People don’t win Pulitzer Prizes by being for; they usually win them by being against.
—PRESIDENT RICHARD M. NIXON, TO THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF BROADCASTERS, MARCH 19, 1974
Bob Woodward had not seen the movie
All the President’s Men for twenty-five years. Then one day in mid-2005 he sat down with his eight-year-old daughter Diana while she watched it for the first time. Noticing her squirming a bit, the
Washington Post assistant managing editor asked what she was thinking. “The guy pretending to be you doesn’t look like you at all,” Diana told him. And what else? “Boring, boring, boring,” she said. “And she’s exactly right,” Woodward agrees, chuckling—not just about the movie, but about the nature of the Watergate investigation itself. “Because it’s about fitting little pieces together. You don’t know what you have when you publish a little piece, but you publish it anyway.”
1Any squirming of his own on the topic of Watergate may have more to do with how often he has been asked over the years to rehash the role of “Woodstein”—as the Post editors nicknamed the duo of Woodward and Carl Bernstein during their investigation—in the events that led to President Richard Nixon’s August 1974 resignation. Just a few months before the father–daughter movie viewing, another flurry of national publicity erupted when Deep Throat chose to identify himself. Woodward’s celebrated secret source turned out to be W. Mark Felt, the number two man at the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the time of the Watergate probe. (A smoke-wreathed Hal Holbrook, stepping from behind pillars in an eerie, dark garage, played him in the 1976 film.)
Alan Pakula’s movie—with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein and Jason Robards as the
Post executive editor Ben Bradlee—actually holds up well today. For adults, at least, it now plays as a historical/political thriller. The mystery is not whether the president will fall but how two reporters and one cantankerous editor helped precipitate it, starting with the simple assignment to report on arrests after a break-in at the Watergate office building’s Democratic National Committee offices.
Missing from the film, of course, is a historical perspective tying the Nixon administration’s criminal activities to a greater political motive—something that four decades now permits. In recent years Woodward and Bernstein have offered an analysis positing the president’s “five wars of Watergate.” Starting with attempts to stem the anti–Vietnam War movement, the White House strategy expanded to interfering with perceived enemies in the news media and in the Democratic party, to undermining the legal system by paying hush money to witnesses, and lying to investigators. The final “war” was against history, in the reporters’ view, and included the portrayal of spying, burglaries, and dirty tricks against administration targets as “capers” rather than episodes in a coordinated mission to subvert governmental processes.
2In one oft-quoted snippet from the White House tape recordings eventually released during the Watergate investigation, Nixon in July 1971—a year before the Watergate break-in—is heard telling chief of staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: “We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy. They’re using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?”
3“Pure Opera Bouffe”
Years before Woodward joined the
Post in 1971, the journalist believes, a skeptical spirit was growing in the media—a spirit that expanded during the Watergate scandal and to some extent continues today. It was “the back-to-back nature of Vietnam and Watergate” that gave it power. “If Watergate had been isolated, the impact wouldn’t have been the same,” he says.
4 In Southeast Asia, journalists had dealt with official deception on many levels. Seymour Hersh won the 1970 International Reporting Pulitzer for his work uncovering the massacre of civilians by American troops in the village of My Lai. His stories had been carried by the small Washington-based Dispatch News Service but had been published by newspapers around the country.
At home, war protests created divisions in the media just as those protests widened the schism between Americans. During that time—marked by the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention and the shootings of Kent State University students by Ohio National Guardsmen at a 1970 antiwar rally—many reporters developed a keen “question authority” mindset. And in Richard Nixon’s White House, war protests fed his paranoia about the president’s vulnerability, compounding his conviction that all opponents of his administration needed to be controlled.
The blue-bound Pulitzer Prize entry folders submitted by managing editor Howard Simons in late January 1973—months before the Nixon administration’s role in the Watergate break-in was confirmed in any courtroom—offer one striking picture of the role of two young reporters and a courageous newspaper in exposing that insidious White House philosophy. Rather than any grand campaign, the folders present the matter-of-fact nature of the early
Post coverage and how it built into a riveting drama mainly through accumulation. He filed two Pulitzer entries: one for public service for the paper and one for national reporting in the names of Woodward and Bernstein individually.
