Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein appeared on ABC’s This Week Sunday to discuss the 50th anniversary of their nonfiction bestseller, All The President’s Men, with journalist and author Jonathan Karl.
The interview was held at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., site of the criminal break-in that led to a White House coverup and, ultimately, the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Published in 1974, All the President’s Men—which Axios calls “the most famous book in journalism history”—tells how the two Washington Post reporters, neither yet 30 years old, investigated and broke the story, famously involving a source identified only as “Deep Throat.” In a starred review, a Kirkus critic wrote of the book, “You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning—‘We’ve never had a story like this. Just never.’”
In the ABC interview, Woodward, now 81, said that at the time their story was considered almost too good to be true: “[We 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 veteran reporters recalled the writing of the book, which took place at Woodward’s mother’s home in Naples, Florida. “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,” Woodward remembered. “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.”
The book was adapted for a hugely successful 1976 movie of the same title, directed by Alan Pakula and starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
Marion Winik hosts NPR’s The Weekly Reader podcast.
