Journalists
scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974? Woodward doesn’t know.
But his reporting partner and lifelong friend Carl Bernstein told the audience Friday that he believed Trump did so because he thought he could win Woodward over.
“Trump always thinks he can outsmart the next guy. Doesn’t matter who the hell it is,” Bernstein said.
Woodward and Bernstein spoke in a lecture billed as “From Watergate to Today: Journalism, Accountability, and the Current Challenges to American Democracy“at FAU as part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s lecture series.
The pair answered questions posed by Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg about the details of the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, which took place 50 years ago this August.
The story’s start was unassuming. Woodward was just 29 years old and had been at The Post for less than a year when he was assigned to cover the burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.
Bernstein, whose career goal was to be a music critic and who was 28 at the time, partnered with Woodward on the story. The two broke the news that one of the five men arrested in the attempt to bug the DNC headquarters was a salaried security coordinator for Nixon’s reelection committee. Their work led to the indictments of 40 government officials and Nixon’s resignation.
On stage on Friday, Woodward and Bernstein also swapped stories about the longtime publisher at The Washington Post, Katharine Graham, and shared their views on the state of local journalism today.
Woodward and Bernstein recall publisher Graham’s fearlessness
Celebrated in Woodward and Bernstein’s memories from the Watergate period were the paper’s executive editor Ben Bradlee and Graham, who was the publisher of The Post for nearly 30 years.
Both said local newspapers need more editors like Bradlee to allow reporters ample time to report a story and more publishers like Graham, who defended them each step of the way.
Bernstein became emotional as he recounted a situation in which a legal courier arrived at The Post building with a subpoena for his reporting notes in the early 1970s. Nixon’s re-election campaign had filed a lawsuit aiming to identify some of the pair’s sources, and Bernstein told building security not to let the legal courier get in the door until he spoke with his editors.
Bradlee sailed away to Graham’s office to notify her of the situation.
When he came back, Bradlee told Bernstein “Katharine says, ‘They’re not your notes. They’re her notes.’ If anyone is going to jail, it’s going to be her.”
Graham, who died in 2001, was known as a forceful and pioneering woman in journalism who defied the U.S. government to publish the Pentagon Papers and the work Woodward and Bernstein did on the Watergate scandal.
On Friday, the pair imagined the scenario of Graham making good on her promise to take the fall if any of her reporters were arrested — chuckling at the idea of her arriving to jail via a personal car and dressed in her best.
Local journalism ‘holds communities together’
Both Woodward and Bernstein lamented the purchasing of newspapers by large companies owned by hedge funds and the loss of local journalism jobs across the country.
Their visit came on the heels of a particularly brutal year for journalism: The news industry shed 3,087 digital, broadcast and print news jobs in 2023, according to Politico, and 500 more journalists lost their jobs last month.
“It’s a terrible loss, because local journalism holds communities together,” Bernstein said. “And we’ve lost that.”
Katherine Kokal is a journalist covering education at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at kkokal@pbpost.com.
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