon as a consummate manager of the news. Leading newsmen said as much. Accepting the “Broadcaster of the Year” award in 1971, Cronkite labeled Nixon’s anti-press campaign “a grand conspiracy.” On The Dick Cavett Show, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee charged that “the First Amendment is in greater danger than any time I’ve seen it.” The National Press Club convened a blue-ribbon panel, which ultimately found Nixon guilty of “an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information” and “discredit the press.” All of this happened before Watergate.⁵

Some Nixon aides later owned up to their zealotry. “We used to watch the news broadcasts and go up the walls at what we thought was unfair coverage of Nixon,” recalled Chuck Colson, who described his efforts to strong-arm CBS executives into gentler treatment. “We did often lie, mislead, deceive, try to use [the press], and to con them,” wrote speechwriter Ray Price, “and I could appreciate their resentment.” William Safire recalled that Nixon told him often that “the press is the enemy . . . to be hated and beaten”—an attitude Safire called “neither justifiable nor defensible.” Nixon, too, admitted to his belligerence, even as he justified it. “I was prepared to have to do combat with the media,” he wrote in his memoirs, “in order to get my views and my programs to the people.”⁶

Not everyone considered the press the victim in the fight. Nixon and his aides saw themselves as the ones under attack. Nixon had long believed that reporters hated him and treated him unfairly. He considered his actions, however draconian, to be reasonable responses to their distortions. (In fact, until Watergate, Nixon received no worse, and sometimes better, coverage than other candidates or presidents.)⁷ The president’s lieutenants agreed, as did many of his constituents. Nixon struck political gold when he, Agnew, and other officials decried the media as a biased, out-of-touch, liberal elite.⁸

Reporters wavered over how to respond. Beholden to a professional code that taught them to prize objectivity, they often bent over backward to be fair. Concerned about their credibility, they flaunted their new penchant for self-criticism. But reporters realized, too, that their pursuit of objectivity had in the past left them vulnerable to government manipulation; now, touched by the tenor of the times, many hearkened instead to a competing tradition—muckraking—which dictated that they distrust official answers and stake out an adversarial stance. White House correspondents took it upon themselves, as one put it later, to “compel the government to explain and justify what it’s doing,” to serve as “the permanent in-house critics of government”—although typically this adversarialism manifested itself not in productive reporting but simply in a snide, captious tone.⁹ Throughout Nixon’s presidency, journalists seesawed between these approaches, sometimes bathing Nixon in flattery, sometimes riding him mercilessly.

The reporters’ image of Nixon as a nefarious manager of the news was forged in the daily struggles of their work. It was also shaped by their own professional (as opposed to ideological) assumptions. In recent years their power had made them what Douglass Cater called “the fourth branch of government”—independent of the state, yet part of the nation’s governing class, with an important role to play in American democracy.¹⁰ Jealous of their status, they read Nixon’s attacks as an assault on the First Amendment.

The reporters’ picture of Nixon as a news manager at first produced just inside-the-profession squabbling. But during Watergate, their critique of Nixon deepened. As his comments became harder and harder to explain except as deliberate falsehoods, Nixon the scourge of the press turned into Nixon the liar, and then into Nixon the crook. These images, building on existing images of Tricky Dick and Nixon the conspirator or tyrant, eventually became permanently attached to the president. The triumph was ironic, since it suggested that, despite Nixon’s efforts to control the news, reporters were much less vulnerable to manipulation than they claimed or perhaps realized. It was their views of Nixon and of the events of his presidency, not Nixon’s, that came to be shared by most Americans. For all their protests about Nixon’s manipulation of the media, their interpretations of the president ultimately proved far more influential and enduring than his own.

That the White House press corps had swollen into a bloated institution by Nixon’s presidency was evident to everyone who traveled on his first overseas trip. In February 1969, Nixon left for Europe with a retinue of two hundred journalists, all clamoring and clambering after the same few shards of information. At more than $2,000 per person for the eight-day excursion (almost $10,000 today), the newspapers and networks were bound not to get their money’s worth. No breakthroughs were about to happen, and few chances arose to report original stories. The gaggle of regulars simply tailed Nixon from one capital to another, relaying the gist of the administration’s press releases. This was exactly what Nixon wanted.¹¹

The European trip showed in microcosm what had become a reporter’s occupational hazard since the White House press corps had become an institution. Washington-based correspondents had covered the president ever since the capital was established in 1800, but only toward the end of the nineteenth century did they congeal into a profession, founding societies like the Gridiron Club in 1885 and the National Press Club in 1908 to certify their identity. With the twentieth-century explosion of government, the White House press corps became an entity unto itself. Theodore Roosevelt opened a White House press room and invited correspondents to hear him hold forth during his afternoon shave. He feuded with reporters too, lashing out at “the man with the muckrake,” thus baptizing an era and a genre of journalism.¹²

Professional routines emerged. Most important was the press conference, which Woodrow Wilson introduced and which underscored the new institutionalized nature of the relationship between president and press. FDR turned it into a regular duty for reporters, and Truman held parleys in the Executive Office Building once a week, having moved them from the Oval Office to accommodate a corps that had grown to 150 scribes. Eisenhower recognized the importance of television and filmed his press conferences for broadcast (after editing). Kennedy pioneered the live conference, with spectacular success.¹³

As part of the power structure, political reporters found that their own role in shaping events became “the object of curious scrutiny,” as Douglass Cater wrote in 1959. Much of this scrutiny centered on how they could resist governmental efforts to control them. Journalists had always denounced attempts to restrict the news, but after World War II technological innovation and the government’s growth made the worry into an obsession. Echoing the era’s intellectuals, reporters feared not censorship but manipulation that might render them unwitting conduits for propaganda. They viewed Eisenhower’s ungrammatical obfuscations as Orwellian doublespeak, and his press secretary James Hagerty’s insinuating charm as a narcotic that numbed them to the restriction of news. Joe McCarthy’s exploitation of their commitment to objectivity was even more troublesome. They saw how the senator leveled wild charges, which they, feeling obliged to be neutral, would publish uncritically and thus vest with legitimacy. Rules of reporting, far from serving truth, abetted falsity. Reporters ended up giving “the lie the same prominence [as] truth,” Eric Sevareid wrote, and elevating “the influence of fools to that of wise men . . . the evil to the level of the good.” Such fears led to congressional hearings in 1955, at which The New York Times’s James Reston warned of “the growing tendency to manage the news”—making “news management” a buzzword for the age.¹⁴

The Vietnam War occasioned more introspection, as journalists pondered how to contend with routine lying from the government. Lyndon Johnson’s “credibility gap” yawned wide. “It was not that President Johnson tried to manage the news: all politicians try to do that,” wrote Washington Post columnist David Broder, then emerging as the dean of Washington journalism. “It was that in a systematic way he attempted to close down the channels of information . . . so that decisions could be made without public debate.” Reporters saw themselves as embattled truth-seekers fighting the president’s vast public relations machine. In 1968, one society of journalists proclaimed in a report that “secrecy, lies, half-truths, deception” had become their “daily fare” and charged Johnson with “perhaps the worst record for credibility . . . in our history.” Nixon, whose devotion to secrecy and enthusiasm for public relations dwarfed even Johnson’s, would surpass that dubious achievement.¹⁵

Reporters were responding to more than deception. The very development of mechanisms for handling a burgeoning press corps in a complex society troubled them. By the late 1960s a reporter’s daily schedule encompassed, as the White House reporter and frequent press critic Jules Witcover described it, “an endless round of press conferences, . . . a dreary buffet of routine announcements and elaborately fortified justifications.” News came packaged, and the demands of deadlines made it tempting to sign for the parcel. Reporters rarely felt good about such compromises and strained at the strictures of their trade. They were influenced, too, by the 1960s spirit of defiance of authority. Journalism had always vaunted inquisitiveness, impertinence, and doubt, but the Sixties gave those values added cachet.¹⁶

Some critics crudely ascribed this adversarialism to politics. Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, like the president himself, believed journalism was teeming with liberal Democrats whose biases skewed their reports. Slightly more nuanced was the view of the administration’s other Pat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the president’s adviser for urban affairs and all-purpose policy guru. Moynihan argued that Washington reporters, once the products of working-class backgrounds, now hailed from the liberal intellectual elite. Raised in well-to-do communities, schooled at liberal-arts colleges, they inhabited, Moynihan said (using Lionel Trilling’s phrase), an “adversary culture” that aimed “to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise” society.¹⁷

Cultural differences undeniably divided the press corps from administration aides, especially after Nixon took office. The clash, wrote the Post’s Meg Greenfield, was “more traumatic” than any “since Pizarro first dropped in on the Incas.” Nixon’s staffers mostly came from conservative regions, had careers in advertising and business, and favored short hair and dark suits. Reporters were self-consciously urbane, and each side viewed the other with curiosity if not contempt. Still, Moynihan and Buchanan were wrong to see a bald political agenda at work. As journalists attested, professional goals—getting a scoop, asking a revealing question, writing a talked-about column—mattered more to them than political goals.^* Although reporters did tend to be liberal Democrats and an ideological bias could sometimes be detected their coverage, partisan loyalties couldn’t explain the similar drubbing that Lyndon Johnson had endured, and countercultural sympathies certainly didn’t extend to the older reporters and editors who still called the shots in newsrooms. Moreover, while some talked of jettisoning hoary values like objectivity, few did so. (“Take out the goddamn editorializing!” The New York Times’s managing editor A. M. Rosenthal was known to howl.) Instead, they tried to reconcile unpoliticized reporting with skepticism toward officialdom. A more knowing and opinionated tone resulted. Journalists now sought to convey the motives behind an act, the likely impact of a proposal, an occasional value judgment.¹⁸

Experiments in news writing emerged: the virtuosic innovations of the “New Journalism,” which tossed out the reporter’s well-thumbed rulebook in favor of brash subjectivity and chatty or stylized language;¹⁹ investigative reporting—adopted at Newsday, The Washington Post, and CBS’s 60 Minutes—which assigned teams to long-term stories to overcome official deceptions;²⁰ and “advocacy journalism,” a hybrid of the two that produced such exposés as a Ramparts report on the CIA’s funding of a national student group or Seymour Hersh’s account of the My Lai Massacre in The New York Review of Books.²¹ Soon the young Turks were winning praises and prizes. Fitfully, the Washington press corps was shedding its clubbiness and coziness as front-line reporters increasingly confronted officials head-on.

Partly as a result of their new posture, journalists too were now suffering from the distrust of institutions. Polls showed record lows in esteem for the Fourth Estate. Much of the public doubted the press’s objectivity, complaining of biased reporting during the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Reporters, in response, embraced self-criticism as never before. If Americans viewed the press not as neutral messengers but as self-interested political actors—as a fourth branch of government—then the press had to be written about critically. Journalism reviews proliferated, and newspapers hired in-house ombudsmen tasked with second-guessing their reporters’ and editors’ decisions.²²

“It was Nixon’s misfortune to be in office when both ‘advocacy journalism’ and the notion that the media should be ‘adversary’ to the government enjoyed their greatest modern-day vogue,” wrote Ray Price.²³ Price was partially correct. The press corps was embracing its position as an adversary; but that embrace, though vigorous at times, was at other times quite reluctant. Facing public criticism, reporters wished to preserve their reputation for integrity even as they sought to escape the confines of workaday journalism. In their erratic treatment of Richard Nixon—sometimes fawning, sometimes hostile—this seesawing, ambivalent response would make itself felt.

