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      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate world

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      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate worldBefore he helped bring down Richard Nixon, the reporter grew up in a school of hard knocks. His memoir is a treasure Few reporters are synonymous with their craft. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post is one, his former partner, Carl Bernstein, another. Together, they broke open the Watergate scandal, helped send a president’s minions to prison and made Richard Nixon the only man to resign the office. On the big screen, Robert Redford played Woodward. Bernstein got Dustin Hoffman.These days, Bernstein is a CNN analyst and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Chasing History, his sixth book, is a warm and inviting read.Now 77, he writes with the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of self-imposed deadlines. His prose is dry and reflective even as it draws in the reader. This is his look back and valedictory, with a fitting subtitle: “A Kid in the Newsroom.”He describes life before the Post, in pages marked with politics – and haberdashery.“I needed a suit.” So the book begins. Shortly thereafter: “My mother and father, in the early 1950s, had taken me with them to join the sit-ins at Woodward & Lothrop to desegregate its tea room.”“Woodies”, a department store, closed in 1995. In the 50s, rather than testify before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, Bernstein’s mother invoked her right against self-incrimination. His father suffered for past membership in the Communist party. The FBI of J Edgar Hoover was an unwelcome presence in the Bernsteins’ lives.Still in high school, Bernstein worked as a part-time copy boy for the Washington Star. “Now that I’d covered the inauguration of JFK, Mr Adelman’s chemistry class interested me even less,” he confesses.He barely scraped out of high school, flunked out of the University of Maryland and lost his deferment from the Vietnam draft. He found a spot in a national guard unit, removing the possibility of deployment and combat. Chasing History also includes a copy of Bernstein’s college transcript, which advertises a sea of Fs and the capitalized notation: “ACADEMICALLY DISMISSED 1-27-65.”On the other hand, before he was old enough to vote, Bernstein had covered or reported more than most journalists do in a lifetime. The 1960 presidential election, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, desegregation and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. All were part of his remit.The integration of DC’s barber shops, a race-fueled brawl at a high school football game, the death of a newspaper vendor. In a nation in upheaval, all captured Bernstein’s attention.He is one of the last of his breed, a national reporter without a degree. Chasing History reminds us that by the mid-1960s, newsrooms were no longer dominated by working-class inflections. Carbon paper, hot lead typesetting, ink-stained fingers and smocks would also give way, to computers and digitization.The Ivy League emerged as a training ground of choice. Television would outpace print. Rough edges would be smoothed and polished, a premium placed on facts. Hard-knocks, not so much.“A big generational change was occurring in the journalism trade,” Bernstein writes. “Editors wanted college graduates now. My view was that you might be better prepared by graduating from horticultural school than from Yale or Princeton.”The kicker: “At least that way you could write the gardening column.”Emphasis on the word “might”, though. Woodward went to Yale. To this day, they count each other as friends.Chasing History is more about gratitude than grievance. For 10 pages, Bernstein recalls the names of his “young friends”, their “remarkable paths”, his intersection with those who would emerge as “historical footnotes” and his “teachers and mentors”.Lance Morrow, formerly of Time and the Wall Street Journal, makes it on to the dedication page. They were housemates and worked at the Star. Later, their careers flourished. Morrow, according to Bernstein, “occupies a unique place in the journalism of our time” and has been an “incomparable joy” in the author’s life.Likewise, Ben Stein – and his appearance as an economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in 1986 – earns more than a passing shoutout. The fact Stein and his father served in the Nixon administration did not dent Bernstein’s fondness. They grew up nextdoor to each other in the DC suburbs. In junior high, the boys founded a “lox-and-bagel/Sunday New York Times delivery service”. The two see each other yearly.Bernstein also pays his respects to David Broder, the late dean of the political press corps. On 23 November 1962, as a copy boy, Bernstein took dictation from Broder, who was in Dallas that fateful Friday afternoon. Years later, Broder provided a useful tip that helped shape the path and coverage of “Woodstein’s” Watergate reporting.One mentor of particular note was George Porter, a Star bureau chief to whom Bernstein refers respectfully as Mr Porter and who regularly gave Bernstein a ride to the office. During the Democratic primaries in 1964, Porter dispatched Bernstein to cover George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor. Wallace never had a chance but his candidacy was newsworthy. Think Donald Trump, prototype.Why the US media ignored Murdoch’s brazen bid to hijack the presidency | Carl BernsteinRead moreLyndon Johnson, a Democrat, was in the White House but Wallace got nearly 30% in Indiana. When Wallace turned to Maryland, Bernstein was there on the ground.It was the first time he’d “seen a demagogue inflame the emotions of American citizens who I’d thought were familiar to me”.Wallace lost but netted 40% and a majority of white votes. In defeat, he blamed Black voters, except he chose a word that began with “N”, and an “incompetent press”, for failing to recognize his appeal. The church, labor unions, Ted Kennedy and “every other Democratic senator from the north” were also subjects of Wallace’s scorn.Chasing History is part-autobiography, part-history lesson. Amid continued turbulence, Bernstein’s memoirs are more than mere reminiscence.
      Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom is published in the US by Henry Holt & Company
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      ‘Nixon is much more serious than Trump’: Michael Dobbs and the tale of the White House tapes

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      “I love you, as you know,” says Richard Nixon. “Like my brother.”The 37th president is bidding farewell to chief of staff Bob Haldeman in an unexpectedly intimate phone call that, half a century later, lingers in the air like a ghost.Donald Trump had tweets but Nixon had tapes: 3,700 hours of them, secretly recorded by a White House system the East German Stasi might have envied. The conversations were released between 2007 and 2013, an eavesdropping opportunity never likely to be repeated.They have proved a goldmine for Michael Dobbs, a British-born author and journalist whose elegantly written book, King Richard – Nixon and Watergate: An American Tragedy, zooms in on the hundred days that followed Nixon’s second inauguration and led to his downfall.The narrative follows Nixon from room to room, day by day, sometimes minute by minute. It tells how the tapes capture ice cubes tinkling in a glass, Nixon’s voice softening when his 24-year-old daughter Julie calls and, as the world knows, some bilious rants about the media as the Watergate scandal deepens.Why did this famously secretive president leave such an incriminating trace? Nixon never intended for the tapes, made between February 1971 and July 1973, to become public. But he did have an eye on posterity.“It’s a bit like Churchill said: ‘History will be kind to me because I intend to write it myself,’” says Dobbs, 70.“That was Nixon’s idea as well. This is one difference from Trump: [Nixon] really had studied history in some depth, and compared himself to people like Churchill and De Gaulle. He wanted to write memoirs that would justify his place in history and particularly undercut any attempts by uppity aides like [Henry] Kissinger to claim all the credit for his foreign policy initiatives.The tapes force a writer to step into his shoes and to see events from his point of view so you see him destroy himself“So he never imagined that the tapes would become public. He thought they were just going to be his private property that he could draw on for writing his memoirs. Of course, he didn’t really understand that just to go back and listen to these tapes, he’d have to spend his entire retirement trying to decipher them. The tapes became completely out of control in the end.”Lyndon Johnson recorded about 800 hours of phone calls but Nixon took it to a whole new level. Dobbs says: “The difference with Nixon was that he was so ham-fisted and a bit of a klutz that he didn’t know how to turn tape recorders on and off so they invented a system which turned out to be completely diabolic: it would just turn on by itself. It recorded absolutely everything without any sort of input from him, which is what really did him in in the end.”Sometimes Nixon could forget the tapes were running as he and his aides plotted dirty tricks, unleashed crude diatribes or made racist asides. In one, Haldeman suggests that the White House counsel, John Dean, must have been taking out “all his frustrations in just pure, raw, animal, unadulterated sex”.Nixon’s Trump-like loathing of the media includes a boast that he “really stuck ’em in the groin”. It also crops up in a conversation with his special counsel, Chuck Colson, on the eve of his inauguration. Dobbs says: “He’s about to give this speech and he’s gloating with Colson, his hatchet man, about how he’s going to stick it to the Washington Post and drive the Post’s share price down. He generally calls the reporters ‘the bastards’.”At this point, Nixon was riding high after a thumping election victory and with a near-70% approval rating. The break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex, seven months prior, was seemingly behind him despite the efforts of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.“But then, within just a few weeks and months, the whole thing has completely unravelled and you have all these people within the White House at each other’s throats and, as Nixon says, ‘pissing on each other’ and eventually pissing on the president. So it’s an amazing three-month period in which probably one of the most disciplined White House operations in history completely falls apart.”By July 1973, some of Nixon’s advisers were pleading with him to destroy the tapes lest they reveal his part in the Watergate cover-up. He felt they would strengthen his defence. He was wrong.The supreme court ordered the release of a “smoking gun tape” confirming Dean’s testimony that Nixon told aides to order the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation into the burglary. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and was forced to resign in August 1974, before he could be impeached.Dobbs reflects: “At a certain point, it becomes Dean’s word against Nixon’s word. There wasn’t sufficient evidence to impeach the president at that point. The only reason that he was forced to resign was because the tapes started coming out and that went all the way to the supreme court. Without the tapes, there would not have been a sufficient basis to force Nixon out of office.”And yet, as Dobbs listened, he also found the tapes that ruined Nixon’s reputation in the moment could yet provide a measure of redemption.“What they do is to force a writer to step into his shoes and to see events from his point of view so you see him destroy himself and destroy his presidency and the pain and agony that he feels.“Unless you’re an absolute dyed-in-the-wool Nixon hater, you have to feel some sympathy for the man, not because you approve of what he did, but just on a personal level.”The president’s conversations with his daughters help humanise him.“You can relate to him the way he talks to Julie, particularly if you’ve listened to the previous tape of him talking to Haldeman. Suddenly he’s switching from being an irascible president who’s barking orders at people to being a loving father.”Then there is that wistful call with Haldeman, who knew the president better than anyone.“Nixon never invited him to a family meal, never shook hands with him, and then suddenly here is Nixon saying, ‘I love you like my brother.’ If you know the background of Nixon’s two brothers dying from tuberculosis when he was a young man, it’s extraordinary.”Dobbs wrote the book during Trump’s scandal-peppered, twice-impeached, one-term presidency. Parallels with Nixon were inescapable: the exploitation of racial resentment, the whipping up of the “silent majority”, the hostility towards the press and east coast elites. But he believes there are key differences too.“Nixon is a much more substantive, serious person than Trump and he had a real sophisticated understanding of history and foreign policy. We don’t know how Trump is going to be treated by historians, 40, 50 years later, but I find Nixon a more empathetic character than Trump.“To some extent, Nixon has succeeded in rehabilitating himself, or at least we have a more nuanced picture of Nixon now. I’m not sure that Trump is going to be rehabilitated, at least among historians.”The author, a dual British-American citizen who has worked for the Guardian and Washington Post, continues: “One distinguishing thing between the two of them is the whole claim that the election was rigged and stolen from Trump. Although Nixon did have a lot of grudges about particularly the 1960 election and felt the Kennedys had stolen it from him, he did not go public with that and he did not try to dispute it in any serious way.“He accepted it because he thought that was one rule of the game. Trump completely threw that rule of the game overboard. Nixon is within the mainstream American presidents. Trump is outside the mainstream.”It remains to be seen whether historians will regard Trump as a Shakespearean figure or conclude he was simply not that psychologically interesting. Dobbs believes Nixon, who rose from poverty to the presidency only to endure catastrophe, does meet the King Lear standard. Along with its theatrical title, the book is divided into four “acts” and has a list of “dramatic personae”.“To call him a Shakespearean tragic hero does not mean that you approve of him or you like him,” Dobbs says. “It means that you’re just struck by this fall from grace and you’ve become aware of the suffering involved. I was more interested in telling the story than to pass judgment.”Exit, pursued by a tape recorder. More

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      G Gordon Liddy, mastermind of Watergate burglary, dies aged 90

