Epstein, who clothes like a model from Esquire, is one in a gallery of tremendous characters from whom the teen learns his trade. At the other finish of the spectrum is the paper’s well-connected police reporter, Ted Crown, who appears and feels like a warthog and is no more capable of writing a coherent newspaper article than of penning a sonnet. A crass bigot, Crown nonetheless has a kind of integrity and an “allegiance to the details and to getting the story right”, demonstrated when he suspects a police chief of framing an innocent black man. Bernstein and his pals were splendidly mischievous, crafting a faux obit they received within the rival Washington Post. It’s the place you learned to confirm a dying with the funeral home.
All 18 have been nationwide bestsellers and 12 of them have been No. 1 nationwide nonfiction bestsellers—more No. 1 national nonfiction bestsellers than any modern author. In 2012, Colby College presented Woodward with the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism in addition to an honorary doctorate. Reporting, Woodward’s give attention to that line was described as “making clear he noticed as a veiled menace”, though Woodward didn’t use the word “risk” or “threatened”.
In Bernstein’s account the capital typically sounds nearer to the civl war interval, then only a hundred years previous, than the vibrant metropolis it is at present. With printer’s ink in his veins and a nostril for secrets and techniques, Bernstein describes walking into the newsroom for the first time as essentially find the beta of a portfolio the most singular moment of all his days. He is like Dorothy stepping out of monochrome into Technicolor Oz. Nicholas von Hoffman has made the criticism that “arrestingly irrelevant element is used”, while Michael Massing believes Woodward’s books are “filled with long, at times tedious passages with no evident direction.”
Is the brilliantly crafted private story of Carl Bernstein’s self-education as one of many great reporters of all time. He taught himself the genius of perpetual engagement that led us to Watergate–watching, looking, questioning, and overwhelming the moment. His rules–go anywhere, listen hard, push and push some more–are, to this present day, the touchstone in investigative reporting.
This is unlike his earlier “son’s memoir” Loyalties, the story of how his progressive parents, for a time members of the Communist Party, though not very lively, were persecuted during the congressional witch hunt for alleged “subversives” in the course of the Nineteen Forties and 1950s. Journalists of my generation and acquaintance are having a memoir second. Funny and exhilarating, poignant and frank, Chasing History is a unprecedented memoir of life on the cusp of maturity for a determined younger man with a dogged commitment to the reality. The door by which I had entered was on the finish of a dim, quiet corridor of the kind you’ll find in any ordinary place of work.
But in widening the historical lens, Jill Abramson provides heft to Bernstein’s romantic personal narrative by capturing the larger, ultimately tragic newspaper business story in which it unfolds. Bernstein’s early career, she reminds us, coincides with journalism’s transition from a skilled commerce to a more genteel occupation recruiting from the Ivy League. Sadly, Epstein could not save his protégé from the Star’s rule requiring a college diploma, so at age 21 Bernstein stop and, after an interim job at a paper in New Jersey, was snapped up by The Post. As we all know, there was loads of history left for Carl Bernstein to chase.
