Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  We walked around the corner to an Italian place. Carl told me the pastas were great but that he couldn’t have any because he’d put on some weight. Then he proceeded to order a salad and an enormous plate of deep-fried seafood that he inhaled as we spoke, including the tails of the shrimp that he initially had cast aside. There was something impulsive and endearingly childlike about him. Whenever he made a point that he thought was particularly important, interesting, or surprising, his eyes would bug out just before he said the capping phrase and then he would deliver it, smile, and wait for my reaction. I remembered what Ben had told me once, that Carl was whip smart but also “the kind of guy who was looking at you while he was talking to you, to see how he was going over.”

  Carl grew up as a lefty, the son of two communist Jews. He started as a copyboy at the Washington Evening Star at the age of sixteen, working three and four days a week during the school year and then summers full time. Later he moved in and out of college, taking classes at the University of Maryland but eventually proving himself to be fundamentally allergic to the idea of doing homework and going to class. “I got thrown out, I quit,” Carl told me, as if there were no difference.

  After a few years at the Star, Carl bumped up against the paper’s policy of not hiring reporters who didn’t have college degrees. He took a job on the Daily Journal in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and moved to Manhattan. He spent a year working on whatever he wanted to in New Jersey—long features, investigative pieces, column work—and ended up winning three state newspaper association awards. When the year was up, in 1966, he wanted out. The Star still wouldn’t take him without a college degree, so he applied to the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Washington Daily News. The Daily News made him an offer, but he didn’t want the job there.

  “The reason I wanted to go to The Washington Post was because of Bradlee,” he said.

  “Already?” I asked. Ben would only have been back at the Post for a year or so by then.

  “Absolutely. Because you could see by then that he was turning [the Post] into a different kind of newspaper.”

  He started off in Metro, as nearly all new reporters did, and quickly earned an enduring reputation as a cigarette bummer and money borrower. “Very talented and erratic … in my work habits,” as he put it to me.

  “That’s the story line.”

  “The story line is fairly true. My agenda usually tending toward my own.” We laughed. “Partly out of a view of journalism, partly out of my own character.”

  The Bernstein stories from Carl’s early days at the Post really are pretty funny. Apparently he used to rent cars on assignment and then leave them parked in random locations only to forget about them, running up enormous tabs with the rental companies. When Carl was covering city hall, the city editor, Steve Isaacs, paid an unannounced visit one day and arrived to find Carl asleep on the couch in the press room. His reputation as an unreliable employee and as a person who spent beyond his own means, and beyond the paper’s, was legendary by the time Watergate started. The joke around the newsroom was that Bernstein had spent more money covering the Virginia legislature than Murray Marder, one of the Post’s foreign correspondents, had spent covering the Paris peace talks.

  Ben’s pre-Watergate perception of Carl was that he was “lazy, talented, streetwise”—not an uncharitable description. At one point in 1972, just after the Post had moved into its current building on 15th Street, Ben noticed that Bernstein would unthinkingly let his cigarettes burn out on the brand-new floor around his desk. That did not endear him to Ben. “If we’d have had a list of people to get rid of, he would have been very high on it,” Ben told Halberstam in the late seventies. “His laziness was almost unparalleled.”

  Despite the differences in background and temperament, Carl looked up to Ben in much the same way that Bob did. “I ask what he thought about Bradlee,” Halberstam wrote privately of his interview with Carl, “and he says, that when he first knew him, ‘I was in awe of him and yet I was bothered by the fact that he didn’t know how good I was.’ ” Typical Bernstein bluster, but he would also tell Halberstam that he admired Ben more than any other man he knew besides his own dad.

  In the months and years leading up to June of 1972, Carl’s main goal—a goal shared by many Metro reporters—was to land a spot on the National staff. That was where all the big-name guys were, the guys whose desks Ben would linger over, punching arms and trading gossip. Those were the highfliers, and Carl was always a highflier in his own estimation. The quickest and most likely path to the National desk lay in convincing Ben to send him to Vietnam, where he could write (or so I imagine) a series of feature stories full of novelistic detail and veiled but trenchant political sentiments and then return to the paper as a hero. Bernstein told me that he asked Ben, repeatedly, to be sent there, and Ben said no every time. When I asked Ben if he ever thought seriously about sending Bernstein to Vietnam, he looked at me like I was crazy.

  Some weeks before Watergate, Carl decided that if the Post wouldn’t give him the bigger opportunities he felt he deserved, he would have to go elsewhere. On a whim he called Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone and talked his way into an interview. “Wenner was so fucking long making a decision,” Bernstein told me, “that Watergate happened in the interim. But I would have gone in a song. In a second, I’d have been out of the fucking door … I was furious. And I was furious at Bradlee.”

  Good son, bad son, good cop, bad cop—these dynamics started early and stayed in place for the rest of Carl’s relationship with Ben and with Bob. In October of 2007, the Society of Professional Journalists invited Bob, Carl, and Ben to sit on a panel commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of Watergate. Backstage, before the discussion started, the panelists and moderators were milling around, waiting for the event to start, when Carl called to say that he was going to be late.