5The step-by-step nature of the
Post’s Watergate reporting is what Bob Woodward still feels is not well understood. During a dinner he had with Al Gore during President George W. Bush’s administration, for example, Woodward even challenged the former vice president’s view of what the
Post had done in 1972. Gore—briefly a visiting journalism professor at Columbia University after leaving office and a reporter with Nashville’s
Tennessean in the early 1970s—“talked about the purity of the Watergate stories.” He said, ‘Those were so wonderful, and now you write about Bush and you don’t nail him,’” according to Woodward, then the
Post’s associate editor. “And I said to him, ‘You have consumed the Kool-Aid of the mythology of Watergate.’ Because those stories were incremental, they were not perfect. They contained some mistakes, they contained some under-reaching, some over-reaching. It’s what you would expect. It’s daily reporting. We didn’t say, ‘In an outrageous violation of all constitutional principles….’ We just said, ‘This happened.’ Very bland, bloodless, if you will. Not in the Pulitzer advocacy tradition.” And, he adds, perhaps thinking back to his recent movie-viewing experience, “there was no music in the background.”
6Here is how Howard Simons summarized that “bland, bloodless” work in the nomination letter that the managing editor hoped would fit the Post entry into the Pulitzer public-service tradition:
It began as pure opera bouffe—four men, gloved and masked, breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters in the dark of a summer night, armed with walkie-talkies and sophisticated electronic bugging devices. They even called it a caper.
But this was the Watergate Case, the biggest political scandal of the decade.
As this is written five men have pleaded guilty. Two more are on trial. A high White House official has been eased out of his job. The treasurer of the Committee to Re-Elect the President has resigned in protest. A Senate investigation is underway. The Administration has been politically embarrassed.
The word “Watergate” has become a symbol for the deterioration of the American political ethic.
All of this has happened as the result of the journalistic efforts of The Washington Post, its reporters—Carl Bernstein and Robert Woodward—editors, editorial writers and its cartoonist.
7
It was a fine nomination letter, but the public service jurors were not persuaded. In March they made the Post only their third choice. It would take another month of confirming news to create media understanding of the Post’s real contributions. Only then was the full Pulitzer board able to find it worthy of the gold medal.
Tip of the Day: Choose the Front Row
The
Post got onto the story fast that June 17 Saturday morning through a telephone tip to Simons within hours of the burglars’ arrest. That call came from attorney Joseph Califano, who had been counsel to both the Democratic Party and the
Post in the past. Alerted by the managing editor, longtime police reporter Alfred E. Lewis accompanied the acting police chief to the crime scene and spent hours behind police lines. Other police reporters remained outside. Woodward—an ambitious first-year
Post reporter not particularly enthused by having to cover a hearing related to a local break-in—went to the burglars’ arraignment. He was in the front row to hear defendant James McCord tell the judge his last place of employment. It was the Central Intelligence Agency.
“No three letters in the English language, arranged in that particular order, and spoken in similar circumstances, can tighten a good reporter’s sphincter faster than C-I-A,” executive editor Ben Bradlee later wrote. (Carl Bernstein recalls Woodward’s two-word reaction: “Holy shit.”
8) By the end of the day, ten reporters were working the story, including Bernstein, who explored the Miami connections that the burglars seemed to have. Both he and Woodward contributed to the main Sunday story, appearing under Lewis’s byline. After that, Woodward and Bernstein were the natural choices to stay with it, at least in the early stages when it appeared to be the very “third-rate burglary” that President Nixon’s press secretary described.