Suspicious by nature, Richard Nixon always distrusted the press. But the press, contrary to his assertions, did not hate him, at least not as much as he thought. Early in his career, reporters lauded him as an ascendant star. Local California papers, notably the Los Angeles Times, hastened his rise. As a congressman, he soaked up the press corps’ flattery. Coverage of the Hiss case generally portrayed him, contrary to his later recollections, as a hero. Time magazine’s Hedley Donovan, typical of his peers, remembered the early Nixon as “swift and coldly analytical” in his intelligence and “many cuts above Joe McCarthy” in his anti-communism—though Donovan added, in an understatement, “I was not captivated aesthetically.” Apart from muckrakers like Drew Pearson or die-hard liberals like those at the New York Post, the press in the 1950s remained balanced in writing about Nixon.²⁴

Members of the Washington press corps, after all, believed their job wasn’t to advocate but to report. They prided themselves on keeping ideology out of their copy. The New York Herald Tribune’s Earl Mazo recalled that when he began a biography of Nixon, he “despised” the man and set out “to cut him up.” But he was a reporter first and foremost, Mazo added, and “I wanted to do it honestly. So I started researching. . . . I found out that so much of what I knew to be total fact, had rated as fact, even written as fact, was just total horseshit. And this alarmed me as a political reporter. . . . I ended up . . . having an enormous amount of respect for the guy.” Mazo’s final product reflected his admiration for Nixon, even as it also acknowledged his enemies’ complaints.²⁵

Nixon, alas, couldn’t distinguish between a skeptical news item motivated by legitimate journalistic concern and a political (or personal) attack. “He took everything critical as a personal blast at him,” William Safire wrote. The scrutiny he received during the 1952 fund crisis confirmed his view of “the press” as a monolithic foe. Although most papers applauded his Checkers speech, his roughing-up led him to conclude that the press had inflated the crisis. Thereafter, he nursed a grudge. When reporters were late for the campaign bus or plane, his adviser Ted Rogers remembered, Nixon would say, “Fuck ’em, we don’t need them,” and start the engine.²⁶

Nixon held reporters at arm’s length. His lingering anger kept him resentful, while his awkwardness made it hard for him to befriend all save a few ideological kinsmen. Hence a self-fulfilling prophecy: Few reporters felt any warmth from Nixon, and the discomfort, not any political disagreement, fostered a distrust. This was an altogether different kind of aversion from the liberals’ hatred—even if Nixon never understood the distinction. “My dislike had nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with the kind of guy he was,” recalled Jack Germond, who covered Nixon from 1954 through his presidency. “He was not someone with whom a reporter would choose to have a friendly jar at the end of the day. He was always posing.” Columnist Carl Rowan recalled that during his first interview with Nixon in 1960, “He kept crossing and uncrossing his legs. He almost never looked me in the eye, acting as though he were reading answers to my questions off the wall or ceiling.”²⁷

Throughout the 1960 presidential race, Nixon shut himself off from reporters, who discovered it was more fun to travel with Kennedy’s entourage anyway. On Kennedy’s plane they sang songs and told jokes, often at Nixon’s expense. “We want Quemoy/ We want Matsu/ We want Nixon/To be their president,” went one riff on a Nixon campaign jingle. Nixon’s resentment burst forth two years later after losing yet another race, to Pat Brown for governor of California. In November 1962, in what he called his “last press conference,” Nixon sneered at “all the members of the press [who] are so delighted that I have lost,” and berated them for slanted coverage.^† Although that speech was more subdued than many would later recall, Nixon’s bluntness etched in their memories the image of a man who regarded them as an implacable foe.²⁸

From his experience with the media, Nixon might have drawn either of two lessons. He might have inferred that it behooves politicians to curry favor with reporters, as Roosevelt and Kennedy did, and that his strong-arm approach only created bad press. Instead, he concluded the opposite: that shutting out the media worked. The Checkers speech succeeded because, as he wrote in Six Crises, he opted “to tell [his] story directly to the people rather than funnel it to them through a press account.”²⁹ He liked the televised speech, in which he could decide how he appeared. He ran his 1968 campaign accordingly.

Nixon expected to face hostility in 1968. Early campaign notices, however, were sympathetic. Reporters assigned to him were too young to harbor grudges; older ones, as Nixon perceived it, “had a guilt complex about their inaccuracy” in the past and repented through softer coverage. John Herbers of The New York Times found Nixon to be pleasant and effective. “In one story I began, ‘You couldn’t find a nicer man in North Dakota today then Richard M. Nixon,’” he recalled with self-mocking disbelief years later. Early in his 1968 bid, Nixon acknowledged to Jules Witcover that since 1962, reporters had been “generally accurate and far more respectful” toward him.³⁰

Nixon reciprocated with attempts, however inept, at small talk. The newsmen rewarded these game efforts. They declined to interrogate him about, among other things, his unspecified plan to end the Vietnam War. Later, they would rue their generosity. “In retrospect, I find our failure mind-boggling,” Germond wrote. “Nonetheless, at the time it seemed to be a natural evolution of our general feeling that Nixon had been treated harshly in the past, if not by us then by others in our role, and was entitled to a fresh start.”³¹

Meanwhile, old hands decreed that Nixon had learned humility. Talk of a “New Nixon,” common in the late Fifties, resurfaced. “I believe that there really is a ‘new Nixon,’” wrote Walter Lippmann, using the standard adjectives, “a maturer and mellower man who is no longer clawing his way to the top.” Theodore H. White, whose Making of the President 1960 had tapped a public appetite for behind-the-scenes reporting, seconded the idea: “One heard a 1968 Nixon quite different from the 1960 Nixon. The snarl and self-pity . . . were gone . . . what was left was genuine and authentic, true to the inner man.” Even the adversarial Norman Mailer agreed. Having loathed Nixon since the Checkers speech, Mailer now professed that the battle-scarred veteran had earned his respect. Admiring the candidate’s fielding of questions at a press conference, Mailer saw in Nixon “the sure, modest moves of an old shortstop. . . . His modesty was not without real dignity.”³²

Most striking was the discovery of Nixon’s sense of humor. Known for his seriousness—Hunter Thompson once wrote that he couldn’t imagine Nixon laughing “except maybe [at] a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn’t quite reach the lever”—Nixon was now said to be able even to laugh at himself. When he appeared on Laugh-In during the campaign to say, “Sock it to me,” the gesture was applauded as proof of his newfound capacity for self-deprecation.³³

Perhaps the most significant endorsement came from The New York Times’s Nixon man, Robert Semple, Jr. A buttoned-down Republican who had graduated from Andover and Yale, Semple was a rising star at the paper. He subscribed to “the rules” at the Times that demanded objectivity—“they’re good rules,” he insisted—and, unlike his scrappier colleagues, balked at introducing opinion into his pieces. “I think there’s such a thing as being too critical,” he said in response to suggestions he went easy on his subjects. Semple asserted that since he was too young to remember Nixon’s early, contentious races, he could “look at this man dispassionately and do a good job.” Put on the Nixon beat in 1967, when the candidate’s chances seemed slim, Semple wrote a long feature for the New York Times Magazine in January. The piece claimed that the McCarthy-era Nixon had “vanished,” that “in his place stands a walking monument to reason, civility, frankness.” Although Semple acknowledged his “great trepidation” in pronouncing Nixon reformed, since he knew that “the search for the ‘real Nixon’ has been a popular but fruitless pastime,” he still heralded a New Nixon who displayed “candor” and a sense of humor.³⁴

Soon, however, Nixon’s openness gave way to cloistering and control. Even Semple protested that the staff “became kind of secretive, and you couldn’t get beyond a certain point with them.” In June 1967 H. R. Haldeman, who shared Nixon’s suspicion of the press, urged the candidate to gear his campaign techniques and strategies to television, “to move out of the dark ages and into the brave new world of the omnipresent eye.” Having failed to exploit TV in 1960, Nixon vowed not to repeat his error. He hired advisers, including advertising executive Harry Treleaven, CBS’s Frank Shakespeare, and Roger Ailes, a young producer of The Mike Douglas Show. Nixon shielded himself from the gaze of reporters. Before the New Hampshire primary he filmed a series of question-and-answer sessions made to look spontaneous, only with handpicked audience members, and no reporters allowed. When Haldeman joined the campaign full time that summer, Nixon shuttered what remained of the openness. He allowed TV reporters few chances to film him, sometimes just one a day, ensuring only flattering images for the nightly news.³⁵

Two decades later, media strategies like Nixon’s would draw ample, even excessive attention from the reporters they aimed to co-opt. But in 1968 editors were loath to inject analysis into news articles, and the press scarcely mentioned Nixon’s designs. Articles that spoke of Nixon’s image making were straightforward and uncritical. A June 1968 Semple piece that profiled the media advisers Harry Treleaven and Frank Shakespeare was typical. Calling the staged forums “a stately, dignified effort,” designed to “emphasize Mr. Nixon’s long experience in government,” the article betrayed not a hint of the anger that reporters felt about being excluded. “The shows were never rehearsed but Nixon was never stumped,” Semple quoted Treleaven as saying, a self-serving remark to which Semple, bound by journalistic convention, added neither his own qualifier nor a dissent from an opposing candidate’s camp.³⁶

Reporters who objected to the dwindling access did little more than grouse, mostly in private. John Osborne, a longtime AP writer who had recently joined The New Republic, was among the critics. Osborne’s background and position gave him a rare perch: he had old-fashioned reportorial skills, but writing for an opinion journal, he was expected to comment. Osborne commanded respect from Nixon’s men for what Ray Price called his “rigorous intellectual integrity” and willingness to “meticulously separate . . . what he knows from what he surmises.” His peers liked him because he often voiced their collective feelings—as he did near the close of the 1968 campaign:

Like other wearers of the Nixon press badge, pampered and cosseted and served as no campaign reporters have ever been before, I keep waiting for Mr. Nixon to show himself. . . . As of this writing, the fourth week of travel just behind him (not really “with him,” as we like to think), I know that I and my companions wait in vain. . . . [Nixon] is not going to . . . tell us anywhere near as much as we need to know about him and the presidency he proposes to give us.³⁷

David Broder, who was also unusually positioned, writing both an opinion column and news stories, charged that Nixon was skirting a discussion of issues. Broder faulted a Nixon commercial that showed domestic rioting and Vietnam carnage while promising peace—but without mentioning any solutions. Broder called the spot “a classic example of ‘image’ over ‘meaning,’” and warned that if politicians continued with such misleading image making, “a system of government like ours may no longer be operable.” If the admonition was hyperbolic, Broder was merely reflecting his colleagues’ fears that in bypassing the fourth branch of government, Nixon was undermining a cornerstone of democracy. Yet despite such occasional cries, the public learned little of Nixon’s media strategy in 1968. Although the press was forming a picture of Nixon as a pioneer of image management, they felt the rules of objectivity still obliged them to relay Nixon’s own preferred view of himself instead of the one that they had formed.³⁸

Nixon thus enjoyed positive treatment into his first year as president. Reporters, happy to be rid of the dissembling Johnson team, placed hope in Nixon’s rhetoric of healing. They trusted his genial communications secretary Herb Klein when he pledged, in words that would come to haunt him, that “truth will be the hallmark of the Nixon administration.” Nixon did some courting himself. With The Washington Post, soon to become his bête noire, relations were “if not cordial,” reporter Chalmers Roberts wrote, “then at least workable.” Nixon sent Post writers thank-you notes for favorable stories; to publisher Katharine Graham, he called himself an “admirer.” Attorney General John Mitchell, for his part, wrote to her: “Now you can see why I say the Post is the best paper in the country.”³⁹

The affection was requited. Setting the tone, Herblock drew a sketch in which he promised the new president a “free shave.” Jack Anderson claimed he “honestly tried to understand” Nixon and “bored in with no more or less zeal” than he had with his predecessors. “I was determined to keep an open mind on Nixon and his administration,” echoed CBS’s David Schoenbrun, “for reasons of professional integrity [and] out of respect for the presidency.” Teddy White sent the president a copy of his latest book, apologizing for his earlier, harsher coverage, which, he wrote, “must have hurt.” The new book, White pleaded, depicted “a man of courage and of conscience . . . and the respect [that Nixon’s campaign] wrung from me—which I hope is evident—surprised me as I went along.”⁴⁰

In Nixon’s first year, he drew positive notices—for reforming the draft, for planning to revamp the welfare system, and for a global tour that took him to the Far East and Europe. Nixon-hater Mary McGrory of the Washington Star was effusive to Herb Klein after the president’s first press conference: “Your man was great. . . . Maybe he’s different now that he’s president.” “Like most of my colleagues and competitors,” wrote Jack Germond, “[I] was impressed by the ‘new Nixon’ we were seeing. He was advancing interesting and innovative ideas on domestic policy, and the White House was relatively open.” Nixon was faulted on a few counts—mainly his ill-advised Supreme Court nominations and his failure to end the war—but year-end assessments in 1969 were kind. Robert Semple declared that Nixon had closed the credibility gap: “So far no major chasms have appeared between what the administration has said and what it is in fact doing.” Semple’s boss, Max Frankel, was just as enthusiastic, as seen in a passage that he later called “embarrassingly generous, if not naïve”:

He is trying to be a temperate president in intemperate times, a moderate man coping with extravagant problems, a modest figure upon a gigantic stage. . . . For the most part, he has lowered his voice, just as he promised at the inaugural a year ago. . . . After a lifetime of sly and aggressive partisanship, he is slipping into the habits of a judge, presiding over policy debates . . . and resolving them—plausibly, practically or even compassionately.

Overall, Nixon enjoyed better press in his first year than any other twentieth-century president except Theodore Roosevelt.^‡ “We all wanted to believe,” explained Newsweek’s John Lindsay, “in a New Nixon.”⁴¹

By August 1969, signs had already appeared that Nixon’s wasn’t going to be an “open administration.” Although the press hadn’t yet learned that Nixon and Kissinger were wiretapping journalists, Newsweek did report that the national security adviser’s mania about leaks was instilling fear among his staffers.⁴² Still, not until the winter did the tension escalate. Although certain controversial decisions—on Vietnam especially—were in part responsible, the new adversarialism also had a lot to do with the publication of a book: The Selling of the President 1968 by a twenty-six-year-old Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, Joe McGinniss.

