June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary attempt ...
Bernstein looked like one of those counterculture journalists that Woodward despised. Bernstein thought that Woodward's rapid rise at the Post had less to do with his ability than his Establishment credentials. They had never worked on a story togeth...
It was 9:30 P.M., just an hour from deadline for the second edition. Woodward began typing: A $25,000 cashier's check, apparently earmarked for the campaign chest of President Nixon, was deposited in April in the bank account of Bernard L. Barker, on...
Hardly unaware of his image, Bradlee even cultivated it. He delighted in displaying his street savvy, telling a reporter to get his ass moving and talk to some real cops, not lieutenants and captains behind a desk; then rising to greet some visiting ...
Until the August 1 story about the Dahlberg check, the working relationship between Bernstein and Woodward was more competitive than anything else. Each had worried that the other might walk off with the remainder of the story by himself. If one had ...
The August 1 story had carried their joint byline; the day afterward, Woodward asked Sussman if Bernstein's name could appear with his on the follow-up story - though Bernstein was still in Miami and had not worked on it. From the on, any Watergate s...
During discussions in his office, Bradlee frequently picked up an undersize sponge-rubber basketball from the table and tossed it toward a hoop attached by suction cups to the picture window. The gesture was indicative both of the editor's short atte...
At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after question at the reporters: Who moved over from Commerce to CRP with Stans? What about Mitchell's ...
The invariable question, asked only half-mockingly of reporters by editors at the Post (and then up the hierarchical line of editors) was 'What have you done for me today?' Yesterday was for the history books, not newspapers. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob W...
Bradlee had been recruited with the idea that the New York Times need nod exercise absolute preeminence in American journalism. That vision had suffered a setback in 1971 when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. Though the Post was the second ne...
Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instants recall. More than any other editor at the Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a refer...
They walked across 15th Street to the Madison Hotel's Montpelier Room, an opulent French restaurant. Bradlee asked for a corner table, and began the conversation. 'You'd better bring me up to date because...' He turned to order lunch in perfect Frenc...
Simons, as restrained as Bradlee could be hard-charging and obstreperous, liked to tell of watching Bradlee grind his cigarrettes out in a demitasse cup during a formal dinner party. Bradlee was one of the few persons who could pull that kind of thin...
A prize-winning science reporter, Simons had become the number-two editor at the Post a year before. An intent, sensitive man with a large nose, thin face and deep-set eyes, he looks like the kind of Harvard teaching assistant who carries a slide rul...
The managing editor shared Bernstein's fondness for doping things out on the basis of sketchy information. At the same time, he was cautious about what eventually went into print. On more than one occasion, he told Bernstein and Woodward to consider ...
Aware that much of the story was out of his hands, he tried to exercise what control he could: he hovered around the reporters' typewriters as they wrote, passed them questions as they talked on the phone to sources, demanded to be briefed after they...
Rosenfeld went to work for the Herald Tribune after his graduation from Syracuse University and has always been an editor, never a reporter. He was inclined to worry that too many reporters on the metropolitan staff were incompetent, and thought even...
Rosenfeld runs the metropolitan staff, the Post's largest, like a football coach. He prods his players, letting them know that he has promised the front office results, pleading, yelling, cajoling, pacing, working his facial expressions for instant e...
