The Press Box - Carl Bernstein on His First Job, Newspaper Love, a Great Prank, and Scandals That Are “Worse Than Watergate”

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Bryan is joined by Carl Bernstein to discuss his career as a reporter dating back to his time as a teenager at the Washington Star. They reflect on the newsroom in the ’60s, what it was like covering the Kennedy vs. Nixon presidential election, and how the Watergate scandal compares to recent times. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Carl Bernstein Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Listen up all you New York fans. Veteran New York Sports Talk host, John Dostromski gives his unique take on all the big stories in the Big Apple and beyond, including guest conversations, gambling picks, and reactions from you, the listener. Check out New York, New York with John Dostromsky on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Friday. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with our producer Erica Servantes. We've got a big one today. It's Carl Bernstein. Yeah, the Carl Bernstein of Watergate reporting fame. Bernstein has a new memoir called Chasing History,

which you might call the Carl Bernstein origin story. It starts in 1960 when young Carl, who stands 5'3 and is all of 16 years old, walks into the old Washington Star newspaper and applies for a job. Bernstein gets the job. High school becomes kind of his side hustle as he spends almost every waking hour at the paper. And Bernstein begins his career as a journalist. Anybody who's heard this podcast knows I love newspapers, I love stories about newspapers,

and what you're going to hear me ask Bernstein is to explain some things. Like what was an evening newspaper? What was it like to cover John F. Kennedy's inauguration? How did newspapers cover the overnight cop speed? I also asked Bernstein about his favorite journalism movie, his unwritten memoir of his reporting adventures with Bob Woodward, and oh yes, that worse than Watergate declaration he's made a few times on TV. This was fun. Here's Carl Bernstein.

Carl, chasing history opens with you at age 16 applying for a copyboy job at the Washington Star. What drew you to the newspaper business? My father rightly feared for my future and got me an interview for a job as a copy boy at age 16 at the Washington. and star. At that moment, I had one foot in the classroom, barely, one foot in the juvenile court, and one foot in the pool hall. That's three feet, but two of them were really in the pool hall and the juvenile court. As I say, one was barely in the classroom. And I think my father rightly feared for my future. I also was working on Saturdays at a layaway department store in a bad part of town selling shoddy merchandise to poor people. So I think my father just thought,

you know, this is not heading in the right direction. And even I thought it wasn't heading in the right direction. My father thought that I had an ability he could see to write a little bit. And I had taken a journalism course in the 10th grade, and I could make my way through essay exams, but nothing else. So he got me this interview. And the interview was with a guy who was called the production manager of the Evening Star. And mind you, the Washington Evening Star at that time was probably the greatest evening paper in America. And it was a much better paper in most regards than The Washington Post. and it was also the town's conservative paper as opposed to the liberal Washington Post having to do with the editorial expressions of each paper.

But also the post in that day bled over the line between fact and opinion. And the editorial positions of the post, its liberalism, often went across the line and into the newspapers. whereas the Star had this really definite separation of church and state, as we called it in business. And my father was a serious left-wing person. Both my parents were. And yet he preferred the Star because of the honesty of its coverage. And he had been a source. He was a union organizer of the government workers union. He had been a source for the government columnist of the Star. and he called that man up who got me this interview with the production manager of the paper, who was also the nephew of the publisher.

And his production editor looked at me and thought I was too young, too short, too many freckles, to be a copyboy at age 16. And most of the copyboys were 19, 20, 21, 22. And he just said, boy, come back after you graduated from high school. and that was not the answer I was looking for. And so I was pretty persistent even then. And the next couple of days, I came down to his office and sat outside his office. And finally, he said, can you type?

And I said, yes. And in fact, I had taken typing with the girls in 10th grade because I was sick of shop classes, wood shop, metal shop, all this crap. I'd made too many little wooden trays and things. so I could type 90 words a minute, which was really fast. So I took the typing test, and he called me up the next day, and he said, boy, you didn't tell me you could type like that. And he said, you're hired. Started at $29 a week. But what had really happened to change my life was the day I had first visited this production editor named Rudy Kaufman.