The book, published in October, created a sensation. An account of Nixon’s image-making efforts in 1968, it won plaudits from liberal reviewers, who recognized in McGinniss’s portrait of Nixon the old Machiavellian they knew. Murray Kempton led the chorus, calling the book a “masterpiece.” British journalist Alistair Cooke cheered that McGinniss had exposed Nixon’s “fraud.”⁴³

McGinniss’s book clearly owed a debt to Teddy White’s Making of the President, 1960, which had shown the significance of the previously neglected role of campaign strategy. But McGinniss’s work was less a sequel than a rebuttal to White, evincing disdain for White’s romantic view of politics as America’s civic religion. In contrast to White’s insiderly authoritativeness, McGinniss’s tone was sassy and brassy, the outsider exposing the insiders’”con game.” If White was the voice of the liberal consensus, with its sonorous, even-keeled wisdom, McGinniss was an emissary from the New Journalism, with his countercultural accents, youthful iconoclasm, and nonchalant willingness to bare his left-leaning political views. Where White gained access to the candidates by virtue of his senior status, positioning himself as the official campaign chronicler, more sober and detached than the riffraff of the press pack, McGinniss sneaked in under the radar screen, presenting himself to Nixon’s men as such an insignificant fly on the wall that they never thought to swat him away.⁴⁴

Following Nixon’s media men into sessions from which other reporters were barred, joining them in casual chats and cafeteria planning sessions, McGinniss gathered the goods for a taut exposé of campaign image making. McGinniss claimed that since Nixon’s natural personality was so unappealing, his campaign aides concocted a new persona they projected through TV ads and tightly guarded performances. Both unscripted debates like the 1960 encounters with Kennedy and outbursts like the 1962 “last press conference” were shunned. He quoted from memoranda, including the following meditation on image by Ray Price: “We have to be very clear on this point: that the response is to the image, not to the man, since 99 percent of the voters have no contact with the man. It’s not what’s there that counts, it’s what’s projected—and, carrying it one step further, it’s not what he projects but rather what the voter receives. It’s not the man we have to change but the received impression.” McGinniss also drew cursorily from Marshall McLuhan (“The medium is the massage,” he quipped, “and the masseur gets the votes”) and from Daniel Boorstin, whose themes about authenticity echoed throughout The Selling of the President. Like Boorstin and other 1950s liberals, McGinniss decried the “insidious” trickery of those who maneuvered public perceptions for political ends. Like Boorstin, he implicated the public for its outsized expectations. “‘We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality,’” he quoted Boorstin as saying. Devious politicians and undiscriminating citizens conspired to create a political world rife with inauthenticity.⁴⁵

But although McGinniss reprinted the campaign’s memos, he subjected them to little analysis. He failed to explore the most original memo, written by William Gavin, a thirty-one-year-old Nixon speechwriter. A closer reader of McLuhan than was McGinniss, Gavin emphasized the idea that TV involves the audience in completing a process as print does not; it is, to use a later era’s jargon, interactive. Nixon’s linear style of painstakingly spelling out his arguments, Gavin wrote, played poorly on the screen. To “the TV generation,” Nixon seemed to be trying too hard, whereas Bobby Kennedy’s “screaming appeal” stemmed not from any “logical persuasion” but from “a total experience, a tactile sense—thousands of little girls . . . [wanting to] run their fingers through the image of his hair.” Nixon had to craft a TV image, Gavin said, in a way that wouldn’t be seen as phony by a television-savvy generation. “It’s got to appear non-calculated, incomplete, the circle never squared,” Gavin wrote.⁴⁶

Read decades later, The Selling of the President would seem somewhat superficial and obvious, undeserving of the outcry that attended its publication. But that loss of luster was itself a result of the book’s impact. For where liberals treated the work as proof of the Old Nixon’s immutability, reporters read it through their own professional lens. Just as The Making of the President had taught them to focus on behind-the-scenes campaign drama, McGinniss’s book made it clear that media strategy—run by masters not just of makeup and lighting but also of speechwriting, advertising, polling, and television—now demanded coverage too. In 1968 Leonard Garment, the sole member of Nixon’s media team without a media background, had commented, as Nixon policy aide Richard Whalen wrote, that “the issues men were now superfluous”; with McGinniss’s book, reporters caught on. “All of a sudden everybody said, ‘Oh I get it. They’re trying to sell candidates the way they sell soap,’” recalled ABC’s Ted Koppel, then a campaign reporter. “From that moment on, we had emerged from the Garden of Eden. We were never able to see candidates or campaigns quite the same way again.”^§ The Selling of the President thus made reporters more self-conscious, since they realized that media strategies were meant to box them into a fixed role; now they had to try to observe the very process in which they were implicated.⁴⁷

For similar reasons, McGinniss’s book heightened the tension between Nixon and those who covered him, because only increased vigilance could guarantee that they wouldn’t be caught off guard. As Rolling Stone’s Timothy Crouse observed in his own campaign book four years later (which centered, appropriately, on the journalists covering the 1972 race), reporters felt embarrassed about their passivity in 1968. “They thought it made them look like fools,” Crouse wrote. “. . . Nixon fed reporters a phony campaign, and many of the reporters ate it up.” More than that, they were angry that McGinniss had shown them up. As AP reporter Walter Mears noted, “McGinniss made it look like he had discovered the TV thing,” when in fact “we knew what was happening and we all wrote stories about it.” Indeed, Mears, Semple, and Teddy White had. But as Semple’s article showed, the strictures of hard-news reporting kept the regulars from presenting the Nixon media strategy with the same bluntness and critical edge that animated McGinniss. The institutionalized role of the established press prevented an overarching New Journalistic critique like McGinniss’s.⁴⁸

Perhaps because they didn’t want to be burned again, most reporters accepted McGinniss’s conclusion that Nixon engaged in an “unprecedented image-management campaign.” But while McGinniss was right that Nixon brought an improved professionalism to his efforts, candidates had been using television to shape their images since at least 1952, as the occasional Nixon defender, such as William F. Buckley, noted. Indeed, after Adlai Stevenson’s fatal failure to exploit TV, no candidate dared deem it beneath him to do so. Only because so many reporters had fallen for Nixon’s efforts did they conclude that it was uniquely insidious.⁴⁹

Besides, no one actually knew if Nixon’s machinations redounded to his benefit. He won the election, but it’s not clear that the media strategy was decisive. Garment recalled that after Nixon’s lead over Hubert Humphrey began shrinking in October 1968, none of the media team’s efforts could counteract it; fortunately for them, the lead never dissipated altogether. What was more, many reporters had remained unpersuaded of Nixon’s professed reinvention. John Osborne, who already considered Nixon a chameleon, huffed that McGinniss’s book held no revelations. “Essentially the same Richard Nixon whom I followed in person around the country came across to the country through the tube.”⁵⁰

Just possibly, the conclusion to be drawn from The Selling of the President was that Nixon’s image making didn’t work. Despite Nixon’s ruses, McGinniss and others had no trouble forming their own picture of him. Without even trying—without even realizing it—they formed an impression of Nixon different from the one he promoted: that of a dissembling manager of the news. “We as a group,” Osborne wrote, “. . . share a sense that Richard Nixon ought to be faulted for a fundamental lack of political honor, for what he is doing to the political process with his tactics of concealment and pseudo-disclosure.” The problem wasn’t that reporters were taken in; the problem was that they couldn’t “establish a just and factual basis” for calling Nixon a manipulator in cold print. They felt obliged to show Nixon as he presented himself. McGinniss’s book, then, didn’t exactly reveal something they hadn’t known. But it did tap into the tension they felt between wanting to brandish their toughness, lest they fall prey to manipulation, and fearing that they would seem biased if they did so. By pointing up their docility, it prompted them to stiffen their spines.⁵¹

Along with Nixon’s policies and McGinniss’s blockbuster, another event also heightened tensions between the president and the press in late 1969: Vice President Spiro T. Agnew’s attacks on the media. Called “Nixon’s Nixon” by Democratic senator and sometime presidential aspirant Eugene McCarthy, Agnew lambasted the media in a pair of high-profile speeches in November that set Washington abuzz. Behind the scenes, Nixon had been moving against the press all year; in the spring, he and Kissinger had begun wiretapping reporters; in the fall he had orchestrated a “Game Plan” of media manipulation to undercut the anti-war protests. But Agnew’s speeches commenced what Herb Klein deemed “full-fledged open warfare between the news media and the Nixon administration.” Where McGinniss’s book pushed reporters toward a more adversarial position, Agnew’s attack tugged them the opposite way, prodding them to mute their critical tone in order to preserve their credibility.⁵²

Nixon ordered the attacks after his televised address of November 3, when he summoned the “great silent majority” of Americans to rally behind his Vietnam policy. After the speech, reporters gathered in the TV studios to analyze it. Having expected Nixon to announce a diplomatic overture, most thought it newsworthy that he hadn’t. “Nothing of a substantial nature or a dramatic nature that is new,” said CBS’s Eric Sevareid. “No new initiative, no new proposal, no announcement of any troop withdrawals,” said ABC’s Frank Reynolds. Others, such as Reynolds’s colleague Bill Lawrence, were more scathing, their analysis shading into anti-war advocacy. “There wasn’t a thing new in this speech that would influence anybody to vote . . . in a different way,” Lawrence said. “A good politician would have taken the momentum of the election and the inauguration and come forward with a program of some kind. He wouldn’t be explaining Vietnam now. . . . He would have done that in February.” By the end of his comment, Lawrence was editorializing. “In his campaign he said he had a plan that would end the war and win the peace. He said that again tonight. I still don’t know where it is.”⁵³

Lawrence and the others thought they were doing their job: describing the speech, analyzing it, judging Nixon’s performance, and perhaps providing the public with a corrective to Nixon’s one-sided presentation. Nixon heard only potshots. He had hoped to “go over the heads of the reporters”—he’d told Haldeman the previous morning that he was hoping to “circumvent” the “hostile press”—but the commentary, he felt (especially Lawrence’s and Marvin Kalb’s on CBS), blocked his direct channel to the public. The next morning, at a meeting of top White House aides, Herb Klein reported that the next-day telegrams (some of them generated by the White House) showed that viewers, too, disliked the after-speech punditry. The president moved to strike back. “Unless the practice were challenged,” he wrote, “it would make it impossible for a president to appeal directly to the people, something I considered to be of the essence of democracy.” He assigned the job to Agnew, who had weeks earlier caused a stir, and sent Americans scrambling for their dictionaries, by branding anti-war activists “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” Now Pat Buchanan drafted a speech, which Nixon personally edited—barely able to stifle his glee, Haldeman noted, as he imagined the media’s reaction. As Nixon remembered it, he “toned down some of Buchanan’s rhetoric”; William Safire recalled that the president “toughen[ed] it up.” Either way, Safire said, “it retained its white-heat vitality.”⁵⁴

Delivered in Des Moines on November 13, Agnew’s diatribe—and especially a few choice alliterations—entered political lore. Decrying the “instant analysis and querulous criticism” that followed Nixon’s talk, the vice president blasted the networks as biased, sensationalist, and irresponsible. “A tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one,” he said, decided what information millions received each day. These men, he continued in the conservative populist vein that Nixon often mined, didn’t represent the nation. They came from elite, Ivy League backgrounds, favored liberal viewpoints, and showcased controversial developments. Invoking the will of the people, Agnew called for a return to “straight and objective news.”⁵⁵

The journalist David Halberstam once discerned two different strains of anti-press thinking in Nixon: “Haldemanism,” which believed in shutting out the press and using direct, televised speeches; and “Buchananism,” which favored attacking the press head-on for its liberal agenda. In 1968 and 1969, Nixon had followed a program of Haldemanism; now came Buchananism. For some years, conservatives had reaped gains by attacking the press. Dwight Eisenhower derided “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators” at the 1964 Republican Convention, and more recently such themes had become a theme of the Republican National Committee’s newsletter. With polls showing that most people believed the press was at least sometimes biased, the president knew his adversaries were vulnerable. Agnew’s speech thus had two (related) goals: tarnishing any anti-Nixon commentary and providing a rallying point for the president’s supporters.⁵⁶

