Watergate: 35 Years Later
Where have we come? Where are we going?
WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 -- At the time, a young Bob Schieffer thought is was a “wacky break-in” as he read the headlines in The Washington Post on June 18, 1972. CBS had scheduled the young correspondent to cover the Democratic Convention in Miami that year.
Never did it cross his mind that the ensuing scandal would destroy a presidency.
The men arrested on the night of the break-in at the Demoratic National Committee’s offices at the Watergate complex in Washington were on the payroll of President Richard Nixon’s re-election committee.
Because it occurred during the weekend, The Post initially called in one of its young city beat reporters, now one of the most recognizable names in all of journalism -- Bob Woodward.
Woodward reluctantly went to the burglers’ court hearing on a Sunday morning. It was then that he confirmed what The Associated Press had already been reporting -- that one of the burglers was a former employee of the CIA.
“There’s three letters that can really get a newspaperman going,” said Post editor-at-large Ben Bradlee. At the time of Watergate, Bradlee was executive editor at The Post and oversaw all news content in the paper.
Soon, another infamous name was paired with Woodward’s to cover the story -- Carl Bernstein, a young city reporter who was close to being fired when he was put on the story.
The reporter duo would cover the scandal over the next two years until on Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon left the White House, facing a grueling impeachment hearing in Congress if he stayed.
The president was forced to give up his office after a series of White House tapes were discovered that would have revealed Nixon giving the OK to break into the Democratic National Committee’s offices.
“I didn’t believe them, who would be dumb enough?” said Bradlee, referring to how the story was playing out. “You couldn’t make this up.”
President Nixon tried to conceal the tapes in hopes that they would just go away, Bradlee said, but would have eventually been forced from office anyway because of mounting testimony on Capitol Hill. The most important of which was coming from John Dean, a fired White House counsel who became the key witness against the president in hearings held by the Senate Watergate Committee.
In the end, Nixon was forced from office and seven of his closest insiders were jailed. All five of the men who broke into the DNC’s offices were charged with burglary.
Bradlee’s high standards to maintain credibility often sent Woodward and Bernstein home frustrated and mad; he always pushed them to verify every fact they had with at least two sources. When they failed to get two sources by deadline, Bradlee would refuse to run the story.
“He was a real hardass about it,” Woodward said of Bradlee, always telling him to “go verify, go make sure, go get additional sources.”
But Bradlee said don’t confuse his harshness with fear of revenge from the administration for going after the president with the investigation. If you knew Katherine Graham, Bradlee said, then you know “not a moment’s thought was given to backing off.”
Katharine Graham was the late publisher of The Post who came to prominence for winning the right from the courts to publish the Pentagon Papers, a secret defense department report that showed the government had been planning to widen the scope of the Vietnam War while telling the public they were drawing it down.
Critical to The Post’s reporting on Watergate was one of Woodward’s sources known only at the time as “Deep Throat.” The name is derived from a journalist only using a source for deep background information and not actually identifying him in the story.
It wasn’t until 2005 that W. Mark Felt, the No. 2 man at the FBI during Watergate, admitted to being Deep Throat, who met with Woodward in the bottom of an underground parking garage during the dead of night to either confirm or deny information.
“He was the only one that would move it forward, and he knew it,” Woodward said of his longtime source. “It was a really a brave thing to do.”
When asked how the secret was kept for so many years, Bernstein said, “None of us told our first wives.”
The story landed Woodward and Bernstein a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Now, more than 35 years since the break-in, the journalists worry that students don’t even know how Watergate affected the nation.
In early October, Woodward and Bernstein sat down with Bradlee, along with Schieffer and Dan Schorr of CBS News, and Scott Armstrong, senior investigator for the Senate Watergate Committee, for a historic discussion of the impact of Watergate on American journalism as well as the political culture of the country.
Schieffer, who moderated during the anniversary discussion, worried that today’s reporters had forgotten the lessons of Watergate, especially journalists.
“We both knew it was going to go somewhere,” said Bernstein, who thinks today’s reporters try too hard to plan out a story before they ever write the first word. “It’s all about where the reporting takes you.”
But Bernstein said that Washington has changed significantly since the investigation, particularly when it comes to oversight within the government. “The system worked in Watergate … that’s the biggest difference between then and now.”
Bradlee said a reporter knows when he’s got a good story sitting on his desk.
“There’s a smell to a good story, and you get addicted to it,” he said.
When asked if Woodward would go on “Larry King Live” to break the story if Watergate happened today, Bradlee said, “Over my dead body.”
Armstrong was on Capitol Hill as the investigation progressed, covering the Senate Watergate Committee headed up by Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C.
“Watergate showed us that cover-ups can work,” Armstrong said.
Bernstein added that the administration tried to make it about the press and not about the president and his men, much like the current administration.
Armstrong said the way the administration handles the press corps today can be attributed to a model put in place by David Gergen in the mid-1980s. Gergen was a White House adviser for four presidents – Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton.
He developed the theory that to avoid scandals like Watergate, the press needs to be fed a little bit of juicy information every day to keep them distracted from looking elsewhere for a lead story. Enter the modern day press briefing. It is irrelevant events such as this, Armstrong said, that keep the press from uncovering stories that had the jaw-dropping effect caused by Watergate.
Schorr described the American public’s initial shock to Watergate as the first time they learned of scandal and conspiracy inside their government.
“Up until Watergate, people assumed what the government did was good and honest -- Watergate broke that,” Schorr said.
Bernstein charged today’s media with too much “speed and impatience” to work on a story the size of Watergate.
While we live in a very different world today, Bernstein said, you must still be a good listener to catch all the facts.
“The answers were in the details,” he said.
Woodward and Bernstein said their only regret was not moving the story along faster by connecting the dots quicker.
After the resignation, Gerald Ford became the only unelected president in American history. One month after taking office, he granted a full and unconditional pardon to Nixon.
As soon as Bernstein heard the news, he called Woodward and said, “The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch!”
Both men now concede that Ford did the right thing, although the pardon was highly unpopular at the time.
One large medium absent during the Watergate era was the Internet and many people wondered what extent it would have influenced the press during the investigation.
Bernstein said, “the Web would put the spotlight on the mainstream press.” Put another way, the Internet would force the press to do a better job because all eyes are constantly on them through blogs and sites such as YouTube and other news feeds.
Woodward worries that the instantaneousness that comes with the Web is forcing young journalists to rush through interviews just to get what they need rather than what they should, which can change the story altogether.
“If you let people talk and you listen to them, the stories will go places you never would have expected,” he said.
As for any modern-day comparisons to Watergate, the only story mentioned was the uncovering of the shoddy conditions for veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. by The Post’s Dana Priest. She is also credited with being one of the reporters to reveal the CIA’s secret “black site” prisons in Europe.
President Bush was furious when the prison story ran and suggested that the series should not have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Bush also railed against The New York Times when it ran a story on the National Security Agency’s secret domestic wiretapping program.
Bernstein said the current administration’s attempt to place blame on the press is quite similar to what Nixon tried to do during the two years of Watergate.
Schieffer remembers when Chuck Colson, special counsel to the president, called up CBS president Bill Paley and threatended to revoke the broadcasting licences of five CBS stations if the story didn’t go away.
Before Schieffer even said Colson’s name, Bradlee said, “I know who spreads those rumors,” noting that Nixon’s staff was synonomous with issuing threats.
It’s something that every administration does and always will try to do, Bradlee said.
For the panel, the lasting lesson from Watergate is that journalists must continue to push for the truth even when the government is trying to turn the people against them.
The battle between the government and fourth estate goes on, Bradlee said.
“Give ’em hell!”
