'Chasing History': Bernstein Before Woodward

Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom?

By Carl Bernstein

Henry Holt & Co./Macmillan/January 2022

Reviewed by Lisa Van Dusen

January 22, 2022

Because he played such a key role in one of the biggest stories of the 20thcentury, our absorption of Carl Bernstein as a figure of history and pop-culture character has always felt truncated, as though he was hatched, fully-formed, from a pod on the day after the Watergate break-in.

For years, the collision of historic competence in a job not known for household-name, worldwide attention and sudden, stratospheric fame cast Bernstein in the blighted role of horse’s ass in the two-man panto pony he shared as the immortal, Ben Bradlee-coined Woodstein byline with Bob Woodward. His marriage to journalist-turned screenwriter Nora Ephron and affair with British ambassadorial spouse Margaret Jay were dramatized in Ephron’s score-settling roman-à-clef and its subsequent film adaptation, Heartburn. His nocturnal exploits across Manhattan in that era were regular fodder for Spy magazine’s Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathlon, complete with visual aids mapping his circuitous perambulations from Canal Bar to Elaine’s like the sightings report on a libidinous Bigfoot. Bernstein was that extremely rare print journalist who was TV-famous, in all the worst ways.

Carl Bernstein’s post-Watergate fame tacked toward infamy for more than a decade, until he stopped drinking and began generating well-reviewed books of his own, including a biography of Pope John Paul II (with veteran Vatican journalist Marco Politi) and Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir, about his leftist parents’ 1950s targeting by J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Bernstein’s new memoir, Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom, is much lighter, funnier, more personal, and reflective of an author with nothing left to prove to anyone — not to history, not to his parents, not to his detractors — except maybe his two sons and posterity. It is, as he writes, “the tale of my apprenticeship in the newspaper trade from ages sixteen to twenty-one, between the years 1960 and 1965.”

The key word there is “trade”. Bernstein belongs (full disclosure, as do I) to that small club of reporters whose careers were launched in newsrooms rather than classrooms. At 16, he was already working part-time as a copy boy for the Washington Star, once assisting in the coverage — as an accredited member of the press — of a John F. Kennedy election rally at the high school he still occasionally frequented between shifts at the Star.

“As Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom makes clear, good journalism is not an academic exercise. It’s more a trade than a science, more like plumbing than physics,” writes David Von Drehle of the Washington Post, the paper where Bernstein’s Watergate reporting with Woodward exposed the iceberg of rot beneath a criminal surveillance operation carried out by plumbers of a different sort at the behest of a dangerously unhinged, power-obsessed commander-in-chief. The kid in the newsroom of this book’s title isn’t there yet; his relationship with the Washington Post limited to the bogus death notice of a nonexistent vaudevillian ventriloquist successfully planted with the Post obit desk as a lark with a couple of young Star colleagues.

All the instinct, all the gut observational skills…the raw BS detection and intuitive judgments that so beautifully balanced Woodward’s calmer, cautious characteristics to make them one of history’s perfect teams, are on display here.

But the story of who Bernstein was — a curious, resourceful, occasionally delinquent, determined, whip-smart kid — before he became the Carl Bernstein shorthanded for public consumption through his identity as half a joint byline, half a bad marriage and a trajectory with fame that neither brought out nor highlighted the best in him — explains a lot.

All the instinct, all the gut observational skills…the raw BS detection and intuitive judgments that so beautifully balanced Woodward’s calmer, cautious characteristics to make them one of history’s perfect teams are on display here. Bernstein presumably kept his head while fighting conventional wisdom, the tacit pressure of the pack, all the president’s men and any Washington self-preservation reflex while reporting on the conspiracy behind Watergate for two years partly because he was not a member of the establishment — via the Harvard Club, a Yale fraternity or even a Columbia J-school degree — to which that reporting posed a threat. This memoir colours in the early backstory to that crucial context.

For someone who has worked for newspapers but always as a columnist writing from elsewhere, never in the hometown newsroom, Bernstein’s description of falling instantly in love with the atmosphere, the noise, the smell, the energy and the rumbling presses of the Washington Star as a teenager evoked nostalgia not just for the pre-digital news business but for pre-pandemic workplaces. His colourful dissection of the anatomy of a 20th-century newspaper through the characters whose reporting, writing, commenting, editing, production and distribution skills were required to put out multiple editions a day under roller coaster deadline pressure — from legendary columnist Mary McGrory to Al Baker, the printing foreman — testifies to the value society attached to real news before the possibilities of instant propaganda glutted the market, shook the business model and, ultimately, helped to imperil democracy.

For anyone who has lived in Washington and come to love the real city that thrums beyond and around the trappings of the political capital, Chasing History?is a window on the recent history of D.C. through the eyes of a second-generation Jewish-American kid whose grandfather did the alterations on the tuxes and gowns for inaugural balls. Bernstein’s youth straddled the transition from city to suburban Silver Spring, Maryland, and from segregation to desegregation. In March of 1965, he spent his vacation from the Star dictation bank moonlighting as a PR for Reverend Walter Fauntroy, Washington representative of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, during the local protests held in support of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and against George Wallace’s racist intractability in Alabama.

Through most of this memoir, readers will smile, frequently laugh out loud and occasionally wince (including during the hazing ritual in which Bernstein is commanded, on his first day at the Star and in his flash new $25 cream-coloured suit from No-Label Louie’s, to wash out a stack of inky carbon paper in the men’s room sink so the sheets could be “re-used”). By the time you’ve accompanied the author’s brash, teenage self through the daily reporting routine of the exhilarating Kennedy presidency to the moment when, on November 22, 1963, he’s transcribing an unflappable David Broder from Parkland Hospital in Dallas, confirming in a priestly quote that “The president is dead. Period. End quote. Paragraph”, you may be crying.

Not that it’s much consolation to Americans living through their current upheaval, but reliving that monumental tragedy from the point of view of the kid in the newsroom who will, a decade later, prove fateful to another president provides perspective. As historian Jon Meacham is known to point out and Carl Bernstein learned firsthand before he was 30, dark forces and better angels seem to be perpetually at war in America. We have been here before.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen during the Clinton administration and Washington bureau chief for Sun Media during the Obama presidency. She also served as international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.