Calls came in to the White House two to one in support of Agnew, and an ABC survey found 51 percent of viewers endorsing his position. Buoyed, Agnew prepared a second blast for the next week, targeting The New York Times and The Washington Post. The follow-up caused a “huge problem” within the White House, Haldeman recorded. Noting that the speech was “pretty rough” and believing Agnew was going “too far,” the staff chief tried to get the vice president to soften his rhetoric. He didn’t get very far, and Agnew’s speech, on November 20 in Montgomery, Alabama, lived up to expectations. The vice president accused the newspapers of having grown “fat and irresponsible” as they accrued power, singling out the Washington Post Company, which owned Newsweek and several TV and radio stations, as embodying the trend toward debate-stifling monopoly. Agnew intimated that the government might use its regulatory power against these conglomerates, threatening to turn Nixon’s rhetorical war on the press into a legal one.⁵⁷

Agnew’s back-to-back speeches, wrote NBC’s Reuven Frank, “shook every broadcasting official.” They amounted, said CBS’s Martin Plissner, to a “declaration of war.” The threat of new regulation was especially troubling, and reporters soon found evidence to conclude that a crackdown was imminent. Dan Rather of CBS reported that after Nixon’s Silent Majority speech, Federal Communications Commission chairman Dean Burch had requested from the networks transcripts of their post-address analyses—a sign, many concluded, that retaliation was in the offing. Then Herb Klein, the Nixon aide most respected by the press, said on CBS’s Face the Nation that the media’s failure to modify its coverage would “invite the government to come in”—an unfortunate choice of words that Klein later insisted he didn’t mean as a threat. The accumulation of such omens antagonized reporters. When Klein appeared before White House correspondents the next Friday, they shoved and shouted in a small room—“mass chaos,” Klein recalled—vying to interrogate him. The behavior suited a war or a national emergency, not a vice-presidential speech.⁵⁸

The press took to denouncing Agnew as a menace to freedom. With their own considerable power, they made sure viewers heard their perspective. Walter Cronkite delivered a rebuttal to a local chamber of commerce in his hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri, which 60 Minutes aired as a special. The outrage was not unmerited. Agnew’s speeches were shrill, misleading, and cynically designed to fan public anger. Some journalists genuinely felt intimidated. Although the editorial page of The New York Times hardly seemed to ease up on Nixon after the speech, the page’s editor, John Oakes, claimed he and others were unconsciously softening their attacks.⁵⁹ What was more, Nixon did move to wrest the Washington Post Company’s local broadcasting affiliates from its control—although his efforts were halfhearted and soon abandoned.^¶

On the whole, however, the initial outrage smacked of overreaction. Notwithstanding the moves against the Post Company—along with the genuinely nefarious but still concealed wiretaps—Agnew wasn’t really seeking to apply government pressure to the press; it was public pressure he wanted to mobilize. Nixon and Agnew were hoping to harness the rage of socially conservative Middle Americans and make the media heel to their concerns. Agnew’s speech contended that journalists were ignoring public sentiment—which could only make them seem irresponsible. The press’s howls meant to make it seem that they were resisting government pressure—in which case they could only look heroic.

But Agnew’s points weren’t just conservative demagoguery. With a few alterations, his addresses could have been given by a liberal journalism-school dean. (Much of the first speech in fact drew from the Columbia Journalism Review.) Liberals had long championed broadcast regulation as a price for private control of the public airwaves. They had fretted that newspaper chains were extinguishing independent papers and narrowing public debate. And they had warned of television’s power to sway impressionable viewers—pointing to Nixon’s Checkers speech, no less, as a prime example. Like Nixon’s original critics, Agnew suggested that televised images evoked raw feelings rather than considered judgments and wondered about television’s “effect on a democratic society.” If charitably interpreted, Agnew had simply joined an argument about democracy in a mass media age.⁶⁰

Nor was the public as credulous as reporters feared. Although many Americans agreed generally with Agnew’s comments, only a minority believed that the press had a vendetta against the president. Most wanted the networks to keep offering “instant analysis.” Like Agnew, the public wanted a greater range of viewpoints than the mainstream press offered. This belief suggested, however, not that they were being duped, but the reverse: that they felt competent to sort out fact from opinion for themselves. Given all this, it was clear that the press’s reaction stemmed in part from its own position of power as an entrenched, influential institution. Its reaction contained more defensiveness than actual fear.⁶¹

Some journalists soon agreed that they had overreacted. After previously envisioning imminent repression, Dan Rather conceded that the speeches contained “a few truths”—a widely echoed sentiment. Ben Bradlee said Agnew’s attack “probably had a good effect overall because they’ve made the intelligent editor be self-critical and examine the decision-making process.” The speech helped convince Bradlee to appoint an ombudsman at The Washington Post; and Richard Harwood, who got the job, found that many of the paper’s reporters also endorsed parts of the vice president’s critique. “We are, for the most part, a collection of Easterners, middle- and upper-middle class, well-educated, relatively sophisticated, generally liberal,” went one typical comment. “This shows in our reporting.” Katharine Graham told the journalism fraternity Sigma Delta Chi the next November that Agnew’s charge had “some validity.” It became a point of pride for journalists to own up to their own (or their colleagues’) shortcomings, to decry their own uniformity of background, opinion, and instinct.⁶²

Such self-flagellation irked others. Increasingly feisty, Walter Cronkite fumed that he was “somewhat sick and mighty tired of broadcast journalism being constantly dragged into the operating room and dissected, probed, swabbed, and needled to see what makes it tick.” John Osborne called the ostentatious introspection “masochistic drivel.” When Agnew appeared on Face the Nation in February 1970, Osborne noted, panelists treated him with kid gloves. One newsman, after a mildly confrontational exchange, obsequiously apologized, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.” Ironically, this rash of self-criticism displayed the same groupthink that the reporters were deploring in the first place. By collectively mulling over the “germ of truth” in Agnew’s attacks, the media tamed themselves more than the government did. Eager to ward off charges of bias, reporters resolved to be fairer.⁶³

McGinniss and Agnew notwithstanding, the tensions between Nixon and the press remained rooted in the president’s own penchant for secrecy and isolation. Nixon rarely gave interviews, background sessions, or informal chats, and he liked to work at his homes outside the capital, in San Clemente, Key Biscayne, or Camp David. Haldeman and Ehrlichman formed what reporters called a “palace guard” or “Berlin Wall” around him, insulating him even from his own staff. At a remove, reporters couldn’t deepen or complicate their image of the president. “Nixon was to me,” John Herbers wrote, “a distant and enigmatic figure as seen backwards through a telescope.” Ben Bradlee defended himself against accusations of Nixon-hating by noting that he barely knew the man. “It’s not a question of disliking him personally,” he said. “We never got close enough—I certainly never did.” “We—the press corps—seldom saw much of Nixon,” agreed Dan Rather, “not even at the start, when the slate should have been clean.” Marvin Kalb felt an air of remoteness about Nixon, who shunned the journalists’ social world and “lived so lonely a life that it seemed as if he had converted the Oval Office into an underground bunker.”⁶⁴

The film of All the President’s Men (1976), directed by Alan J. Pakula of The Parallax View and Klute, memorably rendered Nixon as inaccessible to reporters except via their TV screens. “One of our big problems,” said Robert Redford, the film’s producer and star, was “dramatizing an opposition that had become almost invisible.” Pakula explained that the solution they devised was to make sure “you don’t see the president except on television.” At the opening, Nixon is seen addressing Congress after his triumphant Moscow summit. In the closing sequence, he is sworn in for a second term, pledging to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,” as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, playing Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, doggedly clack away on their typewriters. Nixon’s absence except as a TV image served as a rebuttal to his claims that he liked to speak “directly” to the public via television; as the film demonstrates, the televised address could be an indirect form of self-presentation, compared to press reports based on direct personal contact. Nixon is perceived as a flickering shadow, not a flesh-and-blood person—which was how most reporters experienced him in real life.⁶⁵

To show the faceless “power of the administration,” Pakula laced his film with shots of the imposing facades of the White House and other stony Washington structures. Indeed, under Nixon, the White House became a symbol for the reclusive president. Garry Trudeau depicted Nixon by drawing the White House front with the president’s words floating above the building. Reporters, unable to speak knowledgeably about Nixon personally, increasingly used “the White House” as a synonym. So common did such references become that Art Buchwald joked about a conversation he had with the building. “The other night I heard Dan Rather say on television that the White House planned to stonewall the House Judiciary Committee,” the edifice complained. “I’ve never stonewalled anyone in my life. . . . All I’ve ever done is hold receptions, entertain tourists, and pose for pictures.” The word “stonewall”—the administration’s phrase for stalling by withholding information—poetically captured the concrete obstructions that Nixon threw in the path of investigators. Jules Feiffer drew a strip of a brick wall bearing Nixon’s face, with the bricks crumbling in each successive panel as Nixon declares: “I have not yet begun to stonewall.”⁶⁶

Reporters glimpsed dark designs in Nixon’s remoteness. The creation of a new White House press room in 1970, which was necessary to deal with the burgeoning press corps, struck correspondents as “a subtle part of the Nixon war against the press,” Helen Thomas of UPI wrote, since it ended their freedom to roam the West Wing halls. Also troublesome to reporters was the infrequency of Nixon’s press conferences, of which he held fewer (thirty-nine) than any president since Herbert Hoover. Max Frankel lamented that reporters enjoyed “no chance to measure [Nixon’s] changes of view or mood [or] . . . to remind him of what he said or did a year ago. It is not just the event that is lapsing but a whole process of communication and, indeed, government.” The National Press Club chided the president for shunning “an integral part of government,” for flouting a vital tradition of accountability; if he persisted, “The main casualty [would be] the American people and their confidence in the openness of their government.” Of course, as such commentary showed, Nixon himself paid a price for his isolation, as they painted him as secretive, sinister, and bent on dictating the news.⁶⁷

In a 1972 television interview, John Ehrlichman commented that Nixon avoided press conferences because reporters ask “a lot of flabby and fairly dumb questions, and it really doesn’t elucidate very much.” The press corps pounced, branding the remark another shot in Nixon’s anti-media war, and Ehrlichman recanted. Yet in all likelihood it was the messenger, more than the message, that offended the reporters. Had the rebuke come from the Columbia Journalism Review, they probably would have voiced amens.⁶⁸ Indeed, when White House reporters weren’t groaning about the paucity of press conferences, they complained how pointless the parleys were. In The Atlantic in 1970, Hedrick Smith of The New York Times chided his colleagues for the “hectic superficiality” of their performance at one recent session. “Nixon held the assembled reporters at bay as easily as Cassius Clay dabbling with a clutch of welterweights,” he wrote. “. . . Nothing caught Mr. Nixon off guard or prodded him to acknowledge a shred of responsibility for the turmoil that was rolling over the country.” Jules Witcover also thought the conferences had become “a controlled showcase for [Nixon’s] considerable talents as a semantic shadow-boxer.” Both reporters called on their peers to shed what Witcover called their “excessive deference to the president”—to show, Smith said, more “daring and tenacity . . . without sliding into malevolent heckling or the rasping cross-examination of a district attorney.” John Herbers went further, claiming that the ritual had become “staged and plastic,” “show business and a device for the president to promote himself,” rather than “a session of inquiry to uncover news”—a classic pseudo-event. This evolution of the press conference, its loss of spontaneity, was a long-term cultural development, a response to a larger and more complex press corps and government. But the reporters blamed Nixon, since he had orchestrated his conferences so that they wouldn’t produce any surprises.⁶⁹

In a more subtle way, Nixon’s detachment may have also generated negative press. When previous presidents socialized with reporters or talked to them off the record, they helped persuade the correspondents that they were seeing the “real” man behind the presidency (whether it was true or not). This firsthand knowledge not only created an affection that served to brake criticism; it also made reporters feel that they could understand the man. It made them, however unconsciously, more willing to cut the president some slack. But few reporters ever felt they knew the chimerical “real” Nixon. This lack of intimacy, in the long run, made it easier to believe that Nixon was engaging in shadowy deceit.

Nixon’s hostility to the media surfaced in ways far more troubling than his reclusiveness. Reporters saw sinister designs in Nixon’s efforts to monitor what was said about him and a threat to democracy in his use of his power to suppress the news. Collectively, they concluded that these actions amounted to a war against them.

