The Woodstein Tapes

Bob Woodward: Is this OK for the tapes?

Alan Pakula: It’s OK. This is just for me.

Woodward: Wait ’til it gets subpoenaed!

Pakula: I ought to get a shredder for my office.

Woodward: Erase . . . what’s your secretary’s name, Rosemary . . . We beat that to death.

Pakula: Let’s save all that for the sequel.

Woodward: The sequel?

Pakula: The second picture we’ll make.

Forty-five years ago, during the wee hours of June 17, 1972, five burglars—including the head of security for Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign—were apprehended inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C. It was the beginning of a scandal that would eventually consume a presidency, once Nixon’s secret tape recordings proved beyond any reasonable doubt he had obstructed justice.

There is another set of tapes beyond Nixon’s famous ones. And while they can’t be labeled secret, they have never been thoroughly explored until now.

All the President’s Men, Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 rendering of the eponymous book by reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, is widely regarded as the best movie about journalism ever made. Added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2010, a recent poll conducted by Washingtonian magazine ranked it the best feature film about the nation’s capital; it transformed “Beltway scribes from ink-stained tradesman to the pinnacle of cool.” Waves of Journalism 101 students watch it annually. Yet, as recounted in screenwriter William Goldman’s 1983 memoirs and Jared Brown’s 2005 biography of Pakula, the road to near-universal acclaim was bumpy.

The project was at a crossroads in early 1975. Filming was due to start in just a few months, and Pakula had Goldman’s script in hand. But the obsessive filmmaker desperately wanted more detail and color about key events as well as a complete change of tone in the screenplay. So in February 1975, he sat down with Woodward (then 32 years old) and Bernstein (then 31) for the first of several sessions, taping their recollections for reference. Approximately eight total hours of conversation resulted and there is a single-spaced, 75-page transcript filed among Pakula’s papers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in Los Angeles. The “Woodstein Tapes” will be vital to any historian who contemplates writing a new history of Watergate, because they contravene what we think we know and will help force a revision of the conventional story.

Woodward and Bernstein dish about the stories in their book, but also about stories that were left out and others only half-told. They reveal, among many other things, their occasional anger at Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee; Woodward’s initial reluctance to exploit his social connections in the closed universe of Washington’s young Republicans; and the perceptions they wanted to spread about Woodward’s last meeting with Deep Throat—FBI associate director W. Mark Felt, who was instrumental to their success. The fabled reporting duo also make unvarnished (and sometimes impolitic or impolite) comments about friends, fellow reporters, editors, politicians, and their own relationship, and respective journalism techniques and skills.

‘DEAD ON, OR WE WERE DEAD’

With Hollywood depictions of real-life events, there is always a lingering question: How far does the film stray from what really happened? Sportswriter Dave Kindred, writing about the 2013 Jackie Robinson biopic 42, opined that “When Hollywood tells you a movie is ‘based on a true story,’ that means you’re about to eat popcorn while watching lies.”

Dramatic license is necessary to making a good movie, but the question is does a film go beyond devices like compression, flipping timelines, or using composite characters? This is a particularly interesting with respect to All the President’s Men. Its supposed authenticity has everything to do with its enduring appeal. Pakula and producer Robert Redford claimed an extraordinary degree of fidelity to both the book and the reality it supposedly captured. That included building an exact replica of Post’s newsroom and famously filling it with actual Post trash brought to Hollywood from Washington.

Over the eight hours of the tapes, Woodward and Bernstein talk extensively about the differences between their book and the script and the far more interesting gap between both and reality, all elicited by a cerebral director determined to produce a film that smacked of verisimilitude. But first the script had to be fixed.

