CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article Kitty Kelley's name was misspelled.
After spotting Romenesko's link to
yet another profile of Woodward & Bernstein, I clicked despite myself. I was busy and had no intention of reading the piece at the time. I figured I'd scan the top and print to read (or not) later.
Instead, I read all 8,700 words on the spot. It wasn't the headline or the lede that did this to me. They're pretty ordinary.
It was the story form. At that time of day, with deadlines pressing, there's no way I would have waded through a narrative that long. But confonted with the documentary, oral history style approach employed by the author, Alicia C. Shepard, I was hooked.
Consider the first couple of sub-heds:
"Bob Woodward on working as a teenager in his father's law office"
"Kathleen Woodward, Bob Woodward's first wife"
Call me superficial, an easy mark for snappy heds and tight blocks of copy. But you'd also have to call me a reader, seduced by a story form that jolted me from the status of maybe-read-later to read-it-all-now. If the story form is the barker outside the tent, it's the enterprising reporting and story-telling that keeps a reader engaged. And that's what happened to me here.
There's nothing new about oral history. It's often used to document big events such as September 11 or to chronicle the sweep of an era such as Civil Rights. But its impact on my reading of this piece got me thinking. Maybe it's an old tool we need to use more -- not just for massive projects but for profiles and issue stories, too.
Shepard, an assistant professor of journalism at American University, published her
oral history of the friendship between Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the September issue of
Washingtonian Magazine. Shepard, who has worked as reporter for the San Jose
Mercury News and as senior writer for
American Journalism Review, responded to two dozen e-mail questions from Poynter Online about the piece. An edited transcript follows:
Q. What kind of reader reaction were you hoping to provoke with this approach?
I never write hoping to provoke a reaction. I wanted to convey two things that I found fascinating. One, that Woodward & Bernstein are still close friends. That surprises many people, and also that they are now as important in our cultural history as the people they once wrote about.
By the way, Can you imagine saying: Bernstein and Woodward? They go together now like Rodgers and Hammerstein or Huntley and Brinkley or Thelma and Louise, or Leopold and Loeb. It's never the other way around.
Q. What's the reaction been like among readers you've heard from so far?
I've never written an article that has gotten as much attention and reaction from friends, colleagues, people I've never met. All of it positive. Ben Bradlee even liked it though he thought I wasted my time talking with a few people he didn't mention. But he said that was personal.
Q. At what point -- in the reporting or the writing -- did it occur to you to present the story this way?
I started out with the idea of using oral history in a narrative form. There was never any talk of doing it as a straight narrative, which Kitty Kelley wrote to tell me would not have been nearly as captivating.
Last year, with the Newseum, Cathy Trost and I wrote a book about how journalists handled September 11. We started out writing in a third-person narrative (i.e. Dan Rather stepped out of the shower and flicked on his favorite news program) but it came across as flat. We used the oral history format at the suggestion of uber-editor Shelby Coffey, and found it worked well.
In this case, Washingtonian uber-editor (anyone I like is an uber-editor) Bill O'Sullivan wanted to try the form. We started with the form and searched for a topic. I suggested Woodward and Bernstein for the above reasons.
Q. Is there something about this story that lends itself to this approach?
Not particularly. I think any strong narrative could use this format. My goal was to tell a story and to use this format. Meshing those goals together was the challenge. By the time I had done all the reporting (I started last October 2002), I knew the story I wanted to tell. With Bill's excellent sense of story, we crafted it together.
Carl is a complex guy with a lot of passion and drive who should not always be compared to the prodigiously talented, prolific, and highly disciplined Woodward, who is more reserved and shy than Carl.Maybe this form lends itself more to something I wanted to come across in the piece: that people's lives are complicated, that things are never as they seem, that nothing is black and white. Carl is not bad and Bob good, which is what I think too often comes across when they are written about or spoken about. There's a tendency to reduce them to caricatures. Bob: reporter sui generis whose phone calls are always returned, and Carl as a screw up. It's so far from the truth.