I had gone into his office through a door off a corridor. And as I was getting ready to leave, he took me through a different door into the newsroom. And what I beheld in that moment was the most stunning moment of my life. There was such a purposeful commotion, such an unbelievable scene of people hollering copy and the typewriters clinging and changing and clicking these sounds and the wire room teletypes and people as if they were on the most urgent errands in the nation and they were right on deadline. And he took me up this middle aisle with the reporter's desks on either side and I was like

a puppy on a leash trying to slow them down because I wanted to take it all in. And then a copy boy with a dolly full of newspapers came by, and Rudy Kaufman took one off and handed it to me. And it was still warm from the press. And I could feel the rumbling of the presses underneath me. And in that moment, I knew I wanted to be a newspaper man. You mentioned the star was an evening newspaper. So for people who came of age after the age of newspapers, especially after the age of evening newspapers, was when did an evening newspaper come out and when did people normally read it?

Well, we had, and it's one of the amazing things about the Washington Star, the evening Star. We had five editions a day. The first one came out 11 in the morning. The last one came out after 4 o'clock and was called the Stock Sports Final because it had the final results of the afternoon baseball games and the closing stock market. And so that meant you had five deadlines a day. And the paper was constantly being remade. And because it was an afternoon paper, it was not the same leisurely pace as the Washington Post

as I found when I went to the Post. And I have to say that the Washington Post, when I went there, seemed like an insurance company compared to the newsroom I was used to at the Washington Star. But so with each of these deadlines, as it would approach, reporters would be calling in their stories from out in the field. And dictationists, which was the next job I had after being a copyboy, wearing a headset and typing out the reporter's stories as they dictated off the top of their heads. So all of us who grew up or worked for the Washington Star, we knew how to compose a story off the top of our heads. I mean, most reporters could do it. And I became a reporter at 19 there. And by that time, I had been a dictationist, and I could dictate pretty well off the top of my head.

So all of this is going on at once. And the paper is kind of. constantly changing. And people are hollering copy and the copyboys are running up to a reporter to take the copy out of his typewriter and run it to the city desk or national desk or the state desk, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a constant excitement going on. And people are reading the star at lunch, public transportation on the way home and then before they have dinner when they get home? Absolutely. What was a copyboy expected to do at the star? Almost everything. And and actually performed the function that linked the mechanical part of this newspaper factory, which is what the five floors of the Evening Star Building were,

and the people who composed the words had powerful abilities to express thoughts and inquiry. So the reporters and the editors, those on the editorial side of the operation as opposed to the chemical side. And a copy boy, for instance, to illustrate the linkage of these two parts of the newspaper operation, we would take edited copy, one story up from the newsroom through a hole in the ceiling, a kind of manhole, to the composing room, where the line of type operators were and where each page of the paper was set in type. You mentioned wire machines? What was it like to work a wire machine as a copyboy? Well, it was called a wire room, and it had about 20 teletype machines from the Associated Press, United Press International, newspaper alliance of North America, Dow Jones,

the Starr's reporter, one foreign correspondent that we had, Dow Jones had a wire. So there were constant clacking of these machines, and either one or two of us would be tending the wire room and ripping off a piece of copy after it was about six inches long, a couple paragraphs. And then we would, so usually there'd be two of us in there. And we would run it to the appropriate desk, national, city, state, and what was called the telegraph desk, which was actually stories anywhere in America that were not from Washington. And the reason it was an old term that came from when, well, it still was a telegraph process. It was the teletype machine. It was being, you know, electronically pulsed and then

being written out on this teletype machine. You keep your ears open for the wires because it was a number of bells and the number of bells. And each machine had a bell. And if it rang four times, it indicated the story was marked urgent, which you took a look at it and you got the damn thing over to the desk really fast. One of the other. from that was a bulletin, which five, five bells. I think of it like the rings of a, in a firehouse, the number of rings of the bell going off. And then there was something called a flash, which was ten bells. And I can't remember what somebody said the last time they had heard a flash was, but it was a long time before, I think. You mentioned being a dictation.

I thought that was so interesting because I had an old boss who said, if you want to get better as a writer, take a great piece of journalism sometime and just type it out because you will, in the process of typing it out, kind of learn something about structure and reporting. Did you find yourself doing that as you have these reporters calling you in and you're taking down their story, learning about how to craft a piece? Yes, in the book, I refer to my five years there as an apprenticeship. but the initial apprenticeship really was being a copyboy, being a dictationist, and then when I was 19, they made me a reporter for the summers. And my self-education in terms of writing started as a copyboy. I would sit at night especially if I was working in a night shift, and I would take off the spike of the city. I already had a spike on his, you know, a little spike on his desk.

and I would take the copy he had edited through the day. And this city editor, Sid Epstein, was really my mentor. And I owe pretty much everything to him up until I get to the Washington Post. And I've been blessed by the two greatest editors imaginable. Ben Bradley at the Post and Sid Epstein's star. And Sid's role in my life, as was my whole time, the Washington Star, is formative. It's the most formative part of my life in most regards. And also the five years there bracket the Civil War by 100 years, 100 years after the Civil War.

