Watergate at 50: Solidifying a Mythical Narrative

Abstract

The years since the 1972 break-in at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, have solidified the dominant popular narrative about the scandal that toppled Richard Nixon’s presidency. The dominant narrative revolves around the claim—ever appealing and reassuring to journalists—that investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post uncovered the crimes that forced Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. This essay describes how the narrative of the heroic journalist took hold, why it is misleading, and how it might be revised to emphasize that Watergate ended a corrupt presidency despite, and not because of, journalists and their sources.

Notes

1 Emily Langer, “Barry Sussman, Washington Post Editor Who Oversaw Watergate Reporting, Dies at 87,” Washington Post, June 2, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/02/barry-sussman-watergate-washington-post-dead/.

2 Media-driven myths are prominent stories about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, dissolve as apocryphal, improbable, or wildly exaggerated.

3 W. Joseph Campbell, Getting It Wrong: Debunking the Greatest Myths of American Journalism (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 151.

4 Mark Feldstein, “Watergate Revisited,” American Journalism Review, 67 (August/September 2004): https://ajrarchive.org/article.asp?id=3735&id=3735.

5 “Vice President Biden’s Remarks at Moscow State University,” White House news release, March 10, 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/10/vice-president-bidens-remarks-moscow-state-university.

6 Ryan Chittum, “Michael Wolff’s High Cynicism,” Columbia Journalism Review, September 7, 2010, https://archives.cjr.org/the_audit/michael_wolffs_high_cynicism.php.

7 Murray Clark, “On its 45th Anniversary, ‘All the President’s Men’ Still Stand to Attention,” Esquire UK, April 9, 2021, https://www.esquire.com/uk/style/a36071364/all-the-presidents-men-45th-anniversary/.

8 Jack Limpert, “Deep Throat: If It Isn’t Tricia It Must Be …,” Washingtonian, December 22, 2008, https://www.washingtonian.com/2008/12/22/deep-throat-if-it-isnt-tricia-it-must-be/.

9 See Mark Bonokoski, “I’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” Toronto Sun, April 13, 2012, https://torontosun.com/2012/04/13/ive-come-a-long-way-baby.

10 Among the first publications to discuss Woodward, Bernstein, and the Post’s Watergate coverage in extended and favorable detail was the Columbia Journalism Review which, in an article in July 1973, praised the newspaper for having “pursued the Watergate story with relentless conviction.” In many respects, the article represents the origin story for the “heroic-journalist” media myth. See James McCartney, “The Washington ‘Post’ and Watergate: How Two Davids Slew Goliath,” Columbia Journalism Review 12, no. 2 (July/August 1973): 8–22.

11 Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York: Knopf, 1990), 459.

12 Max Holland, “What The Media Gets Wrong about Watergate,” Unherd, June 17, 2022, https://unherd.com/2022/06/what-the-media-gets-wrong-about-watergate/; and Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President’s Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), dust jacket.

13 Julia Jacobs, “Empathy for a Watergate Casualty,” New York Times, April 25, 2022, C5.

14 Ken Ringle, “Journalism’s Finest 2 Hours and 16 Minutes,” Washington Post, June 14, 1992, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/stories/ringle.htm.

15 Audiotape recordings that Nixon made of most of his White House conversations revealed that he and his top aide, H.R. Haldeman, knew or suspected as early as October 1972 Felt was leaking information to reporters. See Max Holland, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2012), 98–99.

16 Dennis Farney, “If You Drink Scotch, Smoke, and Read, Maybe You’re ‘Deep Throat,’” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 1974, 1.

17 See quoted passages in Limpert, “Deep Throat: If It Isn’t Tricia,” Washingtonian.

18 David Daley, “Deep Throat,” Hartford Courant, July 28, 1999, https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-1999-07-28-9907280810-story.html.

19 Felt never conferred with Bernstein during the Watergate scandal and met the journalist only late in Felt’s life. See “Bernstein First Met ‘Deep Throat’ This Year,” CNN.com, https://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/19/bernstein.qanda/index.html#cnnSTCText.

20 John D. O’Connor, “‘I’m the Guy They Called Deep Throat,’” Vanity Fair, July 2005, https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2005/7/im-the-guy-they-called-deep-throat.

21 Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 125.

22 Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 332.