Screenwriter William Goldman—known for his famous aphorism about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything”—had already worked with Redford on three films when the actor optioned the book in 1974. Redford then agreed to let Goldman take a stab at adapting the wildly successful bestseller into a feature film. No issue loomed larger than accuracy. As Goldman wrote in his memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade:

Goldman delivered his screenplay to Redford in August 1974, the same month Nixon became the first and only president to resign. The basic structure—especially the condensation of the unruly, complex scandal—would remain more or less intact all the way through filming and constitute no small contribution to the movie’s ultimate success. Yet the draft greatly disappointed Redford and everyone at the Washington Post permitted to read it. “It was written very quickly, and it went for comedy,” Redford later explained. “It trivialized not only the event but journalism.” Redford, whose willingness to co-star in the film (playing Bob Woodward) was crucial to its financing, thought that Goldman had borrowed too much of the light-hearted tone of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of their earlier collaborations. And whereas Goldman thought he had done well in bringing newsroom humor—often dark and cynical—to the screen, Post editors saw it differently. They thought Goldman’s rendering of the newspaper’s budget meetings, where decisions are reached on the size and placement of front-page articles, made them look like clowns. Bernstein said the screenplay’s wise-cracking repartee between reporters reminded him of Henny Youngman.

Redford sought out Pakula in the fall of 1974 expressly to remedy trivialization of the story. The director’s most recent film was a political thriller based on the Kennedy assassination, The Parallax View. It exhibited a “strange, threatening quality” that Redford wanted to suffuse every frame of All the President’s Men. He was only further encouraged when he learned that Pakula was a confirmed “political junkie who was fascinated, not bored” by the Watergate saga.

The director envisioned an All the President’s Men that would express a brooding distrust of large and powerful institutions like the government. He told Redford that “I don’t want to make Butch Woodward and the Sundance Bernstein: you know, Bob Redford and Dustin Hoffman [who had been cast as Carl Bernstein] loving and laughing their way . . . as they bring down the president of the United States.” The film, both agreed, would be a newspaper procedural about “two young men who broke through this cover-up and discovered these facts that eventually led to the destruction of some of the most powerful people on earth.” Pakula was equally determined though that the film not telegraph its own importance, lest it seem pompous. He didn’t want drums rolling in the background as was so often the case in Hollywood potboilers about Washington. Everything in the picture had to be “an immediate experience, trying to say what it was like at the time.”

In his relentless search for how it actually was, Pakula spent an entire month at the Post, soaking up its rhythms, routines, and atmosphere. He shadowed Bradlee for three whole days, listening in on his phone conversations, tagging along to meetings, and eavesdropping as he talked with reporters and editors. Pakula supplemented this fly-on-the-wall perspective by interviewing a score of people who had been involved in Watergate coverage and/or the personal lives of the two journalistic stars, ranging from Post editors like Harry Rosenfeld and Barry Sussman to Nora Ephron, Bernstein’s girlfriend and future wife. And so it was that on February 14, 1975, he sat down in Washington with the reporters themselves, a tape recorder whirring, to go over the problematic screenplay scene-by-scene.

Pakula knew he was interviewing the duo at a particularly hectic time. On leave from the Post, they were in the midst of writing their second book, The Final Days, which required an enormous number of interviews. They were also in great demand as paid speakers, and still being deluged by requests for interviews from magazine, newspaper, and broadcast outlets. What the director didn’t know when he pushed the “Record” button was that he was also catching the reporters at a low point in their relationship. The breach stemmed from Woodward’s disenchantment with Bernstein’s work habits, especially his tendency to rebel against whatever was expected of him. The two men sometimes went days without speaking to one another.

THE JUDGMENT OF BEN BRADLEE

Among all the portrayals that contributed to the movie’s success, the one that resonated most strongly was Jason Robards’s impersonation of Ben Bradlee—even though Robards is actually on screen for only about 10 minutes of a two-hour-and-18-minute film.

Bradlee’s star power inside the Post newsroom was captured flawlessly in the film. Robards proved unforgettable as a gruff, hard-to-please, and fearless editor pushing Woodward and Bernstein to reportorial heights and standing by them steadfastly whenever they make mistakes.

The Woodstein tapes, however, reveal a more tumultuous relationship between Bradlee and the two metro reporters than the one depicted in the film—or even conveyed in the book. Woodward and Bernstein had chafed at some of Bradlee’s editorial decisions in 1972, and were willing to share with Pakula their anger over what they regarded as the unflattering ulterior motives behind Bradlee’s placement of stories in the paper.

