YouSaid · the spoken record

Carl Bernstein

lines on the record: 86
first: 2017-02-02
most recent: 2017-02-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The notion of they didn't need to do this breaking into Watergate Watergate was in large part about undermining the whole system of free elections in this country. And it's interesting that we now have, while you and I are talking and we're talking about the specter of the Russians, they're undermining our pre-elections in this country.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tapping burglaries, all kinds of things. Nixon was a criminal president, unlike any in our history from the first days of his presidency until he left. And from his tapes, we now know that with all the evidence that goes with it. You can listen to Richard Nixon a year before the Watergate break in, one year to the day. He wants to get some papers out of the Brookings Institution, a think tank here in Washington that he thinks will make his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, look terrible compared to himself, Richard Nixon, and his conduct of the war in Vietnam. And Nixon says, firebomb the goddamn place. Break into Brookings. I don't care what you have to do to get those documents. Get those goddamn documents. And for the next 13 days, Richard Nixon tried to go back and have that firebombing or burglary committed at Brookings until finally.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't absurd because, and nor is the mythology of the cover-up worse than the crime true in Watergate. Richard Nixon was a criminal president from the day that he became president of the United States, as we now know partly from in the last few weeks. It's been established, imagine this, after all these years, it's now been established through Nixon's notes that he tried to undermine the Paris peace talks that were taking place under Lyndon Johnson so that he could win the election rather than there be peace in Vietnam. He knew that if there were peace said he would have lost him. And the result is that probably 25,000 American kids lost their lives, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Indo-Chinese people. It's a huge event in our history. Right away when Nixon became president, he also set up an internal apparatus for illegal wire.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partly by talking to the wives of some of these burglars and establishing their connections with the CIA, I at first thought that this thing was going to head toward the CIA, not toward Nixon's re-election committee or the president of the United States. And that was where it seemed to be going in the early.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was obvious that this was a hell of a story, but what it was was very unclear. And the next day it was determined that Woodward and I would come into the paper. The next day was a Sunday. And so we were in there by ourselves and we started making calls around. And very quickly it was determined that one of the burglars was also a security consultant for the Committee for the re-election of the President of the United States. And so there were a lot of holy shit moments. The first one you see in the movie of all the presidents' men when Woodward says just that at the court house when this same security consultant also says he works for the CIA. So right away it was apparent that something momentous had happened here”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the two of us were kind of thrown together in that first story that carried the byline of our police reporter, Alfred E. Lewis, another story in itself because there were three police reporters and you'll get a kick out of this at the time in Washington who I had known from back in my star days from the Washington Post to Washington Star and the Washington Daily News. And by that time between them, they had more than 100 years in the cop shop, as we called it. And Al Lewis was a great police reporter and the first Watergate story carries his byline. And then there's a list of a bunch of others, myself and Woodward included, who participated in it.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watch the arraignment of the suspects, of the burglars who had been arrested wearing rubber gloves and wearing and in business suits and with $100 bills. Slightly suspicious. Yeah, slightly suspicious.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ease my way onto this story. It sounded a hell of a lot more interesting than my Henry Howe profile. So I said to the city editor, look, I can make some checks. And I was known as somebody who was very good at getting information on a telephone out of people. And I had good police contacts. I said, I'm going to make some calls. And I got on the phone and I got to some people in Florida who were the wives of the Watergate burglars, and I got to some people at the Watergate. And so I participated. Bob Woodward had been, he was new to the paper. He had been sent down to the courthouse a few blocks from where we're recording this to”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at the time of the Watergate break-in, I was the chief Virginia correspondent, one of two, actually, for the Washington Post. So I lived in Richmond, the capital of Virginia during a legislative session, covered the legislature. And on that day, I was writing a profile of a truly great politician running for governor of Virginia named Henry Howe, a real progressive who had been the lieutenant governor of Virginia, almost became the governor. And I was writing this profile of him in the office, and there was a lot of activity around the city desk, a lot of commotion, and I went up to see what it was about, and it was about this break-in that occurred at Democratic National Headquarters. And the movie of all the president's men is quite accurate when it shows me trying to...”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was at that point, I had covered many, many things on the local side of the paper. I had gone there in 1966. The break-in was on June 17th, 1972, so I had six years at the post. I'd covered the courts. I had covered the counties, the suburban counties. I was a rock critic of the paper. I was the part-time rock critic of the paper.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prizes for writing news on deadline, feature writing, whole bunch of things. And at that point, I applied to go to the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the post hired me partly on the strength of what they knew from my work at the star. But I was the only person hired at the Washington Post without a college degree in a good number of years and would be the last person hired at the post without a college degree.