Washington Post editor who oversaw Watergate reporting
Barry Sussman, the Washington Post editor who directly oversaw the Watergate investigation by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, providing invaluable — if at times unheralded — contributions to the news coverage that helped force President Richard Nixon from office, died Wednesday at his home in Rockville, Md. Hewas 87.
Thecause was an apparent gastrointestinal bleed, said his daughter Shari Sussman Golob.
In Hollywood and in the public eye, newspapering is often imagined as a solitary undertaking, the work of shabbily dressed reporters hunched over their keyboards with telephones cradled between shoulder and ear, barricaded in by notepads and papers piled high atoptheir desks.
Intruth, journalism is a far more collective enterprise, with crucial roles played by people whose names do not appear below headlines. One such person, and perhaps the chief example in The Post’s unraveling of the Watergate affair,was Mr. Sussman.
By Saturday, June 17, 1972, when five burglars wearing business suits broke into the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, Mr. Sussman was The Post’s city editor, in charge of 40 to 45 reporters and editors responsiPaired by Mr. Sussman, Mr.Woodward and Mr. Bernstein— known collectively as Woodstein — became the most famous reporters in American journalism with their incremental and inexorable revelations of the political sabotage, corruption and coverup that began with the Watergate break-in, sent numerous Nixon associates to prison and precipitated Nixon’s resignation in 1974. During their reporting, Mr. Sussman was detailed to serveas special Watergate editor.
The Post’s Watergate coverage received the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for public service, the highest honor in journalism, and was dramatized in “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 movie. Robert Redford played Mr. Woodward, convening by night in a parking garage with his highly placed source called Deep Throat. Dustin Hoffman played the shaggy-haired Mr. Bernstein. Mr. Sussman was omitted entirely.
“More than any other editor at The Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed,” the two reporters wrote in “All the President’s Men,” their 1974 book upon which the movie was based.
The book reportedly contributed to a rift that opened between Mr. Sussman and the two reporters he had supported through the most difficult days of the Watergate investigation. Mr. Sussman had hoped to co-author the account of Watergate with Mr.Woodward and Mr. Bernstein, Alicia C. Shepard wrote in her 2007 book, “Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate,” but the reporters ultimately moved forward alone with “All the President’s Men,” which became a bestseller. Ms. Shepard quoted Mr. Woodward as saying that “it was a reporter’s story to tell, not an editor’s,” and that Mr. Sussman’s “role is fully laidout in the book.”
By the time the book was published, Mr. Sussman had stopped speaking to the two. According to Mr. Sussman, they were “wrong often on detail” in the book and had a tendency to “sentimentalize” theWatergate story.
Mr. Sussman wrote his own book about Watergate, “The Great Cover-Up” (1974), which broadcast journalist Brit Hume, writing in The New York Times, praised as establishing “the compelling case for Nixon’s complicity in theWatergate cover-up.”