The Watergate burglary was a perfect hometown story for the Washington Post. Under
Publisher Katharine Graham and Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, the Post was trying to challenge
the New York Times as the nation’s top newspaper while competing every day for local
dominance over the Washington Star. The elegant Graham had taken over the newspaper after
the suicide of her husband, Philip, and was determined to improve its mediocre reputation. She
had picked Bradlee, Newsweek’s former Washington bureau chief and a friend of John F.
Kennedy, to become the Post’s top editor in 1968. The charismatic, strong-willed Bradlee soon
made clear to his reporters and editors that he wanted the newspaper to write more exposés and
keep a close eye on government. Graham’s steadfast support of her newsroom during the
Pentagon Papers case made the Post’s reporters and editors confident she would stand behind
them as long as they pursued the truth. “There was this sense that we don’t flinch,” reporter Bob
Woodward said years later about the Post newsroom in the early 1970s.1
The Post’s newfound aggressiveness showed when Joseph Califano, a lawyer for both the
Post and the Democratic party, called Managing Editor Howard Simons early in the morning of
June 17 with news of the Watergate break-in. “Right from the beginning, we understood that it
was a big story,” City Editor Barry Sussman said in a 2008 interview.2 Put in charge of the day’s
coverage, Sussman started phoning reporters from his bed before he even went into the
newsroom, eventually dispatching ten reporters to cover various angles of the crime. Alfred
Lewis, a veteran police reporter, was sent to the Watergate complex. Arriving with the acting
police chief, Lewis was able to walk past the police lines and up to the sixth-floor Democratic
headquarters, where other reporters were not allowed, so he could gather details of the break-in.
That same morning, Sussman called Woodward at home and assigned him to the story.
Woodward, twenty-nine years old, had been working at the Post for only nine months after
graduating from Yale, spending five years as a Navy lieutenant, and reporting for a year at a
weekly newspaper in Maryland. Woodward was already a favorite of Bradlee, Sussman, and
Metropolitan Editor Harry Rosenfeld. As a rookie reporter with one of the lowest salaries on the
staff, Woodward started off covering the police from 6:30 P.M. to 2:00 A.M., a beat most
reporters hated. He came in early many afternoons to do extra work, however, and quickly
became known for his productivity, hustle, and ingenuity. Showing the instincts of a natural
investigative reporter, he wrote stories about health violations at fancy restaurants, drugstores
dispensing out-of-date prescriptions, and corruption in an elite police unit. During his first nine
months at the newspaper, he had more front-page stories than any of the other sixty reporters on
the Post’s metropolitan staff. “Woodward was an outstanding reporter,” Sussman said. “There’s
no way he wouldn’t be assigned to the story if I could choose someone.”3
At the arraignment that afternoon of the five arrested men, Woodward received his first
hints the break-in was more than a simple burglary. He observed that two lawyers were
representing the five men even though none of them had made a telephone call from jail. All of
the defendants wore suits or sports coats, not the normal garb for burglars. And sitting in the
front row, he heard burglar James McCord whisper to the judge that he was recently retired from
the CIA. The Post ran three stories in Sunday’s newspaper about the bizarre burglary, but the
newspaper was scooped by the Associated Press, which discovered that McCord was the security
coordinator for the Committee for the Re-Election the President (CRP).4
Sussman asked only two of the ten reporters who worked on the first day’s Watergate
coverage—Woodward and Carl Bernstein—to come to the newsroom on Sunday to work on a
follow-up story.5 They wrote their first story together that day, a front-page article detailing
McCord’s career and job with the Nixon campaign. “We started checking on him [McCord],”
Woodward recalled. “He was this kind of uptight, by-the-book guy, and it was pretty obvious
that he was not financed by the militant campfire girls, that it [the burglary] probably had been
done by somebody connected to Nixon, his campaign, or the White House.”6
As they worked together, Bernstein and Woodward demonstrated that they shared some
traits: they were smart, possessed endless energy and curiosity, and loved newspapers and
reporting. Otherwise, they had little in common. Woodward was a Republican who had voted for
Nixon in 1968; Bernstein most assuredly had not. While Woodward was clean-shaven,
organized, and tidy, Bernstein was a college dropout with long hair and an even longer list of
debts. He had a penchant for staying out late at night, constantly bumming cigarettes from his
colleagues, and wearing military fatigues in the hippie style.
Bernstein, twenty-eight years old, had worked his way into reporting after starting at age
sixteen as a copy boy at the Washington Star. A Washington native, he had the advantage of
knowing the city better than almost any other Post reporter and having many childhood friends
who could supply him with information. Bernstein was street smart and a colorful writer but lost
focus and missed deadlines if he lacked enthusiasm for a story. He was kicked off the local
government beat after an editor found him asleep on the couch of the city hall press room at
noon. According to office legend, Bernstein had once rented a car while on an assignment and
then forgot about it, costing the Post $500.