And that period, too, is formative in the life of this country, if you think about it. The Kennedy era, the assassination, the Civil Rights Revolution, the beginning of the Vietnam War, the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. So country is in a state of constant tension and constant huge events, changing the country irrevocably. And at the same time, this Paul of the Civil War hanging over all of us

100 years later. This is Jim Crow, Washington still. I'm a second generation native of Washington, D.C. I grew up in a Jim Crow capital of the United States. Until the Brown decision of 1954, I went to public segregated elementary school in the capital of the United States, which was finally integrated with Brown in sixth grade in my case. The swimming pools run by the recreation department of the city. of Washington were segregated and then rather than integrate them, the pools were drained so that black and white kids could not swim together.

So this is, and downtown Washington, my parents were civil rights activists. When I was eight or nine, they would take me downtown for the sit-ins in the lunch counters where black people could stand but could not be seated at the lunch counter and the restaurants downtown were all segregated. And so we had sit-ins there as well. So I went with my parents to these sit-ins. And as I say, black people could not eat in restaurants downtown. The only place where black people could eat at a table were the government cafeterias and one cafeteria owned by a man named Shoal. So this is the city I grew up in, as did my mother. My mother went to the elite white high school in the city called Central. It had a swimming pool. It was beautifully built.

And in 1948, because the doctrine of segregation was separate but equal, that was the mythology of the practice of segregation, her high school was transferred from the white division to the so-called Negro Division. And that was as late as 1948. So this gives you a feeling of the kind of city the capital of the United States was. And even though Brown was 54, and integration had come to the restaurants, mid-50s and late 50s, it still was Jim Crow in many regards. The barbers would not, white barbers would not cut black people's hair. I wrote a big story about it, actually. So now you get an idea. And I lived in Silver Spring, Maryland by then, a suburb of the District of Columbia.

And late as 1963, I was covering attempts to integrate Bethesda, Maryland. Right across the district line, the ice cream parlor, the movie theater, the bowling alley, the amusement park. All of these were segregated through 1963. I want to ask you about a couple of those momentous events in the 60s. JFK's inauguration January 1961. How did you help the star cover that? Well, what happened was that composing room that I told you about, where all the stories were put together in metal type.

That was the sphere of the International Topographical Union, which had won for topographers as high salaries as the reporters got. And so I was standing one day by one of the pages that was being made up in a device called a chase, which is like a fence that surrounds all the type. And by then I had learned to read upside down, like a printer could, to read the type upside down, the headlines, upside down and backwards, actually. And I thought I was really clever. And I had a piece of copy in my hand that was a correction sent upstairs from the news, room to the composing room. And the city editor, Sid Epstein, my mentor, was next to me looking at the page supervising the printers as to what need to be moved around. And I saw this mistake.

I put my finger on the type and to illustrate to the printer where he needed to put a block of corrected type. And all of a sudden, the composing room form in a big man name, I wish his Baker took his arm and every piece of type. He just shoved onto the floor and onto the wingtip shoes of Sid Epstein, this very elegant city editor. And I didn't know what was going on. Sid said to me, hey, kid, go downstairs. He came down a few minutes later. And he sent in my office, kid. And he said, what do you want to be when you grow up? I said a reporter. He said, what makes you think you can be a reporter? I said, well, you know, by now I've covered a few citizens, neighborhood association meetings, and I've always been interested in secrets and this kind of thing.

And he said, you've got to make me a promise kid. And I said, what's that? That you'll never again, as long as you live, touch a piece of hot type. And I said, okay, I get it. And then he took out this long roll of copy paper that probably came from one of the Talotype machines. And on it were all of the assignments for the reporters for the inauguration coming up in a few days of Jack Kennedy, the president-elect the United States. And he pointed on this, he said, you cover the inauguration. You go to Fourth in Pennsylvania. Don't think you can write anything. Just call everything you see.

You're there to look at the crowds and cover the crowds. Call it into Herman Shaden, the rewrite man. You go out there and cover the inauguration at age 16. amazing. I had already covered Jack Kennedy in the last week of October, 1960, just before the election, he came to, and Maryland was really up for grabs, and might even decide the election between him and Richard Nixon. And he came to my high school in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the state editor of the paper who lived around the corner from me and who would drive me to and from work some days, said, you know, why don't you help cover Kennedy coming to your high school?