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly as a young reporter. Exactly. And nor was I university. Nor was I going to make it through any college. And so this favorite editor at the star said, look, come to Elizabeth, New Jersey with me. I'll let you do anything you want to. You can write a column. You can cover up whatever you want. And I was there for one year and I was lucky enough to win a whole lot of...”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, at the star, even though they insisted I had to finish college, they let me cover all kinds of things, including the civil rights struggles. It's so funny because there's no college.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And most of them would order these big bird bath martinis for lunch of which they would have two, and indeed I started to drink bird bath martinis at the age of 16 or 17.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was going to say there was a tremendous amount of drinking involved, including by this youngster. And every afternoon, a group of in shifts, people would go to a bar, a restaurant called Harrigan's in southwest Washington”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, the camaraderie. Of these people, which was very different than the Washington Post when I got to the post. As I say, the post was a very foreign experience to me after the star. And these people socialized together After the paper, the Sunday paper had been put together on Saturday night, we would every Saturday, we would go to somebody's house. I bet there were a libation.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I write in the beginning of this book. I was raised by these wonderful people who even today I get a lump in the tummy when I think about them.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a dictationist, especially in an afternoon newspaper, was important because you put on a headset reporters out there dictating their stories. Basically, a rewrite, man. Well, exactly. You help the reporter calling in his story. You would type his story for him, but you would also help him write it on the phone. And we had an amazing dictation bank, as it was called, people like Lance Morrow, the great SAS for Time magazine, Mort Kendrachi, Ben Fordi, who went on to become the architecture critic for the Washington Post and art critic for the Washington Post. A great, great group of people, Warren Ho went to the New York Times eventually. And we became like a family. Now, most of these guys were five years older than I, but we...”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was kind of adopted by these fabulous older people at the Star who saw some talent in me that perhaps I didn't even see in myself. And they let me do amazing things. And by the time I had been there a year, I became what was called a dictationist.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bracket to Civil War a hundred years. And, of course, it's the era of the civil rights movement. It's the Kennedy Johnson years. And I was lucky and the Kennedy assassination, which I covered, in fact, you know, watching we're doing this during the week of Donald Trump's inauguration and the first inauguration that I covered was Kennedy's inauguration. In the cold, I was out there on Pennsylvania Avenue with a pair of earmuffs on, covering the crowd. Full day, it was freezing. But I was able to do everything.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost everything in this city. My years at the Washington Star, in which I was able to do almost everything that you could dream of as a teenager. And I became a reporter at nineteen there at the start. That's what this memoir I'm now writing is about my years at the star, which ultimately ended in failure because the star, even though they had made me a reporter, insisted that I had to graduate from college if I was going to stay on the staff. And there was no way I was going to graduate from college. So at the end and at the end of this book, actually, this memoir I'm writing, I leave the star broken because I don't want to finish college and I go to Elizabeth, New Jersey with a favorite editor from the star who Became the editor of a paper in Elizabeth. But my year is at the star, 1960 to 65.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of traffic and the circulation had increasingly moved to the suburbs along with, especially in Washington, D.C. white flight after Brown versus Board of Education to the suburbs. So here is the thing about this town that I grew up in.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Newspapers were in trouble because it was very difficult to get to. And the star was an afternoon. It was an afternoon paper and it was very difficult to get the trucks out to the suburbs.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The case Well, the post was the number one paper by circulation because in 1954, Catherine Graham's father and her husband, Catherine's husband, had had the foresight to buy the Times Herald, a competing morning newspaper, and combine it with the Washington Post, which was by no means the biggest paper in town at the time in 1954. And the genius of this was really that The Times Herald had a huge number of comic pages. And the combination of the Times Herald comics with the Washington Post comics meant that the Washington Post Times Herald, this combined paper, as it was called for a while, had more comics than any paper in America, as well as the circulation that built it up. And it was an era in which this early 60s, in which television news was beginning to come into its own afternoon.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just great, great reporters all across the board as well as a collection of drunks and hangers on. But by and large, the staff was fabulous, and we beat the post day in and day out. It was a better newspaper than the Washington Post in the early 1960s. I think that's awesome.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I took this typing test at the star, and the guy who was in charge of hiring copy boys thought it was astonishing that I could type 90 words a minute and he hired me. And I went to work in the summer of 1960 at the height of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign as a copy boy.