Woodward & Bernstein's Long Goodbye (Soon to Be a Film Starring...)

Media Event

by Michael Janeway

Once upon a time, “two young men precipitated the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War.”So reads some of the jacket copy on the paperback reissue of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All The President’s Men. Under the title and by-line of this volume appear the words. “Now a film from Warner Bros, starring" you know who. whose intense faces, rather than those of the authors, grace the book’s cover. Redford. Woodward. Bernstein. Hoffman. reporting. “precipitating.” starring, by-line, headline, book, movie rights . . . Distinctions blur. Somewhere there is someone—presumable a production editor at Warner Books (“A Warner Communications Company”)— who made sure this line runs down the binding of the reissue of All The President’s Men: “MOVIE TIE-IN.”

“MOVIE-IN,” second book tie-in. And all that has followed in recent weeks: widely reported furor over second book tie-in. Mounting millions of dollars of book, book club, serialization, paperback, and simultaneous release of movie tie-in.¹ Lots of people unsettled about aspects of all this tie-in. Then, on page 424 of THE FINAL DAYS by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, come the now famous words that, for me at least, tie this noisy confusion of news, books, and show biz up in knots: Nixon to Kissinger, after the praying. crying, drinking, curling-up-on-the-floor scene: “Henry, please don’t ever tell anyone that I cried and that I was not strong.”

What’s wrong with that line?

Forget for the moment, if possible, the storm of news stories about the advance excerpts of The Final Days; by their very nature those stories were going to be “sensational.”News is news. Reviews of the book itself are now catching up with the controversy that preceded even the book’s prepublication serialization in Newsweek, and are pointing out that The Final Days, read cover to cover, is a much more painstaking, even plodding account of the inner workings of the Nixon White House and the deterioration of the former President’s legal and political position than the excerpts, news stories, and headlines would suggest. But there is something wrong with the Nixon-toKissinger line quoted above, something that goes beyond questions of how one documents one’s reporting, questions of taste, or questions of compassion. And there is something wrong with The Final Days, despite its many virtues (and despite the obvious fascination it holds for people. Between the lines of Simon and Schuster’s Zieglerian press release on its price overrun is a longer line of readers hungry to buy the book they love to say they hate).

“Henry, please don’t ever tell anyone. . . .” But he had already told his aides Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft some of what happened: Eagleburger was listening on an extension when Nixon, “drunk" and “out of control.” called with his plea. So someone or ones told, and however Woodward and Bernstein got it. they in turn told the world. It hasn’t been denied. On the contrary, the various blasts directed at the authors by some of the leaky principals are notable for their lameness. David Eisenhower aboutfaced from the observation that the book was “by and large . . . accurate” to a written statement of criticism. Kissinger’s own response advanced the art of neither-confirm-nor-deny but did not get that pious scold out of what H. R. Haldeman would call “the problem area": the Secretary of State had his spokesman say, “Excerpts the Secretary has seen of the material from the book of which he has personal knowledge contain too much gossip, too mans inaccuracies, distortions, and misrepresentations to be dealt with.” Well, shut my mouth!

“. . . that I cried and that I was not strong.” Even in context, even doing one’s best to read the book out of the glare of its publicity, something is wrong in the telling. Kissinger’s spokesman said, “The Secretary believes these excerpts show an indecent lack of compassion and lack of essential human understanding on the part of the authors.” And many people would agree.

I don’t. Once Kissinger said whatever he said about the incident in spite of the embargo Nixon begged him to observe, I don’t see how the embargo applied to Woodward and Bernstein. (The Secretary, in fact, has protested entirely too much over the years, with too many inaccuracies, distortions, and misrepresentations for his protests now to be . . . dealt with.)

What’s wrong with the line, I think, is that the presentation of the wretchedness of the whole scene tells us both too much and too little. Here is Nixon (let us assume Woodward and Bernstein have their account straight; Kissinger has not specified that they don’t) in extremis, with no one to do some very human breaking down with, no one to go into the fetal position with but his secretary of state, a man he has never wholly trusted. And with good reason. For this same man who prays alone with Nixon as the President accepts disgrace—an action and a moment implying intimacy and trust—also monitors all their phone conversations. Everybody bugged everybody, and though Nixon. Kissinger, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, et al. hardly invented the practice, they carried it to extremes of obsessiveness—as if it, rather than the substance of what was going on and being said, was what was important. The family that prays together and also bugs to excess and also talks so derisively about each other (they are all always ridiculing each other as homosexuals, we are told) must be internally corrupt, tacking in any sense of security founded on integrity. Such a family does not stay together.