And he said, our first-rate, you know, our first string political reporter is going to be with Kennedy, the candidate. But you know the grounds of the place, you just be a legman as it was called and cover the crowd. The same thing that happened on the inauguration day. And Kennedy came to my high school and I covered the crowd. And it was a mesmerizing moment, not because of my reporting it, but because of Kennedy. The physicality of Kennedy. His contact with the crowd, the crowd went wild. It was 12,000 people.

The only time I've seen anything like it, I'd been to the 1957 Allen-Fried Rock and Roll Show in New York with Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, and Little Richard, the coasters. and this had the same kind of electricity he generated that Jerry Lee Lewis had when he threw his jacket into the crowd. And the women started screaming and ripped the jacket to shreds. And Kennedy had to pull himself back from the crowds, which would have ripped his jacket and shirt off had he not done that. It was incredible to watch the magnetism. And then he gave this first outside because he had been scheduled to do a big speech inside the auditorium in the gym. But first, the crowd was so enthusiastic that he decided he would make a little speech for the crowd outside. Went up to the podium.

And what he proceeded to do was such gibberish that I couldn't believe it. And he actually said, well, it's really good to be here in Southern Maryland. really wasn't in Southern Maryland. It's about 40 miles down the road. And then he started talking about he was really happy to be there with the senator from California, Claire Engel. Claire Engel wasn't anywhere in the vicinity. The only senator there was Estes Keefather of Tennessee. And it became obviously he was reading the wrong pages of a speech. And one of the pages was from a California speech. And another one was for Southern Maryland, which was going to be its next stop. And it was just disastrous.

But there was nothing disastrous about his inaugural speech, which I heard at fourth in Pennsylvania and asked not what your country can do for you, but you can do for your country. Now, the high school where that Kennedy rally is taking place, you were attending that high school at the time while putting in so many hours at the star. So how are you balancing a big job at the star and actually trying to go to high school the same time. I didn't try to go to high school too much, and it was quite an imbalance. I would go to classes a couple days a week, and I managed to arrange my class schedule when I went into my senior year, which was after I'd been at the paper for, you know, I went there in August,

so about six weeks later, I started my senior year in high school. And I arranged the schedule with a lot of study hall toward the end of the day and gym class at the end of the the day so that I could get out of the place by one or two o'clock and go to work. And I convinced my mother that if I worked in night shift, which I do one or two nights a week, I could do my homework there, which of course I didn't. I would go out with the reporters to fires and murders and whatever was going on. And I was learning. I was learning a lot, but I wasn't learning anything at school. Speaking of fires and murders, this is one of my favorite parts of the book. There's a guy

named Walter Gold, who covered the police beat at night for the star. What was it like riding around with him looking for stories? Well, Walter is an amazing character. He had a big Pontiac that he had ordered special, and it had a sominoid button that you could open the trunk without getting out of the car. You'd just spring the trunk open. It's probably common today, but it was kind of unheard of then. And he was a member of the Bethesda Chetty Chase Rescue Squad as well, and he had a fireman's running coat and a hard hat fireman's hat and an axe in the trunk and all these implements for fighting fires.

As I say in the book, I went to a lot of fires in my time star, but I never dressed for the occasion like Walner did. But I would go with him to the scene, these crimes and fires. And what I learned from Walter Gold, you can even see a straight line from Walter Gold to Watergate. Because, and I should say here, the chasing history of kid in the newsroom is not written in the voice of or from the point of view of the old man Bernstein sitting here and looking back. It's really written in the voice of the kid around the time he leaves the star in 1965.

So it ends in 1965. There's an epilogue that serves to make a bridge to what happened later, like you might see in a movie credit at the end. But Walter Gold had this ability to sit with cops, treat them like real human beings, not like just sources to get some information from and run back to the office. He carried with him donuts and hot coffee in a thermos, which he would give to these cops while they'd talk to him. And the cops weren't supposed to talk to reporters, the ordinary cops. That was supposed to be the lieutenant or the captain who came to the scene of the crime.