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was amazing. It was amazing, and I did not get hired. I was just around my 16th birthday, and I was still growing. I was probably about 5'2", 5'3". And they told me to come back when I was a little older. And I started coming down there every few days to make a nuisance of myself and say that I really wanted to go to work there as a copy boy. And they had me take a typing test. And one of the things that in my terrible student that I had done was I was so sick of taking shop classes and making useless wooden trays for to put toothpicks in with chiseled fish, wooden fish, is that I took typing with the girls in the 10th grade and I could type 90 words a minute. It's pretty damn good. I was very good as a typist.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to work for an insurance company. It was kind of so calm and low key and people didn't yell copy. In fact, there's a hilarious moment during Watergate at the height of everything where there was a copy desk editor who had been at the star with me and some huge story was breaking. And he yelled instinctively, which you've never heard in the Washington Post. Copy. And I instinctively jumped up from my desk.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was that the star, this conservative newspaper in its editorial policies, had covered My father's union and a strike by the government cafeteria workers with great fairness, whereas the Washington Post, the liberal paper in town, had a government affairs columnist who had red baited the union and the strike. And so I got this interview for a job when I was 16 as a copy boy. And I took one look at this newsroom and thought it was the most remarkable thing I had ever seen. There was an excitement. What was going on and energy? And people were running around yelling copy. Was it straight out of the front page? It was. And Star was very much an old-fashioned newspaper, more so than the post in terms of being a tradition. When I went to Washington Post, I thought I was going to...”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a pretty terrible student in school. But the one thing that I could do was I was capable of writing a little bit, and I had taken a journalism course in the 10th grade. But most of the time, really, I was spending at the pool hall and in Silver Spring, Maryland, where we had moved to the suburbs on my 11th birthday from the city. And my father got the idea since it was questionable whether or not I was going to get out of high school, much less go to college That maybe he could get me a job as a copy boy at the Washington Star, the Conservative Afternoon paper in Washington, a great, great newspaper. And the reason for the star as opposed to the Washington Post.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, certainly by the time of the march on Washington, the American Jewish community was very much involved in desegregation. This was a southern town and the organized Jewish community here was not so involved. I think there were an awful lot of Jewish organizations that felt that Jews might be hurt if they were too active as a community in organized desegregation. In the town. This was really a movement led by local people, mostly on the left in terms of the whites who were involved. The African community was united around this in Washington, D.C., and it was a struggle that went on for a good number of years until it was decided in the courts before Brown v. Board of Education that public accommodations, that black people had a right to eat in restaurants downtown.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to integrate the lunch counters, which we were successful in doing in doing. There were white kids, there were black kids, the swimming pools here were segregated by the District of Columbia government. They were drained during some summers so people couldn't swim together in them. It was a terrible, terrible blight on the country. And so that's really what my parents did. And Jay Edgar Hoover was also a native of this town. And he's probably, I think, the most important non-presidential figure in many ways in American history of the 20th century. And his power was immense. And he too looked at Desegregation as a left-wing activity, as is evident from my parents' FBI files. So that's really the background of how I grew up. Interesting.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And municipal workers. Union. In the process, this was a, I'm a native of Washington, a second generation native. My mom is born here. And this was a Jim Crow segregated town. I went to segregated public schools in the District of Columbia until Brown versus Board of Education in the middle of the sixth grade and the companion case to Brown actually is voling versus sharp, which is the District of Columbia school system. The court decided both cases on that day in 1954. But this town was rigidly segregated. An African American could not eat in a downtown restaurant, could not get served, could not stay at White Hotels. And so my parents were among the leaders and very active in trying to desegregate this town and succeeded at it in public accommodations particularly, restaurants. I was on picket lines as a little kid downtown.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dad worked for the government, right? Well, the history is my father graduated from Columbia Law, came to Washington to be an investigator for a great investigation of the railroad trusts during the New Deal. The investigation resulted in the breakup of the railroad trusts. And during that process, he became active in the Government Workers Union. And after this investigation had done its work, he decided to go to work for the union, then called United Public Workers as an organizer. And so he then spent a good number of years as a union organizer for government workers here and in Washington and in San Francisco and really built it into a force, this particular public employees union, which was really the first federal workers.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, one of the things that I deal with in that memoir is the fact that my parents had been members of the Communist Party at one time. But really what my parents...”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I come from a left wing background. Both my parents were real left-wing people, and it was the McCarthy era, and they had been under FBI surveillance for a good number of years. And when I did a memoir about growing up in a left-wing family during the McCarthy era called Loyalties, the son's memoir. I got my parents FBI files, which came up to about chest high, and I went through them all in there. Indeed, there was a report from T2, as he was called, observing and taking down license tags at my bar mitzvah.”
2017-02-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 118 - Carl Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source