9“They got the story assigned to them because they were the first two reporters identifying themselves that Saturday morning,” Bradlee said with a laugh. “The big shots don’t work on Saturdays.” The tougher assignment decision came later: keeping them on Watergate after they began turning up strong White House connections. “There were a few people on the national staff who wanted the story. You’d ask them, ‘What fault do you find with Woodward and Bernstein, and what reason are you going to give for taking it away from them?’ Then, opposition pretty much disappeared,” according to Bradlee, who died in October 2014.
10They quickly made the most of the pairing. Professionally, they complemented each other well despite their many differences. Bernstein’s reporting drive combined with a notoriously mercurial personality that often got him in trouble with editors. There was an office story, for example, about his forgetting a rental car he parked in a garage, running up a huge tab for the paper. For his part, the Yale-educated Woodward, though newer to journalism, had served as a naval officer and had chosen journalism over going to Harvard Law School. “Both are bright, but Woodward was conscientious, hardworking, and driven, and Bernstein messy and undisciplined. He was, however, the better writer, more imaginative and creative,” the
Post publisher Katharine Graham wrote in her 1997 autobiography. “In other ways the relationship was oil and water, but the end product came out right, despite—or perhaps because of—the strange mix.”
11
FIGURE 16.1 The Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein (left) and Bob Woodward meet with publisher Katharine Graham during their 1972 Watergate reporting. Source: Post staff photo. Published by permission of the Washington Post.
Woodward describes the imperfect art of newsroom teaming as “assembling the perfect journalistic brain, something no one person has that I know of.” He notes, “Carl Bernstein and I never really look at things the same way, even to this day.” But there was one big plus to their collaboration, Woodward points out: total-immersion coverage caused no problems at home. “We were young and unmarried, Carl and I.”
12Their reporting encountered lots of dead ends, and some smaller threads of information led down curious alleys but turned up nothing definitive. Still, there were enough exclusives to keep Bradlee in their camp. “They got the White House involvement. They identified the money. They tied the money to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. And this was all Woodward and Bernstein, these nonentity reporters,” according to Bradlee.
13The headline on their Monday, June 19, collaboration read: “GOP Security Aide Among 5 Arrested In Bugging Affair.” Under the heat of a deadline, Bernstein literally snatched the final writing job away from Woodward, who had to concede that his new teammate had a gift for banging out clear, fast copy. The story started:
One of the five men arrested early Saturday in the attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters here is the salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s re-election committee.
The suspect, James W. McCord Jr., 53, also holds a separate contract to provide security services to the Republican National Committee, GOP national chairman Bob Dole said yesterday.
The news for Tuesday’s paper did not develop until after midnight, when a night police reporter for the Post, Eugene Bachinski, called Woodward. A source at the station had told Bachinski of two interesting entries found in notebooks taken from the burglars. The story was another scoop, under E. J. Bachinski’s and Woodward’s names:
A consultant to White House special counsel Charles W. Colson is listed in the address books of two of the five men arrested in an attempt to bug the Democratic National headquarters here early Saturday.
Federal sources close to the investigation said the address books contain the name and home telephone number of Howard E. Hunt, with the notations, “W. House” and “W. H.”
The world would learn one day that it was E. Howard Hunt, not Howard E. (He gained an infamous Watergate footnote for having performed some political dirty tricks while disguised in a cheap red wig.) To track down Hunt, Woodward first called the White House and got a number where he could be contacted. Finally reaching Hunt, the reporter asked him why his name was in the Watergate burglars’ notebooks. Hunt said, “Good God!” He then mumbled “no comment” and hung up.
Helping link Hunt to the case was the man Howard Simons had dubbed Deep Throat after the pornographic movie with the same title—and because of the man’s arrangement with Woodward that his information would be for “deep background,” not publishable unless confirmed independently. His guidance was vital though. To Woodward, the appearance of Hunt’s name in the notebooks was far from proof of complicity. “I called Felt twice that day,” says Woodward of the long-secret contact he now can discuss freely. “Felt said to me, ‘Don’t worry, he’s involved. He’s at the center of things.’”
14 The high-level confirmation was what the
Post needed to run with that story.
