Sunday. 1 p.m. Journalism panel. Miles Corwin moderates Mark Fainaru-Wada, Nick Schou, Alicia C. Shepard and Lance Williams. Audio
Alicia: "I was able to sit down with them for the magazine piece (2003). Woodward will try to talk you out of an interview. He’ll say that he’s not that interesting. He’s just a reporter. Thankfully, I wore him down and he let me come to his house and his maid answered the door and you sit in the parlor and he will talk to you. He’ll engage. Bernstein, on the other hand, is all for it. He wants to be interviewed. He just can’t stop what he’s doing long enough to do an interview. They would not cooperate with the book."
"The most famous line from the movie was ‘Follow the money.’ Daniel Schorr of NPR wanted to know where that line came from… He looked through All The President’s Men and couldn’t find it. He called Woodward who spent the evening looking for it. He couldn’t find it. It turned out the line was made up by William Goldman, the screenwriter."
"If Bob Woodward thought Deep Throat had said that, his memory wasn’t so clear."
"Woodward told a couple of people to not speak to me."
"Bob Woodward is a control freak. It’s why he is successful."
I read Shepard’s book straight through Thursday. The latest book on the topic it is also the definitive work.
Her books contains numerous quotes of letters from regular folk to Woodward and Bernstein but why anyone should care about these opinions is not clear.
Shepard seems to buy into the myth that Woodward and Bernstein toppled a president.
As Edward Jay Epstein wrote in Commentary magazine in July 1974:
The natural tendency of journalists to magnify the role of the press in great scandals is perhaps best illustrated by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s autobiographical account of how they "revealed" the Watergate scandals. The dust jacket and national advertisements, very much in the bravado spirit of the book itself, declare: "All America knows about Watergate. Here, for the first time, is the story of how we know…. In what must be the most devastating political detective story of the century, the two young Washington Post reporters whose brilliant investigative journalism smashed the Watergate scandal wide open tell the whole behind-the-scenes drama the way it happened." In keeping with the mythic view of journalism, however, the book never describes the "behind-the-scenes" investigations which actually "smashed the Watergate scandal wide open"-namely the investigations conducted by the FBI, the federal prosecutors, the grand jury, and the Congressional committees. The work of almost all those institutions, which unearthed and developed all the actual evidence and disclosures of Watergate, is systematically ignored or minimized by Bernstein and Woodward. Instead, they simply focus on those parts of the prosecutors’ case, the grand-jury investigation, and the FBI reports that were leaked to them.
The result is that no one interested in "how we know" about Watergate will find out from their book, or any of the other widely circulated mythopoeics about Watergate. Yet the non-journalistic version of how Watergate was uncovered is not exactly a secret-,the government prosecutors (Earl Silbert, Seymour Glanzer, and Donald E. Campbell) are more than willing to give a documented account of the investigation to anyone who desires it. According to one of the prosecutors, however, "No one really wants to know." Thus the government’s investigation of itself has become a missing link in the story of the Watergate scandal, and the actual role that journalists played remains ill understood.
