"All the President's Men" at 50: Woodward, Bernstein share backstory
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Jonathan Karl interviews Woodward and Bernstein on June 14 in the Presidential Suite of the Watergate Hotel. Photo: ABC News
Fifty years after publication of "All the President's Men," co-authors Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein met ABC's Jonathan Karl for a "This Week" interview in the Presidential Suite of the Watergate Hotel — part of the complex where a break-in wound up sinking President Nixon.
Why it matters: The interview captures the first-person backstory of the most famous book in journalism history.
Driving the news: Woodward, 81, told Karl that the book — which hit the streets on June 15, 1974 — was written out of necessity after Bernstein had the idea ("we'd written these stories that no one believed") and they signed a contract.
- Bernstein, 80, jumped in: "A little bit more than that. We didn't think the truth about Watergate was going to ever come out."
How it happened: Woodward was 29 and Bernstein was 28 in 1972, when they had their first co-byline on a Watergate story.
- Woodward said they were "living in a world where even our colleagues at the Washington Post were saying, you know: 'Those two young kids ... are off on some sort of bender.'"
The intrigue: Karl pointed out that "All the President's Men" — which, along with the 1976 movie, inspired generations of reporters — "became about you guys, kind of, right?"
- Woodward: "Yeah, and so we are going through and, how do we write it? And I said, well, the one rule of journalism: 'Write about what [you] know best.' ... So let's write about what we did."
- Bernstein recalled that he thought it was "going to be an ego trip — that we could not do it. But Woodward said: 'Look, we don't have anything to write about at this point, but ourselves.'"
"And so," Woodward said, picking up the tale, "my mother had a house in Naples, Florida. We went down there with our boxes of data. Carl sat out by the swimming pool in the most awful pair of green shorts you've ever seen — let alone his body — and ... had a little table and his typewriter there."
- "I sat in the kitchen. And we said: To get this done, we're going to have to each do 10 pages a day, and then we can go out to dinner. And so that's what we did."