In the office, Bradlee was an editorial model of tough love, and he radiated aggressiveness. “It was ‘go get ’em, kid; there aren’t limits here,’” says Woodward, who had been at the
Post only nine months the day he called the White House to find Howard Hunt. Amazingly, the cub reporter was not nervous for that first call. “And that’s not because of me; that’s because of the atmosphere of ‘go get ’em, kid,’” says Woodward. Still, Jason Robards got Bradlee’s demanding side right, Woodward says. “Those scenes of his slapping the copy and saying, ‘You haven’t got it, kid’—you want to strangle him, but that didn’t mean ‘I don’t believe it.’ That didn’t mean ‘We’re not going to publish it.’ It meant ‘Work harder; get more sources; make sure it rings with me.’”
15The next major exclusive ran on August 1. In Miami, Bernstein tracked down an explanation for how a $25,000 cashier’s check to the president’s re-election campaign found its way into the Florida account of a Watergate burglar. Then on September 17 the reporters established that the fund paying the burglars was controlled by top aides to former Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell. (As attorney general, the same Mitchell had sought to enjoin the Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers in June 1971.)
Another
Post blockbuster came on October 1. Mitchell, while still attorney general, had personally controlled a secret fund to spy on the Democrats. The story quoted Mitchell’s response to Bernstein, who called him for comment at 11:30 p.m.: “All that crap, you’re putting it in the paper? It’s all been denied. Jesus. Katie Graham … is gonna get caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published. Good Christ. That’s the most sickening thing I’ve ever heard.” It is well known now that Mitchell actually said that the publisher would get “her tit caught” in that wringer. “Leave everything in but ‘her tit,’ and tell the desk I said it’s okay,” the executive editor had said to Bernstein. (The publisher later wrote that Bradlee did not check with her before running the quote—and she added that it was “especially strange of [Mitchell] to call me Katie, which no one has ever called me.”)
Nine days later, Howard Hunt’s phone records led to another Post exclusive. He had made numerous calls to a California lawyer, Donald Segretti, who turned out to be involved in a broad network of campaign dirty tricks. The October 10 Woodward and Bernstein story began:
FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.
The activities, according to information in FBI and Department of Justice files, were aimed at all the major Democratic presidential candidates and—since 1971—represented a basic strategy of the re-election effort.
Included was information tying the White House to a range of tricks, including some involving the Muskie presidential bid that had come apart in New Hampshire. Mark Felt had been a secret source on this story as well. The FBI was following the tricksters too. (Watergate burglars had also orchestrated a break-in at the Los Angeles office of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.)
To get the demanding Bradlee to sign off on any story that the reporters’ digging produced, the
Post set a tougher-than-usual standard for getting information confirmed before publication. Bradlee required at least two solid, independent sources if the information was from individuals who would not allow their names to be used. “It grew out of paranoia,” Woodward says of the rule. “Some source could be spinning you. And a second element was the seriousness of the charges. You’re accusing someone of criminal, unethical behavior.”
16Among perhaps two hundred Watergate stories the
Post did in 1972, Anthony Marro lists only those of August 1, September 17, October 1, and October 10 as breaking “significant new ground.” Still, following Woodward and Bernstein on their daily reports was exhausting, says Marro, whose
Newsday was one of the few papers that tried hard to compete on the story.
Newsday saw it as part of its investigative tradition and also felt a duty to follow up on previous investigations it had done into President Nixon’s personal and business relationships. “You worked all day and all night, and everybody was under a tremendous amount of pressure, and we were still getting beat,” Marro says.
17 Woodward does not disagree with Tony Marro that those few 1972 stories stood out. In between them, though, were dozens of smaller ones that would lead the reporters down the path, stone by stone, to the Oval Office.
“There’d be a little story on [page] B-38 about the expensive receiver that the Watergate burglars used to monitor the calls. A $3,000 receiver from a firm in Rockville called Watkins-Johnson—only I remember it,” Woodward says. “Now $3,000 for a radio receiver was a lot of money. That story really didn’t lead anywhere, except that it told you that this was a really well-financed operation. As you get these details and add them together, the facts created the momentum for understanding what was really happening.”
