Exploding the Watergate Myth
A new book shows that Woodward and Bernstein lied. And lied. And lied.
Wed Jul 20, 2022Bruce Bawer
I was a child of the Watergate generation. Vacationing at a lake house the summer I was 17, I spent weeks glued to the committee hearings on TV. Back in school that fall, I wrote a paper arguing that Nixon should resist pressure to resign. Headed south the next August, I watched Nixon’s resignation speech at a motor lodge on I-95 and the next day, on the highway, listened on the car radio as Gerald R. Ford declared “our long national nightmare” over.
And then there was the book All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who’d supposedly brought Nixon down. When it came out in 1974, I read it avidly. And two years later I was enthralled by the movie version, written by William Goldman and directed by Alan J. Pakula.
But there was one thing - in the book and the movie - that always puzzled me.
I’ll describe it as it’s presented in the film. Woodward (Robert Redford) meets late at night in a parking garage with his secret source, known as Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), who drops a bombshell. The Watergate cover-up, he says, wasn’t really about the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Its actual purpose was to protect a whole raft of covert operations that involved “the entire U.S. intelligence community - the FBI, CIA, Justice.”
After receiving this revelation, Woodward rushes to Bernstein’s (Dustin Hoffman) apartment, puts on some classical music at top volume (the walls, he’s been told, have ears), and types out this mind-blowing new information while a stunned Bernstein reads over his shoulder. They then hurry to the home of Post editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards), where - on his front lawn, to avoid hidden microphones - they share the news with him.
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