Carl BernsteinKirja-arvosteluja

Két ok miatt olvastam el a könyvet. Egyrészt több könyvet olvastam Bersteintől és Woodwardtól, de a leghíresebb és egyben a legfontosabb valahogy kimaradt. Másrészt pedig sokat hallottam a Watergate-botrányról, de a részleteket nem ismertem elég alaposan.

A könyvben a két oknyomozó újságírón keresztül ismerjük meg az ügyet, vagyis ( pár apró kivételtől eltekintve ) mindig pont annyit tudunk mint a két újságíró. Nincsenek más történetszálak ahol az összeesküvők cselekedeteit mutatná be időrendben vagy a hivatalos nyomozás részleteit. Csak akkor értesülünk eseményekről, amikor valaki beszél a főszereplőknek róla, ami akár hónapokkal a történtek után lehet. Különösen a vége felé zavaró ez, amikor az ügy már túlnőtt a két újságírón. Vagyis ha a Watergate ügyet szeretnénk alaposan megismerni, akkor nem ez a legjobb olvasmány. Ha viszont azt szeretnénk látni, hogy két oknyomozó újságíró hogyan deríti fel az ügyet ami végül az elnök bukásához vezet, akkor ez a tökéletes könyv.

A könyv nem túl könnyű olvasmány, a nevek többsége már nem sokat mond ennyi év távlatából és könnyű összekeverni a szereplőket akik apránként csepegtetik az információkat az újságíróknak.

A könyv olvasása után hiányérzetem maradt, aminek egyszerűen az az oka, hogy a könyv még Nixon bukása előtt jelent meg, vagyis hiányzik a történet vége, azt egy külön könyvben írták meg.½

This is gripping and informative, following the lead journalists thru the uncovering of the entire Watergate scandal. I got an idea of how exciting and stressful journalism can be on big events like this, and the tedium and disappointment that comes when things don't pan out. I also enjoyed the new forward that includes comparisons to the entire Trump debacle.

Even as a law student I found this boring. I get the importance. I get the shock of what happened. Maybe it's because I've done two projects on Watergate and this is just... Eh. Been there. Done that. Reporters breaking every rule they can to catch actual rulebreakers in the act. Whenever I come back to this story it just further convinces me to stay away from DC and to never become an investigative journalist. I mean that's really it for me. As a beginner's guide to Watergate, sure go for it. Be prepared for a bit of confusion but the 40th anniversary has some help in it and a good afterword.

Absolutely fantastic. This book went a good way in restoring my faith in the field of journalism, which had plummeted during the past 6 or 7 years due to today's sloppy and biased reporting. Seeing the lengths Woodward and Bernstein went to in order to corroborate information (at least 3 sources) was refreshing, especially given that today reporters regularly quote a pair of anonymous Twitter accounts and call it a story. Eye-opening, compelling read. Highly recommend.

This 19+ hour audio book is not for the casual listener. It's a study book, like you get in college. The cast is a plethora that's hard to keep straight, even if we lived through it on TV every night. I suspect that if it could be distilled down to 1/3 of it's length, it would be tolerable. So, I skimmed through it.

A fascinating look into the details of the reporting of the Watergate scandal. This blow-by-blow account reveals the investigative process, the breakdown in the Nixon White House's internal structure, the lies and dissimulation from political figures, and has insight into how to manufacture, and read, news. A trenchant story for today.

You know the drill: a break-in at the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate complex led to the collapse of Richard Nixon's presidential administration, largely thanks to the efforts of intrepid reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

What I liked about All the President's Men was how Bernstein and Woodward peel back the tight factual skin of newspaper reporting to reveal their own screw-ups and the humanity of their opponents. They repeatedly record that queasy moment when a journalist has to choose between a scoop and compassion. The greater good doesn't always win, but compassion can't compete with good copy:

"As the cry of JEEEEEESUS was repeated, Bernstein had perceived the excruciating depth of Mitchell's hurt. For a moment, he had been afraid that Mitchell might die on the telephone, and for the first time Mitchell was flesh and blood, not Nixon's campaign manager, the shadow of Kent State, Carswell's keeper, the high sheriff of Law and Order, the jowled heavy of Watergate. Bernstein's skin felt prickly." [110]

I really enjoyed learning how newspapers and reporters got things done back in the day. Bernstein's writing is perfectly adequate but the way he chose to conclude was weak and lazy, imo.