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      G Gordon Liddy, a mastermind of the Watergate burglary and a radio talkshow host after emerging from prison, died on Tuesday at age 90.His son, Thomas Liddy, confirmed the death but did reveal the cause, other than to say it was not related to Covid-19.Liddy, a former FBI agent and army veteran, was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping for his role in the Watergate burglary, which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. He spent four years and four months in prison, including more than 100 days in solitary confinement.“I’d do it again for my president,” he said years later.Liddy was outspoken and controversial, both as a political operative under Nixon and as a radio personality. Liddy recommended assassinating political enemies, bombing a left-leaning thinktank and kidnapping war protesters. His White House colleagues ignored such suggestions.One of his ventures – the break-in at Democratic headquarters at the Watergate building in June 1972 – was approved. The burglary went awry, which led to an investigation, a cover-up and Nixon’s resignation in 1974.Liddy also was convicted of conspiracy in the September 1971 burglary of the defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Ellsberg leaked the secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers.After his release, Liddy – with his piercing dark eyes, bushy moustache and shaved head – became a popular, provocative and controversial radio talkshow host. He also worked as a security consultant, writer and actor.On air, he offered tips on how to kill federal firearms agents, rode around with car tags saying “H20GATE” (Watergate) and scorned people who cooperated with prosecutors.Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, George Gordon Battle Liddy was a frail boy who grew up in a neighborhood populated mostly by German Americans. From friends and a maid who was a German national, Liddy developed a curiosity about Adolf Hitler and was inspired by listening to Hitler’s radio speeches in the 1930s.“If an entire nation could be changed, lifted out of weakness to extraordinary strength, so could one person,” Liddy wrote in Will, his autobiography.Liddy decided it was critical to face his fears and overcome them. At age 11, he roasted a rat and ate it to overcome his fear of rats. “From now on, rats could fear me as they feared cats,” he wrote.After serving a stint in the army, Liddy graduated from law school at Fordham University and then joined the FBI. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress from New York in 1968 and helped organize Nixon’s presidential campaign in the state.When Nixon took office, Liddy was named a special assistant serving under the treasury secretary David M Kennedy. Liddy later moved to the White House, then to Nixon’s re-election campaign, where his official title was general counsel.Liddy was head of a team of Republican operatives known as “the plumbers”, whose mission was to find leakers of information embarrassing to the Nixon administration. Among Liddy’s specialties were gathering political intelligence and organizing activities to disrupt or discredit Nixon’s Democratic opponents.While recruiting a woman to help carry out one of his schemes, Liddy tried to convince her that no one could force him to reveal her identity or anything else against his will. To convince her, Liddy held his hand over a flaming cigarette lighter. His hand was badly burned. The woman turned down the job.Liddy became known for such offbeat suggestions as kidnapping war protest organizers and taking them to Mexico during the Republican national convention; assassinating the investigative journalist Jack Anderson; and firebombing the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning thinktank in Washington where classified documents leaked by Ellsberg were being stored.Liddy and his fellow operative Howard Hunt, along with the five arrested at Watergate, were indicted on federal charges three months after the June 1972 break-in. Hunt and his recruits pleaded guilty in January 1973, and James McCord and Liddy were found guilty. Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974.After the failed break-in attempt, Liddy recalled telling the White House counsel John Dean: “If someone wants to shoot me, just tell me what corner to stand on, and I’ll be there, OK?” Dean reportedly responded, “I don’t think we’ve gotten there yet, Gordon.”Liddy claimed in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that Nixon was “insufficiently ruthless” and should have destroyed tape recordings of his conversations with top aides.Liddy learned to market his reputation as a fearless, if sometimes overzealous, advocate of conservative causes. Liddy’s syndicated radio talkshow, broadcast from Virginia-based WJFK, was long one of the most popular in the country. He wrote bestselling books, acted in TV shows including Miami Vice, was a frequent guest lecturer on college campuses, started a private eye franchise and worked as a security consultant. For a time, he teamed on the lecture circuit with an unlikely partner, the 1960s LSD guru Timothy Leary.Liddy always took pride in his role in Watergate. He once said: “I am proud of the fact that I am the guy who did not talk.” More

