Who are Woodward and Bernstein?
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward are two of the most respected investigative journalists in their field. In the 1970s, their most famous story brought down a government, and they have set the standard in the field of journalistic reporting ever since. It was while working for the Washington Post that the names Woodward and Bernstein became synonymous with the power that journalists have to bring integrity and justice to the world. The Watergate Scandal was Woodward and Bernstein’s defining moment. In 1972, Woodward and Bernstein investigated a break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Newspapers at the time dismissed the story, calling the incident a joke. Woodward and Bernstein stuck with it and highlighted the issue of the break-in with President Nixon’s re-election committee. In their series of articles, it became clear that powerful officials of the Nixon administration and the Committee to Re-elect the President had or
When “All the President’s Men” was released in 1975, that scene was a moment of self-congratulation for the audience. We knew who Woodward and Bernstein were. They were our heroes, the men who had broken the story open, who kept it alive when nobody cared. In retrospect, the Post’s decision to put two police reporters on the story of a burglary at the Democratic national headquarters was what Mary McCarthy called one of the providential accidents of Watergate. Had the burglars taped the door lock vertically instead of horizontally, security guard Frank Wills might not have noticed the tape and suspected a break-in. Had Alexander Butterfield not believed that his boss had already divulged the information, we might not have learned about Nixon’s taping system.