18Avoiding the I-Word
As the pair worked on, Bradlee tried to insulate them from the heat of internal and external criticism—and from apathy from the rest of the media. “We knew at the time that people didn’t believe what we’d written. Many of our colleagues on the
Washington Post national staff didn’t believe it,” Woodward says, recalling how hard it was for a young reporter to accept that. Just as hard to accept were the daily Nixon administration denials and attacks on the
Post. “The effort to discredit our reporting was staggering, unparalleled,” says Woodward. “It gets your attention when you turn on the television and there you are, just roundly denounced. And you know what you wrote is right, and carefully done.” But the interviewing and writing demands were so intense through the summer of 1972 that the two reporters had little time to worry about such things. Likewise, they gave little thought to how high in the administration the reporting might lead. “You kept your head down and stayed focused on the next story,” Woodward says.
There was one moment, though, just before the October 1 story on Mitchell’s control of the secret fund, when Woodward and Bernstein had a candid discussion in the
Post cafeteria. “I put a dime in the coffee machine—that’s what coffee cost then—and I felt a literal chill go down my neck,” according to Bernstein. “I can still feel it today. And I turned to Woodward and I said, ‘Oh my God, this president is going to be impeached.’” Woodward replied, “You’re right. But we’ll never be able to use that word.”
19Even when things went wrong on a story the executive editor and managing editor stood up for “Woodstein.” Bradlee and Simons had built up a strong editing crew to handle continuing Watergate-related news. “It takes a particular kind of energy and courage on the part of editors and publishers to support daily incremental coverage,” says Woodward. At the time the Post did not have a standing investigative team with its own dedicated editors. Such editing—along with the extra time newspapers can give to special project reporting—sometimes makes catching potential errors easier.
The best known of Woodward and Bernstein’s mistakes would probably have slipped through any editing processes. While he was interviewing Nixon re-election committee treasurer Hugh Sloan in late October, Woodward misunderstood what the official said about whether his grand jury testimony included mention of presidential chief of staff Bob Haldeman as one of the five officials controlling the secret fund that financed campaign dirty tricks. Flawed
Post “confirmations” of what Woodward believed he had heard from Sloan led to an inaccuracy in an October 25 story. Sloan had not identified Haldeman before the grand jury. The error brought ringing denials from all over the administration and forced the
Post to pull back to discover what had gone wrong.
20It would eventually come out that Haldeman
was the fifth controlling person but that the grand jury had not asked Sloan about Haldeman, so Sloan had not mentioned his name. Still, the error gave ammunition to
Post critics. “You shouldn’t make any mistakes, and the Haldeman story was a mistake,” says Woodward.
21 Bradlee wrote of the error: “Mercifully for us, on the afternoon of October 26, Henry Kissinger gave a press conference at the White House to announce that ‘peace was at hand in Vietnam,’ and that gave us a little breathing room, since it occupied both the press and the Nixon administration.”
22Soon Woodward and Bernstein returned to form. They would continue to lead the nation in coverage of Watergate-related stories through December 31 (the last day of eligibility for the next year’s Pulitzers) and on into 1973 and 1974.
Along with the package of news stories in the 1973 Pulitzer Public Service entry, the
Post submitted a dozen editorials by Phil Geyelin and Roger Wilkins. On the very first day after the break-in, one editorial appeared called “Mission Incredible,” opening with the line: “As always, should you or any of your force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.” Among the cartoons submitted in the package, one by Herblock, as Herbert Block signed his work, depicted a family on a guided White House tour. The mother had strayed down a stairway into a sludge-encrusted basement area filled with “taps,” “bugs,” “handguns,” and “rubber gloves.” The caption was “Sorry, Ma’m—The Lower Level Is Not Part of the White House Tour.”