Nixon devoured the news. Each day, he plowed through his “News Summaries”—thick sheaves compiled by staffers that distilled the day’s stories from all the major media, often in snide or caustic language. Nixon added his own usually intemperate marginalia. Although the White House said the summaries showed the administration’s efficiency, reporters wrote about them in a scandalized tone, as proof of Nixon’s image obsession and his unabating need to keep track of critical reporters to exact retribution.⁷⁰

Reporters glimpsed malice in Nixon’s public relations apparatus as well. Nixon was the first president to make the presentation of his image his dominant goal; his papers brim with notes on tailoring his public persona, strategic memos on projecting that persona, and directives on handling compliant or hostile journalists. He created the White House office of communications and a White House office for dealing with television. He was the first president to hire what he called a “full-time PR director,” advertising executive Jeb Magruder. He established dedicated White House councils to figure out how best to present the administration’s work. “We tried to devise an imaginative, aggressive publicity program,” explained Magruder. “We did the trivia and the dirty tricks when we had to, but we also tried to explore every possible means to reach the public with a program that we all believed to be excellent.” Strategies included drumming up phony pro-Nixon letters to news outlets, devising “Game Plans” for promoting initiatives, and rewarding reporters who wrote kindly about the administration. As with the News Summaries, reporters detailed these efforts in a tone of outrage—even as those exposés showed their ability to see past such ploys.⁷¹

Another count in the bill of indictment against Nixon was that his reclusiveness forced them to rely so much on Ron Ziegler. Where previous press secretaries had usually come from the ranks of the Fourth Estate itself, Ziegler was a twenty-nine-year-old USC graduate, Haldeman protégé, and former advertising man. Like the president he served, he was tight-lipped with information and disrespectful of the reporters with whom he sparred. Lacking the charm or the skills to put reporters at ease, he struck them as self-satisfied and imperious, “a small-bore man,” in the words of Ben Bradlee, “over his head, and riding a bad horse.”⁷²

The contempt, which was mutual, flared up at Ziegler’s daily briefings, which became sophomoric games of charges and evasions. On the average day, a throng of sixty or seventy reporters, most hoping to salvage a tidbit of news from a tedious round of unenlightening exchanges, gathered in the briefing room for an 11:00 A.M. conference. Typically, Ziegler showed up late, since wire-service reporters had to file stories before noon and the truncated hour meant that much less time he had to stall. The session that followed resembled a substitute teacher facing down a roomful of teenagers. Ritualistically, the correspondents tried to pin Ziegler down on questions they knew he wouldn’t answer. Ziegler offered opaque, business-world twaddle. “I am completed on what I had to say,” he would remark, or, “This is getting to a point beyond which I am not going to discuss beyond what I have said.” Reporters dubbed these gems “Zieglerisms,” “zigzags,” or “ziggies.” Even Nixon joked about Ziegler’s obfuscation; at a White House Correspondents Dinner, he said that when he asked Ziegler for the time, the aide responded: “Could I put that on background?” Toward the end of Nixon’s presidency, one reporter vented the press corps’ feelings by trashing Ziegler in the Columbia Journalism Review. In an article reminiscent of those once written about Nixon, he listed eight Zieglerian strategies for ducking reporters’ questions, ranging from “the broad and meaningless statement” and “the I’ll-try-to-find-out ploy” to “the carefully constructed deception” and, worst of all, “the lie.”⁷³

If the administration’s daily evasions elicited overwrought alarmism, its acts of retribution sparked legitimate worry. Not returning reporters’ phone calls or denying them access to trips or events paled next to real abuses of law enforcement agencies to probe, intimidate, or punish journalists. The wiretapping and the abortive efforts to strip the Washington Post Company of its broadcasting licenses were but two examples. Others included the use of the Internal Revenue Service to harass journalists the president didn’t like and the launching of anti-trust suits against the TV networks. One of the most serious cases was the harassment of CBS’s Daniel Schorr. In August 1971, reporting on Nixon’s promise to aid Catholic schools, Schorr quoted a source who said the pledge was “made for political or rhetorical effect.” Enraged, Nixon ordered Haldeman to have the FBI investigate “that bastard. And no stalling.” An FBI agent showed up in Schorr’s office, and when word of the investigation spread among the press corps, the administration implausibly claimed it was considering Schorr for a job. Only during the Senate Watergate investigation did the full story emerge.⁷⁴

Most distressing to the newspeople were the government’s June 1971 lawsuits to stop The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers. When Nixon picked up his Sunday New York Times on June 13, he saw, alongside the coverage of Tricia’s wedding, a long article based on a secret Defense Department study of American involvement in Vietnam; former government official Daniel Ellsberg had given the study to Times reporter Neil Sheehan. Egged on by Kissinger, who told Nixon he would be seen as a “weakling” if he didn’t respond, the president instructed John Mitchell to sue the Times to force it to stop publishing classified information. (Fatefully, he also had Ehrlichman establish a special White House unit, the “Plumbers,” to stop leaks; their first job was to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst, Lewis Fielding, in search of harmful information about him.) Although Nixon won a temporary injunction against the Times, first The Washington Post and then other papers obtained copies of the study and began disclosing its contents. Then the administration lost its bid to enjoin the Post from publishing, the restraint on the Times was overturned on appeal, and on June 30 the Supreme Court rejected the claim that national security warranted the suppression of the information. The press rejoiced.⁷⁵

Though a victory for the press, the case reinforced the notion that there were no lengths to which Nixon would not go to control the news. No previous administration had ever attempted to impose outright prior restraint—that is, censorship. With the Pentagon Papers, the antagonism between Nixon and the press metastasized. “The Nixon administration now entered the ring with a particularly deliberate gusto,” Katharine Graham later wrote. “By sending the Justice Department into court instead of merely using the vice president as a mouthpiece, they had changed the character of the fight.” Halfway through his first term, reporters were convinced that Nixon was hostile to the First Amendment. The episode cemented fears that Nixon’s assault was assuming unprecedented proportions.⁷⁶

Faced with these attacks, the White House press corps felt compelled to react. That reaction, however, consisted mostly of indignation, not inquiry. On June 26, 1972, the board of governors of the National Press Club commissioned a “full-scale investigation of the Administration’s relationship with and to the press.” The committee tasked with the job included some of the White House press corps’ leading lights: Dan Rather, Jack Germond, Adam Clymer of the Baltimore Sun, Alan Otten of the Wall Street Journal. Under the guidance of an American University professor, a team interviewed reporters, presidential aides, and media critics, and issued a report the following year. The press club came down hard on the president for a range of offenses. It rallied journalists to “muster all of the resources at [their] command to resist any and all forms of intimidation and control.” Such judgments were echoed in a spate of studies of Nixon’s treatment of the press. In The Boys on the Bus (1973), Timothy Crouse wrote that Nixon “was different” from his predecessors. “Nixon felt a deep, abiding, and vindictive hatred for the press that no president, with the possible exception of Lyndon Johnson, had ever shared. . . . No other president had ever worked so lovingly or painstakingly to emasculate reporters.” “Under the Nixon Administration, there has been an unprecedented effort,” former Herald Tribune reporter David Wise agreed in The Politics of Lying (1973), “. . . to downgrade and discredit the American press. . . . It was a terribly dangerous policy.” The perception of an “unprecedented” war on the media was virtually universal.⁷⁷

But the press club report said as much about the press corps’ mentality as about Nixon, whose anti-media stratagems were after all a matter of public record. It reflected the frustrated correspondents’ need to register their displeasure with Nixon in some official way. If they couldn’t stop the administration’s news management, they could state for the record that they weren’t going to be cowed. Perhaps the most telling part of the report was its lament that news organizations weren’t “moving smartly . . . to give people a better picture of the workings of the system. While they fend off critiques by self-interested politicians, news executives have only timidly reached out for suggestions for improving reporting on government so that the public achieves a better grasp of what is going on.” Although the reporters, with this passage, shifted responsibility for their neglect onto their bosses, they tacitly acknowledged that they weren’t engaging in the muckraking revival that so many were heralding. Instead, they were lashing out defensively.⁷⁸

Reporters also failed to grasp that the fact that they viewed Nixon as they did suggested he wasn’t really so effective. Whatever Nixon’s public relations skills, reporters had no trouble formulating a different impression of him than the one he wished to convey. Presidential image making, after all, was as much a matter of their control as of Nixon’s.

.   .   .

Nixonites remember Watergate as the ultimate paroxysm of Nixon-hating by the liberal media. They note the barrage of attention that Watergate received in the sixteen months before the president’s resignation. Reporters remember it differently. As they recall the months after the June 1972 break-in, they see an embarrassing indifference to a huge story. For all the lessons they had supposedly learned, White House correspondents in 1972 proved remarkably docile. As Max Frankel observed in a year-end New York Times retrospective, “The president pursued the image of a man who addresses problems and does things dramatically. . . . How can you . . . not feel that the president ultimately came across to the country more or less as he wanted to be portrayed?” From the White House, Chuck Colson agreed that Nixon in 1972 came “as close to managing the news as you can do.”⁷⁹

Within a few days of the Watergate break-in, two young Washington Post metro reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, had linked the burglars to the White House, tugging the string that would unravel Nixon’s presidency. Despite this connection, however, most reporters paid Watergate little heed. When the break-in was first reported on the nightly news, it was covered lightly. Reports emphasized Ziegler’s description of it as “a third-rate burglary . . . nothing the president would be involved with, obviously.” NBC’s John Chancellor smirked as he recounted the “exotic” episode, which most news outlets called a “caper.” When reporters had their first chance to ask Nixon about Watergate on June 22, they posed just one question, retreating quickly when he reiterated that his men weren’t involved. A week later, at Nixon’s first televised press conference in a year, they skipped Watergate altogether. Reporters believed the administration’s denials and focused on seemingly more pressing matters like Nixon’s diplomacy, the conventions, and the fall campaign. Of more than twelve hundred Washington correspondents, only about twenty pursued the Watergate story that summer, some briefly. Nixon, ahead in the polls, declared a cease-fire in his war with the press. Agnew, Buchanan, and others promised to make nice for what Safire called a “period of phony peace.” Warily, reporters softened their tone.⁸⁰

Unlike in 1968, the early failure to pursue Watergate took place amid full awareness of Nixon’s anti-media efforts. “Everyone was mindful of Joe McGinniss’s Selling of the President 1968,” Jules Witcover noted. The Times even assigned a reporter, Warren Weaver, to a media-strategy beat. Reporters grasped that the 1972 Nixon was reprising his 1968 strategy: making few appearances, refusing to debate his opponent, stiff-arming the press. Yet they did little but rail about his invisibility. At one event, the president forbade all cameras except his own from filming his speech and forced reporters to watch it on closed-circuit TV in another room. “You can’t cover this guy,” fumed the Philadelphia Bulletin’s John Farmer as he typed away, screens flickering. “They won’t let you.” Suddenly, the Washington Star’s Jim Doyle, who would later serve as press secretary to the Watergate Special Prosecutor, burst out: “This is terrible! This is awful shit. I just want to be able to take a look at him! Is he alive?” Other reporters, weary and jaded, jotted down Nixon’s words. David Broder, Jules Witcover, and a few others again warned that Nixon was using the press as a propaganda conduit and turning the campaign into a mere “contest of images.” But few reporters did anything to deter such practices. Nixon’s coverage remained positive.⁸¹

Reporters were complicit in their own manipulation—perhaps fearful, after years of browbeating, that they would be seen as biased. Nixon exploited the press’s vulnerability. Reporters, he told Haldeman in 1970, “have a fetish about fairness, and once they are caught being unfair, they are very sensitive about it and try to compensate it from time to time.” (At all other times, he added, “they have no intention whatever to be fair.”) During the 1972 campaign, reporters noted this trait in themselves. The Washington Post’s Stephen Isaacs said his peers were “over-compensating” with gentle treatment of Nixon because they didn’t want readers to think they were “‘in the tank’ for McGovern.” Also playing into Nixon’s hands was a professional consensus that frowned on any indecorous breach of routine. Once, in October 1972, before the full extent of the connection between Nixon’s campaign team and the Watergate break-in emerged, Ziegler let it slip to Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register—a veteran reporter who had briefly worked for Nixon and then quit to return to his beat—that the burglars had been paid from the president’s reelection funds. After Mollenhoff reported the item, Ziegler denied it. At the next White House briefing, Mollenhoff tried to pin him down, but Ziegler just robotically repeated the phrase, “I have issued a statement on that and I will stand by it,” as Mollenhoff fired off questions. The amusement of Mollenhoff’s colleagues shaded into impatience and then contempt, as they itched to move on. No one helped him out. Finally, one reporter huffed, “Ron, may I change the subject?” to the others’ relief. Reporters knew Ziegler’s games and appreciated Mollenhoff’s grievance. But they wouldn’t disrupt their business to indulge a colleague they viewed as eccentric.⁸²

Direct intimidation also contributed to the press’s early neglect of Watergate. The threats to discontinue television licenses, the freezing out of reporters, the investigations into Schorr, Newsday, and others—all had a chilling effect. Most notorious was the case of CBS, the lone television network to pursue Watergate seriously in 1972. Although White House aides told reporters—and reassured themselves—that the break-in was of no interest to most Americans, Dan Rather featured the story prominently. Both Rather and Daniel Schorr worked the story throughout the summer. In October, Walter Cronkite agreed to air a special report, scheduled to consume most of two nightly newscasts. The first segment, which relied heavily on Woodward and Bernstein’s Post coverage, aired October 27 and won much attention, not least because it took up fourteen of the program’s twenty-two minutes of news—a radical departure from the standard format. The segment made Watergate a national story.⁸³