  “I’m not surprised that Carl’s late,” Ben said. “I’m amazed that he called.”

  I witnessed Carl’s aggrandizing tendencies firsthand when our interview at the restaurant was over, and we were walking back to his apartment. We ran into a woman Carl knew, and after they said hello she looked over at me. “Is this your son?” she asked.

  “No,” Carl said. Then, out of nowhere: “He’s my biographer.”

  It was a harmless little lie, but he said it right in front of me. The woman said she was looking forward to reading the book when it came out, and then we walked back to his apartment without saying another word about it.3

  “The thing that I look back on,” Ben said to Kay, in one of the interviews for her memoir in 1990, “[was] how lucky we were … I mean how we had Woodward and Bernstein, had an awful lot of Washington Post eggs in that basket and you look at Bernstein now and you wonder …”

  “Well, I wondered then,” Kay said, drolly.

  “Well, except the thing was, whatever you said about Bernstein, is that Bernstein made the first key connection of the money,” Ben said. This is the core truth of Carl, the seminal piece of Watergate reporting that you can’t take away from him and that justly brought him his place in history. To drive it home, almost as if to ward off his own disbelief as much as to persuade Kay, Ben said again: “He found that money.”

  * * *

  1 This is the interview Bob describes in his long letter here.

  2 She may have been snowing Rosenfeld, at least a little bit. “One of the interesting small pieces of the puzzle & one I suspect you don’t know,” Kay wrote to Ben in 1974, after Watergate was over, “is that I met Bob Woodward—I mean really met him & knew which one he was—at the Pearson Awards lunch.” That lunch was in December of 1972. She had bet the paper on two reporters that she couldn’t distinguish from each other until after their most important reporting had already been done.

  3 After William Goldman wrote a first draft of the screenplay for All the President’s Men, Carl and Bob and most others at the Post were unhappy with it. Carl and his then girlf
riend, Nora Ephron, decided to take a crack at a rewrite, and apparently in that draft Carl exaggerated his role as “the more swinging member of the Woodstein team,” as Time magazine put it. “Carl,” Robert Redford remonstrated after he’d read it, “Errol Flynn is dead.”

  BEGINNING

  Click here to zoom in.

  You know as a journalist, that there is no decision should I go down that road or down that road, there were just thousands of little decisions, get the goddamn story in the paper. And by the time you had done it it was over.

  —BCB to Frank Waldrop, former editor of the Washington Times-Herald, undated but likely 1990

  When the news of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel and Office Building first hit the Post newsroom on the morning of Saturday, June 17, 1972, Ben wasn’t even in Washington. He was out at his country place in West Virginia, where his phone line was spotty, and didn’t fully grasp what was happening until he came home on Sunday night. That day the first stories describing the break-in had run in the paper, and by that night the second day’s stories, linking one of the burglars to the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CRP), had already been written.

  Howard Simons, the managing editor, had made all the executive decisions about placement and play of the stories up to that point. The specific decision to send Woodward to the courthouse that Saturday, where he would famously hear James McCord, one of the burglars, admit that he worked for the CIA,1 had fallen to city editor Barry Sussman. The decision to allow Bernstein to muscle his way into the story, as Bernstein so often did when he sensed that something big was going on, fell to Sussman, too.

  That Sunday, Carl and Bob had their first real collaboration, in which Carl surreptitiously took each page of Bob’s draft story out of the city desk editor’s hands and rewrote it on his own. The story, the first of many to appear under their joint byline, began, “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.” Their partnership wouldn’t solidify until more than a month later, but it had begun.

  Late Sunday night, after the paper had been put to bed, the Post’s night police reporter called Bob to tell him that the name “Howard E. Hunt” had appeared in two of the burglars’ address books, with entries for “W. House” and “W.H.” next to Hunt’s name.2 When he arrived at the office Monday morning, Bob called the White House switchboard and asked to be connected to “Howard Hunt”—having no idea who Hunt was or what his role might be. The operator rang an extension, but nobody answered. When she came back on the line, the operator told Bob casually, “There is one other place he might be. In Mr. Colson’s office.” Hunt wasn’t there, either, but Colson’s secretary kindly gave Bob the number of the public relations firm where Hunt also worked.

  Later that day, Bob confirmed through the White House personnel office that Howard Hunt was a paid consultant to Charles Colson, special counsel to the president and known widely as Nixon’s hatchet man. He reached Hunt directly at the public relations firm and asked him why his name and number were in the address books of two of the burglars. “Good God!” Hunt said, before begging off and saying that he had no further comment.3 A call to Robert F. Bennett, the head of the public relations firm (and later a senator from Utah), yielded an unguarded reference to the fact that Hunt had worked for the CIA, something Woodward hadn’t known. The next morning a story would run in the paper under the byline of Bob Woodward and E. J. Bachinski, the police reporter who had given Bob the tip, and it included Bob’s interaction with the White House switchboard operator, Hunt’s “Good God!,” and the link to the CIA.

  But that morning, Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, was asked about the Watergate situation. He cautioned that “certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is.” The incident was nothing more than a “third-rate burglary attempt” and didn’t deserve any additional response from the White House.