They are just different. They have different lives. Different goals. Different strengths. Comparing them is ridiculous. Carl is a complex guy with a lot of passion and drive who should not always be compared to the prodigiously talented, prolific, and highly disciplined Woodward, who is more reserved and shy than Carl. The older I get, the more I realize there are no black and whites, only grays. And it's the grays that are fascinating to explore. My intent was to portray Carl's and Bob's rich lives and how sudden fame affected them. Never did I want to make a judgment that one is better than the other.
I hope one reads the piece and has a sense of the journey they've taken since Watergate.
Q. What is this form, anyway? Have you seen stories told like this elsewhere? Has it got a name?
I'd call it an oral history. They are done in various ways, sometimes just to document an event. But it's been used often. Howell Raines employed it in "My Soul is Rested," to tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement. George Plimpton used it in a fascinating way to write about Truman Capote. Long ago, when I was in my 20s, I read Jean Stein's tale of Edie Sedgwick ("Edie: An American Biography"), using oral histories to tell of her short-but-fascinating-New York high-society, drug-saturated life. She was Andy Warhol's constant companion and dazzled everyone with her style and beauty. She died at 28 from drugs. I recall reading that and being blown away by the format.
There are straight oral histories documenting people's lives that are often in a Q&A format. What I tried to do was tell a story using the words of people who know W&B or whose lives intersected with theirs. Some people call the format I used "documentary style."
Q. Any sense of what percentage of the reaction you've received came from people who had read the piece in the print magazine vs. online readers?
I would say 80 percent of the reaction I've gotten comes from people reading it online. Especially after it went up on Romenesko. But I've gotten phone calls as well. My favorite might have been your comment that the piece was keeping you from your work. This weekend, Maud S. Beelman at the Center for Public Integrity said much the same thing, along the lines of 'I started reading it, not expecting to find anything new, and read it all the way to the end.' Mike Isikoff said he thought he knew everything about W&B, and wrote to say he'd learned new things. That's obviously flattering when you take on a well-covered subject such as "the boys."
Q. As you began the reporting, what questions were you most interested in pursuing and answering?
I wanted to explore most their friendship, its rift, and how they repaired it. They both spoke honestly to me about how they feel about the other. I found it curious, though, when Carl said: "I don't know what Bob would say." I just went back to see if that stayed in the piece. It didn't.
Their friendship is what Robert Redford told me initially attracted him to the Watergate story. Not the politics -– but the people. They are obviously two very different men, who Bernstein admits would not have been friends had it not been for Watergate. Yet over the decades they've forged a deep, meaningful, reliable friendship. They went through something together that only they can understand. What does that say about our own friendships and our unfortunate proclivity to ignore people who are not similar?
Q. How did you plot the reporting?
I wish I could say I had a structured approach. But anyone who knows me or has worked with me knows that structure is not my friend. It should be, but it's not. First, I read tons of articles and books on W&B for background. I reread "All the President's Men," and I watched the movie again several times. As I did this research, I jotted down names and organized them by time period, in terms of when the person intersected with Carl and/or Bob. Then I threw out a wide, wide net and began interviewing people. As I've always done, at the end of the conversation, I ask for recommendations of whom else to call. And for phone numbers. I was trying to fill in the 30 years since Watergate but I couldn't possibly do that other than to loosely tell the story of their lives after Watergate.
I wanted to retell the Watergate story, but my editors chopped that out fairly quickly. They were right.
Q. Once you settled on the format to present the story, how did you organize it? Entirely with your keyboard, or did you print chunks and quotes that you then clumped into various sections off the screen?
The first draft was well over 20,000 words, mostly chronologically. I turned that in. Bill O'Sullivan whacked mercilessly at it, and sent it back (all electronically) for more weed whacking. But by then, I'd done more reporting and wanted to add. I'm sure I drove him crazy. And yes, I would print it out, take it to Starbucks and go through it with a fine-tooth pen reorganizing and moving things around. In the process, I got to know a man who was writing a book for National Geographic, working exclusively on a laptop at an Arlington Starbucks.
Q. What role did the editor(s) play in the piece? In charting the course of reporting, in framing the approach you ultimately settled on? Bill O'Sullivan and
Washingtonian's top editor, Jack Limpert, played a key role in developing and shaping the piece. But I worked directly with Bill.
