Unraveling Watergate

...They are gotten by hard and stubborn work...

...One may enjoy the human drama of two boy reporters probing darkest Washington...

...But, for perspective on the trauma of a nation, in which they played a key part, look elsewhere...

...the other will make history...

...And, as though still dizzy from what they wrought, they display a fascination with recounting how they did it rather than what it all meant...

...Woodward quotes his most shadowy source, "Deep Throat," as describing Haldeman's coup this way: "It looks like he really stuck it in your eye, secretly pulling the strings to get even The Washington Post to fuck it up...

...The Washington Post, though the most spectacular and the most successful, was not alone in tearing away at the cover-up...

...When reporters are immersed in conspiracy, everything seems to become conspiratorial...

...It is a paradox that the mighty Nixon Establishment was taken on mainly by the biggest journalistic establishments...

...Woodward and Bernstein will make a fortune on their journalistic escapade...

...All the President's Men is a successor to The Front Page...

...It lay in the hundreds of telephone calls to unwilling sources, the late-night visits to the homes of those who might know something, the explorations of telephone bills and bank records...

...The role of the press in Watergate was as unprecedented as Watergate itself...

...Since the role of the press was so crucial, a reporters' book ranks more importantly than the first books of participants such as Jeb Magruder and James McCord...

...It was by happenstance that two young local reporters, well-born Ivy Leaguer Bob Woodward and long-haired college dropout Carl Bernstein, found themselves teamed up on the story of the century...

...Perhaps that is why the Nixon Administration has been so intent on trying to disperse that power...

...Into that law enforcement vacuum stepped the press—more precisely, a few aggressive and powerful organs of the press—to assume a role not only investigative, but quasi-prose-cutorial, even vaguely judicial in the sense that conviction before the pervasive court of public opinion can today be as damaging to reputation and future prospects as a sentence in a court of law...

...The unique feature of Watergate was a cover-up by conspirators placed so high that they were in a position to manipulate the investigation that should have brought them down...

...But there is also the possibly more significant institutional drama of a newspaper risking its fortune, and perhaps its very life, to confront a powerful and vindictive President...

...A dark day was the day they erroneously identified two White House aides as recipients of Gemstone wiretap reports...

...It came only from the news media...

...One will make a movie...

...While the Nixon Administration was throwing fits over them, Woodward and Bernstein were throwing fits over occasionally being beaten by The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times...

...What the book confirms, and what most readers rarely appreciate, is that the biggest stories are not given, but gotten...

...Daniel Schorr, CBS News correspondent, has specialized in reporting the Watergate disclosures since the original break-in exposure...

...They were being successfully monitored, controlled, and misdirected...

...There were also The York Times and The Los Angeles Times, Time and Newsweek, and, yes, CBS News...

...All of them persisted in the face of threatening pressures...

...he left messages in Woodward's home-delivered New York Times to arrange secret, late-night meetings in such places as a deserted garage and gave him Delphic advice at crucial junctures in the investigation...

...Perhaps it is only the Big Press today that can stand up to big and vengeful government...

...And so the preoccupation with denials and deniability, scenes and scenarios, buttoning up and keeping the cap on the bottle...

...But, The Washington Post deserves its Pulitzer Prize for exposing Watergate...

...All of them represent large economic concentrations...

...Yet, as we learn from the White House transcripts, this was the only process of retribution that was working...

...It does not detract from this book to say that it is not really about "All the President's Men," but more about how the story was covered than what the story really was...

...That is the bigger story of which Woodward and Bernstein tell their exciting share...

...The substitution was necessary, but perilous...

...This news source was the government official who seemed to know what was going on in the deepest recesses of the White House and the Nixon campaign committee...

...And they are gotten when reporters' tenacity is backed up by the resources and organization of a great and courageous newspaper...

...Yet, for me, Deep Throat and similar titillations only distract from the more important journalistic lesson embedded in this book...

...Surmisals about the identity of Deep Throat—well-connected enough to know the deepest secrets, yet apparently hostile to those from whom he derived them—have become a favorite Washington guessing-game...

...It is an exciting narrative in itself...

...It is likely that our free press has saved freedom for all of us, but at the price of expanding beyond its normal bounds, becoming an unappointed inspector-general, employing the inadequate tools of tips, sources, interviews, and deductions to replace the tools of subpoena, sworn testimony, and contempt citations rusting in the hands of those sworn to use them...

...In those days, the agenda for a White House crisis conference was less likely to be the latest finding of the official investigators—that could be contained —than the latest report in The WashALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein...

...I state this with pride as a newsman, but with concern as a citizen...

...Crisis for them was not whether the Government would stand, but whether their story would stand up...

...It wasn't that Haldeman wasn't, but that Sloan hadn't told it to the grand jury...

...But, for more than a year, starting in the summer of 1972, it was the press, almost unaided and heavily impeded, that carried the burden of disclosure and ultimately defeated the massive obstruction of justice...

...Simon and Schuster...

...8.95...

...Readers—and, soon, moviegoers— will get a bang out of such melodramatic touches as Deep Throat...

...So, the Haldeman error is presented not as a simple journalistic goof, but as a possible Haldeman-con-trived diabolical plot to lure them into discrediting themselves...

...While their work was helping to precipitate crises in the White House, they were having professional crises...

...However much one tried to check, there were dangers in relying on the tendentious, the self-interested, and the second-hand...

...ington Post, which could not, and not for want of trying...

...349 pp...

...For, whatever the contribution of Deep Throat, the real work of unlocking the Watergate conspiracy lay in sWeat, not melodrama...

...Woodstein" (in the Washington shorthand for them) would still be two local reporters had it not been for the resolve of publisher Katharine Graham, in the face of economic reprisals plotted in the Oval Office, and had it not been for a team of involved editors, led by Benjamin Bradlee, whom Woodward and Bernstein treat with tolerant scorn...

...Jeopardy, for the Oval Office conspirators, came not from the FBI and the Justice Department, in the early stages of the cover-up...

...Their blackest day was the day they cited former Nixon campaign treasurer Hugh Sloan as having told the grand jury that H. R. Haldeman was one of those controlling the secret slush fund...

...So the White House transcripts provide a fascinating counterpoint to the Bernstein-Woodward account in All the President's Men of their heroic tenacity and monumental chutzpah in working to unravel what had been so elaborately raveled...