Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  CB: Remember, we didn’t know what had really happened …

  BW: And so she said, “He’s moved out, and you and Mr. BernSTINE come up here, and you can go into his office. He left all these papers …”

  CB: She was a well-known drunk by this time.… She intimated that there was more to the Watergate story than anybody knew.…

  B: Did he have a girlfriend? I bet he did.

  CB: Well, later—Martha must’ve been about sixty.

  BW: So we call Bradlee, we always observe the chain of command.

  CB: Oh yeah.

  BW: This is one of the great lessons of this. We call the city editor, we had eight levels of editors between us and Bradlee. So we just said, there’s not time. And Martha …

  CB: This is part of the good cop/bad cop between us.

  Elsa: And it was Sunday.

  CB: It was always Sunday.

  BW: So we call Bradlee, and we say we have this offer to come up and go through his papers. And so Bradlee says, “We better get the lawyers.”

  CB: Legal reasons.

  [The editors, reporters, and lawyers agree on a theory of “constructive abandonment” that allows them all to feel that what they’re doing is okay.]

  BW: And she greets us at the door, I remember it, and she had a martini in one hand and the Chinese menu in the other, and she said, “Let’s order.”

  B: This is Martha?

  BW: “I hope you nail the son of a bitch.”

  CB: [The apartment] had a lot of cabinets. There was this linen closet that was painted all powder blue. And she said, “I think that he keeps stuff up in there.” So I took my shoes off and went crawling around in this closet, throwing down [papers].

  BW: There were letters in there, one from Elmer Bobst who ran a big drug company, saying, Dear John, if we give a hundred thousand dollars in the ’72 fray, campaign, will you help us with our problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission? I mean, no one ever writes letters like that anymore. But they did.

  Everybody at the table has heard most of these stories before, but it’s fun to hear Carl and Bob egging each other on, with Ben cracking wise whenever he sees an opening. Conversation turns to Robert Redford, and to how boring All the President’s Men seems to their kids. Bob retells the story about Pakula and Robards having to find fifteen different ways to say “Where’s the fucking story?” Carl tells an abbreviated and often interrupted version of the moment in September of 1972 when he and Bob realized that Nixon might well be impeached.

  “That was a word I never used,” Ben says, as serious as he’s been the whole night, “and a word that I told you never to use.”

  As we are having dessert, Bob gives his own toast, in earnest:

  BW: One of the fires in my life is Elsa, who—and she lights many fires. And one of the things she’s said over recent years is, “Take Ben to lunch. See Ben. Go do this, go do that, with Ben.” And we have the saying, in our family, because in our place in Maryland we have sculls and we go out and row, and the saying is, “Any day you row is a good day.” And I have, in the last good number of years, realized that any day you get to spend some time with Ben Bradlee is a good day. So thank you.

  Quinn [Ben’s son]: He also put you on the map, too.

  [laughter]

  Sally: Or maybe the other way around, they put him on the map.

  B: We shared that.

  BW: No, no. [To Quinn] Your father had the answer to this. Nixon put us on the map.

  CB: He’s right.

  WOODSTEIN

  My perceptions of both of you? You and I have had conversations about this, old buddy. I thought you were a guy who was not always running at top speed but you had extraordinary talents that you didn’t always use. And I thought Woodward, who the Christ was Woodward? I had often said that Woodward reminds me of me as a beginner. I thought that you were hopelessly inexperienced to tackle something like this and I probably would have fought tooth and nail if I had known then what I know today to involve either one of you.

  —Ben’s response to a question from Carl Bernstein in a private interview with Woodward and Bernstein for All the President’s Men, July 16, 1973

  In the Fall of 2008, Bob took Ben out to lunch and, naturally, brought along his tape recorder. Over the course of the lunch, Bob tried to dig down into some of the general principles of Ben’s career at the Post, to locate or articulate what it was that made Ben tick as an editor. That’s an impossible thing to do, as Bob must already have known, but there is one moment that resonates.

