Woodward and Bernstein are the guys who did the early reporting on Watergate, authored the bestselling book about their journalistic experiences, and got to be portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in a really, really good & well loved movie. And they are described as chalk and cheese; two very different people with clashing personas.
They're superstars in the journalism community, they have footnotes in U.S history books, and I don't have any conclusions about them that others haven't already made. I just think they're neat...
Oh and ''Woodstein'' is their cute little portmanteau name given to them by one of their editors.
Bob Woodward
He's an enemy of the Ghostbusters. He enjoys Ovaltine. He's a book-writing powerhouse. And he looks like a scared baby kitten. There's something evil deep down in him.
Bob was born on March 26, 1943, in Geneva, Illinois, and grew up in Wheaton. His parents were divorced early on, and his Dad took custody and merged his family with his new wife's family Brady Bunch-style. It kind of messed Bob up a bit, especially when he used his budding investigative skills to figure out that his dad was buying more gifts for his new wife's kids than for his own :-{
Bob worked as a janitor at his Republican-lawyer dad's law office, and liked snooping on all the records and learning all the dirt about the people in the Wheaton community. Divorces, child custody cases, and financial debts, that kind of stuff. Bob would later write an experimental(?), fictional novel inspired by all the hidden misfortunes in his town, but his draft was rejected by the publishing company, and Bob ended up burning all drafts of his book.
Wanting to be financially independent from his dad(??), Bob got an rotc scholarship to pay for his Yale education, meaning that after he graduated, he would have to serve a few years in the military. He became a Navy lieutenant with control of nuclear launch codes, living on a few different boats during the Vietnam War. Desipte being out at sea, Bob didn't support the war and marched in his uniform at an anti-war protest later on in 1969. How sweet.
After a few years in the Navy he started working with the Pentagon in D.C, doing communications stuff and whatever. But while living in D.C., Bob took a liking to the Washington Post's coverage of Vietnam and thought they had a better grasp on it than the actual generals in the Pentagon.
Wanting to work at the post, Bob sent a letter asking for a job despite having no reporting experience, and got passed along because of his Yale education. He got rejected at first, so he went and got a job at a smaller newspaper in the area, then returned to the Post and got hired. The Post editors liked his insistent, hard-working attitude and promoted him often. A lot of his fellow reporters (especially Carl Bernstein) were a bit jealous and saw him as a boot-licker.
Before Watergate, Bob wrote some restaurant inspection stories, but also got some early political stuff in there with a story about George Wallace's assassination attempt.
Beautiful Pictures
Carl Bernstein
Greasy, pushy, antsy, veryyyy busakawa. He was an avid biker (at least during the time of Watergate), and desperately needed an adderall prescription. And there's a very, very small chance he fucked a CIA agent at a D.C. party in the early 70s.
Carl was born on February 14, 1944 (a Valentine's Day baby) in Washington, D.C. His parents were secular Jews dedicated to fighting for civil rights/desegregation and were a part of the Communist party for a little while... during the 1940s and 50s. A notoriously terrible time in U.S. history to be a communist/socialist. Itty Carl wasn't having it; he was rebellious against his already rebellious parents... (tbh I don't fully understand Carl's backstory-feelings, but he seemed angry at his parents for seemingly putting the family in danger for supporting progressive causes (ex: FBI agents were snooping around at Carl's bar mitzvah). And even though I think Carl's parents were really cool for their activism in a super conservative time, I guess that if you were a kid who wasn't fully aware of stuff like institutionalized racism, maybe you'd not understand the point of sacrificing your safety. But I'm not totally sure and it seemed pretty complicated...yeah. Also he goes more into this stuff in his book Loyalties: A Son's Memoir)
Carl was a terrible student, barely graduating from High School. He was a big truancy guy, driving around without a license and going to the pool hall during school hours.
At some point in his high school career, he got tired of sawing pieces of wood together in shop class, and took a typing class and found he was good with the typewriter. Carl's dad, worried about his delinquent son's future, took notice of his typing skills and got him an interview with a newspaper called The Washington Star.
After a few interviews, he was hired as a copy boy and became absolutely infatuated with his job & the newsroom, it being way more exciting than school.
Carl had a kind of found-family thing with the Washington Star people; they trained him to be a reporter and they got to cover all the freaky stuff (race riots & assassinations) that where going on in the 1960s. He got a lot of reporting experience, ONCE AGAIN he goes more into it in his book Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom.
Carl went to college at the University of Maryland for a bit (to avoid the draft lol), but didn't apply himself much (and later dropped out) since he was more focused on his reporter work.
Things changed when The Washington Star changed management and decided they only wanted college grads to work for them, so after another job at a different newspaper in New Jersey, he made it to The Washington Post and worked as a reporter there.
At the Post, Carl wrote some interesting articles pre-Watergate (my favorite one is where he complains about U.S. record vinyl pressing quality).
He was pretty erratic & messy at work (according to many sources his desk was disgusting) and often missed deadlines. He was basically on thin ice all up until the Watergate scandal.
Beautiful Pictures
Rye's Long, Hopefully Comprehensible Woodstein Timeline
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Watergate Trenches (1972-1974)
- - On the morning of the Watergate burglary, Bob is chosen by his editor at the Washington Post to go out to the courthouse for the trial of the Watergate burglars, Carl snakes his way into the story, first contributing by making some calls to get sources, then just stealing Bob's story and the break-in and re-writing it. Their editor, Harry Rosenfield, assigns them both to the story.