Because he was unreliable, Bernstein was in danger of losing his job in the summer of
1972. He was in the newsroom when the Watergate story first broke only because an editor had
ordered him to work that weekend after he was late with a story. Despite Bernstein’s reputation,
Sussman thought he was an excellent reporter who did well on big stories and whose flair and
intuitions would complement Woodward’s dogged reporting style. “Woodward was slow to draw
conclusions from facts, preferring simply to report what he had found out on a given day,”
Sussman wrote in his book The Great Cover-up. “Bernstein was often eager to make
assessments, to underscore what his stories meant.”7
They both benefited from the work of other Post reporters. Woodward worked Monday
on a tip from colleague Eugene Bachinski, who had developed great sources after three years of
covering the D.C. police. When Bachinski asked a friendly sergeant what he knew about
Watergate, the officer invited him to his home for drinks and placed on his kitchen table the
evidence the police had seized from the burglars. The items included two address books, one
with Howard Hunt’s White House and home phone numbers. Woodward tracked Hunt down and
learned he was a former CIA agent who had worked in the office of Charles Colson, one of
Nixon’s closest aides. The next day, a story with Bachinski’s and Woodward’s bylines appeared
linking the burglary to Hunt and mentioning his connection with Colson.8
While working on that story, Woodward called an acquaintance, W. Mark Felt, for help.
He had met Felt a few years earlier when Woodward was stationed at the Pentagon as a Navy
lieutenant. Felt had risen through the ranks to become the number-two man at the FBI, in charge
of day-to-day operations. He was bitter that Nixon nominated L. Patrick Gray instead of him as
acting FBI director after J. Edgar Hoover died in May 1972. Felt considered Gray “a neophyte
not only to the FBI, but to the profession of law enforcement” who was submitting to White
House pressure to limit the Watergate investigation. Felt did not easily volunteer information
when Woodward first called about Watergate. Woodward persisted, however, until Felt
confirmed Hunt was a prime suspect in the burglary.9
Throughout his Watergate reporting, Woodward continued to contact Felt periodically for
guidance. Because the White House was determined to stop leaks, Felt wanted to stay
anonymous. He would only meet Woodward late at night in a Rosslyn, Virginia, underground
parking garage where no one could see or hear them. According to Woodward, they concocted
an elaborate scheme to signal each other when one of them wanted a meeting: Woodward would
move a flowerpot on his apartment’s balcony, and Felt would have page twenty of Woodward’s
home-delivered New York Times circled and the hands of a clock drawn on it to signal what time
to meet. To this day, Woodward says he does not know how Felt managed to get access to his
Times.
Felt never gave Woodward new information. He remained on what journalists call “deep
background,” meaning the Post could use the information but not attribute it in any way. “He
was scrupulous about staying away from specifics in FBI files,” Woodward later wrote. “I
suspect he did not consider that he was ‘leaking’ information—he was only supposed to confirm
what I had and steer me. But the sum of all the confirmations and guidance added up to more
than a leak. It was a road map.”10
1. Bob Woodward, author interview, 20 May 2009; Barry Sussman, author interview, 11
September 2008; Alicia Shepard, Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate
(Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 22–23; Sussman, The Great Cover-up, 22; Bradlee,
A Good Life, 323.
2. Sussman, author interview.
3. Ibid.; Bradlee, A Good Life, 325; Downie, The New Muckrakers, 2; Bernstein and
Woodward, All the President’s Men, 13–16; Shepard, Woodward and Bernstein, 7–17; Bob
Woodward, The Secret Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 27–34.
4. Sussman, The Great Cover-up, 15–18; Woodward, The Secret Man, 53–55; Shepard,
Woodward and Bernstein, 32; Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 13–20.
5. Years later Woodward wrote that eight Post reporters worked on the first day’s
coverage, but Sussman, the editor in charge, said in his 1974 book that it was ten. Sussman, The
Great Cover-up, 17.
6. Woodward, The Secret Man, 55–56; Bob Woodward, remarks at “Watergate—35
Years Later.”
7. Sussman, author interview; Bradlee, author interview; Timothy Crouse, The Boys on
the Bus (New York: Random House, 1973), 291; Downie, The New Muckrakers, 3–6; Graham,
Personal History, 462; Shepard, Woodward and Bernstein, 17–29, 32; David Segal, “Carl
Bernstein, Back on the Beat,” Washington Post, 20 June 2007, C01; Sussman, The Great Coverup, 54–55.
8. Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 23–25; Bradlee, A Good Life, 325–
26; Shepard, Woodward and Bernstein, 33–34.
9. W. Mark Felt, The FBI Pyramid from the Inside, 12–13; Woodward, The Secret Man,
15–22, 57–58; Woodward, author interview, 20 May 2009.
10. Woodward, The Secret Man, 63–67; Woodward, interview by author, 20 May 2009.