The first occasion had to do with a July 6, 1972, article about E. Howard Hunt’s duties while working in the White House. Hunt, a former CIA officer, had supervised the Watergate break-in along with G. Gordon Liddy. Bernstein had been tipped off by a White House secretary that when Hunt worked at the White House, he had shown an inordinate interest in Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, the one Democrat that drove Nixon bonkers. The secretary “started telling me about Hunt and telling me he was the one guy [she] liked and he was doing these strange, fucking things,” Bernstein said to Pakula.

When the two submit their story about Hunt in the film, Bradlee, dressed in a tux and obviously headed for a social event, sits down, puts his feet up on a newsroom desk, and reads their copy. “You haven’t got it,” he flatly declares. Bradlee quickly fashions a new lede and then orders that the story be buried in the front section. The reporters, duly chastened after their first encounter with Bradlee, resolve to try harder. The episode is tersely portrayed in the book in similar fashion.

The duo told a different story to Pakula about the Hunt piece, which was the very first Watergate article Bradlee personally vetted. The administration had been portraying Hunt as an “ordinary consultant,” and the reporters were certain they had nailed down an account that really would have “scared the shit” out of the White House, as Woodward put it in the tapes.* The problem was the story “didn’t scare the shit out of Bradlee,” who was just “awful” about it, Bernstein recalled.

The two reporters had actually written a fuller and more truthful description of this first encounter with Bradlee in an early draft of All the President’s Men, but it didn’t survive editing. Instead, the book blandly noted that Bradlee was “sensitive to stories about the Kennedy family,” and the episode was drained of drama. Their Simon & Schuster editor, Alice Mayhew, had “cut the end of it”—meaning the reporters’ actual reactions to being doubted. “We were both furious,” at Bradlee, Bernstein recalled. Bradlee’s maiden involvement, he said, was “like the visual equivalent of going at something with a razor blade.”

The Hunt article was also the first article Woodstein had worked on together from start to finish. At one point, Bradlee wanted to know who precisely had told the reporters that Hunt was investigating Kennedy. Woodward described how they had also corroborated the secretary’s information through a young White House aide, but Bradlee was not impressed. He couldn’t quite understand how two lowly metro reporters had gotten such a story without access to someone like a deputy assistant to the president. To Bernstein, implicit in Bradlee’s skepticism “was the whole Kennedy thing,” meaning the editor’s fabled friendship with JFK. Or as Woodward described it, Bradlee “was always being accused of dancing with the Kennedys and here we’re saying the Nixon White House is investigating Kennedy.”

Bradlee’s change to the lede substituted “showing a special interest in” for “investigating.” “It resulted, as Woodward recalled, in the “strangest god-damned lead I’ve ever [written].” “I went around shaking my head, and said ‘showing a special interest in’—what the fuck does that mean?” It was “boom, you haven’t got it and up he got and marched out.” The Post’s metro editor, Harry Rosenfeld, followed Bradlee to the elevator, and asked about putting the story on the front page nevertheless. “Hell no,” Bradlee effectively replied. Instead, “‘Bug’ Suspect Said to Seek Kennedy Data” appeared on A4.

“Woodward was more crush[ed] than angry,” Bernstein remembered, [but] “I was just off the walls.” Woodward recalled that he “didn’t talk too much about it” afterward, but “it was obvious [Bernstein was] disgusted. [He was] saying to me ‘that fucking Bradlee.'”

It bears mentioning that Woodward now describes the sterilized “You haven’t got it” scene in the film as one of his personal favorites because it depicts Bradlee “raising the performance bar.” Via this endorsement, the false representation of what happened becomes more real than the truth.

A second clash that left the two fuming over Bradlee’s judgment occurred on October 26, 1972, just two weeks before the election. That evening Clark MacGregor, who had succeeded John Mitchell as Nixon’s campaign manager following the botched June 17 break-in, confirmed the existence of a slush fund at the Committee for the Re-election of the President—although MacGregor disputed that it was “secret” or had ever been knowingly used to support illegal acts. Still, the admission corroborated the Post’s reporting and validated the weeks spent painstakingly tracing the flow of campaign funds to the burglars.