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      in Elections

      Can Trump do a Nixon and re-enter polite society? Elizabeth Drew doubts it

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      Asking if Donald Trump can rehabilitate himself in US public life as did a disgraced president before him, legendary Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew was not optimistic.“For all their similarities,” she wrote, “Nixon and Trump clearly are very different men. For one thing, Nixon was smart.”Drew, 85 and the author of the classic Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall, published her thoughts in the Washington Post.“Donald Trump and Richard Nixon both left Washington in helicopters and ignominy,” she wrote, “awash in financial problems and their customary self-pity.“Both were above-average paranoiacs who felt (with some justification) that the elites looked down on them and that enemies everywhere sought to undermine them; they despised the press, exploited racism for political purposes and used inept outside agents (the “plumbers,” Rudy Giuliani) to carry out their more nefarious plots.“Neither was inclined to let aides rein them in. Both faced impeachment for trying to manipulate the opposition party’s nomination contest. Both degraded the presidency. Both came unglued at the end.“But then, astonishingly, Nixon rehabilitated himself … [his] post-presidency was a quest to make himself respectable again and it worked … through wit, grit, wiliness and determination he wrought one of the greatest resurrections in American politics.“If he could do it, can Trump?”Her short answer? No.Impeached a second time, Trump now awaits trial in Florida, playing golf but keeping himself involved in Republican politics, making endorsements, sitting on $70m in campaign cash and entertaining thoughts of starting a new political party, if reportedly mostly as a way of revenging himself on Republicans who crossed him.Drew wrote of how after Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, to avoid impeachment over the Watergate scandal, the 37th president went into exile in California. But she also cited his deep background in US politics and institutions – as a former congressman, senator and vice-president who “essentially understood the constitution and limits, even if he overreached at times” – and how, “interested in the substance of governing, he studied white papers and was conversant in most topics the government touched.”Drew also discussed the way Nixon set about re-entering public life, mostly as a sage voice on foreign policy, and eventually moved back east to become “the toast of New York” and, in 1979, one of Gallup’s “10 most admired people in the world”. Ruthlessly, she wrote, Nixon even managed to force his way back into the White House, visiting (under the cover of night) to counsel the young Bill Clinton.Trump, Drew wrote, “lacks discipline, intellectual rigour and the doggedness Nixon used to pull himself up from the bottom.”But on the day the solidly pro-Trump Arizona Republican party formally censured grandees Cindy McCain, Jeff Flake and Doug Ducey for daring to cross Trump, Drew also had a warning.“Trump has one advantage Nixon didn’t,” Drew wrote, “even after the assault on the Capitol this month: a large and fanatically devoted following.[embedded content]“According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released 15 January, 79% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents still approved of his performance. Trump of course had the backing of many Fox News hosts, and … some still supported the Trump line about the 6 January attack on the Capitol (for example, that it was spawned by a leftwing group). There was no such thing as Fox in Nixon’s day.”Though Drew thought Trump unlikely to gain access to mainstream media, as Nixon famously did via interviews with David Frost, and has been suspended by Twitter and Facebook, she did note that he “still has the support of fringe networks like One America News and Newsmax”.“If Trump is canny enough and has the energy,” she wrote, “he will have already begun devising ways to heal his battered reputation with much of the public and, in particular, the Republican politicians who indulged him for years.“But unlike Nixon, Trump faces a paradox: how can he maintain the support of his rabble-rousing followers, particularly if he wants to run again in 2024 or simply remain a force in in the GOP, while building respectability among the broader public?” More