Q. By my count, you quote 43 people in addition to Woodward and Bernstein. How many other people did you interview but didn't quote?
Overall, I talked to over 80 people. So much (sigh) ended up on the cutting room floor. I got an e-mail from Kitty Kelley, who didn't make it in the piece though she had a good story to tell, asking me what else was on the cutting room floor. Enough for a book, I'd say.
Q. Anybody refuse to be interviewed? Who?
Yes, a few. Notably, Barry Sussman, the
Post editor who first shepherded the (Watergate) story. He was one of the first people I approached, thinking he'd be a great starting point and could fill me in. I was taken aback when he refused but I thought it said something that he didn't want to talk about W or B 30 years later.
I talked with Sally Quinn several times, but never got an interview. First, she wanted to make sure –- as did a few others -– that Carl and Bob sanctioned what I was doing. I respected that. Both men graciously and generously told their friends to talk to me. I just never connected with Sally, although I would have liked to.
Q. How did you conduct the interviews? In person, telephone, e-mail?
I did the bulk of my interviewing –- save for Bernstein and Woodward –- over the phone. It allowed me to wear a headset and type the interviews verbatim.
Q. How much time did you spend with each of the main subjects?
Bob is a v. busy guy, always has another book in the works. So he would only allow about an hour and a half. Bob was more prompt in responding to my request. Carl seemed impossible to pin down for an interview, granted I'm in Washington and he's in NYC. It took me six months to get time with Carl, but when I did he opened much of his afternoon to me. We spent part of the interview in his New York office and the other outside of Central Park near the Plaza hotel. He's very relaxed and easy to talk to.
Q. Difficult to get to Redford and Hoffman?
Oh yeah. Took months. But persistence is my middle name. I don't give up. I like to think of myself as "warmly aggressive," others might characterize it in a less flattering way.
Talking to them was great. Both of them were quite loquacious on the subject of "All the President's Men." Redford's assistant firmly told me: "Ten Minutes. No more. He's very busy." But once Redford called me, and warmed to the subject, he talked and talked. It was great. I could have written a story just on what he told me about how he came to the movie and all the obstacles he encountered, including the fact that W&B refused to believe that Robert Redford was interested in a story about them. This was 1972. Long before journalists became celebrities, or had great personal stories that Hollywood or even people like me wanted to tell.
Maybe this form lends itself more to something I wanted to come across in the piece: that people's lives are complicated, that things are never as they seem, that nothing is black and white.
One of the most fascinating aspects that didn't make it into the piece was how Redford came to make the film, "All the President's Men." He really had to pursue W&B. Redford told me he literally begged both men for the rights to tell their story. I found that odd, imagining THE Robert Redford chasing after two then-Metro reporters.
Dustin Hoffman won my heart, if that's alright to say, when he said he refused to play Carl in the movie "Heartburn" because he has two boys of his own (coincidentally named Max and Jacob as Bernstein's boys are). Hoffman was thinking more about how the movie would hurt the kids than that it was a great story to tell. As a mom, I say he won my heart because he was putting kids first.
But I loved it when Dustin told me about later working with Nora Ephron, Carl's ex-wife and mother of Jacob and Max, and said something along the lines of, "Nora, stop getting so angry at me. I'm not Carl. I just played him in a movie."
Q. You get personal in a few places -- quoting a Watergate prosecutor saying that Woodward's family kept secrets from him -- but the piece stops short of getting intensely personal. No probing of the family secrets, for example. Did you hold back from probing more deeply in this or other areas out of respect for your subjects' privacy?
No, not necessarily. But space was limited and my editors wanted to go forward with their lives after Watergate and not rehash the past.
Q. From your point of view, what impact does the absence of even a single unattributed quote have on the piece? Are there aspects of their personalities -- their friendship -- that might have been more fully told if you used some unattributed material? How did you calculate the trade-offs vis-à-vis the credibility of on-the-record and what is often assumed to be the greater candor of not-for-attribution?
As you may know, I am wedded to not using anonymous sources or off-the-record comments. I think of them as the tool of lazy reporting.