Woodward and Bernstein naturally thought MacGregor’s admission cried out for front-page treatment. But Bradlee wouldn’t put “Campaign Fund Is Confirmed” on the front page. The reason was that national security advisor Henry Kissinger had declared earlier in the afternoon (and perhaps not coincidentally) that “Peace is at hand” in Vietnam. That story, under a banner headline, was going to dominate the front page, and a Watergate-related story by Post reporter Sanford J. Ungar was already slotted to run lower down. When Woodward asked why the MacGregor story wasn’t going to be prominently featured, Bradlee told him “we can’t have two Watergate stories on the front page the same day that Nixon ha[s] peace at hand.”

In the book, Bradlee’s decision was attributed to Kissinger’s declaration but evoked no reaction whatsoever from the reporters, and the episode wasn’t even part of the screenplay. Yet that was “about as angry as I ever got at Bradlee,” Woodward told Pakula. The fact that the New York Times put “MacGregor Identifies Four Who Guided Special Fund” on its front page only served to incense Woodward even more. “Bradlee thought it the better part of wisdom,” Bernstein observed, to put the MacGregor corroboration on page A6 rather than trumpet it as validation of what the Post duo had been reporting for weeks. It was another “political decision,” Bernstein recalled, not a journalistic one by the celebrated editor.

WOODWARD AND THE ESTABLISHMENT

Besides neatly eliding sturm und drang in the Post newsroom, the book version of All the President’s Men was scrubbed of any meaningful understanding of Woodward’s social connections and how they contributed to the paper’s coverage of Watergate.

In the book, Woodward and Bernstein presented themselves as pavement-pounding (and telephone-dialing) reporters, wearing out their shoe leather undertaking the most tedious chores to corroborate every story. There was truth in that, of course, but it was not the whole story. Several prized sources were the result of Woodward’s social connections, including, for example, Donald E. Santarelli, a fast-rising legal star in the Justice Department. Young, upwardly-mobile, ambitious Republicans in Washington like Woodward (a Yale-educated former Naval officer) were a tight-knit bunch, and for good reason: For all practical purposes, they were encamped deep in hostile territory.

Woodward’s establishment connections were a subject of endless fascination to Bernstein, a red-diaper baby whose parents had been card-carrying members of the American Communist Party. The alien world of WASP casualness was, Bernstein told Pakula, his favorite part of the book’s first draft, and he never quite understood why it got cut out. Woodward “would always drop these little things [about people he met at social occasions],” Bernstein explained. “I remember saying, ‘What is this shit that he knows these people?'”

As late as August 1972, Woodward was still being invited to select get-togethers by White House staffers, such as a tennis party John Ehrlichman was having at Camp David. Woodward had accepted the invitation and fully intended to go until Ehrlichman called him up and rescinded it. “I don’t think you’d better come,” Nixon’s domestic policy adviser told the reporter. Woodward and Bernstein had just published a story (“Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds”) tracing contributions from well-heeled but unsuspecting donors to the Watergate burglars.

Bernstein, once he learned the bare outlines about Woodward’s naval career, liked to imagine what having a TOP SECRET clearance signified. That “was another thing he dropped one day. He dropped this in the car one day. My fantasy was that, Jesus Christ, Woodward, you’re one of these guys who keeps track of the president’s nukes. . . . Woodward at the map with his pointer saying to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, ‘Right there, gentlemen, is where your problem is in the Mideast.'”

“And that must be where he met Deep Throat!” Bernstein declared to Pakula. This clue about Woodward knowing Mark Felt from his Navy days was, unbeknown to Pakula, tantalizingly close to the truth. Young Lt. Woodward hadn’t kept track of the nuclear arsenal, but, outfitted in his dress-blue uniform, he had occasionally delivered highly classified documents from the Pentagon to the White House’s Situation Room. It was in a small anteroom in the West Wing that Woodward had first encountered Felt, whom he later cultivated as a source when he turned to newspapering rather than attend Harvard Law School. Perhaps Bernstein was tweaking Woodward in front of Pakula by referencing this tightly held morsel of information. It certainly suggests the tense relationship between the reporting duo in 1975.

