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Reporters Need to Re-Learn The Lessons of Watergate
On June 15, 1974, almost two years to the day of the Watergate burglary, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published All the President’s Men, a narrative of their reporting on Watergate that begins with the break-in, climaxes in May 1973 with the revelation that the cover-up went all the way to the White House, and closes with a brief epilogue bringing the reader up to date on the convictions that came as a result of the Watergate hearings. Less than two months after its publication, President Richard Nixon resigned.
The Watergate reports are still considered the gold standard of American political journalism, but 50 years after the scandal, and 48 after the publication of All the President’s Men, political journalists seem to have forgotten the lessons of Watergate by withholding the most vital scoops until the publication of their books. This practice directly contradicts the legacy of the Watergate reports.
Faced with the enormous task of reporting the most severe Constitutional crisis to have faced the United States since the election of 1876, Woodward and Bernstein employed tried-and-true, shoe leather methods — making phone calls, finding documents, building a network of sources — to expose the wrongdoings of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, the Nixon Cabinet, and eventually, Nixon himself. Readers who followed these reports had the chance to learn about the scandal at the same time Woodward and Bernstein did, almost like they were watching a serialized drama, except it was real life.
All the President’s Men did not have the same seismic impact as the Watergate reports. Reviewing it for The New Yorker, Richard H. Rovere called it “a work barren of ideas, of imagination, and of a sense of either the tragic or the comic aspects of the subject, one that would be essentially boring if it were not for the historical importance of the events dealt with.” Rovere is too hard on the book, but he’s not completely wrong: read today, All the President’s Men is workmanlike at best and clunky at worst, written in a style that does not reflect the urgency of the events it recounts.
The most striking aspect of All the President’s Men is that it does not reveal any Watergate scoops that the public didn’t already know. The book was not meant to break news. Rather, it…