23“A Pimple on the Elephant’s Ass”
Even with its string of exclusive stories, supporting commentary, and dramatic cover letter, the Post’s bid for a Pulitzer Prize was a tough sell in early March of 1973—in part because of its timing. Many journalists still were suspicious of any stories under the Woodward and Bernstein byline. President Nixon had been inaugurated after his landslide re-election over South Dakota Senator George McGovern. Most Washington correspondents had made the campaign, not Watergate, the main story.
It had been such a strange contest, with one Democrat after another seemingly stumbling into some great gaffe. First Maine Senator Edmund Muskie withdrew after being embarrassed on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. The
Manchester Union-Leader had received a mysterious letter suggesting that the senator condoned use of the slur word “Canuck” for French-Canadians. And later McGovern vice presidential choice Thomas Eagleton, a Missouri senator, withdrew after press reports that he had been treated for clinical depression in the past. A black cloud seemed to hang over the Democrats all the way to their flop at the polls. Surely this had been the real story, many journalists thought at the time—far bigger than a peculiar June 17 attempt to bug the Democrats, which had resulted in guilty pleas by men whose suspected ties to the Nixon campaign were all officially denied.
24None of the five public service jurors who convened on March 8 and 9 was from Washington, New York, or Los Angeles, where Watergate stories had been in the news more regularly. One juror was from Portland, Maine, and the others were from Chicago, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, and Riverside, California. Their overwhelming first choice was the Chicago Tribune for a probe of primary election violations that had led to indictments and convictions. Articles on police corruption by the New York Times, the previous year’s winner for the Pentagon Papers, earned that paper a spot ahead of the Post as well.
In notes submitted to the Pulitzer board, the jury said that one juror had ranked it second and three ranked it third. “However, a fifth juror gave it a substantially lower rating on the ground that the Post had overindulged professional restraints on unattributed information in order to make its point.”
25 (Woodward laughs when first told of the argument from the work’s detractor. “We weren’t trying to make a point,” he says.
26) Beyond that, some jurors felt that office break-ins and campaign slush funds were relatively small potatoes, even if the reporting was correct. One unidentified juror told a Columbia official: “Watergate is only a pimple on the elephant’s ass.”
27FIGURE 16.2 The report forwarded to the Pulitzer board by public service jurors in 1973 made the Washington Post’s Watergate entry their third choice, after work by the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. The board selected the Post as the winner. Source: Report provided courtesy of the Pulitzer Prizes.
The view of the
Post’s coverage changed dramatically before the Pulitzer board met to choose their winners though. On April 5, Watergate break-in suspect James McCord, the former CIA man, told federal judge John J. Sirica that there had been White House pressure to keep the defendants silent. As more high-level figures then became implicated in the break-in and cover-up, others in the media began publishing stories that confirmed much of what Woodward and Bernstein’s hard-won anonymous sources had told them months earlier. As Pulitzer Prize administrator John Hohenberg put it:
It was in this charged atmosphere that the Advisory Board met at Columbia on April 12. The same membership as in 1972 met around the black oval table in the World Room under the lighted Statue of Liberty stained glass window, only this time Messrs. Bradlee and Reston were out of the room…. Within a few minutes after Chairman [Joseph] Pulitzer [Jr.] had declared himself in favor of the Washington Post for the public service gold medal, all nine Board members in the room agreed to reverse the Public Service Jury.
28
The Pulitzer board gave the
Tribune the Spot News Pulitzer after its members had decided on the gold medal for the
Post.
Bradlee had been prepared to resign from the board if the
Post had not won for its Watergate coverage.
29 But even after the gold medal was won, he had a delicate job to do: explaining to Woodward and Bernstein that the Public Service Prize was for the newspaper, not for individuals. Officially, they would not be winning it themselves. In fact, the reporters were not listed in the Pulitzer citation. Woodward remembers Bradlee reassuring the reporters that they should not worry because they would forever be identified with Watergate.
“It was one of his all-time understatements,” Woodward says.
