The work on the book was interrupted only when Woodward unearthed information that couldn’t wait for the book’s publication and necessitated a front-page article. I was grateful for breaking news—anything that brought me back among people. I missed the newsroom—the hum of working reporters, the collective messiness of notes, documents, and cassette tapes stacked everywhere, an obstacle course for anyone moving quickly on deadline. Working on Woodward’s book was a mostly solitary endeavor, and his orderly and well-scrubbed house felt sterile and eerily quiet in comparison.
Loneliness aside, the education I was receiving from Woodward was priceless. I learned the importance of meticulous organization in the face of copious amounts of material. Woodward would ask different sources the same set of questions. Once I had the interview tapes transcribed, I would print them out and cut them up, pasting together the different answers, writing the name of the interviewee in the margins. Patterns or narratives would emerge when, say, twenty people provided the same answer to one question—or when they all gave different answers.
Transcribing Bob Woodward’s interviews—usually drudgework in other contexts—was a master class in technique, persistence, and finesse. I would learn, by osmosis, the value of the poker voice. If he hadn’t come by his flat midwestern affect by birth, I think he would have appropriated it anyway. He scrubbed his questions of any adjectives that might reveal judgment. Stick to the chronology. When did this happen? Who else knew about the arms sale? When did they know?
Above all else, I learned, sometimes the hard way, to meticulously check and recheck information. Talk to everyone who attended the meeting. Don’t assume anything. Don’t connect dots that you can’t confirm are connected.
Though we spent most of our time at his home office, we occasionally went into the newsroom, which is where we were one day when Woodward asked me if I had a dress suitable for a black-tie event. He said he was sending me to the Watergate hotel to crash CIA director Bill Casey’s private forty-fifth wedding anniversary party, to be hosted by Casey’s daughter, and it was strictly off-limits to the press. He said it was going to be a little tricky. I didn’t know what he meant by “a little tricky,” but it soon became clear to me.
As we were standing there, Woodward spotted Ben Bradlee, the newspaper’s legendary executive editor, and called him over to us. Woodward told Bradlee about the party and said he wanted me to get in the room somehow. They agreed it would be really interesting to know who was there and what they said.
I didn’t understand why Woodward was involving Bradlee in this. Bradlee was looking at me and sizing me up. He acted like he’d never seen me before, and he probably hadn’t other than to recognize me as Woodward’s girl.
He laughed and said “Sure,” giving Woodward the thumbs-up, but then he instructed Woodward to stay by the phone in case I needed to get “bailed out.” That’s when it hit me that they thought I might actually get arrested or detained. Bradlee was still staring at my face, which must have been registering horror. He laughed again, rapped his knuckles against a filing cabinet, and sauntered off toward the center of the newsroom.
That night as I got dressed in my black velvet, off-the-shoulder cocktail dress, I kept picturing myself behind bars. What would the charge be? Trespassing? Impersonating an invited guest? I briefly considered calling Woodward and telling him I had food poisoning. But I summoned my nerve, got in a cab, and headed for the hotel at the Watergate complex.
When I arrived, I asked at the front desk where the party was. I went down a spiral staircase and found myself alone in a hallway that led to the various party rooms. It was then I realized I was probably among the last to arrive. I hurried past a row of Secret Service guys, mumbling something about always being late, fully expecting them to ask for an ID. But they didn’t; they just smiled and I smiled back.
By Washington standards, it was an intimate affair, meaning there were about seventy people there. I was the youngest by at least a few decades. I tried to blend in and stay away from the Secret Service guys, while also trying to look like I belonged. With a club soda in one hand and my little black clutch purse in the other, I hovered on the periphery of small clusters of chatting Washington power brokers.
I kept busy memorizing the names on the place cards for the dinner that was to follow the cocktail party. I would commit as many names as I could to memory and then rush to the bathroom, where I scribbled down the ones I could remember. I went back and forth so many times the Secret Service agents started making jokes about the size of my bladder. Otherwise, they didn’t seem to be interested in me or the least bit suspicious. I guess a twenty-six-year-old young woman in a cocktail dress didn’t appear to pose much of a security threat.
At one point, I was standing just outside a group of chitchatting guests, including a cabinet member and a White House speechwriter, when I suddenly felt the cold grip of a small-handed person on my bare shoulder.
“I’ll bet I know who you are,” a woman’s voice said in a singsongy teasing way.
“I bet you don’t,” I singsonged back, terror welling up from my gut as I turned around, steeling myself.
Woodward had told me that if anyone interrogated me about who I was or why I was there that I should fess up and then call him if there were any problems.
“Aren’t you Suzy Garment?” the woman said.
I didn’t know who Suzy Garment was, but I later learned she was a Wall Street Journal writer who focused on Washington. She was married to Len Garment, who had been Nixon’s special White House counsel. Never mind that she had to be fifteen or twenty years my senior. I was still young enough that I wanted to look older.
“Look! There’s Henry!” I responded and made a beeline over to Henry Kissinger, who was holding forth to a group of adoring women.