Nixon was furious. “That finishes them,” he told Haldeman. Colson, whose job included bullying network officials at the president’s behest, phoned CBS chairman William Paley and dressed him down in an obscenity-laced rant, claiming the show amounted to McGovern propaganda. Paley said that he too considered the Watergate segment excessive and sent word that the second installment was to be scaled back. Producer Stanhope Gould was forced to trim it to eight minutes, “cut[ting] the guts out” of a piece, he felt, that could have riveted attention on the scandal.⁸⁴

Such out-and-out intimidation, however, was not the norm. More typical was the case of The New York Times. “The Times bureau was made up of well-established men who were not inclined to drop everything, their home life, their wives and children and hang onto a story night after night no matter how late or how much effort it took,” said James Naughton, who came to the paper from the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. “There were no hungry reporters in the Times’ Washington bureau in 1972.” One well-qualified reporter assigned to Watergate, Tad Szulc, was misled by his own extensive experience reporting on U.S. efforts to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro. On learning that several right-wing Cubans were among the burglars, Szulc guessed anti-Castro forces were behind the whole plot—a theory that, unfortunately for Szulc, dovetailed with Nixon’s initial cover story. Another potential sleuth for the Times, Seymour Hersh, hadn’t yet joined the paper, but even he didn’t consider Watergate significant at first. On the White House beat, Bob Semple couldn’t fathom how high up the involvement ran. “It was hard to believe that a national administration, a president, would stoop to something like this,” Semple said. “Maybe there was a belief all around that it just couldn’t have happened.” Senior editors were blinded by their competition with the Post. “I was so envious of the Post’s lead [on Watergate] that I allowed myself to be skeptical of some of its revelations,” Max Frankel said, even though he granted that the rival paper turned out to be wrong “only once or twice that fall.” This attitude was widespread. White House reporters, Jack Germond noted, arrogantly dismissed these “two unknown young punks . . . Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whoever the hell they were.” The beat men told themselves, Germond said, that “the story is old stuff or it’s exaggerated or it’s just plain horseshit. . . . There was a lot of that going around when we were getting our brains beaten out during the summer of 1972.”⁸⁵

Underneath was a systemic problem. CBS, the Times, and the established organs of the press were too entrenched in their ways to get the story. “It was not gullibility that kept many of us from grasping the significance of Watergate,” Henry Grunwald of Time magazine explained, “. . . it was sophistication”—a blasé attitude, born of years in elite circles, that made it hard to imagine that Nixon’s men had done anything so unusual. White House beat reporters fell victim to their routines. Their daily tussles with Ziegler, their lunchtime gossip with sources, and their felt duty to report the White House line all militated against breaking stories like Watergate. “The White House press room,” John Herbers ruefully noted, “is the last place from which to launch a journalistic investigation of crime and corruption.” “The brutal truths of the Watergate story continued to be broken not by television or by the White House press corps,” Dan Rather noted, “but by a pair of mavericks from the police beat: Woodward and Bernstein.”⁸⁶

The story of how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and The Washington Post blazed the lonely Watergate trail long ago passed into legend. Three decades later, it’s still hard to dispute the judgment of former Post editor and longtime press critic Ben Bagdikian, who called it “the most spectacular single act of serious journalism [in the twentieth] century.” Watergate made the reputations of Woodward, Bernstein, and the Post, inspired generations of young journalists, and established a benchmark for investigative reporting. Some have argued that Woodward and Bernstein have reaped too much credit, since they brought to light information that was already in the hands of government investigators. Such a claim, while a useful corrective, fails to consider how press coverage itself influences political actors, like judges or congressional investigators. In Watergate, it was unclear at first whether the FBI would pursue crimes beyond the break-in itself. If the Post hadn’t kept Watergate alive, it’s not certain that the bureau, or the Senate, would have kept digging. Woodward and Bernstein’s work shaped the way Watergate unfolded.⁸⁷

Yet it doesn’t diminish their accomplishments to note that their story has also become enshrined as what Ben Bradlee himself later called “mythology.” As others realized that Woodward and Bernstein were onto something big, a David-and-Goliath storyline emerged: two cub reporters, armed with skepticism and determination, uncovering the scandal of the century and forcing a president to resign. The magazine profiles of Woodward and Bernstein, the success of their book All the President’s Men, and the award-winning film based upon it all fostered this mythology—as did the behavior of colleagues like Bradlee, who was heard around the Post’s newsroom hollering, “The White Hats win!” The film furthered the theme of light and truth against darkness and evil. When Pakula filmed the Washington structures that he intended to convey the administration’s faceless power, he showed the buildings shrouded in shadows, to suggest a hidden menace. In contrast, he shot the Post’s newsroom in all its fluorescent vividness. The workspace’s “incredibly harsh, tough poster colors,” Pakula said, symbolized the often-unsettling light of truth. “You can hide nothing in that room,” he explained.⁸⁸

Because of the book and the film, the Watergate story itself has come to be known from the Post’s point of view. The highlights are familiar but still dramatic: When the paper’s editors heard about a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, they treated the case as a local crime story and assigned it to Bob Woodward, a recent hire. At the burglars’ arraignment, Woodward learned that one of them, James McCord, had worked for the CIA, and he soon discovered that someone listed in a burglar’s address book, Howard Hunt, worked for the White House. Woodward was joined by another young reporter, Carl Bernstein, his stylistic opposite: Woodward was moderate in his politics, Midwestern, and WASPish; Bernstein, a Jewish Red-diaper baby, had almost gone to work for Rolling Stone. Their differences introduced a creative tension as the reporters rushed in where senior colleagues feared to tread. Running on instinct and shoe leather, they pursued leads the old-fashioned way: knocking on doors, combing phone books, assembling the puzzle piece by piece, with occasional help from Woodward’s high-level source known as “Deep Throat.” After enduring barbs from the administration, Woodward and Bernstein were vindicated when confirmations of the administration’s corruption spilled forth, Ziegler publicly apologized to them, and Nixon resigned.⁸⁹

As commonly presented, this story is divorced from the context of the press’s love-hate relationship with Nixon. But the story’s significance lies partly in the contrast between Woodward and Bernstein and most of their peers. The film, of course, engages in some dramatic license, compressing certain incidents and omitting others. City editor Barry Sussman’s real-life role is folded into that of other Post editors, and Woodward and Bernstein are often shown laboring in a newsroom that’s emptier than it really was. But for all the altered details, the film remains true to the way the reporters experienced Watergate. “If there were ever a movie that had to be authentic,” the screenwriter William Goldman noted, “it was this one.” Goldman knew he couldn’t reproduce the book with absolute fidelity to facts, but he tried to obey what he considered “the most important rule of adaptation . . . you must be totally faithful to the intention of the source material.”⁹⁰

Although the film didn’t show rival reporters carping about the Post’s coverage, throwaway lines of banter among the paper’s editors did capture the skepticism with which some first viewed the story. One scene showed editors talking avidly about McGovern’s hardships in picking a vice president while paying Watergate little heed. “No one cares about the Dahlberg repercussions,” one editor says about a Woodstein story linking cash solicited by Nixon fund-raiser Kenneth Dahlberg to the burglars. Another editor speaks of “lunch at the Sans Souci”—a high-end insider restaurant in the 1970s—where administration sources assured him Watergate was a minor matter. This resistance from the upper tiers (with some important exceptions) tracked with actual events. According to Roger Wilkins, Walter Pincus, and others at the Post, veterans of the national desk assumed that Nixon administration higher-ups couldn’t have been involved. “If the national staff of the Washington Post had handled [Watergate],” one press corps regular said, “. . . even if it had been men like David Broder and Haynes Johnson”—two of the paper’s best reporters—“I don’t think they would have picked it up.” It wasn’t just Woodward and Bernstein’s talent that served them well but also their position in the Washington order.⁹¹

Also accurate is the film’s portrayal of the reporters’ methods. As Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee have said, their work was mundane and apolitical. “The reporting we did was not that extraordinary,” Bernstein said. “We used the most basic empirical reporting techniques similar to what you first learn when you go down to police headquarters. We knocked on a lot of doors. . . . What was extraordinary, however, was the information that these rather simple and basic techniques yielded.” Nor were they motivated by politics; theirs was not advocacy journalism. Woodward said he “never detected any political motivation” in himself or his colleagues. “. . . We tried to do our job and, in fact, if you look at it, our coverage was pretty conservative.” If anything, Bradlee added, “we started worrying about the question of the perception of some that we had an animus against Nixon [and] bent over backward the other way.” Bradlee remembered times when “we had stories ready to write and I held back and said, ‘No. We have to go another mile. We have to get another source.’ I felt we might be accused of being motivated by animus rather than fact.”⁹²

The movie’s scenes of ringing doorbells and phoning sources captured the legwork that contrasted with the normal press corps rituals of attending briefings or riding the press bus. All the President’s Men also underscores the reporters’ empirical methods, which differed from the newly faddish opinion-mongering of the era. Early in the film, Bernstein leaps to unsupported conclusions about what “must have” happened: someone must have financed the Watergate break-in, he says, because the burglars carried so much equipment; Howard Hunt must have been investigating Ted Kennedy because of the books he checked out of the library. Although Woodward lets Bernstein’s inferences guide their questions, he tells his partner that they can’t print surmises without evidence. (Later in the film, the roles get reversed, as Bernstein reins in the speculations of an impatient Woodward.) Bradlee, too, presses the reporters for “harder information,” relegating a story to the inside pages because they “haven’t got it,” postponing another one because “there’s not enough fact.”

The film dramatizes the idea that Woodward and Bernstein cracked Watergate because they shunned attitudinizing and advocacy and strove for objectivity. Woodward has acknowledged that the reporters’ pursuit of Watergate “became a form of combat”; yet he also made an important distinction. “We didn’t go after the president,” he said. “We went after the story.” The two reporters were skeptical, but constructively so. Their doubts about Nixon’s claims arose not from any worldly-wise cynicism but from curiosity. Yet unlike some of their peers, they didn’t let fairness and balance translate into a wishy-washy capitulation to the administration’s line. Woodward and Bernstein thus found a solution to the dilemma of reconciling objectivity and toughness. They took an adversarial stance toward authority while preserving a reputation for fairness. It was this feat—much more than the toppling of a president—that won the reporters the admiration of their peers.⁹³

.   .   .

What allowed this circle to be squared was not just Woodward and Bernstein’s methods but also the realization that Nixon was lying. If Nixon was a liar, then being objective wasn’t inconsistent but synonymous with being adversarial. Reporting just “the facts,” as the administration had long demanded, no longer meant accepting White House spoon-feeding; it meant countering White House falsehoods. Pitting oneself against authority could be understood not as an act of rebellion but as a venerable professional mandate.

It took reporters a while to label Nixon a liar. By mid-1973, journalists had no choice but to give the scandal massive attention. Without their knowledge, Nixon was committing many of the acts that would drive him from office: meeting with aides to prolong the cover-up, suborning perjury, authorizing payments of hush money, talking about offering clemency to the defendants. But as damaging to him as those secret crimes were his public statements. Under mounting pressure to explain his and the White House’s role, Nixon made a series of spoken and written remarks that reporters who were sifting through the facts could only regard as highly dubious at best.

