Carl Bernstein, currently a Contributing Editor at Vanity
Fair Magazine, is best known as half of Woodward &
Bernstein (a.k.a. "Woodstein"), the pair of Washington
Post investigative reporters who broke the Watergate story
that led to Republican President Richard M. Nixon's
resignation. For this reporting he shared a 1973 Pulitzer
Prize with Bob Woodward.
Carl Bernstein was born in February 1944, the red diaper
son (communist) of a radical labor union lawyer and activist
mother. "I went with my mother, and I was on a lot of
those picket lines as a kid," he told an interviewer in
2002. "I did not like the fact that my parents were of the
left. There was a period there that I didn't like it at
all. And I was pretty rebellious about it."
In his 1989 book Loyalties: A Son's Memoir (Simon &
Schuster), Bernstein describes how he rebelled against his
father Alfred's atheism by insisting on being Bar
Mitzvahed. "You don't want me to be Jewish," he recounted
telling his parents. "This has to do with your politics.
And it's not right. And you don't really believe in
freedom. It's communism…."
Bernstein acknowledged in this memoir that both his
parents were secret members of the Communist Party USA
(CPUSA), two of thousands brought by the Party to
Washington, D.C. during Democratic President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.
"You're going to prove [anti-Communist U.S. Senator
Joseph] McCarthy was right," Bernstein quotes his father
telling him when he was writing his memoir, "because all
he was saying is that the system was loaded with
Communists. And he was right…. I'm worried about the kind
of book you're going to write and about cleaning up
McCarthy. The problem is that everybody said he was a
liar; you're saying he was right…. I agree that the
[Communist] Party was a force in the country."
In 1960 Bernstein, then 16, began working as a copy boy at
the Washington Star, which he later described as "a great
newspaper…a better newspaper than the Washington Post at
the time." In November 1963 Bernstein transcribed then-
Star (later Post) reporter David Broder's telephoned story
from Dallas, Texas in 1963 on the day President John F.
Kennedy was assassinated.
Bernstein entered the University of Maryland but dropped
out in 1965 to work full-time as a reporter for the
Elizabeth Journal in New Jersey.
In 1966 Bernstein was hired by the Washington Post to
cover police, court and city hall beats. In 2002 he
described the Post he joined as biased. "At the time, the
Washington Post had, deservedly so, a reputation to some
extent for slanting stories, and it did." By contrast, its
rival the Star, he said, "really had the best of old-
fashioned journalistic, play-it-straight values." The
Star, Bernstein said, also had "great reporters as well as
some real characters straight out of [the play] The Front
Page," while the Post was much more sterile, rigid and
conformist. "When I went to work at the Washington Post,"
he wrote, "I thought I was going to work for an insurance
company. I really did."
In June 1972 one of Post Metro Division's newest
reporters, Bob Woodward, was assigned to cover a petty
burglary of the Democratic Party's headquarters at the
Watergate complex. After doing a sidebar piece to
Woodward's story, Bernstein persuaded editors to assign
him to cover it as well. The two reporters used marginally
ethical methods, including unnamed sources and
confidential telephone and credit card records to link the
arrested burglars to the Committee to Re-elect the
President (called by them "CREEP").
Source:
www.discoverthenetwork.org