“I don’t consider myself as having ever won a Pulitzer Prize,” he adds, “and that is factually correct.” As he thinks about it, Woodward believes it is wise for the Pulitzers to have an award acknowledging a paper and not individuals. “Anything that’s a little humbling is a good thing,” he says.
30FIGURE 16.3 The Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee ponders history in the making. The headline reads “Nixon Resigns.” Source: Post staff photo by David R. Legge. Published by permission of the Washington Post.
“The Light Comes Out in Darkness”
The board never gave an explanation for why the two reporters’ names were left off the citation. Reporters by then had been identified in Public Service Prize citations three times: in 1947, 1950, and 1960. Some board members who have served more recently have viewed the omission of Woodward and Bernstein—as well as Neil Sheehan’s exclusion from the 1972
New York Times citation—as unfortunate mistakes. “It would seem to me to have been entirely appropriate to have named Woodward and Bernstein, and to have named Neil Sheehan. They were central figures and it was their initiatives that led to the Prizes,” says Seymour Topping, the retired
New York Times editor who served as administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes during most of the 1990s.
31Gene Roberts, editor of the
Philadelphia Inquirer during the Watergate years, believes that the public service citation should have named Woodward and Bernstein, but adds that individual Pulitzers should have gone to them as well. In his nine years on the Pulitzer board in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Roberts found the board too reluctant to acknowledge individuals by name when it honored a paper with the gold medal. “I think it’s wonderful that the paper would win an award,” he says, “but it’s even more important to the institution of the Pulitzers to take a step backward and always put the reporters first.”
32Other board veterans don’t think the exclusion of the names is a serious concern. “It’s not as if either of them failed to get the accolades,” says the retired
Chicago Tribune editor Jack Fuller. Besides, “Woodward and Bernstein did terrific work, and it was the centerpiece, but the
Post stuck its neck out big-time and deserved the Public Service award.”
33Just how exposed it was became apparent when tapes of conversations in Richard Nixon’s Oval Office were released. In one conversation on September 15, the day Hunt and the burglars were indicted, the president told some senior aides: “The main thing is that 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…. And it’s going to be God damn active here…. [T]he game has to be played awfully rough.”
34 What would people have thought of the Pulitzers had the
Post not won a prize for its Watergate coverage?
Some board members from later years believe the damage could have been severe. “If the Prize had been awarded two months earlier, it would have been extremely embarrassing for the Post not to get the Pulitzer,” says Gene Roberts. Seymour Topping agrees and extends that sentiment to the case of the New York Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers the previous year. “Those two achievements were so outstanding that to put them aside would have indicated that there were extraordinary political considerations behind the choices,” he says.
For Woodward, some lessons growing out of Watergate were very personal and long lasting. In recent years he has resumed doing “night work,” as he calls it—going to interview sources at home after hours as he and Bernstein had done regularly. It was a technique that Bernstein proposed but that Woodward described well by saying that “the light comes out in darkness,” according to Bernstein.
35 “That’s where you get people alone, away from the office,” says Woodward. “Seeing them empty their pockets, as Howard Simons used to say.”
Simons, who died in 1989, also gets credit for teaching Woodward a broader life lesson. Just after President Nixon resigned, Simons “called me into his office with these arm motions that only he could do,” says Woodward. On the desk was a reporter’s recent obituary. “It had a headline like ‘Joe Smith, 80, won Pulitzer in 1947.’ And Howard said, ‘That’s you. This guy won the Pulitzer and you never heard from him again. That’s what happens. Always remember, you’re never going to have a story that has the impact of Watergate. Never.’ And then he said the most important thing: ‘Now get your ass out of here and get back to work.’”
36
1973—The
Washington Post for its investigation of the Watergate case.
37
The
Post’s coverage of Watergate has continued to be among the most studied cases in journalism schools and—thanks largely to the book and the movie—a topic of general conversation as well. It has been the subject of several academic books as well. When the University of Texas created a home for Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate papers in 2005, Tony Marro, by then the retired
Newsday editor, led a seminar in Austin to reexamine many Watergate-related questions, including the
Post’s broad use of anonymous sources and what impact that had on later journalism. His position was that anonymity “can be as addictive as heroin” as sources gradually learn to expect being shielded. And that makes on-the-record material harder to get.
