Havill’s book is a little sloppy at times, full of typos and
certainly has a lopsided agenda, but it’s also one of the very few books
available that have the nerve to take on the most sacred of sacred cows in
investigative journalism. Woodward and
Bernstein’s Pulitzer-winning Watergate articles, their best-selling book, and
the movie of their book have fueled the dreams of generations of aspiring
journalists; the message being that breaking the rules for a just cause will
lead to fame, fortune and unquestioned canonization. Havill is not alone in taking a skeptical
view of “Woodstein’s” legacy, but for the most part the duo enjoy pristine
reputations in the media and are the standard by which investigative reporting
is measured. Just as every scandal is a “something-gate,”
every journalist who would break such stories is a budding Woodward and
Bernstein. The problem is: they are
false gods, whose greatest real success has been the careful covering of their
tracks to hide their dubious motives and practices. Those who press them for details are labeled
jealous competitors, conspiracy junkies, or tools of sinister
powers-that-be. Despite charm and a
flair for self-promotion, Carl Bernstein is shown to have not accomplished anything
of consequence beyond Watergate, and to have an almost non-existent
work-ethic. Bob Woodward has carefully
hidden his own past in the decades since Watergate because the simple image of
a plucky young newspaperman who came from nowhere suits history much better. In reality, though, he was a hopeful novelist,
a Yale graduate, a member of its secret society ‘Book and Snake,’ and – during a
stint in the Navy – an intelligence officer with an extremely high level of
clearance. In this job, he briefed important
military officers like Admiral Thomas Moorer and General Alexander Haig,
sometimes right in the White House, right up until merely a year before getting
hired at the Washington Post in 1971.
The primary source for Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate stories was
christened ‘Deep Throat’ to protect a highly-placed whistle-blower in the
executive branch whose ethics were offended by the criminality of the Nixon
White House. Every attempt by the curious
to reconcile Woodward’s account of ‘Deep Throat’ with reality have failed. FBI deputy Mark Felt simply cannot have been
everywhere described in All the President’s
Men or known all that he is credited with revealing. ‘Deep Throat’ is certainly a composite of several
sources as well as a cloak-and-dagger literary invention designed to make
publishers drool; movie producers too, as Robert Redford was in contact with
Woodward even before the book was finished, full of tips on how to make it better
for a screen adaptation. Woodward
himself has never explained why he trusted his sources so guilelessly. There is much evidence that his known
sources, such as Felt, Haig, Henry Kissinger and Robert Bennet all had quite shadowy
agendas of their own, had bones to pick with Nixon, and were interested in
finding a reporter inexperienced and hungry enough to manipulate. Bennett is the biggest red flag. He was Howard Hughes’ lobbyist and the president
of the Mullen Company, a well-known CIA front.
He reported directly to CIA Director Richard Helms regarding the successful
connection with Woodward for the purpose of steering the Watergate probes away
from the agency and towards the White House.
Woodward has never addressed any of this, because to do so would
indicate that he was not a David against a Goliath but merely a pawn in power
struggles between players far shrewder than himself in 1972. Everything about his career since then has
borne this out. Unnamed sources, books
full of revelations but no citations, indexes or chapter notes, his involvement
in Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Post story that proved to be a hoax, the
Valerie Plame affair, the supposed death-bed confession of CIA Director William
Casey that provided the dramatic climax to his book Veil. The list goes on and
on. With each best-seller, he merely repeats
without question whatever powerful government men tell him, validating their
point-of-view, whether it’s Haig, Casey, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, or
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who persuaded Woodward to write The Brethren as part of his mission to
discredit Chief Justice Warren Burger.
The bottom line is that Carl Bernstein’s journalism is almost
non-existent and Bob Woodward’s is something else entirely; a genre of speculative
fiction that purports to be fact while being safely unverifiable.
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