But Walter would get these guys off in the corner, sit down with him, he treated them with great regard and respect. And they talked to him. And that lesson stayed with me. That and the fact that Walder carried rolls of dimes and quarters and nickels in his pocket to feed the pay phones because we didn't have cell phones. So you had to always scope out where the nearest payphone was and have these rolls of coins in your pocket. So there is not a chance that you were going to get caught without the ability to call back to the office and dictate or give notes. I really enjoyed that because whenever the star would cover a big story around town like the inauguration of the march on Washington, They would make sure to have pay phones or dedicated phones where you guys could go phone your copy into the paper.

The only time that there were dedicated phones that I remembered was on the March of Washington in 1963. And Sid Epstein himself had done the reconnaissance and gone down to the mall to scope out where or what would happen. And he managed, because he had some pretty good contacts at the local telephone company, to get the telecom. company to install eight telephones, starting at Lincoln's foot. In the Lincoln Memorial, there was a red telephone that I used, actually, or took dictation from. I did not use the phone there. I took dictation from the reporter there by Lincoln's foot as the March on Washington went on. But he had scoped out to place, gotten the telephones installed. and that was a remarkable day.

Well, you tell us the story of how you and a bunch of your cohorts at the Star managed to plant a fake obituary in the Washington Post, the rival newspaper? We did. The way that happened was there was a copyboy named Mark Baldwin. And Mark had tried to slip a fake obit into the Washington Star, the paper he worked. And it was about an architect who had designed. designed a underwater city for the Washington Channel of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers. And he had written it so plausibly that it had gotten through tonight's city editor

and was about to get into the paper when somebody on the copy desk decided, you know, this is kind of unlikely to have a kind of Atlantis under the Potomac and the Anacostia. And so that was the end of that story. And Mark almost got fired for it. But it was told, it was a great tale that was told in the newsroom afterwards. And so one day I said to some of the other dictationists, I was by then a dictationist, I was 17 or 18, said, you know, let's see if we could get a fake obit into the Washington Post. So I came up with this idea of a character who was in his 80s who had died.

and he had managed to play a lot of instruments, and he became a one-man band who would play a trombone and drums with his feet and a ooghorn and all kinds of contraptions, and he played a command performance for President Woodrow Wilson, and then later he became a magician named Rudy the Magnificent, which was named after Rudy Kaufman, who was the guy who gave me my interview,

here to get hired. And it went on and on. And a couple of other dictationsists contributed to it. And I went down to the lobby to phone in the details to the Washington Post. And we thought there was a slim chance that this would work because both papers knew that there had to be great protections taken to keep fake obits, you know, or any kind of trickery from getting into the paper. So the rules were that, one, you had to have the facts both from the funeral home and a relative of the deceased. And in this instance, I said I was the son of this amazing musician and magician, and that I was calling from Sarasota, Florida, and I was about to get on a train and accompany the body of my father back to Washington for the funeral. So that took care of getting in touch with the funeral home as well as being in further touch with me, the only survivor of the one-man band. Well, the reporter that I got at the post, I could hear that he was really excited about writing this great obit.

And I embellished it a little farther, a little more on the telephone. So the next morning, we come into work and we see that the obit is not only the lead obit in the Washington Post with a big headline. It's also been cut out and Sid Epstein, this mentor of mine and city editor of the paper, has the obit cut out on his desk. And he looks at it. His head goes down and up again. And Sid had this habit of rolling a pencil back and forth. He kept his desk immaculate, and he would roll a pencil back and forth, and his knee would go up and down. And sometimes the only time when he would get mad, he was never loud, but his face would get red,

as it did actually in that composing room incident that I told you about when the type went on the floor. And we could see his face get red. He would look down at this Obit, pencil would go back and forth. Hey, look over at us on the dictation bank. And we were afraid that he was going to tell us, hey, the Post has this Obit, one of you guys, one of you guys, see if you can match this Obit. And then we would crack up or something. And he kept looking at him. Finally, at one point, a couple hours later, he took the Obin on his desk, he balled it up, threw it in the trash can, gave us a look that said, you ever do this one more time, you're never going to work at this newspaper for another day.

And the Post ever corrected? Do they ever figure it out? No, never corrected it. Never corrected it. And when I was researching for the book, I couldn't find it in the microfiche of the Washington Post for some reason. What a wonderful fellow dictationist I stayed in touch with over the years and who had been a part of this plot. I called him and I said, can you remember the name of this? so maybe I could find it somehow going through the post archives. Can you remember the name of this guy that we invented? He said, no, but I think I have the clipping.