  Nearly the whole of Watergate is there, three days into the story. You couldn’t prove anything from a name in an address book or a switchboard operator’s easy fluency with where Howard Hunt might have been, but in retrospect you can deduce the rest of what happened from these details alone. If Charles Colson knew what Howard Hunt was up to, you could bet pretty safely that President Nixon knew, too. And Ziegler’s characterization of the break-in as a third-rate burglary—a phrase now legendary for its calculated understatement—typified the White House’s response to Watergate for much of 1972.

  At the Post, you had Woodward and Bernstein nosing around the story and figuring out how to work with each other, not yet a team but becoming one. They were overseen by Sussman and Rosenfeld and Simons, but not yet Bradlee. He hadn’t even been there for the first few days, which is meaningless as a detail but important in terms of understanding how a newspaper works. Executive editors don’t usually dig their hands into stories that small; there isn’t time. And stories that small don’t get bigger unless the reporters and the city editor and the Metro editor and even the managing editor, all of whom were more involved in Watergate than Ben was at first, have the resourcefulness and determination to make it so.

  One of the oddities of Ben’s memoir is its singularly unsatisfying Watergate chapter. It’s by far the longest chapter in the book, and also the least revealing. Most of the material is cribbed from All the President’s Men and a couple of other key texts.4 It reads as if Ben scanned those other books, put all of the important events in chronological order, and then just left it at that. You get no sense of what it felt like to live through Watergate as the executive editor of The Washington Post, which is the one thing most readers might reasonably have hoped for. Ben doesn’t do soul searching. But why couldn’t he tell us something that we didn’t already know?

  I cycled through a lot of different answers to that question as we spent more and more time together, but I think the right answer is this: if you dig around in the archives of an executive editor, you can’t help but realize just how difficult and all-encompassing the job is. While Woodward and Bernstein were out in the newsroom writing down every quote from every source and obsessively working over the small details of the story with Sussman and Simons, Ben was holding editorial meetings on other topics and worrying about the play of the stories on the next morning’s front page and what he was going to do about the budget for next year and who was going to cover the antiwar rally that half of the reporters’ and editors’ wives were marching in. There were larger stories like the Vietnam War and the presidential campaign of 1972 to deal with, in addition to pressing internal issues. Three months before the break-in, the Post had been sued by seven black reporters for racial discrimination in employment practices. In June, as Watergate bloomed, Ben and the rest of the editorial and business staff were still figuring out how to respond. He had other things to think about.

  Ben has also never been known for his ability to retain small daily details, from “forgetting” about some of Kay Graham’s less inspired requests to meeting reporters on his own paper numerous times and having them never be quite sure that he knew what their name was, or where they reported from. Even in July of 1973, while the Watergate story was still unfolding, he didn’t remember much about the beginnings of the story, other than an (admittedly powerful) general feeling:

  Woodstein interview, July 16, 1973:

  B: … I’d love to claim such prescience in late June that we knew where this thing was going, but that’s a lot of shit. We didn’t.

  BW: What was your reaction when you first heard about it?

  B: I was probably, you know, fun and games. Hell of a good story … you knew once they’d been arrested they had no real defense and it would be a fun story, in terms of it was going to hang around, that it was going to make a lot of people embarrassed.…

  I will not be able to remember the individual decision-making things but [two weeks into the story] I sure as hell was
beginning to realize that the reputation of the Post was going to hang out there publicly, whereas I was ready to back you guys up, I wasn’t as ready as I became later.…

  CB: When did you first start—

  B: What painted the scene was a gradual and not so fucking gradual in terms of all that time but a steadily and slowly increasing awareness that we were going to play the hardest ball that we had ever played. I mean not to put too fine a point on it and I might suggest to you that I don’t believe I trailed either one of you by very far.

  BW: That’s right.

  B: I mean, you were fucking around with another police story and then one more thing would come up and the look of incredulity on both of your faces I will remember until I die.

  That’s most of what Ben remembers about Watergate. By nature, he thinks about the things that are in front of him. If he’s not looking at you or talking to you, odds are he isn’t thinking about you. Watergate to him was what happened. He doesn’t deal much with larger implications. That’s for other people with more time on their hands.

  If you really want to know what Ben thought about Watergate, and what he learned from it, you’re better off focusing on how he behaved during the Janet Cooke scandal in 1981, which I’ll get to later. The simpler and perhaps more fruitful question to ask about Watergate is this: What did Ben do? What does an executive editor really do? How do you lead an entire newspaper—a frightened owner, a turf-wary staff, an unlikely pair of young reporters—through the greatest newspaper story of the twentieth century?

  First, some basics. Watergate began early in the morning on Saturday, June 17, 1972, when a security guard named Frank Wills (who plays himself in the movie) discovered that the lock on a stairwell door in the garage of the Watergate complex5 had been taped. He removed the tape and continued on his rounds. When he returned to that same stairwell some time later, he discovered that the door had again been taped—a woefully incautious move on the part of the burglars6—and called the police.