On May 22, 1973, for example, the president put out a long account in which he claimed: “I took no part in, nor was I aware of, any subsequent efforts that may have been made to cover up Watergate.” He insisted he’d had no role in any of the specific activities, whether the hush money payments or the bogus CIA directive to thwart the FBI’s probe of the June 17 break-in. But as his chief of staff Al Haig later admitted, six of the seven denials in the statement were knowingly false. After John Dean implicated Nixon during his five days of testimony before Sam Ervin’s Senate Committee in June, Nixon went farther out on a limb by denying the charges. “Not only was I unaware of any cover-up,” the president said on August 15, “I was unaware there was anything to cover up.” In other similar statements, Nixon would assert the White House’s innocence, claim that he wanted to get to the bottom of Watergate, or state that he would punish any obstruction of justice.⁹⁴

“Watergate joined the issue of credibility,” wrote The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee and Howard Simons, “as it had never been joined before.” So stark were the daily contradictions between what Nixon said and what journalists were discovering that many concluded he was something much worse than a wily news manager; he was a liar, they believed, whose need to control the news overrode ethical compunctions and even legal limits. To be sure, many Americans, not just reporters, had for a long time thought that Nixon was dishonest. But during Watergate it was the working press, which sorted through Nixon’s statements day after day, that kept this image in the forefront of the culture. The administration’s ongoing attacks on the media and its claims that reporters were manufacturing an issue “forced the reader and the listener,” Bradlee and Simons noted, “to choose between the White House and the press.”⁹⁵

For a while, reporters, not wanting to seem biased, avoided inflammatory labels. “When it’s Richard Nixon,” Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register explained, “you restrain yourself and do not call him a liar.” But the accumulating evidence that Nixon had deliberately misled the public tested the reporters’ restraint. The release of the damning tape transcripts on April 30, 1974, was the final straw. Some friendly columnists, such as Joe Alsop, now turned on Nixon (“sheer flesh-crawling repulsion,” he wrote), while other reporters at last said publicly what they had suspected privately: Nixon was incorrigibly dishonest. Helen Thomas maintained good relations with Nixon before Watergate, but during the scandal, when asked when she first knew Nixon was lying, she cuttingly replied: “In 1946.” “He lied to the people. . . . He lied to his lawyers. He lied to the press,” wrote the conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick the day after Nixon resigned. “My president is a liar.” Nixon’s mendacity became, for reporters especially, his defining trait. “For more than two years he looked the nation in the eye . . . and lied,” Meg Greenfield wrote in 1977. “Tonight, he would say, he wanted to talk to us ‘from my heart’ . . . and there would be more lies, ever more elaborate lies that brought down people and dirtied institutions as he sought frantically and recklessly to hide.”⁹⁶

Nixon’s liar reputation caught hold, of course, far beyond the press corps. Even loyalists endorsed it. “Lies,” Chuck Colson noted years later, “brought Nixon down.” “Nixon had no compunction about lying to the press,” concluded David Gergen. Philadelphia Inquirer cartoonist Tony Auth drew Nixon dressed in Revolutionary garb holding an ax amid a plain of fallen trees, declaring, “I cannot tell the truth. . . .” A Watergate-era bumper sticker called him “Richard the Lyin’ Hearted.” Even the dishonesty of his successors was seen as derivative of his own. Well after his resignation, Johnny Carson was still joking that “whenever anyone in the White House tells a lie, Nixon gets a royalty.”⁹⁷

Among its other consequences, the mounting evidence that Nixon was lying prompted a change in attitude among the Washington press corps. It forced reporters to own up to their earlier neglect of the issue. It also led them to pursue the story with a vengeance. Although the reporting in Watergate’s later stages was mostly responsible and valuable, it also showed an unseemly side that belied later myths of the press corps’ unmitigated heroism.

With the breaking of the Watergate dam in 1973, some reporters engaged in self-rebuke. John Osborne wrote that when Nixon first denied White House involvement in Watergate, “I stood within ten feet of him and didn’t even try to ask [the] simple and obvious question” of whether he knew who ordered the break-in. Osborne chalked up his failure to “respect for the presidency” and a feeling of weariness, rooted in “the futility of trying to make this president say anything he doesn’t want to say.” Dan Rather offered a similar mea culpa. “I’m angry with myself for not having worked harder at bringing it out,” Rather declared in late 1973 (despite being labeled “the reporter the White House hates”), “. . . I think a beat man at the White House could have done more.” The colleagues who had dismissed Woodward and Bernstein now fêted them at the White House Correspondents Dinner and honored them with a slew of awards.⁹⁸

In contrast, other reporters distributed credit to “the press” as a collective entity, thus claiming a piece of glory for themselves. “It was the press, and essentially the press alone,” asserted the National Press Club’s 1973 report, “that unearthed the most scandalous misuse of the powers of government in this century.” As Carl Bernstein noted, this “orgy of self-congratulation” was a bit much. It not only slighted the roles of Congress and the courts in exposing Watergate; it also ignored the fact that those reporters who did the unearthing were few, and unlikely to be found conducting studies of presidential press relations. But now every reporter wanted a piece of the action.⁹⁹

It was in this last year and a half of Nixon’s presidency that the notion of a braying press pack emerged. Between April 1973 and August 1974, Newsweek ran thirty-five covers featuring Watergate, and another four on Agnew’s scandal. Time ran more than thirty. Although the coverage of Nixon’s early presidency had been no more negative than what other presidents endured, his treatment in 1973 and 1974 was decidedly more critical than any of his twentieth-century predecessors. “There was a feeling in the White House press corps, which I had just joined and didn’t share so much,” said Lou Cannon of the Post, “of how we had been betrayed and lied to. If you are looking at that, Watergate did change everything.” Once friendly reporters felt violated. Joseph Kraft, a Georgetown society regular and Kissinger lunch companion, had been by his own admission “on reasonably good terms with the Nixon Administration.” But Kraft was “caught off guard,” he said, when he learned that Nixon had tapped his phone. By October he came to share the view, once the province of the radical left, that Nixon was making the country “very close to something like a police state.” Even William Safire had a change of heart. In his first column for The New York Times in April 1973, he called Watergate “a tempest in a Teapot Dome,” confirming the fears of liberal readers who considered him a Nixon apologist. By the end of 1973, however, Safire recanted, saying he had been “grandly, gloriously, egregiously wrong.” Nixon’s anti-press efforts had turned allies into enemies.¹⁰⁰

With knowledge of Nixon’s complicity in Watergate, it is hard to recall the impassioned debates that raged in 1973 over whether he was guilty or innocent, over what he knew and when. The involvement of his top aides, his defenders claimed, didn’t necessarily implicate the president. He may have been no worse than negligent, some said. But Nixon’s continued lack of candor led reporters to conclude that he was concealing abuses of power and serious crimes. At Time, erstwhile Nixon enthusiasts Hedley Donovan and Hugh Sidey became convinced of Nixon’s criminal guilt. So did John Herbers, Dan Rather, and Helen Thomas, among other press corps regulars. Again, plenty of people outside the press corps were coming to similar conclusions; Nixon made his November 1973 declaration, “I am not a crook”—probably the most famous thing he ever said—at precisely the moment that millions of Americans were concluding he was exactly that. Only the revelation of the contents of key tapes in mid-1974 would confirm Nixon’s criminality for citizens and reporters alike. But among the press corps, the view of Nixon as a criminal became increasingly popular, and was decisive in changing their coverage from deferential to antagonistic.¹⁰¹

The new suspicion that the president was a criminal had some unwholesome consequences. Reporters, swept up in the chase, made mistakes that they failed to correct. In May 1973, Walter Cronkite opened the CBS Evening News with an item erroneously implicating a Bethesda bank run by Pat Buchanan’s brother in Watergate money-laundering. The AP falsely reported that Ehrlichman was present at a key cover-up meeting among Nixon, Haldeman, and Dean. ABC’s Sam Donaldson wrongly asserted that James McCord had implicated departed aide Harry Dent in the White House sabotage efforts; Donaldson apologized. News outlets overplayed trivial items, as The New York Times did by placing on the front page a three-column story about the possibility that Nixon’s campaign had received gambling money from the Bahamas. As Post editor Robert Maynard conceded, there was “a lot of fast and loose stuff being printed.”¹⁰²

More pervasive was the snide and pugnacious attitude many journalists struck. Not all reporters channeled their adversarial spirit into productive investigation. Often the result was sarcasm and churlishness. Ziegler, always a target, became a piñata. “We felt we’d been shown up by a pair of kids,” one press corps veteran confessed, “so some people tried to prove their manhood by bellowing at old Ron.” In March 1973, Ziegler fielded, by one count, some 478 Watergate questions and grew visibly exasperated. On April 17, he told the press that new information about White House involvement had come to light and that all his previous statements were “inoperative” (which essentially meant, as David Gergen later said, “We have been lying from the start”). At the next day’s briefing, Clark Mollenhoff, now one of Nixon’s most dogged pursuers, verbally assaulted the press secretary. His voice oozing contempt, Mollenhoff asked how Ziegler could unabashedly “stand up there and lie and put out misinformation and then come around later and say it’s all ‘inoperative.’” The press secretary, Mollenhoff asserted, was “not entitled to any credibility at all.” Thereafter, Ziegler was jeered at the briefings, as reporters “crossed the line,” the battered functionary complained, “. . . from aggressiveness to belligerence.” Explained Helen Thomas, “The evasion we accepted before we will never accept again. We realize that we did a lousy job on Watergate. We just sat there and took what they said at face value.” Now, unanswered questions prompted reporters to editorialize creatively about Ziegler’s evasions while technically sticking to accounts of the facts. “For the third day in a row, White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler refused to answer questions about how that 18½-minute gap appeared on the tape of the President’s conversations of June 23, 1972,” read one lead, a statement that, while wholly factual, clearly meant to convey the reporter’s scorn for the press secretary’s circumlocutions.¹⁰³

If some reporters felt they were just belatedly doing their job, others discerned a new insolence. Nixon certainly saw it that way. “It was as if a convulsion had seized Washington,” he recalled in his memoirs. “Restraints that had governed professional and political conduct for decades were suddenly abandoned. . . . In reporting the story the members of the Washington press corps . . . felt that they had embarrassed themselves by uncritically reporting the months of White House denials, and so they frantically sought to reassert their independence by demonstrating their skepticism of all official explanations.” Some regulars agonized over their new tenacity, just as they had rued their earlier passivity. Daniel Schorr said that in 1973 “a new kind of journalism developed,” in which, during the absence of disclosures, “the press began to try men in the most effective court in the country . . . the media.” ABC’s Harry Reasoner singled out Time and Newsweek for “pejorative pamphleteering [rather] than objective journalism.” The Chicago Daily News’s Peter Lisagor, a press corps regular, saw a “sadistic quality” in the battering of Ziegler. John Osborne described his peers as “dogs who have scented blood and are running the fox right down to his death”; Joseph Kraft, despite having warned of a Nixonian police state, now argued that since the machinery of government was functioning, reporters’ skullduggery had become unnecessary.¹⁰⁴

Some reporters were still doing important work. Though the revelations of Nixon’s financial improprieties paled next to his abuses of power—indeed, they became sideshows in the grand Watergate spectacle—on their own they might well have crippled Nixon’s presidency. During Nixon’s last year in office, reporters discovered that he had illegally backdated the donation of his vice-presidential papers to claim a bigger tax deduction; that he had paid barely any income taxes in some years; and that he improved his properties with federal funds. Notably, these exposés came from writers who worked at small papers or floated outside the White House press corps nucleus. John Blackburn of the Santa Ana Register first reported that Nixon acquired the Western White House at San Clemente with shady financial help and renovated it with public funds. John White of the Providence Journal-Bulletin exposed Nixon’s minuscule income tax payments. Others who broke fresh ground, such as Jack Anderson, were once scorned as eccentrics but now celebrated as mavericks. That the high-profile Washington correspondents reverted to pack journalism during Watergate’s climactic months reflected not any dearth of information to be unearthed about Nixon but rather a reassertion of old, enduring habits.

Nixon’s own press conferences from January 1973 until his resignation in August 1974 allowed the public to see the mounting antagonism. At the start of his second term, the president set the relationship off on the wrong foot. Before the election, he had been relishing the thought of punishing hostile journalists, and Colson and others had been less than subtle in communicating those intentions to the press. But no one was prepared for Nixon’s taunts at his January 31, 1973, press conference announcing the peace settlement in Vietnam. Proudly declaring that he had reached his goal of “peace with honor,” Nixon sneered at the journalists. “I know it gags some of you to write that phrase,” he said, “but it is true, and most Americans realize it is true.” “It was the first of a sparse, infrequent series of press conferences,” commented ABC’s Howard K. Smith, “that could aptly be called carnivorous.”¹⁰⁵

With the springtime Watergate revelations, Nixon again withdrew into isolation. Only after an extended hiatus did he return, on August 22, to face the press, when he announced Kissinger’s appointment as secretary of state. By this point Watergate had sprouted multiple subplots, and reporters were backlogged on questions. The tension was thick, especially when noted Nixon antagonists, such as Dan Rather, took the floor. “I want to state this question with due respect to your office,” the reporter said, unintentionally doing just the opposite. Nixon shot back: “That would be unusual.”^# “I would like to think not,” Rather replied, and he proceeded to ask Nixon about John Ehrlichman’s ex parte contacts with Pentagon Papers judge Matt Byrne. Nixon dodged the question. For the next half hour, tough interrogation followed, until Nixon erupted and chastised the reporters for neglecting “the business of the people.” Two weeks later, at another press conference, the parties reenacted the drama. Nixon began talking about policy, but reporters badgered him about Watergate; the president then lashed out at the press’s attacks “by innuendo, by leaks, by, frankly, leers and sneers of commentators.”¹⁰⁶

After the Saturday Night Massacre, the need for yet another press conference became apparent, as public opinion was crystallizing in favor of Nixon’s ouster. Adding to the call were mainstream media, including Time magazine, which ran its first ever editorial to urge Nixon to step down. Weakened, Nixon twice postponed the crucial press conference, finally going before the correspondents on October 26, at 7:00 P.M., in the White House East Room. It was, Helen Thomas judged, “the most excruciating news conference, and the lowest point ever between the president and the press in such a venue.”¹⁰⁷