38 (Woodward disagrees that there is an over-reliance on anonymous sources, arguing that granting anonymity remains necessary for reporters to get at hidden truths.)
Another question posed at the Austin seminar: Just how much credit did the press deserve for driving a president from office? Marro, recalling days when he was among the reporters competing with the Post for early Watergate stories, argued that the media got too much credit. “The fact is that Nixon was ousted by a constitutional process that involved all three branches of government—criminal investigators, the courts, and the Congress,” he told the assembled journalism students. It is a position that Bernstein supports. Calling the press-brings-down-a-president theme “an overstatement,” he has said that Nixon’s resignation “was about the system working. The legislature, the judiciary: It worked.”
Woodward believes, though, that the full impact of the
Post’s reporting cannot be truly known. Without press exposure, the White House cover-up might well have succeeded in protecting the guilty and obstructing justice enough that the facts remained hidden. After the intricate web of criminality was exposed, about forty people went to jail, including former attorney general John Mitchell, Nixon chief of staff Haldeman, and chief domestic advisor John Ehrlichman. “The truth of the matter is that prosecutors had some of this information, but they didn’t use it. And we made it public,” Woodward says. The
Post stories—vehemently attacked at the time as biased, shabby journalism by a White House anxious to isolate the
Post from the rest of the press—may also have directly led federal judge John J. Sirica to put pressure on a key defendant, James McCord. Only in April 1973, when McCord began talking about the burglars’ ties to the White House, did the conspiracy of silence begin unraveling, eventually setting off the avalanche of confessions and convictions.
39The 2012 occasion of the Watergate break-in’s fortieth anniversary gave the American Society of News Editors a chance to assemble a panel that included Woodward and Bernstein, who otherwise spend little time together. The topic, “The Digital Age and Investigative Journalism,” was largely eclipsed by recollections by the famous pair who covered the original scandal. (The then–Seattle Times editor David Boardman set the tone in introducing Woodward and Bernstein by equating the place of their Watergate reporting in American journalism with that of The Birth of a Nation in film, Origin of Species in science, and The Beatles in rock ’n’ roll. Welcome, he said, to “our D. W. Griffith, Charles Darwin, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo.”)
Woodward told of Yale University students who had written short papers on how Watergate might be covered today, with one student suggesting that the Internet could have helped root out offenses in the Nixon White House. “I came as close as I [ever] have to having an aneurysm,” Woodward told the audience with a laugh. When talking to reluctant sources in 1972 it was often not until “the eighth interview you started getting the real story of what’s going on,” he said. Bernstein recalled that in some of those interviews, “we encountered incredible fear, bordering on terror” among sources who worried they might be unmasked by the administration.
Amanda Bennett, the executive editor at Bloomberg News when she served on the “Digital Age” panel, garnered agreement when she noted, “despite the talk about the tweets, how little has actually changed” in reporting techniques since Watergate. It is still a process of “just kind of following the string” with diligence and support from editors that leads to success in investigative stories. The
Post’s Walter Reed Army Hospital disclosures and the
Boston Globe’s coverage of sex crimes by Catholic priests—Pulitzer Public Service winners in 2008 and 2003, respectively—both were mentioned.
40The
Post’s extraordinary diligence back in 1972 remains unquestioned. As rival reporter Tony Marro has said, “Woodward and Bernstein just worked harder than everyone else.” They spent “hundreds and hundreds of hours assembling and updating chronologies and files detailing just who had been accused of what, who had admitted to what, who had pointed the finger at others, and who was still out there—a superior or a subordinate or a partner of the accused—who could fill in what pieces of the puzzle.”
41And Gene Roberts, then of the
Philadelphia Inquirer, takes it a giant step further. “It was maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time,” he says.
42