Excellent memoir by Carl Bernstein on his early days as a reporter and also a historical look at how a newspaper worked in the mid-twentieth century.

As he states in his acknowledgments in the book, this is his telling of his life at the ages of 16 to 21 which were his formative years working in many roles at the Washington Evening Star newspaper jumping at every opportunity to write and report on events in Washington, DC. Through his eyes we meet many interesting and in some case eccentric individuals who worked at the Star and who influenced Bernstein's career.

He was there when JFK was elected and later assassinated. He also experienced the great Civil Rights revolution that divided America during the 1960's. This is reading history up real close.

Change the names from 1972 to today's names and nothing has changed. The talking points and the words are the same. Denials and coming down on the press from the White House. I am astounded how much things stay the same in 50 years. While the book at first is a little disconcerting because of all the names as well as feeling I was dropped into the middle of a conversation, I soon got comfortable as Bernstein and Woodward tell of putting the Watergate story and the subsequent fallout stories together to get a full story of what happened during the Nixon reelection campaign. This is much more interesting now than it was 50 years ago when all I cared about was my soap operas being exempted for the Watergate coverage. There are so many parallels to 2020 and beyond.

This is my first Carl Bernstein book, and I really enjoyed it. Having studied journalism in college and having taught it to high school students for about half of my 40-year teaching career, I’m always interested in someone’s story about his or her life in newspapers. Bernstein is the last of a dying breed of self-taught journalists. He tried college but just couldn’t put up with the nonsense required to earn a degree. And, in fact, that was responsible for his leaving the Washington Star where he began his career. An editor at the Star seemed to think a college diploma was more important than the thick scrapbook of clips Carl had accumulated during the time he spent at the Star. Bernstein went on to win a Pulitzer. The Star went bankrupt. You don’t have to necessarily have to be a fan of Carl Bernstein’s to enjoy this book. It does help if you have at least a passing interest in newspapers, especially newspapers before the age of the Internet. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Bernstein’s book of his early days of reporting for the now defunct Washington Star reads like it could have jumped from the pages of The Front Page. There are the bells going off on the teletype machine denoting a news flash coming in, reporters calling in news stories to “dictationists” who type up the stories as the reporters are dictating them, linotype men setting one of the paper’s five editions in type, and the rumbling printing presses that make the building shake. The only thing missing is Bernstein running into the composing room yelling, “STOP THE PRESSES!”

Bernstein surely had newspapers in his blood, starting as a copyboy at age 16 while he was still in high school Bernstein works his way up to general assignment reporter and manages to be present for quite a lot of history along the way. He also manages to come in contact with the kind of colorful characters that filled books, and movies for the first half of the twentieth century.

This book makes me sad for what has been lost in our digital age and makes me want to read a print newspaper again.

Chasing History is about the author's working at the Evening Star, a daily Washington newspaper, from the ages of 16 to 21. This is the same Bernstein who later worked as a journalist at the Washington Post, and, along with Bob Woodward, was heavily involved in solving the Watergate crisis. However, this story takes place earlier, between 1960 and 1965, a very exciting time with the election, administration, and murder of John F. Kennedy and the civil rights unrest. Bernstein was the right person in the right place at the right time; he was a native of Washington who had grown up in that area, and knew his way around. He started out at the very lowest level as a copy boy, went on to the dictation bank, and on to reporting stories. Although Bernstein was an excellent reporter for the Evening Star, his career there ended because he was not a college graduate, and the Evening Star decided its reporters should be college graduates. Bernstein was uninterested in school, barely graduated from high school, and flunked out of the University of Maryland. He found newspaper work much more exciting than school work as is shown in this excellent autobiography.½

Read this. Now.

I can't find the quote in the book, but there is a point where someone (McCord? Magruder?) is willing to finally tell all to the Senate committee. He didn't testify earlier because he did not trust that the Attorney General (John Mitchell) or the FBI Director (L. Patrick Grey) were not in Nixon's pocket. That was a good decision and is eerily resonant with the Trump White House.

The dramatic structure is controlled by real events, but captivating. The origin is the break-in at the Watergate. Then each clue uncovers three more clues. The web gets very large, then everything stalls before the election. Nobody will talk. There are setbacks, then the evidence points closer and closer to the White House, eventually converging on Nixon. But the President cannot be indicted.

From the afterword in the 40th anniversary edition:

The Watergate we wrote about in the Washington Post from 1972 to 1974 is not Watergate as we know it today. It was only a glimpse into something far worse. By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise.