23 Stanley Kutler, “Remembering Watergate,” (Madison, WI) Cap Times, June 16, 2012, https://captimes.com/news/opinion/column/stanley-kutler-remembering-watergate/article_c91f1147-e1aa-5b49-8a8f-8da7d4a098c5.html.

24 Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds,” Washington Post, August 1, 1972, A1.

25 Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “Mitchell Controlled Secret GOP Fund,” Washington Post, September 29, 1972, A1.

26 Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “Spy Funds Linked to GOP Aides,” Washington Post, September 17, 1972, A1.

27 John Dean, White House counsel at the time, later recalled: “I can say without equivocation that not one story written by Woodward and Bernstein … from the time of the arrest on June 17, 1972, until the election in November 1972, gave anyone in the Nixon White House or the re-election committee the slightest concern that ‘Woodstein’ was on to the real story of Watergate.” See Dean, Lost Honor (Los Angeles, CA: Stratford Press, 1982), 271.

28 Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 35.

29 McCartney, “The Washington ‘Post’ and Watergate,” Columbia Journalism Review, 21.

30 These articles, at a minimum, referred to events stemming from the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate hotel and office complex. Articles that mentioned “Watergate” in another context—as in reporting flood depths of the Potomac River near the Watergate complex—were excluded from review. Examined in the review were front pages of issues of the Washington Post available in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database.

31 Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, “Audit Set on Nixon Fund,” Washington Post, August 2, 1972, A1.

32 Jim Mann and Bob Woodward, “Judge Seals Watergate Testimony,” Washington Post, August 23, 1972, A1.

33 Sanford Ungar, “Insiders See Kleindienst on Way Out,” Washington Post, October 20, 1972, A1.

34 Carroll Kilpatrick, “Tour is First in Deep South,” Washington Post, October 13, 1972, A1; George Lardner Jr., “The ‘Whole’ Man,” Washington Post, September 23, 1972, A1; and Ken Ringle, “Pat Nixon Campaigns like First Lady,” Washington Post, September 27, 1972, A1.

35 Three other front-page Watergate stories by Woodward and Bernstein suggested meaningful advances in public understanding of the scandal. But the articles were marred by significant errors that undercut their value.

36 Bob Woodward and E.J. Bachinski, “White House Consultant Tied to Bugging Figure,” Washington Post, June 20, 1972, A1.

37 Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “Watergate Data Destruction Charged,” Washington Post, September 20, 1972, A1.

38 Jack Nelson and Ronald J. Ostrow, “Watergate Witness Describes Bugging,” Washington Post, October 5, 1972, A1.

39 Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 110. They praised the Los Angeles Times article as a “most vivid piece of journalism.”

40 Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “Bugs Memos Sent to Nixon Aides,” Washington Post, October 6, 1972, A1.

41 Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 111.

42 Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “Testimony Ties Top Nixon Aide to Secret Fund,” Washington Post, October 25, 1972, A1.

43 Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 193.

44 Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 186.

45 Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “Magazine Says Nixon Aide Admits Disruption Effort,” Washington Post, October 30, 1972, A1.

46 Campbell, Getting It Wrong, 157. See also, “Breaking the Watergate Story,” C-SPAN, June 12, 1997, https://www.c-span.org/video/?87494-1/breaking-watergate-story.

47 “Ben Bradlee, John Dean III, and Howard Baker Discuss the 25th Anniversary of the Watergate Break-In,” Meet the Press, NBC, June 15, 1997, transcript retrieved from Lexis-Nexis database.

48 See transcript of Frontline interview with Woodward, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/press/interviews/woody2.html.

49 Michael Getler, “‘Deep Throat’: An Omb’s Observations,” Washington Post, June 5, 2005, B6.

50 Kathy Kiely, “Years Before Watergate, a Young Carl Bernstein Fell in Love with Local Journalism,” Washington Post, January 14, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/01/14/years-before-watergate-young-carl-bernstein-fell-love-with-local-journalism/.

51 Dwight Garner, “Life in a Newsroom, in a Time of Typewriters,” New York Times, January 6, 2022, C1.

52 “The First Woodward and Bernstein Story on the Watergate Scandal,” Washington Post, June 13, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/13/first-woodward-bernstein-watergate-scandal/.