The only thing that left Bernstein more speechless than who Woodward knew was Woodward’s hesitation to trade on these friendships. Bernstein had to push his reporting partner—and push him hard. Indeed, the major reason the duo believed they had the Hunt story that Bradlee buried was that they had gotten a young, well-placed presidential aide (who has never been identified) to corroborate it.

As they remembered it for Pakula, Bernstein had asked Woodward if he knew anybody at the White House who might have an inkling about Hunt’s actual duties. Woodward continued (the remarks are edited for brevity and clarity),

THE INVENTION OF DEEP THROAT

Pakula acted the part of the gently probing interviewer during the taped sessions—although Woodward and Bernstein rarely needed much prodding. At times things got testy.

During the last session, for example, the subject turned to the nitty-gritty of how Woodward and Bernstein wrote stories together. The book and the film depict this intimate relationship, after a rocky beginning, as a largely egoless and frictionless one, as evinced by the “Woodstein” moniker bestowed on them. Woodward, an outstanding reporter, had trouble with the standard, inverted-pyramid style of newspaper stories, particularly ledes and the crucial “nut grafs.” Bernstein was by far the better writer, and Woodward was quick to recognize this. Soon all that mattered was the story, not who wrote it first or wrote what part. This was more or less the account in All the President’s Men.

Throughout this prickly exchange, Pakula doesn’t utter a word, keeping with his practice of letting the reporters talk and not cross-examining them.

On at least one occasion, though, he dropped his passivity and general credulousness, expressing some puzzlement, if not outright doubt, about an episode vividly portrayed in the book: the last meeting between Woodward and Deep Throat. The May 1973 encounter was of keen interest to Pakula because it was going to be the key late scene in the film.

An image of Deep Throat had formed in Pakula’s mind of a terse, chain-smoking man, always half in the shadows, who bites off his words as much as he speaks them. His Deep Throat was the ultimate Washington realist, a weary veteran of government who has seen everything—and was thus able to see through the Byzantine intrigues of the Nixon White House.

Shattering events—including the abrupt departures of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, White House counsel John Dean, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst—had occurred since Woodward’s last clandestine rendezvous with Deep Throat, and the Watergate hearings were to begin in the Senate the very next morning. According to the book, Woodward called the meeting anticipating that his über-source, the man who had done so much to keep the reporters on the right track, would be in a good and expansive mood. Instead, Woodward arrived in the parking garage to find Felt pacing nervously. His lower jaw seemed to quiver as he raced through a near-monologue, and the meeting ended hastily with ominous warnings to Woodward: “Everyone’s life is in danger,” Felt said, and “electronic surveillance is going on,” conducted by the CIA.

Pakula couldn’t understand Deep Throat’s transformation from cold-eyed observer to conspiracy theorist. It seemed to defy explanation and greatly complicated the portrait Pakula wanted to paint. Pakula’s bewilderment over Felt’s behavior had an earlier parallel inside the Post‘s newsroom. At an emergency meeting of all the principal players involved in the paper’s Watergate coverage, national editor Richard Harwood had ridiculed Deep Throat’s claims. He said Woodward and Bernstein had “finally gone around the bend and [were] nearing the edge of fantasy” themselves in giving credence to this “paranoid delusion of persecution.” Moreover, in the nearly two years of investigation by the Watergate special prosecutor that followed this morning meeting, nothing surfaced that even remotely validated Felt’s warnings. Pakula was confused.