Nixon came out fighting. “Cronkite’s not going to like this tonight, I hope,” he muttered before heading out to face the crowd. He opened with a discussion of the Middle East, but the first question, from Dan Rather, raised the question of resignation. “Well, I am glad we don’t take a vote of this room,” the president sniped. Responding to another question, Nixon began calmly but then segued into an attack on the “outrageous, vicious, distorted . . . frantic, hysterical reporting” that he said had shaken public confidence. (“I’m not blaming anyone for that,” he added.) CBS’s Robert Pierpoint asked why Nixon was angry with the press. “Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger,” Nixon said tersely. “You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.”¹⁰⁸

Reporters were flabbergasted. Some, like Hugh Sidey, thought the press had embarrassed itself. The reporters, he charged, “could not or did not ask the right questions for a public that cries out more each day for some answers.” He described the East Room as “a bear pit” of reporters, “shrieking and roaring for attention, jostling each other as they leaped up and down signaling frantically for the president’s attention, ignoring the previous questions and the incomplete answers to press their own divergent points.” Others, like Pierpoint, were “in a bit of a state of shock,” as he said two days later when he and Rather interviewed Pat Buchanan on the CBS Morning News. Noting Nixon’s “vitriolic attack on the news media,” Pierpont said he would assume “it wasn’t directed at me personally, although I happened to be the immediate object of it.” Buchanan blamed the press. “The mood there was really like Sunday afternoon in the Tijuana bullring,” he said. When Rather replied that the tension was “mostly of the president’s own creation,” Buchanan countered with a description of “the jumping up, the shouting, the screaming of questions” that he said forced a fair-minded reporter like Sidey to leave the room. Buchanan’s view was echoed in National Review, which described the press as “sweating, jumping and shouting, hair matted, eyes glazed—wondering about Mr. Nixon’s emotional stability.”¹⁰⁹

Though chastened, Pierpoint and Rather were arguing that the testy clashes showed only that the press corps was doing its job. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker agreed. With the recent news conferences, he claimed, “for the first time in my experience, the press has suddenly become what it has touted itself to be all these years—an adversary.” Others were downright gleeful, not because they hated Nixon, as the president claimed, but because they seemed now to have a role in history. Reporters thrilled to the thought that they were important players in a momentous event. “I am not proud of this, but I enjoyed Watergate,” Hedley Donovan later wrote. “To a journalist, it was a stupendously exciting story, fascinating in its complexity and fecundity, new sensations constantly leading onto more sensations. Beyond the sensations, however, I thought in the spring and summer of 1974 I was also seeing a majestic republican drama.”¹¹⁰

Nixon, for his part, had been exploiting the press’s excitement to paint himself as the victim of a lynch mob. When Nixon scheduled time on March 19, 1974, to field reporters’ questions after an appearance before an audience of media executives whom he expected to be friendly, Dan Rather and others wondered if the session was meant as an ambush. Rather vowed to hold his tongue. Yet when Nixon falsely said in his talk that he was cooperating fully with the Special Prosecutor, the newsman felt obliged to speak up. As Rather rose to his feet, audience members, who had seen the reporter’s chilly exchanges with Nixon and watched his hard-edged reporting, cheered and booed. Picking up on Rather’s obvious notoriety with the crowd, Nixon fired off a barb whose meaning was obscure but whose sarcastic tone was unmistakable: “Are you running for something?” he asked. Caught off guard, Rather lost his composure. “No, sir, Mr. President,” he said, adding just as opaquely, “Are you?”¹¹¹

If the literal meaning of the exchange was murky, the hostility between the two men was clear. The White House considered it a victory for Nixon, who pointed to the incident as proof of the press’s hostility. When Rather saw Pat Buchanan the next day, the speechwriter was grinning triumphantly. Journalists were divided. Some praised Rather’s gutsiness. “It’s obvious that there is tension between Rather and the president,” James Reston said, “but . . . he is doing his job.” Owners of many CBS affiliates, who tended to be conservative local businessmen, were angry with Rather and began an abortive bid to have the network formally censure him. Some Washington journalists also said the newsman had overstepped his bounds. The Washington Post’s Phil Geyelin thought Rather’s rejoinder to Nixon was “gratuitous” and served only “to confirm in the public mind what the president says about TV newscasters.” John Chancellor thought that whatever jabs Nixon took at reporters, it was wrong to reciprocate. Rather himself regretted the remark instantly, realizing it diverted attention from the substance of Nixon’s reply to the dynamic between president and reporter.¹¹²

If Rather had crossed the line into gratuitous adversarialism, he behaved differently when he was assigned, along with CBS’s other leading newsmen, to provide instant analysis of Nixon’s resignation statement on August 8, the night before his East Room farewell. Nixon’s speech was dodgy and defiant enough that, had the commentators been the unstinting opponents that Nixon imagined, they surely could have picked apart his performance. But almost everyone at CBS, from the executives to the on-air analysts, was reluctant to kick Nixon when he was down. During the day, Washington bureau chief Sanford Socolow had urged Daniel Schorr not to appear “vindictive” in his reporting—and told Schorr the word was going out to all correspondents. Executives also decided not to show a “political obituary” of Nixon that reviewed the history of Watergate.¹¹³

Far from vindictive, CBS’s newsmen gushed with praise. Eric Sevareid claimed that “few things in his presidency became him as much.” “It certainly was a conciliatory speech,” agreed Walter Cronkite. Rather had been in Lafayette Park, enjoying his celebrity as “thousands of people” mobbed him, as Hugh Sidey enviously recalled, excited “to see Dan Rather in the flesh.” But Rather, too, disappointed the Nixon-haters with his analysis, judging it Nixon’s “finest hour.” The president invested the moment, he said, with “a touch of class” and “a touch of majesty.” Only Roger Mudd, Rather’s rival to succeed Cronkite, was critical, noting that Nixon had refused to accept blame for the ordeal of the last two years.¹¹⁴ Even as Nixon departed, the press was still torn between its competing impulses.

The press’s relationship with Nixon had consequences. For the press, the initial result seemed to be salutary. The investigative reporter became “a new American folk hero,” as New York magazine wrote, seen as a fearless truth-seeker, and record numbers of students enrolled in journalism schools and joined newspapers. Beat reporters now reflexively adopted an adversarial posture. Any act of news management could be the tip of an iceberg of concealment; any hint of deceit could justify an investigation. After Watergate, Joseph Kraft wrote in 1979, “there has been no holding us. The more august the person, the hotter the chase.” By 1996, the media critic James Fallows was writing that “The working assumption for most reporters is that most politicians and handlers will mislead them most of the time.”¹¹⁵

This zeal for exposure was a mixed blessing. As always, when channeled into hard reporting it provided an indispensable check on official dishonesty, a proper function of the government’s fourth branch. But too often post-Watergate journalists set themselves up as the nation’s guardians of political morality and joined in what came to be called “feeding frenzies.” In learning from Watergate, they too often emulated not the trailblazers whose skepticism had produced fruitful inquiries but the latecomers who jumped on Watergate only as it was becoming a media spectacle. When distrust of authority spurred investigation, it remained a cherished trait; but when cynicism fed easy opinion-mongering and bandwagon journalism, it was bound to be superficial and fickle—and could easily revert to its mirror image, an equally shallow pose of credulous appreciation.

Compared to this mixed legacy for reporters, the repercussions for Nixon of his battles with the press were less ambiguous. His image as a spin doctor remained (only in later years it was historians, not newsmen, he was said to be spinning). And although his news management came to be viewed as his mildest sin—no different from the incorrigible PR work of his successors—the images of him as a liar and criminal continued to mark him as a uniquely blameworthy president, in the eyes of many groups in society other than just the press. The images of Nixon as liar and crook built upon and commingled with his other menacing images—the liberals’ manipulator, the radicals’ dictator—to form a portrait of America’s chief political villain that endured long after.

The durability of this revised Tricky Dick image itself had a double legacy. For while it fed a distrust of all politicians and a taste for scandal, it also served as a benchmark, a reminder of the singular severity of Nixon’s crimes. Even in the fog of the post-Watergate scandal culture, in which crimes were often lumped together with peccadilloes, Nixon’s dark image served as a bright beacon for the discriminating. Memories of Nixon’s abuses helped Americans decide when their fourth branch of government was onto a real scandal and when it was working itself into a lather simply because of its ingrained adversarial attitude.

Like most post-Watergate representations of Nixon in film and television, the movie Dick (1999), directed by Andrew Fleming, reaffirmed the former president’s image as a liar and a criminal. The film, a comedy, supposes that two dizzy teenage girls, Arlene and Betsy, who live across the street from the Watergate building, are the real but uncredited heroes who brought Nixon’s crimes to light. Meeting Nixon by accident on a school field trip to the White House, they become his official dog walkers and soon begin, unwittingly, to unravel the Watergate conspiracies. They feed their discoveries to Woodward and Bernstein, calling themselves, of course, “Deep Throat.”

A broad satire, Dick is less scathing in its portrayal of Nixon than was the humor of the Watergate era; Nixon is portrayed as a bumbler, incompetent to run his own cover-up. But the film is far from the sort of anodyne non-ideological political satire of a Jay Leno monologue or the later years of Saturday Night Live. “Ultimately, our goal was to personalize Nixon’s betrayal of the country,” explained Andrew Fleming. His portrait of Nixon’s deception of Arlene and Betsy stamps the president as a genuine, if comic, villain—ranting about Jews, lying to the country, and even kicking his dog, King Timahoe, whom he absent-mindedly continues to call “Checkers.”¹¹⁶

If in many respects Dick could have been made by Watergate-era Nixon-haters, in one important way it bears the imprint of its own time: its portrayal of the press. Indeed, the film is largely a spoof of All the President’s Men and its main characters; even the actors who play Woodward and Bernstein resemble Redford and Hoffman more than the real-life reporters. In place of the earlier film’s heroic depiction of the journalistic sleuths, Dick offers a pair of Keystone Kops—petty, vain, and as incompetent and bumbling as Nixon himself. Woodward is parodied as humorless and plodding, Bernstein as a hypercompetitive runt. When Betsy and Arlene call the reporters, the men fight like schoolboys for control of the telephone, and they insult each other with sophomoric taunts. More pointedly, they are shown to be utterly dependent on the scraps of information that the teenage girls toss their way. Left to their own devices, the film implies, they never would have cracked the case.

Twenty-five years after Watergate, Dick spoke to the cultural perceptions of both Nixon and the press. Where Woodward and Bernstein were hailed as heroes in the 1970s, their 1990s emulators became objects of public scorn. Nixon’s image as a liar was indelible. But the moment of revival and heroism for American journalism was all too fleeting.

* David Halberstam: “In the give and take and scrambling for status among their peers, liberalism, do-goodism and bleeding-heartism are really not deeply admired. Tartness, skepticism, irreverence, fatalism are much more valued among reporters . . . the sense at least of partial alienation.” David Broder: “The evidence I have seen—and the personal experience of thirty years’ political talk with other journalists—makes me think the charge of ideological bias in the newsroom laughable. There just isn’t enough ideology in the average reporter to fill a thimble.”

† Nixon praised one reporter, Carl Greenberg of the Los Angeles Times, for covering the campaign “fairly” and “objectively,” adding that editors had “the responsibility . . . to put a few Greenbergs on the candidate they happen to be against.”

‡ According to one political scientist’s study, Roosevelt’s coverage in his first year was 88.8 percent positive, Nixon’s 81.2 percent.

§ Others made similar comments. “The packaging is important, and Joe McGinniss’s book was the first time a lot of us thought about that. . . . [Newspeople are] still coming to grips with that,” said TV producer Tom Bettag. “That changed the way everybody covers campaigns to a degree,” agreed Don Irwin of The Los Angeles Times . And Don Oberdorfer of The Washington Post: “The press became much more conscious of political advertising.”

¶ In January 1970, a corporation headed by Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo applied to the FCC to take over the license of the Post’s Miami station. Three years later (after the Post began investigating Watergate), other Nixon allies challenged the license of the Post’s Jacksonville affiliate. In a White House conversation on September 15, 1972, with Haldeman and Dean, Nixon fumed over the paper’s Watergate disclosures: “The main thing is the Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one. They have a television station . . . and they’re going to have to get it renewed. Does [the radio station] come up too? . . . The game has to be played awfully rough.” And on January 2, 1974, the Justice Department asked the FCC to deny license renewal requests to stations owned by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Cowles Communications, which had been critical of Nixon during Watergate.

# Nixon was angry at Rather in part because CBS had recently aired footage of the president shoving Ron Ziegler before a speech in New Orleans, an incident discussed in chapter 6.