What I knew about Kissinger was that he had been involved with Nixon’s foreign policy and that Ben Bradlee’s wife, Sally Quinn, had written a famous Style profile of him in which she got him to admit he was “a secret swinger,” something he’d never completely lived down.
A few minutes later, I called Woodward from a pay phone outside the party room to tell him I had a notebook full of information, but I was getting nervous that the hotel security, if not the Secret Service, would soon be on to me.
“Can’t you stay a little longer, just for the toasts?”
I told him the seats had all been assigned and that surely I’d be caught if I sat down in front of someone else’s name card.
“You’ll figure out something.”
Taking that as an order, I hovered in the back of the room as everyone else was seated and the first course was served. I nervously shifted from one foot to the other and then decided to kill some time visiting the ladies’ room.
When I returned, I saw that people were finishing up their entrees. I listened as people clinked on their glasses to silence the room for the delivery of speeches. Bernadette Casey rose from her seat and said, “I wanted this to be at least a semisurprise. But you all know how hard it is to keep a secret, from Dad especially.”
Everyone laughed and someone yelled, “That’s what the Allies said,” referring to Casey’s intelligence work during World War II.
More people got up to speak, and I tried to take mental notes on what they were saying since I couldn’t whip out my notebook. Even so, I felt the steady gaze of one of the hotel’s staff. Finally, she walked over and asked if everything was all right, a polite way of getting at why I wasn’t sitting down. I started coughing and told her I had this darn cough I couldn’t shake and didn’t want to be a nuisance to the toast makers. She disappeared momentarily and returned with a cough drop. I thanked her profusely, popped it in my mouth, and stood there smiling and sucking.
A few minutes later, I saw her looking at me and leaning over to another woman, who then went and fetched a man who appeared to be from the hotel’s security staff.
As the toasts continued, I slowly backed out of the room and into the hall
way, where I saw several Secret Service agents. I quietly kept walking until I rounded the corner and saw the stairs. I took off my heels and flew up the staircase to the lobby, out the door, and down the street, running as fast as I could, my stockinged feet cold and sore on the pavement.
I hailed a cab, jumped in, and before I even slammed shut the door asked him to step on it. The cabdriver sized me up in his rearview mirror and, reassured I wasn’t a bank robber, headed toward Capitol Hill to take me home.
Woodward included a paragraph about the party in his book, listing about a dozen of the A-list guests and quoting Reagan’s attorney general, Ed Meese, who noted in his toast that without Casey’s 1980 campaign efforts, “most of the people in this room might not be here today.”
Nine months after the party, in late 1986, as we were heading into the book’s final stages, Casey had a seizure and was taken from CIA headquarters to Georgetown Hospital, where he was operated on for brain cancer. Six weeks later, Woodward decided it was time to interview Casey, who had just resigned and was languishing in the hospital. Woodward told me to go over to the hospital and do some advance work for him, to try to find Casey, who was staying there under tight security and an alias.
I was unsettled by this assignment. It was one thing to crash a festive party, and another to enter the hospital room of a sick man uninvited. Still I went and roamed halfheartedly around the halls for a bit. I had met Casey’s wife before (at a legitimate event, not when I was party-crashing), and the idea of running into her when I was hunting down her dying husband was an unseemly prospect. Of course she would have no reason to remember me, but still, just the possibility of that encounter gave me cold feet. So instead, I went to kill time in the hospital’s chapel and thought about what it meant to be a reporter, at least the kind that gets the big stories.
I wondered whether I had what it takes, and whether Woodward had ever asked himself that question. For me it was a tangle of self-doubt and uncertainty about the profession itself. This was four years before Janet Malcolm’s famous first line of The Journalist and the Murderer, the one so often quoted by journalists and journalism professors: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
That’s what was dogging me about journalism: Could it be done well, and by well I meant ethically and thoroughly, without doing harm? I didn’t answer that question for myself then, and I’m still trying to answer it for my students, even now, nearly thirty years later in my role as a journalism professor.
But the self-doubt was also a problem, bigger than I was equipped to face. I remembered something we had learned about at Berkeley in one of my literature classes when we read The Madwoman in the Attic, an idea of feminist theory the authors called the “anxiety of authorship.” It was the idea that women and men approached authorship differently, that women had too few role models and that this resulted in a fear of creating. In the classroom it was all so theoretical and scholarly. Here, in the moment, it was too real. To be bold enough to do what investigative reporters do—to challenge, to uncover, to create? To fight back the anxiety, the fear—I didn’t see others grappling with that. It felt like a problem unique to me, my failing.
I left the hospital, went back to Woodward’s house, and told him I couldn’t find Casey. He went over to the hospital himself and was gone for a few hours. When I heard him open the front door, I came out of my office and met him on the stairs. I could see immediately that his usual veneer of calm and control was eclipsed by an uncommon excitement. He said he had found Casey and that they had a brief conversation, during which he asked the CIA director if he had known about the diversion of Iran arms sales to the Contras and when Casey nodded affirmatively Woodward asked him “Why?” The exchange was in a shorthand; Woodward had interviewed him more than four dozen times for the book and this last encounter was limited by the circumstances of Casey’s illness—his speech was affected by the brain tumor—and the fact that Woodward had entered the room without permission so he needed to be brief. The implication in that one-word question, “Why?,” was significant—that to know of illegal activity was to be complicit, and so how did he justify that? He said Casey had whispered, “I believed.”
