'Woodward and Bernstein mattered, yes, but not in the way that the popular history recorded in the gauzy, laudatory movie 'All the President’s Men' tells us,' writes vermontgmg
Carl Bernstein , 29, and Bob Woodward , 30, in the city room of the Washington Post office on May 7, 1973, shortly after it was announced that the Post had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its investigative reporting of the Watergate scandal. Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images It’s easy looking back a half-century later to feel that the fall of Richard Nixon was inevitable, but the Watergate plotters almost got away with it.
Over the next few weeks, both Woodward and Bernstein, who had doggedly reported about the burglary in the first following days, both drifted away from the story. The Post had all but moved on by mid-July. Bernstein was sure that the break-in was bigger than anyone imagined, but the Post had a daily newspaper to run, and despite his protests, his editors assigned him back to his normal Virginia beat.
Rugaber’s scoop on July 25 spurred the Washington Post to reassemble their Watergate team. Managing editor Howard Simons, annoyed, cornered city editor Barry Sussman with the Times in hand and demanded, “Why didn’t we have that?” And by the end of the day, Woodward and Bernstein were back on the beat until further notice.
Through the early fall, Woodward and Bernstein kept pushing the story forward — helped by Felt — but their impact was subtle, less revelatory in the moment than it seemed in hindsight. They excavated the money trail that the FBI and Gerstein had identified, making public how checks from Nixon’s donors had ended up directly in the hands of the burglars, and beginning to pierce the cover-up that had descended over the Committee to Re-elect the President in the hours after the June arrests.
The story by Nelson and Ostrow revealed the first direct link between the burglars and the Nixon campaign and rocked Washington. Nelson’s scoop, wrote David Halberstam later, was “perhaps the most important Watergate story so far, because it was so tangible, it had an eyewitness, and it brought Watergate to the very door of the White House.
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