And he had the clipping and it's reproduced in the book. Why did you wind up leaving the story in 1965? I had been made a reporter in the summer of 64. and I wrote as many stories and as well as the journeyman reporters, really, who were on the local staff. And all of the editors, including Sid Epstein, wanted me to stay on the staff. It had been a thing all through my years at the start that it was expected that I would have to finish college before I could become a reporter. And this was right into transition. There were no reporters, no new reporters, I think, who had not finished college.

The last person who had been put on the staff without a college degree was actually my housemate. We lived, there were four reporters myself. They were in their 20s. I was 17 when I went to live there. And we lived in a house in Arlington. But this reporter, Tom Diamond, had been the last one not to go to college. And this was four years before. And the managing editor just insisted that I had to finish college before I could be a reporter,

though they made me one for this summer in 64. And they were hiring new reporters. And Sid Epstein said to the managing editor, hey, let's just have Bernstein stay on the staff and you won't have to find a new reporter. But the managing editor said this thing. I went to see him because he refused. And I couldn't believe with all the editors saying that, hey, let Bernstein stay on the staff as a reporter. I couldn't believe this managing editor who was the one character in the newsroom to begin with

that I thought really was not of the caliber. that a managing editor should be. And instead of seeing told me this, I mean, I was so shocked and so deflated and so depressed. I said, I want to talk to this guy. His name was Bill Hill myself. And I went in to Sea Hill. And he said his most amazing thing to me that became a kind of litany in the newsroom to ridicule him. He said, Carl, you've put your shoulder to the wheel.

But experience is no substitute for the training program. And the training program was a thing that C. Ed Epstein had invented so that new reporters coming off the Dictation Bank and graduating to be reporters or newly hired young reporters would spend a few months on this so-called training program supervised by one of the assistant city editors. They would cover every beat on the city side of the newsroom, tutored by the people who were the regular reporter. on those beats. It was a magnificent program. But I've done all these things. I was an experienced reporter about his time. And so Bill Hill told me this. The Carl experience is no substitute for the training program. So I worked there for about another six months, and I knew I had to leave. And a favorite editor besides Sid Epstein, his deputy, man named Coit Henley, he too was ready to leave after being deputy for a number of years without getting onto a higher position.

And he was asked to be the editor of a small paper in Elizabeth, New Jersey, exit 13 on the turnpike right by the Bayway refinery with all its noxious fumes going up in the air, flames shooting from the refinery. And he became the editor of paper called the Elizabeth Daily Journal, with maybe a fifth of the circulation of the star, maybe 20 reporters as opposed to 100 or whatever we had at the star. No, we had more than 100. And sight on scene, he said, look, if you come up here to Elizabeth's with me, you can do anything you want. I'll give you a journeyman's pay of eight years' experience.

You can write a column. You can go on the desk and be an editor. Because at that point, I thought, if I could ever be really what I really wanted to do when I grew up was B. Sid Epstein and the city editor to Washington Star or the Washington Post if it couldn't be the star. And so I went up there to Elizabeth's with him. It's a terrible, terrible town. And I've been there one day and I knew I had to go over to New York City to live. I could work in Elizabeth, but I couldn't live there.

And Elizabeth also had, the great thing was he was a working class town, The Singer-Sowing Machine Plant was there. There would be a weekly lunch that I would go to. The people there became my sources. The mayor, a guy named Tony Provenzano, who was the head of the Teamsters Union, who, of course, went to jail for really he was responsible for killing Hoffa, and he became a source.

These great characters in Elizabeth, New Jersey. And there was a state newspaper association. I never heard a such a thing in Washington. And they had a contest every year for stories. And I managed to win three of the first prizes. I think it was News on Deadline, feature writing. And I can't even remember what the third chapter. Investigative reporting.

It's got a big one, Carl. And I won these three first prizes. And so I decided after a year, I had to get out of this Bush League newspaper and out of this place. And so I applied for jobs at the New York Times where I knew I wouldn't get hired. The New York Herald Tribune, where I also figured I wouldn't get hired and didn't. San Francisco Chronicle where I got turned down. The Washington Daily News, which was the afternoon tabloid, which said, oh yes, come down. here right away, we'll put you to work tomorrow. And I applied it to Washington Post, even though

they too had no new reporters who weren't college graduates. But Ben Bradley, one of the reasons I wanted to work at the Post, the Star was a much better paper than the Post when I went to work here. But by 1965, Ben Bradley had become the managing editor, and he was going to obviously become the editor of the paper. You could see how he was starting to change it, how the post was by then even becoming a better paper than the star was. And I thought it would be great to go there and work for him. And the city editor at the post who interviewed me, he asked me a lot of questions and he said, why do you think you can be a reporter here? And I said, well, I've had the best education a reporter could ever have. I said, I've spent five years at the Washington Star under Sid Epstein,