But that’s not Woodward and Bernstein’s story. They are not moralists. If the complete story of the Nixon Administration has any morals (in the Aesopian sense), I doubt that more than a handful of indicted or unindicted coconspirators or sources close to them know right down to the bottom line what they are. Woodward and Bernstein have no pretensions to being anything but reporters. True, the narrative voice here is the voice of God (or his spokesman). jumping awfully assuredly from lines like “The lawyers knew . . . .” or “Garment became angry to dialogue reported now within quotation marks, now without (“Ford was not good enough to be President of the United States, Haig said . . . ‘Do you know what could happen in the Middle East?' Haig asked again”).

Woodward and Bernstein have a story, a long journalistic account of “the final days”; a book, in fact. But I do not think that The Final Days is the final word. Perhaps some reaction against the authors will drive them or their parties in profit to the rationale that everything they have told us is, after all, the stuff of history, right down to and including what one must presume is another violation of a confidence, that between Mrs. Nixon and a White House doctor about the state of her marital relotions. (After all. it’s relevant: it helps explain Nixon’s isolation, and how it was that he turned to Kissinger on that night of ruination.) Then let those who keep count of such things tote up scores on what it’s okay or out of bounds, obscene or objective, to say when, in what circumstances, about whom: FDR and Lucy Mercer Rutherford, JFK and Judith Campbell Exner, dead or alive, author or subject, in the White House with a finger on the button or long buried, murdered suspiciously, or exiled. History. or Gossip? Just questions of timing, and of quality of documentation? I don’t think so.

The Final Days (not unlike the inside story of the making of the movie of All The President’s Men) is meat for historians. It is daring and effective journalism. Damn it, it’s worth buying at whatever price. But to qualify as history it ought to do more than redramatize a ghastly experience, in the course of which no viewer of nationwide television could have failed to suspect that the leading player was a broken and possibly unhinged man: to qualify as history it would have to take one closer to, rather than further from, a sense of the whole truth. I don’t think The Final Days does. I am more convinced after reading it than I was before of a proposition expressed in print during the Watergate crisis: that Nixon did not decline and fall simply because of the cover-up of a politically motivated burglary; simply because of lie upon lie revealed at the moment of truth by tape recordings previously withheld. There had to be much more (I think), of a much more serious nature, probably known, or coming to be known in part, to those running the various investigations and proceedings closing in on Nixon. That would be, at the very least, money, extraordinary amounts of it by standard political payoff measure ("I am not a crook”). Accordingly, I happen to think that Nixon’s questions to Kissinger before he collapsed on the floor of the White House Lincoln Room make sense, and that his discomfiture is understandable:

Between sobs. Nixon was plaintive. What had he done to the country and its people? He needed some explanation. How had it come to this? How had a simple burglary, a breaking and entering, done all this? . . . He was hysterical.

I don’t believe a simple burglary did do all that. I rather think Woodward and Bernstein do. It has been their strength to report what they could get their hands on, ex-police reporters that they are; to find sources to back it up. and to persuade their editors to publish it. Nixon seems so irrational and uncomprehending in the accounts Woodward and Bernstein have pieced together. I think, precisely because their store is not as full as what the work of historians will demand in order to make what happened comprehensible.

For now, Woodward and Bernstein have created some problems for themselves. as well as pleasure and pain for the rest of us. One big problem is their complicity, and that of their associates in Washington. New York, and Hollywood, in the self-congratulatory myth that the press destroyed Nixon; indeed that these “two voting men precipitated the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War.” (That last is an easy line to, shall we say, misunderstand.) Nixon destroyed himself, and Woodward and Bernstein were present at the destruction, and more than mere witnesses at that. But what is good for the Warner Communications box offices and Simon and Schuster sales this week is not necessarily good for Woodward’s or Bernstein’s or anybody else’s ability to distinguish reality from hype next time round.

On the question of who—in reality— precipitated both crisis and stink, and of where responsibility rests for what shook and sickened the nation. it is best to turn back from Woodward and Bernstein and all the publicity, wanted and unwanted, that surrounds their work, and listen to one of their sources. Leonard Garment, a White House counsel, was one President’s man who seems to have kept both his head and a reputation for decency intact through all the President’s days. Woodward and Bernstein write of him in The Final Days:

On Garment’s stage, life was a process of being belter than the worst side of oneself. But Nixon, he said, had a peculiar monster perched on his shoulder that whispered into his ear—and onto his tapes. With the release of the transcripts Nixon had allowed America into the ugliness of his mind—as if he wanted the world to participate in the despoliation of the myth of presidential behavior. The transcripts. Garment thought, were an invasion of the public’s privacy, of its right not to know.