This became the last scene of the book, and it made headlines everywhere. And it sold a ton of books. Many had no problem with what came to be referred to as “the deathbed scene” and valued the insight that scene, and the book in its entirety, offered.
But Woodward also took considerable heat for including the bedside conversation. Some people thought he had invented the exchange. And many who believed him didn’t approve of his sneaking into a dying man’s hospital room. Mrs. Casey said Woodward made up the scene and was outraged. Her husband died a few months later, on May 6, 1987, and the book came out the following fall.
Three
Loyalties
Everything is copy.
—Nora Ephron quoting her mother, Phoebe
In early 1988, Veil had been out for a few months, and I was still on Woodward’s payroll, tending to the loose ends of a bestseller: fielding interview requests and answering correspondence.
But with Veil launched, and Woodward not yet focused on a new project, the clock was ticking for me. Though I knew it was time to look for new employment, I was dragging my feet, reluctant to leave the nest. I felt part of the family, having spent more time at Woodward’s place than I had in my own apartment over the past three years.
His former book researchers had gotten jobs back at the newspaper, but it was becoming clear to me that I was more drawn to the book business and that daily reporting wasn’t for me. Though admittedly a lonely endeavor, the pace of a book project suited me much more. Even if I wasn’t working on my own novel, it was still a luxury to immerse myself in research pursuits, to chase down leads and make connections that required patience and careful work. But I had only one book under my researcher’s belt, and though it was a book by one of the world’s preeminent journalists, it was still just the one.
Luckily, Woodward knew someone else working on a book who needed assistance and he recommended me. This is how I would get most of my future book gigs: word of mouth among writers, editors, and agents in Washington literary/journalism circles. The author who needed help was none other than Woodward’s Watergate partner, Carl Bernstein.
I was relieved it was someone I already knew and liked. I had gotten to know Carl when he came to stay at Woodward’s house in the fall of 1986 to get some traction on his own book, to be called Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir. His book project had a long history. Carl had attempted to write it in the late 1970s but hadn’t gotten very far and then put it aside, possibly because it involved digging up some painful memories from his family’s past. He tried his hand at network news as ABC News Washington bureau chief and as an on-air correspondent. But when that didn’t work out, he returned to the book, and on and off over several years had been working toward finishing it. He was writing the book for his and Woodward’s Simon & Schuster editor, Alice Mayhew, who had worked with them on All the President’s Men and The Final Days.
Loyalties had several layers. It was a portrait of the Red Scare through the lens of Carl’s parents’ membership in the Communist Party. At the same time, it explored how their political activities shaped his childhood and his struggle to understand the context and circumstances of the 1940s as a way of better understanding his parents’ choices. As if that weren’t enough, the story also addressed his parents’ distress over the book’s impending publication.
Carl had an uneasy relationship with them, particularly his father, Al Bernstein, a graduate of Columbia Law School, who had held various government positions and then worked for the United Public Workers of America as their director of negotiations. In that role, he represented more than five hundred public employees who had been accused of disloyalty and were called before government hearings. Carl’s father appeared before cong
ressional committees five times.
His mother led lunch counter sit-ins for desegregation and marches to protest the pending executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been found guilty of spying for the Soviet Union. When Carl was just ten years old, his mom was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. A newspaper headline referred to her congressional appearance as d.c. housewife takes the fifth. When the public scrutiny into their activities was over, Mr. Bernstein ran a laundry business to support the family.
So for three months, while we had worked on Woodward’s Veil, Carl stayed in a nearby guest room. He arrived full of promises to make real progress on his manuscript, but he spent little time on the third floor, the designated workspace, where we were toiling away on Woodward’s book. Carl was loud and messy, gregarious and funny: the life of the party who was still there the next day.
But as far as I was concerned, Carl was a welcome break from long days and too many nights hunched over my computer reading Woodward’s drafts or transcribing taped interviews or trying to find some needle-in-a-haystack fact buried within an intelligence document. Carl brought some much-needed levity to our regimented work environment, even occasionally loosening up Woodward, who was otherwise completely focused on his reporting and writing. One day when I came to work with a raspy voice from seasonal allergies, Woodward convinced me to call Carl—I don’t remember where he was, perhaps he had gone back up to New York for a few days—and pretend I was the bad girl movie star Debra Winger, whose signature husky voice mine apparently bore a temporary resemblance to. At Woodward’s instruction I bantered a bit and then invited him to a party “I” was throwing. When Carl returned, he told us about the call and wondered if the actress was romantically interested in him. Woodward cracked up and I turned red and we fessed up to the prank. Carl good-naturedly joined in our laughter.
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