which was the same job that this city editor had. And I also, he had recommendations from some of the editors at the Star that had been sent on to him. And he looked at me and he said, that's a great answer. And that he was probably the greatest education you could have to be at the Washington Star and do those things. I'm going to hire you. And he did. A couple more for you, Carl, and then we'll let you go. The work you've done at CNN over the last couple of years during the Trump administration, you would have the occasion to say that a particular Trump scandal or another was worse than Watergate. Of course, that would create headlines all over the place. Bernstein says this is worse than Watergate. Were you surprised at the number of scandals that actually registered

as worse than Watergate over the last couple of years? Let me back up on that question a little bit. Because I had actually gone to CNN much earlier when Hillary Clinton was first running for president to get the nomination. And, of course, she didn't get it. Barack Obama got the nomination. But I had written what now is the definitive biography, I guess, of Hillary Clinton. And so that was how I got to CNN because ostensibly everybody thought she was going to be the nominee of the party, not Obama. And so I got to CNN. And I'd been in television before. I'd been a bureau chief for ABC News and on the air from 1980 to 1985.

And so I went to CNN with that expectation that I'd be covering or commentary on Hillary Clinton, which didn't materialize. But I did other commentary in reporting. And then Trump became president. And very early on, I went on. on the air and I said, this president is a serial liar. And I took a deep breath and said, I can't believe I'm saying this on television about the president of the United States, because I know it sounds pejorative, but it's repertorially correct. And that became the model. I could not believe what I was getting from the sources, especially Republicans.

And very early, I said on the air, there are a good number of Republicans in the House and the Senate who really questioned Trump's stability. And then I did a story that said, finally I got tired of these people in the House and the Senate hiding with anonymity. And I'm used to anonymous sources. God knows in Watergate, we never named a source in three, 400 stories that we wrote in those two. two years. And finally, I did a story because I was learning a lot, not from just the senators, but in Senate particularly, I was learning about these feelings about this disdain that these Republican senators had for Trump, finally did a story naming 21 Republican senators who disdained, ridiculed, and hated Trump. And none of them. denied the story, incidentally. And that gives you an idea of how craven, and look at it now,

these same, most of them are still there and are following the Trump line and voted to acquit him rather than convict him. And then, but you're right, very early on, I started saying this is worse than Watergate. Why? Because in Watergate, there were courageous Republicans who made it possible for there to be a peaceful transition, for Nixon to resign the presidency? And the backstory to that is, and we tell it in Woodward and I in the final days, which is the book that succeeded all the president's men, that Barry Goldbock, the 1964 nominee of his party to be president, the great conservative, after Nixon's tapes had been disclosed and what they disclosed, the horror of what was on those tapes. The House Judiciary Committee voted

articles of impeachment. It was a certain thing Nixon would be impeached in the House. And nobody knew what would happen in Senate. There was a good chance he would be acquitted, much as Donald Trump had been acquitted twice, because they failed to get a two-thirds majority to convict. So Goldwater called together the Republican leadership in the Senate and the House, Bob Michael, the Republican, leader in the House, New Scott of Pennsylvania, a very senior and distinguished Republican senator. And it's interesting, actually, the way we learned about this, and we wrote about it in the final days is I'm going to do a little backtracking here.

I'm often known and criticized by members of my family for telling stories circumlocutiously, which is one reason why it's good to write for a new. newspaper because I can discipline myself a little. So those listening to this podcast will understand my circumlocutious nature. And while working on the final days, Bob and I went to see Goldwater. And he was in his apartment. And I hit at the star, interviewed Goldwater the day he was nominated to be his party's presidential candidate. I had interviewed him by ham radio.

