Washington D.C., June 17, 1972. A group of men age caught breaking in to the Watergate Hotel. J. Edgar Hoover had just died, leaving a power vacuum in the FBI, and Nixon was facing reelection.
Turmoil is everywhere and it would have been so easy for editors at the Washington Post to simply turn away a story on something as insignificant as a burglary. Except. The Democratic National Offices were the units being burgled inside the Watergate Hotel.
So would begin a set of career-making stories by a duo who are the proverbial Odd Couple. Woodward was well-connected with an honorable discharge from the Navy. Neat, tidy, and logical to a fault, Woodward's sniff test was key to any story the pair would write together. Bernstein had worked his way up from a copy boy to a reporter's desk. He rode his bicycle in to the office most days, and was the impulsive one who jumped on leads.
Both young men were cunning, suave even, when the situation called for it. And it definitely took the both of them working together to uncover what they did.
I first tried to read this book more than a decade ago, and set it aside after the events covered in the Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman film. I just did not have a lot of the context to know who was whom and why this other person was a big deal. This time I had a U.S. history course that used Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" as a syllabus. I also had all of this great information fresh in my head from fellow Washington Post reporter Betty Medgar's The Burglary. I had so many of the names and positions in my head it was easier for me to know what was going on, and to pick up some nuance of the situation.
This book I would reccommend to anyone with an interest in 1970's America, Richard Nixon, or even the writers of The Washington Post. It was definitely written for the folks who lived through it. If you're only an honorary child of the 70's like me, you may have a difficult time.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4/5
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