- - They investigate Watergate, following checks and visiting Republicans to extract info. Their Watergate burglary story continues to grow in scale with more Nixon whitehouse people being involved. Bob & Carl are both young, single, don't have much else going on in their lives, so they put everything into reporting on the Nixon Whitehouse. They're all greasy & gloopy, skipping showers and living off of McDonalds. The Post is under a lot of pressure because if they get any details wrong in their story, their credibility could get shot down. Still... Ben Bradlee and Kathrine Graham trust them enough to let them keep reporting. Their book and the 1976 movie go more into detail about their work
- - Robert Redford likes their articles and is intrigued by their dynamic; he offers to buy the rights to their book IF they decide to write one. They ultimately do... welcome All The President's Men. Carl & Bob decide that the book will be about their experiences reporting on the story, giving an inside look at what exactly journalists do.
- - They put together their book at Bob's mom's beach house in Florida... A romantic summer getaway...
- - Carl & Bob are getting pretty famous by 1974, their work is being recognized and they're appearing in more articles and lecturing at colleges. Also Bob gets married
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THE DIVORCE (1975ish-1978)
- - By the time they're working on their book The Final Days (about Nixon's treacherous final days in office), Carl basically dropped off and is hanging out with his girlfriend Nora Ephron and fucking around in NYC, Bob isn't happy about that. He also seems a bit jealous of Nora but that's just my observation
- - All the President's Men THE MOVIE is released, Bob&Carl are fully in the limelight now that they're portrayed by hot actors. Also the movie is really good and is nominated for an Oscar.
- - Despite all the fame, Bob & Carl are fighting a lot now, mostly over Carl's work habits.
- - Carl leaves The Post in 1977 to move to NYC to be a professional novelist, Bob stays at the Post, gets promoted to an editor.
- - After the Final Days was published, they kinda don't talk to each other for a while.
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The Rekindling (1978-1989)
- - Bob gets divorced in 1978. Carl calls him about it and they revive their relationship and take long walks on the beach together. Yes they actually did that. They are so cute
- - Bob and Carl go through hell and back in the 1980s. Carl gets wrapped up in an affair with Margaret Jay (daughter of the British prime minister) while his now-wife Nora is pregnant with their second child. It's very messy; they get divorced, and Nora writes a book about it called Heartburn (their names and some details about them are changed, but the characters in the book are basically Nora and Carl.) The book is a huge success, and Nora Ephron's career pivots from being a food critic(??) to an even more respected writer, ultimately going on to make iconic romantic comedy movies. Carl is slut-shamed in periodicals for the rest of the 80s.
- - Bob is involved with the Jimmy's World scandal, where new Post reporter Janet Cooke fabricates a story about a child doing heroin. Bob & Ben Bradlee run the story, but once it wins a Pulitzer, it's found that the story is fake. Bob realises the errors in his ways with chasing the story instead of seeking help for this potentially real heroin-addict-kid.
- - Carl starts working at ABC but is a terrible boss and never comes to work. He's either out doing some womanizing shit at parties or at home suffering from stress and alcohol-induced migraines. Bob bails him out of jail for drunk driving and pretty much stays by Carl's side throughout all his calamities, and I can picture a lot of woodstein whump happening in the early 80s.
- - Bob writes a book called Wired about comedian John Belushi's drug abuse and death by overdose, but the reception is mixed since his reporting was very unforgiving. Bob gets waist-deep into the sludge of Hollywood drug culture in his book and he makes Belushi and the people around him look like no-good-enabler-assholes. Belushi's wife and fellow comedian friends want to kill Woodward now. (Wired later becomes a MOVIE in 1989 but it's really strange and weird and bad and metaphorical tomatoes are thrown at Bob when he attends the screening at Cannes film festival) (Note: a couple of biographers think that Bob wanted to write about John Belushi because of the addiction-spiral parallels he saw in John and Carl's lives. If that's true then that's... hmmmm)
- - Carl slowly starts to get himself back together (...mostly) and in the late 80s he gets back to writing a book about his communist-parent-trauma after procrastinating on it since the late 70s. (It's called Loyalties and I actually read this book and liked it! There are a lot of sweet moments in it and Carl's writing style was easy for me to follow) Bob along with other people help him stay motivated.
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Nowadays (1990-present)
- - Bob will not fucking stop writing president books.
- - Like there are THREE Trump books now. He's enjoying the profits... (Bob has 20 published books, most of them about U.S. government stuff. I have no interest in reading them, all besides the Nixon stuff ...sorry)
- - Carl also writes a few more books. One on the pope, one on Hillary Clinton (he's a #feminist now) and most recently one about being a copy boy at the Washington Star as a teenager.
- - Carl's on CNN sometimes and his webcam is really bad so I have a collection of unflattering, low-res pictures of him. Also I'm his 16th subscriber on Youtube
- - They need to write a gay memoir together before they die
Note: This goes without saying but I don't condone anything these two do, and while they're obviously very important to history and advocate for quality journalism, I wouldn't say I ''idolize'' them. They both have pretty assholish tendencies with Bob withholding information for the sake of book sales, and Carl for... well you can take a guess. I just like W&B for their overall cuteness together, and I get a kick out of trying to characterize them. Basically, they fit into my favorite shipping trope put perfectly here:
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