Woodward and Bernstein hastened to rationalize the absurd scene. “I think that we know now that there came a point at which people with wide knowledge probably would have thought that people’s lives were in danger,” Bernstein said to the film director. “. . . It’s very logical. What is probably illogical is that the information might have been a few days late by then. Might have been something that was considered and then discarded.” To which Woodward added, “He may not know exactly whether there are plans to kill somebody, [or] whether there are plans for the CIA to bug us. But he puts it all together.” Bernstein then said a Howard Hunt or Gordon Liddy or some other “cracker-jack” type character might have suggested “the only way to take care of this is to rub everybody out,” adding vaguely that in such an instance, Nixon would not have been able to hide behind the doctrine of plausible deniability. “If I had to guess, I would think we were under some kind of surveillance, [though] it wasn’t bugging. . . . I think you would be much smarter to use directional mikes, Bernstein opined. “And the CIA doing it makes all kind of sense,” Woodward concluded.

This sequence was the only time Pakula came even slightly close to penetrating the deception being foisted by Woodstein. The truth was that All the President’s Men was a fabulistic account of a newspaper procedural, part and parcel of what was then called the New Journalism. It presented a sanitized and often trivialized account of what had gone on inside and outside the Post—or what Barry Sussman described to Pakula as a “modified, limited hang out,” intentionally parroting John Ehrlichman’s infamous phrase about the tactic of presenting misleading information in order to divert attention from the real facts. In particular, Deep Throat was a fiction—not in the sense of a completely invented character—but in the motives attributed to him.

What Woodward and Bernstein conveniently left out of their explanation to Pakula—either because they were all-too-acutely aware of it or were inexcusably ignorant of it—was that this last rendezvous had coincided with Felt’s abrupt departure from the FBI because he was suspected of leaking to the press. He had never talked to Woodward out of a concern for the office of the presidency or the bureau, much less the law or morality. He had leaked to damage the reputations of his rivals for the FBI directorship, which he coveted above all things. In May 1973, years of scheming had finally come to naught, and if he wasn’t experiencing a nervous breakdown that night he was close to one.

Woodward and Bernstein, of course, could hardly fess up: It would have been impossible to do so without providing Pakula with a serious clue to Deep Throat’s identity, and they were intent on keeping his name secret. More importantly, the mythology of Deep Throat-as-whistleblower had become central to their book and their reputations—and soon it would be central to the movie. So the duo kept up the pretense that Felt was a truth-teller and they had been in danger. Pakula faithfully recreated the paranoia in the film’s penultimate scene, careful, as Redford counseled, not to deliver the message “with hysterics.”

PRINTING THE LEGEND

The Woodstein tapes have the reporters letting their hair down. Taken together with other interviews and memoirs, they provide a fascinating insight into how a best-selling book was fashioned into an exalted film.

Pakula’s implacable search for how it really was could have enabled him to realize a film nearer to fact than the book, but producer Robert Redford was bent on making a Western in Washington. So Pakula delivered a taut, visually authentic film that, in effect, transformed a modified, limited hangout into a fairy tale.

The slavish devotion to visual hyper-reality, while ignoring or running roughshod over important story elements, left behind severely bruised feelings inside the place that mattered most: the Washington Post newsroom. Howard Simons, the managing editor who had insisted on assigning reporters to the story full-time in the first place, bitterly resented being depicted in the film as a hand-wringing worry-wart and mere appendage to Bradlee. And Barry Sussman, who guided the Watergate coverage and proved the sturdiest leg of what was a triumvirate not a duo, was left out of the film entirely. “Of all the filmmakers’ real and imagined derelictions,” wrote the Post’s own film critic, Gary Arnold, in 1976, “the elimination of Sussman as a character was the one that bothered Post staffers most.” Indeed, if any one individual at the Post was deserving of a Pulitzer for the newspaper’s Watergate coverage, both Simons and metro editor Harry Rosenfeld had told Pakula during his research phase, it was Barry Sussman.

As we mark the 45th anniversary of the break-in, with the scandal resonating daily and having more raw currency than at any time since 1974, perhaps it is time to entertain a more sophisticated and mature account of what happened—or at least one with more nuance than the version propagated by those invested in the fable.

*Correction: A comment from the tapes was originally mistakenly credited to Bernstein instead of Woodward. The text has been corrected.

Max Holland is the author of Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, which has just been published in paperback (University of Kansas Press).