I-d like to think the on-the-record quotes lend credibility to the piece. I should tell you that if someone I interviewed asked me to show them their quote before the piece went to print, I did. I often do that because I like to think I'm a fanatic about being fair and accurate -- and also because I've never had the experience where someone says, "Wait a minute. I never said that." I think if you present yourself as going out of your way to be fair, people will have a greater respect for you and other journalists. Despite the bad rap and the bad apples, I believe most journalists are dedicated, ethical' and do a great job. We really saw that firsthand on Sept. 11.
Q. How did you decide which family members to pursue, or not to?
I would have liked to speak to more family members. I did attend the service for Carl's father after he died earlier this year and got a sense of Carl's family, though his sister Laura turned me down. I spoke to a couple others but they didn't make it in the piece.
Q. It looks as if you've broken new ground in at least a few respects, e.g., Woodward's interest in buying the San Francisco Chronicle, the pair's interest in becoming co-Metro editors at one point. What are the pros and cons of this approach when you've got news down deep in some of the answers?
When you frame it that way, it would seem there are only cons, i.e. people want to know more. But it depends on the value of the information. The Chronicle purchase struck me as fascinating though whimsical, which makes that a nugget worth including but not expanding. What if Scott Armstrong and Bob Woodward had bought the Chronicle? It might have changed my life, as I was a reporter at the San Jose Mercury at the time.
Q. What surprised you about the reporting of this piece? About the writing? About what you discovered about Woodward and Bernstein?
The reporting was tons of fun. But then it always is for me. It was tremendous fun to talk to the Watergate figures and just spend a lot of time lounging in W&B's lives, although I wouldn't claim to be an expert.
What you learn in doing an oral history is that truth is relative. People remember things differently, sort of like physics with parallel universes.Q. What did you learn about Watergate that you didn't know before?
I hadn't realized how truly significant Alexander Butterfield's role was in Nixon's downfall, though it was a role he told me he hates. He never set out to bring down his president. Butterfield and Haldemann and Nixon were the only people in the country, according to Butterfield, who knew about the voice-activated taping system. I talked to Butterfield at great length and not a word made it into the story. He'd made a decision, seconded by his wife, that he would only reveal the existence of the taping system if he were asked a direct question about it. A fuzzy question would get a fuzzy answer, but he would volunteer nothing. This was on Friday, July 13, 1973 when committee investigators met privately with Butterfield.
What you learn in doing an oral history is that truth is relative. People remember things differently, sort of like physics with parallel universes. As an example, who actually asked Butterfield the direct question about whether Nixon had a taping system? Was it Scott Armstrong, (Woodward's friend and committee investigator) or committee investigator Don Sanders? I'm told they both lay claim to that. Butterfield recollects clearly, he says, that it was Don Sanders.
Also, there's a myth, more induced by Hollywood than Carl and Bob, that the pair single-handedly brought down Nixon. They didn't. The legal system did. But I'd argue strongly that their aggressive, unrelenting reporting played a huge role in engaging the attention of the courts and Congress. The role the media can play most effectively is keeping the spotlight on an issue.
Q. About life at The Washington Post?
Not a lot that I didn't already know. But life at The Washington Post sounds like it was a lot of fun back in the day.
Q. About friendship?
I find friendship a fascinating study. What would the world be like if there weren't people we could truly count on? Bob and Carl, I believe, truly know that the other one is always in their court. After three decades and some serious setbacks in their own lives, they know they can count on each other. There's something poetic to me about that. It's what I most wanted to convey in telling their story.
Q. How might this approach be used with other kinds of stories? What advice can you offer colleagues interested in trying it?
Read other oral histories. Study them. Imitate them. And pick a rich subject that has some depth. I don't think, for example, that Britney Spears would make a good subject.
Q. Anything else I should have asked about?
I'm shocked. Shocked. That you didn't ask about Deep Throat and his absence in my piece. I intentionally steered away from that subject. I don't doubt that there is a Deep Throat, but it's a parlor game at this point and one I don't find fun to play. But believe me there are people who are obsessed with finding out who DT is or would try to engage me on the topic. We'll know when we know. Being the nosiest person I know, a quidnunc by definition, I usually will do anything to find out something. But this is one case where I'm willing to wait.