For Trump, I would substitute "commercial enterprise".

One tiny complaint. This could use a much more detailed index. For example, it doesn't list James McCord. I'm sure that Bernstein and Woodward view the actual reporting as the official record, but most of us don't have NEXUS/LEXUS to dig through that. For us, this book is the story of Watergate and Nixon's crimes.

Enjoyed the Washington DC scenery and the story of life in the newsroom before computers, but Bernstein doesn't know when to leave the party. I was ready to end the chase long before he stopped running.

I think it's pretty clear by this point that I love books like this, ones that focus on very in-depth journalism into one issue and this is probably the most well known of those stories. I really enjoyed reading this. Yes, it can be a little dry at parts but the magnitude of the story really made me want to keep reading.


I saw the movie version of this a few years ago. I think that's a really good movie but it just can't completely demonstrate just how much was going on in this story. I think sometimes this story gets turned into just a story about journalists meeting with secret sources in parking garages and while it is that, it also is a story that started with just a couple of guys and some suspicious checks and it could have easily ended right there. The amount of work and persistence that went into this is truly astounding. The cover of my edition describes this as the greatest reporting story of all time and I wouldn't argue with that. The legwork that Woodward and Bernstein did is commendable and something I bet so many journalists today admire and try to model. I wasn't alive when this story was breaking but I would think that this tale of excellent journalism inspired many people to pursue this profession.


I'm sure there aren't that many people who haven't read this book or at least seen the movie. If you were like me, I absolutely do recommend reading this book. It really is remarkable how large a story this was and how much was uncovered after starting with so little information. Definitely worth a read.

Style wise this read simply (except for the myriad of names and sources that were hard to keep straight) like a newspaper article. No descriptions. No fluff.

There are many things to be learned to be learned from this book. Among my favorites...

1. "Fake News" is not a new accusation. It has been touted by authority figures before.
2. There was a time when authority figures were largely trusted. Myself, being raised in my time, was quite willing to go straight to the top with my mental suspicion (and this from someone who vaguely remembering the movie thought he was framed). But Bernstein and Woodward, suspicious as they were, never went that far until it got that far. Trust, once broken, is often irreparable.
3. Admission of wrongdoing enables more trust than covering up wrongdoing.
4. Ultimately everyone at some point must ask and answer for themselves the following question: Is it ethical to use unethical means to help a "good"** cause suceed?
5. This is something I would highly recommend as a must read list for anyone considering running for president. Except I worry that the message they would take away would be "Don't get caught." I prefer the lesson "It's kinda impossible to hide illegal and immoral conduct for very long." Just ask Nixon who, most recently, was spoofed in a Dr. Who episode.
6. At what point do we forgive Nixon? I don't know. Which leads to...
7. When do we forgive Clinton? Are bullies in any form, blustering, silent, or suave, worth remembering with any degree of honor for time served? And..
8. Are we so desensitized to this sort of dirty play that it just doesn't matter any more? (aka whatever is happening with Russians, Mueller, etc).
9. and let's not let the media off the hook either. I feel like Bernstein and Woodward wanted stories that didn't confirm previous personal bias. Nowadays I'm not really ever sure that personal bias doesn't enter into it (See Simon Sinek).

* Let the record show I thought it was rather sad that expletives were scattered throughout this book, yet there was a time when a direct source uttered a swear and the writers covered up that one word by saying they wouldn't want to darken our ears with that word. It included every possible word and those, mostly, could have been omitted.

** and what really is a good cause? I'm not sure this qualifies, Mr. Nixon.

First read this in 1975 as a required book in a class, of course, at that time, I really did not "get it"-Now 40 years later it is riveting....enjoying every second.

Getting Hillary once again.½

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, the dean of Vatican journalists, tell the amazing story of Pope John Paul II. At once compelling journalism, drama, history, and biography, His Holiness reveals how John Paul II has used his global pulpit to make headway in the world political arena. of photos.

Un retour intéressant sur un épisode incroyable et un personnage bien complexe.½

Journalism at it's best - both interesting and educational to read about the work that exposed Nixon and his accomplices. Four decades later, it's more relevant than ever.

The possible parallels to modern times engender hope.

Bob Woodward identifica a "Garganta Profunda" como W. Mark Felt. Este hombre le permitió a él y a Carl Bernstein revelar el caso conocido como Watergate que acabó con la renuncia del presidente de Estados Unidos Richard Nixón.