He was in San Francisco for the convention, but he was this ham radio enthusiasts. He had taken out all his ham radio equipment so he could play of being a ham radio operator while he had nothing to do in the Mark Hopkins Hotel except run for president. It was absurd. And I heard about this,

and I went to a ham radio operator in Harleton, Virginia, and I said, can you hook me up with gold? Water, and I called Goldwater's press secretary, and say, yeah, that would be a great story. And so I proceeded to interview Goldwater by Ham Radio. Well, Goldwater remembered this when Woodward and I came to visit him for the final days. And he was drinking a scotch, and he pulled out, and he said, here's my diary from the end of the Nixon presidency. And he then told us the following story, which obviously was true, and we used in the final days, that he had called together. these leaders of the House and Senate, the Republican leaders, gone down to the White House to

meet with Nixon. Nixon said to him, Barry, how many votes do I have in the Senate to be acquitted? Nixon fully expected that Goldwater and the other senators were telling him he was going to be just fine. They would never get two-thirds majority to convict him. Goldwater looked at Nixon. He said, Mr. President, right now, you might have four or half a dozen votes and you don't have mine. At that moment, Nixon knew he was through. And two nights later, he announced that he was going to resign. So what does that mean in terms of comparing Watergate and Trump and the Trump presidency? The system worked in Watergate. You had a bipartisan investigation, the Senate Watergate Committee, chaired by Senator Irvin. You then had

courageous Republicans in the House who voted for articles of impeachment. And then you had this amazing visit to Nixon by Goldwater and the leadership. And so, Republicans said to the President of the United States, you're unfit, you're a criminal president. You have to leave. Trump is unfit. He's a criminal president. He ought to have had to leave. But it didn't happen. And that's how it's worse than Watergate. And you could start to see this early on. And also think of what happened on January 6th. I mean, this is long after I had said, worse than Watergate.

And I started saying worse than Watergate, pretty early on. And because largely of this aspect that the Republican Party just kept putting up with it, putting up with it, putting up it. you have a favorite journalism movie, Carl, other than all the president's men? Okay. His girl Friday. Ah. With Rosalind Russell.

Great picture. Just a great, great, great movie. And it's funny, I was just asked, I was just asking in another, actually, it was a Reddit interview online. And I was asked about being played in another movie. by an actor named McCulloch. And it's a great movie called Dick, which is a fabulous send-up of Watergate, of Nixon, and particularly of me and Woodward.

And Will Farrell plays Woodward. And McCulloch plays me. And they've got down every aspect of our doperness and anything else that Woodward and I are capable. They've got it just wonderfully. And it's a hilarious movie, and I recommend it to everybody. All right, last one. You've done two memoirs.

So you've done chasing history, which we're talking about today, and also a book about your childhood, loyalties. Are you now going to do one about the post years? Is that the next memoir for you? I doubt that I'll do another memoir. I don't think I will. I haven't ruled it out. But if I did, it was.

really be a short memoir. The book about my parents is really about the McCarthy era and what happened to my parents who were left-wing people in the McCarthy era who were under constant surveillance. Both my parents testified before the Un-American Committee and the Senate Internal Security Committee. And so if I wrote another memoir, it would be really about my whole life. I've had an, look, I've had an extraordinary life, ups, downs, done some, had some opportunities that made the most of and was able to do some really amazing things, see amazing people, got the best seat in the country at age 16, which is what this memoir is about, this kid that gets the best seat in the country at age 16. I mean, think about that. It couldn't happen to

And in the capital of the United States, the city of my birth, in a time of American bedlam, as well as cops and con men, et cetera. But if I did another memoir, it would be about my whole life, but it would be short, I think, in which I really looked inward, but also about this kind of big life. and with, as I say, these ups and down. About the people that I've found most interesting, about being a reporter for, it's now 61 years, that's a long time to be a reporter, and I still love it.

So I've been blessed, and my kids are really lucky. One son is a terrific reporter at the New York Times, Jacob writes for the style section. And his brother, Max, the great musician, plays guitar for Taylor Swift, by Osiris. And I used to be a rock critic, and I gave him his first guitar when it was three. So, you know, I've been lucky. And so might I do such a memoir? Yeah, but it would be constructed unconventionally, I think.

And I try to keep it small and yet hit on. the things that are important to me and the amazing people that I've met who have been my friends, people I've encountered throughout my life. The new book is Chasing History, A Kid in the Newsroom. Carl Bernstein, thanks for coming on the press box. Good to be with you. Thanks again to Carl Bernstein, who endured a two-and-a-half-hour Reddit, asked me anything before talking to us.

They didn't tell him about that when he was breaking all those Watergate stories. I'm Brian Curtis production magic by Erica Cervantes. A couple things coming up for you. We are doing our long-rumored John Le Anderson interview this week about his terrific biography, Che Guevara, A Revolutionary Life. That's coming soon. We're going to start our pre-Super Bowl push here on the press box

with a lot of very cool media football guests. Plus, David Schuemaker and I back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a fantastic weekend.