Right away on the phone, you know why legendary Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein has been hailed as one of the best investigative journalists in the world for more than 50 years.
The Charleston City Paper is the alternative weekly there? How long have you been with the paper? What did you do before that?
And that’s in an interview about him.
Bernstein’s endlessly inquisitive nature — what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has called his “infinite curiosity” — was evident throughout the conversation. But that didn’t stop him from offering his own thoughts on the state of the country when asked.
“There’s absolutely no question that our very history and the basic tenets of our democracy are being tested by Donald Trump and what he has said he’s going to do and is doing,” Bernstein told the City Paper on President’s Day. “We’ll see in these coming days and weeks and months how our institutions and citizens are going to react to this test.”
Still, Bernstein is no partisan. In fact, he calls the media’s coverage — or non-coverage — of President Joe Biden’s age and possible cognitive difficulties a “great reportorial failure.” (Bernstein’s reporting on CNN last year about more than a dozen incidents of Biden’s early cognitive decline brought on increased calls for him to step away from the 2024 presidential race.)
What’s more, Bernstein says, it’s important to remember that Trump is a legitimate democratic phenomenon. As we’ve seen in other nations, voters are freely choosing more authoritarian rulers — and that’s a story he’s working to understand.
“It should never be lost on us that Donald Trump became president twice by being elected in democratic, fair and free elections,” he said. “It’s a reflection of what people wanted, and we always need to keep that in mind.”
Bernstein says he’ll have more to say about these issues when he speaks in Charleston on Feb. 26 at the Sottile Theater, as part of the program by the Milton and Freddie Kronsberg Lecture Series and Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, the birthplace of Reform Judaism. It is celebrating its 275th anniversary.
In the meantime, Bernstein talked with the City Paper about the last time the country faced a major test of its democracy — a time when his reporting with fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward changed the course of history.
It was a time, he says, when “the system worked.”
The most consequential burglary in history
Long before “-gate” became a suffix for every American scandal du jour — Ronald Reagan’s Irangate, Bill Clinton’s Monicagate, even Tom Brady’s Deflategate — it was part of the name of a fashionable address in Washington, D.C.
In the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, D.C. police arrested five men breaking into the national Democratic Party offices in the Watergate building. The men, dressed in suits and ties, were carrying sophisticated listening devices and $3,500 cash.
As befitting a minor local burglary, the Washington Post assigned a pair of twenty-something Metro beat reporters to the story — Woodward and Bernstein.
On the first day, they uncovered a link between one of the burglars and a Nixon White House consultant. And over the next two years, their old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting led to one bombshell story after another. There was the secret political slush fund controlled by the attorney general. Then came an illegal conspiracy to use the dirty money, followed by dirty tricks to destroy potential Democratic candidates in the 1972 presidential election. And finally was the cover-up that led all the way to the Oval Office.
On Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon, facing certain impeachment and conviction by the U.S. House and Senate, became the first — and so far only — president to resign the office.
That same year, Woodward and Bernstein’s book about the scandal, All the President’s Men, became a national bestseller, followed soon by the classic film starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the young reporters known in the newsroom as “Woodstein.”
But to hear Bernstein tell it, the story wasn’t about them. It was about the often dreary, always exhilarating act of reporting the news.
“It’s really about basic [reporting] principles,” he said. “It’s about knocking on a lot of doors and using common sense, trying to get as many sources as we could . . . and finding the best obtainable version of the truth.”
Lessons for today
In an era when Bernstein sees democracy as threatened at home and abroad, he notes that one of the major lessons of Watergate was that the system worked because American institutions held firm — and did their jobs.
The Washington Post stood by its reporters — even when the Nixon administration threatened the outlet’s TV broadcast licenses, the real profit center of the company.
The courts refused to bend to political pressure — even after Nixon won a sweeping 49-state reelection in the fall of 1972.
And in the end, it was a group of GOP senators, led by Arizona U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, who told Nixon he had to resign — even though he was a Republican president.
These days, though, Bernstein says he’s not sure our institutions are as strong. And that’s something else he plans to discuss in his Charleston appearance.
“There’s a systemic failure in terms of democratic values, institutionally,” he said. “And I think that will be part of what I talk about when I’m in Charleston.”
Another topic he plans to discuss here in the Holy City? His years in the 1960s as the regional president of B’nai Brith Youth, which he said brought him down to the Carolinas at the height of the civil rights era.
But that was as much of a preview as he wanted to give.
“I’m really looking forward to being in Charleston,” he said.
Odds are, he’ll be bringing a notebook. You should, too.
To attend, you need tickets, but they’re free. Get them online through the College of Charleston at: http://bit.ly/432HlKZ.
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