Bernstein and the art of reporting
Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporter who, in investigating the Watergate scandal, helped to bring down a corrupt presidency, was a journalistic prodigy.
He entered the profession with the old Washington Star while still a teenager. By the time he was 21 he was writing a column and otherwise doing his own thing at the newspaper in Elizabeth, N.J.
I should have known all this, being a newspaperman and all, and in light of the fact that Bernstein and his Post/Watergate partner, Bob Woodward, are celebrated as the best, or at least, the most impactful reporters of their generation.
But I had no idea until I read Bernstein’s recent memoir, “Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom.”
A spectacularly poor student in both high school and college, Bernstein was an early success in the Star newsroom. He played a role in the Star’s coverage of the March on Washington in August 1963, which featured Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.
Bernstein was stationed outside the White House in the early morning hours of Nov. 23, 1963, when President Kennedy’s body was brought back to Washington from Dallas, Texas, where JFK had been assassinated the day before.
Bernstein wasn’t even 20.
Maybe most people – and I’m including myself here – have no idea what they’re doing at so young an age. I eventually came to the conclusion that it’s a great advantage to know early what you want to do in life.
Bernstein knew early. What’s more, he was talented. He was a great observer. Sid Epstein was the Star city editor. “Chasing History” includes a paragraph in which Bernstein describes Epstein’s attire on one of the rare Sundays the editor showed up at the office.
Bernstein records that Epstein was “wearing off white linen pants cinched with a lizard skin belt, argyle socks descending into white leather loafers, and a paisley foulard triangle tucked at the neck into a powder-blue silk shirt with a distinct reflective sheen.”
Reporter that he was, Bernstein writes, “I recorded the details in a reporter’s notebook the minute I got out of his office.”
It’s probably a good bet that Bernstein still has that notebook.
Reporter’s notebook. What a nostalgic ring. Spiral bound at the top, they fit easily into a pocket, whether a suit or pants.
It’s not the only note Bernstein strikes in the book that sounds familiar to me. Take obituaries. As a dictationist at the Star, Bernstein took his share, which he seemed to relish. As a young reporter with the newspaper in New Castle, I dreaded them.
The News didn’t publish on Sundays, which meant on Mondays obituaries flooded into the newsroom – 20 or 30 of them from early morning to around deadline time at 11:30 (we were an afternoon paper).
Dictated over the phone by funeral directors in those pre-computer days, the volume of obituaries was a nightmare. I was expected to be perfect with each and every one – me, with my imperfect (and slow) typing skills. I wasn’t perfect. I was awful. It’s a wonder I wasn’t fired.
I played in the bush leagues, Bernstein was in the majors. He played alongside such notable Star reporters as Myra MacPherson, Haynes Johnson, and David Broder. The Star was star-studded. The biggest star of all was columnist Mary McGrory.
McGrory “cast a spell with words.” She also “knew her worth,” Bernstein writes, which meant she (quietly) ruled the Star newsroom. It was that way on Capitol Hill during the Clinton impeachment trial. Reporters opened doors for her, and she had reserved seating in the Senate press gallery.
But Mary McGrory was far from being a snob. Standing next to her once during a break in the trial, I asked what she planned to write about in her column the next day. “I wish I knew,” she said with conviction. It made me feel good. It was reassuring to know that the great McGrory was as stumped (at times) as I was (all the time).
Carl Bernstein became a great reporter through hard work and persistence. The Star, he writes, expected its reporters to proceed “without judgment … to wherever the facts and context and rigorous questioning led.” The ideal, he notes, was “to get as near the truth as good reporting could take you.”
We seem far from that ideal now. Proceeding “without judgment,” especially on TV, the dominant medium, seems like a relic from a quaint past. Today’s journalism ping-pongs from one set of judgments on one channel to a second set on another.
The age of Bernstein and Woodward seems all but dead and buried in an avalanche of opinion journalism – the kind personified by snarling Jake Tapper and sneering Tucker Carlson, who don’t so much chase history as try to create and mold it.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.