  “I didn’t realize when I came on how important just the people were,” Ben said. “It’s one thing to say you’ve got to get the best people, but you’ve got to get the right people. There’s a lot of luck in that. Lot of luck in that. How the hell did we get you?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I was lucky,” Bob said.

  “You know, how much credit do I deserve for that?”

  “But you …”

  “But I had created an atmosphere that appealed to you.”

  “Exactly, exactly.”

  “I understand that,” Ben said. “And I understood it even then, I think.”

  Bob decided that he wanted to be a journalist—a Washington Post journalist, to be precise—in August of 1970. After four years at Yale and another four years at sea with the Navy, he had spent his fifth and final year in the service working at the Pentagon, as the watch officer overseeing worldwide Teletype communications. He was a driven, ambitious young man, eager for life experience after having given so much of his youth to the Navy, and he wanted to be where the action was. He had applied to Harvard Law School, but that was the safe choice, an extension of the life he had already led.

  Most biographical sketches of Bob include two episodes from his childhood that theoretically primed him for his career in investigative journalism. Both hinge on secrets. The first occurred after Bob’s parents divorced, and he and his brother and sister chose to live with their father. Their father remarried, to a woman with children of her own, and at one of their first joint Christmases Bob felt quite acutely that he and his siblings had been given the short end of the stick. He tracked down the prices of all the gifts and then compared the amounts that had been spent on him and his siblings to what had been spent on his stepsiblings. “It was a moment of great emotional distress for me and my father when I confronted him and showed him that the money he’d spent on them and on us was so dramatically out of balance,” Bob told an interviewer in the eighties. His response to disorder and distress was to locate and take solace in the facts.

  The second episode occurred when Bob went to work as a janitor in his father’s law offices in the small, Republican suburb of Wheaton, Illinois, where he grew up. His curiosity about what his dad did led him to nose around in the files, eventually reading whole confidential reports and realizing that people’s public fronts often masked more sordid private lives. An esteemed local school official, for instance, might secretly be trying to seduce a female student; what you saw wasn’t always what you got. As one of his editors would put it later, “Woodward was very naïve and yet very aware of original sin at an early age.”

  As the 1970s began, The Washington Post was doing to the Pentagon and to the Nixon administration what Bob had done to his own father that Christmas as a boy: holding the authorities accountable for their actions, describing the distance between public statements and the realities they often obscured. Bob saw this all firsthand from his perch at the Pentagon. “You could just see the disparity between the classified message traffic and what was being said publicly,” he told me. The Post was out to expose the facts, and he admired the paper for it.

  In August 1970, his time in the Navy over and his law school plans in the dustbin, Bob walked into the Post and asked for a tryout. He had no experience as a reporter, but he talked his way into an interview with Harry Rosenfeld, the Metro editor who would be one of his main overseers during the Watergate story. Rosenfeld had never interviewed
a naval intelligence officer for a job before, so he decided to give Bob a chance. “I thought he was worth a tryout,” Rosenfeld said to me, still sharp at eighty-two. “But that’s all I thought he was worth.”

  “I failed miserably,” Bob told me. “Wrote a lot of stories, none were published.”

  “You don’t know how to do this,” Rosenfeld said to Bob, after the tryout was over. “If you’re really serious, go get some experience.”

  Rosenfeld helped him line up a job interview with the editor of the Montgomery County Sentinel, a small weekly paper in suburban Maryland. When an editor at the Sentinel asked Bob why he should hire him, Bob said, “I want this job so bad I can taste it.”

  After he was hired, he shone. He had a good nose for controversy, and he worked prodigiously. Within a couple of months he was scooping the Post on stories, so much so that Jim Mann, his competitor at the Post, started recommending that the paper hire him. Rosenfeld noticed, too. “It began to be embarrassing,” he told Kay Graham later.

  Rosenfeld had instructed Bob, somewhat loosely, to get a year’s experience and then knock on the Post’s door again. Bob doesn’t do loose. Nine months after he’d left, he started calling Rosenfeld at the office and at home, hoping for a second chance. One hot summer day in 1971, Rosenfeld was on vacation from the paper, painting his basement. He was up on a ladder, “furious with the world,” as he put it, when the phone rang. His wife, Annie, called him upstairs, and when he got there and realized that it was Bob he blew his top. “Goddammit, Woodward!” he shouted into the phone. “Call me at the office!”

  He slammed the receiver down and turned to his wife. “That asshole is calling me up all the time!”

  “Isn’t that what you always say is the kind of person you want?” Annie said.

  Soon enough Bob was back making the interview rounds at the Post, and this time he made it all the way to the top, to the final up-or-down interview with Ben.1 During their interview, Ben homed in on Bob’s time in the Navy, referring to it “as if it were the brotherhood,” as Bob remembered it later. This was an Ivy League kid and a Navy veteran, like Ben himself, who had forsaken an ordained slot in the establishment to pursue journalism as a calling and as a career. Just as Ben had been brought in as the low man on the city desk in 1948, Bob was brought in as one of the lowest-paid reporters on the paper, covering night police for the city staff. His first day at the Post came precisely 366 days after he’d been sent off to the Sentinel.

  His first story, about a lawyer who had been disbarred, ran on September 17, 1971, on the third page of the Metro section. Six days and five stories later, Bob made the lower left corner of the front page with a story about a fire that killed five of six children in one family. The next day, he was back up on the front page with a follow-up story, reporting that the mother of the children had been offered a chance to move her family out of their unsafe house but had never answered the letter from the National Capital Housing Authority.

  This was a breakneck pace and Bob maintained it. Sometime shortly after Bob was hired, Ben held one of his occasional lunches with new reporters in one of the upstairs dining rooms at the Post. Three or four cub reporters sat on either side of the table, and when Ben walked in he went immediately to his place at the head. “Which one of you is Woodward?” he asked as he sat down. Bob raised his hand. “You’re all over the paper,” Ben said. “Good work.” That was the highest praise you were ever going to get.

  Ben has always been accused of playing favorites, and he has always responded by saying that the people who were his favorites were the people who produced. Of Bob, he once said, “People have to write stuff that is relevant and that gets in the paper, and wherever you put him that’s what happens.”

  In January of 1972, just four months after he’d been hired, Bob produced ten front page stories (and a host of others) as he zeroed in on low-level police corruption in D.C. In February he had another seven front page stories, following the trail all the way up to the former number two man in the metropolitan police department’s internal affairs unit.

  While Bob was working on the police corruption stories, he had an experience that everybody in the newsroom longed for. As Bob was sitting at his typewriter hammering out an early draft, Ben walked across the newsroom, stopped at Bob’s desk, and pulled up a seat next to him. This was a rarity, a public tactic that everybody noticed and that Ben used masterfully throughout his career. It scared the hell out of Bob, that all of a sudden Ben was looking over the shoulder of a lowly Metro reporter, firing off questions about the story: Where is this coming from? How sure are you? Ben seemingly grasped every important detail in the story in less than two minutes, and then he was gone.

  After Ben walked off, Bob felt that he had arrived. “You feel like you’ve been authenticated,” he told me, of Ben’s visit to his desk. “Like what you’re doing is … blessed.”

  “You couldn’t keep him out of the paper,” Ben told David Halberstam a couple of years later. “You know, you’d give him the real shit detail, and the next day he’d have it on page one. I was using him before Watergate as an example of someone who can always get in the paper. He knew how to crack the code.”

  Bob himself told Halberstam that when Watergate came around people thought that he worked so hard on it because he recognized it for the story it would become—which wasn’t true. “It was not that it was Watergate,” Halberstam wrote of Bob in his interview notes, “he simply was working that hard, he was that driven and he was that insecure.” On the morning of Saturday, June 17, 1972—the same morning that the five Watergate burglars were arrested and the epic journey began—Bob had yet another story on the front page, about a U.S. Civil Service Commission vice chairman who was steering business to one of his cronies.

  “I think [Woodward] engendered some jealousy and resentment because of his work,” Rosenfeld told Kay in their interview years later. “But it was outstanding. And when Watergate breaks there’s no question in my mind … nor in Howard’s [Simons, the managing editor] … who’s the first person we’ll put on the story. There’s no question.”

  “There was no question,” Kay agreed.2

  Ben put it in his own way many years later, when he was talking about how hard Bob worked and an interviewer had the temerity to ask, “But didn’t he cause you problems as an editor?”

  “Jesus,” Ben said. “Editors should have such problems.”

  In July of 2009, I went up to New York City to talk to Carl. He had been hard to pin down. I had been trying to get an interview with him for six or seven months, with no success, but this time I had him. I took the train up to meet him for lunch.

  We had met in person a couple of times, when I worked for Bob. Carl would call at Q Street every once in a while, and at first I got a kick out of relaying the message: Bernstein for Woodward! Sometimes he stayed in the guest room on the third floor of Bob’s house, where we worked, and he would pop his head into my office and ask what I was working on.

  In those days, Bob didn’t talk about Watergate much unless he was at a public event and the inevitable bore asked him who Deep Throat was. The sheer number of people who did this was staggering. I always thought Bob handled it pretty well, evasive but gracious, never betraying any irritation. If it wasn’t a question about Deep Throat, it was a joke about Redford playing Bob in the movie. Bob’s line on that was pretty good, too: “You have no idea how many women I’ve disappointed.”

  It didn’t take much to figure out that, of the famed duo, Bob was the dutiful son and Carl the profligate one. You could tell just by looking at them. Both had held the live wire of Watergate in their hands at roughly the same age, in their late twenties, but it seemed like Carl had held on a little longer and been burned a little deeper.

  In the whole “Woodward and Bernstein” game, Bernstein always comes out on the bottom. I defy anybody to find a substantive piece about Carl Bernstein from the period 1974 to 1990 in which somebody doesn’t refer to the fact that
Carl was known for borrowing money that he never repaid, or that he smoked cigarettes but rarely had his own supply—and never had his own matches (the horror!). These details are meant to reveal his character, his nature, which we are implicitly supposed to question.

  And then, of course, he gets crushed by comparison with Bob, who pumps out biennial bestsellers like batches of brownies. It’s an unenviable position for anybody to be in, measuring your career next to Bob’s. Bernstein fell apart after Watergate, but it’s hard to imagine that he could have kept up, even if he’d managed to hold his life together.

  I arrived on time for our interview, but Carl had me cool my heels in the lobby of his apartment building for a while. I expected that. When I eventually made it up to the apartment, he opened the door, classical music blasting behind him, and welcomed me in. I walked straight toward the source of the sound, which turned out to be two of the nicest stereo speakers I’d ever seen. We gave them a quick listen and then moved into Carl’s office, just off the living room, which was lined with hundreds of vinyl records, mostly symphonic recordings and opera but also a healthy selection of old rock records. There were four different tube amplifiers in the room—only one of which was in use, hooked up to his system via a series of industrial-level electronic connections—two racks of sophisticated audio gear, and two state-of-the-art record players. You could buy a very nice car, maybe even more than one, for the cost of the unused audio equipment in that room.

  He wanted to know, right away, what Bob had already told me about Ben. “How much time did he give you?” he asked, before I’d even been able to pull out my tape recorder. He wanted me to know that he and Bob have a “different understanding” about the Post, that they talk to each other about it in ways that they wouldn’t with anybody else. The sense of competition, of wanting to be seen as Bob’s equal and to make an equally weighty contribution to what I was doing, was unmistakable. After some small talk, we agreed to go out for lunch and start the tape recorder there.