53 The first article of impeachment accused Nixon of obstructing justice. The second article accused him of having used the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies against political foes. The third article accused Nixon of refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas. Two other proposed articles of impeachment failed. They accused Nixon of waging illegal war in Cambodia and of cheating on federal income taxes.

54 Garrett M. Graff, “Intelligencer: Woodward and Bernstein Didn’t Act Alone,” New York Magazine, February 13, 2022, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/02/woodward-and-bernstein-didnt-act-alone-on-nixon-watergate.html.

55 Graff, “Woodward and Bernstein Didn’t Act Alone,” New York Magazine.

56 Seymour M. Hersh, “4 Watergate Defendants Reported Still Being Paid,” New York Times, January 14, 1973, 1. Hersh’s report quoted one of the burglars, Frank A. Sturgis, by name and said he was receiving payments of $400 a month.

57 Dean, Lost Honor, 272.

58 See, for example, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991). Silent Coup argued that White House counsel John Dean was the mastermind of the Watergate break-in and duped Nixon into ordering the cover-up of the burglary. The authors, however, failed to make a compelling case.

59 Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 208–211; 222–224.

60 Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 36.

61 Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 194.

62 Memorandum to US attorney general Richard Kleindienst, October 26, 1972, National Security Archive, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB156/1414.pdf.

63 Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats,” Washington Post, October 10, 1972, A1.

64 Holland, Leak, 94.

65 A portion of the memorandum was reproduced in L. Patrick Gray III with Ed Gray, In Nixon’s Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate (New York: Times Books, 2008), 128.

66 In an essay written in 1974 that challenged the emergent mythology of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting, Edward Jay Epstein noted the Segretti connection “was a detour, if not a false trail. Segretti (who served a brief prison sentence for such ‘dirty tricks’ as sending two hundred copies of a defamatory letter to Democrats) [was] not in fact … connected to the Watergate conspiracy at all.” Almost all Segretti’s work took place before the Watergate break-in. See Epstein, “Did the Press Uncover Watergate?” Commentary, July 1974, https://www.commentary.org/articles/edward-epstein-3/did-the-press-uncover-watergate/.

67 Holland, in an essay coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, wrote that “Felt leaked not out of pique or bitterness, not to protect the FBI, and not out of any concern over the office of the presidency. His sole aim was to destroy Nixon’s confidence in acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray, smear presumed rivals for the job, and steer Nixon toward appointing Felt himself. Richard Nixon was Felt’s only ticket to the directorship and the idea that Deep Throat ever intended to bring the president to ruin was absurd.” See Holland, “What the Media Gets Wrong about Watergate,” UnHerd.

68 David Von Drehle, “FBI’s No. 2 was ‘Deep Throat,’” Washington Post, June 1, 2005, A1, A6.

69 Von Drehle, “FBI’s No. 2 was ‘Deep Throat.’”

70 Woodward said of Felt: “In the end I think he is and will be seen as a man of courage.” See “Woodward: Deep Throat a Man of Courage,” NPR interview transcript, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/98529519 (published December 19, 2008).

71 Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (New York: Penguin, 2015), 135.

72 Robert Pear, “President Pardons 2 Ex-FBI Officials in 1970’s Break-Ins,” New York Times, April 16, 1981, A1. The chief prosecutor in the case, John W. Nields Jr., said no one had spoken with him about the pardons before they were announced. Nields also said that “the pardons, done in secret, are trivial in comparison with the jury verdict, which was done in a court of law pursuant to established procedures.”

73 The film, wrote a reviewer for the Atlantic, “has all the subtlety of a term paper.” See David Sims, “Mark Felt Tells a Familiar Tale of the Watergate Scandal,” Atlantic, September 26, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/09/mark-felt-the-man-who-brought-down-the-white-house-review/541053/.

74 Matt Carlson, “Embodying Deep Throat: Mark Felt and the collective memory of Watergate,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 3 (July 23, 2010): 235–250. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295030903583564.

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Notes on contributors

W. Joseph Campbell

W. Joseph Campbell is a professor in the School of Communication’s Communication Studies program at American University. He joined the AU faculty in 1997, after some twenty years as a professional journalist. Assignments in his award-winning journalism career took him across North America to Europe, West Africa, and parts of Asia. Campbell is the author of seven books, including most recently Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections.