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Book Review All The

Book Review All The image
Parent Issue
Day
26
Month
July
Year
1974
OCR Text

BOOK REVIEW: ALL THE [PRESIDENT'S MEN]

Cari Bernstein was 28, a copy boy turned reporter, estranged from his wife, mean and driving, with long hair and a trendy interest in such things as rock music and 10-speed bicycles. Bob Woodward was 29, divorced, tight-assed, ambitious, with a degree from Yale and a Republican voting record. In the summer of 1972, they were junior reporters on the make, covering local news. When . they were assigned to report on the Water gate break -in, they got the break of their journalistic careers. They made the most of it. Over a period of some eight months -- from June 1972 (when the seven burglars got caught) to February 1973 (when the Gray hearings busted the case open) -- these two reporters were responsible for most of the major breaks in the developing story. Thanks to them, the Washington Post scooped the competition and became No. I on Richard Nixon's hate list. They won a Pulitzer Prize for "brilliant investigative journalism". In All The President 's Men, they tell how they did it.

On one level, this is a good detective story. Woodward and Bernstein are aggressive, resourceful reporters. Throughout their odyssey, their biggest problem was reliable information. The really interesting portions of the book have to do with the way they tracked down leads or located and milked sources. They proceeded as most decent reporters would. They were logical: why was the slush fund in Maurice Stans' office (which supplied the Watergate buggers with their cash) so large? Surely Watergate was not an isolated episode, but part of a larger, covert operation. This led them, via Miami and Mexico, to Donald Segretti and dirty tricks and via Segretti, to Kalmbach and Haldeman. They were skeptical: why was the government unwilling to pursue its investigation beyond the Watergate seven? Why were the men in the White House so anxious to play down the story and stonewall further probes? Woodward and Bernstein pushed harder - harassing key figures with midnight phone calls, bluffing, bullying, and occasionally trapping a reluctant source, and in one instance trying to purloin a grand jury. They played a lot of hunches and happily for them, most of their hunches proved correct. And they were incredibly lucky: a disgruntled bookkeeper at CREEP told them all she knew about Stans' secret funds; a chance telephone call revealed Segretti; a disillusioned staffer at the White House gave them important leads at critical moments. Incidentally, this informant (whom Nixon would surely like to get his hands on) remains anonymous; Woodward and Bernstein dub him "Deep Throat" (which, if it doesn't reveal who it was, does reveal the trendy boundaries of the journalistic imagination). Woodward was the only one who knew him. Their meetings were arranged through an elaborate system of code messages -- moving flower pots on balconies and drawing clocks inside morning newspapers. They rendezvoused in the middle of the night at abandoned parking garages. "Deep Throat" knew a lot, and he was desperately afraid of Haldeman. He infected Woodward with his paranoia. The reporters began to worry about being assassinated. In their book, they make the most of this sort of James Bond stuff.

TV melodrama, everybody is everywhere playing their role wholeheartedly. The men are manly, the women are womanly, the reporters are cynical and overworked, and the President's men are devious and crooked. Everything is sacrificed to movement. Individuals are caricatured, conversations are recalled in utterly unconvincing detail, events are pinpointed Dragnet style ("at 5:33 pm Woodward received a phone call...) And the whole is served up in that snappy, on-the-move journalese which may carry alright for a few column inches but gets rather tiresome after 300 pages. Moreover, it is 300 pages of straight narrative, without a hint of analysis. Woodward and Bernstein's intimacy with the Watergate story is probably unparalleled; yet they offer no reflections on their personal experiences, on the meaning of the event itself, or on what it says about the American reality. What we get are facts - buggings, slush funds, laundered checks, dirty tricks, silence money, plumbers operations -- all of it last year's news, now rather stale. Most maddening of all, the book peters out just as the story gets good. By February / March 1973, as the coverup comes undone, Woodward and Bernstein are losing their exclusive: television is better suited to public hearings than the printed media and, therefore, takes over center stage; other journalists (including senior staffers at the Post) begin to shoulder their way into an expanding field; and the competition (especially the hated New York Times) begins to scoop the pace-setting duo. Woodward and Bernstein collect the prizes, write their memoirs, and fade away. They have gotten good mileage out of a good story. Ultimately, their tale tells us more about the world of American journalism than about the President's men. Watergate is an issue in a larger, on-going drama: the power struggle between the media and the White House.

Woodward and Bernstein are fairly representative of their trade. Basically, they are wordsmiths, bound by the mechanics of their craft and blinkered by their own definitions of what news is. They have a job to do - stories to write, follow-ups to prepare, deadlines to meet, and bosses to please. They pursue their job with a certain professional diligence and with a keen eye on their own careers. For them, the real stakes are played out in newsroom politics (which Woodward plays better than Bernstein). They are not anti-Nixon by instinct. Indeed, at the beginning of their collaboration, they were far more suspicious of each other'ss ambitions than they were of the President's men. And even as they pursue their story into the Oval Office, it is clear that their biggest "thrills" come not from implicating Nixon, but from making contact with important people, breaking a good story, bettering the competition, and getting a pat on the back from their publisher. Their greatest moment of triumph came when Ron Ziegler was finally forced to apologize for dismissing their stories. These guys are not just "giant killers". They are reporters after a story. Their account gives a definitive lie to Nixon's claim that he has been persecuted and martyred by ideological enemies in the media.

Like all reporters in the Washington news corps, Woodward and Bernstein are awed by the power of the presidency. They become noticeably nervous as they begin to take on the White House. Their superiors are clearly uncomfortable about the adversary role which the Watergate story forced upon them. Editors warn Woodward and Bernstein to be careful, to double check their information, and to tone down their language: "hold your water for awhile" -- "this is the hardest hardball that's ever been played in this town." Twice Woodward approached the White House to elicit their side of the story. Ultimately, what got these reporters mad was not the crime they were uncovering, but the bland denials and obsessive secrecy of the President's men.

This is not very surprising. The media are not the natural antagonists of government. They are big corporations, part of the political establishment and sensitive to the definitions of the status quo. They are participants in Washington power games. They do not relish being in the opposition; they prefer to be in the know. The primary preoccupation of everyone in the news business is access. For all reporters, the name of the game is to be "informed"; this means going to background briefings, having reliable informants on the inside, hob-nobbing with the great and powerful on a first name basis, and collecting trivial tid-bits about personality which they can drop into their stories to satisfy their own self-importance and to show their audience how close they are to the big time. In the media, Nixon's crime was not in breaking the law, but trying to deny reporters access. The last thing any journalist wants is lo be branded a renegade. To criticize too brazenly (i. e. to report

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