Thorn: Odd couple of journalism

Published January 20, 2007 at midnight

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They were Oscar and Felix; Laverne and Shirley. One was a clean-cut overachiever. The other, a disheveled rebel who once looked at a roommate brandishing a toilet brush and said: "Clean the toilet with that? I've been scrubbing my back with it."

One was a Yale WASP. The other, a college dropout, the son of communist Jews. It was button-down collar meets hippie, detail man meets big-picture guy.

And here's the damndest thing: for one brief moment, it was a match made in heaven.

You may have seen the movie about this pair - a little thing called All the President's Men - but you haven't had as much fun learning about the peccadilloes of Watergate scribes Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as you will reading Alicia Shepard's Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate (Wiley, $24.95), which details the duo's triumphs and foibles, pre- and post-Watergate.

A journalism teacher at American University in Washington, D.C., Shepard first wrote about the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal in a 2003 piece that ran in the Washingtonian. While the two sat down with her for that article, ironically, the scribes who made their fortune digging up dirt on others became as scarce as a certain, infamous 18 1/2 minutes of tape in the face of the book project.

"They made it clear they weren't going to cooperate with me," says Shepard, whose many registered letters requesting interviews went unanswered.

Shepard instead relied on 175 interviews with the mens' friends and co-workers, as well as notes taken by Robert Redford and director Alan Pakula, who studied Woodward and Bernstein carefully while working on All the President's Men. Even better: She hit pay dirt when the duo sold their papers to the University of Texas for $5 million in April 2003.

"I think Carl needed the dough," Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Post during Watergate, told Shepard.

"They saved everything from the day of the break-in in 1972 'til their partnership ended in 1976," says Shepard, who sorted through 75 boxes filled with 250 reporter's notebooks, the pair's financial records, press tags, and (imagine this!) a piece of "discolored paper crammed with phone numbers," she writes, that just happens to include the number for Deep Throat (their mystery source, recently revealed to be former FBI assistant director W. Mark Felt).

The sheer historical weight of the topic is daunting, but Shepard easily brings the men down to earth with amusing detail. Before Watergate hit, Bernstein thought of Woodward as a "suck up," she writes. For his part, Woodward saw Bernstein as a "long-haired freak." During the scandal, the methodical Woodward kept the more visionary, but maverick Bernstein in check.

It didn't make for an easy relationship, and after the pair had capitalized on their newfound fame with two bestselling books (All The President's Men and The Final Days) they split up, barely speaking for nearly a year afterward.

Eventually, Woodward emerged as the more respected of the two, writing 12 books on his own. Shepard calls him "Woodward, Inc.," for his prolificacy. Reporters at the Post, where he's an assistant managing editor, have a more snarky name for him: They called him "Mr. Carte Blanche." Let's just say, no one's asking the famed reporter to write daily obits anymore.

Bernstein's escapades often provide the comic relief in the book. But ultimately, he's the more tragic figure. Womanizing ruined his marriage to writer Nora Ephron, who later vilified him in a thinly veiled autobiographical novel-turned-movie, Heartburn. And his erratic work ethic has often sabotaged his career.

Shepard notes that when a friend of hers asked Woodward if he thought Bernstein would ever finish a book about Hillary Clinton he contracted to write in 1999, he held out his hands and widened his eyes as if to say, "Who knows? Who knows with Carl?"

The two have long since made amends, and Shepard's book is nuanced enough to give each his due. However, at 266 pages it's not intended as a definitive piece: Many facets of the journalists' lives are mentioned, then frustratingly dropped (we could have used more on why Woodward's marriage broke up, for instance).

Shepard also could have used a better editor; after trying to make sense of too many puzzling sentences, I began highlighting the grammar mistakes in irritation.

But the entertaining anecdotes make up for any faults. Who could resist, for example, the story of the time Bernstein rented a car while covering the Virginia legislature - only to park it in a garage and forget about it. "Get rid of that sonofab-----," said Bradlee, upon seeing the $500 bill. (Given that the reporter was in the midst of breaking the Watergate scandal, Bradlee was quickly disabused of the notion.)

In light of such tales, you can't help wondering: Will the two enjoy reading about themselves? When asked what he thought of Shepard's project before the book came out, Woodward had only three curt words for Editor & Publisher - but he was supremely qualified to use them:

"First Amendment prevails."

Did you know?

Anecdotes from Shepard's book:

• Woodward, as an adolescent, worked as a janitor cleaning his father's law office. Foreshadowing his future, he snooped in people's drawers and files while working.

• Just weeks before Watergate broke, Bernstein heard that Hunter S. Thompson was leaving Rolling Stone magazine and applied for the job.

• Washington Post city editor Barry Sussman, who played a large role in shaping the Watergate story, wanted to help write All the President's Men. Bernstein and Woodward nixed the idea. When Shepard called Sussman, years later, he said, "I have nothing good to say about either of them."

• When the pair's literary agent put All the President's Men up for auction, no one offered to buy the book. The agent appealed to Dick Snyder, publisher of Simon & Schuster, who also passed. "I did something I never did before," said the agent. "Piteously weeping, I implored him to buy this book, and he did."

• Simon & Schuster had a company contest to name the book. One suggestion: Reporting Watergate. The marketing director who came up with All the President's Men got a measly bottle of champagne, while the book went on to become a huge seller.

• The famous bit of advice offered to Woodward and Bernstein, "follow the money," was never actually said. Scriptwriter William Goldman made it up for the movie version of the book.

If you go

Author Alicia Shepard will appear at two events:

• Monday: 6 p.m. reception, followed by a talk, hosted by the Colorado Society of Professional Journalists, Denver Newspaper Agency, 101 W. Colfax Ave. at 7 p.m. Free, but reservations required; call 720-299-4895. • Tuesday: Book signing at 7:30 p.m., Boulder Book Store, 1107 Pearl St., Boulder, 303-447-2074.

Patti Thorn is the books editor. thornp@RockyMountainNews.com 303-954-5419.

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