Years After We Got Nixon's Papers, We Finally Get the Papers of the 2 Key Reporters Who Got Him
The Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, one of the world’s leading manuscript archives, paid $5 million in 2003 for the Watergate papers of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- 74 boxes, 6 oversize boxes, 3 oversize folders, 3 galley folders, and 21 bound volumes (so far) of interview notes and memos as they pursued the Watergate story for the Washington Post, as well as correspondence, manuscript drafts for All the President’s Men, and the like. Last Friday, those papers were opened.
That afternoon Watergate buffs packed the university’s Hogg Auditorium to hear Woodward, Bernstein and eight other Nixonologists -- Nixon biographer Richard Reeves, historians Stanley Kutler and Joan Hoff, Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, CBS Evening News anchor-designate Bob Schieffer, former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, Nixon Library director John Taylor, and me -- who sat on a pair of panel discussions about Woodstein’s Legacy.
Not present (to anyone’s knowledge), but much discussed, was that legendary garage-dweller with the bawdy moniker, Deep Throat. Unfortunately, Throat’s identity wasn’t revealed at the symposium -- you would have heard if it had been -- nor are Woodward’s notes of their fabled conversations yet open for perusal; honoring Woodward and Bernstein’s promises to confidential sources, Texas is releasing only interviews with the deceased. Of course, that didn’t stop the indefatigable Deep Throat sleuth Bill Gaines, a journalism professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has fingered former White House lawyer Fred Fielding, from turning up with a brigade of students at 9 a.m. Friday to hunt for more clues. (I worked as Woodward’s assistant on The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House but could never wring from him even the meagerest tidbit about Throat’s identity.)
Early in the first panel discussion , Joan Hoff -- whose influential book Nixon Reconsidered (1994) argues that Nixon’s presidency should be remembered foremost for domestic policy, next for foreign policy, and last for Watergate -- refreshingly stated that all the questions about Deep Throat’s identity were a “diversion” from more important issues. (Stanley Kutler, author of the acclaimed Wars of Watergate [1990], has made a similar argument in Slate) But rather than sparing the discussants a round of idle conjecture, Hoff then jumped into the national parlor game, speculating that Throat was someone who thought Nixon’s foreign policy too dovish and wanted to weaken him -- probably a “neocon” such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or Richard Perle. Present-day concerns, it seems, are never far from our thinking about history.
Hoff also argued, as she has before, for the relative unimportance of not just Deep Throat but of Watergate itself. Although John Taylor seemed grateful to have an ally on the stage, the other panelists -- Woodward, Kutler, Reeves, Ben-Veniste -- weren’t buying. The argument, Woodward said, was like the skipper of the Titanic saying that it had been a great cruise, except for the iceberg. The quip brought down the house. A “You’re no Jack Kennedy” moment, it ended that debate.
Watergate, as Kutler said, is the spot that will not out for Nixon. If relegating the Constitutional crisis to last place in Nixon’s presidential record was a tough sell, so was Taylor’s argument, made in Austin and elsewhere, that as a war president, consumed with national security concerns, Nixon should be cut some slack for his transgressions. Taylor rightly called for historians to connect Watergate to the Vietnam War (as many have), and his “national security” argument is close to what Nixon himself seems to have believed, at least in his self-justifying moments -- that the exigencies of the Vietnam War legitimized his illegal actions (The reductio ad absurdum of this line of thinking came with Nixon’s famous 1977 remark, “When the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal.”) As others commented, however, it has been precisely the bogus invocation of “national security,” and the equation of the wish for a president’s reelection with the good of the American people, that got Nixon, and other presidents, into trouble.
Where the first panel focused on Nixon, the second panel (on which I joined Bernstein, Schieffer and Lewis) dealt with the press during and since Watergate. Lewis, spry and provocative at 77, tossed the biggest firecracker of the day into the proceedings, delivering an electric indictment of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 record on civil liberties and executive secrecy. Lewis’s point was to underscore the general absence under Bush of the aggressiveness and skepticism that had supposedly been Watergate’s cardinal lesson for journalists. Whether in failing to challenge the administration’s false claims about Saddam’s weapons stockpiles or in not directing attention to the inhumane treatment of our POWs, Lewis said, the watchdog press has been scarcely seen of late. His remarks got the biggest applause of the day.
It fell to Bernstein to defend today’s journalists -- a bit improbably, since recently he has become a scourge of what he called in a 1992 New Republic cover story “the idiot culture” of Geraldo-style journalism. But at the symposium Bernstein insisted that many reporters continue to do their jobs well; after all, the 1,200-strong audience was hardly uninformed about the torture going on in American military prisons. What’s changed since Watergate, he noted, was the explosion of the amount of “news” devoted to quick entertainment and simplistic conflict, with no interest in investigative reporting or patient analysis. The problem, he suggested, was how to get through, amid the cacophony of talk radio and cable news shows, to the rest of the people. Lewis joked that perhaps the solution was the one Bertolt Brecht proposed after the failed 1953 workers’ uprising in East Germany: Electing a new people.
For my part, I said that the notion of simply being more adversarial toward authority doesn’t entirely capture what we admire in Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting. After all, when we’re not faulting today’s press for being too deferential to authority, we’re blaming it for manufacturing gaffes and scandals; aggressiveness often seems too much in evidence among Washington journalists. What Woodward and Bernstein really succeeded in doing was to reconcile two professional imperatives that journalists hold dear but that usually seem to be at odds: objectivity and muckraking.
On the one hand, journalists strive to do their job -- and maintain credibility with their audiences -- by accurately and fairly reporting the facts and keeping bias in check. Pressure to do so grows especially strong when, as in the Nixon years and today, a right-wing administration tries to tag the mainstream media as liberal, forcing journalists to bend over backward to prove their fairness. On the other hand, journalists also still hearken to the muckraker’s trumpet, believing in the kind of watchdog role that Lewis described. The first goal requires summoning a robust skepticism toward official pronouncements; the second means not letting that skepticism overwhelm your reporting. One of Woodward and Bernstein’s signal achievements was to aggressively investigate the White House while remaining old-fashioned empirical reporters. They harmonized two key professional imperatives that had seemed irreconcilable.
It’s often said that journalists since Watergate have aspired to “bring down a president.” I don’t know any reporters who want to do that. Rather, the achievement of Woodward and Bernstein’s that their successors seek to emulate, I believe, is to square the circle of muckraking and objectivity (even if they wouldn’t articulate it in precisely that way). As Woodward once said, “We didn’t go after the president. We went after the story.” That statement goes a long way toward explaining why their interview notes are now being opened at the University of Texas with so much celebration and fanfare.
An amended version of this piece first ran in Slate and is reprinted with permission of the author. Click here to see a list of his other History Lesson columns in Slate.